Travels

by Michael Crichton

  “Yes,” he said, smiling, “usually some sharks.”

  I was in Tahiti for Christmas with my family—my brother and sister, and assorted husbands, wives, girlfriends, friends. We were visiting several islands, and we had begun with the most remote.

  Rangiroa was more than an hour from Papeete, one of the Tuamotu chain of atolls. The highest point on Rangiroa was about ten feet above sea level. From the air, it looked like a pale, sandy ring in the middle of the ocean.

  The Tuamotus were old islands; their volcanic peaks had been eroded until they finally disappeared, and nothing remained but the coral reef that had originally surrounded the island, but now merely enclosed a lagoon.

  On Rangiroa, the lagoon was enormous—some twenty miles in diameter. There were only two breaks in the enclosing reef, through which the tides came and went twice a day. So much water, moving through just two passes, meant that tidal currents were strong indeed. It also meant that lots of fish were attracted to the pass, because of the great nutrient flow in the water.

  “It is very exciting,” the proprietor said. “You must do it.”

  We went to Michel, the divemaster, and said we wanted to dive the pass. He consulted a tide table, and said we would do it at ten the following morning. (You can only dive the pass when the tide is running into the lagoon. Otherwise you risk being swept out to sea.)

  The next morning, with everyone out on the dock ready to go, my sister asked Michel, “Are there really sharks in the pass?” We were all experienced divers; she was the only one who hadn’t seen sharks.

  “Yes,” Michel said. “You will see sharks.”

  “A lot?”

  He smiled. “Sometimes many.”

  “How many?”

  He saw she was getting nervous and said, “Sometimes you see none at all. Are we ready to leave?”

  We got in the boat and set out. The pass was a quarter-mile-wide gap in the atoll. Inside was the calm lagoon, outside the swells of the ocean, which crashed continually against the outer reef. We took the boat to the outside, and Michel got out a float and a spool of thread. Then he gave us a lecture.

  “You must stay together,” he said. “Everyone get your equipment on, and everyone go into the water as close together as possible. Go right down; do not stay at the surface. When you are down, try to stay within sight of each other. I will be in front of you, with this float”—he gestured to the float in his hands—“so the boat can follow us. The current is very strong. Partway along the pass there is a valley where we can get out of the current for a rest; keep an eye out for that. From there we will continue, and we will be swept into the lagoon; you will feel the current slow; you can look around the coral at your leisure until you run out of air, and come up to the boat. In the pass, do not go below seventy feet. Okay?”

  We got our equipment on, waited until everyone was ready, feeling the swells, the rocking of the boat. Finally everybody was ready, and we went over the side in a mass of back-ended flippered splashes.

  In diving there is always an initial moment of adjusting, clearing the mask, feeling the temperature of the water, seeing the clarity, looking around, going down. The water here was clear, and I saw the side of the pass, an irregular rocky wall to my left, that went down from the surface to about seventy or eighty feet, where it became bluish sandy bottom.

  We went down. It wasn’t until we got near the bottom that I realized how fast we were moving. The current was really ripping. It was tremendously exciting—if you didn’t mind being out of control.

  It didn’t matter whether you were facing forward, backward, or sideways: the current moved you at the same swift pace. You couldn’t stop yourself, you couldn’t hold on to anything. If you grabbed a piece of coral, you’d either rip it off or rip your arm off. You were just swept along by the current, in the grip of a force orders of magnitude greater than you could possibly fight. There was nothing to do but relax and enjoy it.

  After the first few minutes, after getting used to seeing the others perpendicular to the current, or looking up, clearing their masks, or facing backward, but always carried along at the same pace, it became fun. It was a kind of amusement park ride, and our powerlessness became pleasant.

  Then I saw the sharks.

  At first they were moving at the limit of my vision, the way I am used to seeing sharks, gray shadows where the water turns deep blue-gray, far from you. Then, as I came closer, the shadows gained definition, I could see details, and I could see more sharks. Lots more.

