by Nina Burton
It turned out that fish would also ease my growing hunger that afternoon. In my hurry to get out to the rotted wall, I had forgotten to bring proper food, but there were some classic pantry staples in the kitchen – a tin of so-called ‘Master’ sardines and one of herring. Those would do just fine. Both sardines and herring are among my favourite kinds of fish. I knew that this was a predilection I shared with many others, for both are part of our cultural history.
Salted herring was a Nordic staple for over a thousand years, both on land and at sea. For the Vikings it was a provision, and it later became such an important commodity for the Hanseatic League that the confederation completely fell apart when schools of herring fled for other coasts. Now that I thought about it, such schools had in fact become increasingly scarce in recent decades as well, although this time it was probably due to the fishing industries vacuuming them out of the sea. So perhaps I should go with the tin of Master sardines.
Sardines are part of a southern European cultural history that even encompassed their packaging. During ancient times, salted sardines were stored in amphorae, which were replaced by sturdy wooden barrels after the fall of the Roman Empire. And when those were later exchanged for tins, it was as a result of Napoleon’s many wars, as his hundreds of thousands of soldiers needed field provisions that were easy to transport. First, they tried canning the fish in glass jars with a boiling water bath, and this was later replaced with iron boxes that had leaden lids. But they were heavy and hard to open, so it was soon their turn to be replaced with tin cans that had small keys for opening – and they were a huge success. Entire ship crews brought along tins of sardines, even while circumnavigating the world, and as a result sardines got to travel further than any other fish.
Meanwhile, British rule was increasing on the seven seas, and they fed their sailors with catches of herring. It was almost as if the Napoleonic wars lived on through the tiny fish. Still, sardines and herrings aren’t that dissimilar. In the 16th century, Conrad Gesner had a rather tough time describing their differences, as sardines belong to the herring family. I myself had learned that smaller herring in the Baltic Sea and larger ones in the North Sea go by different names in Swedish – strömming and sill, respectively – but today the two types intermingle in those seas. Climate change has also caused sardines to move northwards into the North Sea, so the species seem to be getting all mixed up with one another. This was only confirmed when I took a closer look at the Master sardines tin. Its contents were in fact listed as skarpsill, or European sprat, yet another relative of sardines and herring. My choice between herring and sardines had solved itself.
As I arranged the herring-sardines from my tin on a slice of crispbread, I tried to imagine their bodies as they were when alive. Size-wise, they were somewhere between krill and larger fish, and in the water they would have gathered in billowing, silvery ellipses like creatures a kilometre long. They would almost blend into the sea, too, for each fish reflected it off thousands of scales. If they twisted in one direction they would reflect the light from the surface; if they twisted the other way they would throw back the darkness of the deep water. Since the fish at the edges of the school were closer to both food and predators, they would have taken turns being farthest out. They also helped each other find plankton and spot dangers like whales, seals, seabirds or larger fish. Each member of the school was in tune with the others, so if a few of them were captured, their neighbours’ heart rates would increase as if in sympathy. Perhaps only one in ten thousand would survive to adulthood, but on the other hand, those who made it could live to be fifteen years old – and there have even been cases of twenty-five-year-old herring. Thus there were most likely a variety of fates to be found in a can of sardines.
While I rinsed the alleged sardine oil from the plate, the water flowed over my hands and something inside me responded. After all, like fish, I was 65 per cent water. Since that water constantly had to be replenished, the well was really the most important spot on the property, but the moisture in my body was actually that of a sea. It was there in the salt of tears, sweat and mucus, and the amniotic fluid where I’d spent the first part of my life was salty as well.
It seems I would have liked to stay there. Foetuses are supposed to turn towards the cervix before birth, but I stubbornly rested on my side. Like an old-fashioned telephone receiver on its cradle, I lay there listening to the sounds outside. They were sharper than in the tiny primitive sea I had grown used to. I made my hugely pregnant mother so heavy that together we crashed through a rotting dock. Clearly the sea had a hold on me.
Once I came out into the air, however, I lost my sense of security around water. I only graduated from swimming class when I needed the certificate as a prerequisite to sail, and by then I associated water with a certain amount of fear. Diving was an obligatory part of the exam. I was seized with dizziness on the bouncy springboard and letting go of it was as challenging as leaving my amniotic fluid had once been. Mammals like me could drown. When my body finally sliced through the surface of the water it felt like an existential trial. It was an encounter with an element that could mean both life and death.
My ancestors among the fish, too, hesitated a long time before venturing into an unfamiliar element. While they were establishing themselves in the sea, other life forms were already crawling onto land. Algae were the first ones here too, and gradually they brought a hopeful, green cast to the Earth. Then ferns and lycophytes increased the oxygen content of the air in the Devonian Period. At the same time, the soil was improved by fungi with tough-as-nails eating habits – they could devour stone. As their acids dissolved rock surfaces, their root threads sucked up the minerals.
