Dogfish

I suggested fishing and then showed up to the dock without any gear. Mira showed up with a cooler full of Fat Tug. The sun above us is an infected eye, red and squinting. Its gaze illuminates the boat’s railing, coral pink, anemone orange. Below, the churning sea is pale yellow, the colour of melted butter washed down a drain.

It’s been like this all day. Smoky. Fire season snuck up like a dentist appointment. Already, memories of blue skies are fading like the grey horizon, which once featured mountains. I have been at sea for six months, and yet within a week, a golden sun will look alien, and my nose will be blind to the stench of millions of gallons of sap burning. Millions of gallons of would-be syrup up in smoke.

I find I have to remind myself to be upset about this. Obviously, it’s tragic that forests are burning, and if I was a dendrologist, I would be inconsolable. If I was a silviculturist, or a lichenologist, or a forest ecologist, I would be frenzied with the grief and bitterness of a stockbroker on Black Monday.

I am an oceanographer, and my crises move like the ocean’s inhabitants: sluggishly, and out of human sight. The ocean is growing more acidic. The ocean is growing, cancerously. Bloated with melting ice, queasy with tropical storms. But the ocean is not on fire and therefore doing alright, all things considered.

It is difficult for me not to see the sudden inhospitality of dry land as a victory in the rhetorical cold war between earth and ocean. A chance for me to stand, hands on hips, and say “well, well, well” to those who insisted that setting foot in the ocean is tantamount to suicide.

I think about telling Mira this, but she would know I was talking about our parents, and I don’t feel like talking about our parents right now. Instead, say I think the word “shark” resembles the animal, in lowercase at least. A jutting “h” and “k”. The “s” could even shape itself into a Hammerhead’s hammer head, if you squint. Mira wordlessly offers me a beer. And cracks it herself when I decline.

You can’t say “shark” without scaring people. Jaws taught me that. To be fair, it’s an unsettling word on the ear; a sharp sandpaper hiss stretching over a cavernous vowel, ending with a crack you could split your tooth on.

“I can’t see anything,” I say. “Can you?”

Mira sips her beer.

“What are you looking for?” she asks.

I don’t say shark.

These days, Mira mostly loads and unloads cargo ships. She also moonlights as a bartender and, a year ago, she bought a little fishing cruiser so she could ferry around tourists for some extra cash.

“What?” she asks, I guess off my expression.

“You just never really liked the ocean.”

“I liked it enough,” she says, “I just didn’t care about it. Not as much as you.”

“Do you like it?” I ask. She shrugs.

“It pays the bills. Can’t complain. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a calling, you know.”

She asks what I’ve been up to. I tell her that I recently authored a story for CBC News in which I argued that rising sea temperatures would likely cause, among other things, an uptick in Great White Shark sightings off the coast of BC.

“The shorelines of British Columbia and Washington are already home to favourite prey of White Sharks,” I tell her. “Seals and sea lions. Historically, these waters are only just too cold for White Sharks—who already prefer cooler temperatures compared to other Chondrichthyes. A slight warming—such as the predicted one point five Celsius by twenty-fifty—would bring the local ocean temperature up to a perfect Goldilocks zone for these animals.”

“Do you have the entire thing memorized?” she asks.

“You read it?”

She nods slowly. I tell her at least four people responded with a GIF of Roy Schnieder saying we’re going to need a bigger boat.

I roll my eyes when I say this, and she reminds me how I was obsessed with that movie when I was younger, how I’d insist on watching it over and over even though it gave us both nightmares. How I talked about it so much at school other kids would call us the shark sisters.

