Shark Drunk

by Morten Stroksnes

  To make himself popular among his own people in Andalusia, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco built a number of factories where the fish were processed and packed into millions of cans. New technology made the fishing more efficient, and a new fleet of large motorized vessels followed the tuna out into the waters of the Atlantic. The Second World War put a stop to the overfishing, and the tuna populations recovered. After the war, the Bay of Biscay was littered with mines. The Spanish and French fishermen didn’t dare fish in that area. This too added to the increase in stock, and the bluefin tuna grew in huge numbers all the way up to Vestfjorden.

  Yet after ten short years, the tuna disappeared from the Norwegian coastline, and for several decades it has been considered an endangered species. But during the past few years it has again been observed off the coast of Norway. The Japanese will pay more than a million Norwegian kroner for a perfect specimen. But the fish has to be alive so it can be fattened up before slaughter. The meat around its belly contains a butterlike, pleasant-tasting fat. No other raw material is as coveted in sushi restaurants. I’ve seen where the catch ends up: in the famed Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. There, in vast hangarlike halls, the fish lie lined up like unidentified corpses after a plane crash, a tsunami, or some other major disaster.

  Who knows? Maybe the bluefin tuna will come back to Vestfjorden, fifty years after it disappeared. Hugo has started keeping an eye out for tuna whenever he goes out to sea. Many other exotic species keep showing up along the Norwegian coast, such as the ocean sunfish, European sea bass, Peter’s fish, and other “tourists.” A few years ago a swordfish was caught in a net in Steigen, very close to Hugo’s place. Colonies of tropical jellyfish, commonly called sea raft or by-the-wind sailor, have washed ashore in Lofoten. They float on the water and have little sails, which cause them to be blown across the oceans. No one had ever seen any in Norway before.

  This sort of phenomenon is most likely due to global warming. But don’t think it will make these waters richer. As new and ill-adapted species move farther north, the fish already here will slowly but surely move farther north if it gets too warm along the Norwegian coast.

  —

  At night I sleep with the window open. Only a gentle breeze ripples through the air. The muted, soft gurgling of the sea against the rocks underneath Aasjord Station finds its way through the thin veil of sleep. On the seaward side of the Vesterålen archipelago, they have a special word for the sound of the ocean when heard through a bedroom window on a mild summer night—the sound of water calmly lapping against the shore. The word is sjybårturn.

  10

  The next morning we haul out a couple of crab pots and a long fishing line with dozens of hooks. It’s just as warm and calm as it was yesterday, and the dog days of summer (July 23 to August 23) have just begun. We can already sense it. Seaweed has detached from the seafloor and is now quite visible as it floats in the water. That’s how the ocean regenerates.

  Dead bodies that have lain on the bottom also have a tendency to rise to the surface at this time. The sea gives up its dead, as it says in Revelation 20:13. In the old days, people believed food spoiled easier when the dog days set in and that the flies were more numerous and insistent. The sea reaches its warmest temperature during the dog days. The algae bloom depletes the seafloor of nutrients and oxygen, and many jellyfish appear in the ocean. They swim or drift around, pale and yellow, like fringed moons.

  As we set out the crab pots, we know they will be filled with brown crabs when we come back to get them in the evening. But are the crabs safe to eat? The level of the heavy metal cadmium is so high that the health authorities have issued a warning. We discover later that two of the crabs have ugly black patches on their shells, no doubt caused by some contagious disease. Hugo also tells me that in the past ten years very few wolffish have been caught. At first he thought it was being fished farther out to sea, in the wintertime. But on those occasions when he did catch wolffish, he noticed many of them had abscesses that looked like cancerous sores. Today the wolffish is making a comeback, though no one knows exactly why.

  The sea in Vestfjorden seems cleaner than in most other places in the world. The ocean is deep, the current strong, and huge masses of water are recirculated each day. But there are more heavy metals in this area than farther south, maybe because the sea is like a giant organism, and these open waters are directly linked to the global system of currents, many of which are northbound.

