Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Tiwarik and Kansulay

  8

  The journey back alone from Manila is somehow less arduous. My heart lightens with each turn of the wheels leaving the city behind. The first glimpse of the sea – even if it is framed by the scummy reaches of an estuary where we embark – is a benediction. By the time I reach Bulangan in mid-afternoon the following day I am transformed, lighter by the weight of generalised anxiety which has slipped from me along the way. In Malubog I greet a shopkeeper with perhaps too much effusiveness. Pleased as I am to see him, it is only eight days since I last did so. I cover up this lapse by buying from him several tins of Alaska condensed milk for families in Sabay: it is not done to return from any trip without a pasalubong.

  In so doing I nearly miss the last jeep of the day to Sabay. This is just leaving, already laden past the point where it is worthwhile to wonder how it functions at all. Glad I do not have to wedge myself inside and look sheepish for being so huge I stand instead on an empty fish-box roped to the tail grid and cling to the edge of the roof-rack which is itself piled high with luggage and children. The bright air whizzes past, we duck beneath sprays of leaves. From my eminence I look down at the boy beside me who has just clambered on and found a toehold. I recognise one of Intoy’s younger brothers. His small hands are clenched around the edge of the polished aluminium roof, tendons standing out. The brown and serious face stares into the wind. From this angle the fine silk on the side of his cheek and the corner of his upper lip is a pale powdery nap. More extraordinary is his hair whose straight Asian jet shimmers in the airflow. Its movement is continuous like a stream of water, like the slide of water seen from over a boat’s edge, a hypnotic lively rush. It is as if hair in an unending bow-wave were bursting from his temples and scurrying back off his head with its passing glints and lights and flecks of foam. I almost expect to look behind and see a growing wake of tresses in our following dust.

  That night I walk the shore of Tiwarik alone, seeing my footsteps agitate invisible grains into momentary phosphorescence, living granules stranded by the outgoing tide. The shingle is alive with hermit crabs, a constant seethe of tiny castles lurching and jerking across a battered terrain which remarkably affords them rich pickings. I salute them for their life on the edge, being neither wholly of the sea nor of the land, living in cast-off forts, scavenging their sustenance from anything left by sea or man. Here and there two engage in battle, overbalance, roll down into the water. Others bump into each other, pass, following their own wandering courses with implacable purpose. How could each have a separate, valid path to pursue over those hillocks of dead limestone, among those valleys and crags and boulders? Is their progress merely random? Do they become confused and distracted by all the olfactory intertwinings? To understand what each crab is doing, exactly why it goes where it does, would be to understand something significant. Here in the moonlight by the still sea it is possible to glimpse an end to the world, aeons after the last human corpse has yielded up the ghosts of its last aminoacids, the hermit crabs still busy with the sea’s mullings, shuffling and clicking their tangled paths which with the terrain they cross are daily washed into new configurations.

  The sun next morning is not the same star which baked the photochemical smog above Manila into a pale brown dome. It is utterly direct and clear. It bleeds away the terpenes from the forest above, it strips off any human folly which I might have draped about the place. In that brilliantly-lit discourse between land and water something other is going on which I long very much to follow. For above all else the light reminds how unsatisfactory it is to look at the sun and say ‘sun’, at the sea and say ‘sea’. It is no use pretending they don’t have metaphoric status, that the rocking dazzle of noon about Tiwarik does not also contain all manner of departures from light. Thus one glimpses behind any landscape a fleetingness as if something not visible to the eye were racing through, something which nearly was the eye, amorous and transient, intelligent and thirsty.

  This is the eye to cultivate, the way of looking which leaves behind the ego. The proper eye does not care to be liked nor does it feel it has to amuse. Tern-like it drifts on the thin gale amid arctic glaciers or stares into holes beneath ultramarine fathoms. When it looks at skin it marvels at the easy rubbing away of desire but knows of longing forever unassuaged. Uneasy winds blow through all it sees and can leave very clear and unexpected outlines. Tiwarik at noon has the contours of a mind, massively quiet and sentient with its humming surf. Like some mysterious vehicle at rest it waits, ticking over. The passenger goes up to his hut, sits on the floor in the shade. A different kind of journey has begun.

