1. One day a man from Maine walked along Lighthouse Beach on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas and discovered, to his surprise, a piece of his own home. The beach, facing the strong waves of the Atlantic, featured some of the softest, whitest sand in the Bahamas. The sand would remain in the grooves of the man’s shoes, long after he departed and settled back into his own rockier coast of Maine. But that day on Eleuthera, he spotted something ahead in the foam crest on the shore, a familiar piece of styrofoam. A lobster buoy, he realized as he squinted. He reached down to it and wiped some of the clinging sand from its shiny surface, and saw that the colors that painted this buoy were his family’s colors: deep green and a bright red stripe through the middle. The colors of the McClintocks. He stared at the deep green in this new place, against the palette of white sand and teal water. How in the world did his family’s buoy get there?[1]
Still Life 1: “Lesbian Moon Lobster.” Twitter concurs with the cultural muscle of over three hundred thousand likes: Throw her back into the sea. Once back in the sea, the Moon Lobster apparently retweets.
2. The inside of the tank house was cold and fluorescent; the air was stale and smelled not like fish or ocean but something subtler, something in between. You wouldn't know driving from the road that this plain-looking, steel-paneled building was filled with thousands of live lobsters, whose net worth was in the millions. You might suspect that something lucrative was going on, though, based on the security camera hanging over the door. The camera probably noticed that we were a small group of writers, notebooks in hands, pens tucked behind ears. The camera would not have known our motives here on the remote island of Grand Manan, New Brunswick: to document recent changes in the island’s fisheries.
Inside the building, the entire floor was filled with tanks burbling quietly. In the tanks were cages that fell five feet below the floor line. Each of the cages was filled with dozens of lobsters. Though I tried to peer, I couldn't see their delightful, dinosauric[2] greenish-brown bodies. I could only see the tops of the cages, which were tied up with the bright turquoise rope that I had begun to associate with lobstering activity on this island. I had found shards of the rope everywhere, strewn across pebbled beaches and nestled into the delicate troves of purple harebell flowers that line the coast.
The man who showed us around the tank house was named Stewart, a name from the old Scottish "guardian" or "warden." It was an appropriate name, I thought, for someone whose job is to both contain and keep alive thousands of crustaceans. He had kind blue eyes, slightly bluer than the burbling water in the tanks behind him. And he was tan, built muscularly, with the heft of someone who has been hauling lobster cages for many years. As he led us around, the thuds of his muck boot footsteps echoed against the building’s steel frame. I peered into the water and noticed that the cages were classified into three different colors that Stewart told us roughly corresponded to both size and age of the lobsters within: the green, the most abundant, cages were for the 1-2 pound lobsters; the yellow, 2-4 pounds; the blue, 4-6 pounds; and in the orange cages, deep under the water, the 6+ pound lobsters, lobsters so big that their meat is too tough to eat, lobsters as old as thirty years, who move significantly slower than their younger, feistier counterparts in the green cages.
In the tanks all around us, none of the lobsters were feisty -- as none of them could move. Each of them had their claws strapped closed with rubber bands. Each of them sat in what Stewart called a rectangular "condo" just larger than the size of their body. Each of them was living in a torpid state, their bodies cold enough that their metabolism had slowed. In the tanks, at the torpid state, they need not eat nor defecate for months at a time.
Torpidity explained the surprising quiet of water brimming with life—it was a hibernating life, a not-quite-still life.[3]
When the lobsters first arrived at the tank house, they were their prototypical snappy selves. They flexed their bodies, thrashed their tails as Stewart and his colleagues wrestled them into the bands and the condos. Then Stewart adjusted the water temperature slowly - taking it from the temperature of the Bay of Fundy, from which the lobsters were drawn, and lowering it to just above freezing, so that their bodies fell into a state of torpor. In the wild, a torpid state allows lobsters to survive brutally cold winters underwater. In a tank house, a torpid state allows fishermen to hold the lobsters in biological limbo until their price on the market is high enough to load them into trucks and ship them away.
"It's just a second winter," Stewart said, but I wondered how a second period of extreme cold affected the creatures. “When they wake up,” he explained with a glint of memories in his eyes, “they’re really fierce.” Just as snappy then, just as spritely as they were when they went in – keen to grab at the fingers of anyone who dares to process them for the market.
Still Life 2: “Rare Blue Lobster.” The odds of catching a blue lobster are one in two million. New Hampshire Lobsterman Greg Ward has either beaten the odds or caught a whole lot of lobsters, because he’s hauled in two blues over the course of his life.
