He speaks with confident sentences and long silences, the memories clearly vivid to him. He checks the last hook, lets the rig fall, and fixes me with his unsettling gaze.
‘Rob, I have a gift for – how would you say – seeing what the future will be.’
Looking into those white eyes, being looked through by them, I do not disbelieve him.
Bjørnar began his campaign against the plans, even as the oil companies continued their seismic blastings. He fished and he fought. He was elected secretary of the local fishermen’s union, which gave him a political authority he then wielded for access and voice. He knocked on doors up and down the islands. He took to the newspapers, writing about the dangers of blasting and drilling. He activated the old Norwegian allegiance to cod, and set it against the new Norwegian allegiance to oil. He challenged oil company representatives to debate. He used satire, mocking them and their plans in print and broadcasts, and he challenged the hard science of their claims.
‘Maybe my main strategy was delay,’ says Bjørnar. ‘Time was working for the resistance and the people. I knew this. If you get things delayed, new information comes in – and the new information is working usually against industry.’
He is telling his story faster now, speaking in a torrent, hard to interrupt or question. His mood flickers as he talks: big smiles, big laughs, then pulses of sadness and loss. There is an aggrandizement at work, too, but I hear this not as bragging or chest-beating, rather as an echo of the self-heroizing that was necessary for Bjørnar to fight his battles, and to absorb the damage that he personally sustained.
Six months into his campaign against big oil, Bjørnar broke down. The strain was too much. He was found at his keyboard one day by Ingrid in something like a fugue state. He spent weeks in a psychiatric ward. When he came out, he spent three months rebuilding himself. Then he began the fight again.
Thump of the engine, roll of the big swells. Two fulmars in the seabird plume now, the kittiwake gone.
‘I will tell you a picture I had in my head when I came back from that first trance,’ says Bjørnar. ‘It felt like I was standing out on the peninsula furthest away from shore there’ – he points back at the spined peaks of the Andøya coast in the distance – ‘with my boots in the sea, my front turned to the people onshore, fighting against mankind, and with the Edge waiting to claim me. This was the image that surfaced from my subconscious at that time. It was that crazy. Can you imagine?’
The boat is locked on its autopilot course. Bjørnar has stopped all work with the fishing rig, focused wholly on telling his story. The Trongrun noses north-west, wallowing on the hummocks. He has braced himself against the wheelhouse and is looking unblinkingly at me. The story is gushing from him under great pressure now.
‘Slowly, though, others joined me on the shore. More and more environmental organizations came up here and joined us. Individuals came together to protest.’ He spreads his arms wide, then curves them around in a gesture of gathering. ‘My project was always to build all these organizations into one big army!’
‘“Coexistence”, Bjørnar,’ I say. ‘You learned your tactics from big oil!’
He laughs. ‘Together, yes, we were coexisting, the resistance, we were making history, starting to turn the tide back against these big men. We raised so much noise out here. They were going to take it. They were going to annex the area at that time. But we stopped them.
‘The season of the seismic surveys was from May until September. They blasted for three years and I fought them for three years. My brother died in Finnmark of cancer, and my sister near Paris also died of cancer. They blasted for three years, and for three years I was brought away to the mental hospital once a year, in a trance. I was blown out.’
Shriek of the gulls, mew of the kittiwake.
‘I do not regret those years of the battle and the trances, Rob. I learned from them, though they were hard on all of us, there is no doubt about that. During those years, even my fisherman son, he looked at me as a stranger. I could not have done this without Ingrid. She is such a strong woman, so very strong. Always there behind me. Taking care of my family . . .’ He trails off. I nod. Even from my short time with them, it is clear to me that Ingrid is a person of exceptional surety and subtlety; bedrock to Bjørnar’s torrent, calm to his storm.
The pressure is ebbing. He speaks more slowly now.
‘The tide was turned, though. Minority parties in coalition blocked the drilling. It was a victory for us. And we have only grown stronger. Now the majority in Norway says no to oil. So much has happened because of the oil battle and those years. The youth is coming back to the fishing, moving back to this way of living, to the rural areas. All of the nation has been watching this fight up and down the coast.’
The aftershocks of those years were disastrous both for Bjørnar’s health, however, and for the undersea world.
‘Since the seismic testing,’ says Bjørnar, ‘everything has changed here. You know the fish that we are going to catch today? They disappeared. Before the blasting we could get up to 3,000 kilograms of fish just with these jigging lines in only one day. That was one of the reasons I bought this boat.’ He pats the wheelhouse of the Trongrun affectionately.
‘But in the first year of the blasting, the saithe disappeared, and only in 2015 did they start to come back. Six years after the last blasting. The whales, too, it affected them. The orca left also. And we began to see sperm whales in the fjords, where they had been driven by hunger.’
He pulls back on the throttle, setting the engine to a gentle idle. He puts his hands together in a wry gesture of prayer, bows smilingly towards me.
‘And now, let us fish.’
~
The night before Bjørnar and I set out in the Trongrun, I stayed up reading Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 story ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’, about the whirlpool that lay just off the Lofoten shore; the whirlpool I had seen and heard during my days in the bay of the red dancers, the drill hole of which was thought by some – including Athanasius Kircher, author of the early modern epic study of the underland, Mundus Subterraneus (1664) – to penetrate the earth and resurface in the Gulf of Bothnia.
Poe’s story opens with two men near the summit of Hellsegge, the blunt peak that rises to the south of Refsvika Bay. The men are sitting on the brink of ‘a sheer unobstructed precipice of black shining rock’, looking at the distant island of Værøy. One of the men is a nameless visitor to the archipelago; the other is a Lofoten native from Moskenes, who has a head of strikingly white hair.
When the two men first gain their observatory, the ocean beneath them is a ‘wilderness of surge’ with ‘something very unusual about it’. The visitor experiences an apprehension – a disturbing sense of something part-glimpsed. Then comes a sound, loud and gradually increasing: a moaning, like that of a ‘vast herd of buffaloes’. Quickly the sea changes its textures: currents of ‘monstrous velocity’ begin to run, and the sea is seamed and scarred into a ‘thousand conflicting channels’, which gradually resolve into a multitude of small whirlpools. These vortices vanish and then, ‘very suddenly’:
[a] circle of more than half a mile in diameter [appeared]. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half-shriek, half-roar.
‘This,’ stammers the narrator, who, feeling the mountain shake beneath him from the force of the water’s rage, has thrown himself to the ground in panic, ‘can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelstrom.’ So it is, and into its maw, the white-haired islander tells him, have been sucked over the years whales, pine trees and countless boats. Even a polar bear was once caught within its traction, c
onsumed by ‘the abyss of the whirl’.
Poe’s description was, of course, nautically preposterous. He had never been to the Lofoten Islands, nor had he spoken to anyone who had seen the Maelstrom. His vision of the Maelstrom was constructed from legend, hearsay and the cartouches of sea charts. The image of a funnel descending to the bed of the ocean and beyond bore no relation to reality. The Maelstrom resembles neither a tidy double spiral, nor a dipping hole in the ocean with blackness at its core. Rather it is a churning field of water, roughly circular in outline, ranged over a diameter of a mile or more. Within that rough circle the water stands up in waves, and from that rough circle – like the arms of a spiral galaxy – wandering lines of foam track the incoming tidal currents that make the Maelstrom.
Poe’s surreal vision of an irresistible, helical vortex does, though, speak to the draw that whirlpools – from plughole swirls in a bathtub to cosmic black holes – exert upon the imagination. Such structures captivate us because of the distant tractions they exert, the event horizons they establish. Their victims are trapped before they are even aware they have been caught.