  On this journey, which takes place at any time, he learns he has no right to expect a free passage. The landscape carries him along but it is not going his way. His desire that it be ravishing or mystical is only his desire he tries to foist onto it; the landscape couldn’t care less what he wants. Underneath it is proceeding in its own way with extreme energy and economy, entirely self-aware and entirely uncompassionate. In the forest, on the beach and among the reefs it goes, in a manner which looks to a human observer like war. But the complexity of what is happening, the sheer beauty of the huge structure has nothing to do with human interpretations but merely encompasses the raw terms of life. The bristle worms fluff out their brilliant feathery crowns; the coral algae are busy with their photosynthesis, the polyps with their daily routines of chemistry and light. Outside the reef a hammerhead glides like a priest. He is quite clear from the bluff above the head, unhurried, not hungry, for he passes over the deep blue trench within a few metres of half a dozen bluefin. Both shark and fish must be perfectly aware of each other but whatever the means of communication it bears a message which allows them to continue their separate routes that so briefly crossed. The bluefin do not alter course. Like the hermit crabs they are purposeful, on the way somewhere or merely on the way through miles of sunlit water. Slowly, too, the hammerhead fades. I watch him in his magnificence growing dim, becoming a faint shape scribbled across by surface ripples, his image erased by wind.

  *

  From my vantage point I can look down and speculate about the million messages carried on the currents below, intercepted and acted on, heard, smelt, tasted, seen, palpated, received. Some of the messages are highly dangerous in themselves, cytotoxic and neurotoxic venoms leaked from a variety of sting-cells, spines, fangs, glands. Such messages are often received by human swimmers and the fishermen of Sabay answer back in kind, for in addition to being accomplished bombers they are poisoners as well. It is only at these moments the reef becomes a battlefield, when man deploys weapons designed for effects on a different scale and on different terrain.

  How resourceful they are, these people who have learned hard how to stay alive by such a variety of means. Not only can a Sabay fisherman turn his hand to agriculture on the steep slopes behind the village, planting rice and cassava when the rains come, fishing with net, spear and explosive when the sea is right, but he has yet another source of income. This is from two distinct activities known collectively as similya or ‘seedlings’. One involves children trudging up and down in the breakers at certain seasons towing behind them billowing nets of the finest mesh to catch the tiny fry of bangus. The bangus or milk fish (Chanos chanos) is greatly prized in the Philippines and has been elevated to the status of National Fish. It is expensive and hence much farmed. The fry are bagged in plastic and shipped off to agents for rearing in fish pans.

  The other kind of similya is the gathering of live specimens of coral fish for export to dealers abroad who specialise in tropical fish for the world’s aquaria. Once again the methods of the Sabay fisherfolk are illegal and ingenious. The technique this time depends on sodiúm or kuskus: sodium cyanide which is smuggled in from a distant province in the form of white crystalline chunks looking for all the world like washing soda. These are put into plastic Shell Rotella motor oil containers fitted with a short spout and diluted with seawater. Lighter boats are us
ed than for dynamiting since the corals being fished are generally in shallower waters and there is no need for a compressor. Goggled swimmers hold onto the boats’ outriggers and drift in the water above the corals until a suitable species is seen or a likely outcrop spotted. Then the poisoner swims down and squirts his bottle into cracks and holes. It appears that diluting the cyanide with seawater makes it less lethal and more anaesthetic in effect. By the time the poisoner has come up to exchange his bottle for a light net the first fish are beginning to reel out of the coral, moving dopily on their backs, on their sides, acting drunk. The ones that are wanted are scooped up and transferred to polythene bags of seawater in the boat. Once back in Sabay they are rebagged according to species and twice a week are shipped up the coast for collection by an agent from Manila who generally pays the fishermen one-sixth of the price he will ask foreign dealers two days later.