3. The buoy arrived at the beach in the Bahamas like this: likely, someone cut it from the lobster trap that it corresponded to, or perhaps the buoy was separated from the trap in frothy storm waves, even a Nor’easter. Freed, it bobbed along and was picked up by the Gulf Stream Current, which carried it up and up, to skirt the island of Grand Manan and the rest of Atlantic Canada before getting slingshotted over to the North Atlantic Current, which would carry it across the pond. Just before arriving in the English Channel - the natural trajectory of the North Atlantic - the buoy could have turned north up to the arctic, to Norway and then Northern Russia, likely to get frozen ultimately in some inhospitable cocktail of ice-filled sea.[4] But the buoy did not stop in England, and did not turn north. Instead, it opted, unlike the cold-loving American lobsters it had helped to catch for many years, for warmer waters. Down and down, the buoy bobbed, floating in the Canary current, past Portugal, on to Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania. And then about the time it hit Dakar, Senegal, another cross-Atlantic slingshot -- this time along the North Equatorial. Bobbing, bobbing, on and on until reaching the gulfstream again, which deposited the buoy on the Atlantic side of Eleuthera, on the soft sands of lighthouse beach, where the Mainer picked it up, incredulous.[5]
Still Life 3: Bring in the dancing lobsters! A classic scene in the Amanda Bynes Show, which ran from 1999-2002. The humans dressed as lobsters, here flanking Amanda, always got a laugh. This time Twitter liked it fifteen hundred times.
4. Every year on the Island of Grand Manan, New Brunswick, which is located in the upper branch of the Gulf of Maine, the inlet of the Bay of Fundy, most of the island residents head to the North Head wharf and watch the lobster boats – wide-hulled, freshly painted, and charming – as they race out to sea to claim the best spots for lobster traps. This event is called “Setting Day.” Once set, the traps will remain for the season, so the race to set first is vital for a season’s success. Families and children gather at high tide among the boats that sway as the crew hops aboard. I imagine the scene, all of them waving wildly as the lobstermen (and lobsterwomen[6] and lobsterpeople[7]) set out to sea.
They are practicing a tradition that has been around for so much of Grand Manan's human history, from the Passamaquoddy people, who first frequented this island from the mainland via canoe, to the herring fishermen of the early 1900s, who caught and sold herring all over the world. It is a tradition of hedging uncertainty, working to find fish, or waiting at home for the ships to return with the catch. Mid-way through the island there is a row of houses that feature prominent, ocean-facing cupolas. These were the waiting places from which captains' wives looked in anticipation of the men's return. Sometimes, as I drove by these houses, especially on nights when the island's fog started rolling in, I could imagine the figures of corseted women staring out the windows at the darkening sea.
These days the waiting game has changed. Lobster boats will stay out for forty-eight hours at a time, return for brief stints, a Saturday of donuts at the Grand Manan Bakery[8], and then set out again for another long shift. A lobsterperson described the shifts to me as zombifying. Crew members perform the same motions over and over, all day, into the night, and back into the day again. Hauling the traps, banding frantic claws, casting the traps into swells. Crew members are careful to watch their footing, for one wrong step could cinch someone’s foot to a rope moving swiftly to or from the ocean, where they could be dragged under in their heavy layers and boots. Getting off the boat, they say, is a relief, but even then, when the shift is done, ghosts of the swells follow your body into sleep.
At a party in Dark Harbor, Grand Manan’s quiet fisherman’s retreat, I shook the hand of a man who had been injured on a zombie shift. It wasn't until I grabbed his hand that I realized its frailness; the slight nervous splay of his fingers. Later he told me that his arm had been crushed while he was out hauling lobsters, between quickly moving machines and pulleys. “At least I survived,” he said, which apparently hadn't been true for all of his friends.
Setting Day can be grueling for the crew. Some captains will cut ahead of the others, frantically scanning the ocean floor with their sonar devices to find the perfect crevice for a lobster cage. The underwater geology appears on their screens, along with digitized fish schools and triangulating maps, lest they lose their way in the Bay of Fundy’s thick fogs. All of this technology reveals to the captains the sorts of places that lobsters like the little dips in the ocean substrate that are irresistible to the crustacean sensibility.[9] Places that are good for a trap. Other captains prefer a more cautious approach, placing each trap carefully, perhaps at the same locations at which they have set traps for years.
