Shark Drunk

by Morten Stroksnes

  Olaus Magnus wrote that the voracious håfisk, or shark, will even eat small pieces of itself, if necessary. Some types of cephalopods, when in need of food, will actually eat one of their own arms. It grows back. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that many squids and octopuses are capable of issuing clouds of ink that take on the same shape as their own body—and in some cases, the ink glows with luminous particles. Humans with the same capabilities are familiar to us. They exist in comic books and films and are called superheroes.

  A cephalopod discovered in Indonesia in 2005 is able to assume the same shape as a flounder, a sea snake, or almost anything that appears before it. Most squids and octopuses can also instantly change the color and pattern on their own skin in order to blend in with their surroundings. Those that swim in the deep waters are invisible from both above and below.

  Their arms or tentacles can shoot out like projectiles, moving faster than our eyes can see. Each arm has a long, heavy suction cup, which in turn has chemical receptors that function like taste buds, while a fine-meshed net of nerve fibers makes the arm extremely sensitive.

  Some cephalopods can swim at speeds up to twenty-five miles an hour. They have blue blood, three hearts, a brain in each arm, and nerve cells like ours, but we don’t know whether they ever sleep. There is no doubt they are intelligent, and they quickly learn to recognize symbols.30 And it’s clear that they can grow to be enormous.

  Even today, only two intact examples of the colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni), which is the heaviest in the world, have ever been studied. Colossal squids live only in the vast depths of the Antarctic and nearby areas, but we hardly know more about them than people did in Olaus Magnus’s day. He tended to exaggerate when it came to the size and aggressiveness of sea monsters. Cephalopods do not get as big as ships. But in reality they have far more amazing characteristics than Olaus Magnus described. And it has actually been well documented that dolphins have indeed saved people from drowning.

  20

  After four days the weather eases. I put down my books and leave my improvised study chamber at Aasjord Station. The storm has left behind a faded, damp world in almost transparent tones of gray. The landscape and the buildings seem to have lost all contour, while the sea is heavy and listless, as if exhausted after the ravages of the past few days. Even the fish I observe from the dock are swimming sluggishly, maybe for lack of anything better to do.

  Behind a gray and despondent haze, the sea is pushing in and out of Vestfjorden. The tidal water picks up waves from the south to the north, reaching the Skrova lighthouse twice a day when the sea rises on its coastal currents that slip into the fjords while the formidable currents in the Atlantic Ocean continue on their way toward the Arctic Sea. We could have gone out in the boat now, but I have to return to Oslo.

  —

  Hugo and I have already started planning our wintertime fishing trip. We have to get hold of some stillborn or deformed piglets from one of the pig farms in Steigen. Then we’re going to catch a Greenland shark. That’s what we tell each other when we say good-bye. Do I glimpse a shadow of uncertainty in his eyes?

  No, I’m probably just imagining that. We still feel the drag of the irresistible arm Melville wrote about. Our internal mine workers will tirelessly persevere. Our lack of success so far only serves to harden our steely determination. It’s like a propeller that spins and spins, issuing a deep, rotating sound. Two men in a small boat, never sure what they might encounter out on the sea or what they might pull up from the abyss, beneath melted stars and electric full moons, where breakers and swells assault the islets like hysterical herds of cattle and the lunatic eye of the lighthouse never lets us out of its sight.

  Winter

  21

  It’s early March the next time I travel north, enticed as usual by the sea’s old promises of adventure and the hunt for a shark you can only dream about when inland. My route takes me from Berlin to Oslo to Bodø, and then by catamaran ferry north to Skrova. In the villages of Brennsund and Helnessund, white smoke rises from the chimneys through the frosty arctic air.

  It’s unusually cold. Winter along the coast is often damp and raw, but rarely does it get this cold. Each day the Gulf Stream carries as much heat to Europe as is generated by the entire world’s coal consumption over the course of ten years. Lofoten lies a good deal farther north than Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, yet in Lofoten the average temperature is almost ten degrees warmer, year-round. Without the Gulf Stream, the Norwegian coast would be one continuous expanse of ice, broken only by short, arctic summers.

  On the catamaran I buy the local newspaper. I read a story about more than a hundred wild sheep that have been taken by high tides. They were on the foreshore in freezing cold weather, near Burøya. Their wool became coated with ice, the tide came in, and the rocks ended up submerged, which was something the sheep couldn’t have foreseen. They didn’t have a chance. One hundred and four sheep are no longer among us. Only three survived. What were they doing out there on the rocks?

  Hugo has had a rough night. Yesterday he treated a floor with lye. But it’s five degrees Fahrenheit, which is abnormally cold for Skrova, and the water froze in the pipes. To rinse the lye off the floor, he had to bring salt water from the sea. The result is visible on his fingernails, which have split and partially dissolved. Plus he has the flu.

  Yet Hugo is his usual positive self. I ask for an update on the restoration process. He tells me there has been some trouble with the financing needed to realize his big plans to bring a gallery, restaurant, pub, and overnight accommodations to Aasjord Station. The work has come to a standstill, but this doesn’t seem to be worrying him too much. I ask about his stomach. He merely rolls his eyes and takes me around the fishing station to show me what he and Mette have done since my last visit.

  He’s made good progress on the interior of the Red House. They’ve also done a lot inside the station itself. What first meets the eye is that they’ve actually managed to clear out the fish-drying warehouse, the storage area for fishing gear, and the ground floor of the main building. All the old seines, vats, tools, materials, and equipment are now gone. In their place Hugo has built a bar from fishing crates printed with the names of fish landing centers and other companies from Vardø to Ålesund. In a week there’s going to be a big party at Aasjord Station.

  During the winter Hugo and Mette have also spent long periods in Steigen, where Hugo completed several large oil paintings. One painting is twenty-three feet wide and it is going to be hung in Stormen, the magnificent new cultural center and library of Bodø. A couple of other unfinished paintings are of the Greenland shark. The huge elusive fish has begun to impact our lives, maybe even to the point of turning Hugo into a figurative painter.

  As for storms: Hurricane Ole swept across Skrova and blew a large shed off a dock and into the sea. It also sent the waves surging up past Aasjord Station. The sea reached so high, they actually had to remove some floorboards inside the station to let the water flow in. Otherwise the waves would have forced their way through the floor and caused much more damage, maybe even lifting up the whole building. If the station hadn’t been restored and was still perched on wobbly rotten posts, it probably wouldn’t have withstood such extreme weather.

  After Hugo has brought me up to date, I ask him, “So, what else? What have you been doing with your time?”

  “What else?!”

  This time I can’t keep a straight face and start to laugh.

  “What about you?” he asks.

  “Oh, you know. Dealing with all the big-city hustle and bustle. Nothing but dirty snow, caffé lattes, fish sticks, bad kebabs, parking tickets, and stress,” I tell him.

  Hugo laughs. He has nothing against big cities, just as long as he doesn’t have to live in one permanently. Theoretically he could have moored his boats at the fashionable Aker Brygge in Oslo, but try as I might, I can’t even picture this.

  —

  We switch to a t
opic of more current interest. We’ve both seen the news about the record-sized Greenland sharks that have been caught off Andenes, not far to the north of us, in a southwestern fjord. A Dane caught one weighing 1,940 pounds—using a pole. A Swede managed to bring one up that weighed 1,235 pounds—from a kayak! He told the press that he’d dreamed of catching a Greenland shark ever since he was a child.

  “What’s so special about that?” asks Hugo.

  “Well, when the Dane finally brought the shark to the surface, he started to cry, comparing the experience to a religious revelation. He’d brought along divers with underwater cameras, an assist boat, and a helicopter in order to document the catch. Kind of pathetic, don’t you think?”

  Hugo merely snorts. Neither of us wants to waste much time on the news of a rich Dane who happens to be obsessed with sharks. In fact, we quickly move on. In one of the deep fjords outside Stavanger another Greenland shark was caught, weighing about twenty-four hundred pounds. Based on the photographs and our knowledge of the anatomy of Greenland sharks, Hugo and I are both skeptical about the report. We don’t get the point of such tall tales and boasting, especially when it’s so easy for experienced eyes like ours to spot lies.

  The video, which was posted on the Internet, shows a Greenland shark that is lethargic, almost comatose. In my mind, the shark was pulled up too fast, and its blood filled with bubbles of nitrogen, like a shark version of the bends. Hugo strongly doubts this idea. He also thinks that the two guys who caught the “Stavanger shark” had no real idea what they were doing. One of them actually jumped into the water to swim alongside the shark.

  “If the Greenland shark had suddenly lashed out, as we know it can, that guy would have had the biggest—and final—surprise of his life,” says Hugo.

  He once saw a film in which Greenland sharks wolf down big chunks of a whale carcass on the seafloor. They keep striking at it, rolling the huge body around, sort of like crocodiles do, until the blubber comes loose. I add a footnote about the cigar shark that lurks in the waters off Cuba. It can suddenly shoot up from below and sink its teeth into the blubber of a dolphin, whale, or shark, and then start rotating. For decades marine biologists wondered what was making the round, symmetrical flesh wounds they’d seen, until someone finally caught the predator on film.

  Hugo has found new information on the Internet indicating that a Greenland shark may have attacked a person. In 1856, a human leg was found inside a shark’s stomach near Pond Inlet, on the northeast coast of Canada. Of course, the leg could have belonged to a drowned fisherman, or to a passenger or crew member on a capsized boat, or to a suicide or murder victim—practically anything was possible, but nothing could be verified. And there are old Inuit legends that tell of Greenland sharks attacking kayaks.

  A legendary encounter between a Greenland shark and a human took place in the Kuummiut region of eastern Greenland in 2003. Dressed in oilskins, the crewmen from an Icelandic trawler, the Eiríkur Rauði, stood in shallow water, which was teeming with fish guts and blood. Up on deck the captain spotted a Greenland shark swimming toward the men. The captain was Sigurður Pétursson, nicknamed the Iceman because of his fearlessness. Pétursson threw himself into the water and grabbed the shark, then dragged it far up onto the foreshore, where he killed it with a gutting knife. Afterward the Iceman claimed he had been afraid the shark would set upon his crew. This incident should be classified as a human attacking a Greenland shark, and not the other way round.1

  At the very least, we know that Greenland sharks aren’t exactly picky about what they eat, and they’re more than capable of eating humans, if the opportunity arises.

  —

  Toward evening the air outside becomes clear and cold, and everything seems to expand. The ice appears to be coated with a thin layer of “flour,” as my grandfather would have said. It’s hoarfrost. The sky is a deep blue. On the horizon in the west the colors change to yellow, red, and purple near the mountaintops. On the highest peaks, light from the sun is faintly visible, like the reflection from a distant fire.

  Otherwise the light is blue. Even the snow looks blue.

  This intense, and yet muted, winter light is easy to see in Hugo’s paintings. He’s an abstract painter of the subtle light in the “dark” season. He draws a great deal of inspiration from his surroundings, turning them into something either almost unrecognizable or hyperfamiliar, depending on the eye of the beholder.

  Dinner is fried skrei (cod) tongue with grated raw carrots and an excellent sour cream sauce made with Hugo’s special homemade curry mix. This is the season when the skrei spawn in Lofoten. Some of the tongues are as big as fish cakes; they must have belonged to cod weighing sixty-five pounds. Hugo’s grandmother in Svolvær had a different recipe. She used to boil the tongues in a white sauce. These didn’t sit as well with Hugo, and to this day he hasn’t been able to shake off traumatic memories about his grandmother’s boiled cod tongues. On the other hand, he could probably eat fried cod tongues several times a week.

  As we enjoy our meal, we talk about the Lofoten fishing season, which is going on right now. The waters all around Skrova are teeming with fish. Outside Senja and Vesterålen, where the cod have come to spawn on their journey south from the Barents Sea, the fishermen are reporting record numbers of skrei. Huge shoals of the fish have rounded Lofoten Point, and the fishing off Skrova right now is probably better than anywhere else in the world. And that’s no exaggeration.

  The skrei are practically lining up to spawn. And in turn the fishing boats are lined up to deliver their catch to Ellingsen’s Fish Landing Center on the other side of the bay. The boats are heavy with skrei. Their gunwales are barely above water when they dock at Skrova. Many thousands of skrei have been gutted and hang on the drying racks. From the Ellingsen station great quantities of cod livers float past Aasjord Station. Using a fine-mesh landing net, Hugo has fished up a barrel of livers. He’ll use the oil to make paint.

  During Lofoten fishing seasons of the past, the bay was packed with fishing boats, bait boats, salting boats, and transport boats. The local population doubled and for a couple of months Skrova actually became a small town. However, beginning in the 1970s, more and more fishing stations closed. The reasons are many and complex. Profits were decreasing, but there had been bad times before, without causing closures. Fisheries have always endured natural fluctuations. The 1970s brought some extremely poor cod fishing seasons. During these years, what was referred to as a “seal invasion” also occurred. The seals did eat huge quantities of fish, but they probably didn’t deserve the blame. The main culprits were closer to home.

  Herring, halibut, and rosefish had also been overfished. Factory trawlers had depleted the cod stock in the Barents Sea, and all quotas—not just those of the trawlers—had been severely reduced. The miserable catches made 1980 a particularly difficult year. Those who depended on fisheries lost a lot of money. The authorities could do nothing but cut the quotas even more, to avoid a total depletion of the stocks, which is what happened in Newfoundland. After just a few years, a feeling of gloom pervaded many coastal communities in northern Norway.

  The Aasjord family’s location out in the sea had always been beneficial, but it soon became a disadvantage. Oddly, the future of fishing was not on the sea but on land. To survive, stations needed a direct connection to roads—something that Skrova will never have, since it lies close to six miles out to sea from Austvågøy.

  For a long time the Norwegian authorities had wanted to turn the smaller-scale fisherman into a farmer or factory worker. Viewed from the power center of Oslo, way to the south, the coastal fisherman had become an unwanted individual, with an unreliable income and perhaps erratic state of mind. In 1937, Bishop Eivind Berggrav had already become a vocal part of this tradition when he wrote in support of actions that were meant to turn the northern Norwegian fishermen into individuals of “more stable mind.” He said it would take generations.2 And today there’s hardly a single fisherman left who liv
es permanently on Skrova.

  It was as if the very zeitgeist were conspiring against places like Skrova, which had played such a central role as long as almost all transport took place by boat along the coast. From time immemorial the shipping lanes had been Norway’s highways. The national network of roads changed all that, and old island communities that used to be right on the main marine highway were doomed. New centers with more convenient locations were planned. They were situated farther inland, often in very desolate spots deep inside long fjords, in places where only a few houses had previously existed.

  Strategists and planners in Oslo redrew the north, in the name of modernization. In the fisheries it became all about industrialization, both at sea and on land. Coastal fishing, which for a thousand years or more had followed the seasons and the natural fluctuations in resources, was suddenly depicted as a national burden—outdated and lacking the economy of scale that characterized the steel industry and factories in central Norway, where shift work kept operations going around the clock. Those who defended small fishing vessels and the traditional way of doing things were dismissed as “romantics.” Yet the modernists promoted equally romantic notions about trawlers and industrialization. New fillet factories were established in a few cities and towns, such as Tromsø, Hammerfest, and Båtsfjord. But these vast and expensive structures—dependent on seagoing trawlers bringing enormous catches to land—soon proved useless when the fish disappeared.

  Several weeks before I arrived in Skrova, I was at the legendary Lopphavet in Vest-Finnmark. There the fishermen get ice from the Øksfjord glacier, which calves into Jøkelfjorden. The municipality’s coat of arms shows a cormorant on a golden backdrop. Their motto is “A sea of possibilities.”

  In the past there were fish landing centers on every other promontory in Loppa. The fishing banks are still extremely rich, but today there isn’t a single landing center in the entire municipality. The folks of Loppa have lived off fishing for many thousands of years. Now they have largely lost the right to harvest the sea’s resources, because the quotas have become unaffordable commodities and objects of speculation by investors. The locals have little or no share in the profit others are making in their region.