  The current was carrying us into the middle of a school of gray sharks, so numerous that it felt as if we were entering a cloud of animals. There were easily a hundred sharks circling in a large cluster.

  I thought, Oh my God.

  I didn’t want to go right through the middle. I preferred to go to one side, but the current was uncontrollable and indifferent to my preferences. We were going right through the middle of them. In an effort to control my panic, I decided to take a picture. I stared down at the exposure settings on the Nikonos around my neck, feeling slightly idiotic: Here you are in the middle of a hundred sharks and you are worrying about whether the f-stop is f8 or f11. Who cares! But it was one of those situations; there was nothing I could do about it, so I might as well think about something else, and I took a picture. (It came out very blurred.)

  By now the sharks were all around us, above and below and to all sides. We were being swept along by the current, like passengers riding a train, but they did not seem affected by it; they swam easily, flicking their powerful bodies with that peculiar lateral twisting that makes their movements so reminiscent of snakes.

  The sharks turned away, came back, spiraled around us, but I noticed that they never came close. And already we were moving clear of the cluster, swept onward by the current, drifting away from the compact cloud of sharks. And then gone.

  My breathing had not returned to normal when Michel jerked his thumb, gestured to me that we were to go down into the crevasse he had mentioned. He was twenty yards ahead of me. I saw him swept across the bottom, and then he ducked down headfirst and disappeared into a trench. I saw a cloud of his bubbles rise as I was swept toward the trench. I also swung over, had a quick glimpse of a shallow little canyon perhaps ten feet deep, and twenty feet long.

  I was much relieved to be out of the current, but unexpectedly found myself in a black cloud of surgeonfish. These plate-sized fish, moving in dense, impenetrable schools, seemed agitated. I presumed it was because of the arrival of divers into the trench.

  Then the black cloud cleared, and I realized it was because of the sharks in the trench. A dozen gray sharks swam in the far end of the cul-de-sac. They were each about nine feet long, dull-snouted, beady-eyed. They swam irritably, within a couple of feet of me and Michel. I was vaguely aware of Michel, ever calm, looking at me to see how I was taking this. I was only looking at the sharks.

  I had never been so close to so many sharks at one time, and a dozen impressions assailed me. The gritty texture of their gray skin (sharkskin). The occasional injuries, white scars, and imperfections. The clean gill lines. The unblinking eye, menacing and stupid, like the eye of a thug. The eye was almost the most terrifying thing about a shark, that and the slashing curve of the mouth. And I saw the way one shark, hemmed in by us, arched his back in what I had recently read was typical gray-shark threat behavior that often presaged an attack—

  The other divers came swinging over the lip, blowing bubbles.

  The sharks fled. The last of them threaded his way between us as if we were pylons on an obstacle course. Or perhaps he was just showing off.

  Now we all looked at one another. Behind the masks, lots of wide eyes. Michel let us wait in the trench for a few minutes; he checked everyone’s air; we stared at the large surgeonfish and tried to get our bearings.

  Pretty soon Michel gestured for us to go back over the lip, into the current. Again we felt it catch us, and we were swept forward into the lagoon. The current
slackened and the water became murkier, the coral more scattered, separated in small heads by an expanse of brown muddy bottom. The coral heads were inhabited by small fish; they were familiar; the best part of the dive was over. We finished our air, and headed for the boat.

  One measure of a good dive is the amount of adrenaline still pumping through you afterward, and how much you talk when you get back to the surface.

  “Oh my God, did you see that?”

  “I thought I was going to die!”

  “Wasn’t that amazing?”

  “I was terrified, I really was. I didn’t like it.” My sister, seriously. But the conversation swirled past her.

  “What a dive!”

  “It was fantastic.”

  “Unbelievable! I admit it, I was scared.”

  “Scared! I saw you shaking.”

  “That was just cold.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “What an incredible dive!”

