Outside my bedroom window, four monk seals laze in the shade of bushes clotted with brown noddies. One twiddles its rear flippers. Another lifts its head and splutters a baritone phrase that sounds like bogs on bogs on bogs. A third rolls over, stretches its cream belly longer and longer. The fourth, vexed by a bird, nips at it, then crawls under a tree heliotrope (Tournefortia argentea). A male booby whistles, as if through badly fitting dentures. While two of the women researchers cook chicken curry for dinner, they play a tape of Beatles songs, which fills the barracks with close harmonies backed by birdcalls. We eat communally, worn out from the day’s heat and drama; then, while the regular staff settles down on couches in front of the VCR to watch the remake of The Thing, Gil, Bill, and I retreat to our rooms.
At sundown, the barracks grow dim and a trail of small fluorescent stars guides one down the hallway and around the bathroom’s sink and side table. All of a sudden, the wedgies begin moaning—only a few at first, then urgent throngs of them as night pours its India ink into the shoals.
The next morning, I toss on an oversized T-shirt and head for the kitchen, where I find Gil somnambulantly making drip coffee. Bill saunters in a moment later, his eyes still scrunched up from sleep.
“Sleep well?” Gil asks us. “The wedgies keep you awake?”
“Not me,” Bill says. “It sounded like a thousand orgasmic women. I smiled all night.”
Gil laughs. “That’s a new one. How about you?”
“I liked the racket, too,” I say, rummaging through the cereal boxes to find one without swarms of ants.
Bill leans close, whispers: “Try the Shredded Wheat; they’re individually wrapped.” I pull a packet from the box, pour its contents into a bowl, inspect it carefully for wildlife, add milk.
“Didn’t get into it as much as Bill, of course,” I continue, “but I love my room. There’s a fairy tern nesting on my open window. And the monks were having themselves a fine old snore.”
Gil laughs, shakes his head. Bill cuts me a glance that says Look over there, and I follow his gaze to a colossal box of ear plugs sitting on a shelf. Staff and visitors alike seem to find the night noises a plague. Still dozy, I think of Boethius, who once advised his readers that it was wiser not to yearn for “wine at midwinter” but instead to relish wintry things. This winter, in New York, I’ll relish the snow-djinns swirling among the trees in my backyard, but I’ll miss the moaning of the wedgies.
After breakfast, we go out to check the seals on Tern itself. Hiding behind bushes and crouching low, we travel along the beach like three cat burglars. Everywhere we look, we find recumbent monk seals—by the old water tanks, under tree heliotropes, on the basketball court, tucked in the dunes, using cement curbs as pillows, with tail flippers hanging into wedgie nests. There is a graceful, hillocky rise and fall to their outline, a soft geography. In molt, they look as if they were putting on their old trousers but got tired and lay down to rest halfway through. When a monk seal’s whiskers dry, they curl up into a mustache; when they get wet, they straighten out. Older animals develop gray whiskers. Sometimes they raise their tail flippers higher than the rest of the body and rotate them in a wringing-of-hands movement. They don’t get sunburned, as whales do. They don’t pass out from lying for many hours with their heads downhill. They have hips, but narrow ones, and they sometimes cross their rear flippers, play patty-cake, or make praying hands of them when they sleep. On an incline, they find it easiest to move by curling the tail around, making a crescent of the body, and then shifting their weight until they’re off balance, rolling downhill into the water. We watch a large male slow-gallop down the beach, rippling its thick weight across the delicate pink five-petaled morning glories. Its insides seem to be moving more slowly than its skin.
Ruddy turnstones stilt along the tideline, picking at the sand, and sometimes at the whiskers of sleeping monk seals, which wake briefly and bark at them. Downy frigate chicks hang out of their eye-level nests like sleeping cocker spaniels. Red-footed boobies with blue beaks peer at us with their sharp eyes; as we pass, they make the sound of clocks being wound. Around a clump of bushes, we find a large female monk seal with “132” bleached into her fur (researchers use Lady Clairol). Her mouth, curved like a croquet hoop, sports a thick, wiry mustache above it, and a white feather has been trapped in her whiskers. Dragging her five-fingered flipper across her face, she scratches the feather away.
