On the Broken Shore

Now she was almost a young woman, who looked at him with reproachful eyes, remembering all their earlier arguments.

‘Why are you always with Julian, Dad? You spoil him, you know you do.’

‘No,’ he would say. ‘I love you just as much as Julian, but he’s a boy so maybe I do more stuff with him. It’s a different relationship. But I love you just as much—’

‘There you are, you’ve said it. See? I was right.’

‘Darling, your mum spent more time with you than she did with Julian. Maybe that’s the way parental love works. But we still love you both the same.’

‘Don’t care.’ And she would leave the room, banging the door.

Then he would bring her back and make her laugh by telling the story of her reaction to Julian’s birth. After a week of observing the new addition to the family, Sam, then aged 4, had asked, ‘When is he going home?’

‘He is home, darling,’ said Margot. ‘He’s your brother and I’m his mummy.’ Sam had fled the room in tears.

After her brother’s death Sam tried to become the family peacemaker, patrolling the frontiers of their marriage, anxiously assessing threats from outside and signs of discord within.

‘Dad, why don’t you spend more time with Mum? You’re always working, always at the Institute, always away for weekends.’

And she would tell Margot to be kinder, nicer, more gentle; bury the anger that burns in your soul, Mum, she wanted to say, but she could never find the right words.

Yet, against the odds, she held them together.

Leo heard the front door close and a car engine start. Margot was not one for scenes any more. No slamming doors, no wheel-spin on the drive, no transparent excuses about going to the gym. Their marriage had sunk into that quiet and desperate place where there was no need to alarm the neighbours or traumatise their child. The china-smashing rows broadcast to the whole street had stopped. She did what she wanted to, and went where she wanted to go. And so did he.

He knew she went drinking with the fishermen. She’d begun to go down to the harbour bars in Falmouth and Chatham after Julian died. She said she liked the company, and that for all their bravado and tribal loyalties the men were so vulnerable, always at the mercy of the weather, regulations, the volatile market price for their products and the fickle nature of their chosen workplace, the North Atlantic. They were just like little boys really.

She listened sympathetically to their doom-laden stories about a dying industry being slowly throttled by state and federal regulators. She knew all about the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, brought in to stop the killing of seals but which was now killing their industry – or so the fishermen said. It was the same at home in the UK, she told them. There were more lawnmower repairmen in Britain than fishermen, a statistic she had once heard somewhere.

Leo looked across Vineyard Sound. A light south-westerly ruffled the waves; the sky was clear, with high cirrus cloud forming mares’ tales four or five miles up. The weather should be good for the field trip tomorrow – his last, unless the appeal was successful.

THREE

The twelve students were waiting for Leo on the Institute’s pier. Jacob Sylvester and Rachel Ginsberg helped him carry on board the large tape deck containing the recording equipment. They lowered the machine, which was waterproofed with a crude plastic cover, on to the deck using Leo’s lifejacket to provide some padding.

He ran through a checklist of names, carefully ticked them off on his clipboard and handed out packed lunches and a bottle of water each. There was nobody missing, and Leo was gratified that for once they seemed pleased to see him. He corrected himself. That was too harsh. On the whole his students were usually pleased to see him. He had had coffee with Gunbrit once in the commissary, and had asked her what the students thought of him. She smiled at the question, looked into her coffee mug and said shyly, ‘They think you are a little unusual.’ He took that as a compliment.

Most of the students were carrying smart digital cameras with pop-out lenses that took brilliant pictures even at a distance. There were seasick pills for those who wanted them. Only two did.

On board he assembled the group on the rear of the transom deck and handed out lifejackets and oilskins. This was to be a six-hour trip, he told them, during which they would be listening to, and recording, underwater communications among seal rookeries up the coast, but mainly at Monomoy Island. Lifejackets were to be worn at all times, there was to be no smoking, no use of mobile phones, and in an emergency they were to do exactly what the captain told them. They all knew Buck, who waved from the upper deck.

