Читать книгу Mountains and Marshes - David Rains Wallace - Страница 14

the crowded desert islands

One of my adolescent fantasies was of a desert island, a small one with just a cliff and a beach. I’d live in a cave in the cliff and comb the beach. I had it on Sunday nights, before I had to go back for another week of junior high school, thus its appeal. This became less urgent as I got older, but I still liked the idea. When I came to California, I thought about such a place. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is supposed to be based on the California coast.

Living around San Francisco Bay, I developed a mild fixation on the Farallones, a 221-acre island cluster twenty-seven miles off the Golden Gate. I’d see them on clear days as I hiked a ridge at Point Reyes, sugarloaf shapes jutting from an otherwise empty ocean, and feel a faint frustration at their distance. They’re an extension of the mainland, granite ridges dragged north from California’s Transverse Ranges by tectonic plates, but the cold, windy Pacific cuts them off.

I first came to California to visit a friend who had a salmon fishing boat, at Bodega Bay. When I arrived the boat was broken, and all I ever got to do was help him unsuccessfully try to fix it. The farthest out I got was on a rowboat on Tomales Bay, east of Point Reyes. The Farallones just hovered out there. Tectonic plates might have dragged them north to the Aleutians—as they eventually will—so far as I was concerned.

I finally got to visit the Farallones years later when an Oceanic Society guide who was taking a writing course I taught at UC–Berkeley Extension gave me a free ride on a whale-watching trip there. The trip was not much like my solitary beachcombing fantasy. Few experiences are less solitary than a whale-watching cruise, and we didn’t set foot on the islands, a national wildlife refuge reserved for breeding marine life. Yet those desert islands proved more fantastic—in the sense of diverse, surprising, curious, lively—than the fantasy one.

A half hour outside the Golden Gate, somebody said, “Look at the jellyfish.” I glanced over the rail, expecting to see some of the little moon jellies and blue sailors that often wash ashore. A few drifted here and there, but below them floated an almost solid mass of golden brown, furry-textured disks, each as large as a child. They were close enough to the surface to see in detail but deep enough to appear shadowy and mysterious, and they extended in all directions—a mermaid’s meadow of giant, pelagic chrysanthemums.

My student, Mike Ezekiel, said they were lion’s mane jellyfish, each furry disk a colony of tiny coelenterates that strain microscopic plants and animals from the water with structures like miniscule poison darts on trailing filaments. I’d heard a lot about how fertile California’s offshore waters are because of nutrient upwellings from deep currents, but I’d never seen such graphic evidence of it. The big jellyfish had to be floating in a plankton soup to be so abundant.

Many things we passed were new to me, although I’d been living a few miles from them for years. I didn’t recall seeing the shy little harbor porpoises that showed dorsal fins for an instant as they surfaced to breathe. I’d seen a lot of penguin-like common murres on shoreline rocks, but I was unfamiliar with the pigeon guillemots that flew out of the boat’s way, the little Cassin’s auklets that dove out of its way, and the tufted puffins (named for the peroxide blond wings they seem to be wearing) that floated past. I’d seen red-necked phalaropes, but I hadn’t seen those delicate shorebirds sitting on the deep-sea swells like gulls. Ezekiel said phalaropes like to follow blue whales and eat the shrimplike krill the whales feed on. They’d seen blues—the biggest animals that have ever lived—around the islands the day before.

We didn’t see blue whales that day, but as we neared the main island we saw spouts and then flukes. A pod of gray whales was feeding in the shallows, sucking up bottom mud and straining out copepods and other small animals with the sieve-like baleen in their mouths. Of course, we couldn’t see them doing this, just their tails as they dived and their mouths as they surfaced. Despite their semiconcealment, the gray whales’ pale, mottled bodies had a weighty solidity, surprising in a medium that so far had mostly revealed amorphous jellyfish and kelp. Even the best photographs can’t convey this solidity: it must be seen in the flesh. It impressed the whale watchers so much that they cheered each time one surfaced.

As we passed the whales, something even stranger than lion’s mane jellyfish appeared in front of the boat—a large circular object with one black eye, like a giant, animated tea tray out of Through the Looking Glass. When the prow neared it, the tray brandished stubby fins and upended itself, than shook a stubby tale and swam down out of sight. It was an ocean sunfish, or mola, a several-hundred-pound species that likes to sunbathe lying on its side on the surface. Mike Ezekiel had described it in one of his class essays, but I had assumed something so exotic lived only in the tropics. They come north to California’s coast to eat the abundant jellyfish, although nobody knows how they get much nourishment from the watery coelenterates.

We steered past the island into deeper waters to look for more whales, and we soon found some humpbacks, a more pelagic species. Although larger than the grays, they seemed less substantial, more part of the amorphous marine world. Their dark, slick backs were hard to discern from the shifting swells, and they kept farther from the boat. They soon disappeared, probably diving to find plankton swarms.

