The Crying Crabs
Photo Tom Kay
He said he had heard whales singing, many times he had heard them. A lovely moaning sound like a deep flute. He learned how to listen to the ocean by using bone conduction. You put the end of an oar against your head and put the other end into the water then you waited. All the sounds and vibrations from the ocean would travel up the oar and right into your skull. It was like being down there in the deep, hearing everything in stereo on his very own improvised hydrophone.
The sea is a noisy place.
Engines of fishing boats, drilling from oil rigs, explosions from seismic testing sites, the growling of container ships thousands of kilometers away, the tectonic boom of meting ice, the whoops of fish that howl at the moon.
Then there are the whale songs – the sub-bass and the ultra-sonic shrieks; the clicks of the sperm whale that can be heard miles away; the creaking of the humpback sounding like rubbing a wet rag on a plastic tube.
But he was listening for a certain sound - the sound that crabs and lobsters make.
These sounds would tell him where to place his pots.
On one particular day he was busy analyzing the sound of the crabs crying and scratching about on the seabed, when he heard another sound mixed in with it.
The sound of someone whispering
He recognised the voice, as well. It was his wife, who had passed away a few years ago.
She was complaining about some new coin that had been introduced, saying that it was too small and fiddly, and how was she expected to use it? One of the crabs had said never mind about that, we haven't even got contactless down here.
He carried on listening to his wife whispering with the cacophony of the ocean wrapped all around her, and after a time he felt he could hear everything in the universe magnified a million times; the nibbling of barnacles, the stretching of the weeds, the moon’s reflection on the water creaking as it curled and uncurled, and his wife's voice whispering goodbye and telling him she was happy.
