The Lost Art of Finding Things by Richard Newton
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If you could view the Mediterranean through the eyes of Ahmed Mones, you would not be looking at a featureless sea.
“Kerkennah fishermen own sections of the ocean, like farms,” he says. We are tacking lopsidedly across shallow green water in his skiff, taut sail bulging. “My section is 18 kilometres offshore. I keep octopus pots on the seabed.”
“How do you find them?”
He shrugs: “How do you breathe?”
He draws deeply from a Gaulois and releases the smoke shoreward. There is little to see back there. We are less than a kilometre out, yet the Kerkennah Islands have sunk from view.
Arid and flat, never rising higher than a date palm, these torn-off fragments of the Maghreb lie an hour’s ferry ride from the Tunisian industrial port of Sfax. The two main islands, Gharbi and Chergui, are effectively contiguous, linked across an isthmus of salty marshland by a Roman-built causeway. The landscape is desolate and fractured by mirage. The few stony fields are tilled almost exclusively by women, while their men tend the sea.
Out here, beyond sight of land, we pass a fisherman walking waist deep towards his charfia fish traps; zig-zag palm-frond fences that funnel glittering shoals into submerged wicker baskets. He still has some distance to wade. If he has caught anything worthwhile, he will lug the roiling baskets all the way back to the beach. Ahmed gives him a languid wave.
The octopus season is currently closed, so this is not a working voyage. “When I became a fisherman aged 15, we caught octopus all months,” Ahmed recalls, casting his mind across a 47-year working life. “It changed in the 1980s when the Japanese started to buy our catches for high prices. Everyone went a little crazy with greed. They brought in big boats and thousands of concrete pots. Some of the boast used GPS and sonar. In no time, almost all of the octopuses were gone.”
The fallout of the brief boom and inevitable bust can still be seen on the islands. Many of the whitewashed, flat-roofed houses are boarded up. Even the conspicuous mansions built on octopus money are abandoned now. The so-called tentacle-tycoons have moved to Sfax, and a centuries-old industry lies in ruins.
There is little else here. Grand hopes for tourism have never been realised. Local politicians continue to dream of high-rise resorts lining the horseshoe beaches which indent the northern shores, but the sea is too shallow for watersports (even swimming), fresh water is in short supply, and the islands have no airport.
The two low-key hotels catering for budget French and British holidaymakers have contributed to the steady exodus. Every summer, local waiters and barmen find tourists to marry and emigrate to Europe.
“Everyone is leaving,” says Ahmed. “Even my own children. They now live on the mainland.”
The population has dwindled to 14,000, though it temporarily surges to 120,000 each August when erstwhile inhabitants flood back for the wedding season (which, ironically, takes yet more young men and women away from the islands permanently).
Although everything has changed around him, Ahmed remains sure of the sea. In part, his navigation is tactile. He feels familiar currents through his grip on the tiller and steers accordingly, while his pale eyes scan for sand banks and channels that he can read like a map. By this method, he is able to drop a terracotta octopus pot into the sea and return to the precise spot weeks later to hook it out with a long pole. At night, he fixes his bearings by Polaris, the moon, and the orange smudge of Sfax on the western horizon.
In the late afternoon, we follow our long shadows from the harbour up to Ahmed’s simple house in the half-abandoned hamlet of Maatoug. We sit cross-legged on a mat in the living room, leaning on cushions. His wife joins us with tea and a plate of dates. She has news of serious floods on the mainland, and fetches the newspaper for Ahmed to read. Receiving it, he stands up and scours the room, lifting cushions, checking the window ledges. This, a man who can locate a basketball-sized pot in the wide ocean.
“Where are my reading glasses?”