When people on the television talk about what’s clogging up our waters, they like to paint the story black: black with oil, black with tankers, black with death. Black unblinking eyes of the floaters, the fish in their thousand-strong schools, bobbing up to the surface like so many discarded balloons. Black mold clinging to the whales washed up on the beach, haunting in their fallen majesty and quite decidedly blocking off the road. Black smoke billowing up from the depths of the underwater shale banks … whatever those are.

The politicians on the posters like to paint the story white: white with paper, white with plastic, white with steam, billowing out of the exhaust pipes of the fishing boats. White expanses of petrified coral reef, the walls of their labyrinthine structures crumbling in on themselves. White flesh of dead animals, rotting in the sunlight with bottle caps down their throats. White plastic bags skipping ethereally across the water, their eerie grace only disrupted when some innocent creature snaps it up and suffocates … guess they should have asked for paper.

The problem with them, detached as they are, hidden from reality by their posters and podiums and cameramen as they are, well, they see the world in black and white. Right and wrong, left-wing and right-wing, it’s all one or the other to them.

But there’s a whole spectrum of issues that they never stop to consider.

And the oceans aren’t black, or white, or even gray or blue or some murky in-between – they’re green.

Monochrome

Once, when she was little, her parents took her to the beach. It isn’t the most stunning memory she has – the beach looked much the same as it does now, and besides, beach trips are hardly exotic when you live on the water – but she does remember it, which has to count for something.

She remembers digging her fingers into the scum under the water, laughing at how the green of the algae stained her skin. But there’s still silt under her fingernails, and it won’t go away. The water she tries to wash it away with is the same poisonous shade of emerald, so it’s just spread.

Also, her hair smells like seaweed.

Then again, what doesn’t?

Now, when she looks around, she sees the world through tinted lenses. All around her is a steady stream of green, green, green – the waves, lapping against the silty shore, the puddles, cropping up now and then to remind her just how waterlogged her life is, the bile that comes up whenever someone eats anything that came from the sea; the plants, the soil, the sky, all of it is green. The only break in the pattern is whenever a fish or a bird washes up on the beach, dead skin sort of gray if you look at it funny.

Even that’s sort of olive, though.
(God, she’s jaded.)

Fall

(It strikes him that maybe there’s a reason for that. it grosses him out.)
Either way, he doesn’t dwell on it. He likes to think of himself as a veteran of these waters (even though no one goes near them anymore), and so he knows what he’s supposed to do: rearrange his flailing limbs to control his descent, then kick to the surface. His strength isn’t what it used to be, but he figures he can kick off the sandbar and he’ll be fine.

He draws his arms in close, and his hands brush against something slimy — a dead fish, he realizes. He tries not to dwell on that either.

Through the silt, he can see the sandbar rushing up towards him. Relief floods through his system. He stretches out his legs, eager to take steady footing and push him back to the familiar gray of the sky and the air that he can breathe . . . But there is no sandbar.

When he looks down, to where he thought the earth had finally surfaced, is a mess of tangled seaweed, all the same slimy green as that fish he’d seen earlier. He thrashes and kicks, desperate to burst out of the foliage, but the more he moves the stucker he gets in the heap of dead kelp. Panic blossoms in his chest, alongside a burning pain in his lungs — an intense need for oxygen now, now, now —

The cloud of dirt he kicked up has dissipated, but he still cannot see anything above the surface; not even the silhouette of his faithful little dinghy, nor the sunlight that had enticed him outdoors that morning. Perhaps it is the water that inhibits his vision. Or perhaps it is the dark spots that have started dancing in front of his eyes. His thrashing is considerably more labored now, and thousands of needles press at the tissue of his lungs, screaming for air. Though his thoughts are blurring, he manages to wonder, just before the last of his air leaves him, whether his corpse will be as green as that fish’s . . .

Then everything fades to black.

Sick

“You need to drink,” comes a voice. “Just have some water, quit being so whiny.”

It is brought to him in spite of his weak protests. In the darkness of the room, its pale green siltiness might be attributed to the glass, or perhaps the dust swirling through the gloom. He knows that isn’t true, though, for as soon as the gritty liquid touches his lips, he is hanging over the bucket again. By now only stomach acids come dribbling out of his mouth. And the water. There is something wrong with it, he manages to think (as if the color was no indication), but the exertion quickly leaves him drained of energy again.

“This will pass soon,” the voice continues, though he has been in this state for over a week now, ever since they all rented that little beach cottage and he decided to take a swim. The brine had raised rashes along his arms and legs, and though he had been swimming all his life, he could propel himself forward through all the silt in that sea. And of course, afterwards, he had begun to retch – and continued to do so until nothing more came out, and then he’d retched some more.

He knows it was the water. There is no other explanation, and besides, never has anything good come of water that dirty. Still, he will waste away quicker if he does not drink. Besides, maybe the filth of the water is but a manifestation of his fever-ridden imagination. Swallowing back his protests, he chokes back the water. It is all he can do now. that, and pray he will be fine. (He won’t.)

Goodbye

It all started when the old guy who lived out on the fringes had fallen out of his rowboat and drowned, they knew, though the press and the politicians did not get involved until that tourist had snuffed it. He shouldn’t have gone swimming, and he shouldn’t have drunk all that tapwater, they suppose. Still, nobody’d thought to tell him. The dangers of the water are obvious to them. While some of the pensioners have stories passed down to them from their own grandparents about when the water was still clear (of course, they themselves are not nearly so old as to remember those days), they are just that: stories. The water is to be avoided. That much, they know.

But now that the patrols have deemed their homes unsafe for habitation and their water a hazard to humanity, the buses come, and the people leave. Some have relatives in the city, or in other countries, who will take them in. Others are not so lucky. They leave the perils of the sea behind for newer, more intimidating ones: they must find employers who will hire them, schools that will teach them, landowners that will sell to them, all the while knowing that uneducated hillbilly farmers are hardly the crème de la crème of any market.

When they leave, the town will fall to ruins behind them. No stragglers are allowed to remain, other than a select few who will see the farm to its last. But they will not be around to manage things forever. Sooner or later, the sea will rise up to reclaim the land that the settlers took from it. Some of them feel oddly guilty at the prospect, though they are told that they are just being silly. They are so few, and the sea so large. How could they have been the ones to see it go sour?

In the end, it is hardly a blame game anyhow. Perhaps it was because of them that the sea rotted, perhaps not — they are leaving now, either way. They say their goodbyes, and they look forward, not back. When they have left, their existence will be erased from the books. It will be as if their town never existed. One or two of them might hope for things to fix themselves, or for the sea to be cured, but this is beyond them now.

It always has been.

Or so they say.

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Seasick – Tales of Eutrophication on the Baltic Sea