Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Meanwhile the blundering capsule is suffering, but mind is busy admiring the gems of this hidden world. The sand is littered with empty shells, with nacreous spires and ginger fans, with spotted carapace and claw. Hands clutch and grab but then feet kick decisively off for the unending, swerving ascent which at last brings body bursting to the surface. There it lies, panting the sunlight in and out while the slower bubbles of its passage continue to prickle up from below and fizz around it. It is a minute or two before I can examine what my hands have found. Up here in the brilliance the objects are small and ordinary: common shells, parts of a dismantled crab. For a while a certain strangeness clings to them as to anything retrieved with effort which should never again have seen full light of day; then my hands open and the extreasures wobble their way down in the long fall back to their entombment.

  The pleasure of this sort of retrieval is self-renewing. I do such dives many times, pure recreation amid the serious daily task of killing to eat, until they become a necessary habit. Now and again I come back up with something I keep. Mostly these gems are devalued as they cross over that barrier between the lower and the upper, like all souvenirs, like those hypnagogic fragments I so often awake with clutched in my mouth. I speak them on waking: significant phrases whose meaning quickly drains away until they are arbitrary jumbles of words and sounds. Occasionally they provide ideas, titles for stories, private jokes.

  Face down in the water now I can no longer see the fragments I have released. Even the crab’s shell with its gleaming white inner surface has been swallowed up. My mind starts working properly: that graveyard on the seabed might have accumulated because of the way the currents eddy at that point but more likely it represents the backdoor débris of a creature’s lair in the rock face beneath the overhang. Probably there is a good-sized octopus resident in one of the slots and fissures. I ought to go down again and discover where so I can come back and fight him.

  Half an hour later I do so, this time armed with a long wire probe to take soundings. In a series of dives down beneath the ledge I quarter the rock face systematically. Several times my wire encounters something soft but the holes are too small. Eventually I do find the right hole. The probe quivers. A cloud of disturbed silt puffs out as the occupant shrinks back towards the island’s roots. It will be a dangerous fight and impossible without a compressor. I doubt it is suitable for a solo effort.

  *

  Since a spear gun plays such an important part in my daily life on Tiwarik I shall have to describe it properly. It is a fishing tool which has been around for a long time: the oldest man in Sabay tells me he used one as a boy and that it was exactly the same as the modern ones except that in those days all the elastic was black. There may be regional variations in style but basically the classic Filipino spear gun is a wooden stock shaped like a child’s toy rifle equipped with elastic thongs and a barbed metal spear. If the gun is for day fishing the combined length of spear and stock may be as much as five feet; if it is for a child or to be used for night fishing it is short: usually no more than a scant metre overall. The reasons for this difference are that at night most fish can be approached very close so less power is needed, also that the shorter the spear gun the easier it is to manoeuvre in darkness into holes and crevices in the rocks.

  The top surface of the toy rifle is planed flat and a few inches of bamboo ‘barrel’ lashed to its front tip. To this in turn powerful rubber strands are tightly bound with elastic. At their ends are loops made of nylon or stainless steel wire. These fit over a raised tooth near the rear end of the spear which is inserted backwards through the ‘barrel’ and held in place against the combined tension of the rubber by the sear of the trigger. The trigger itself will be one of two kinds. The simpler consists of a metal lip driven into the stock which engages with a slot cut in the underside of the spear. The butt end of the spear is held in a hole drilled in a piece of wood which pivots. The firer’s thumb presses down on the end of the wood, the hole lifts the slot in the spear clear of the metal lip, the spear fires. The other kind is more of a conventional rifle trigger, the upper end of which emerges as a spike through the stock and goes into a hole drilled in the end of the spear. The firer’s forefinger squeezes the trigger, the spike retracts, the spear fires. This is the pattern of all the spear guns at Sabay and is the type which I now use, having started some years ago in a different province with the ‘rocking’ kind of trigger.