  Local lore has it that kuskus crystals are more dangerous to the humans and their families than they are to the fish, for doped fish appear to recover quickly if the dilution is correct. Unfortunately the truth of this extends only as far as the Sabayans’ observation: it is what they don’t see, the effects of kuskus on invisible plants and animals which is so disastrous. In the meantime if kuskus becomes temporarily unavailable there are potent alternatives, among them bayati and tubli root, both common enough plants but harder to use because more powerful even than cyanide in salt water and tending to kill the fish outright rather than just anaesthetising them. They are useful for flushing out large and dangerous prey such as big eels, however, allowing a spear-fisherman time to place his shot while less menaced by the slashing mouthful of teeth which can strip flesh off a hand like a glove. Fishermen who tackle big morays many feet down are grateful for all the help they can get; a squirt of tubli root slightly up-current of that swaying, fanged head can make all the difference.

  Poison, like dynamite, is not something I have ever used myself nor ever shall. For one thing I am far too afraid of it. For another I hate its imprecision, its casual slaughter of micro-organisms which happen to get in the way of the pursuit of a single small aquarium fish. Besides, because I do not have a family to feed I can afford to adopt the weird and quirky view that if one chooses to engage with a large moray one should be responsible for one’s temerity as for one’s skill. A true hunter could never allow poison into his armoury; it is a matter of pride and good taste. Eels are not at all difficult to shoot but they are excessively hard to kill. They have terrifying strength and once they have retreated into their holes enough for half their length to have gained a firm anchorage, one may all but tear their heads off without budging them. To me it is a sad and piteous sight, a great eel with his head slashed, a spear through one eye and his lower jaw torn off, the white flesh hanging in shreds in the current, still with his muscles locked in a tetanic spasm and his blank remaining eye fixed on the nearest enemy. He can never survive in that condition but maybe he can hold on for another hour or so (for his brain is tiny and inaccessible), long enough perhaps for weary hunters to give up and move on, leaving their ruined prey. Anyone who has ever seen his own blood blossom in green stranded clouds around him in the water ought not to lack feeling for tenacious life, the proximity of death.

  Meanwhile the villagers’ use of sodium cyanide remains a vital part of their similya operation which in turn provides a significant proportion of their income.6 It is not a form of fishing which interests me at all so no doubt its finer points of technique elude me. Sodium cyanide dissolved in seawater may indeed be an endlessly subtle poison worthy of a Renaissance venefice. But then, plenty of apologists for dynamite – Arman himself included – will argue how selective and accurate that can be. It is true these techniques have been around a long time and still there are fish in the waters of Sabay, in Tiwarik’s coral reefs. But I myself have not been here long enough to know how much better fish stocks and corals were ten or more years ago. At a local level, then, knowing the people involved and knowing their lives I sometimes think they are getting by, just on the edge between destroying the marine environment on which they depend and allowing it to survive.

  This may be how the particular and partial eye observes and reasons. But if that eye withdraws far enough to see Sabay as just one more tiny village whose fishing activities are not untypical, the whole archipelago presents a gloomy prospect. No matter how skilled they may be the Filipinos are steadily destroying their corals as they are their forests. Dynamiters are often little more than cowboys raiding other people’s fishing grounds in powerful boats, stuffing their ice-boxes with corpses and pushing casually on, leaving behind them shattered corals, dead and dying creatures, vital colonies of micro-organisms annihilated. In its own way cyanide fishing is even more destructive because what the villagers do not see are the coral polyps themselves being poisoned, the algae on which they depend and the hidden life deep within the reef being killed.

  This is a national problem since probably almost 80 per cent of the world’s salt-water tropical fish come from the Philippines, a market supplied by a comparative handful of rapacious and cut-throat exporters. It is they who keep the fishermen supplied with the cyanide, buying off local coastguards and policemen in order to get the drums of poison distributed among the islands. Certain species of fish are now becoming quite scarce. Some of the larger angel fishes such as the Majestic (Euxiphipops navarchus), the Blue Face (Euxiphipops xanthometopon) and the Imperator (Pomacanthus imperator) have been decimated. Blue Tangs (Paracanthurus hepatus) are increasingly rare as are several species of butterfly and clown fishes. As stocks decrease the prices rise and competition becomes still more unscrupulous. The American and European owners of calm and bubbling tanks which sustain their mournful slivers of life as clinically as any life-support system cannot guess – or prefer not to know – the other end of that chain. The world in which those fish were taken is lawless and destructive: greedy fiefdoms protected by bribed local officials, smuggled sacks of poison, exploited fishermen and dying habitats. For every live specimen which survives to expire on its life-support system in somebody’s living-room are an uncounted number of fish which die in the process of being poisoned on the sea bed, bagged, tagged and exported.

