On the Broken Shore. James MacManus
whales are nearby. That way they block the whales’ locating signals.’
‘That’s definitely not serendipity,’ said Duncan.
Leo looked at Jacob Sylvester. God, the arrogance of the boy. He could never admit there might be another viewpoint than his own.
‘OK, I take your point,’ he said finally.
Joe Buckland, known to everyone for as long as he could remember as Buck, was a mile off South Chatham on his gillnet boat with nets out for flounder, bass, maybe squid, when the call came to get the tug ready for a field trip the next morning. Buck turned his boat towards shore, grumbling to himself. He liked the money – the Institute paid $400 for a four-hour trip, exclusive of fuel – but why the short notice? He had other things to do.
When his father had bought the Antoine from the docks at Boston after the Second World War, everyone had laughed. It wasn’t a proper tug, because the builders had gone broke in the Depression and had left the superstructure half finished, with a two-storey plywood box cabin and a bow that reared up like a wounded stag. The Antoine was now 80 years old, an ocean workhorse that for years had shipped out of Boston to salvage and assist wrecked or disabled ships in rough seas off the east coast. Locals joked that she should have been in a museum, but Buck said she was as much an American classic as the 1948 Chevrolet, and just as able to do the job.
His father had died in 1952 when Buck was 18. The Antoine was all he left his son. Once it became clear that the tug was going to make him some money Buck had torn down the old plywood cabin and built a proper superstructure, fitting for a standard seagoing tug of its day: a two-level deckhouse with the second level split between the open Texas deck and the pilothouse, the highest point on the tug. Here, polished to perfection, was the equipment he had bought second-hand from the breakers’ yards: a large manual wooden wheel, the smaller brass power wheel, the polished oak binnacle for the compass. Only the ship-to-shore radio was new.
‘What are you going to do with it?’ his father’s friends had asked. He had his answer when the Institute chartered the tug to take research students up the coast, and occasionally far out into the Atlantic. That was in the early fifties, when the first postgrad students were arriving at Coldharbor. The Antoine had paid for herself many times over since then. Now she was on permanent charter to the Institute, and Buck had a regular income, unlike some fishermen, who were reduced to scrabbling for clams at low tide in the off season.
He still fished from March to October, and had his own line of lobster pots out in the season; lobsters were good business, but the money was not regular because the bureaucrats in the Fisheries Department kept changing the weight and size of permitted take. Worse still, they were now charging up to $100,000 a year for a general fishing licence.
Buck had been lucky. He had spent his best years in a business he loved. Now the fish stocks were declining – and Buck well knew whose fault that was – and the industry was dying. Young men still came into the business, but he wondered what for.
His passion for fishing had begun at the age of 8, when his grandfather let him use a small rowing boat on a lake near his home in Massachusetts. It was when Buck was allowed out night fishing on his own that his young world changed.
The Cape Herald had interviewed him some years before as the oldest working fisherman on the Cape. Sandy Rowan was a rare journalist, in that he reported exactly what people said in interviews. ‘That way you get the truth, and get a feel for the person behind the words even if you do lose the grammar,’ he said. So Buck’s words were laid out on a centre spread between two huge quotation marks, alongside pictures showing him from boy to man with rods and reels, and finally as an old-timer pointing to the nets on his 43-foot fibreglass day boat.
‘Out there on the lake at night the bug bit; I was just a kid but I got this amazing sense of freedom and I suppose responsibility. I mean, I was alone, in charge of the boat, the rods, everything. I could have fallen in or anything, but Grandpa let me go off. I spent as much time with him as I could, and fished whenever I could. When I got older and went out on dates, after I dropped the girl off – yeah, this was a long time ago, and we did that in those days – I’d get the boat out and go fishing on the lake. It didn’t pay, so I became an electrical engineer and began going to the Cape at weekends. Salt-water fishing was different. You had to know everything about that damned bitch the sea – currents, tides, weather, and the habits of the fish. I learnt it all. Out there on the ocean you’re always thinking – you have to. It was like going to a school you loved.’
The article was headlined ‘The Happy Hunter’. Both Leo and Sandy reckoned Buck was the happiest man they were ever likely to know.
Buck had no illusions about the future of the fishing industry. It was almost finished and he wasn’t going to spend his last years competing with the other boats for the last fish in the sea. His final destination was a small cashew-nut farm in Hawaii that he had bought back in the fifties, when land was cheap. He had managed to hold on to the farm when he and his wife divorced, and had married second time around to a Filipina called Renee.
Leo had met Buck on his first research trip after arriving at Coldharbor, and long before it became fashionable the two would take Buck’s boat and some beer and spend all day on the Stellwagen Bank watching whales. That was when Leo began to understand what was happening to one of America’s greatest marine sanctuaries.
Leo drove home the four miles to Falmouth, taking care to keep the needle on thirty. In the off season the Cape police had nothing to do but hand out speeding tickets. That was mostly all they did in the high season, come to that. He killed time over a coffee at Betsy’s Diner thinking about the letter; a summons to a meeting, most likely. Tallulah Bonner was a pain, but he had to admit that she did a great job on the money side. The taxefficient endowments rolled in. Trouble was, he had more than once expressed his doubts to her about how it was being spent.
‘Tell me exactly what you mean,’ she had demanded. ‘Give me an example of what we should be doing that we are not.’ When she was angry the treacle in her voice hardened and the Southern drawl tightened.
So Leo tried to tell her. It was difficult, he said, because he was talking about a culture here: a Big Science culture. Hubris, arrogance, the overwhelming view that we know most of what there is to know about planet earth and that we just need to fill in a few gaps.
‘Examples,’ she had snapped at him. ‘Give me examples.’
So he told her how some years back an eminent physicist had dropped a deep-water recording probe into the Southern Ocean, and at 12,000 feet below the surface, well beyond the diving depth of a whale, it detected something enormous, really enormous, passing beneath it.
‘So? What was it?’
‘We don’t know, Tallulah.’
He told her that there were hydrophones throughout the seven seas, mostly operated by the big-power navies, that could pick up the whisper of a distant submarine and from the sound of its propeller identify its class, direction and speed. Sometimes the operators listening in heard a roaring noise from the ocean depths, a roar that was clearly biological in origin. The wavelength of the sound told them it was not that of the blue whale, the largest creature on the planet. It was something much bigger. Something unknown to science.
‘And what conclusion are you asking me to draw from that?’ The treacle was back in her voice now.
‘I’m honestly not trying to be awkward. I’m just saying that we should be a little more honest about what we don’t know, and less arrogant about what we do know.’
Maybe he had told her that once too often. Still, beneath those starched linen suits, the endless talk of budgets and quarter-one forecasts there was a real human being, a management caterpillar who briefly took wing as a butterfly on the annual staff picnic outing to Nantucket. Kids buried her in the sand; she drank a little too much beer, let the salt water ruin her hair and wore a diaphanous Indian garment that billowed up showing long, shapely legs.
Kemp parked his car in the driveway, noticed the needle in the fuel gauge was once more