  I go into such detail because the fishermen take great care with the guns they make and the designs they use are now as perfected as is that of the bicycle. There may be improvements to be made possible by new materials but the basic idea is a beautiful balance of simplicity, ease of use, accuracy, cheapness and adaptation to the human body. The spear gun grows from the hand, the eye is at the tip of the spear (which is barbed, generally with a sharpened nail pivoting through a hole). The spears themselves are a matter for some competitiveness. The best are of steel rod, about a quarter of an inch thick, which flexes but will not easily become bent. The ideal rod is stolen from the core of local government power cable and bears the spiral shadow of the wires once wrapped around it. A good alternative is a light reinforcing rod. The cheapest and least successful spears are of mild steel or iron. They bend very easily so that at the end of a short struggle with a small octopus they are kinked throughout their length. On the other hand they are much simpler to work.

  The strength of the propulsive rubber, the number and length of the thongs, is dictated by how strong the user is and how much power he needs. A heavy spear for daytime use needs an effective range of only about ten feet. This seems a tiny distance on dry land. Underwater it is hard for mere elastic to drive a steel rod much further than that with any accuracy: water slows projectiles abruptly as anyone versed in ballistics knows. Besides, the spear takes a measurable time to travel that distance and it is difficult to ‘lead’ a fish and outthink it when the mere sound of the trigger releasing is sufficient warning. The spear passes through the space where one hoped it might have been, except that it is now a good yard away and going in the opposite direction. It is because a spear gun like this is so ‘low-tech’ that the fisherman must compensate by acquiring knowledge of his prey: how each species moves, how each reacts, the subtle differences of behaviour. I cannot imagine what it would be like to hit every fish one aimed at as if shooting tin ducks. The fishermen of Sabay might yearn for such luck but after a while the fish would react by staying out of range. It must be at least partly because the present technique is so heavily in the fishes’ favour that they continue to loiter and be shot at and this whole method of gathering food remains possible.

  We have all spent hours speculating about ways of increasing our spear guns’ power. Instead of elastic stretched straight back along the stock in the catapult principle, how would it be to build an underwater crossbow? But the objections are at once obvious: re-loading would be far too slow, the ‘bowstring’ would be impeded throughout its length by the water, the overall width would be cumbersome and out of the question at night. Springs, then? But these argue a much more complicated containing mechanism which in turn means concealed metal parts which will corrode. The power of a compressed spring is also released over a short length only; one of the advantages of elastic stretched so many times its own length is that the spear is driven and accelerated right up to the moment its tail disappears into the little bamboo guide.

  A further issue is how to avoid losing the spear which is not, after all, an anonymous bullet but like a mediaeval arrow, a hand-made weapon representing hours of work. One may most easily lose a spear by firing it out into a sudden deep or by hitting a fish big enough to swim off with it. Neither is likely to happen close inshore when the spear being used may not be much heavier in gauge than an average knitting needle. Either is very likely indeed when using a big spear gun for deeper work on the outer slope of the coral shelf, which is what I like doing.

  Some years ago I finally made my own first s
pear of which I was greatly proud. Not that there was much craftsmanship involved, merely a sense of having triumphed over difficulties. I had had no tools other than a bolo and worked crouched over a fire: rocks were hammers, an old nail gradually banged into red-hot metal was a drill, a piece of broken cement paving was a file. Eventually, at the cost of an hour or two’s clumsy labour, burns, cuts and a mortified fingernail, I was holding a serviceable spear. I took it out and in the first hour’s fishing bagged a fat tudluan. The following day I hit a large cuttlefish which had just begun to pick up nervous speed the moment my spear pierced its bony plate. There was an ink explosion in the water ahead of me. I caught it up and groped inside the opaque cloud. Nothing. Then I spotted the cuttlefish moving steadily away towards deeper water, much hampered by the weight of the spear it trailed but making a good pace. Every so often it let out a pulse of ink which hung in the water as a twirling sepia nut. I set off in pursuit. At some point as it got deeper I stopped chasing a fine cuttlefish and started trying to save my spear. I had given up pursuing it underwater and was on the surface preparing for one last attempt when the dimming shape far below me stopped. I swam down. It made a despairing effort to escape but it was even more exhausted than I and I plucked both it and the spear from deep water.

