In Båtsfjord on the Barents Sea
Jan. 20th, 2008 06:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusYou're not quite sure who you were and where you lived before. All you know is where you live now: Finnmark, on the coast of the Barents Sea. Here, in the sub-polar Arctic, renegade bits of Norway, Sweden and Finland join up with lost particles of Russia. Båtsfjord, your town, is 70 degrees north and has an 80 degree temperature range -- it can go from minus 50 in winter to plus 30 centigrade in the summer.
At this time of year there's no sun at all in Båtsfjord -- "polar nights", they call them. You work in the crab processing plant -- the money's pretty good -- wearing hygienic protective clothing. Everybody in this town wears brightly-coloured functional clothes; most of the jobs in Båtsfjord are something to do with fishing and fish processing. The equipment is also painted in primaries and fluorescents; orange, pink, yellow, bright green. It almost makes up for the lack of light, the general greyness, blackness and whiteness of everything here. Another thing that compensates, of course, is the aurora borealis. Sometimes the sky seems to wear fluorescent safety gear too.
The commodity that makes this lurid, sparse, functional town possible is crabs. Not just any crabs, but the world's largest, the Kamchatka Crab. They aren't native to the Barents Sea; Joseph Stalin introduced them from the Pacific in 1930 to help feed the hundreds of thousands of people he was sending to Siberia at the time.
Originally basic protein for prisoners and exiles, the Kamchatka Crab is now a premium-priced luxury product. That's capitalism for you, I guess; take prolefeed and package it as aristogourmet. The crab is also a bit of an environmental hazard. These pinky-white extraterrestrial arachnid things, up to six feet in span, hobble along the bottom of the ocean devouring every living thing in their path. They're spreading west at the rate of 20 kilometres a day, clawing their way around the coast of Norway towards the North Sea.
All this sounds fairly intentional, but the creatures don't even have a central brain. Like cockroaches they have bits of low intelligence distributed across their nervous system -- at the tops of their legs, for instance. They're unloaded from the Russian and Norwegian fishing vessels alive, and killed in the processing plant by being chopped in two, right down the hard shell of the back. The nervous system just fizzles and stops. That's where your job starts. You assess the various parts for meat quality, grade them. Then other employees wash them, pack them and box them up. 70% of what we process here goes to Japan.
You don't know what you did before, or where -- your memory is as bare as the rocky Martian hills behind the little red metal house where you live. But this is what you do now, here. When work is finished you might go to the bar with your workmates (when the masks come off, suddenly they have faces) or climb the icy, gritty permafrosted path that leads away from the flat industrial quayside. You'll watch the late flight descending into Båtsfjord Airport as you fumble for your key with big orange-gloved hands. You'll remove your moonboots, take off your thermal suit, click on the television, take a shower, crack open a beer, and head to the kitchen freezer to select a pack of fish for dinner. As you slide the pale frozen block out of its packet you watch the lights of a square-windowed Russian ship sliding into position under pink cranes. And you wonder, as usual, who you were and what you did before.
At this time of year there's no sun at all in Båtsfjord -- "polar nights", they call them. You work in the crab processing plant -- the money's pretty good -- wearing hygienic protective clothing. Everybody in this town wears brightly-coloured functional clothes; most of the jobs in Båtsfjord are something to do with fishing and fish processing. The equipment is also painted in primaries and fluorescents; orange, pink, yellow, bright green. It almost makes up for the lack of light, the general greyness, blackness and whiteness of everything here. Another thing that compensates, of course, is the aurora borealis. Sometimes the sky seems to wear fluorescent safety gear too.
The commodity that makes this lurid, sparse, functional town possible is crabs. Not just any crabs, but the world's largest, the Kamchatka Crab. They aren't native to the Barents Sea; Joseph Stalin introduced them from the Pacific in 1930 to help feed the hundreds of thousands of people he was sending to Siberia at the time.
Originally basic protein for prisoners and exiles, the Kamchatka Crab is now a premium-priced luxury product. That's capitalism for you, I guess; take prolefeed and package it as aristogourmet. The crab is also a bit of an environmental hazard. These pinky-white extraterrestrial arachnid things, up to six feet in span, hobble along the bottom of the ocean devouring every living thing in their path. They're spreading west at the rate of 20 kilometres a day, clawing their way around the coast of Norway towards the North Sea.
All this sounds fairly intentional, but the creatures don't even have a central brain. Like cockroaches they have bits of low intelligence distributed across their nervous system -- at the tops of their legs, for instance. They're unloaded from the Russian and Norwegian fishing vessels alive, and killed in the processing plant by being chopped in two, right down the hard shell of the back. The nervous system just fizzles and stops. That's where your job starts. You assess the various parts for meat quality, grade them. Then other employees wash them, pack them and box them up. 70% of what we process here goes to Japan.