  —

  At last we’re going to put out our baited fishing line, five nautical miles south of the Skrova lighthouse. Hugo stays as far away as he can possibly get in our small boat as I cut open the remaining sack of offal from the slaughtered bull. The corpse stench pours out of the bag to hover over Vestfjorden. If we’re lucky, we won’t have a Greenland shark jumping into the boat while I’m attaching a hip joint covered with rotting red meat to the big, shiny hook. I don’t know what sort of expectations the Scottish Highland bull may have had, but I’m pretty sure the animal never imagined anything like this.

  We make sure we’re positioned in exactly the same spot as yesterday when we sank our chum bait to lure the shark. Then I drop the hook over the side. As Rimbaud put it: “Hideous strands at the end of brown gulfs / Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs / Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent!”33 I let the chain and the line run down to the bottom, not stopping until the reel is almost empty, which means we’ve let out close to eleven hundred feet of line. The twenty feet of chain at the bottom are essential because if the Greenland shark bites, it will start to roll around. The skin of the shark is so rough that a chain is the only thing that will hold. If you were to stroke a Greenland shark away from the direction it swims, its skin would feel smooth and frictionless. But if you stroke it in the opposite direction, you would cut your hand badly, because the shark’s skin is covered with tiny “skin teeth,” sharp as razors. Before World War II, Greenland sharks were exported to Germany, where the skin was used for sandpaper. The liver of the shark was boiled, and the fat was used in the production of glycerin and nitroglycerin. The latter, a highly unstable explosive, would often go off accidentally when sparked by small shocks or friction, and kill the people who handled or transported it.

  Finally Hugo fastens the line to our biggest float and tosses it into the water. The float is now transformed into a fishing bob, which is something I often used as a boy. But back then I was fishing for perch, brown trout, or arctic char—fish that weighed a pound at most. The bob was the size of a matchbox. You might say we’re still using the same sort of gear, but now we’ve grown up, and we’re fishing for Greenland shark with a bob that measures a yard across. And instead of a worm on a half-inch hook, we’re using a hook that looks like something used in a slaughterhouse, with parts of a huge dead beast attached to it. But that’s what we need. Even a Greenland shark won’t be able to pull the float under, at least not for more than a second at a time.

  Wanted: one medium-sized Greenland shark, ten to fifteen feet in length and weighing about thirteen hundred pounds. Latin name: Somniosus microcephalus. Blunt, rounded snout, cigar-shaped body, relatively small fins. Gives birth to live offspring. Lives in the North Atlantic and even swims under the floating ice cap at the North Pole. Prefers temperatures close to freezing but can also tolerate warmer water. Can dive to a depth of four thousand feet or more. The teeth in its lower jaw are as small as a saw blade’s. The teeth in the upper jaw are equally sharp but significantly bigger, and are used to bore into the prey while the lower teeth saw their way through. In addition to saw-blade teeth, it has, like a few other types of shark, suctioning lips that “glue” larger prey to its mouth while chewing. And every mating act is violent. On the bright side, the Greenland shark does not have sex until it’s about 150 years old.

  Scientists who have examined the stomach contents of Greenland sharks have encountered many surprises. How is it possible that in Greenland, Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), the famed Norweg
ian scientist, explorer, and politician, opened the stomach of a shark he’d caught and found a whole seal, eight large cods, a ling four feet long, a big halibut head, and several chunks of whale blubber? Nansen claimed, by the way, that the shark was able to live for several days even after this “huge, ugly animal” had been cut open and placed on ice.34

  The eye parasite Ommatokoita elongata, which is about two inches long, slowly devours the cornea of the Greenland shark, until it goes blind. In the folds of its belly the shark also has other parasites in the form of little yellow crabs (Aega arctica). Old shark fishermen have recounted how the parasites would fall off by the hundreds when the shark was hoisted aboard.