Two pups roll on the beach, making a snoring moo at each other. The sunlight sparkles off their wet fur, painting neon down their backs. As the smaller one rolls, its tan-gray belly looks soft as a fedora. A single blast of sunlight, sharp as a welding spark, shines off the larger black pup. They roll downhill to the water and tumble in the surf, letting it toss them any old which way. Muzzles colliding, they body surf the waves. Then a third pup joins them to bob like dark plums in the green syrupy shallows. Now they roll onto their backs like otters and arch their fanned tail flippers out of the water. Newly weaned pups love to cavort like this, but by the time they’re yearlings they’ll be less frisky and more languorously adult.
A brown noddy glides overhead, making a perfect infinity sign in the air, as we inspect the deteriorating sea wall. There are eighty-nine monk seals on Tern this morning, and they seem content to lie asleep on the sand, dreaming their slate-gray dreams.
As the days pass, we rise in darkness, dress by moonlight, and set sail as the sun begins blueing up the sea. Few things are sweeter than the cool damp morning of a scorching day on the ocean. We return often to East Island and Whale-Skate, two prime pupping islands, and always find new pups to tag, new adults to inspect and fret over. Disappearing Island stays submerged all week. But we visit Gin Island, Little Gin Island, Trig Island, Near Island, Shark Island, and my favorite, Round Island. Floating near the north center of the lagoon, Round lies almost four miles southeast of Tern and it is not easy to find, since it is less than two hundred feet long and, at its steepest, rises only four feet above sea level. All coral and broken shell, the island has no vegetation. It looks like a lily pad drifting across the sea. And yet it boasts the highest number of successful monk seal births per square foot of any of the islands. Each time we approach it, through a maze of coral heads and sandbars, we see it floating small and arklike in the distance, brilliantly lit by the sun, with at least a dozen monk seals basking on its sands.
Although we call our planet Earth, it’s mainly water. We should call it Ocean. This becomes radiantly clear as we fly for three hours over the plunging, misnamed Pacific, en route back to Honolulu. It’s no use trying to fathom the ocean by studying a map or a globe. Anything our eyes can devour in a single gulp seems small and tameable. On a map, the whole Pacific Ocean looks no larger than a football. Maybe we should judge size not with our eyes but with our sense of time. As astronaut Paul Weitz once said of the Pacific, “When you’re traveling at four miles a second and it still takes you twenty-five minutes to cross it, you know it’s big.”
Far below, the ocean slides along like endless yards of dull fabric. How can the birthplace of all life on earth—a realm of risk, terror, chance, and sunlight—look lifeless, boring? Our eyes fail us when we stand back too far. What we gain in perspective we lose in the polite blurring of details. Without the details nothing can be known, not a lily or a child. Looking down through ten thousand feet of sky, as if through the invisible pleats of history, I try to imagine the busy ocean below, which surges and leaps, froths and strains, contains rowdy fish and mammals, bustles like a souk in Marrakech. Ingenious hucksters haunt its coral reefs, eager to con passersby clean out of their cells. Large, muscle-bound thugs prowl its shallows and depths. Everything is up for grabs. Its sands bubble with skates, flounder, starfish, and sea urchins. Some of its inhabitants are as well armed as assassins. Others rely on armor plating, athletic ability, sonar, or illusion. Whales and dolphins mind its hinterlands, chatting and singing. Some of its creatures come to life, mate, give birth, and die without ever moving mo
re than a yard or two. Others travel halfway around the planet, following their food supply or a yen for warmer temperatures. It contains valleys and rivers and great hulking mountain ranges and raised shallow platforms and precipices and chasms. In some places, there are ceilings of ice; in others, lava geysers or honeycombs of rock. It is not silent, but all atwitter and abuzz, full of animal clicks, moans, squeaks, and caterwauling, as well as the relentless gnashing of water against coast.