  Through all this, Michel just sat patiently, smiling and nodding, letting us burn off the tension, signaling to the boatman to wait a few moments, until we calmed down, before he started the engine and we ran back to the hotel.

  At the hotel, we showered and changed and drifted to the bar. We could talk of nothing but the dive, our reactions, what we saw, how close the sharks came, how they looked to us, how we felt, whether the pictures would come out, whether the pictures would do the experience justice.

  Implicitly, our attitude was that we had survived a brush with death. Deadly dangerous, but we survived. It was so dangerous we never would have done it if we had known what it would be like. We were lucky to have survived. Sure, it was fun, but it was also terrifying.

  Then at dinner my brother said casually, “Anybody want to do it again?”

  A silence fell over the table, because he was contradicting our implicit assumptions. If it was really so dangerous, we shouldn’t do it again.

  “I’m going to,” he said.

  One by one, we admitted that we might do it again.

  By the following morning, we were irritable when Michel told us that the tides were not right and we would have to wait until tomorrow to dive in the pass. Wait until tomorrow! We were quite put out.

  When we dived a second time, we saw hardly any sharks. Now we were really put out. What a waste of time: no sharks. So we were obliged to dive the pass a third time, when we at last saw lots of sharks, and had a delightfully frightening time.

  * * *

  I think the only true expression of one’s beliefs lies in action. Like the way my family decided to dive the pass again. Whatever we said about sharks at dinner—then or later—we knew they weren’t dangerous.

  In 1973 I was shooting a movie that called for an actor to be struck by a rattlesnake. We needed shots of a snake crawling in the desert, then striking, then sinking its fangs into the actor, and so on.

  To do this film work, particular rattlesnakes were cast as if they were actors. We had four “crawlers” to perform the crawling scenes, and six “strikers” to do the strikes. These snakes were brought to the location in big plywood boxes.

  Immediately one of my first concerns about snakes was answered. Whenever I was in the woods, if I heard a rustling sound, I always wondered: Is that a rattlesnake? I was always concerned that I would get bitten by something I had wrongly decided was a cricket.

  When the snake wrangler pulled the plywood boxes out of the station wagon, everybody for a hundred yards snapped his head around at the sound. There was no question about the sound. You knew. That dry, hissing rattle could not be mistaken for anything else.

  Then the wrangler pulled out the snakes. They were each six feet long and as big around as a human forearm, and hissing mean. The crew was impressed.

  We set up for the first shot. The camera was placed on a tripod with a telephoto lens, about thirty feet from the snake. A blanket was hung to protect the solitary operator from the dreaded snake; the rest of the crew was even farther away. We all watched as the first mean six-foot rattle-snake was released to crawl menacingly toward the lens.

  The snake took one look at all of us, turned around, and wriggled away toward the hills. The wrangler had to go catch him.

  We set up again. And again. And again.

  Each time the poor rattlesnake just tried to get away. Eventually we had to form two rows of people, standing just outside camera range, and herd the frightened snake between us toward the lens.

  Once we had the crawling footage, we set up for the shot where the snake coils and strikes. For this we used our “strikers.” They were supposedly mean and angry. The wrangler explained that they had not been milked, which would have made them passive.

  For the next hour, we tried to get the strikers to strike. We had a variety of sticks, balloons, rubber hands, and cowboy hats, with which we waved, prodded, and generally irritated the snakes.

  Occasionally one struck. But you could smack them around quite a lot before they would do so. It was easy to see why. A rattlesnake’s strike is rather pitiful. A snake can strike only a fraction of its body length; these six-foot snakes couldn’t lunge more than a foot and a half, or less.

  What that means is that, at a dinner party, if the person sitting next to you had a big rattler on his plate, the snake probably couldn’t strike you. In fact, it probably would have trouble striking the person whose plate it was on.

  And the snakes weren’t aggressive. After a strike, these big, ferocious rattlers would get their fangs tangled up in the equivalent of a snake’s lower lip. They’d look silly, and they seemed to know it. In any case, they would generally back away rather than strike.

