by Carl Safina
We all do the same thing almost daily, of course. The corporate climber seeks to be a tribal chief. The necktied, starch-shirted businessman seeks respect as a maker of killings. It’s all the same: bring down the quarry, tell the harrowing tale around the fire, howl in victory, sleep off the full belly, and hunt again. The rawness is masked, the flesh deodorized, but we still, simply for status, strive to excel among our peers. Beneath the suits, the bulk of business consists of cave dwellers on commuter trains.
All ashore was elaborate convention. Here was a truer enduring reality: a risky hunt, a struggle to capture food, the promise of praise. But if I had thought of those things earlier, all thought now was narrowed to a point. In the heat of the moment, the shark was neither allegory, nor parable, nor metaphor. My knees were shaking. I wanted to kill this fish.
It was a hot, calm day, the August sun stabbing the sea to depth. The shark went deep to fight in cooler shadows. Bowed over the arced rod, I broke a sweat. I rocked and cranked. I raised the fish a few inches at a time, so slowly, so sleightly, that the mako began to rise as if lulled, as if it had gotten over its alarm.
Its glowing color appeared below, its body turned against the pressure, hanging hard and hardly moving.
I reached for my glove. I rehearsed the endgame in my mind: When the ten-foot wire leader broke the surface, I’d unclip the harness from the reel. When the leader reached the rod tip, I would put the rod in the boat’s rod holder. While grasping the leader—smoothly, so as not to alarm the shark—I would lift the readied harpoon. I would delay the thrust until the shark broke the water and hesitated. I would wait until I had a clear shot to the wide part of its body behind the dorsal fin. Then I would visualize darting the shaft clear through the other side and would ram it with all the thrust one arm could muster.
The shark loomed up. It was tired and stayed calm. It seemed large. A hundred and eighty pounds? All fish look bigger underwater. Pay attention. There’s the leader. Unclip the harness. Here it is. Rod into holder. Leader in hand. Be smooth. Harpoon seems heavy; arm’s tired.
I had the weight of the fish on the leader in one hand, the weight of the long wooden harpoon shaft overhead. A man with a spear, face to face with a large, dangerous animal—an old, old scene.
I pressured the leader and the shark’s bullet of a snout rose through the surface, pointing at me. Bad angle. The hesitation made my tired arm weaken.
I relaxed the leader a little and the shark rotated slowly onto its side and turned to dive.
I struck and the fish exploded, spinning crazily and diving, ripping the dart from its side and stripping line from my humming reel.
I had not lunged hard enough; my arm was too tired from the fight and from holding the heavy harpoon overhead.
Amazingly, the violence did not break the line or throw a weakening kink into the leader. In a few minutes I again drew the shark close. I decided that this time I would try for a shot through the gills. A gill shot is more decisive but riskier. The head, rather than the tail, swerves toward you, making it harder to place the securing tail rope, increasing the chance of the shark biting and perhaps severing the harpoon line, and—notably—raising the possibility that a sudden leap will propel the animal straight at you.
The mako came up again. I was ready. But when the shark presented the perfect shot, I hesitated.
The shark waited.
I looked deep into that black eye. Undefiant, matter-of-factly, the mako informed me that this was no game, not a “sport.” That eye rolled forward just a bit, then back to me—and inquired, What next?
I reconsidered. Then I thrust.
The mako blurred into lashing froth and blood. I reached for the gaff and sank it and swept him toward me and cinched the tail rope.
Now I had my prize. Each subsequent thrash pumped a new pillow of blood into the water. For a few more minutes, the black eye queried: What next? Then the creature drained away into the sea, and all I had was a dead carcass tied to the boat, and myself. And something had gone from me in that same billowing blood that took the shark and left the carcass. I’d sought to prove my place among others. The shark taught me that everything has its place, and I had overstepped mine. I knew then it was the last time I would ever feel that trembling buck fever.
