Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas Read online

  For Rose and Mercédès

  Who knows what admirable virtue of fishes

  may be below low-water-mark, bearing up

  against a hard destiny, not admired by that

  fellow creature who alone can appreciate it!

  Who hears the fishes when they cry? It will

  not be forgotten by some memory that we

  were contemporaries.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Preface

  BOOK ONE - Northeast

  The Gulf of Maine

  Ogunquit

  Cape cod Bay

  Shores of Three Continents

  South of Block

  BOOK TWO - Northwest

  Yaquina Head

  Yachats

  Valley of Giants, Mountains of Gods

  on the ground

  Astoria

  Columbia gorge

  The Dalles and Umatilla

  Golden State

  BOOK THREE - Far Pacific

  Malakal

  Koror

  Ollei

  Hong Kong

  Sulu

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Move

  Praise

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  When I was a boy, on warm spring evenings in the rich light before sunset my father would often take me down to the pebbly shore of Long Island Sound to hunt striped bass. At the shore, with the sparkling water, the coursing terns, the iridescence of a freshly caught fish, the world seemed unspeakably beautiful and—I remember this vividly—so real. It seemed so real. Compared to the other families in our neighborhood—the ones with absentee businessmen fathers and kids with television dependency—I thought that my father and I, with our secret fishing spot, were very, very lucky. When one is growing up with a sense of place, the world seems secure and filled with promise.

  The arrival of bulldozers on our shoreline was an unfathomable catastrophe. In a youngster’s worldview, the country map is small. Loss of my beach amounted to expatriation. And no one is so long-remembering as a refugee.

  In graduate school, I arranged to do field work on the ecological relationships between seabirds and fishes. This would allow me to spend many hours out in the coastal ocean habitats that had opened my heart on my boyhood shores. At least now I was far from the bulldozers. My research began to develop into a reputable body of work, and to be published by well-regarded scientific journals. By all outer measures I was beginning a promising career as a research ecologist.

  But something else was happening during the course of my studies. Magnificent creatures that I was just getting to know in the ocean, like giant tuna, sea turtles, marlin, and sharks, were growing scarcer each year. The oceans were being depopulated; the creatures were not just being used—they were being used up. Watching them disappear, I felt helpless. It was almost as though the bulldozers had found me again, and were at work in the ocean.

  Sixty million buffalo once roamed the rolling green prairies of North America. They supported human cultures for thousands of years. But after a few decades of exploitation by industrial-age people, they were reduced to relics, symbols of profligate waste and dull self-interest. From my own vantage point— my research and fishing activities—it seemed that a last buffalo hunt was occurring on the rolling blue prairies of the oceans. The sea, as I watched, was being figuratively and literally strained. Overfishing was draining the ocean’s vitality, compounding the bulldozers’ work in the coastal wetland nurseries. Though overfishing threatens the very people who engage in it, this simple connection seemed as lost on many fishers as overhunting had been on the buffalo hunters.

  To plumb the extent of the changes I saw among the oceans’ creatures in my home waters, I undertook a journey of discovery beyond the blue horizon. I went to search out the oceans’ messages, and to bring those messages ashore. I traveled in a variety of roles: scientist, observer, advocate, guide, tourist, fisherman. The following pages record my journey. I will be your guide and interpreter. But ultimately you must judge what the oceans’ creatures and its peoples have to say, and what it means to you.

  Montauk, N.Y

  1997

  BOOK ONE

  Northeast

  New England & the Maritimes

  A few inches from where I stood, human history ended. The bronze age, the industrial revolution, the space age—gone. One hundred years ago, one thousand years ago, one million years ago, ten million years ago, much of the world looked like this. Sixty million years ago, the creature I was now watching, the shark slowly circling me, looked like this. Already perfected. In the beginning, all was void, and darkness was upon the waters. Ancient before Creation itself: the eternal sea.

  A slick plain like molten glass stretched away to the far horizons, where it seemed to meld upward without boundary into the deep blue sky of outer space. Just arcing out of night, the new sun sent an apricot-colored wash into the moist dawn like watercolor touched to wet paper. Thirty miles at sea, adrift in an open eighteen-foot boat, the world seemed freshly created and miraculous, laden with possibility. Even nowadays, the ocean at first light has that kind of power. The shark angled away, so unhurriedly that I could hardly mark the moment when its shape, so startling when it had first appeared, finally vanished.

  For two hours, my drifting boat rode a soft swell, the sea heaving and subsiding as though breathing, and I rising and falling gently as though resting my head on my lover’s chest. During that time the only thing I noticed was that the sun had purged the atmosphere of excess moisture, had sharpened the outline between sea and sky. The sky now seemed a circular curtain around the rim of not planet Earth but planet Ocean.

  What caught my eye was a faint chevron bulging ever so slightly from that molten, glassy sea, fifty yards from where I sat adrift. As I rose to my feet to study it, the chevron grew to a distinct wake. A wake without a boat. The wake ran along the surface for a few seconds, accelerated, and exploded like a revelation.

  A giant bluefin tuna, among the largest and most magnificent of animals, hung suspended for a long, riveting moment, emblazoned and backlit like a saber-finned warrior from another world, until its six hundred pounds of muscle crashed into the ocean like a boulder falling from the sky. The jagged tear it left in the sea was marked by an emerald patch of fine bubbles rising slowly to the surface until the spot healed, slowly turned blue again, and became indistinguishable.

  Wind and sea remained kind to me and my small craft for the duration of the morning, and I found my way back over the horizon, through the inlet, and home, without incident. Ashore, the vision of that giant tuna never dissipated.

  That morning I saw something. Not new—after years of fishing, it was certainly not the first tuna I had seen—but I saw something differently. I saw this fish not as a struggling opponent at the end of a line, not as potential dollars at the fish house, not as a prop against which my “sport” was framed, not as the prospective evening meal, but as a wild animal, perfect master of its element, no less spectacular than a grizzly bear or an eagle. No less spectacular, but perhaps even more venerable. “In a world older and more complete than ours,” Henry Beston wrote in The Outermost House, “they move finished and complete.”

  The bluefin tuna is clearly complete. Some say it is nearly finished. Scientists calculate that the bluefin population off the eastern s
eaboard of the United States and Canada has declined sharply since the 1970s, plummeting nearly 90 percent. They say reproduction is now very low. But commercial fishermen in New England—good fishermen and good people—say this is hogwash, that the fish are abundant, increasing in numbers. This debate is more than academic, because an adult bluefin may be worth more money to the person who can kill one than any other animal on the planet, elephants and rhinos included.

  Probing for the truth to this debate requires following the bluefin, and the bluefin’s trail leads us in many directions. It leads across and through oceans. It leads into a dense human jungle filled with shadowy figures, vinelike tangles of crisscrossing agendas, and thickets of politics. In this odd jungle, on the trail of a giant fish, our attention is continually diverted by side paths, made by other creatures, crossing the main trail again and again, leading intriguingly into the dark underbrush where we cannot follow. In this watery jungle, the bluefin’s path may cross the swordfish’s, the cod’s, even the scallop’s, and we may pause long enough to examine their tracks before we press onward. But most of all, the bluefin’s trail leads through the looking glass of the ocean’s surface, revealing that while the ocean may look the same as it has for millennia, it has changed, and changed greatly.

  The Gulf of Maine

  “I think there may be something to show you here,” Charlie Horton is saying through my headphones. Horton likes the color of this water. After flying over miles of oceanic desert, skimming wave upon wave unrelieved, this blue oasis is coming alive for us, finally.

  Two sleek finback whales are plowing furrows in the surface below us, at an uncommonly swift pace. Charlie banks his airplane for a better look. As he’s visually locked onto them, I glance down between the struts and am startled to see a school of very, very big fish. “Right here! Right here!”

  Horton banks hard and the plane wheels in a tight, gut-jumping circle. “Yup, tuna!” he says. “Good ones! Some five-hundred-pounders in that bunch.” About a hundred giant bluefin tuna are traveling peacefully just under the surface. The animals I am looking at are so large, I expect them to behave like dolphins; that they are not coming to the surface to breathe air feels somehow uncomfortable. I have to remind myself—it seems so odd—that these large creatures are truly fish.

  Close your eyes. Think fish. Do you envision half a ton of laminated muscle rocketing through the sea as fast as you drive your automobile? Do you envision a peaceful warrior capable of killing you unintentionally with a whack of its tail? These giant tuna strain the concept of fish. “Fish,” anyhow, is a matter of dry taxonomy, the discipline that tells more of your origins than of who you are now. “Fish” is a label, like your surname that relates you to both your disgraceful uncle and your extraordinary cousin, yet says nothing of you. Name is not destiny. Your relationship to those around you—your ecology, if you will—defines you in the moment.

  The giant tuna rise in unison, their backs breaking wakes like a flotilla of small boats. As they continue cruising, one of them splashes and sprints forward a few yards, like a thoroughbred jittery before a race, its behavior hinting strongly of enormous power in repose. What sense of the world, what feeling, moves this animal? Is it impatient? Is it thinking?

  Questions large and small come forward. The airplane turns a slow arc.

  Below, in plain sight, swim giant creatures from another dimension, confined below the surface no less than we are confined above it. They feel not the breeze but the tides; they have never pressed a solid surface; they breathe by moving forward and can never rest. How may we know them?

  Charlie watches the bluefins a moment and jots a note about their number and location. Charlie Horton is a professional fish spotter, finding bluefin tuna and swordfish from the air, then guiding a commercial fishing boat to them. Today, though, Charlie isn’t working with a boat. He has only me to worry about. I have formally requested that the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service begin a process that could end commercial fishing for bluefin tuna. But I’ve arranged to come fishing (as Charlie refers to flying) with him and with others in New England, because many fishermen insist that bluefin numbers are increasing and that the petition should be withdrawn. I want to see if I can get their sense of things, and try to understand their lives and livelihoods a little.

  We continue onward, hurtling over the shimmer, searching, scanning. White bursts—these too may be giant bluefins—draw our attention. Rather than tuna, several hundred white-sided dolphins come into focus, undulating crisply through the sea surface below. They glide up to snatch breath without breaking stride, then run along submerged, until coming easily again for the next inspiration of air. All this they do in one fluent movement, seemingly having as little need to think about breathing as we. Their fluid maneuvers are excruciatingly beautiful, a living embroidery of motion through the ocean’s wrinkled cloth. Having never watched dolphins from the air before, I am surprised that the animals are not evenly spaced. Certain individuals consort more closely together than others. I wonder if these are parents with their grown offspring, families, relatives, perhaps friends. Behind and following the dolphins, crisscrossing and coursing just above the waves, flies a loose flock of shearwaters, oceanic wanderers who touch land only when nesting. A blue shark appears, lazily wagging its way along just beneath the surface.

  All the animals gathered in this one area have my riveted attention, but Charlie sheers away, and we continue along at 107 knots.

  For the next thirty miles, we see little but ocean and sky. Charlie scans intently and tirelessly, as many square miles of sea surface pass beneath us. The shimmer mesmerizes me. After what seems a long while, Charlie says, “Look west.”

  A couple of miles away, the activity of half a dozen whales whitens a small area in the rolling blue universe. Another isolated oasis. A hundred and twenty miles an hour is fast, and we cover the distance to the whales in a blink. Now at least a dozen finbacks and humpbacks trouble the surface below, over an area perhaps four miles in diameter. One humpback breaches and crashes back, sending up an astonishing geyser of spray and foam. Remarks Charlie, “When you see whales like this, you could see tuna anywhere around here.”

  Up ahead, an enormous finback is doing some heavy breathing at the surface, sending up columns of steamy vapor each time it exhales. Signaling a deep dive with its arching back, the whale sounds straightaway like an arrow, out of sight. Directly below, two humpbacks, a mother and calf, erupt suddenly through the surface, blowing hard. Another mother and calf soon follow, up from infinity. We watch the whales moving along beneath the surface between breaths, their long and slender pectoral fins waving like the graceful arms of dancers. The whales roll forward in unison, lifting their massive tail flukes toward the sky, then flowing seamlessly into a sounding dive, digging straight down into very clear water for a few wonderfully extended seconds, before finally dissolving into that deep eternal indigo.

  Charlie goes into a search pattern. His judgment that this is a place worth scrutinizing pays off. We spot a school of a dozen giant bluefins and turn hard to circle them. Their movements appear stiff, as though their massive musculature is packed into too tight a skin. Autumn is upon us, and after summering on rich feeding grounds, the bluefins are nearing their fattest. The big fish swim tautly. Their tails—sickle shaped, capable of flexion but stiff, fibrous like fiberglass—wag ever so slightly. I am looking down at a pod of zeppelins reshaped for speed. Were Atlas to put down the world for a moment and pick up a giant bluefin, it would balance in his fingers like a dart, with its greatest mass gathered up front, to carry the momentum and deliver the impact. Widest just behind the head, the animals I am watching taper rapidly toward their propelling tails. When a giant bluefin tuna decides to move, it does not so much swim through the water as split it like a wedge.

  Charlie asks whether his abrupt maneuvering is making me queasy. His questioning brings me back inside my body, and I realize that the engine no
ise, the vibration, and the frequent sharp banking and rapid changes in altitude are getting to my stomach a little bit.

  We head off to the southeast, crossing miles of featureless water over many long minutes, scanning, always scanning. Each time we go searching, my stomach recovers. Each time we find life and begin to bank hard and wheel, queasiness returns.

  Off in the eastern distance, a hundred or so shearwaters and gulls are sitting on the water in scattered groups, like salt and pepper on a blue plate. We investigate. A dead whale, well decomposed, hangs vertically, producing a slick that runs for miles. Charlie banks tightly and swoops in. My poor stomach gives another tug. I dig into my sweatshirt for a package of little crackers and unthinkingly toss a handful toward my mouth; they bounce off of my headset’s featherweight mouthpiece and scatter on the cabin floor.

  Several large, well-gorged blue sharks—“blue dogs” as Charlie calls them—lounge with languid leisure in the fetid slick. They exemplify carnivorous contentment. Most assuredly, this is blue shark heaven. When blue dogs die, they must hope to go to the big, reeking whale carcass in the sky. Charlie only glances at the sharks, but he watches the birds’ behavior carefully. These birds prey on the same fish and squid as do the tuna, and birds’ behavior can betray tuna hunting near the surface. Charlie tells me that once, while watching shearwaters swimming underwater, feeding on small herring, he saw one of them get hit by a blue shark during a dive. “When the shearwater come to the surface, one wing was not working. He began going in circles. The shark appeared, chasing that bird round and round like you wouldn’t believe. Finally wore the shearwater out and nailed him.” Blue shark heaven can be shearwater hell. We leave the scene.