  Between takes, the snakes were placed under a little yellow-polka-dotted parasol. As the day progressed and I didn’t get the shots I wanted, I complained about this coddling of the snakes. Let them feel the sun! The wrangler protested, but I was adamant—and I nearly cooked one in a matter of minutes. The snake became extremely sluggish and had to be exchanged for a fresh one. These fearsome reptiles are unable to control their body temperature, and on exposed ground they will fry like eggs. Rattlesnakes are, in truth, rather frail creatures.

  The outcome of all this was that, although we started out with blankets and telephoto lenses and a nervous operator by himself, by the middle of the day all the crew were standing within a few feet of these giant rattlesnakes, turning their backs to them, flicking cigarette ash on them, talking of other things. Nobody worried about snakes any more. We had quickly and unconsciously adjusted to the reality of what we had seen.

  The rattlesnakes couldn’t hurt us.

  In most situations, wild animals are encountered so rarely that it’s more appropriate to feel privileged than afraid.

  Of course that depends on the situation, and the animal. White-tip sharks are relatively benign; other species of shark may not be. There’s no point pretending that African lions are tame and therefore you can get out of the Land Cruiser and go over and say hello. But, by the same token, you should realize that if you did get out, and if there were no cubs around, the chances are that the lions would just move off.

  For some reason it seems difficult for people to get an appropriate perspective on animals. In American national parks a certain number of people are killed or injured each year because they approach wild animals, such as bison, to get a better picture, or to feed them. For many urban dwellers it may be that the concept of “wild animals” is itself extinct; the only animals they encounter are pets or animals in zoos, so why not send your four-year-old daughter over to pose next to the buffalo in Yellowstone? It’ll make a cute picture.

  This kind of blind trust is the reverse of the blind fear that so many people feel. Sometimes I think that man needs to feel a special position within nature, and this leads him to believe that he is either specially hated by other animals or specially cherished.

  Instead of the truth, which is that he’s just another animal on the plain. A smart one, but just another animal.r />
  I found it difficult to give up my fear of animals. I had to, because my experience was forcing me to stop seeing animals as fearsome; I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. But it was still difficult to give it up.

  For one thing, a certain thrill is gone. We don’t like to give up our thrills. I have told people about the fact that certain sharks and moray eels and barracuda are not dangerous and watched their faces fall, then tighten, grow pinched. They disagree with me. They tell me I am reporting special cases. They remind me of the limits of my own experience. Sharks not dangerous? Morays not dangerous? Snakes not dangerous? Please.

  They don’t like to hear it. Telling them facts and statistics only makes them more irritable. Yet the chances are almost vanishingly small that any Western person will have a dangerous encounter with an animal. In America, every year, sixty thousand people die of auto accidents, a possibility no one fears. Some seven people die of snakebite every year, and everyone is terrified of snakes.

  Then, too, fear of animals is a part of popular culture, a theme of books and movies and TV. If you drop it, it gives you the same feeling of loss as not watching the latest hit TV show, or not knowing about this year’s intellectual pinup, or not following professional sports. You lose something in common with other people.

  The other thing that happens is that, since fear of animals is a part of popular culture, it reminds you that one of the deep, unquestioned beliefs of popular culture is wrong. This is a little unsettling, because you are obliged to wonder what else is wrong, too.

  Fear of animals is also a pleasantly childish feeling, and to give it up is to exchange some of the magical feelings of childhood for some of the more practical feelings of adulthood. At first it’s not comfortable. Later you wonder why everyone doesn’t do it.

  In the end, how does anyone benefit from being afraid? Maybe it’s bolstering of the values of civilization, by making nature the bogeyman. Here I am sitting in this traffic jam, breathing carbon monoxide and pollutants, staring at a hideous manmade landscape, but I really am better off because, if all this were gone, lions and bears would attack and eat me.