Long after the crowds have left the main wharf with the final hurrah of the departure, crew members continue to throw trap after trap out of the stern of their boats. The traps descend through the blue green waters, the small offering of herring pinned into the trap flickering as it becomes engulfed by deeper and deeper water. Each cage is connected to a buoy. The buoys, holding fast to their ropes, are tugged northwards and southwards daily by the extreme pull of the Bay of Fundy tides (home to some of the largest tidal variation in the world), as the traps themselves stay put, perhaps filled with waiting lobster bodies, somewhere on the ocean floor. The family colors are not just some quaint marking. They are an indicator of fierce territoriality. A Maine lobsterman once told me that a crew caught stealing from someone else's traps could expect to have their own traps cut from their marking buoys, their catch lost forever to the ocean, the buoy lost forever.[10]
Grand Mananers have sought lobsters for decades, for extra income, but mostly as an aside to the more lucrative catches of ground fish (halibut, cod, haddock) and the once-prolific herring. As these other fish populations have declined, lobster populations have grown. I learned this from the local fisheries officer, Soni, who offered to provide some insight on the state of the fisheries. I sat with him on his porch, which overlooked the North Head wharf, which was quiet at that time of day, as all the fishing boats were out at sea. Soni’s large lab/newfoundland mix rested his head in my lap for a while as we tried to imagine ourselves into the world of changes stirring beneath the waves. Soni told me that lobsters were booming in part because the large populations of ground fish used to feed off of young lobster larvae. These, by the way, are truly marvelous little critters. Speckled, translucent, brilliant, blue-green, pink-flecked. Something a fish would surely attempt to eat.[11]
Without predation, larvae numbers grew. And as sea water temperatures rose throughout the American Lobster's habitat, the populations started marching upwards, preferring water that was slightly cooler, but not too cool; Goldilocks, all of them. I should clarify: it wasn’t as if the individual lobsters all started marching northwards[12] -- they are mobile, but not that mobile. Rather, the offspring of Northern larvae started to thrive in cooler temperatures, and older lobsters in Southern habitats began to die off from temperatures outside of their preferred range, temperatures that weakened lobster immune systems enough so that they couldn’t fight off paramoebae[13], a parasite that attacks lobster nervous systems, ultimately leading to death. Former lobsterpeople at the southern part of the lobster range reported massive declines in their catches. According to Emily Greenhalgh at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, off the coast of New York, lobsters dropped by 97.7% between 1996 and 2014; from 9.4 million pounds in ’96 to 215,980 pounds in 2014.
Soni described the Bay of Fundy, that water he watched every day, as a perfect new home for them. He said it was as if the geography of the long, thin inlet was an enormous lobster trap in its own right. And if you’re a lobster, why not settle in a place that is rich with offerings for feeding?[14] So much food already set out and ready for the taking.
Still Life 4: Live lobsters, coming soon to a condo near you
5. Though most stories about fisheries are stories of demise and struggle[15],[16], The Gulf of Maine lobster fishery has been a source of inspiration for fisheries regulators. It is a story of brutality and cooperation, of lobsterpeople carefully monitoring each other’s behavior so that no one takes more than their fair share of crustacean. The fishery has been self-policed by the colors and stripes of particular family identifiers on particular buoys – a seemingly quaint practice that can at times look like this: Lobstermen will not only cut each other’s buoys[17] but sink each other’s boats, drain gasoline, sabotage nets, do literally anything to stop someone from cheating the system.
But no matter how regulated the fisheries have been, no matter how spirited internal regulation of the fishery may be, the Gulf of Maine also happens to be one of the fastest warming bodies of water in the world, and so all of that self-regulation may be moot when global carbon regulation has run amok. While lobster larvae have recently thrived in the Gulf’s cool waters, those glittering larvae have started once again to show signs of distress. Recent studies have shown that the larvae are smaller than they used to be, perhaps a sign of warming temperatures again, just outside of the lobster’s range. Which means that they might start moving north again – and that means that Grand Mananers have to store as many of them as possible in Tank Houses in the interim. [18]
Still Life 5: On a less frequented corner of Twitter, larvae glitter. Smaller though, than they once were.
