Paris - Nam Đông 1: The Whale

A conference and a field trip

So I'm in Paris.

A lot more happened in Vietnam between March and June this year. I was given a tupperware box, I attended a balloon festival, I helped put up a chainlink fence. All deeply significant stuff. However it got a bit much. I was back for midsummer among the hogweed and the meadowsweet and now I am here in Paris because I was at a conference last week and lost my passport on the bus.

I was here to join a conference panel on "animism and extractivism." An old friend, a Swedish anthropologist who I'd worked with in Vietnam, suggested back in March that we submit an abstract and we did. Predictably, with everything else that was going on, we didn't manage to write the actual paper and it ended up being a pretty ludicrous display of last-minute-ism even by my standards. Nonetheless, what we managed to present was pretty well-received, I think. Also we only managed to present a small portion of the thoughts that had been unleashed by the whole thing. All the other papers presented at the panel touched something of relevance to me as well as the discussions with Nikolas before and after, and the papers that the discussions have prompted me to read.

So, in the unlikely event that nothing else unexpected heaves up from below, I might take these thoughts as guidance for the next little while. I might leave off posting about my last trip and go back instead to 2008 when Nikolas and I were in Nam Đông. It seems like the past is calmer water. Not empty water, though.

The first presentation on the panel was on the Vietnamese whale cult. A month ago, on the road down to Quảng Binh, we’d passed a seaside temple but we didn't stop. The mountains and forests are enough for me to deal with and, in Vietnam, I tend to avoid the sea. The sea is variously traversed, claimed, longlined, and - in recent spectacular flourishes - poisoned. Geopolitical voices are raised about the perches that nations find or build in it. It is the country's other parent.

Blue boats cluster in bronze river mouths and I see them from the old and easy road. I don't know much about what they see themselves through their long painted eyes, or what the fishermen see. Sometimes, though, it seems they would see the elephant-fish and he would bring them luck. And sometimes they would find him dead on the shore and they would give him a long and elaborate funeral until his bones were raised in long temple hall and called Lord. Shrines are also raised to the pig-fish which are dolphins and to the huge crocodile-long sawfish that had the misfortune to live near the shore. However, Whale is paramount. Dr Thanh said that, to the fishermen, He is more important than Buddha and the ancestors both. The skeletons she showed us first seemed to be Humpback but on the last slide I saw one with teeth.

In the afternoon of the second of August, 2008, I was sitting on a rock at the junction of two streams, reading Moby Dick. The streams were called Hra Loong and La Vân and their meeting was made violent by the storm that had rolled over the hills behind. That storm had literally stopped me in my tracks because our path home followed the river downstream from that confluence. The river was uncrossable now; roaring and white as milk tea, filled with debris and at least waist high, even up here. Just a couple of hours earlier I'd been washing my hands in the thin clear water at the ford of Hra Loong. Or rather I'd stopped washing to let a great black butterfly drink the sweat from my palm. Tùng the student had scampered lightly down and asked if we should try and make it out in a day as it was only noon. I did not want to push on; I had just slithered down a steep logging trail with a 20kg rucksack on my back and had spent the previous day pushing up impossible gorges in the rain. Tùng's question had to push its way into my brain along corridors full of the sound of hammering blood. Still, as it went, it set off alarms; I'd had a disastrous meeting in the WWF office before I left and thought with a lot more office work I could set it all right. We could be in Hue the following morning for another day of work. Bảo, our Katu guide, didn't like the idea but then he was getting paid a daily rate; he might well be reluctant to press on because he’d lose the extra day . Turned out that wasn't the reason.

I was safe on my rock except for the ants, so I ate tart yellow rambutans and read Herman Melville talk about whales. I found out later that the cetology chapters are the bits American students skip through to get back to the human drama but for me they were the best part. Then I got to chapter 105 where Melville explains why whale populations are not now, and can never be, seriously impacted by humans. His arguments are as follows:

1. Yes the vast American bison herds were exterminated in less than a lifetime but the kill rate per hunter was far higher than for whales. Over the same time period, and for the same number of hunters, it is possible to kill a thousand times as many buffalo from horseback as it is possible to kill whales from sailing ships.

2. We tend to underestimate the population size. American capture rates of over 13,000 baleen whales per year on the north-west coast may seem high but elephants have been hunted in their thousands for millennia and still survive in great numbers. Furthermore, the total global area of elephant habitat is several times smaller than the equivalent for whales.

3. It is true that old whalers report finding whales much closer to home than they do now and that old hunting grounds are empty; but this doesn't mean much. In the case of the sperm whales, it is only because they now aggregate in greater numbers as a behavioural response to predation. Encounter rates for groups are thereby lowered, giving the illusion of reduced numbers overall.

4. Baleen whales, meanwhile, have simply moved on to other areas. The polar ice, in particular, will always be an effective refuge because they can reach inaccessible patches of open water by diving under the ice.

5. Because whales live so long, many adult generations are alive at once.

And so "if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies."

The fifth argument is undeveloped but, on the whole, Melville makes a lot of sense. Without the benefit of hindsight, I might have been convinced. As it is, it seems ridiculous; he reckons without technological change. In his day the rorquals could outstrip the fastest sailing vessel and the blue whale was a cryptid. Now, of course, it's different; the northern right whale, which was the target baleen species around north America in his time, now numbers under 400 globally. He expected a harvest of 13,000 per year forever and that was barely any time ago. Some whales that were alive when he said that may still be alive today. Other species than the Right have recovered and number in the tens or even hundreds of thousands but only because we stopped whaling; only because we chose. And we made that choice when we had other ways to get oil. It is hard to imagine the whales of today spouting defiance. Relief, perhaps, among the old Bowheads that remember Melville's day; maybe even gratitude. Confusion, bewilderment and loss, naturally. But Moby Dick is gone. After the seminar in Paris, someone asked Dr Thanh what the fishermen made of the great container ships that ply the best travelled whale-road on Earth. It's like they see them as things from another universe, she said.

On the rock above Hra Lang and La Vân I sat and tossed the rambutan seeds into the chundering flood. They could survive and sprout downstream whereas, if I fell in, the river wouldn't even have to chew me. My rock felt like the prow of a boat. On a sunny afternoon four months earlier I'd tried to swim across and been sucked through the rapids, entirely powerless. I'd just had to surrender to the flow and hope we avoided the boulders. The sky was a stern peaceful colour and those little grasses which grow on wet rocks and look like tiny bamboos stood out in the stormy light. The whole forest stood as green and still as ever above the furious water, seemingly waiting. The hill we had come down had a long line of snares; well, they all did. I wrote in my notebook about being stuck in "this scrappy forest." Then I stopped myself. How could I call what I was seeing 'scrappy?' Tree-clad hills rearing over the passing clouds, bronze-blooming and unblemished... I stopped myself again. It was no good trying to write like Melville and not only for the obvious reason. "True, there’s a trapline running back from our camp," I wrote, "the Saola is probably eliminated already from these environs but…"

Well but what, 28-year-old me? "The eternal whale" is hard not to believe in. It's hard, despite everything, to believe extinction is a real thing that can happen to a species you know. That can happen to everything you know. But actuallly that wasn't why I stopped; it was because I didn't want to be weighing up pros and cons. The wild is where we should be tested, it wasn't my job to be judging the forest; that was the wrong way around. Except that was precisely my job.

Spots of rain fell on my book and the light was dim. I could hear some frogs rustily cheeping from the herbage by the stream. It was time to go back under the tarp, to Tùng and Bảo and phones playing music - even back then - and the fire. There were violet flashes on the high ridge but the mountain above me was all black. At the time I didn't know its name or evil reputation. I can't help but wonder now if it noticed me there

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