You don't know what you did before, or where -- your memory is as bare as the rocky Martian hills behind the little red metal house where you live. But this is what you do now, here. When work is finished you might go to the bar with your workmates (when the masks come off, suddenly they have faces) or climb the icy, gritty permafrosted path that leads away from the flat industrial quayside. You'll watch the late flight descending into Båtsfjord Airport as you fumble for your key with big orange-gloved hands. You'll remove your moonboots, take off your thermal suit, click on the television, take a shower, crack open a beer, and head to the kitchen freezer to select a pack of fish for dinner. As you slide the pale frozen block out of its packet you watch the lights of a square-windowed Russian ship sliding into position under pink cranes. And you wonder, as usual, who you were and what you did before.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 07:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 10:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 07:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 08:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 10:34 am (UTC)The Omega 3 Man - or - Former Commie Crabs Take Manhattan
Date: 2008-01-20 10:35 am (UTC)Chris Rock to play the scientist, with Charles Napier as an aging Alaskan crab hunter (Captain Ahab-esque, monomaniacal vendetta with Kamchatka "red nippers"), who riles scuba-clad marine activist Olga Kurylenko.
Re: The Omega 3 Man - or - Former Commie Crabs Take Manhattan
Date: 2008-01-20 07:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 10:44 am (UTC)crabby business
Date: 2008-01-20 10:50 am (UTC)Jesus, minus 50? Are we talking Celcius? Respect.
Re: bus stop
Date: 2008-01-20 11:00 am (UTC)soft shell crabs are yummy
plus oysters give a fine narcotic kick...
should i go and see bert jansch on wednesday or not its a fool moon
Re: crabby business
Date: 2008-01-20 11:18 am (UTC)That's the Finnmark region's record low, yes.
"Finnmarksvidda in the interior of the county has a continental climate with the coldest winter temperatures in Norway: the coldest temperature ever recorded was -51.4 °C (-60.5 °F) in Karasjok on January 1 1886."
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 11:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 12:03 pm (UTC)And sure, something about how badly people dress in the new season of The Wire would reel 'em in. (Never seen it in my life, actually.) But why reel comments in with crabby stuff about TV when I could be fishing for Kamchatkas on the Barents Sea?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 04:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 06:12 pm (UTC)I feel the need to counter my initial glib comment.
I loved this post and when I saw there were no comments I felt like a Huskie who discovered a new frozen tundra. I had to make my mark.
It was the wee hours of the morning when I came upon your entry. My wife was sitting on the couch with her laptop surrounded by papers. She was tracing her Finnish roots.
I asked her if she had heard of Finnmark and then we wikied for awhile.
But even without the coincidence it was a lovely piece. Thanks.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 11:51 am (UTC)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamchatka_crab)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 12:04 pm (UTC)So... be afraid.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 07:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 12:58 pm (UTC)It was 1993, and I was in Finland filming the "Man of Letters" film. I rented a Volvo in Finnish Lappland and drove north through Norway, worrying herds of reindeer, feeding enormous mosquitoes with my blood and videoing myself. Some of the footage ended up on the "Man of Letters" DVD.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 06:55 pm (UTC)(I also find it funny that my parody montage videos of you with Adam Ant and Howard Devoto are on the first page of results when I search "Momus". Haha!)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 07:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 09:21 pm (UTC)Stalin's ecological legacy reminds me of the Emperor of Japan introducing Black Bass and Blue Gill into Lake Biwa so that he could enjoy sport fishing. The predictable result of course is that they are eating all the indigenous fish, including the Nigoro-Buna which are fermented to create my favourite Japanese delicacy, funazushi.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 02:20 pm (UTC)film idea
Date: 2008-01-20 02:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 07:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 03:53 pm (UTC)If that were really the case, they'd be off the English coast in a couple of months' time...
A horror horde of crawl and crush giants.
Date: 2008-01-20 04:47 pm (UTC)Those kamchatkan anthropodal beasts of the deep are coming for us!
Beat your ploughshares into avocado salad.
Thomas S.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 07:33 pm (UTC)Okay, perhaps we need to say:
1. They're spreading west, always moving into new territory.
2. They're capable of traveling at 20km / day when they need to.
3. However, individuals and families tend to settle in fixed areas and stay there.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 05:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 06:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 07:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 06:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 08:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 08:52 pm (UTC)Other ways of living
Date: 2008-01-20 09:11 pm (UTC)There's something a little haunting about your tale of luminous-vested men processing overgrown crustacea in this remote frozen landscape.
I wonder is the workers life quite as existential as you imagine it to be.
At this time of year Batsford must seem like the ends of the earth.
Thomas S.
Re: Other ways of living
Date: 2008-01-20 09:14 pm (UTC)Thomas.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-20 11:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-21 12:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-21 02:18 am (UTC)And here's one showing the impressive size of the crab's penis:
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-21 04:02 am (UTC)click on the television " RIPPING YARNS"
Date: 2008-01-21 02:09 am (UTC)