Leo had already asked the group to read the Herald profile of Buck, and he wanted them to spend some time with him. ‘If you want to understand the ecology of the sea,’ he had told them, ‘you need to know what’s happening to fish stocks, and for that Buck is your man. Talk to him. Take him out for a coffee, a drink maybe.’

The weather was fine, as the sky had promised the previous evening. Leo checked his watch and steadied himself as the tug rocked in the swell of a departing Martha’s Vineyard ferry. The big 1,000-ton ferries were still running off-season schedules, and thankfully the whale-watching, dolphin-spotting tourist boats had yet to begin operating. In The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald described Long Island Sound as the busiest body of water in the western hemisphere. He had obviously not seen the stretch of sea between the Cape and Martha’s Vineyard in the summer. But today they would mostly have the sea to themselves.

The tug nosed out of the harbour, passing Penzance Point to the west with its $10-million homes. That was where Tallulah Bonner lived, and Leo swung his binoculars along the shoreline, searching for her house. But they all looked the same, big two-storey houses with swimming pools, green carpet lawns and white flagpoles, all built after the First World War when the big money came down from Boston to find weekend retreats to rival the Hamptons.

Several of the students gathered at the stern watching as the boat rode a gentle swell, trailing a white wake of foam and a flock of seagulls that fell upon the small fish churned to the surface. The Antoine headed out to sea for half a mile, and then turned north-east, leaving Martha’s Vineyard to the south-west to run up the coast.

Leo looked at the horizon. A ridge of grey nimbus was building where the sky met the ocean. He climbed the steps to the top deck where Buck was fiddling with the radio. Buck had been the first person Leo had met outside his colleagues at the campus when he arrived all those years ago, and they had worked together on these research trips ever since.

It was Buck who had opened his eyes to the power of the fishing lobby when they took his boat out to the Stellwagen sanctuary, 842 square miles of federally protected ocean between Cape Ann and Cape Cod, ten miles north of Provincetown at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay. They had made the first of several trips to Stellwagen a month after Leo had arrived on the Cape. The point about Stellwagen was that it wasn’t a sanctuary and it wasn’t protected, as Buck showed him. On calm days Buck would turn the engines off over the bank, a kidney-shaped shelf that rose to within 100 feet of the surface, and let the boat drift. Around them were the whale-watching boats, and as the day drew on the fishing boats working out of Gloucester, Portland and Portsmouth up the coast.

They would open their beers, unwrap cold steak sandwiches, and Buck would tell his story. The shallow waters of the bank were the heart of the sanctuary, but beyond lay deeper water, dropping at some places to a depth of 600 feet. The steep sides of the bank created rising currents which brought nutrients into the shallows. In turn the fish followed, and they brought the whales.

The fish brought the fishermen, and the whales brought the tourist boats. And both were killing Stellwagen. But the main culprits were the fishermen.

‘That’s me,’ said Buck. ‘Well, people like me. We’ve fished this place to hell and back. Know what? They should have no-take zones in every marine sanctuary, especially here. No fishing. Full stop. But the politicians daren’t do it. Gutless cowards.’

As Leo discovered, it was all true. The fishing industry along the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts could easily withstand the creation of a fully protected reserve over Stellwagen, but all that happened was a seemingly endless series of studies commissioned by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration – and the continuation of bottom-trawling over the bank.

So 80 species of fish and 22 species of marine mammals were being studied to death by Federal bureaucrats, fished to extinction by the local boats, and all the while gawped at by the 300,000 tourists who cruised these waters in the summer months.

That was the way Leo put it in his lectures, and in a guest column for the Herald.

Leo watched Buck at the wheel, his deeply lined face jutting out from an old captain’s cap, his rough hands almost stroking the polished wooden casing of the compass. He wanted to tell Buck that he had been fired. This would be the last trip they would make together on the Antoine, and Buck needed to know. Now seemed as good a moment as any. He watched the older man’s face as he registered the news. Like most Cape Codders, Buck was intensely proud of the Institute, the work it did and the jobs it created. He had lived in its shadow most of his life.