  The Greenland shark can be used for more than just making sandpaper and nitroglycerin. Its flesh is poisonous, smells like urine, and can serve as a potent drug. The Inuit used to feed the meat to their dogs, if nothing else was available. But the dogs would get extremely intoxicated and might even end up paralyzed for days. During World War I, there was a shortage of food in many places in the north, and people couldn’t be choosy. There was more than enough meat from Greenland sharks. But if people ate the meat when it was fresh, or neglected to treat it in the proper way, they could get “shark drunk,” because the flesh contains the nerve gas trimethylamine oxide.

  The resultant inebriated state is supposedly similar to taking in an extreme amount of alcohol or hallucinogenic drugs. Shark drunk people speak incoherently, see visions, stagger, and act very crazy. When they finally fall asleep, it’s nearly impossible to wake them up. To avoid these side effects, you need to cut the main artery of a Greenland shark immediately, so that the blood drains out. Then the meat can be dried or boiled in water, which has to be changed several times. In Iceland, the shark (called hákarl) is considered a delicacy, but there everyone is careful to prepare the meat properly. To make the poisons disappear requires repeated boiling, drying, or even burying the meat until it ferments.

  It should be no surprise that people living in northern Norway developed a healthy skepticism when it comes to the meat of the Greenland shark. The reason they even bothered to catch it was because the liver is extremely rich in oil. In the 1950s, Norway was the leader in commercial fishing for the Greenland shark, but by the early 1960s, demand was already fading.35 Only now is it making a small comeback.

  —

  Our boat is gently bobbing in the sunshine in Vestfjorden. Yesterday the sea glittered and crackled with light. Today it has a steady, calm glow. The ocean has found its lowest resting pulse, as it does only after many days of good weather in the summertime. It’s also a neap tide, which means the difference between high and low tide is unusually small. The gravitational force of the moon and the sun pull the sea in opposite directions, canceling each other out to a certain extent, like when two people arm-wrestle and neither has an advantage.

  Our only task is to wait and keep an eye on the floats. Maybe it’s because we’re drifting in Vestfjorden—where the currents function just fine on their own even when there’s no wind—that Hugo happens to think of a story about one time when he and his brother were out in their fishing smack. The boat, called the Plingen, was a small carvel-built vessel made in Namdalen in the 1950s. The fishing smack was waterlogged and sat low in the sea. In bad weather they had to pump out the water frantically by hand. One ice-cold day during the Lofoten fishing season in 1984, the two brothers went out during a squall. The motor wouldn’t start, but another boat in the fishing grounds saw they were in trouble and towed them back to Svolvær.

  That reminds Hugo of a similar situation. They were on board the Helnessund heading out of Svolvær after picking up a cargo of fresh shrimp that had been caught farther north in Finnmark. When a storm blew in, the boat quickly ran into trouble. The refrigeration unit failed and the cargo shifted. The freighter ended up drifting in the middle of Vestfjorden. By using countless buckets of seawater, they were finally able to cool down the engine enough to make it over to Skrova.

  Hugo often makes these sorts of associative leaps. When one story starts getting a bit worn out, it taps the next one on the back and sends it off, in a relay race that can go on and on. The stories usually move further and further away from the starting point. Sometimes I get confused and wonder what Hugo’s stories have to do with anything at all.

  But something about what he has already told me makes Hugo think of Måløya, one of the small islands on the seaward side of Steigen. That’s the location of a tiny, abandoned community that Hugo was curious about. Together with his brother, he dropped anchor and left the fishing smack to row a skiff, or reksa, as Hugo always calls these small wooden rowboats, toward a gently sloping sandy beach. But they misjudged the waves, and the little reksa got tossed around. Both brothers ended up in the icy water. They went ashore but didn’t stay long because it was late winter, and the air and water were freezing. On their way back to the fishing smack, the reksa again filled up with water because a small crack in the bottom was now much bigger after the rowboat had been tossed by the waves. Just before the reksa sank, the brothers managed to grab hold of the fishing smack, not by the gunwale, but farther down. They clung to the scupper. It was impossible for them to haul themselves on board, exhausted as they were, and with their soaked clothing heavy with seawater. After hanging there for a while, side by side like in some cartoon, they both realized how absurd the situation was and burst out laughing. But their strength was about to give out, and they needed to focus all their efforts on one last-ditch attempt to save themselves. So Hugo became a human ladder for his brother to climb up and clamber on board.

