Hirsh - Telling our way to the sea: a voyage of discovery in the Sea of Cortez

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For Veronica and Henry

We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are good to eat but because they are good to think with.

Claude Lvi-Strauss, Totemism

Stories, stories, stories. A world and a land and even a river full of the damn slippery things.

Richard Flanagan, Death of a River Guide

We notice that it required a separate intention of the eye, a more free and abstracted vision, to see the reflected trees and the sky, than to see the river bottom merely; and so are there manifold visions in the direction of every object, and even the most opaque reflect the heavens from their surface.

Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

CONTENTS

AUTHORS NOTE

Each summer for a decade, my wife and I took a group of about twelve college students into the Sea of Cortez for an intensive field course in ecology and evolutionary biology. This book focuses on one special class, but I have also drawn liberally on experiences from a number of other summers. The narrative is therefore a composite. Such compression makes certain deviations from facticity unavoidable. In addition, I have changed many names and some identifying attributes. In general, though, the events that I describe here did actually happen, and the characters are based on real people. The sections on science and history areto the best of my knowledge and abilitystraightforwardly true. References and further technical notes for those sections are available on the web at www.tellingourwaytothesea.com.

Ive adopted certain textual conventions that are atypical and therefore merit a note. This book is unusual in having both a lot of dialogue and many quotations from texts. To distinguish between the two, Ive used quotation marks only for words spoken aloud; excerpts from texts are in italics.

PART I

Isostichopus fuscus

LEARNING TO SEE

A school of needlefish parts to stream around me, and I find myself momentarily among the silver traces of a comet shower. I move to join them, but they accelerate and dissolve into open water, leaving me to stare at the luminous, molten mirror that is the underside of the oceans surface. Veronica taps my arma signal that says both look at that and be right back as she slips from the roiled layer of silver and descends swiftly, like a being born underwater. Her skindivers fins form a single broad fluke, which propels her neoprene form sinuously toward the rocky bottom. Bright bubbles, escaping her snorkel, wobble urgently back to the air above. A thousand times I have seen her descend like this, yet still I find myself wondering if, this time, she might go too deep, or stay too long.

Here, mercifully, the seafloor is only twenty feet downa depth at which the plunging chutes of sunlight are just converging to their vanishing point. As she approaches the rocks, Veronica twists, glides to a supine and weightless pause, and gazes up at the students who float beside me here at the surface. She seems to be pointing at something on the seafloor.

Allie, the student to my right, turns to look at me. Inside the partial shade of her dive mask, her eyes are hard to read: They look puzzled, a little concerned. She is probably just wondering why Veronica wants them to notice what appears to be a mud-brown lump of sea muck. Though it also seems possible that Allie has already perceived Veronicas tendencies underwaterthe strange private gravity that seems to draw her to depthand she is now asking, in her gentle way, whether something should perhaps be done to bring Veronica back to the surface. I take several long breaths, saturating my blood with oxygen and preparing to dive, but just as I draw my last, deep dose of air, Veronica finally relents. She places her hand gently around the nondescript mound and pulls it from the rocks, holding it as one might hold a soft loaf of bread.

Arriving among us, Veronica holds out her hand, upon which rests her inert quarry. What was mud-colored below is nowin this bright, shallow watermore of a yellow ocher, and it is studded with pale tubercles that are almost the color of lemon drops. The skin, stretched taut over the knobby body, appears thin and mucosal, making the thing look terribly exposed, like a bodily organ drawn by the hand of a surgeon into the sudden brightness of the operating theater. The studentsthere are five of them heredraw in around Veronicas palm, peering intently through their panes of tempered glass. They seem transfixed, certain that Veronicas plunge must have been for something thrilling, and yet I know their patience can be short, especially this early in the trip, when everything around them feels new. And so, as the thing on Veronicas palm waits us out, stolid as a piece of earth, I begin to worry that the students will soon lose interest, and miss what Veronica wants them to see.

Just when I think they may be eyeing one another through their personal portholeswondering, perhaps, if it would be rude to resume their search for colorful fishthe lump trembles, inches forward along Veronicas palm. Suddenly it is less vegetable than animal, and the students pull back apprehensively. But as the circle of masks starts to widen, Veronicas free hand catches Allie by the wrist.

Veronica is wise, I think, to choose Allie, because there are others who might not be so trusting. Carefully, she opens Allies palm and holds it beside her own. As the knobby creature slides from one hand to the other, Allies eyes widen and she speaks into her snorkelan incomprehensible but richly expressive string of syllables. For a moment, she seems frozen. But even in her astonishment, she looks to the other students. She takes the hand of the young man floating beside her, opens his palm, and holds it next to her own. The animal slides over obligingly, and as it does, Cameron explores the creatures back with his other hand.

Camerons hands look muscular, well-worn, and they sometimes move in unusual ways: the fingers seem to explore independently, executing many minor adjustments, as if they were navigating the neck of a string instrument. These hands have learned to perceive more than other hands, because Cameron cannot see. He is blind. And as his fingers creep across the animals back, investigating, it becomes clear that they are following a pattern: the yellow warts, which at first seemed to be scattered more or less randomly, are in fact arrangedloosely, but nonetheless perceptiblyinto two rows.