Nature Conscious: Fish Out of Water

A “fish out of water” is how I’ve felt for some time now. Actually, witnessing a “fish out of water” is how I got here.

​​​​​​​Only it wasn’t a fish but a sea turtle, caught unawares in a fisherman’s net, hauled ashore aboard his wooden boat. I watched as the fisherman’s fingers, salted and sunbaked, deftly untangled the net that cinched the turtle’s body. A knife flashed, and the strands gave way. But the turtle’s breath remained laboured, its head drooped with fatigue. The fisherman, having done his part, busied himself with counting his catch.

Eventually, the turtle was released. Whether it survived, I will never know.

I often revisit that memory — my first wild turtle sighting. I struggle to make sense of it, so I try a couple of different perspectives. A conservationist would lament the lack of resources for rescue in a remote village and simultaneously enquire about bycatch patterns. A social scientist might remind us that the turtle's story is also the fisherman’s. A vegan friend would bristle at what our consumption costs other lives. A village priest might offer reverence to the turtle — an avatar of Lord Vishnu.

Me? I couldn’t do much but bear witness, overwhelmed by the complexity of the situation.

Was the turtle an animal in mortal distress or a liability for a fisherman already encumbered by a tough livelihood? And could I, in good faith, rank one life above another, the turtle over the fish on my plate, and call that moral clarity?

As I wade through these questions, my world expands and certainty shrinks. Expert voices bleed into one another until the boundaries blur. The turtle becomes sacred, symbolic, and a statistic, all at once.

From the noise, the ocean and terra firma reappear, connected by a rickety wooden boat and its agent. I recall the quietude of the fisherman, his singular awareness while freeing the turtle — disentangling, cutting, releasing. He would later use this meditative rhythm to mend his net, a symbol of his livelihood, strand by strand. Perhaps that is why his movements were careful yet assured when he cut it. All of it was real to him; there was no abstraction.

​​​​​A fish out of water, in the hands of those who work the Earth with a private resilience, finds small respite. 

Nature Conscious is a series built from reader contributions. It is a collection of fieldnotes, moments or brief encounters with the wild, expressed through words, art, music, photographs or poetry. The series is curated by author and guest editor Aasheesh Pittie.