In Poe’s story, the islander proceeds to tell the narrator about how he and his brother, out fishing, once became ensnared by the Maelstrom. As their boat was pulled towards the vortex, the man said, he found himself peculiarly calm, his terror giving way to an odd kind of fatalist love: ‘I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself. I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make.’ Spinning furiously, held in the power of the Maelstrom’s centrifuge, the boat slowly slid down the slopes of the black-sided shaft. ‘It appeared to be hanging, as if by magic,’ recalls the islander, ‘midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony but for . . . the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth.’ The spray thrown out by the vortex formed a moonbow of light above the whirlpool – an unearthly crescent hovering over this underland portal.
Poe’s story partook of widespread nineteenth-century fascination with the idea of an actual global underland to which certain entrance points existed, giving access either to a wholly hollow planet or at least to substantial interior space. A subgenre of subterranean fiction flourished in the 1800s, in which the Earth’s crust and mantle were frequently imagined as riddled with tunnels, often leading down to a habitable core. In 1818 an American army officer called John Cleves Symmes began to advance as fact his belief that the Earth was structured as a series of concentric spherical shells, with vast openings some 1,400 miles in diameter at either pole. Symmes argued for the need to make an expedition to the North Pole to descend into these spheres and explore their potential for resources and habitation.
That expedition was never made, but in an early science-fiction work entitled Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (1820), purportedly written by a ‘Captain Adam Seaborn’, a group of travellers descend into the Earth’s centre via the North Pole, where they do indeed discover an inner continent. Poe extended Symmes’s theories in his 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, then in 1864 came the most famous of these fantasies, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, in which his explorers enter an Icelandic volcano, descend to a depth of eighty-seven vertical miles, sail an underground sea, and emerge from the crater of Stromboli off the coast of Sicily. The following year, Lewis Carroll published Alices Adventures in Wonderland – originally titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground – a very different kind of expedition to the subterrane.
These hollow-Earth fantasies persisted and mutated in the twentieth century. In 1923 the Russian mystic and painter Nicholas Roerich staged a Himalayan expedition with his philosopher wife, Helena, to seek the entrance to the city of Shambhala, which would lead in turn to a ‘Hollow Earth Kingdom’. They travelled on horseback from Darjeeling on their futile quest, carrying an American flag fluttering from a Mongolian spear, and probably aided by Soviet intelligence agents. After 1945, disturbingly, a post-Nazi geo-fantasy emerged of caverns in the Earth’s crust into which Hitler and his closest allies had supposedly escaped from their bunkers during the final Russian assault on Berlin, and from which Aryan power might in the future resurge.
That night in Andøya, I came to think of Poe’s story as a premonitory oil-dream. In it, the Maelstrom operates both as a kind of boring drill and a means of seeing the seabed where it lies bared at the base of the vortex. Often Poe describes the water of the Maelstrom in oily terms: it turns ‘smooth’, ‘shining’ and ‘jet-black’, it ‘gleam[s]’ like ‘ebony’. Like oil it is both fatal and miraculous – and like oil, it re-sequences time.
Poe’s story and others like it speak in part of the mid nineteenth-century dreams of the ‘oceans of oil’ that were imagined to exist under the earth. These narratives advanced the Holocene delusion of a planetary interior containing inexhaustible wealth and energy – a delusion that still characterizes expansionist oil discourse, nearly two centuries after Poe was writing. ‘We need new acreage to explore, and want to step up our exploration activities,’ Norwegian Statoil declared the autumn before I travelled north. Several months later the Australian oil and gas giant Karoon announced its wish to open up new fields in the Great Australian Bight on the grounds that the area held ‘underexplored Cretaceous basins’.
The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe of 2010 was partly a consequence of pushing deep drilling to its limits in an effort to open new territories. On 20 April that year, forty-one miles off the southeast coast of Louisiana, the borehole of a semi-submersible oil rig burst. The ensuing blowout at rig-level killed eleven crewmen and ignited a fireball that could be seen onshore. Two days later the rig sank, leaving the well gushing from the seabed at a water depth of around 5,000 feet. Two hundred and ten million gallons of oil escaped into the Gulf of Mexico, rising on the ocean as a slick that was visible from space. At sea level the oil devastated marine life. Tar-balls, rolled by the waves, gathered in their thousands on the coastline. Striped dolphins leaped through floating slicks. It would take until the autumn to cap and seal the well successfully, such that it could be declared ‘effectively dead’, but the consequences for the ecosystems and communities of the Gulf persist today. Deepwater was a rare laying-bare of the darker operations of the global extractive industries. One of the agreements tacitly made by consumers with these industries is that extraction and its costs will remain mostly out of sight, and therefore undisturbing to its beneficiaries. Those industries understand the market need for alienated labour, hidden infrastructure and the strategic concealment of both the slow violence of environmental degradation and the quick violence of accidents. Deepwater violated that agreement shockingly, manifesting a substance on which most modern human life depends but that few people encounter in the raw.
After returning from Norway, I would learn that the Moskstraumen Maelstrom had become literally enabling of the oil industry. In the 1980s a man called Bjørn Gjevig – an antiquarian scholar, professional mathematician and amateur sailor, who seems as if he must have been invented by Poe, but truly exists – became fascinated by the hydrodynamics of the Maelstrom. Using data gathered in part while sailing close to the whirlpool, Gjevig began to model the maths of its currents. When oil was discovered off the Lofotens, he realized that his data had gained application: oil companies would need to understand such ocean forces in order to construct rigs that could withstand ‘destructive currents of the kind found in the Maelstrom’.
At the climax of Poe’s story, the human body loses all volition and becomes a kind of drift-matter, helpless within the ‘destructive currents’. The fisherman and his brother are drawn steadily deeper into the vortex. The fisherman realizes that he has entered a giant grading-machine, which weighs and measures the objects that have been pulled into it – and moves the heaviest and most irregularly shaped items to destruction at its base.
In a wondrous flash of
intelligence, he understands that in order to survive he must, counter-intuitively, leave the apparent safety of his heavy fishing boat, and lash himself instead to a lighter wooden barrel. Unsurprisingly he cannot convince his brother of the wisdom of this course of action, so he is left with no choice but to abandon both brother and boat. The barrel onto which he is lashed rises slowly to safety, as he predicted. But the fishing boat with his brother spreadeagled on the deck is dragged down to its destruction.
All of these nineteenth-century hollow-Earth texts read, now, both as beckonings into and warnings of the void. All are Anthro-pocene works avant la lettre, about longings to gain access to the Earth’s wealthy interior. They foretell the arrival of the extractive industries in all their gargantuan force. They portend the establishment of the immense infrastructure that has spread across the Earth, dedicated to retrieving from the underland the raw materials it holds, creating petro-scapes from the burned-back wastelands of the Niger delta, to the flaming oil wells of the Middle East and Houston’s sprawl of refineries and silo tanks. Our modern species-history is one of remorselessly accelerated extraction, accompanied by compensatory small acts of preservation and elegiac songs. We have now drilled some 30 million miles of tunnel and borehole in our hunt for resources, truly riddling our planet into a hollow Earth.
~
The Trongrun’s killing space was stripped back and simple: a zinc trough bolted to the starboard side of the boat, and a removable wooden cutting board that lidded the trough. Bjørnar ran the jig-lines off a winch. The press of a button brought the line up, the winch creaking with the weight of fish.
Tick of the winch. Click of the jig. Bjørnar peers over the edge. Silver shapes swimming up into view, finding focus, then thrashing to the surface. Bjørnar holds the line clear from the boat with one hand, and with the other gaffs the fish, each in turn, jerking them up and into the trough with single, practised movements. A shake of the lure to free the hook, and each fish falls to flap in the trough, their orange swim-bladders extruding out through their mouths like party balloons. They are saithe, similar to the pollock and coalfish I’ve caught off British shores before, but huge: seven, ten, twelve pounds. A strong white line runs along the mid-length of the flank of each fish, like the line on the fish-finder; black-copper above the line, and a bronze-brown below it. They are gorgeous even in death.
Underland Page 26