Seen from a great height, the ocean appears flat, silent, and blue—a blue so turbulent and dark. The sea looks blue because it reflects the sky, but it’s always a deeper blue than the sky itself because it doesn’t reflect all the light. Some of its color also comes from the seabed. In the ocean, light falls from above as “down-welling light.” Some fish, squid, firefleas, and other creatures make their own glow. But mainly light cascades over them. You need to be under the skin of the ocean, part of its gelatinous fathoms, to find illumination. When we look down on the ocean, it appears opaque. All its fascinating life-forms and geography are hidden, which leaves a mental void that quickly fills with imagined terrors. Therefore many people perceive the ocean as another form of night. And yet we are also drawn to the ocean; we like to vacation beside it, staring for countless hours at its hypnotic pour and sweep. It’s both mesmerizing and narcotic. An impulse ancient and osmotic connects our fluids with the ocean’s. I suppose we feel drawn to it because we ourselves are small marine environments on the move.
Islands bloom on the horizon, and we fly straight toward the center of the Hawaiian archipelago. First we pass over Niihau, a large privately owned island that’s a cattle ranch. Monk seals haul out on its beaches, but the island’s owners won’t allow researchers to step ashore to monitor the seals, so no one knows how many use the island, what sex they are, or if they’re healthy. Lehua, a tiny crescent-shaped island, floats off its eastern coast. Then the large island of Kauai appears, and a little later we land in Honolulu.
After a week of riveting calm spent on nature’s timetable, the sensory blast of Honolulu hits hard. Bidding farewell to Gilmartin, Curtsinger and I fly to Kauai and rent a diving boat to take us out to Niihau. Even if we can’t land on its beaches, we might be able to glimpse monk seals from offshore. After a three-hour sail through choppy waters, we arrive at Niihau, the Forbidden Island, as some call it, and scout its north shore for basking monks, but find none. It was a long shot anyway. The towering crescent of Lehua looms half a mile across the channel, smooth and brown, with white specklings of guano. Long fingers of frozen lava stretch down its sides to the sea. Only one cloud haunts the Wedgwood blue sky—a large oval hanging directly over the island looks like a scar left by a knife wound. We head for the crescent’s shallow reefs, to snorkel in one of several spots favored by divers. Seabirds work the thermals and the ocean pours metallic blue and green as we drop anchor on the south side about a hundred yards from shore. At the bottom of steep, twisting layers of rock, a weather-beaten hut sits on a cliff. Below and to the right of the hut lies an oyster-shell-shaped cave, partly above water, with a small lagoon in front of it. Sunlight dances like flame across the roof of the cave. Putting on a mask and fins, I slide over the side into twenty feet of water and find coral heads trembling with brightly painted fish and shifting spears of sunlight. The bottom is a maze of lava rock covered with oblong gouges where sea urchins have gnawed rock away, using their six teeth.
Heading for the sea cave, I enter a small commotion of water and light. The surf frets the entrance to the lagoon, where bubbles shake like beads hanging in the doorway of an opium den. Passing through the bubble net, I find a calmer, gourd-shaped lagoon, whose sandy bottom churns fifteen feet below. How silty the water is, thick and grainy. Ahead of me, a long, gray shape maneuvers. Suddenly it turns, comes closer, and stops six feet in front of me. Staring me straight in the face is a large monk seal with black eyes and thick whiskers. Heaven only knows what may be going through its mind. Perhaps something like: Funny place to find a primate. Eyeing me carefully, it pauses, then dives under me, rolling over as it does, comes up in back, eyes me again, and swings to my right. It doesn’t seem to be using its flippers at all and barely moves its body, and yet it darts around at quite a clip. Two more seals appear from the curtain of bubbles, rolling tightly together. Then another monk seal swims underneath me, looking up at me the whole time by turning its neck right around like a ball turret, swimming forward but looking backward. It rolls onto its back and swims along the bottom below me, with its front flippers lying quietly against its chest as if they were tucked into vest pockets. Stopping ten feet away, it surfaces and considers my face. Then it turns slowly and swims toward the cave. Now the tussling couple reappears, biting and chasing each other. If I could rub my astonished eyes I would as five adult monk seals swim around the lagoon, in front of me, in back of me, at the surface, below me. What a dazzling spectacle. I am right in the middle