  This episode, ending as it did in a sense of triumph at having retrieved the spear just as it was about to become irretrievable, had a nonsensical effect for it made me more confident of being able to deal with such things in the future rather than serving as a warning. For another couple of days I fished on but without any spectacular catches. Then on the fifth day of my new spear I sank to about seven metres, to that gracious level where the human body achieves equilibrium in seawater, neither sinking nor rising and initially making one feel it would be possible to spend all day there without taking a breath of air. I lay behind a coral outcrop and waited for a knot of offshore fish to assemble in their curiosity. I waited so long I knew I could not last another ten seconds without air, let alone all day, and at that point a gigantic parrotfish swam slowly past, its eye swivelling to watch me from its blue socket. Startled, I fired even as I pushed off for my ascent and saw, incredulously, the spear miss. The parrotfish characteristically dumped a trail of excrement as it bolted while my spear fell in an ever-steepening arc out over the shelf and into the deep purple beyond.

  The rest of that day I made numerous attempts to retrieve it. I had fixed its position in relation to a curious green toadstool of coral growing on the very edge of the undersea precipice. If I swam down to the toadstool itself, about thirty-five feet, I could just make out the spear lying at the foot of the cliff. I took great breaths and pushed myself down to fifty, sixty, seventy feet. But the spear must have been lying in a hundred and twenty feet of water and I never came closer to it than forty feet, from which distance I could see every inch of it in all its familiar detail: the scratch-marks from my improvised filings already beginning to go ochre with rust, the slight lop-sidedness of its barb. Had I been ten years younger, had I trained myself for depth diving, had I …

  I exploded up to the surface, ears squeaking and ringing, head squeezed, rib-cage quaking. Had I nothing. Had I had the sense not to fire at all. Never would I have killed a bonak that size outright: it would in any case have swum away with my spear, probably shedding it within a hundred metres. But to have fired seawards at anything from the edge of a coral reef was fatuous and betrayed a complete lack of the right instincts. I had been so excited by the sight of a big fish close up that all I could think of was pulling the trigger. I meditated sadly on this unprofessionalism as I fashioned another spear, this time stabbing my palm with a hot nail. One learned with awesome slowness; but I did resolve to learn, for even then I knew there was a psychic investment involved.

  Nowadays I, like all the other serious spear-fishermen of Sabay, have thin nylon cords on my spears, spliced through a hole in the end. These lines which are anything up to four metres long serve a dual function, enabling one to retrieve the spear and also providing a place for the catch. It took time to learn how to use a spear trailing a line. At first it seemed impossibly cumbersome. The tail snagged on corals, it fouled my plywood flipper, it drifted around my legs with the current. In fury I cut it off; penitently I later had to re-splice it onto yet another new spear.

  The technique of using a catch-line is that until there are some fish on it one holds a gather between two knuckles of the trigger hand. One swims, gun loaded and arm outstretched, the cord loosely held in such a way that it can run between the fingers when the spear fires but be stopped instantly if a fish is hit or the spear is about to fall into deep water. I very soon learned not to tie it to my wrist or ankle. I once found myself tethered thirty feet down by unbreakable nylon cord to a steel rod whose barb was firmly embedded in coral. This is not an experience one forgets; in the last resort one always needs to be able to let a spear go and after some years of spear-fishing the circumstances in which this happens are not likely to make one lament the spear overmuch.

  When the fisherman hits a fish he makes sure it is safely impaled through a substantial part of its body so that once on the catch-line it will not be torn off if snagged on a rock or kicked by a flipper. He passes it down the spear and onto the cord. Two-thirds along its length the line has a brass swivel spliced in to prevent the fish’s body acting like a propeller in the water and winding the line up into kinks. The fish is now pushed over the swivel until it reaches the stop at the end of the cord. In practice the whole action of hitting a fish, sweeping it back along spear and line and reloading the gun takes a matter of seconds during which time the hunter, who may still be deep under water, is looking about him for fresh prey even as he rises for air.

