Chasing the beast
Before starting, are you familiar with the Greenland shark? Go find a picture of one. The photos are often grainy and fugitive, because the shark, being a Greenlander, likes it cold, in the shark’s case typically 4,000 feet under the water’s surface. They are a mottled grayish white, like ancient granite, with a severe overbite, which makes them look like very dangerous, very big zucchini: up to 24 feet long, weighing a ton-and-a-half — about the size of the specimens you find in your late-September garden. Unlike the zucchini, they live 400 years, give or take 120. They are an apex predator — principally piscivores, though one was found with an entire reindeer body in its stomach — and as ghastly antediluvian as snapping turtles.
The Greenland shark is the totemic protagonist of Norwegian journalist Morten Strøksnes’ prime, digressive — a brand of free association that knows when to rein in — entertainment, “Shark Drunk.” It is the story of two men in a rubber dinghy, Strøksnes and his northern Norwegian artist friend, Hugo Aasjord, who putter off into the temperamental waters of the Westfjorden, which lie between the Lofoten archipelago and the Norwegian mainland, to see if they might be able to have a close encounter with a Greenland shark.
One last unusual feature of the Greenland shark, which is where the Drunk comes in, is that its flesh is saturated with “the nerve gas trimethylamine oxide.” Partaking of the flesh in its pristine state results in a feeling “supposedly similar to taking in an extreme amount of alcohol or hallucinogenic drugs. Shark-drunk people speak incoherently, see visions, stagger and act very crazy. When they finally fall asleep, it’s nearly impossible to wake them up.” If they wake up. Icelanders con-
sider the flesh a delicacy once properly prepared, which requires “repeated boiling, drying, or even burying the meat until it ferments.” Someone somewhere always considers stuff like this a delicacy. Who but the utterly starving would figure out how to eat this meat without killing themselves?
The elemental Why? anyone should choose to monkey around with the Greenland shark is that its liver is a vast repository of oil, and whale oil was a big thing for a good long time: to light lamps, make soap, and as a cooking oil. As for the project at hand, Strøksnes is a journalist writing a book, and the subject is, admit it, outré cool. And he doesn’t treat it like some gonzo bizarrerie, but as chromatic, investigative work, one in which you can laugh instead of feel nothing but grim. Aasjord, on the other hand, has longtime family ties to the area — for many natives of which the shark has, understandably, shamanic qualities — so even a momentary communing with the creature would be a numinous experience.
Being a bit of a slowpoke, the Greenland shark often scavenges, so fishing for one, while not a unique technique, is a surprise to the novice. Luckily, Aasjord had found the perfect bait right before the weather would bring the light air and calm seas needed to fish from a rubber dinghy in “the deep, salty black sea ... cold and indifferent, lacking all empathy” for a shark that
weighs as much as a Studebaker: the rotting remains of a fairly recently slaughtered Scottish Highland bull, waiting for them patiently in the summer warmth of a nearby field. Heroically, they gather the remains in garbage bags, and it is Strøksnes’ job to chum; that is, to toss most of the bull remains into the water to arouse the shark’s olefactory interest. “I stick a hole in the trash bags that are filled with intestines, kidneys, liver, gristle, bone fragments and joints, fat, sinews, fly larva and maggots. I throw up nonstop.” Then there is Iceland, where they yell down the dining table, “Don’t bogart that trash bag, Karl.”
Strøksnes finds himself with a lot of time on his hands, but there is much local color and history to plumb. Sometimes he is in the previously mentioned associative mode, a consciousness streaming of the here-and-nowness of being out in a boat. The trance-like state is something Strøksnes remembers Herman Melville
writing of: “Water and meditation are wedded for ever.” So it goes — how the night sky provided the tableaux for constellations, which is fun, but a notch on the way to using the sky as a canvas for myth and story. Which sparks: “From outer space the Gulf Stream looks like the Milky Way. From earth the Milky Way looks like the Gulf Stream,” then recalls, “Lots of people have multicolored irises. If you look closely, the iris resembles a nebula. Sometimes they are many colors like a galaxy, or an ocean current seen from space, scaled down.”
Most of the time he is more focused with page after page of sharp vignettes. On bioluminescence, a sure showstopper: Most bioluminescence produced by various deep-sea species is blue, and blue light is the only color most of these species are capable of seeing. But one trickster, the smalltooth dragonfish, has developed red lights. “Using the red light, the fish can approach
other animals that have no clue a spotlight is being directed at them.” Strøksnes has dozens and dozens of these low-key noteworthies, on the family empires of lighthouse keepers, on the history of cod drying, the shock of a williwaw, the iridescence of place names.
There is the spooky sound of a whale pumping air in and out of its lungs, thunderous rumbles that sound “like a rock slide.” And the equally spooky sound of the sea’s underwater, “a deep humming that emanates from itself,” long sea swells creating trembles on the sea floor. There is the wonderful radiance of these two gents out chasing their curiosity — the we-only-regret-theadventures-we-didn’t-take school — out chasing that romantic mingling of terror and beauty, the sublime.