  *

  Many months later and far away a small incident was poignant with recollections for me. I was in London, intending among other things to have an ear seen to – presumably the constant diving had affected some remote piece of tubing. Thanks partly to a family connection I was to be seen by a private ENT consultant. One morning I found myself in a typical consultant’s waiting-room.

  From the room itself there was no way of telling whether waiting patients were to pass through a dark red mahoganyesque door for new contact lenses, a hair transplant, dental work or a gynaecological examination. They might from the look of the place expect to be told they owed three thousand pounds or that with a lucky remission they might just have six months to put their affairs in order. The air smelt of Cavendish Square. Deep carpet on the floor, a standard lamp with a gold shade in one corner, leather armchairs, stacks of Vogue, Punch, Country Life, The Lady, Autocar on low tables. Heavy moth-coloured curtains framed a view of what were basically eighteenth-century rooftops misshapen with grimy aerials, asphalted water tanks and corroded heat exchangers. On the marble mantelpiece stood a marble clock of enormous weight and absurdly slow tick: ‘Festina lente’ said the apt admonishment in copperplate script near the top.

  But the ordinary gloom and tension which always pervades such fake-clublands was pricked into real poignancy by a large aquarium which stood in the corner opposite the lamp. In it were the usual sorts of small fish inertly doing nothing among the little thermometers, the thin plastic tubes emitting sprays of bubbles, the whimsies embedded in the gravel at the bottom. The purposeful, unreadable courses the fish would have been swimming in their natural habitat were impossible. Suddenly from behind a pirate’s chest purporting to spill a cascade of jewels onto the sea bed swam an old fr
iend: a tiny specimen of the Queen Trigger such as I had often hunted for my supper. Each species of fish has its characteristic movements and attitudes in the water. Listless and foully lost as this poor creature was it was not so denatured as to have unlearned how to face a threat from in front, in this case my affectionate fingertips on the glass at its nose. It hung there in that familiar head-on posture, dorsal and ventral fins appearing to move in contrary motion, then half-turning to back up and re-face the threat from a little further away. That was the moment juste for the spear, as it briefly presented a side view. Mentally I fired and heard the pok! of tough hide being pierced, heard alarmed drumming as I headed up through thirty feet of water (for Queen Triggers prefer a bit of depth), my prey spitted. Even as I rose to the sunlit surface I had swept the fish back along the steel rod onto the catch-line trailing below me, starting the process of re-loading before my head broke through into bright air.

  ‘Pretty, aren’t they?’ I had been joined by the receptionist who had shown me into the waiting-room. ‘Are you a fish fancier?’

  I made some non-committal remark and asked whether they had had the Queen Trigger for long.

  ‘About a week. Handsome little devil, isn’t he? We’ve had several like him already. If you look very carefully you can see he isn’t black at all but midnight blue. And if you look really close you’ll notice his scales are sort of fake: they’re just a diamond pattern on his skin. I don’t know why, that kind never seem to last very long. Only a month or two usually.’

  I wondered whether to tell her about its high first dorsal spine which locked vertically up to wedge the fish defensively into cracks and which could only be released by pressing down the lower second spine, the trigger. I didn’t tell her the fish were very tasty if wrapped in a banana leaf and roast over an open fire. Instead I wondered whether this particular specimen had hatched into life as fry in the offshore swell of Tiwarik, later to be stunned by Arman’s cyanide and retrieved in his net, from that moment destined to stare for the rest of its life not through thirty feet of vivid tropical sea but through a few inches of reconstituted seawater warmed by electric bulbs at a wall of glass until saprophages grew in its gills and killed it.