water. His fingers were covered in blisters, his clothes were soaked through, and his glasses were stained with salt from the seawater.
“He’s a bit of a fanatic, isn’t he?” Conway said quietly.
As the cold nights wore on, we worked in a kind of fog. We were getting little sleep during the day, and it became harder to pay attention to the mounds of larval fish, shrimp, krill, and jellyfish; not even the sight of dolphins jumping in the waters nearby relieved the drudgery. At one point, I felt fatigued, and lay down in the forward berth. I could fit only if I bent my knees toward my chest. As I closed my eyes and listened to the waves smashing against the hull, I could hear O’Shea grunting as he pulled in another net and cursing when there was nothing inside.
On yet another night, at around four in the morning, as we pulled in the trawling gear and dropped the contents in the cylindrical tank, Conway shone a flashlight and asked, “What’s that?”
O’Shea peered inside, and blinked several times, trying to keep himself awake. “Heaven help us!” he shouted. “It’s a fucking squid!” He stared blearily into its eyeball. “It looks like Archie,” he told us.
Although the creature was only the size of my thumbnail, I could see it, too-its tentacles, its fins, its eyes, its arms, its bullet-shaped mantle.
“This could be your dream squid,” Conway said.
“Quick,” O’Shea said. “Let’s drain some of the krill before they crush it.”
He held the cylindrical tank in the air, his arms shaking from exhaustion, as the waves pounded the side of the boat. “Steady!” he yelled. It was hard to see in the darkness-there was no moonlight-and as he poured some of the contents into a strainer, struggling to balance against the violent waves, something happened.
“Where did it go?” O’Shea asked.
“I don’t know,” Conway said. “I can’t see it anymore.”
“Jesus Christ,” O’Shea said.
He grabbed a specially designed tank, which he had purchased expressly for transporting a baby giant squid, and poured the rest of the cylindrical tank’s contents inside it. “Where is the bloody thing?” he said. “Where is it?”
He reached in with his hand, stirring the water frantically. “It has to be here,” he said.
He pulled out one shrimp, then another, holding them under the light.
“It’s gone,” Conway said.
But O’Shea didn’t seem to hear. He sifted through the mounds of plankton, trying to find the baby squid’s microscopic tentacles. At last, he stumbled backward, and put his arms over his head. “It’s a fucking catastrophe,” he said.
He fell back in the captain’s chair, and sat motionless. I tried to think of something to say, but failed. “It was right there,” O’Shea said to himself. “I had it.”
After a while, he tried to drop the traps in the water again, but he no longer seemed able to muster his strength. “I can’t take it anymore,” he said, and disappeared into the forward berth.
That afternoon, O’Shea was sitting on the cabin porch, sipping a glass of whiskey. “Want a spot?” he asked.
“That’s all right,” I said.
He spoke in a whisper, and much more slowly than usual. He said he had pinpointed a new location to search, but I told him I thought I would stay behind and catch up on my work. He looked at me for a long moment. “That’s what always happens,” he said. “People get bored and give up. But I can’t pay any attention to what’s going on around me. I just have to stay focussed.”
He took a sip of his whiskey. “I can already hear the critics saying, ‘The great squid hunter lost his blasted squid again.’ Do you know how it feels when everything goes to custard like this?” He fell silent again, then added, “I’m not going to stop. I’m not going to give up. I don’t care if someone finds the squid first. I’ll still go until I find it myself.”
The next morning, when he pushed open the cabin door, he looked despairing. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”
It was the end of the expedition; he had to go back to Auckland to lecture. We loaded up the gear and returned to the city. When we got there, O’Shea went to the aquarium to visit his specimens. In his absence, seventeen squid had died. The employee in whose care he had left them had posted a sign on the tank. It said, “They have a new trick… It’s called ‘jumping out of the tank and committing suicide!’”
O’Shea checked the temperature and salinity of the water in the tank, and offered the remaining squid some sprat. Then we drove to his house. As he got out of his car, he said, “You may want to take a look at this.”
He led me into the garage, which was cluttered with tools and appliances. He started to clear off an enormous box. “You better put this on,” he said, and handed me a gas mask.
I slipped it over my face, and he opened the top of the bin. Inside was a dead giant squid. “It’s a twenty- seven-foot male,” he said.
The carcass was ivory white and was floating in embalming fluids; its arms were so long that they were bunched together in folds, and its suckers were the size of a child’s fist. “I’m preparing this one for a museum,” he said.
He told me that he had buried one squid corpse in his garden, under a patch of watermelons. Leaning over the box, he picked up the dead animal’s mantle, which was bigger than he was. “That’s the head,” he said.
He turned it over, and I could see a massive, lidless eye staring out at us.
“See here, this is the mouth,” he said, speaking rapidly again. He stuck his fingers inside the white cusp of flesh, revealing a sharp black beak and a serrated tongue. “It’ll cut right through your cartilage,” he said.
Though O’Shea didn’t have a mask on, he took a deep breath and, with great exertion, lifted half of the creature in his arms. He grabbed a tentacle and started to extend it. “Look at it. They’re fantastic, aren’t they?”
He ran his fingers up and down its limbs, opening and closing its suckers. For a moment, he shut his eyes, as if he were trying to imagine it underwater. Then he said, “The dead one is beautiful, but it’s the live one I want.”
– May, 2004
In December, 2006, near the Ogasawara Islands, south of Tokyo, a Japanese scientist and his squad finally captured a live giant squid. After spending years pinpointing a potential location, they attached a chunk of squid to a missile-shaped multipronged hook and dropped it more than two thousand feet down. Eventually, they caught a relatively small female giant squid, measuring eleven and a half feet long and weighing a hundred and ten pounds. As the men tried to reel it in, the giant squid spouted water-from its funnel and struggled to escape. By the time the men pulled the elusive creature on board, it had died from injuries. O’Shea has not given up his quest.
City of Water
CAN AN ANTIQUATED MAZE OF TUNNELS CONTINUE TO SUSTAIN NEW YORK?
No one knows how many sandhogs are, at any given moment, working beneath the streets of New York City, but one winter morning half a dozen men could be spotted gathering around a hole on the northwest corner of Tenth Avenue and Thirtieth Street. The hole, surrounded by a tall aluminum fence, was thirty feet wide and reinforced with concrete. A priest had visited months before, to offer a brief prayer: “May God be with all ye who enter here, that the earth shall return ye safely.” Now, as the sun rose, the men stepped from the snow-covered ground into a green metal cage, which was suspended over the chasm by an enormous winch. They wore yellow slickers and rubber boots with steel tips; they carried, among other things, flashlights, scissors, cigarettes, cough drops, knives, extra socks, and several twenty-pound crates marked “EXPLOSIVES.”
A worker who was to remain above ground pulled a lever, and the cage began to descend. As it accumulated speed, and the light from the surface grew thinner, James Ryan, one of the older men in the crew, peered over
