The Invisible Flag

I bring this up because I was listening to sea shanties (and more generalized maritime/nautical music) and came upon a Stan Rogers song I haven't heard before: Free in the Harbour

The song is beautiful and haunting. The collapse of maritime communities by the encroachment of modernity but also The Market™, which forces people to abandon their traditional ways of life to search for work elsewhere. But in the rupture of these poor folks' community is the continuity of nature (in the form of whales) going in to clean up the wound left by man.

The chorus is to me the most haunting and beautiful part (emphasis mine):

Free in the harbour; the blackfish are sporting again

Free in the harbour; untroubled by comings and goings of men

Who once did persue them as oil from the sea,

Hauling away! Hauling away!

Now they’re Calgary roughnecks from Hermitage Bay,

Where the whales make free in the harbour.

And that's all humanity was to the whales: A problem. There's just something so profoundly sad in that. It's very Tolkien. That sort of self-admission of man's failure. We were given the world and told to be good stewards and all we did is take the beauty of the world and throw it away. Paved over paradise to put in a parking lot. And to look at it a slightly different way, the men aren't gone, they've just moved on to the next place they'll ruin. The problem isn't gone. It's just moved down the road to pave the next parking lot.

With lop-side grins, they waggle their chins and they brag of the wage they'll be earning.

Now there might be some misplaced optimism in this setting out younger generation, but moving on from, essentially, subsistence fishing, will bear no greater risks than heading to sea: