Shark Drunk

by Morten Stroksnes

  We are all going to disappear eventually. But on the dark bottom of the sea, where the fish and those crawling little animals are waiting, we would vanish so completely that the very thought is hard to bear.

  —

  Beginning in antiquity, explorers, geographers, and naturalists have gradually mapped the whole world. According to Dante, Odysseus did not go home to Penelope, as Homer claims. Odysseus wanted to press on, so he passed the Pillars of Hercules, left the Mediterranean, and headed westward on the open seas. According to Greek mythology, these pillars were raised to mark the border of the known, inhabited world. Even Hercules didn’t dare travel beyond that point. But driven by curiosity, a thirst for knowledge, and an adventurous spirit, Odysseus set off into the unknown, as Dante writes in the Divine Comedy (ca. 1320). Dante sternly punishes Odysseus for this transgression, sending him almost all the way down to the bottom of hell, to the eighth circle, where he is permanently engulfed in fire.24

  Only a few centuries ago, many still believed that there were people with dog heads, or with their face attached to their chest—or creatures that were a combination of scorpion, lion, and human being. Anyone who traveled far enough away from what was familiar and home ground risked encountering horses with wings, dragons breathing flames, and creatures with eyes that could literally kill. The existence of unicorns was commonly accepted. The oceans teemed with huge creatures possessed of the strangest traits and intentions.

  The façades of medieval cathedrals swarm with both fantastical animals and demons, all of which were considered to be real. We have always feared the bestial, especially predators that could kill and eat us. Through our activities, we are eradicating other species at a dizzying speed because we have obtained hegemony on earth and mastery of the seas. We’ve come so far that there’s almost never any question of a fair fight between humans and animals. These days, the real fight always takes place between people.

  Today the wild animals are threatened. For the most part we encounter them only in zoos or on safaris, where people pay huge sums of money to catch a glimpse of big game on the savannas, maybe even through a telescopic sight. Seeing whales or sharks up close gives many people joy, but it also gives them status.

  And by the way, sometimes whalers and whale watchers have come closer to each other than you’d think was possible. A few years ago, a boat packed with people from around the world was on a whale safari off the Norwegian island of Andøya. They were having a great time because there were lots of minke whales in the area. Their joy abruptly ended when a whaling ship appeared nearby. Before the very eyes of eighty whale-loving tourists, the ship’s crew harpooned a minke whale. On their way back to shore, the tourists witnessed another whaling ship hoisting a minke whale on board, as blood ran in torrents. Those tourists, and especially the children, would remember that scene for the rest of their lives. In an interview in Andøyposten, the head of Norway’s Småkvalfangerlag, an organization founded in 1938 to protect the interests of whalers, said, “It’s important to point out that those who go out to watch whales are extreme opponents of whaling.”25

  Take note of one thing: These days most monster movies are no longer about wild animals. They’re more often about perverted versions of ourselves, like zombies and vampires. Other threats to us usually come from outer space or, once in a while, from the sea. That’s where something unknown still exists, something we can’t completely control.

  —

  So what about Hugo and me? When putting on Brian Eno doesn’t help, things aren’t good. How about Robert Wyatt? Forget it. Not even with Robert Fripp on guitar. Right now even early Roxy Music comes up short.

  Every year humpback whales change the long and complex songs they sing. The new tune is delivered over great distances from one group to another. Hugo and I don’t update our music that often. The music we play tends to be forty years old. I try Ummagumma, Pink Floyd’s double album from 1969. It’s described as some of the strangest music they’ve ever released, and most of the band members have disavowed the album. But Hugo belongs to a small group of people who regard it as a brilliant masterpiece.

  We have fried klippfisk for dinner. The skrei we caught some two months ago has now become the most perfect dried-and-salted cod. Hugo treated the klippfisk the way they did in the old days. He carried the drying fish inside and then took it back out so it wouldn’t get too much sun or any rain. He took sheets of the salted and dried fish out to Vestfjorden to rinse them in pure seawater.

  As the evening progresses, the general mood gradually improves, more or less keeping pace with the rising of the sea toward high tide. But when the waters turn and the tide goes out, the mood again sinks.

  Before we go to bed, Hugo and I agree on one thing. Neither of us will mention the name “Greenland shark” until we’ve brought it up from the water. As if the mere words might evoke a curse. But don’t think we’re starting to have religious or superstitious notions about the shark. That’s not what it is.

  Shark worship does exist in other parts of the world. In Hawaii, the ‘aumakua was regarded as the most powerful guardian angel, and it often took the form of a shark. The Japanese thought of the shark as master of the ocean storms. In some island societies around New Guinea, a shark caller has higher status than all other members of the group. In the old days in Fiji, the islanders worshipped a shark god called Dakuwaqa as a direct ancestor of their highest chiefs. On the island of Beqa, the people still regard their shark god with such respect that just like Hugo and me, they never utter the name. For them it’s all right to put it in writing.26

  —

  It’s almost noon by the time I get up the next day. By then Hugo has been doing carpentry work for several hours. He comes into the building as I’m making myself a sandwich in the kitchen. He asks me about something I thought I’d explained in great detail yesterday, because it was important.

  “How scatterbrained can you be?” I say, and instantly regret my words.

  At first Hugo doesn’t reply, but two minutes later he asks me, with his head slightly bowed, what exactly it was I’d said when he came in. I deny saying what I’d said and at the same time apologize for saying it. Something is going on between us. It reminds me of the dregs left in the bottom of returnable bottles.

  Fish have a so-called lateral line, a system of sense organs that keeps them from touching one another, even when they’re swimming in large schools. Humans don’t have that, so clearly it’s time to take a break. I had planned on achieving close contact with the sea, but not by having Hugo heave me off the wharf.

  —

  As I’m walking through the station, I stop to take a closer look at the old diving gear the Finns left behind, hanging on the wall. The wetsuit is much too small, and a lot of the gear is missing, so you couldn’t just jump into the water. Even though Hugo and I are getting on each other’s nerves, I think: Why not keep things in the family? Hugo’s daughter, Anniken, likes to go diving. She lives in Kabelvåg and could lend me the equipment I need. She might even come with me for a dive. It’s been years since I’ve done any diving, and most of my dives were in distant places like Sumatra and Surabaya. To go diving in Vestfjorden suddenly seems like the only right thing to do.

  But there’s something else I need to do first.

  36

  I keep an old car in Skrova. I bought it last year because I have a house far out in the Vesterålen archipelago. Over the winter, water has leaked inside the car through the roof. The seats are damp, and there’s water on the floor. An acrid, moldy smell permeates the whole vehicle.

  I drive on board the ferry to Svolvær and continue along the sparkling fjords to Fiskebøl, where I catch another ferry to Melbu and Vesterålen. My route takes me across bridges and sounds, through Sortland and onward over a small mountain pass with hundreds of whispering streams, out to the seaward side in the municipality of Bø.

  Here the landscape changes dramatically. The almost alpine, wide-open, and classic fjord
landscape of northern Norway now looks more like the terrain in places like the Shetland Islands or Greenland. The green marine landscape is treeless, stripped bare in all its glory, with black peaks reaching many hundreds of feet into the air. The low flora hugs the ground, its colors blue, rust red, or pale green. Out here, the land has been ice-free for eighteen thousand years, longer than anywhere else in Norway.

  Where the road ends, in Hovden, farthest out near the sea, my house stands on a green moraine ridge above a white sandy beach. The house is white, but every corroding nail is visible because the walls have been sprayed with salt from the ocean. I go into the living room and notice that the wallpaper on the ceiling is bulging. All it takes is the light touch of a fingertip to poke a hole through the paper. A steady stream of water spurts right into my face. I run to get a big pot, but it fills quickly, so I get a basin.

