III
The Resources of the Sea
Sit inland on the ground on a sunny day, and color, shadows, sound, substance, novelty in great detail, invade the smallest areas. One flower may attract many species of insects, brilliantly patterned and colored, flicking around, crawling, eating, gathering pollen, in any number of arresting ways, and the growth of plants around you, the shape of leaves, the general stir of things comes running like a carnival.
On the beach you might see a lone dragger lifting and falling, moving slowly parallel to the shore, beyond the measured fall of the green surf. A herring gull flies by. The vast sky swings overhead; the wind flies down the sand. Purple stones, driftwood, an occasional dead skate or dogfish comes to your attention as you walk on. A black crow pecks at seaweed far ahead. A sanderling flits by. You notice a finger sponge attached to a large mussel or a sea scallop, broken loose and washed in from offshore beds, and that seems to be all, in a relatively empty world; but between these single things, a grain of sand, a stone, a bird or bird track, a wave, you become conscious of a bounty of space.
The sea and its shores are still not caught, still relatively immune to human claims. Fill them with knowledge and with crowds and they still escape us, outrunning us like the sunlight on the water. Specifically, this age which is able to measure everything but mystery, might tell you just how capacious the oceans are. They comprise two thirds of the earth’s surface; they have a close relationship to the atmosphere and are in large measure responsible for our weather; and we know, with the assurance of conquerors, that if all else fails we may be able to save the human race from dying of thirst and starvation by extracting water and food from them, providing our atomic wastes do not prohibit it. We are also learning how to mine the ocean floors for their minerals, how to harness the tides, and how to use their depths for concealment.
Oceanography is one of the great modern sciences and it has revealed mountains, rifts, plains, and canyons on a scale that would astonish us if we saw them on earth, as it has also brought us more knowledge of marine animals at all depths. It has made great contributions to the restless modern mind. How can we look at the sea without at some time thinking of our earth’s submerged geology, gigantic, uneroded by wind, sun, or rain, in calm waters inhabited by strange aquatic lives?
Strange is still the word for them. No amount of assessment of the sea’s contents quite translates them for us. What, for example, is a fish? What is that flat creature the skate lying there on the sand, with its tough hide and the small slit of a mouth on the same side as its belly?
There is an aquarium at Woods Hole with a collection of many of the kinds of fish that inhabit the waters off Cape Cod. They seem foreign, weird, almost unexampled when you see them in their captured state. I saw a woman standing in front of one of the windows looking at some toadfish, little fat animals with great mouths, squat, with round-edged fleshy fins that gave the appearance of warts and knobs, expertly camouflaged in varied patterns so that they can at once sink in and become a part of the bottom: “Oh!” she cried. “Horrible!”
All the others there become more than the term “fish” when you see them suspended behind glass, floating in their own world of water, strangers in the perfection of their own remoteness. Their dull jaws open and close as they breathe. Their filmy, diaphanous fins wave lightly and loosely. Their flicking eyes pass you by, with a kind of self-enclosed abstractness, a stiffness, as if they had not seen you at all, and no doubt the blurred human form means very little to them. The glass separates the world of water from the world of air. Their bodies curve deliberately and slowly, and then suddenly switch into an unsuspected quickness, while we tourists shove and crowd and gawk from our unbridgeable distance.
At other windows the rays and skates, with fins fused to bodies like wafers, wave through the water. Bottom fish suddenly disappear in puffs of sand. The lean, long sand shark, primitive, tough, swims with infinite smoothness back and forth, an expression of coldness, an incarnate simplicity.
They are all unknown, not of our race, and giving the unknown the old credit of fear, they are horrible, monsters in their realm, with intercommunications, receptions, that we are unable to touch.
An aquarium is a luxury. Most of the fish we see are dead, a boatload of wet, cold, slippery white and gray flounder, cod, or haddock just come into port, or dying, like a striped bass caught by a fisherman casting off the beach—flipping on the sands with all its cool brightness still alive, a slippery, lucent sea green. The color loss is quick as a fish dies, leaving the rippling shades of its great medium behind.
The world of ocean color comes inland in the spring with the alewives that migrate from salt water up inlets, streams, and estuaries on both sides of Cape Cod. They are silver, like the sea they come from, with backs of gray green, and in a shallow stream they seem to reflect the colors of the season, having in fact the ability to change the pigment in their skin so as to blend with their surroundings. They mouth the water and stare forward with their big eyes, running upstream with the unswerving directness of their need to reproduce—which gives us at least one reassuring alliance with them!—and being of a fairly large size compared with most fresh-water fish, they have a look of marine capacities, a fast-schooling fish made for water masses, great sweeping currents, and tides.
Even the alewives, which migrate by the hundred thousands, are only suggestive of the far running but hidden nature of the oceanic depths. Most of us, failing a glass-bottom boat or a glass-sided submarine, have to stand on the beach and take in the vast motions of the sea surface with only the vaguest idea of what is happening below. Sometimes it looks like a bowl of dazzling, dashing light, and at others a gray, monotonous range under a raw wind with white-groined waves constantly moving across its distances. The sea takes all the light and air, the storms, clouds, moon, and stars, in endless, various reflections over its watery reaches, with a monumental acceptance.
Are there not a thousand ways to describe the sea which in their sum amount to inscrutability? How can you translate its abundance even by counting so many thousands of protozoa in a drop of water? Who can fathom the range of appetite it contains, the ferocity of the life its amplitude allows?
One day in early fall I traveled from the Cape with a party of people in a chartered boat, heading for an area some ten or fifteen miles out. The offshore breezes coasted over smooth, sun-bright waters that carried some of the land’s litter with them, sticks, leaves, petals, and even butterflies. At one point a dragonfly skimmed past us; and silky seeds of milkweed and dandelions went sailing and twisting by to land eventually where they could never take root. Farther out, oceanic birds like jaegers, shearwaters, and phalaropes began to appear. When we were plowing out across the open ocean with its short-crested waves we came upon a broad path of waters which were foaming and flashing and leaping, a white windrow of fish flipping violently above the surface, lasting perhaps a mile or more. Evidently we had come upon an area that was rich in plankton, attracting many small fish, attacked in turn by larger ones. What we were seeing was part of the classic food chain that leads, in terms of size, from microscopic plants and animals to whales. The sea was splitting its sides with riches, and a kind of savagery that most of us hardly dare admit, although as a race we are not so far removed from it ourselves.
As the glass on the aquarium window separates the spectator from the world of the fish, so the long nearly unbroken line of the Outer Beach stands between us and the vast, alien reaches of the North Atlantic. It is not our natural environment, and so we can legitimately call it treacherous, sullen, cold, and grim, and even in its hours of brilliance and warmth it seems to lead us off in no terms we can call familiar. It is full of fickle changes, fogs, and storms, unpredictable shifts in mood. We are still unable to set forth on the open ocean without the skill of a sailor or the protection that a technical civilization affords us.
Yet our neighbor the sea provides the amplitude and even, being still relatively unaffected by human ownership, the regenerative power of what is both dangerous and undiscovered in the universe. All its shores are washed by a capacity. If it is constant in peril for us, and for its own voracious inhabitants, it is also beneficent as a medium for life. Those tidal rhythms, watery colors, and reflections are translated into living organisms whose uncounted numbers are assured by their vast and relatively temperate home.
We only see a small part of those numbers, at least consciously, since sea water may be swarming with invisible life, but during spring, summer, and early fall, the sea’s bounty often reveals itself. Countless moon jellies for example, pulse through waters inland of the sea during the springtime or in Cape Cod Bay, where I have seen comb jellies in great profusion during late summer. Watching them, it is not only their primitive, brainless nature, or their numbers, that has seemed incredible to me, but their approximation to their environment.
