End of the River (eBook)

I have a Japanese friend called Miss Tojo. Maybe 'friend' isn't exactly right, although 'acquaintance' doesn't seem to capture her either. 'Presence' might be best, she certainly is that. We'll meet her properly later. Miss Tojo is one of the reasons I've never learned Japanese very well, because she never lets me get a word in. Miss T isn't interestedin communication. Instead, she hectors, and she does it from inside my head. I hear her all the time now: whenever I hear the words 'global warming,' every time I read about another fishery closure or another species added to the list we've learned to grow in cages on soybean meal. I think these things are problems, Miss Tojo prefers to view them as novelties, or as obstacles to be overcome with planning and hard work. When I spotted yet another new fish in the supermarket the other day - Russet Perch, I think it was called - Miss Tojo piped up immediately. 'Excellent,' she said. 'What will they think of next?' I had to duck into Meats to shake her. Miss Tojo is always there. She lurks behind every page of this book, even if you can't hear her yet. Miss T doesn't mind waiting, as long as she gets what she wants. She knows I'll get to her eventually. When she realizes the book takes place mostly in Brazil, she'll be annoyed, there's no denying it, but dealing with Miss Tojo's annoyance is something we're all going to have to learn to do. We might as well start now. When we can't ignore her any longer, I'll do my best to translate what she has to say. Translation is something I'm getting better at. I do a lot of it in this book. Not just the familiar kind, from one country's language to another's, but also deciphering the jargon of specialists who may be from one's own country but whose pronouncements are incomprehensible. Scientists - especially scientists - bureaucrats, environmentalists, sociologists: does anybody know what these people are talking about? Half the time I don't, and I've dabbled at being all of them. I can't tell you exactly when it happened, but at some point in my career I realized that, as a scientist, I was speaking a language few people understood. How I figured this out is one of the themes of this book, I might never have figured it out at all if I hadn't had the wit to take my training as a fish biologist on the road. But I did travel, and it didn't take me long to realize that if I was going to learn anything about the world beyond my backyard, I would have to pick up a few more of the old-fashioned kind of tongues. So even if Miss Tojo's incessant nagging thwarted my attempts to learn Japanese, I did learn a few others - sort of. Fisheries projects in Southeast Asia (where I went first) weren't much of a challenge because lots of the locals spoke English. But South America, where I went next, was different. After my first few trips to South America I knew it was no place for a linguistic ignoramus.Two weeks inVenezuela in the care of a loquacious professor was enough to convince me there might be good scientific work done here, but the 'in the care of ' part was a problem. I might as well have been a Western visitor to the old Soviet Union, with my minder always at my elbow, arranging hotel rooms, checking me into flights, taking me to approved shops. It was infuriating, and the experience in Colombia was worse, falling in love and meeting a narcotrfico's veterinarian were fine things to have done and I'll tell you about them later, but they should never have been attempted on a twenty-word vocabulary. There's a fine line between honoured guest and appendage, and when I couldn't get directions, let alone read a map, I felt uncomfortably dependent.