6. Stewart grabbed a large hook and pulled a large cage of lobsters out from one of the very cold pools. I was not sure what I expected they’d look like in their torpid phase, but they seemed extraordinarily sentient; their antennae swiveling back and forth and their eyes, short, black glossy waggling tubes. Their claws were larger than my hand and realizing that made me put my hands behind me, out of sight, just in case it got feisty. But while the littler lobsters can take off part of a finger, apparently the big ones move too slowly for that. Too old and sluggish from life in the deep seas.
The ordinarily solitary critters in the air before us were huddled together in unexpected companionship within the green web of the cage, limbs moving like metal mechanical characters at an amusement park. The black eyes of one of the biggest ones swiveled, probing the air for information about this sterile fluorescent place. Its eyes swiveled in our direction. Fisherman and writers: we were a human blur.
Stewart, standing firmly as he held up the heavy cage, started, "These ones are mostly for our Chinese market. We usually throw them back if they're this big, but people over there like to use them for centerpieces on the table." Stewart went on to say that he and his colleagues would soon load up the 6+ pounders into trucks and then into planes, where they would be shipped halfway around the world. I imagined them almost glistening, bright crimson and dead on the table, in their newfound cultural status. Since lobster flesh that old is too tough to eat, the centerpiece would probably shine for one night and then be discarded whole, taken out with the trash the next day.
“They love ‘em for the red holiday they have over there,” he said.[19]
The Chinese market for lobsters is, in fact, booming. As the Chinese middle class grows, so does the nation’s appetite for crustaceans. Many of the lobsters fueling that market come from Grand Manan, which is such an isolated island (accessible only by ferry and plane) that it seems surprising that such a place would be connected to an appetite so global in nature. However, so many Grand Manan lobsters eventually go to China that Chinese companies have begun to build their own tank houses on the Island. Several people told me that one was being built by the Grand Manan Airport, so that live lobsters could be loaded directly onto a plane without much hassle at all and directly shipped overseas. I pictured their spindly bodies in the plane. How does a torpid lobster feel in flight?
Still life 6: Wow! Lobster found in airplane luggage. Imagine this. One Like.
8. In Maine, a number of lobsterpeople have been using heroin.[20] In Grand Manan, cocaine is more popular. Apparently the remedy for long days at sea (downer vs. upper, torpor vs. snap) varies across the international maritime border, “the Grey Zone,” a contested no-man’s-land between the U.S. and Canada, where anyone with a license can haul lobsters year round. This part of the Bay of Fundy is not just a territorial question mark, but a regulatory question mark. Neither U.S. nor Canadian policies apply to the lobster quota – so this area may well be the place where lobsters, like ground fish and herring before them, are being overfished. But no one can know for sure, even with the sophisticated ground-scanning cameras and regulation that does exist. What happens under the blue-green waves of the Bay of Fundy remains a mystery. And the trouble with the recent lobster boom is that no one knows when or where or how it will bust, and what that will mean for the people involved.[21]
Cocaine medicates the zombie shifts, the repetitive motions, the banding lobsters over and over, the hours of tiring waves rocking your body, the staying awake, alert, astute. And heroin medicates inevitable muscle aches, tendonitis, the injuries, machine accidents. Neither drug, of course, is so good for any of these things over the long-term.
Even if a lobsterperson does not use drugs, they are likely to face another affront to their health: diet. I met with one of the island nurses, Hallie Bass, to talk about the relationship between health and the fisheries. She invited me into her house to talk, and her cat Bubbles, with blue-grey eyes, not unlike the fishery officer’s dog Soni, sat on my lap and purred throughout our conversation. Turns out I will always be a softie for other people’s animals.
Since the “Lobster Gold Rush” Hallie has started to see more patients with diabetes in her office. She thinks this is because of the demands of the lobstering shifts: out on the ocean, there’s no time to eat a luxurious healthy lunch[22], even if the fishermen could afford it. Instead, they’re likely to eat packaged food filled with sugar, along with caffeinated soda or energy drinks. Whatever can sustain them through the shift.
She’s noticed that women on the island have also started to get married earlier, too. Young men in the throes of the Lobster Gold Rush offer to support the women financially, and so Hallie has seen that they are less inclined to seek their own employment, and more inclined to start a family earlier, or even have more kids than they might have had otherwise. In that regard, the island reminded me of the fracking fields of rural West Virginia and New Mexico, where I have conducted ethnographic research on extractive economies and health. In the fracking fields, a man (yes, mostly men) can make nearly $80,000 right out of high school by laying down pipelines or operating truck. New income often goes to a new truck capable of accessing remote oil and gas fields; capable of carrying a wife and new family through the traffic of boom towns.