of a monk seal fantasia. They seem no more bothered by my presence than they would be by that of a jellyfish floating above them. I think it is because I have large eyes (magnified by the face mask) and am watching them that they don’t actually toy with me. None of the seals have flipper tags, so, unless they’ve seen humans on Niihau, I may be their first hominid. By now I am able to identify the couple as male and female. Occasionally they surface and baah loudly at each other; then the female darts away and the male joins her in a swirling subterranean dance. Bubbles trail from them like comet tails as they glide and spin, occasionally swiveling their necks to nip and bite. Before I have time to think, a new drama unfolds. To escape, the female dives to a jagged corridor of rock at the bottom that is just wide enough to hold a seal. The male follows her at speed, bites her flank, her tail, then tries to reach over the sharp rock. Huddled tight as a letter in a slot, the female pulls in her head and tail. At last the male sees an opening, grabs her back below the neck, and drags her out, forcing her belly-down on the sandy bottom as he mounts her. She goes suddenly passive. It lasts only a minute, but to me it seems ages as I float above them, frozen in amazement. Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time. I am watching monk seals mate, I tell myself twice, as a complete sentence, because it is an astoundingly rare event to behold. The two other recorded sightings were vague and incomplete, and I feel lucky indeed. Most likely the pups I saw wrestling in the surf at French Frigate Shoals, tumbling and nipping like this adult couple, were practicing courtship. When the male releases his grip, the female bolts, and he chases her. They surface and one of them barks a short, gargling, wide-mouthed protest, to which the other answers with a loud, foggy bleat.
Night will be falling and the long trek home is best done in daylight, so, reluctant but happy, I fin back to the boat. What an array of monk seals I’ve seen. There is something sacred about seeing them, the last of a dying race of monks, swimming through underwater caves in a cathedral of light. When we hoist anchor and set sail for Kauai, we salute the sea cave I now think of as honeymoon grotto. Two monks are still swimming somewhere inside it. One large adult, hauled up onto the rocks rimming the lagoon, dozes peacefully near a pup. The courting couple continues swiveling tightly together among the coral heads. Over and over they roll, spiraling gracefully through the water. May their offspring flourish and be female. Standing at the stern as the boat gathers speed, I watch until the crescent island grows shorter, the shining monk seals become indistinguishable from smooth wet stones, their boudoir cave disappears, and all that’s left are the indecipherable gestures of the sea.
IN THE AMAZON,
WHERE THE SUN DINES
Is there anywhere on earth that fires the imagination the way the Amazon does? Even when I was little, a pint-sized would-be explorer, I dreamed of seeing its thick realm of vines and snakes and gorgeous flowers and stealthy jaguars and feather-clad Indians and piranha-studded rivers and gushing green jungle. It took thirty years for that dream to materialize in all its lavish splendor. But, by then,
the huge ecosystem of the Amazon was endangered. The time I spent cruising along the Amazon was an experience both dizzyingly sensuous and deeply spiritual. There was so much life at every level that my senses felt almost bruised from the overload. How could it be otherwise, seeing Nature at its most luxuriant, teeming, and wild? It was like entering the original Garden.
On Halloween, we drop anchor at Altar do Chão on the Rio Tapajós, a beautiful clear-water river, one of the tributaries of the Amazon. It is so wide, one cannot see its distant shore, only the shudder of its gray skin and the faint blue of the horizon. A white scimitar beach sweeps around a peninsula and tiny frogs hop near the tide-line. Strolling through the nearby forest, we find large sandstone boulders ribboned with lavender; a stand of rubber trees, scored for their latex ooze; and a breu tree, whose resin, cousin to frankincense and myrrh, seeps fragrance and burns slow and aromatic. At eye level, on a slender tree, sits the top of a small bleached skull. I lift it down, look closer at the two sharp incisors, and offer it to David, a savvy ecologist, who has joined our cruise ship’s scientific staff after a two-month botanical expedition deep in the interior of the rain forest. It is some sort of carnivore, but what? Cat? Dog? Otter? Raccoonlike animal? In the back of the skull, a small perfect bullet hole leads from one world to another. When David finds the mandible lying in the grass nearby and puts the set together, his face blooms with delight. It is the skull of a sloth, and he collects skulls.