Like coral in the sea, the terrestrial fungi allied themselves with algae, which shared their solar energy. This gave rise to a new category of plant – the lichens. These, too, made use of softening acids, which eventually created pockets of earth where mosses could grow. The land was starting to be more habitable. Lobe-finned fishes and lungfish slowly began to crawl out of the sea, in the company of small mites and arachnids.
What followed were millions of years of climate change wherein the seas vacillated between rising and falling. Alongside the new coniferous trees, gigantic dragonflies and metre-long millipedes of the Carboniferous Period arose marshy areas full of decaying vegetation.
Then, during the dry periods and earthquakes of the Permian, came a mass extinction in which 90 per cent of all the ocean species vanished. Trilobites were among those who died off, while some thick-skinned reptile species survived. The ancestors of mammals would arise from one of them. Another species, however, brought about the dinosaurs, which would dominate the Earth for 150 million years – as long as the trilobites had ruled the seas. Meanwhile, my mammal ancestors turned into timid, shrew-sized creatures who only dared to come out at night while the dinosaurs were sleeping.
The turning point came 65 million years ago, when an asteroid struck the Earth. Debris from the strike blocked out the sun for months, and more than half of all species died out, including the dinosaurs. But one befeathered species survived, and so did my shrew-like foremothers, who finally dared to come out of their holes.
In the kitchen window, a spider from the Devonian Period was spinning a web. Outside, a dinosaur descendant was warbling in a tree. I went out among the seasoned old pines, ferns and lichens. Beneath them lay sea sediment and fragments of long-vanished mountains. Through the moss crept microscopic tardigrades, invisible Michelin men with eight legs. They had survived five mass extinctions thanks to their tolerance for dehydration, extreme temperatures, vacuums, high pressure and radiation. Amidst all the death and destruction, there was a tenacious vital force.
Where does that vital force come from? It is passed along by something much smaller than those tiny water bears – it’s inside molecules of DNA. Memory and future are linked in a double helix that can reach two metres in length when unrolled, a chronicle
of the history of life. The tiniest parts of it have been there from the start.
Everything within is described on the micro-level. For instance, the manuscript of me had fitted in a fertilised egg cell just one millimetre across, and yet that information would take up twenty-five cubic metres of stacked reference books if it were put into words. Not even a third of it would fit in the writing nook. Each new cell was then provided with its own copy. A few cells would form my heart, others my brain, and still others a spine. Inside them, thousands of chemical reactions were at work, and in some miraculous way every cell fell into its proper role. This was made easier by the fact that each had a slightly different surface, like a puzzle piece, and all genes are already present in the chromosomes in the nucleus of the cell. I am, after all, part of an ancient story handed down through 500 million years, although with every copy small variations are introduced.
During my time as an embryo, evolution was fast-forwarded. As soon as the fertilised egg began to divide, it began to flicker like a spinning kaleidoscope. Soon I looked like a sprout, then a tadpole. I had a tail that disappeared and gills that turned into my middle ear, larynx and part of my jaw. All the while, cells added or took away different parts. My hand looked like a shell that developed five branches, and between them a web formed that soon died back so fingers could take shape. It was the same all over my body. Every cell knew when it was time to develop, divide or die, because they were in tune with one another. At the end, almost 90 per cent of all the cells in my foetal stage died to benefit the whole. Only the cancer cells that dreamed of eternal life ignored the others and kept up their own eternal division. Thus I was doubly grateful for all those that died. Both their legacy and their death had created me.
Since the past felt so close, I was taken aback when my phone made a buzzing sound in the writing nook. It turned out to be the crew boss, who explained that they’d had to stop their work but would return the next day. With that, I was suddenly brought back to the present moment. I had, after all, come out to the cottage to discuss the wall issue.
Still, I was glad to have had such a lonely day, a chance to view the situation from a perspective other than the purely practical. A broadened perspective of time can bring a sense of proportion that really puts human trivialities in their place. The catastrophes that beset the Earth were certainly of a different scale than a rotted wall, and they often paved the way for something new as well, although it took time. Even the rain behind the famous biblical flood could, according to geologists, have gone on for millions of years.
On the whole, the history of life is so vast that it must be shrunk down to a week for us to get an overview. If the burning clump that was Earth were formed on a Sunday night, the first life would have been born on Tuesday. These were cyanobacteria that were to have the planet to themselves until Saturday, when the marine animals appeared. But the second Sunday was a hectic time. In the morning, the first plants crept onto land, and a few hours later they were joined by amphibians and insects. In the afternoon the great reptiles took over the Earth, and half an hour later there were mammals as well, although they had to spend four hours living in the shadow of the dinosaurs. The birds arrived around dinnertime. Just before midnight, apes were climbing in the trees, and thirty seconds before the clock struck midnight on this last day, early hominids began to walk on two legs. The entirety of human history took place within a fraction of a second.
Thus we arrived at the last minute on a common journey through life that did not belong solely to us. It was full of the stories of innumerable species, families and individuals. Without them our own history would have been very different, for others, too, were contributors.