On Grand Manan, Hallie told me, young people are still adjusting to the whopping increases in income. The island is filled with relatively new pickup trucks, many of which you can find at the bakery, at the bank, at the beach. My favorite on the island was lime green and had an enormous lobster decal on the side, so that there was no question where the money came from. But beyond the trucks, for many of these young fishermen, the money goes to drugs. While a pipe-layer in West Virginia can make $80,000 a year in the fracking business, a lobsterperson told me that some of the youngest fishermen in Grand Manan spend that much per year on cocaine alone.
None of this, of course, would be possible without the tank house, without the capacity to release lobsters onto the market when the price – in Boston or Shanghai – was just right.
Still Life 7: Lobster Rarities, New England Aquarium.
9. A lobster will molt when its exoskeleton can no longer contain its body. To prepare for an act as monumental as this, the lobster takes in seawater into its skin for several days. When the time is right, its swelling flesh presses up against the carapace of the exoskeleton, and the lobster wiggles and presses its way outwards, leaving the old shell of itself behind. The new exoskeleton stays soft for a period of several days, during which the lobster hides behind rocks or in the deepest crevasses, waiting for its skeleton, its protection, its container, its home, to ossify. Sometimes, Stewart said, his friends and colleagues would catch one of these lobsters with a softer shell. But, he noted, those don’t qualify for life in the tank house, because they won’t be able to last quite as long on the market. So the ritual goes: throw those ones back into the sea.
Each time a lobster molts into a new body, it is an opportunity for us, too, hominid onlookers, to reconsider. Lobsters molt through our cultural imaginations, appearing in the most unlikely places.
To consider a lobster is also to consider pain, especially through the eyes of David Foster Wallace, who asked us the ethical questions around boiling a lobster alive. Does a lobster scream when its flesh hits boiling water? Can it feel pain? Swiss lawmakers have recently banned the boiling of live lobsters because of new research in animal cognition that has shown that lobsters do, in fact, feel pain. Instead, they suggest that lobsters be stunned before being boiled. And notably, they say that lobsters may not “be transported on ice or in ice water,” a move that seems like it could have implications for the use of tank houses if the Swiss legal precedent makes its way across the pond, like our friend the McClintock buoy.
There is a levity in the act of considering lobsters, though, and a levity to the act of reconsidering, too. It is easy to retweet that the “lesbian moon lobster” should return to the sea! Easy to read Wallace, to take note of new Swiss policy, to stand before a tank at the grocery store and empathize fleetingly with the crustaceous forms behind the glass. But to really consider the lobster today would require us to consider its enmeshments in global economic markets, and those same markets’ deep connections to climate change. What the lobster really demands is a swivel-eyed approach, a consideration more consequential and broad-reaching than perhaps any of us could have ever imagined. To consider the lobster fully is to consider ourselves fully, too.
Still Life 8: 1996, when, in the show Friends, lobsters became synonymous with love and monogamy. Number of friends who told me to write about Friends in this essay: five. Number of lobsters who are actually monogamous: unclear.
10. As we were wrapping up our conversation, Soni said a curious thing that I can’t help but consider in light of tank houses: “Technology has always been the death of fish.” The continual evolution of this technology is all over Grand Manan. Just the other night I watched fishermen set up one of the oldest fishing technologies – the weir – in the quiet cove of Dark Harbour. The way the men moved as a crew revealed their expert understanding of the unsteadiness of waves that rocked the craft. As I watched, men and raft swayed together, their silhouettes occasionally blurred by waves of fog that slipped by in sheets from the sea. Pulling up a stake, placing the stake, hammering it with the giant driver, hit by hit, as many clangs as it took to drive the sharpened tip of it into the ocean floor. Soon they would string the weir with twine, seine the weir, and haul herring from the sea.
Something about the tank houses is different, a new kind of “death of fish.” Death for the lobsters does not happen instantly; the tank houses keep the lobsters a different kind of alive, they are still life, until their death arrives by plane and by pan, hissing in the boiling water thousands of miles from the Bay of Fundy.
Since the bounty under the corrugated roof is so lucrative, Stewart’s boss has hired a security company to monitor the lobsters at all times. If anyone enters the tank house, Stewart is immediately updated by an app on his phone, an app that also allows him to monitor pH, dissolved oxygen, and ammonia levels in the tanks at all times. It is good that the lobsters are connected to Stewart by an app. The banded, condoed creatures that could once seek out these conditions on their own are now entirely reliant on him to stay alive.