I had loved the sleek motion, the speed and agility, the gliding vitality and ocean-bursting power. And all these things, I had just destroyed. I had sought connection, but beyond connection, possession. And beyond possession, I had used the shark to prove something to others. That left my motives open to question. It is one thing to catch a fish and eat it. But there is in these equations a matter of scale, and such a thing as too much. And sometimes, why one does something is more important than what one does.
Now I’d have my steaks. Grills would sizzle. At the dock came the expected congratulations, the admiring onlookers male and female, the incredulous head shakes that I had conquered this fish alone. My name found its way into the weekly fishing columns. I had distinguished myself. Perhaps people would say, “He’s a good fisherman.” But with sharks declining, I could not duck the fact that I was still drawing blood from such magnificent creatures. And that made the sought-after admiration feel hollow.
* * *
A few days later I repeated the offshore solo venture and located another mako. This time, after its leaping fight subsided and I drew the creature close, I leaned overboard not with harpoon but with hook remover. In those days virtually no one released sizable makos. But at the dock no one who asked what I’d caught questioned my tale of solo catch and solo release—because I’d proven my prowess with the earlier carcass. Now I was proving—if only to myself—that the next step in prowess was to relinquish the prize. But as it turned out, I again made the fishing columns, this time as a kind of mako liberator.
Neptune pronounced this good and did what he could to encourage the publicity: I caught seven makos that season—more than twice my previous seasonal high. And except for that first, I released them all. Each release was duly noted in the weekly fishing news. People responded favorably; some suggested that I was setting an example. Maybe I would become a good fisherman after all.
People are hungry to make their mark in the world. Every shark would understand. Or would they? The shark has a hunter’s attitude, but there’s nothing social in its killing. It gains only nutrition, knows no pride. The shark does only what it needs, and needs only what it does. Of the burden of needing to make an impression, the shark is free. Yet we cause the whole world, even the sharks of the blue ocean, to bear the burden of our egos. Certainly I had.
We must all kill to live, and scarcely a vegetarian would deny it. Some measure of good resides in getting one’s food from nature, for the connections it brings, the sense of place and the community it gathers. But two forks exist in the decision tree: One involves whether the killing is humane. The other, whether we can keep doing this. Shark hunting fails on both counts. If a course of action simply cannot last, we must admit to ourselves that it’s wrong. I knew that whether I killed one mako shark a year or released them all would not decide the future of the species. I wasn’t the problem, but we’re all always only part of the problem. At some point one confronts the question of right and wrong in private, with the door closed. We can do the right thing. Right things maintain a community. I prefer a community that includes, among many things, sharks.
We each make our solo voyages to deep, expansive waters. Alone in our contest with the wider world, we test our mettle and seek our trophies, promotions, compliments, and accolades. We strive to be needed and to thereby know that there is a reason for us. We seek to be told we are good because we’re too unsure of ourselves to know. Yet often we remain so focused on our neediness that we forget the creatures—human and otherwise—we’re drawing into the vortex of our own passion play. All of us have compulsive loves we must forbear. We forget to see that we can engage the world without harming it. And although we fish for approval, the cha
llenge is: to capture our prizes while bringing more to the world than we take.
TRAVELS POLAR:
BAKED ALASKA
In the panhandle of Southeast Alaska, we saw a system working and recovering because enough was left to maintain its viability and resilience. Up in Svalbard, we saw how a changing Arctic climate can affect wildlife. In mainland Alaska, you can see how it affects people, too.
* * *
Belying its ferocious reputation as a deadly body of water, the Chukchi Sea is laid down flat like a lion among lambs, gently licking the shoreline. The air feels thin, the sun direct. I push up my sleeves, enjoying beach weather a stone’s throw from the Arctic Circle.
The Inupiat Eskimo community of Shishmaref (population 600) stands upon a sandy island, three miles long but just a quarter mile wide. The mainland and its shimmering mountains lie five miles away. To say it is in Alaska, in the United States, is to obscure its history. These people have lived here for centuries. Located near where human footprints first marked a vast new world, this site has likely been used for millennia. The current residents say four thousand years. During all the long quotidian cavalcade of centuries, only in the last decade has their way of life seemed threatened.
Fluffy Arctic Cotton Grass nods in the breeze, acknowledging the faint melancholy of tundra summer. Long-tailed Jaegers and snowy Glaucous Gulls drift overhead. Rock Sandpipers, Long- and Short-billed Dowitchers, and Golden Plovers probe the marshes for food they will turn to jet fuel. The Goldens, once plumped, will launch another of the planet’s most extreme migrations, crossing the trackless Pacific to somehow arrive, famished and exhausted, on little dots and atolls of land throughout Polynesia.
* * *
Over the sandy streets the sky is haphazardly crisscrossed with utility wires. Among the clustered wooden houses, snowmobiles, dogsleds, and all-terrain vehicles in repose and disrepair clutter the neighborhood. Everyone’s got their own used-parts scrapyard. At the edge of town, canted oil drums and dead snow machines lurk in the weeds. There’s no “away” to throw them.
One might see here an Arctic slum, but this community’s sense of itself has withstood the twenty-four-hour nights of hundreds upon hundreds of winters. As Eskimos, their identity is as hunters, past and present. On the steps to one home, as I might temporarily place grocery bags on my own porch, lie two fresh Spotted Seals, their fine pied pelts stained crimson from gunshots to the head. The roofs sport caribou racks and whale bones. A Polar Bear skin, its fur impossibly deep and dense, dries outside. Numerous skulls and antlers, which elsewhere might be trophies, lie simply discarded.
Hunter economics still apply; meat gets shared. Many men support their immediate families plus needy extended-family members. There are some jobs in infrastructure and a little trade work. Sealskin handbags and carvings of Walrus ivory or bone are sold to shops in places like Anchorage. But for most people here, employment is as sporadic as berry picking.
In the school, virtues rim the gym walls: “Family,” “Humility,” “Respect for Others,” “Loyalty,” “Love for Children,” “Domestic Skills,” “Hunter Success.” The gym also features an American flag and a large mural of frolicking Polar Bears (with a rifle-bearing hunter sneaking up from behind a floe so stealthily that I noticed him only when I reviewed my photographs days later).
Internet access notwithstanding, most talk revolves around hunting and the changing weather. Still heavily reliant on wild food, the people remain embedded in the cycle of seasons. But as the climate changes, they become not just dependent on nature but hostage to it.
Because sea ice buffers Shishmaref from winter storms, provides access to winter hunting, and brings Walruses and seals, ice loss threatens these people acutely. Eskimos rely on conditions that would kill Polynesians—or even New Yorkers. And vice versa, probably. But once people have adapted, change can destroy them.
Shishmaref is not about one unlucky community. It’s about having a front-row seat to changes that will sweep the world. If a few Eskimos recently descended from a nomadic culture are finding the challenge of moving daunting, can our own entrenched energy, water, and agriculture systems adapt to accelerating changes? About how human beings respond to change, Shishmaref is oracle.
* * *
And Shishmaref’s own local oracle is one Stanley Tocktoo, mayor, a man of medium build and copper skin. On a small bluff overlooking the sea, we talk over the growls of huge balloon-tired trucks delivering massive boulders to a crane; the crane is arranging the boulders into defensive beach armoring.
Earlier defenses—caged rocks and sea walls—the sea demolished. Now the folks are ratcheting up with boulders barged in from elsewhere. I’m told that this will cost $36 million. Thing is, nobody believes that it can fix the problem. Everyone understands this fact: Shishmaref is doomed.
“They tell us this place has nine to fifteen years left,” Tocktoo relays. It would cost an estimated $180 to $200 million to move the town—houses, generators, schools, clinic, airstrip, infrastructure. The hope is, these boulders will buy the people enough time to abandon the place.
When asked if there is an Inupiat expression for climate change, Luci Eningowuk responds, “No. We’re too busy fighting it.” As Shishmaref’s Erosion and Relocation Commitee chair, she doesn’t have time for chitchat.
In times past, sea ice, and perpetually frozen ground called permafrost, constituted Shishmaref’s natural armoring. Ice extending seaward from the shoreline prevented ferocious storm waves from approaching town. These days, there’s often no ice.
Tocktoo says, “Without ice, we lose land. One storm, northwest, seventy-miles-an-hour wind, we lost fifty feet of land.”
“A silent storm will do it too,” adds Luci. She’s referring to an exceptionally high tide, with no wind.
“We’ve seen the water rising up so far—. Every high tide like that, we lose part of our island. Never been like this before. Man, it’s weird,” says Tocktoo. A few paces away, a house lies newly shattered on the beach, toppled just days ago from the crumbling bluff. “There was eighteen homes here,” Tocktoo adds. The ruins of only the last one remain visible between the newly collapsed bluff and the newly advancing surf. “One was my old house. Washed away. It can do that.”
“In the 1950s we had three rows of rolling sand dunes out there,” Luci tells me, waving beyond the rolling surf. Her mind must be painting a picture from memory, but her gestures carry my gaze only to open water.
“Used to be you could dig maybe five, six feet in summer to permafrost,” Tocktoo explains. “Permafrost was our refrigerator. That’s where we stored Walrus, seal meat, kept our seal oil—.”
“It’s gone,” Luci emphasizes. “Even in the winter now, it’s mushy.”
Melting ice and melting permafrost drive a vicious cycle of “positive feedbacks” about which little is positive. Thawing permafrost exposes dead vegetation that was deep-frozen for millennia. Its rotting releases more methane and carbon dioxide, which trap more heat in the atmosphere. (Methane traps twenty times more heat than carbon dioxide and is currently at concentrations two and a half times higher than it was two hundred years ago. Methane comes from rotting and fermentation and natural gas. Most now emanates from gassy cows, pigs, and chickens; manure and sewage; and rice paddies.) There’s a lot of carbon in Arctic soil, and its release hasn’t been factored into most climate-change models.
Wind turbines at the edge of town lower Shishmaref’s emissions. These people being swallowed by the swelling sea are doing their part but are suffering our consequences. To oversimplify: we took oil from the Natives and returned it in the form of heat, which is destroying their culture. Now it’s a little as if, in order to placate the rising sea, we’re offering as sacrifice the people of this town.
Arctic winter temperatures are up 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit (2° to 4°C) since the mid-twentieth century. The Arctic surface is mostly frozen ocean, which can all melt. As we saw in Svalbard, the more it melts, the faster the me
lting goes. That’s because ice reflects 70 percent of sunlight striking it, but seawater reflects only 6 percent; the rest of the light gets absorbed and converted into heat. That’s why the Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Consequently, the Arctic Ocean is melting faster than predicted. A few years ago, scientists predicted that the whole Arctic Ocean would be practically ice-free in summer by 2100; the latest analyses say before 2050. Where warming fueled partly by petroleum has helped melt the north, various nations are scrambling to claim the newly accessible Arctic seabed. They’re hoping to find … petroleum. If we were nearing the end of the Stone Age, these are the people who would be stockpiling rocks.
* * *
“It’s very sad, you know, to see our community wash away,” Tocktoo says.
The sea level has been rising for millennia, though literally at a glacial pace. But now “glacial pace” is faster than it used to be, since nearly all the world’s glaciers are melting, faster. And because seawater expands as it warms, warming compounds the oceans’ rise. Since the last ice age, sea levels have risen four hundred feet. But during all of human civilization, neither the sea level nor the rate of its rise has ever been higher or faster than both are now.
Nearby, kids are swimming in the surf, something unthinkable just a few years ago. “The water’s too warm to leave our salmon nets overnight,” Luci complains. “The fish get soft and fall apart when you dry them. You have to check your net every few hours now.” Elders were recently puzzled by a strange new fish washed up on the beach; it was the first skate anyone here had ever seen.