Mira tells me that yesterday she found a decapitated seal on the beach. (“speaking of nightmares). I think decapitated might be the wrong word for what happened to the animal. Beheaded likewise. Both terms have a barebones applicability to the situation, but both carry with them connotations of a legality and transgression, a human conception of crime and punishment. Its head was simply separated from its body. Or rather, its body was separated from its head. She shows me a picture on her phone. The tearing of the neck tissue is jagged, pockmarked. Indicative of teeth, sharp ones and lots of them. It is also more or less even. A clean severance. It was a harbour seal. Or had been. On average, harbour seals grow about six feet from snout to tail. Their heads are proportionally petite compared to their bodies. This is to say that the average harbour seal’s body was roughly human sized—larger even considering the layers of protective blubber. There was no sign of a body. I imagined the seal being eaten like a strawberry—all but the stem, snapped up in a single juicy bite.

“Weird, right?” she says. “My first thought was shark, but then I figured it was probably an orca or something. I thought about texting you and then forgot.”

When someone writes an article saying there has been a rise in Orca sightings, people rejoice. I remember taking the ferry, about to start university, someone over the loudspeaker informing all passengers there was a pod of orcas visible on the starboard bow, Mira and I clambering to the edge to catch a glimpse of fin or blowhole. I remember thinking about how the ocean that we were on was the same ocean as everywhere else on earth, that we could, hypothetically, drift off course and wind up anywhere, and how beautiful was that? I remember Mira pulling me back by my hood when I leaned too far over the railing.

I wonder what would happen if someone were to see a shark. The word shark is sort of like the word fire. It’s not something you can shout in public.

The smoke’s coming from up island, which is worrisome. Fire, in previous years, was an affliction chiefly suffered by the mainland. Tinderbox towns like the one we grew up in. Where campfire bans remained in place from April till October, and yet men in lifted trucks didn’t think twice about flicking their cigarette butt out the window. A heat that kills slowly, like a frog in boiling water.

Fire is something I naively thought I escaped, traded for the threat of earthquakes and tsunamis. Mira always said I was insane to trade one natural disaster for two, and I told her that must have made her insane as well for following me.

“It’s only really gotten bad recently,” Mira says. “I remember people here complaining about smoke when it was just a little hazy and I was always like you guys haven’t seen smoke. If you can still see the road when driving, you’re fine.”

Mira’s fishing boat is small. I sit facing the stern, and she sits facing the bow. We both sit facing each other. The sun beats down on the back of my neck. The smoke scratches the back of my throat. I haven’t talked this much in months, and still I keep talking.

I tell her that I think I find flooding preferable to drought because things can and will always live in the water, and the presence of life is always more desirable, in my mind at least, than its absence.

That’s what appeals to me about the ocean rather than, say, outer space. The comfort of something living, even if that something stretches our very definition of life. There are single-cell organisms frozen in the deepest sea sludge, which are, hypothetically, immortal. The Greenland shark lives, on average, upwards of 250 years. The ocean swells with life. A flood swells with life. Miniscule, microbial. But life all the same.

“I mean, obviously it’s not a good thing that the oceans are getting warmer, or that animals are being forced to migrate,” I am on a rant and can’t remember how long the words have been spilling out. “But at least they are migrating and not just dying, you know. At least—at least…”

“At least something’s doing alright,” Mira finishes for me.

“Exactly,” I say, leaning back on a steering wheel that’s deceptively cool to the touch. “At least someone’s doing alright.”

She nods. The boat bobs, jostled by the same feral wind that delivered the smoke. The same wind that’s cheering the fire on fifty kilometres away.

I open my mouth to ask something banal. Are you doing alright? Are you happy? Are you mad at me? Why don’t we talk like this anymore? But Mira is staring past me, into the ocean.

“Look,” she says, and I turn around just fast enough to see two sharp black fins fall back into the yellow sea. And then there is nothing. No ripple, no shadow. The smoke is so dense now that there’s not even a horizon. It is easy to believe that we are the only things alive for miles in every direction. Then the fin rises again, gliding along beside us; a shape that’s survived for four hundred million years.

“Shark,” we say in unison. The word anchors the moment, keeps it from slipping away too quickly.

“It’s like it followed you home,” Mira says. The fin drops again and does not emerge. Out of sight, but in no ways gone.