The hunt for the aurochs was a challenge, but after this muscular beast was subjugated eight thousand years ago, its descendants became our dairy cattle and draught animals. They toiled in our first fields, and with the farm full people could devote time to tasks other than hunting for food. The population increased, and alongside it grew the need for an organised society. So much depended on precious animals and plants that the Sumerians developed a written language to list them. Horses allowed for communications and warlike conquering, and trade with sheep’s wool birthed a market economy where fortunes could be made on herring and whale oil just as well as purple shells, silkworms and ivory.
The most dramatic change came when horsepower was replaced by fossil fuels. These hid memories from early life on Earth, for coal came from decayed vegetation of the Carboniferous Period, and crude oil was the billions of algae, plankton and animals that had been compressed on ancient ocean floors. It seemed, when they burned, that the millions of years that had passed since their time had been squeezed into a massive explosion that transformed the world in an instant. As agricultural societies became industrialised countries, the schooners of the sea were replaced by container ships and tankers, even as the oil that drove it all had to be pumped up from ever greater depths. And sometimes, hundreds of thousands of tonnes escaped into the sea, where it had all begun.
I had seen it happen at close range, along with some old boating friends. A tanker had released so much oil into the Baltic Sea that the clean-up required extra hands, and we wanted to help. We sat in the military helicopter that would bring us to the outer archipelago, ready to fight like soldiers. Through the windows we spotted peacock colours drifting on the sea below, so different from the shades we were used to seeing from the waves.
The rocks of the skerry where the helicopter landed were covered in a pitch-black sludge. The idea was that we should shovel it into bags, but no matter how we scraped with our shovels it stuck to the rock surface. It seeped into cracks and clung to flowers, and we knew that the nesting seabirds would die from the tiniest dab of oil among their feathers.
This was in the 1980s, and a new term had just been minted for the geological era we were living in. The old name, the Holocene, came from a Greek word for ‘wholeness’. The suggestion was that it should be called the Anthropocene instead, a name that came from a Greek word for humans. The name change was not an homage. Until this point, the Earth’s disasters had been caused by the planet’s own convulsions, or by outer forces such as destructive asteroids. Now, however, we were the ones behind a violent and accelerating revolution, with dire consequences for everything from ecosystems to the climate.
There I stood on the black skerry, seeing the future hidden by a shadow. When the sea turned up in my poetry, it was still a result of awe at the drops of water that created life, and at the fish who were so mysteriously drawn to the Sargasso. But lurking beneath the surface were nuclear submarines, and on the bottom was a stash of depleted nuclear fuel that would be deadly for a hundred thousand years. The perspective of time had died of a cancer-like growth.
A few decades after that day among black boulders, everything we had been warned about was undeniably happening. It felt as if the history of Earth had taken a turn when the decayed organisms were taken from their dark realm of death. Once oil became plastic, 15 tonnes of it went into the seas each minute, where it killed millions of seabirds, thousands of whales, turtles and seals, as fragments meandered up the food chain by way of fish. Once oil became energy, 10 million litres were burned each minute, and carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, a growing greenhouse, and everything got hotter. Suddenly, a third of the world’s population was said to face water shortages. At the same time, the oceans were rising as glaciers melted and threatened other coasts. And we were told that biological species were vanishing a thousand times faster than before, setting us on a course for Earth’s sixth mass extinction. As the Earth’s master race, we could see our Promethean fire turning back towards us. The banks of the rivers that had birthed our civilisations were marked by clear signs of where we were heading. We were warned that The Flood was coming.
It was getting dark outside, and the boats in the sound had turned on their lanterns. As I walked across the property, I could also se
e a point of light moving in the sky. It was probably one of the satellites that orbits the Earth nowadays to surveil it or to transmit sounds and images. Some had carried reluctant passengers, such as the cosmonaut dog Laika in her boiling space capsule. Later, thousands of animals took off in satellites – snails, beetles, butterflies, crickets, wasps, spiders, flies, fish, frogs, turtles, mice, apes and cats. Researchers wanted to find out how all these creatures would fare in space once Earth became uninhabitable.
In the kitchen, I found a flashlight to counter the darkness. Somewhere on the shelves of the storage shed should be the sleeping bag that had accompanied me on sea and shore. It was in a crate at the very back, and I was glad for my cone of light when I saw something moving from the corner of my eye. Perhaps it was one of the animals that only came out at night, when people were sleeping.
The wind had picked up, and in the house with three walls the blue tarp began to flap as if it wanted to sail away. When I got back to the writing nook and wriggled my way into the sleeping bag, I was once more reminded of the old school ship. It felt like I was on my way, and in some ways I suppose I was. From a wider perspective, every living creature is a stream between what has been and what awaits.
But as I turned over in my narrow sleeping bag, my perspective began to shrink after all. It had to, because the next morning the tradesmen would turn up again. Could any improvements be made when the torn-down wall was replaced? After all, life had evolved by way of a porous cell wall.
Perhaps my angle of approach had expanded during the day, for now I could turn the problem around in my mind and view the house in a slightly different way. The old cottage sat at an angle to the kitchen extension. That angle had two walls, and if another wall and a roof were added it would form a room. It would only have three walls, but it would do.