Still Life 9: Emojis have always signaled the death of sea life
11. In the Grand Manan Museum, a quaint white building with black shutters, in the middle of the island, there is an exhibit that the very first director of the museum created, which documents the history of fishing. It starts with black and white photos of herring seining, a diorama of a weir, and the painted words: The story of Grand Manan begins and ends with people and fish. More dioramas scattered around the room showed human figures made of clay holding clay fish in their hands, and nets, and poles, pushing technology and resourceful scrappiness just to the edge of its limits.
At least with these earlier iterations of the Grand Manan fishing the story seemed like a collaborative one, co-written between people and groundfish or herring or periwinkles or what have you. Full of frothy waves, deep fog, and the anticipation of the catch. The chance of a real fight on both ends. But for the lobsters who could be seen underwater with penetrating radar, the lobsters being held in artificial pools, breathing bubbles whose contents Stewart can adjust from an app on his phone, the story seemed already written. Past tense. As I read the painted museum words, I thought again of the biggest crustaceans that Stewart showed us; their old glossy eyes. For them, for now, for this particular molt, the story of people and fish had already ended.
[1] I won’t tell you… yet, at least. For now, I will say this: when writing about a creature in peril it seems useful to start with an anecdote with a good sense of intrigue, something that makes softer a sense of imminent planetary collapse.
[2] In case you were wondering, this adjective choice is grounded in phylogenetic fact. Lobsters actually did exist during the time of the dinosaurs. Of this coincidence, Alison Deming writes: “The oldest fossil lobster on record dates back to the early Cretaceous, the geologic period that began about one hundred fifty million years ago and ended sixty-five million years ago with the cataclysmic extinction that took down the dinosaurs. All during this period, lobsters were scuttling about the ocean floor on their ten legs and breaking open shellfish for supper… Next to their species' longevity, ours is negligible. They have been on Earth about six hundred times longer than we have.” This history of lobsters on the planet, their longevity, becomes strange to reckon with when one realizes that fossil fuels, whose combustion leads to the climate change that is driving massive changes in the lobster fisheries, are derived from dead organisms that were alive within the history of this creature’s long history of “scuttling about the ocean floor.” Critters that once scuttled alongside the lobster, an ancestral lobster’s old buddies or foes, an ancestral lobster’s old dinner, have been combusted at such a rate that may ultimately lead to changes in present-day lobster populations. I wonder how ancestral lobsters would consider that, or, from any current incarnations, how they do consider that.
[3] Lobsters, by the way, have been the subject of still life for some time. Take for example a famous painting by the Dutch artist Willem Kalf, which features as still life a brilliant crimson lobster alongside wine vessel made of buffalo horn trimmed with silver; a composite that journalist Jonathan Jones at The Guardian calls “A monument to luxury.” Luxurious is the horn, the wine inside it, the lush velvety table cloth, the luscious peeled lemon just out of reach of the lobster’s dead claws, and of course the brilliant flesh of the lobster itself, practically asking to be crushed open and slurped up. Kalf crafted this oil on canvas in the year 1653, at which point lobsters had apparently become a luxury food item in Holland. Prior to that, lobsters were considered low-class food. Kalf’s still life, then, is not just art but a snapshot of cultural transformation. The still life is really just life in motion.
[4] Though, to be sure, a buoy’s need for hospitality is rather low.
[5] While this particular reunion with floating waste was positive, if not almost unbelievably fortuitous, others are distinctly not. You have probably heard of the trash gyres that spin and spin and accumulate plastic waste in the ocean. The North Atlantic Gyre, which the buoy would have passed on its international journey, is apparently hundreds of miles wide. So is the state of Arizona, from which I write to you about distant oceans. And this is not to mention all of the floating trash that is gyre-less, as well as all of the plastic too small to accumulate in such a visible spectacle. Anyhow, it’s hard to know whether the Mainer’s buoy might have been sucked into The Atlantic Gyre on its way over to England, whether it could have released itself from the centripetal force of the trash heap. Ocean currents slingshot floating human inventions, crap on crap, all over the world, including onto Lighthouse Beach, where, working one summer at a nearby sustainability school, I found a white construction helmet upon which I sketched pictures of sea life and tropical plants, only to throw away, again, years later.
[6] Yes, women haul lobsters too. Fiercely, efficiently, excellently.