  If Hugo had lost his grip before his brother made it on deck, it’s unlikely either of them would be here to tell the story. But Hugo seems to think the main point of the whole tale is that a person doesn’t actually get all that cold by floating in Vestfjorden for nearly half an hour in March.

  “We stayed out for the rest of the day, and without changing our clothes. Although, I have to admit that behind our ears, and at the back of our necks—that’s where the cold settled.”

  Sometimes I wonder whether my friend is actually part sea mammal.

  11

  What’s going on down there on the seafloor, more than a thousand feet below us? Is the beast starting to sniff its way toward our stinking bait? The oily substances of putrefaction must be spreading like smoke from a fire, way down there in the water. What are we going to do if we actually manage to bring the shark up to the surface? I feel a certain fear mixed with anticipation at the thought.

  An acquaintance who used to be a seaman on a trawler once told me what they would do if a Greenland shark got caught in the trawl net and ended up on deck. They would tie a line around the base of its tail, lift it up with the derrick, and swing the shark out along the side of the ship. Then they would cut off the tail so the shark fell into the sea with a big splash. The amputation was accomplished in a flash, since Greenland sharks, like all sharks, have no bones, only cartilage. The shark is very much alive when it lands in the water, but it quickly discovers that something is seriously wrong. We humans wouldn’t have much of a chance if someone chopped off our legs and arms, and threw us overboard in the open ocean. Without its tail fin, the shark is helpless. It can’t move forward or keep its balance in the water. After a short time it sinks to the bottom, and down there in the ice-cold dark, it’s most likely eaten alive by other Greenland sharks.

  Hugo tells me that something similar was done with basking sharks. It was common to turn the shark over and cut open the belly so the liver floated out. Then the shark would continue swimming without its liver, at least for a while.

  They didn’t always cut off the tail of a Greenland shark. My friend the trawler seaman told me that sometimes they also painted the name of their boat on the side of the shark, as a greeting to the next trawler that happened to catch it. Whoever landed a shark like that in their net would paint the name of their own trawler on the other side of the fish and then set it free a
gain. It probably would have been easier to send a postcard, but trawler crews have their own brand of humor.

  “Look! Isn’t the float moving?” Hugo says.

  It looks like it’s popping up and down with the unnatural rhythm of a gigantic fishing bob. Something is definitely happening a few hundred yards away from where we’re sitting, in the middle of a shoal of mackerel. Hugo starts the motor, and in sixty seconds we’re at the site.

  Hugo starts pulling up, meaning he hauls on the line, and there’s no doubt that something big has taken the bait. After a while I take over, and it goes even slower. Have you ever tried to haul up from the seafloor a Greenland shark that’s maybe twenty-two feet long and weighs fifteen hundred pounds? A shark that’s holding on to an eleven-hundred-foot line attached to twenty feet of chain? The line digs into my fingers. It’s sheer agony. Stinging jellyfish have attached themselves to the line, and we’re not wearing gloves.

  My arms are practically lifeless, and there’s no more than 150 feet left when all of a sudden it gets a lot easier. Anyone who has ever gone fishing knows the feeling of deep disappointment. In a hundredth of a second all your hopes are crushed. You go from being excited, determined, and focused to tumbling down the basement stairs. Even though the line had been cutting into my hands, it hurts more to feel the weight disappear. Hauling the line the rest of the way up seems like harder work, even though it weighs next to nothing. A few minutes later the hook attached to the chain is right under the boat. I lift it up so it dangles in front of us. When we dropped the baited hook in the water, the hip joint was covered with red flesh. Now it has been gnawed clean. Dozens of tiny orange parasites are scratching at the bone. They look like lice or little insects. They must be what live in the folds on the belly of a Greenland shark.