The first scientific trip in my life turned out to be unforeseen.
Having decided to continue the dynasty of naturalists, by the time I graduated from Dnepropetrovsk University, I got a job at the Laboratory of bioresources of the Indian Ocean at the Kerch Research Institute as an ichthyological engineer with modest experience on Black Sea voyages. But the time was late Soviet, and the so-called exit visa was still required to participate in the coveted oceanic expeditions. This is the first time a seaman has been checked for trustworthiness. Will he run away to a foreign port? – it took an average of six months. But my student biography must have been particularly entertaining, and the wait had been dragging on for over a year. In anticipation of manna from heaven, I was doomed to work, I’m ashamed to say, as a desk scientist. This was mainly the processing of materials collected in the tropics by colleagues.
And suddenly, in the spring of 1986, Ivan Ivanovich Serobaba, the head of the neighboring laboratory of bioresources of the Black Sea, stopped me in the corridor: “Listen, our employee got sick, the front was exposed at a scientific station in Abkhazia. Will you close the embrasure for us in May?”
To say that I was elated is to say nothing. A trip as a preschooler with his parents to the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus was remembered as something fabulous. Therefore, the subtropical Apsny – the “Land of the Soul” – was as alluring terra Incognita as some Senegal or Madagascar.
* * *
If your childhood and youth were spent in a provincial city closed to foreigners, sooner or later you will be overcome by an unbearable thirst to see the life of the planet firsthand, to pierce the parallel worlds of other countries and continents. And if you have also ventured to connect your life with literature, traveling is already understood as a deadly necessity.
However, the chosen path narrowed the choice of a topic for future specialization. The Southern Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography (YugNIRO), where I worked as a student, was not an academic institution, but an applied one. I had to do something–or rather, someone! – commercial.
A writer who studies the cod population? A monograph on the breeding cycle of halibut? It’s better to hit a coral reef right away and sink.
However, there were also romantic names in the soup set of possible research objects. Swordfish? It’s strong: Ham’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and in general… By its scientific name, Xiphias gladius (“sword” in Greek and Latin), the beast was reminiscent of gladiators and battles. But the metenos has long been studied inside and out. The ferocious barracuda, too. In addition, it is, alas, the pseudonym of the sea pike.
That leaves the sharks, the great and the terrible. Delicious meat, delicious fins, and a pharmaceutical–promising liver: in other words, it has a high commercial value. And at the same time, real literary heroes range from Chukovsky’s Karakula to Benchley’s “Jaws.” And the number of species is unknown – today there are more than half a thousand, scientists regularly discover another unknown toothy creature. They are named after each other.
To become a pioneer in our age of ready–made reference books, to make unexpected additions to them – what could be cooler! I began to prepare for a career as a shark researcher, or, as my sister put it, a shark expert. The least studied sharks were deep-sea and dwarf sharks, and the institute’s chief expert on tropical fish taxonomy, Seryozha Usachev, agreed to be my mentor.
* * *
But the era did not foreshadow the dynamism of events. Perestroika had not even sounded like a term yet; it was unclear how long to wait for a visa. That is, the mako shark, hammerhead fish, fox shark, brownie shark, tiger shark, whale shark, carpet shark, and all the others, including my cousins rays and chimeras, were in big question in my future.
I still had a single shark registered in the Russian seas at my disposal. Katran, or prickly shark: Crimean holidaymakers love its meat, dried and known on the market as sturgeon balyk. However, with the size of the comrade let down, it rarely grows to one and a half meters. But implicitly, as semiotics puts it, it is present in the world classics. Shagreen leather in the fur business is called, not least, katran skin.
There are no known cases of Katran attacks on humans. Recently, however, there was a story on the Internet about the only case of a shark bite in Crimea in 500 years, which allegedly took place in the same year 1986. An anecdotal detail – a student from Africa was unlucky to swim naked in the sea, and therefore his genitals were (slightly) injured – raises doubts about the reality of the plot. Moreover, katran’s teeth are small, the oral apparatus is rather not biting, but grasping, and the diet consists of medium-sized fish and invertebrates.
Isn’t it a shame to study a predator that can’t handle an adult of my species?
* * *
On an Abkhazian business trip, I had to live in a tiny fishing village near New Athos, consisting of several trailers, measuring the parameters of fish of various species from the brigade’s catch on a daily basis. Over the years, this trip and the outlandish acquaintances associated with it will lead me to the topic of my future dissertation… But suddenly there was a “but”.
The trouble was that the deputy director of the institute was careless (or maybe a sense of humor? – I’m thinking now) to have an installation conversation with me before shipping.
The number of flounder, Gubanov recalled, is steadily decreasing. The permission to catch it will be kept by you personally. In any case, do not allow fishermen to sell caught cockroaches to the left, this will provoke them to target catch! Precious specimens caught in the net are handed over against receipt, at the price of a sprat, to a fish store.
It is logical that if you cannot earn money on some fish, they will not hunt for it specifically. However, as it turned out on the spot, the catch of kalkan on the Black Sea coast has only grown over the years, developing into a small but stable industry. The experienced scientists sent here did not consider this to be a particular problem: coastal fishing does not have such a strong impact on the situation, where trawling (towing) by industrial vessels is much more destructive.
* * *
The problem was with me. I’ve been an environmentalist since I was a kid, and yesterday, as a student at the Faculty of Biology, I was much more enthusiastic about fighting poaching than studying. The All-Union Student Nature Protection Squad had an expansive ideology (the slogan “Love nature, your mother!” came from us) and a heroic history, including sometimes even the death of students for the cause of saving the biosphere. It is very difficult to pacify this pathos. I took the noble task seriously.
In general, from the first day in New Athos, your author, who is generally quite sociable and prone to compromise, entered into a deep clinch with a fishing gang. And the people were colorful, such a local Babylon: several Abkhazians and Georgians, a Bulgarian cook, one Armenian, one Russian, one Ukrainian, and two Greeks: ancient uncle Anastasy and 40-year-old good-natured Nestor, an ex-boxing champion of the republic who served time for the manslaughter of a bully, the son of a party boss. Feeling great sympathy and interest in this motley and extremely vital company, I could not compromise my principles and became a roaring cerberus on the way to trade an endangered species.
The situation smelled like a fight. For preventive reasons, I went to the beach in the morning before breakfast and did a karate workout in the style of kyokushin. Perhaps these demonstrations stopped the escalation of the conflict. But besides the carrot method, there is also a wide menu of carrot methods. A week later, the foreman offered me 100 rubles (almost my monthly salary at that time) in lifting fees: “Take a ride, see Mingrelia, Adjara, Kakheti, Svaneti.” The partisan heart did not flinch.
I still regret it sometimes.
* * *
When I returned to Kerch, a strange incident occurred. A mediocre tennis player, one of the worst at the institute, I won 12 games in a row against our ping pong king Sasha Semik. It didn’t matter if the ball was successfully sent. I was driving such an energy wave at the opponent that his racket fell out of his hands.
The fart never came up again, and soon I was playing again somehow. The vibes of confrontation developed in extreme conditions have dissipated unnecessarily. Since then, I’ve been consistently sociable again and appreciate healthy compromises. But then I discovered a certain fundamental law of life.
The secret knowledge could be useful, because big sharks were waiting for me ahead.