  *

  One night not long after my arrival on Tiwarik I wake just after the moon has set. I get up and go out. There is nobody else on the island; Arman has not come over to fish. I am glad since I am not in the mood tonight. Leaving my spear gun tucked into the roof I walk down to the beach through swirls of fireflies. I do not know why fireflies are more plentiful on some nights than on others, nor why phosphorescent plankton in the sea should be equally variable. Maybe the weather, the temperature or barometric pressure have something to do with it; maybe it is merely a matter of season. At any rate the night is now moonless, overcast, utterly black except that in the blackness swim these constant or winking insect lights.

  I walk on into the still water which is the same temperature as the air and can hardly be felt except as a weight. I go on; the water comes up to my chest. Almost without noticing it I have stopped breathing and find myself heading downwards into equal black in which the stellate points of tendril and plankton whirl and glow. The island and the sea are not after all separate entities but one continuous medium. In a while I no longer know for certain if my head is breaking through into air or water. Somewhere in this spangled firmament I take breaths. I know only there is a great lid over this universe, or else an unyielding bottom beneath it, and that if I keep heading up or down for long enough my head will strike one or the other but that if I steer a middle course I could keep on for ever, dazzled by these infinite motes, by my passage through a void in which mill the atoms of creation. In this pre-Genesis my mind floats off and out. There is no longer any body left to move in this nothing, only a cloud of electrons rapturously adrift in chaos.

  Intoxicated, I am aware of motionless points of light. I find I am on my back. The overcast is dissolving and stars are coming through. Gradually their constant candlepower outlines the dark heave of Tiwarik and everything reorients itself according to old conceptions of gravity. The island has revealed another accuracy in its name but now its bulk settles the right way up. Fathoms below my soles lie the familiar marauding teeth and chitinous beaks among the great sierras of coral. Far above me the forest and grasses shed down their drifts of fireflies, a twinkling dandruff eddying lazily in and out of the thorny brushwood above the shoreline boulders.

  I
love this place.

  4

  The more familiar it becomes the more the reef surrounding Tiwarik is unknowable, a disclosure of that mare incognitum without whose liquid setting the island would be a stone instead of a jewel. At Kansulay I was intrigued by the spectacle of Lolang Mating’s ruined hut shimmering with cold fire, but they exist here beneath the sea, too, such luminous fungi. And just as in the woods one sees a glow and shines a torch to reveal some undistinguished mould, deep underwater a coral hill may bulk with a beacon on its peak which is much harder to find. In the dark I mark the place and switch the torch on but at the instant of light everything springs slightly to one side. Eventually I track it down: a tiny nodule of jelly lost among a tuft of weed. Still stranger are the lights on the sea bed which bring me down with my belly on the sand, flattened beneath black fathoms. That steady incandescence is surely a lure put forth by some poisonous predator bunched in waiting beneath the sand like a buried ray trailing its white quill. But no; it is so invisible by torchlight it needs a long minute finally to see it: something shaped like a sodden wisp of cellophane which, enveloped in dark once more, pumps out light as an insignificant flower its scent.

  What is it for, this light? To entice, to warn, proclaim? We are in a foreign place and nothing may be taken even as language, still less as translatable. The light may simply be part of the creature’s outline, much as a dog’s four legs go towards defining its shape. On the other hand it may not be a creature at all but a fragment of one, a tatter mimicking autonomy like the severed tail of a lizard or the crawling blushes which run and pool on the skin of a dead squid. It brings me down with my nose to the sand time and time again. If scientists are right in claiming that algae were for aeons the only living things on the newly cooling Earth, maybe what we see now is the scattered remnants of a former splendour, much as a skein of incandescent gas a few light years across may mark all that remains of an entire galaxy.