  My great-grandfather built this house. Recently four other people and I purchased it along with the land, which covers more than twelve and a half acres. But property that is situated on the sea legally extends all the way out to where the steep underwater shelf begins. And from the water’s edge on the shore below the house, there are well over three hundred feet to the drop-off. In other words, we own part of the sea. That doesn’t feel quite right, but that’s how it is.

  The house is in a state of decay. A lot of water has collected along the pipes, and that’s what has settled in the living-room ceiling. Water has also been blown in from the side. One of the winter storms has torn off a board from the façade. Water drips into the basin with sharp little plunks, breaking the muted, rolling rhythm of the waves washing ashore. SWOOSH. Plunk. SWOOSH. Plunk.

  Water is in the process of taking over the house, which has withstood the sea and stormy winds for a hundred years. A little bailing was all my car needed, but the house should have been pumped out and then properly moored. The wind is blowing in from the sea, prompting a plaintive whistling sound from the roof and corners. Next to the house is an old well. It’s full, and the water I drink from it tastes salty.

  I get in the car to drive back to Lofoten. Condensation forms on the inside of the windows, but I hardly notice any difference when I wipe the water away, because there’s sea mist on the outside. Through this blurry waterworld, I occasionally glimpse cormorants nesting on the cliffs as the waves crash against caves and channels. My car thinks it’s a boat. I don’t need any road signs, but I keep an open eye for the beam of lighthouses along the way. My body feels saturated with water, and I have a runny nose.

  I phone Anniken, Hugo’s daughter. She agrees to go diving with me.

  37

  Two days later Anniken and I tip backward out of a boat near Kabelvåg. Finally I’m underwater in Vestfjorden. I put my head down, lift up my feet, and let the weight belt do its job. Like a sea mammal, I glide down toward the bottom twenty-five feet below. I see an opening between two dense forests of large brown kelp and make my way through. The kelp, as tall as trees, has wide, flat, glossy blades that gently sway back and forth with the current up through the water column. The blades slide along my body without catching hold.

  On the bottom I lie down to rest and look up. Above me I see ripples and a trembling blue light on the surface, which has now become the border to an entirely different world. On land, we have the sky above us and the sea below. Down here, I’m looking at a membrane so thin that it can’t be said to have any tangible substance at all; it merely represents a direct transition to another element.

  Most organisms on earth live down here. Very few species can live both on land and in the sea, and then only for brief moments. In theory, penguins are equally at home in both places, yet they’re quite helpless on land. The same is true of seals, walruses, and turtles. Only amphibians and some snakes are masters of both elements.

  At first the earth was covered by a shallow, lifeless ocean boiling with sulfur. Living cells arose and clumped together to form increasingly advanced organisms. Everything happened slowly until the point when life accelerated and shot out buds in all directions. For many billions of years, all life on earth existed in the sea. Creatures that are now extinct swam around weightlessly, breathing through gills and similar contrivances. It was only about 370 million years ago that the first living creatures hesitantly crawled up into shallow waters. They developed legs for walking and lungs for breathing. In the beginning they lived both in the water and on shore. Then they took their first steps to emerge fully and began to colonize the land. Some changed their mind and went back into the ocean.

  Here the water is clean and clear because currents are constantly moving through the area. When storms come in, this strip of coast gets blasted right in the face. For most people, the sea seems foreign and threatening but also strangely intimate and familiar. If one blows air at a healthy baby’s face, it will take a quick breath and close its mouth. This is one part of the phenomena called the Mammal Diving Reflex, or bradycardic response. Most healthy babies will hold their breath under water. Their heart rate will also slow down, their blood vessels will contract, and less oxygen will be transported to the extremities. The diving reflex decreases after six months, but it could be argued that babies are born to dive. All I hear right now is the sound of my own breath, a gaseous hissing when I inhale, deeper when I exhale, as the air combines with water and creates a wet gurgling sound. Breathing underwater reminds me of the wet, burbling sound of a baby’s heart inside the womb, the way you hear it via ultrasound sensors. In the womb, we all were enveloped by salt water. Even our lungs were filled with salt water, until the last period before birth. We had no idea that anything else was possible until we were forced out into the dry world, surrounded by light, and a slap made us empty our lungs for the first time. And we screamed. No longer underwater, from now on we would have atmospheric oxygen as our life force. As if over the course of nine months we had mirrored and reexperienced the entire process that the creatures of the sea had gone through on their way from water to land. In the classic movie The Abyss (1989), in which an alien, otherworldly civilization finally emerges from the ocean’s depths, the divers go so deep that they have to breathe a liquid blend of oxygen. “Your body will remember.”