A swarm of seabirds rested on the water, a sign of schooling fish, and we headed that way. A herd of California sea lions appeared, also headed for the fish. I hadn’t seen sea lions swimming in a herd since a rowboat excursion when they’d startled me by rearing up out of the water exactly at sunset and barking in unison. Unlike the preoccupied whales, the lions craned their necks to eye us curiously. Some swam under the hull and appeared on the other side. One group hung back timidly, probably juveniles still getting used to things.

The lions departed as we turned back toward the islands, but a pod of black-and-white Dall’s porpoises began to ride the boat’s bow wave. A porpoise would surface just under the rail, glide effortlessly as the wave pulled it along, and then veer off to be replaced by another. “It’s like they’re doing it to be friendly,” someone cried, although to me it seemed more like the daredevil exuberance of skateboarders attaching to cars.

As we approached Southeast Island, a fishy, ammoniac reek and a screeching din filled the air, then clouds of big black kelp flies that somehow managed to swarm around our heads despite the sea wind. The reason for all this soon became visible. Marine birds and mammals covered the island except for the empty buildings of a former lighthouse station. Gulls, murres, and cormorants sprinkled the tan granite like salt and pepper: their winged comings and goings blurred the horizon. When I focused my binoculars on what seemed to be blackish-brown moss on the seaside rocks, it resolved into masses of California sea lions, broken here and there with light brown patches of larger Steller’s sea lions.

A litter of silvery, cylindrical objects covered one cove—basking elephant seals. They were so much larger than the sea lions that they confused my sense of scale. I thought of the first elephant seal I’d seen, a twenty-foot bull protruding from both ends of a willow thicket at Año Nuevo Rookery south of San Francisco like something back-projected in a monster movie. Once considered extinct, elephant seals have taken full advantage of protected rookeries since I first came to California in the late 1960s. Hundreds of bulls now rampage like blubbery buses up and down beaches. Away from rookeries, they live like sperm whales, swimming to mid-ocean and diving a mile deep to feed on abyssal squid and fishes.

The crowded desert islands were exciting, but they dispelled my adolescent fantasies of living on one. I felt no wish to land on the beach where the elephant seals sprawled. They’ve been known to run over unwary visitors. I felt even less wish to penetrate an island interior swarming with kelp flies, maggot-ridden guano, and territorial gulls. Wardens and scientific researchers need protective clothing to walk there.

The island may have been more pleasant during the nineteenth century, when commercial egg hunters and sealers had reduced their breeding populations to a fraction of today’s restored ones. But I liked it the way it was. Thoreau wrote: We need to have some life “pasturing freely where we never wander.” I think we also need to have some life rampaging, shrieking, and stinking freely where we never wander.

It was getting late, and the boat turned back. It had been a perfect August day, with a quiet sea and only a light fog. If we’d come out a few weeks later, when the fall storms had begun, things might have been less serene. Entire boatloads of whale watchers have succumbed to seasickness on blustery days. The islands’ fauna also gets more active, as dozens of limousine-sized great white sharks arrive to feed on the seal population. Whale watchers sometimes see sharks decapitate unlucky seals and fling their bleeding bodies about. A few times, they have seen truck-sized orcas seize unlucky sharks and fling their bleeding bodies about.

I thought I’d seen almost everything for that time of year. As we plowed back into the lion’s mane jellyfish pasture, however, Mike Ezekiel shouted, “A turtle!” A dark, spherical head and part of a ridged carapace protruded from the water a few yards off the bow. It was a leatherback, the largest sea turtle species: this one was at least five feet long. They appear around the Farallones occasionally, probably to graze on jellyfish. Leatherbacks are less confined to tropical waters than other species because their bulk minimizes heat loss.

I was still surprised to see a sea turtle in the chill waters off the Golden Gate. I was equally surprised to see another leatherback fifteen minutes later, long enough to be sure it wasn’t the first. We got close enough to hear it breathing and to see limpets and barnacles on its carapace. Both turtles had orange patches on their heads and pinkish ones on their throats, colors I hadn’t expected, possibly epiphytic organisms like the limpets and barnacles.

The turtles reminded me of one of my favorite childhood books, Time/Life’s The World We Live In. It contains a painting of Mesozoic-era sea life, with plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and mosasaurs swimming in an aquamarine ocean off a mountainous, palm-fringed coast. Those toothy reptiles were thrilling, but what most struck me was an enormous, leathery-shelled turtle swimming under them. It seemed a connection to my world as well as the distantly past one. “Why turtles were selected for survival on land and sea remains one of evolution’s mysteries,” the book said. That was in 1955, but it’s still a mystery. But the fact that some sea turtles nest on desert islands probably contributes to it.

—Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, Winter 1993