Buck peered ahead, rubbing a cloth on the windscreen.

‘How come?’

Leo explained about his interview with the Herald and how the Boston Globe had picked it up and how in the age of the 24-hour news cycle his words were soon out on the wires on radio and television.

‘What did you say in the interview?’ Buck kept his eyes on the sea and a hand on the wheel.

Leo told him he had used the example of Hoover the talking seal, long dead but still the subject of some controversy, as a metaphor to expose the arrogant mindset of the marine science establishment in general. And he had thrown in the fishing lobby and Stellwagen and all that stuff.

When he had finished, Buck slapped him on the back.

‘Congratulations! No more students, no more getting up for nine o’clock lectures. Now you can get a real life. You never could stand all that hassle up there, could you?’

‘I like teaching, Buck.’

‘You can teach anywhere,’ said Buck, spinning the wheel and bringing the bow of the boat around so that it pointed shoreward. ‘We’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

Monomoy Island appeared out of the haze, a low-lying smudge on the horizon that gained shape and colour as the boat drew closer to it. As Leo scanned the white, yellow and pink of the island’s sand and rock, covered in the grey-green of coarse sea grass and gorse, he made a mental note to sign up for a week’s watercolour course with Gloria Gulliver.

She was a Cape divorcee in her mid-fifties who wore startling low-cut one-piece swimsuits in the summer, revealing a heart-shaped strawberry birthmark on her right breast. Leo focused on the image of her breasts, holding them in his head as he had in his hands. Her breasts in his hands, his mouth on her lips, the unforgettable Mrs Gloria Gulliver.

He looked back at the strangely unfamiliar shoreline. Wind, tide and the autumnal Atlantic gales had reshaped the island since he had last seen it. It happened to the whole Cape coastline almost every year, rendering charts outdated almost as soon as they were published. Navigation depended on local knowledge and every spring, fishermen working out of Chatham, Coldharbor and Hyannis had to plot the new shoals, skerries and channels carved out by tide, current, and wind.

Back in 1942 a whole island had vanished. It was called Billingsgate, after the old fish market in London, and had a school, a lighthouse and a small fishing community. The sea took them all, as it will the whole Cape in time. Occasionally winter storms would excavate an old wreck from the depths, bringing it perilously close to the surface.

Buck had lost his last fishing boat that way. The nets snagged on the funnel of a tramp steamer that had gone down in a sudden autumn storm in 1917. In the heavy sea the stern of Buck’s boat had been pulled under. It went down in seconds as the sea flooded the rear deck. Buck and his three crew had got off in their liferaft, and had been picked up two hours later. He bought another boat, of course. He always had a fishing boat but it was the tug that brought in the steady money.

Kemp had already decided that he would ask Buck to help him with his appeal. He was the only fisherman he knew who would stand up and tell the truth about the fishing lobby. Fish stocks were in freefall because of overfishing. Seals were being culled in their hundreds of thousands because they were blamed for the declining stocks. The fishing industry and the powerful politicians behind them were slaughtering seals for no purpose.

If there was going to be an argument, Buck was a good guy to have on your side. He had done it before at a conference in San Diego that Leo had persuaded him to attend as a guest speaker: the raw voice of the sea telling a gathering of marine biologists what was really happening to fish stocks and why.

That was how Joe Buckland, nervously clasping and unclasping his hands, desperate for the large rum that Leo had refused him and wishing himself rather in the eye of a hurricane at sea than in that place, came to stand in front of 300 delegates at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. Leo had told him that Scripps was the oldest, biggest and most important centre for marine research science in the world. Looking at the large, oak-panelled auditorium with its motto inscribed in Latin on the proscenium arch, he believed it.

Buck had wowed them from the start.

‘I have been asked to talk to you about why fish stocks are falling, why the cod has gone, why other fish are going too. Halibut, marlin, you name ’em, they’re going. The problem is simple. You’re looking at it right here in front of you. I’m a fisherman. But I’m only half of the problem. You ladies and gentlemen are the other half. You eat too much fish,’ he said.

‘I’ve been told to get to the point early, and here it is. Hands up who knows what a steaker is.’

Not a hand in the hall went up

‘Steakers are what fishing people call the best cuts of fish, the ones with real big steaks on them. And you know what? Fishermen throw back dead into the sea any fish that doesn’t look like a steaker. Every fishing boat does it. They’ll deny it, but they do. Fishermen throw more fish back into the sea dead than they land for market. Not just us here in the US. They do it everywhere. That’s why the stocks have collapsed.’

Buck was applauded as he left the stage, and afterwards some very charming women smiled sweetly at him and pressed drinks into his hand. He told Leo he reckoned he made a wrong career choice all those years ago. He should have become an academic. The money was easy. They paid you to stand up and talk sense, and they even gave you a drink afterwards.

Kemp turned towards the stern and looked down at his students, all of them working towards a degree that would lead to the further study of the minutiae of the ocean rather than of the warm-blooded mammals that lived in it. Endless papers circulated within the academic community – and then what? Maybe Margot was right. It was all nothing but chatter on the academic networks. But maybe all the research, the lengthy dissertations and those closed conferences so beloved by academics might lead to a new way of thinking about the seas from which we all crawled so many millions of years ago.

Some hope, thought Kemp. And he wasn’t putting much faith in his own book setting the scientific world to rights either.

Buck turned the boat, slowed the engine and moved towards a series of sandbanks that had risen above the waterline on the back of a falling tide. Already grey seals and harbour seals were hauled up on them, dozing under a darkening sky. One or two of the females were still pregnant, but most had already pupped, and the young were nervously flopping towards the water, having caught sight of the intruder.

In the channels between the sandbanks grey-whiskered heads turned as the Antoine approached, then vanished beneath the waves, reappearing a few feet away, ducking, diving and resurfacing. It was too early in the year for the young seals to have got used to boats, and many had not seen or heard one before. The older ones paid less attention.

In their identical black oilskins and yellow lifejackets the students looked like outsize penguins as they trained their binoculars on the seals. Kemp knelt down and pushed the tape deck firmly under the slight overhang of the enclosed deck rail that ran around the transom. He plugged in the leads to four headsets and attached four other leads to a set of hydrophones: large cigar-shaped microphones encased in thick transparent plastic casing.

The technology was a big improvement on what he had been used to in those early days at St Andrews, but it was still petty crude compared to the latest equipment being used by the military. In the 1960s the US Navy laid a grid of underwater listening posts around the world to track Soviet submarines. The fixed hydrophones were linked to onshore listening stations by cable, and the Navy called the whole thing the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS). When the cold war ended the system was made available to marine scientists studying whale communication. But the more rarefied area of seal communication did not get a look-in, and Leo had to make do with an off-the-shelf version. It was expensive enough, as the treasurer at Coldharbor had pointed out when he signed it off.

‘A ten-thousand-dollar recording outfit just to listen to seals – right?’

‘Right,’ replied Kemp, and that was that.

Kemp paused as a larger swell than usual lifted the boat, causing his students to stumble and clutch each other. Gunbrit Nielsen seemed to have more than her fair share of helping hands.

A casual glance towards shore brought one of those surprises that could lift these trips from the routine to the extraordinary. There, on the furthest sandbank, was a small pod of hooded seals. Normally found only in Arctic waters, they were rarely seen at this time of year on the Cape. The inflatable hoods on top of the heads of the adult males made them look comical, like circus creatures.

When excited or nervous the seals closed their noses and pumped air into these hoods, which swelled up to the size of footballs. That was what they had done now, and Kemp shouted to his group to take a look and to get some photographs. He handed his binoculars to Jacob Sylvester, who took a quick look before passing them back and joining the others in taking photographs that would be uploaded on to computers and winged around the world to friends and family, showing inhabitants of a cold Arctic world sunning themselves within sight of some of the Cape’s most popular summer beaches.

