“I saw Eternity the other night,” wrote the poet Henry Vaughan. “Like a great ring of pure and endless light.” Well, so did I last night—when I was asleep. In my dream, however, eternity wasn’t a ring; it was a mass of tiny, silvery green fish all swimming in one direction, turning neither right nor left. If I’m right—that dreams are like kaleidoscopes shaking bits of daily experience into new forms and sometimes new narratives at night—then the dream is not so surprising.
Much of the summer I’d been drawn to watching tiny fish, particularly in the lagoon that is Port Royal Cove. Most tourist visitors to the cove are more attracted to the parrotfish gnawing on the rocks framing the water than to the smaller fish swimming in schools. This is understandable since the parrotfish are individually far more dramatic with their luminous colours of green, blue, turquoise, reds and oranges than these sardine-like fish, a mere three or four centimetres long, whose fins are scarcely noticeable and whose species are hard to identify, at least to amateurs like me.
Sometimes I ask local fishermen, who turn up at the cove armed with pails and rope, what they are. Unlike the tourists, fishermen are more attracted to these fish than the parrots although for one reason only—they see them as food, either as bait for catching other fish or as the opportunity for a delicious fry-up. In response to my question, I’m given an incredulous stare as if to say, “Are you foolish?” Because what else could these creatures be except fry? What else does one need to know? While I wouldn’t admit it to the fishermen out of embarrassment, my attraction to fry has to do with a ripple effect, with aesthetics rather than diet and, if possible, I always want to know the names of what I’m so appreciating.
In the end, as so often happens, Wolfgang Sterrer’s Bermuda’s Marine Life helps me out. He mentions several kinds of fry in Bermuda, three of which I think I’ve seen at the cove: hogmouth fry (Anchoa choerostoma), apparently not a true fry at all, but the only true anchovy known in Bermuda; blue fry (Jenkinsia lamprotaenia); and rush fry (Allanetta harringtonensis). As he says, “several species often school together, which apparently lowers the per capita rate of predation—there’s safety in numbers.” (I’m not sure of this when I see the fishermen’s large buckets.) Usually, though, I don’t see a mixture of species but a mass of what I think may be rush of fry gliding together in fantastic formations like a murmuration of starlings. It’s the shape of their movement, the pattern that fascinates me as they flock together in unison as if they are of one mind, as indeed I suppose they are.
And yet, I don’t appreciate their pattern in isolation from the patterns the flow of the water creates. On calm, sunny mornings, I love to wade into the cove, let my eyes rest on the gentle waves perpetually flowing to the shore and watch the floating tracery of sunny, crisscrossed lines which are the sandy floor partially reflected on the ocean’s surface. How appropriate it is, I think, that these lines knit together like a fishing net. Gazing down, within the ripples, I see wrinkles, or shorter lines like musical staves etched on water. And then, beneath the harmless net, I watch the miniscule silvery, streamlined fish all swimming in the same direction just as they did in my dream. Massing together, they create different diverse shapes, one time a dolphin, another a geographical map of France.
One morning, I waded through the mass, dividing it so that, temporarily, the fish became individuals darting this way and that. Watching their movement, I remember another sight though in the deeper water of Harrington Sound. Suddenly, fry leapt mid-air in perfect silver arcs, their bodies glistening in the sun. What can be more magical than the patterns created in nature?
