Shifting Baselines #4 - Wull, Moray Firth

This fictional creative piece allows Wull to talk about the loss of fish life in the Moray firth in the context of 'shifting baseline syndrome'. It is the fourth in a series of 12 essays on 'Shifting baselines' looking at different ecosystems and how they have become depleted in living memory. They are written in dialect where possible to acknowledge the language around nature that is being lost concurrently with nature itself.

Sit like, min. Sit ye doon out of the wind, for there is aye a wind here, it comes straight off the Firth and it has been blowing through this town since afore there was a town. Ye can hear it in the way we speak, folk say, all the vowels flattened doon by it. Never mind. Ye have come to hear an old fisherman and here is one, near the last of them, so let me get my pipe going and I will tell ye what the sea was, for ye will not have seen it, and there is scarce a soul left in this town that has.

The sea was silver, min. Now I do not say that the way a man in a book says it, to make it bonnie. I say it the way I would tell ye that water is wet, for it is a plain fact and I stood in it. Ye would go out in the black of the night in the season, and the herrin' were that thick under the boat, shoal on shoal of them a mile and more long, that the very sea shone. It shone. Ye would look over the side and there was a light coming up out of the deep at ye off the sides of a million million fish, a cold green-silver light off the living sea, and the whole north of Scotland got its bread off that shine. The silver darlings, we cried them, and there was never a truer name put on a creature. Silver, for the look of them. And darlings, for they were the darlings of the whole coast, they were oor rent and oor meal and oor bairns' boots, they were the making of every town from Wick to the Broch, and this town of mine was one of them.

Ye should have seen the harbour, min, when I was a loon. Ye could near enough have walked across it dry-shod on the decks of the boats, it was that thick with them, black wi' masts, the whole basin of it a forest of masts and the reek of the peat and the tar and the fish over all. There were fifteen hundred boats working this coast in my grandfather's day, they tell me, and fifteen thousand men in them. Think on that number in a string of wee towns like this one. Every hoose had its man at the sea and its boat drawn up and its nets spread on the braes to dry, and the whole place lived to the one clock, and that clock was the herrin'.

And it was not just the men, and I'll not have ye think it was. The quines. Oh, the quines, min. When the fleet moved, the women moved with it, doon the whole length of Britain following the fish, from here away doon to Yarmouth and Lowestoft in England for the back-end of the year. The herrin' gutters. My ain mither was one, and my wife forbye, God rest the both of them. They stood at the long troughs, the farlins, in their oilskins in all weathers, and they gutted the fish faster than your eye could follow, a fish a second, sixty in the minute, the wee sharp knife going and the guts away and the fish intae the right barrel by size, and they never so much as looked doon at their hands. Could not afford to. And the salt got intae the cuts on their fingers, for cut ye did, and it burned like the very devil, and they wrapped their fingers up in strips of cloot, wee rag bandages, and gutted on. And here is the thing that stays with me. They sang. Ye would think it a misery, and it was hard, hard work, cold and wet and their hands in ribbons, but they sang the whole day at the farlin, the old songs, in the Gaelic some of them for a wheen of them came off the Islands, and a body walking the shore of an evening would hear the whole town singing over the guts of a million fish. My mither met my father at the gutting. Half the marriages in this town were made at the farlin. That was the herrin' too. It was not just a fish. It was the whole of us.

We measured them by the cran, min, that was the old measure, a great basket of them, near a thousand fish to the cran, and a good boat would come in of a morning riding low with fifty cran, sixty, and the men grey in the face with the night's work but grinning, for a good shot of herrin' was money in a place that had little else. And the barrels went out of here by the thousand, salt herrin' in barrels away to Russia, to Germany, to the whole of Europe, for the herrin' fed the poor of half the world, min, cheap good food full of goodness, and there is a thing I want ye to hold onto when I tell ye the rest, for the rest is a sad tale and I do not want ye thinking it was all for nothing. It fed millions. It was not greed at the start. It was folk feeding folk.

But I will tell ye the thing that did for us, and it is the same thing ye will have heard from every old fool round this coast, and it is true for all it is common. We thought it could not end. That is the whole of it, min. Ye cannot look at a sea that shines silver from the one horizon to the other, a thing that big, that endless, and believe in your heart that it has a bottom to it. It would be like believing ye could drink the Firth dry with a teacup. So when the times were hard, and they were hard, betwixt the wars and after, we did the thing that seemed only sense. We built bigger boats. We got better nets, and then the trawls, and then the great purse nets that took the whole shoal at the one go, and the engines, and then the machines that could find the fish for ye doon in the dark where they hid. And it was not just us. The Norse and the Danes and the Dutch were at it and all, whole fleets of the great purse-seiners, hunners of them, each one able to take a thousand ton in the one night. There got to be no place left in the whole North Sea for the herrin' to hide and breed and come back. By the finish they reckoned the boats could take three quarters of every herrin' in the North Sea in a single year. Three quarters, min. Ye cannot do that to a living thing and have it last. Ye just cannot.

And so the shine went thin. That is how it came, no all at the once but slow, so ye could near enough tell yourself ye were imagining it. One year the shots were a wee thing smaller. Then a wee thing smaller again. The old men said it was a bad few years and it would turn, for it had aye turned before. But it did not turn. And I mind, I mind it like the day my father died, the last year afore they shut it, when we worked the whole season, worked oor hearts oot, and came back with a fraction of what my grandfather would have thought a poor night. The sea did not shine any more. Ye looked over the side intae black water. And in the year of nineteen seventy-seven they did the only thing there was left to do, and they shut it. Shut the whole North Sea herrin' fishery, stone dead, nae fishing at all, and it stayed shut the best part of ten years. A thing that had gone on in this town since afore anyone could mind, since afore the kirk was built, stopped, in my ain lifetime, because we had near taen the last of them.

Now I said I would be fair, min, and I will. It was the right thing they did, the shutting of it, hard as it was, for by then it was that or lose the herrin' for ever, and when they let the sea rest, the fish did come back, some of them. There is herrin' in the Firth again the day, and they tell me a body can buy it now with a wee stamp on it saying it was fished with sense, and that is good, that is right, I am glad of it. So it is not a tale of pure loss, and I'll not tell it as one. The sea can fill again. That is worth the saying and I want ye to write it doon. Leave a thing be, pull back afore it is too late, and the sea is that generous it will forgive ye and fill again.

But it never filled to the shine. Ye understand me. There is herrin', but there is no the silver sea. There is no the forest of masts in the harbour, for the harbour the day has a few creel boats and a wheen of yotts for the folk from away, and the gutting sheds are all fallen doon or made intae wee hooses for incomers, and there is no a farlin left standing in the whole town, nor a woman that could gut ye a fish if her life hung on it, nor the singing. The herrin' came back a bit. The town did not. The young folk were away by then, to the toons, to the ile rigs oot in the very sea their grandfathers fished, and they did not come back, for there was nothing to come back for. That is the loss that is bigger than the fish, min, if ye want the truth of an old man. It is no just the herrin' that went thin. It is the whole way of being folk together that went with them. The one clock we all lived to. It stopped.

And here is the bit that keeps me in my chair by the window of a night. My ain great-grandson, a fine big loon, has a grand job oot on the rigs and good luck to him. And he has never in his life seen a herrin' that was not lying on a bit polystyrene under a light in the supermarket. Never. And when I say to him, laddie, the sea out there that ye fly over in the helicopter, that sea was once solid silver, ye could have walked on the backs of the fish, he looks at me. He does not say anything, for he is a kind loon and he loves his auld grandda. But he looks at me the way ye look at an old man that is going saft in the head, that is mixing up what was with what he dreamed. And I cannot blame him, min, for how is he to believe it? He never saw it. It is not in him to grieve it, for ye cannot grieve a shine ye never stood in. To him the empty sea and the empty harbour is just the sea and the harbour, the way it has aye been and aye will be. And that, that is the cruellest turn of the whole thing. No that it went. Things go, min, I am old enough to ken that fine. But that it went so quiet, and left so few behind that saw it, that a body can stand in this town the day and never ken there was ever a shine at all.

So that is why I talk, min, to onybody that will come and sit and listen, the way ye have done, and I thank ye for it. I am no wanting your pity, mind. I had a good life at the sea and I would take it again the morn. I am wanting one thing only, and it is the thing I will say to ye and then ye can away hame afore the licht goes. Do not believe in the bottomless. That is the whole of my wisdom, forbye seventy year at the fishing. Whatever ye have that looks endless, the fish in the sea or the birds in the sky or the very black earth itself, it is not endless, there is a bottom to every one of them, and the only way ye ever find where the bottom is, is by hitting it, and by then it is ower late. We found the bottom of the silver sea. I would not have ye and yours find the bottom of whatever is yours to look efter. Pull back in time. The sea forgave us, for we stopped just in time, and there is herrin' oot there the nicht because we did. So there is hope in it, min, real hope, but it is a hard-bought kind, and I have paid for it, so ye may as well have it for nothing.

There now. Away ye go, and mind the wind on the brae. And if ever ye see herrin' for sale with the wee stamp on it, buy it, and eat it, and think on the shine.