Kemp raised his glasses and swung them seaward; the cloud base had darkened and thickened. Over Chatham harbour a mile away the skies were still clear, and he pointed out to the students the old Marconi radio masts moved there from Wellfleet up the coast, where in January 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt had sent the first radio message across the Atlantic, to King Edward VII in the village of Poldhu in Cornwall. A king emperor conversing with an American president who liked to talk softly and carry a big stick. Leo always wondered what they had talked about in that first brief transatlantic conversation: probably that great British default topic of conversation, the weather.

The masts had now been adapted with wooden platforms on which ospreys built their stick nests. The birds had almost been wiped out by DDT poisoning in the 1960s, but were now increasing in numbers; an example of old technology infrastructure being used to repair the damage done by what had once been hailed as the new wonder chemical herbicide.

‘See what I mean,’ Leo told his students, although more accurately he told Gunbrit and let the others listen in. ‘Take nothing for granted. DDT wasn’t a modern miracle, it was poison. But everyone fell for it, like asbestos.’

No sooner had he said this than he wished he had kept quiet and let them work it out for themselves. Maybe he was banging on too much; becoming a bore, a one-track mind with a message that had lost all its potency through endless repetition. Maybe he should just shut up.

He shook himself out of these thoughts and turned his mind to the task at hand. ‘All right, everyone, gather round. Bring your mikes and pair off.’

He helped the students lower the hydrophones into the water. They needed to be positioned carefully so that the sensors were facing the source of the sound. There was one headset for every two people.

‘What’s the depth?’ he yelled to Buck.

‘Thirty feet.’

‘OK, lower the hydros to twenty feet and turn the sensors to face the sandbanks. And get your headphones on,’ he shouted to the students.

Seal talk, Kemp called it. Down there in the waters around the sandbanks the seals would be sending their rumbling signals to each other, warning of dangerous intruders. It was a language he knew well, and there were times when he felt he could half guess the meaning of these long underwater conversations. But the real code he had yet to crack.

He had made his name at St Andrews, where an unusually generous subsidy from a government determined to prove it cared about its maritime heritage had led to the establishment of the Sea Mammal Research Unit. Out of curiosity, on a field trip to the north of Scotland he had lowered his hydrophones into 100 feet of water below the mile-long Cromarty Firth Bridge that carries the A9 road north from the Black Isle. The waters there were rich in fish and heavily populated with seals. With Loch Ness only a few miles to the west it was no surprise that the coast was also rich in marine mythology.

The fishermen working out of the deep-water ports of Inverness and Aberdeen had plenty of stories about seals and how they could talk and sing. Even today the older generation who crew the deep-sea trawlers out of Scotland recount the Celtic myths about the selkies, the seals who come ashore, shedding their skin to take human shape as beautiful women. The stories vary little among the fishing communities around the Celtic rim of Britain – the Orkneys, the Hebrides and the Aran Islands off the Irish coast: a seal in human form bewitches and marries a local fisherman only to flee back to the sea, sometimes years later, leaving behind motherless children, broken hearts and empty beds.

Science paid no attention to such fantasies, of course, and at first Kemp thought his own discoveries would be treated in the same light. No one had ever identified and recorded the language of seals until that day in 1992 when his hydrophones had picked up low rumbling noises. At other times he picked up a crescendo of noise, like a bowling ball and the crash of skittles. At first he thought that it was trucks passing over the Cromarty Bridge above him. But the strange rumbling noise continued after the trucks had gone. There, 100 feet down in the darkness of the estuary, harbour seals were making sounds no one had heard before – or if they had heard them, they certainly had not been identified as seal talk.

Kemp had taken his tapes back to the university and played them to his boss at the research unit. Professor Melrose Stubbs had listened, eyes fastened on the revolving spools of tape, smoke from a clenched pipe drifting out of the window.

‘No one’s heard this before?’

‘If they have, they didn’t know what it was.’

‘And you do?’

‘Harbour seals. There was nothing else down there.’