It has been estimated that jellyfish are 95 per cent water. Dried out, they resolve into almost nothing. How could such evanescent creatures be predators, killing and ingesting living organisms? When you see such transparent flower-animals it is even difficult to believe that they have the nerves and muscles to be able to pulse through the water; but their chemical balance, their physical responses have a direct relationship with the sea water, whose salts are in them. Salt water is a liquid medium for life, a blood that circulates through the creatures of the sea. So close is the association of the sea and its lives, though each species has its unique kind of locomotion, respiration, aggression, its own way of feeding and being food, joining in the employment of energy, that it is almost tempting to inquire whether the sea does not have an organic nature of its own. I will not get very far by suggesting that a medium and environment “knows” anything beyond what all nature knows, but this primal “mother” great provider and provided, has its own deep rights in the realm of being.
In summer and into fall you can see thousands of small fish schooling in the shallow tidal edges of Cape Cod Bay, moving slowly until approached, when those closest to you swing forward, or run, rush, and circle as need be, the whole crowd sometimes escaping with a simultaneous, sideward sweep. They are all spontaneity, life on the run, endowed with limited attributes from the point of a “higher animal” but of strict extravagance in form and action, born of ocean waters. They suggest the incomparable, swimming out of range.
There is something of this suggestion in many specific aspects of animal, or even plant, life in the sea. In a sense their fascination lies in what has not yet been discovered about them, but just as much, from the average human point of view, in the way their actions are those of the sea rather than the land to which we are accustomed. In fact all of us are obliged to make surface discoveries a great deal of the time, even with respect to what is around us, or even inside us, like fishermen following the seasonal movement of fish, sometimes predictable but often hidden and unreliable, or students who chase after migratory birds in planes. So the sight of grunions wiggling in California sands, depositing and fertilizing their eggs, bound to a complex interrelationship of spring tides and the moon, still excites our curiosity, being a phenomenon that is not fully understood, taking place in a proximate but different world.
Migrant fish, like the alewives, may return not only during the same season each year but very close to the same day as a run of the year before. Perhaps the cycles involving sea and climate average out very accurately, but it is too complex a phenomenon to say that it goes like clockwork. Tides are measurable but constantly changing in time and amplitude. Environmental conditions in sea water are various and the seas coordinate relationship to the atmosphere is an elaborate one. Rhythmic response in an organism may be simple and spontaneous—like a fucus, or rockweed, only ready to spawn after a period of exposure at low tide—and it will have its causes, but the causes themselves are greatly complex in nature.
The sea’s discovery will not be made by factory ships that process their huge catches of fish, by killer submarines chasing after whales, or by mining equipment. We can physically affect its life with our one-sided power, but it will remain protean and indifferent and we will go on imagining our conquest of it.
On this overdiscovered and overexploited earth the sea remains a wilderness, a resource not of goods but of what is rich and wild. That which we have been unable to use up, or harry to extinction, has the power to renew. The sea is a positive mystery. I hear the surf’s continual breathing in the distance; I see the stars that literally cover the sky over the beach on a winter’s night like white animal plankton in the spring waters; and I realize that I know no more about them than I know about myself. The depths are still ahead, with the fear and the temptation that the undiscovered arouses in us.
All of us are drawn to the sea’s edge as to a fire. Its vast reaches roll and heave in the light. There is an incalculable weight of waters withheld just beyond us, a roaming kept in check. What an exalting thing it is to see those waters dancing with silver castings from the moon! Even in our careless, civilized state, drinking beer, watching driftwood burn, or absorbing the sun and one another, in no way obligated to the kind of cold suffering or exile which sea and seashore have meant to men in the past, there is something in us that wants this brilliance, this barren waste.
The sheeted surfaces blown over by all winds rove on with their freight of light during the day, constantly changing, sometimes black, purple, and gray under pigeon-silver skies, with hazy, soft horizons, sometimes silver scudding with gold, or blue, green, and white in all shades; and always the tidal balance, the surf’s fall and drag at the sand’s edge, whatever the season.
During the autumn and winter months the cliffs hang their shadows over the beach very early in the afternoon, cold darkness moving toward an iridescent surf that reflects the last light of the sun. The sunset shows curly salmon and fiery orange streaks on the other side of the vast flat table that often runs with sea ducks at this time of year; and then, singly, the stars begin to shoot up their spears and arrows, alignments for eternal navigation.