by Simon Barnes
I was drunk with delight: half-seas over on the joy of the things that the smallest adjustment of vision had brought before me. But it was not as if I had changed: it was more as if the world itself had changed, and done so especially to please me. It was as if things I longed to see had become visible before my eyes, as if the creatures I longed to share my life with had appeared, summoned by my own needs. The earth had changed: it had changed for me: and it would never change back. No wonder I was drunk.
We ended our Hong Kong adventures and returned to England. Cind was going through drama school; we had a bedsit in Ealing. I was doing sub-editing shifts for Titbits, and subbing the astrology for the Daily Mail. It was all rather suddenly and dramatically different from freebooting around Asia. The wild world went elusive again. But I was with Cind; what else mattered? I also began to write for The Times. I had nothing to complain about. We went ahead and got married while Cind was at college. What little money we had was in a building society awaiting some fantastical moment when we might be able to buy a little shitheap of our own. There was none to spare.
So Cind had the notion that we should spend our honeymoon on the Norfolk Broads. In April. Her family has always had romantic feelings about boats: Cind’s mother spent the first seven years of her life at sea, while her grandfather had captained one of the last Thames sailing barges to run cargo around the coast of Britain. (He took it to and from Dunkirk several times during the great evacuation as well.) Cind chose a boat from a catalogue, one suitable to the grand-daughter of a sailing bargee. And me, I had forgotten what England was like. I had spent the last four years in Hong Kong and then the past eight months in offices, in the tube, in pubs, in the bedsit, which was warm enough if you had sufficient coins to appease the hunger of the meter. I was not prepared for this.
You couldn’t fault the theory. We needed to see the horizon. We needed to be where wild things were. It was just so cold that I wanted to die. Still, we made that stop and bought that thermal underwear and things improved. And there were nice birds, even if I didn’t really know how to look at them. Despite the best efforts of S Vere Benson and Roger Tory Peterson, I was a hopeless practical birdwatcher. Still, I had binoculars, and I peered at birds here and there, and very often, the sight of the bird would marry up with the half-remembered, wholly-loved images from The Observer’s Book of Birds and from other books I had perused so often and so long and so fruitlessly.
I had once owned quite a few. People gave me bird books. Kind grandparents, kind aunts, kind friends of the family bought them for me. It was the default present. When in doubt, they gave me bird books: sometimes years after I had stopped thinking of myself as a birdwatcher. All kinds of unexpected memories from those days of nightly perusal came into play as we chugged our way around the Broads. We saw kingfishers, fleeting and distant, and congratulated ourselves on our field skills. I saw a tern, sitting on a post just as it did in a photograph in a book I could no longer name: but how much better this bird looked in its black-and-white reality than it did in its black and white picture, in those days when colour photography was an exoticism.
I remembered one such photograph with special clarity. It was in a book of black-and-white pictures, each picture accompanied by a brief text. It showed a male marsh harrier on a nest: I was to learn later that it was a famous picture taken by the great pioneer of bird photography, Eric Hosking. The bird stood there with his wings raised high like the wings of an angel: indeed, some claim that the carved angels in the churches of Suffolk are borne aloft on marsh harriers’ wings. Alongside this bird is a chick of woeful ugliness. I no longer have the book in question, but I have a book of Hosking photographs, and it includes this seminal and dramatic picture, taken in 1942, when this was a feat of adventure on the far edge of the possibilities of technology.
I can’t remember the wording of the caption in my original, but it basically said that if you want to see a bird like this, think again. This, it said, is a bird beyond your scope. It is a bird for supermen, a bird for the elite of the elite. It is only found in the wildest places, and it has been driven – harried – to the point of extinction. I couldn’t know when I read the book as a boy, and I didn’t know when I visited the Broads on my honeymoon, that the population of marsh harriers was reduced to a single breeding pair in 1971: that summer when I listened stoned to birdsong in the garden of Burwalls. All I knew was that marsh harriers were rare beyond all hope of ever seeing one.
