Fine Distinctions

Though the merman has nothing to do with my original reason for visiting Orford Ness, his story has complicated my musings about stones and shingle beaches. Local fishermen claimed they had caught him in their nets, a slithery creature, man from the waist up, fish from the waist down. They grabbed him under his arms and dragged him across the shingle beach, his tail flopping and flailing over the pebbles, which must have rolled and shifted a bit in his wake, darkened by seawater shaken from his scales. The villagers feared him. They took him to the bottom of the castle keep, bound him up in the dark and beat him, and finally, in a last resort to get him to speak, they hung him by his tail over a fire. “Burn,” they tried to get him to say. “Scare.”

The English warden who’d dropped me at the edge of the Orford Ness Nature Reserve on the southwest coast of Suffolk wanted to know what my interest was, why I’d searched out this place now closed to tourists. I didn’t say anything about the merman, whom I’d first heard of just last night at a local art gallery when a woman who knew of my planned trip to the Ness had approached me, her eyes glittering. Nor did I say I’d been intrigued by the various descriptions of the Ness that I’d run across in my reading: “aura of mystique,” “wild and hostile,” “potentially dangerous.” Debris, I told the warden, especially debris that’s washed up by the sea—kelp, bottles, driftwood, stone. And shore regions formed by debris—coastal moraines and shingle beaches. He’d been understandably reluctant at first, but finally agreed to take me by boat and then by jeep out to this barren spit that juts into the North Sea. His only caution: stay off the shingle above the high-water mark. “If you’re not back at the landing jetty in a few hours,” he said as he turned the jeep around, “I’ll come back out and look for you.”

Last night in my hotel room after the gallery opening, I unwrapped a package the woman had delivered to me—a musty book published in 1700—and turned the yellowed pages carefully to the marked passage about the Merman of Orford. There the historian recounts the tale told by a monkish chronicler about a creature caught in the fishing nets off of what became, centuries later, the shingle beach at Orford. Half man, half fish, bearded and scaly, the story says, a wild man who fought the nets that tangled him and the men who locked him up in the dungeon of a nearby castle. The woman from the art gallery evidently believed in a literal merman. I think she wanted me to also.

On the beach this drizzly November morning, the castle keep and its dungeon behind me, I picture the fishermen on the sea, eyeing the wind, hauling nets, calculating the odds of a good catch just a few miles farther out, where survival depends on knowing what the water holds. They catch sight of something they can’t identify, something that lures, as the strange often does, a vision or a fear that requires an explanation. A sea turtle with tendrils? A squid with expression? What to think of a creature who resembles you but lives in a way that you cannot? Did they fear the merman, finally, because he was too much like them or not enough? They did what we humans too often do: imagined what might scare them and then created that very thing so they could drag it ashore, tie it up in a castle, make it feel what they didn’t want to: burn, scare.

The warden has driven off. To both sides and in front of me, a desert of pebbles extends almost as far as I can see, a vast mosaic of flindered ochre and gray. No honking horns, cell phones, the sound of anything human. Out here on the Ness, no trees provide shelter, no butte or peak breaks...