  After lying on my back on the seafloor for a while, I continue swimming, moving away from the small clearing in the middle of the kelp forest. Finally I’m seeing the world through the optics of the ocean. A brown crab slips sideways toward a crack, then takes up position with its back against the wall, its claws raised. I pick it up, then set it down again and move on. A small school of what I think are Raitt’s sand eels burrows into the sand. Starfish feel their way along the bottom of a knoll. The small fish keep to the kelp forest, along with all the camouflaged creatures that always hide there.

  The water feels silky smooth against my body, even through the black rubber wetsuit. I keep swimming with the gentle current, among the silent, swaying kelp trees. I am weightless like water in the water. Not indistinct or a nothingness but like a drop in the ocean.

  The sea anemones wave, the plumose anemones are passively decorative. A lumpfish scowls at me, its spines out. It has a silly pout and looks excessively arrogant. Then a small shoal of fry appears, sleek and silvery. With abrupt lurches the fish all dart in the same direction, though without a specific leader.

  I’m actually in fairly shallow water, but I can still feel the pressure in my ears and sinuses. Jellyfish and many other species that live in the deep will explode if they’re taken up to the surface—just as we would be crushed into a shapeless mass down below. Only thirty feet down in the water the pressure is double what it is on the surface. At a depth of sixteen hundred feet, the pressure is the same as fifty-one atmospheres. That’s a heavy burden to carry. Divers who go down to great depths risk developing one or more nervous-system syndromes. They can become drowsy, they can fall asleep for short moments, or they may suffer from shaking, nausea, hallucinations, delusions, diarrhea, vomiting, and other symptoms that would be bad eno
ugh on the surface but are life threatening down in the deep. The pressure is so great that it’s much harder for the lungs to move the oxygen mixture in and out. All deep-sea divers have to go through decompression, which can take days. Without it, the blood becomes fizzy, like champagne, which makes a person drunk in the absolute worst way. Clots that form in the blood, joints, lungs, and brain can lead to a painful death. That’s how poorly adapted we are to the environment of the Greenland shark.

  The queen of bubbles lives in an underwater cave. In the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the first great work of literature known to the world, the hero Gilgamesh seeks immortality and is told that it can be found in the form of a plant at the bottom of the sea. Gilgamesh ties stones to his legs and lets himself sink into the water. There he finds the plant that will give him back his youth. But he should have taken better care—because when Gilgamesh returns to the surface, a snake steals the sea plant while the hero is bathing.

  —

  Now is when it happens. A current along the bottom carries me off with a force you wouldn’t think possible. There’s no point trying to fight it. I’ll just get whirled around. Instead, I keep my hands close to my body and let myself travel along, shooting through the water, farther and farther down, as I pass the most incredible sights. From now on, I’m swimming in the poem of the ocean—past sailing ships with torn sails to where the smiling sperm whale swims along the bottom in search of giant squids with eyes as big as plates and arms that sparkle; through the colorful violet forests of coral, where slimy eels slip in and out of skulls with clumps of seaweed on top. The current carries me along a deep sea trench to a big opening where the fin whale polyphonically sings a deep, plaintive ocean song. The low humming of the cod larvae can be heard from above, in between the trumpet fanfares of the seahorses, while the lobsters dance in circles around halibut and flounders that flap their tails to applaud. The wolffish, as usual, bear the faces of people I know. Ocean sunfish stand still in the water, lighting up the wide-open jaws of basking sharks. Stingrays fly past in formation like stealth bombers on a raid.