And I saw one. Our barge-like boat was tied up, and since Cind sat there it was like a burnished throne that burnt on the water. Certainly, its occupant beggared all description. And so, for that matter, did something else I saw when I turned my eyes from the boat to see a large flying bird, unmistakably a bird of prey, yet not a black kite or a white-bellied sea eagle; or, to be a bit more English and sensible, clearly not a kestrel or a sparrow-hawk or a buzzard or any of the birds of prey you are allowed to see. It flew with the greatest nonchalance, hanging in the air as though doing the air a favour, holding its wings, a bit like the white-bellied sea eagle to tell the truth, in a shallow vee or dihedral. But it was the wrong shape for an eagle; it had the wrong vibes, and besides, it was the wrong place. I couldn’t believe my eyes, or rather, my mind: I was convinced that I must have made the most colossal howler, that some obvious and common bird explained this fabulous and thrilling sight, that if I were to explain it to a proper birdwatcher, I would be laughed at: Oh, that’s the sort of thing crows do round these parts; it’s a well-known confusion. Did you really think you’d see a marsh harrier? That’s too rich for words.
But it had to be. Didn’t it? Eventually, almost to my relief, it floated easily away on whatever drifting errand that absorbed it, and I went back to the barge and the barge-borne queen, my long-johns warm beneath my trousers, to look it up. “Has low quartering flight with occasional wing-beats and long wavering glides, with wings in shallow vee.” There was no questioning any further. A miracle had taken place before my eyes. The dead had been brought to life: the extinct had leapt up before me in glorious existence: the impossible was now quite obviously possible.
There were two endlessly thrilling things to deal with. The first was this dramatic revelation, this epiphany, which had informed me that the wild world is available to us all, even the likes of me; that impossible creatures were there for the seeing, that I didn’t have to be a different person to do that seeing. All I had to do was look, and to be forever looking, and I would always be able to see. The wild was within my scope: within my reach: within my grasp.
The second was that nearly extinct is not the same as extinct: that imminent disaster is not the same as disaster. It was unquestionably true that marsh harriers had become fantastically rare in this country: but that was not the end of the matter. Things had changed. Things had, it seemed, improved. Things had actually got better: how about that for a thought? I didn’t know then that DDT had been the problem, that it is a residual poison, that it builds up in all creatures in the food chain: that it builds up in the insect-eaters, and therefore the build-up builds up catastrophically in those that eat the insect-eaters. I didn’t know that DDT causes eggshell-thinning in birds of prey, and so the eggs broke and bird after bird failed to breed. I didn’t know that the poison was now illegal in this country, and that since it was banned, birds of prey had begun a recovery, aided by conservation organisations like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The RSPB looks after many acres of reedbed, which is the prime habitat of marsh harriers.
What I did understand was that I had a legitimate cause for optimism. I could rightly feel optimistic about the world and optimistic about the possibilities it had. I felt that life was only now beginning in earnest: that the 30-odd years I had lived were nothing more than a preparation for the real thing that was now upon me. It was not a new start. It was the start. That’s what honeymoon, that’s what marriage means. A new optimism was sustained in the air: it had a low, quartering flight with occasi
onal wing-beats and long wavering glides. Hope had taken to the air above me, holding its wings in a shallow vee.
13. Grey whale
Eschrichtius robustus
A few years after my return to England, the wedding, the honeymoon and the marsh harrier, I was, if I might be so immodest, a success. At least, modest aims had been immodestly realised. I was a sports columnist for The Times, I travelled to far places to write stories, I had won a journalistic award, I had published a couple of books. What more could anyone want?
Cind and I were now living in a Victorian terraced house built on the roof of a railway tunnel at the extreme northern tip of London – clinging onto town by a whisker – and she was working as an actress when the work came in. Things were going well, and there was plenty more still to be done, more than enough to give savour to life.
It was January and I had a trip before me. Its main purpose was to cover the Super Bowl, the final game of the American football season. It was to take place in San Diego, and I had been told a fine thing about that town, something that lit up the prospect of the entire trip. I was also to go on from San Diego to Los Angeles to spend a few days at the racetrack doing some horsey stories; but before that I had to go to Atlantic City to cover some boxing. Mike Tyson was to fight Larry Holmes for the heavyweight championship of the world.
I can only assume that the reason for my presence in Atlantic City was economy, for this was a drastic measure. Certainly, the boxing correspondent was far from pleased, but he showed no signs of blaming me for stealing his trip. He knew I hated boxing. I had covered a fight in Las Vegas, in the belief that every sportswriter must do so at least once, and I had loathed every inch of the place and every nuance of the event. I had also written fairly unapologetically in favour of the abolition of boxing. I was in no mood to start enjoying myself, then.
Atlantic City was vile, without any of the surrealism that – sometimes for minutes at a time – redeems Vegas from itself. Atlantic City was Las Vegas without the charm and sophistication; Las Vegas with all the subtlety and intellectual challenge removed; Las Vegas without the chance of escape. I walked endlessly along the winter boardwalk to get away from the claustrophobia of the gambling halls, past the same grey Atlantic that rolls past England, squadrons of ring-billed and herring gulls wheeling and squabbling around my head, marching through the short days before twilight forced me to return to the hotel, the way to my room taking me not-at-all beguilingly past serried ranks of slot machines and gaming tables, back in the land where there is no night and no day.
I can’t say I handled myself well in Atlantic City. I drank copiously with kind and generous colleagues in the bar known as the Irish bar, a place blessedly without gambling to distract you from the task of drinking, but that was not the problem. I began to feel increasingly peculiar. Before long it became clear that I was entering the arena of the unwell. I grew increasingly disconnected. When I spoke I could hear my own voice in my head, as if I was listening to myself on headphones. I remember disconcerting an American sportswriter who, out of sheer good manners, asked me my views on the coming Super Bowl and whether I favoured the Redskins or the Broncos. I told him that my real ambition was the whales. I hadn’t intended to broach the subject, but sometimes you just say what you’re thinking, particularly when disconnected.
I got through the fight all right. Better than Holmes, anyway. Got my copy written. It was a brutal business. In 1980, when Holmes had fought the fading Muhammad Ali, he had shown compassion, and refused to destroy the man before him. Tyson had no such instincts. Au contraire. He pummelled the beaten Holmes with sadistic relish over four bloody rounds. The crowd roared: it was clearly worth paying good money for such a spectacle. Afterwards, I did the press conference duties, my head spinning like a top. And all the time, very high, very faint, very distant, I could hear music. I wasn’t humming to myself: the music was outside of me, or certainly seemed so: apparently wholly external in origin. I could recognise it, though: a tiny fragment from Paul Simon’s then hugely popular album, Graceland. It played on and on, on an endless loop: “I don’t want no part… I don’t want no part… I don’t want no part…”
I went back to my room – reeled, rather – and soaked the sheets with my sweat, abandoning them towards dawn, cold and clinging, for prickly but dry blankets. Then, after a weekend in New York, mostly spent sweating and starving and drinking water, I took myself, recovered and again cheerful, free from both flu and the sulks, across the continent to San Diego, there to immerse myself in the madness of the Super Bowl, to take part in the massed press conferences and the press breakfasts for 2,000, to climb the cholesterol mountain of scrambled eggs, to pile into the media scrimmages at those times when all the players were available and the linebackers and the nose tackles and the free safeties all politely told us what sort of tree they would be. Super Bowl week is so absurd it makes cynicism redundant. No one believed in it as a serious occasion: everyone went along with it. There was absolutely no danger whatsoever of confusing this with reality. It all made great copy, of a not uncrazy kind, and I was content throughout, if not entirely sober of an evening.
But all along, it was Saturday I was looking forward to. The game, I should point out, was Sunday.