[7] If women haul lobsters and men haul lobsters and binaries should be dead, why not just keep this neutral?
[8] Of which, I highly recommend the cinnamon, served warm, with a hint of allspice.
[9] For the record, doesn’t all of this start to seem invasive of the lobster’s privacy? Let them scuttle in peace! No need to watch & know everything about them!
[10] Unless fortuitously found years later in the Bahamas.
[11] Because of their interest in sparkling prey, A Grand Mananer referred to ground fish as “sluts.” If this detail enhances your reading of this story, great.
[12] Though this, if you were swimming above, would be admittedly spectacular.
[13] Evidently, the worst kind of bae.
[14] Why not? As of the latest tweet, you might just get caught, and bought and sold on Amazon. Amazon.com’s original motto was Amazon.com: And you’re done.
[15] See New England Cod, Argentine Angelshark, Common Angelshark, Sawback Angelshark, Smoothback Angelshark, Spiny Angelshark, Bacaccio, Banggai Cardinalfish, Nassau Grouper, Gulf Grouper, Island Grouper, Blackchin Guitarfish, Brazilian Guitarfish, Common Guitarfish, Yelloweye Rockfish, Largetooth sawfish, Smalltooth sawfish, Narrow sawfish, Atlantic Sturgeon, Adriatic Sturgeon, Chinese Sturgeon, European Sturgeon, Green Sturgeon, Kaluga Sturgeon, Shortnose Sturgeon, Totoaba.
[16] See also all of the people who depend on any of the above declining fisheries for a primary source of protein; see 97 percent of fishers are in what the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) calls “developing” countries. See their sobering assessment that “[fish] provide two and a half billion people with at least 20 percent of their average per capita animal protein intake.”
[17] …A phrase that, out of the mouth of a Grand Mananer, might strike some sense of fear in you, reader, given that most Gulf of Maine residents pronounce buoys BOYS.
[18] Dear reader - I really want to know: what distress does this cause you? How many times have you been asked to consider climate change? And what does me asking you to consider really do? It asks you to think, surely, as David Foster Wallace asked readers to do in his famous Consider the Lobster essay, but what then? My brother posted a photo on Instagram recently of dead lobsters in boiling hot water, with the caption “I considered all of them.” Kudos, brother, literary points to you! And kudos moreover because your caption shows the frailty of consideration, the frailty of thinking and then continuing to act anyway, which seems more or less like the way most people deal with the moral urgency of climate change, myself included at times, and perhaps yourself, too, reader. Consider and then continue. No changing the course. This, incidentally, was probably the foundation of David Foster Wallace’s ethical stance towards the women in his life, too…maybe consider, definitely continue. How much pain did he cause with these ethics? As for me, I want – no I need – a set of ethics that does more than consider.
[19] In reference to perhaps any number of holidays, potentially including Chinese New Year.
[20] It seems that most environmental stories of late shift from biocentrism (the needs of other living things are more important than human needs) towards anthropocentrism (the needs of humans are more important than the needs of other living things). In the grander scheme of things, it also seems that the market has already decided on which centrism is winning out. But haven’t the needs of human beings always been inextricably linked with the needs of other living creatures?
[21] The Canadian lobstermen I spoke with were somber and realistic about the reality of climate change because they feel as though they are experiencing it firsthand -- and not in the way you might expect. Many were straight up with me about the fact that they’re benefitting from climate change firsthand – simultaneously thrilled about the boom and afraid about the lobster void that would soon follow. One lobsterperson predicted that the boom would last for about two more years. “Why not catch as many as possible now?” they said.
[22] Maybe not lobster, not when your every waking moment has been lobster, not when your clothing still smells like lobster, not when lobster costs $13/pound, as it did this last winter, due to rough weather and steady cost increases from overseas demand from China, though surely one would hope that lobsterpeople themselves would get a discount?
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Kourous, George. “Many of the world’s poorest people depend on fish.” FAO Newsroom. June 7, 2005.
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NOAA Fisheries. Endangered and Threatened Marine Species under NMFS' Jurisdiction. Updated January 29, 2018.
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Kathryn Gougelet is a PhD student in cultural anthropology at University of California Santa Cruz. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona in 2018. She writes essays about environmental health, pain, and justice, and is currently working on a collection of essays about the lives people build around extractive industries across the United States. Follow her on Twitter @kgougelet.
cover photo by: Photo by in-test-in on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA