Who Hears the Fishes when they cry?

Who knows what admirable virtue of fishes may be below the low-water-mark, bearing up against a hard destiny, not admired by that lone creature who can appreciate it! Who hears the fishes when they cry?   – Henry David Thoreau

It was a fair morning in June, the sea a calm cerulean blue, sparkling in the reflected sunlight. A few terns plummeted head first in the water and came up with something small and silvery wiggling on the end of the beak, and in the woods behind the house a song sparrow cranked up for the trill. I was cranking up the wood stove for breakfast and the children were stirring in the back bedroom. Out the kitchen window I could see the fishing boats coming in, a working man’s regatta of white and brightly painted Cape Island and double-ended fishing boats. The seagulls swirled above them in patterns of calligraphy washed across the cloudless morning sky and added their cries to the sound of the motors, the swosh of the parting waters.

Dimly, crawling up out of sleep, I’d heard the boats going out around 4:00 a.m., at that hour a chorus of motor made purrs, growls and putt-putts.   Each wife could tell the sound of her husband’s motor and could identify most of the others along the shore. “Oh, that’s Leon coming in now. Must have had a good catch.”,  Kathleen Hirtle might say without rising from her chair to look out the window.

This morning a white boat with green trim broke out of the flotilla and began steaming toward our cove, the swirl of complaining gulls drawn along by invisible ties. It was Kathleen’s husband, Collin and his son, Wade. Because the tide was high, the boat came right up to the dock, both men leaning over the side and grinning as the children spilled out of the house and raced to the shore.  “T’ought you might like a nice mess a’ mackerel for breakfast”, Collin said, his lined brown face still creased in a smile, as he brought out six newly dressed mackerel and laid them on the dock, their iridescent rose, black and silvery sides echoing the shine on the water. My husband, not to be out done in courtesy, invited Collin and Wade up to the house, but when they grinned again, pointing to their blood and scale flecked oilskin overalls he sent one of the children for a few bottles of beer and squatted down on the dock for a “visit” while I gathered up the mackerel and went back to the stove.

Collin’s great grandfather emigrated to Nova Scotia from Germany in the early part of the nineteenth century and his grandparents were among the first settlers on these islands in the mouth of the La Have River.  For a hundred years a few families, fleeing the poor harvests of Germany, Scotland and Ireland gradually settled along the coast and then moved to the islands, adding houses as the sons grew up, married, and started families of their own.  The life was hard but land was readily available and the fruits of the sea seemed infinite.

From the turn of the century until the mid 1950s, more or less, the fishing communities on the islands grew and prospered.  In the beginning men sailed or rowed to the fishing grounds and so houses were built on the islands furthest out to sea. The women managed the house, the garden and farm animals, wood gathering and water carrying, the children and all the necessary back-up for the men who went out fishing no matter the weather.  Fishing, in that era, meant either off-shore fishing: you went out daily before dawn in your own boat, with probably a son or nephew aboard, and dropped nets or jigged for the fish prevalent at that time of year and in those waters. The other way to fish was to go off in the big boats, and fish from dories in the fish rich waters of the Grand Banks or George’s Banks.  An alternative was to go on the schooners  to the West Indies, trading salt cod and lumber for rum, sugar and dynamite. The cleared and cultivated land became more productive. Sails gave way to the single cylinder engine, then the double cylinder, then the car engine and finally the marine engine.

We came to the La Have islands in 1968, not much more than a hundred years after the first settlers, but we came only as summer people to live in the houses now abandoned by fishermen.  We were welcomed into the community like family. “When are you coming home?” they’d ask us when we left in the fall. We learned from them about the local waters, the ways of the weather, where to fish for mackerel and how to cook an eel. Best of all, perhaps, were the yarns about being shipwrecked in the south seas, submarined in the first world war, near escapes at sea and eccentric neighbors.

In the 1960s it was no lack of fish that emptied the outer islands; it was better fishing boats and equipment.  With motors and safety equipment in the boats fishermen could live on the islands or move to the mainland with electricity, telephones, cars and more convenient access to schools and hospitals.  They could sail farther out and be more certain of coming home. Although each generation had been better off than the previous one, this generation benefited the most from improving technology, and more substantial government support in the form of subsidies for fishing gear, unemployment, free medical care and pensions. In 1968 technological improvements had made a significant difference in the lives of the fisherman without disturbing the balance in sustainable practices.

In our first ten years on the island fish were plentiful. We could row out into the sea, drop a jig line and come back within the hour with cod or mackerel for supper. The kids fished for flounder off the docks, dug clams on nearby beaches, and mussels, which the fishermen spurned, could be torn off the rocks for as large a meal as you wished.  Some days the boats came in so loaded the gunwales were almost awash and only the white wake would be visible at the stern. In June there were salmon for those with licenses but the staples were herring, cod, mackerel and haddock.  Sometimes the men caught ground fish – flounder and halibut, sometimes perch but always cod.For a few years the squid came in and we had a glorious time dipping jigs, sticks, old brooms, whatever into the water and pulling them up again a few minutes later with squid hanging from every surface, squirting black ink, making a colossal, hilarious mess. Once one of the younger fishermen came in with a four foot shark that had got caught in his net and we cut it up then and there on the dock.  It was delicious.

Between our arrival in 1968 and 1998 the fish disappeared: from abundance to scarcity in thirty years. “The culprit – as it almost always has been in fishing  – was a sudden change in technology.”  Sebastian Junger, in A Perfect Storm goes on to explain:  “…fishing had changed,…boats were using satellite navigation, electronic fish finders, temperature depth gauges. Radar reflectors were used to track gear and  new monofilament made it possible to set thirty or forty miles of line at a time.   He quotes a government study of the 1980’s: ‘The technological change appears to be bumping up against the limits of the resource’ . Large trawlers scoured the bottom, with nets and huge chains, sometimes two or three abreast, bringing up literally tons of fish.  They picked out the few fish which were marketable and dropped the remainder back, dead.  They “raked the bottom so hard that they actually leveled outcrops and filled in valleys – the very habitats where fish thrived…”

By the 1980’s, “…haddock landings had plummeted to one-fiftieth of what they were in 1960, cod landings had dropped by a factor of four.  New quick-freeze techniques allowed boats to work halfway around the world and process their fish as they went… Enormous Russian factory ships put to sea for months at a time and scoured the bottom with nets that could take thirty tons of fish in a single haul.    They fished practically within sight of the American coast, and within years the fish populations had been staggered by fifty percent losses.”

The American response was to announce a two hundred mile offshore limit to American sovereignty, and then hastily set to work constructing ships which could do the same thing . “Better equipment resulted in such huge takes that prices dropped and fishermen had to resort to more and more devastating  methods just to keep up.” (p.68)

Fishing on shore for a living is no longer viable along most of the north Atlantic coast. Every year there are fewer fish and, at last, more restrictions.  Whether it will be possible to restore the greed devastated stocks is still unknown.  Whether it will be possible to learn from the experience is still unknown. Possibly not.  I read in today’s paper that marine scientists are predicting for shellfish in Newfoundland a fate similar to that of the cod if the current rate of take continues, but every effort to regulate the industry is defeated.

During our brief thirty plus years on the island there has also been a sudden and startling drop in tide line creatures and in song birds.  In just the last ten years we have noted the almost complete disappearance of sea urchins, star fish, mussels and sand dollars. Few periwinkles crust the dock pilings. There has been a corresponding decline in the number of song birds.  The swallows which used to make a nuisance of themselves nesting in the  barn, the warblers teasing us with song but never staying still long enough to be identified: at least 20 species I recorded in the early years I am unable to find now. Whether the destruction of the sea’s bottom and the corresponding interruptions in the food chain are responsible for the disappearance of the tide line creatures I do not know.  To what extent increasing urbanization and chemical additives in the environment are responsible for the decreasing activity in our woods I do not know.  I do know that, as each summer when I return to the islands I realize that one more bird is absent, one more sea creature gone, one more fisherman has moved away I feel the reality of “endangered species” and “silent spring” not as mere concepts but as personal loss.

This essay is not to rant against change.  It is not a condemnation of technology.  Safer boats and better living conditions make sense. However, throwing back 90% of the catch and leveling the ocean bottom makes no sense. Building more and bigger draggers when the fish stocks are plummeting makes no sense. It is about acknowledging those times when  “technological change bumps up against the limits of the resource” and putting on the brakes, practicing restraint, passing and enforcing regulations to conserve the resource, whether it be cod fish, shell fish, wood or oil. This essay is against greed; against those who can not say enough is enough; against action without consideration for the long term consequences; against continuing with a practice even when the long term consequences are known to be disastrous; against the terrible disrespect we show for living things and the earth we have been given.

No fish, no terns, no fishermen, no fishing community.  The fish and birds are not the only casualties of technology coupled with self-interest. Collin is dead and Wade is working at a hospital in town. There are only two or three elderly men fishing off the islands now where once there were thirty to forty.The older men die or retire: their sons have gone elsewhere for work or  now live on the dole. There are no fishermen’s wives rocking by the window.  Their empty houses are being snapped up at startling prices by summer folk, mostly non-resident, mostly non-Canadian.

Perhaps the changes in the La Have Islands fishing community were inevitable as families moved off island and became absorbed into the mainstream of late 20th century North America.  Perhaps there was no way to stop the advance of civilization in which the TV replaces personal story telling and well packaged, well advertised food replaces your home grown or sea caught dinner. Perhaps the advantages of electricity and, even more important, the access to social services are worth the losses, but I mourn them nonetheless.

This essay is about loss but it is also about celebration and gratitude. Like the death of a friend I mourn the loss of the terns and the cod; like the death of a family I mourn the loss of my fishing community.  Even more than the loss of a resource our lives on the island, all our lives are lessened and diminished by the disappearance of these living creatures and different cultures. All the more reason, then, to be grateful for the opportunity we had to enjoy them in the fullness of their time, and to be grateful for what remains.  I still have the ubiquitous sea gulls screaming overhead or swimming upright and regal in the blue morning cove; there are still song sparrows in the hemlock tree and crabs scuttling in the waving seaweed. We can celebrate, we can be grateful for what was and what remains, but we must redouble our efforts, everyone of us, to preserve what is still preservable and to attempt to restore what we have destroyed.  We must add our voices to the cry of the fishes.

References

Junger, Sebastian. 1997.   The Perfect Storm. WW Norton, New York

(Originally published in Whole Terrain by Antioch New England in 2006.)