I had walked up and down the waterfront at San Diego every day, for sunlight in winter is a rare and precious thing for an English soul. And there I found what I was looking for, and so I paid my money – five bucks? Ten bucks? Maybe even 20? No matter, it was a wonderful investment. Saturday morning came, and I made my way out for the treat with all the other tourists, as if we were making a journey to the lighthouse rather than a pilgrimage towards ultimate truth. Most of my fellow-passengers, my fellow-Ishmaels, were people in town for the big game, some wearing grotesque colours to show their scarlet or orange affiliations, others wearing the curious clothes Americans wear for lee-zhurr, most with children, because we all know that the wild world is a thing for children, rather than grown-ups. There were even a couple of my colleagues: I had obtained tickets for them at their request, for they showed unexpected enthusiasm when I mentioned my plan, and I was, even then, not without an evangelical streak. One of them, Simon Kelner, went on to edit the Independent, and under his leadership, the paper became notable for the prominence given to stories on wildlife and the environment.
But on with the trip. A slow trudge out to sea, cheerful yammering of families on a day out, endlessly taking pictures of the boat and each other, other vessels around us, boats that were following us to steal our captain’s knowledge and expertise and gain a free look at the treasures we were tracking.
And we found them. We found them all right. A pod of three grey whales: I simply couldn’t believe it. I mean that quite literally: this was not a thing that made for easy credibility. It was, unlike the Super Bowl press conferences, quite evidently real, but something in the mind rejected the evidence of the senses. This couldn’t be, could it? These things, so uncompromisingly, so bewilderingly huge: they couldn’t exist just like that, could they? It didn’t make any sense to our human, our land-locked, our city-locked gaze. I stared at the three plumes of spume, each one holding a distinct shape for a couple of seconds before being whipped away in the sprightly breezes of the ocean. A back, breaking the surface, then rolling, siphoning past us, also like an endless loop, on and on, more and more and more of it, yard after yard after yard. Then a pause and then again the breaking, the echoing sigh of the triple breaths: the grey whales southing their way towards the breeding lagoons of Baja California.
That breathing is the most colossally intimate thing: the vast noise – grey whales are noted for the din of their blow – the least subtle way possible of reminding us that whales are mammals, just like us, that they breathe, just like us, and for that matter, they drown, just like us. Some scientists have suggested that sometimes the whales that get beached are sick animals, returning to land in dread of death by drowning. To see a whale is to experience not differences but
similarities: not what divides us but what we share.
After that, the sounding. A deeper sigh, a more explosive exhalation/inhalation, the body siphons past, perhaps a shade more quickly, and certainly there is more of it than before, for it takes longer to go past and then – oh, like a Roman candle bursting – the flukes break the surface and the great grey Y is silhouetted against the sky, dripping, wonderfully elegant in shape and conception, and then soundlessly it has vanished. Who could restrain a gasp, an oath, a tear? I wanted to drop to my knees, sing hallelujahs, fling myself into the ocean, kiss all the prettiest girls on the boat, the plain ones too, utter broken thanks to the skipper, be for ever a better, a humbler, a wiser person.
When the flukes break the surface – that’s when the differences come crashing home, the extraordinary fact that these creatures are so much bigger than us, for all their likeness so unlike us, for all the received wisdom of their near-human intelligence, so fundamentally at odds with any way of thinking that humans can grasp. Fellow-mammals: creatures as alien as any a science-fiction writer ever came up with: these were the denizens of Mars, Krypton, Tralfamadore, yet they were equipped with flesh and blood and lungs and hearts like our own. It was the scientist and writer JBS Haldane who said: “My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” You don’t have to leave the atmosphere of the earth to know that he’s right.
Every time the flukes broke the surface was a profound revelation of this truth. We were face to face with the vastness of whales, the vastness of creation, the vastness of the principles that make our planet function. There was no song in my head save the sighing of the whale’s breath. I wanted to be a part of it – but then I was a part of it, after all, and had been all along. That was inescapable. The great Y in the sky said Yes, and Yes, and Yes again.