About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

by Barry Lopez

  LIKE MANY scuba divers I had made my initial dives (after those for certification) in a tropical sea, in warm, clear, currentless waters on the Great Barrier Reef in my case, east of Cairns, Australia. In the years following I saw more of the tropics but dove, too, in steep-walled fjords in southeast Alaska, in subtropical Galápagos’s shark-filled waters, in kelp forests off the coast of California, and under the sea ice in McMurdo Sound, in Antarctica. Diving regularly on the northwest coast of the United States, near my home, in strong currents and cold water and wearing a bulky dry suit has made diving in the tropics seem an unencumbered, almost rarefied experience. The ornate patterns and brilliant color of tropical reef life, displayed like Persian rugs in glycerin hues, and the sometimes overwhelming number of living forms in lucent, tranquil water, are enough to make some cold-water divers, like myself, speechless. The visual impact of Bonaire’s reefs is further intensified by the fact that they have changed very little since Vespucci’s ships passed overhead. Only large conchs and lobsters and the larger grouper have been hunted out. Here is a welter and diversity of life still comparable to what once stunned the first Europeans to enter the Americas.

  In 1971, as a precaution, Bonaire closed its near-shore waters to spearfishers, to collecting for the aquarium trade, and to commercial fishing. The same terrestrial barrenness that once caused the island to be disparaged (and so left undeveloped) has, oddly, contributed directly to the preservation of its reefs. Elsewhere in the tropical world coral reefs are significantly endangered—a blight little known but comparable to that on tropical rain forests. (Because coral reefs occupy less than 1 percent of the ocean floor but harbor close to 25 percent of ocean species, marine scientists regard any threat to them as alarming.) An unspecified amount of reef destruction in the past decade, all over the world, has been attributed to a rise in ocean temperatures, one debated cause of which is global warming. Less debatable causes of coral-reef destruction include coastal logging and intensive agriculture. Sedimentation from eroded, clear-cut slopes and pesticide and herbicide runoff from farmlands may have damaged many coral reefs in Central America and Indonesia irreversibly. In the Philippines, cyanide flushing used to stun fish bound for pet shops and restaurant aquariums and fishing with dynamite are major problems.

  One is not reminded of these troubles in Bonaire. Before coming here I had read several intriguing papers about Bonaire’s healthy waters. One discussed the shelter offered by sea-grass beds and saltwater-tolerant mangrove swamps in an embayment called Lac Lagoon, a highly productive nursery for yellowtail snapper, great barracuda, stoplight parrotfish, schoolmaster, French grunt, and dozens of other species of fish. Another paper described cryptobiotic marine communities, so-called hidden neighborhoods established beneath natural coral rubble in Bonaire’s shallow waters, ensembles of life in which the authors counted 367 species of sponges, tunicates, bryozoans, and other small aquatic creatures. These communities were vigorous, varied, resplendent.

  Provoked by such wonder, ordriven by curiosity, the ordinary diver in Bonaire finds this complex seascape nearly impossible to penetrate with any degree of certitude. With a concentrated effort (an enthusiasm admittedly at odds with the relaxed atmosphere of the resorts), one might sort out the differences among several dozen fish or learn to distinguish between corals and sponges. But even for a conscientious diver the task is enormous. The descriptive vocabulary—crinoids, ctenophores (ten-ah-fores), nudibranchs (nu-da-branks)—offers relatively few images or names easy to recall. Of the thirty-three or so body plans, or phyla, into which all life is routinely sorted, only two arrangements are at all familiar to land-habituated divers: arthropods (insects and spiders) and chordates (all fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals). Representatives of every phylum are found in the ocean, arthropods and chordates minor among them. The specific arrangements of biological architecture, metabolism, and propulsion are so counterintuitive here, so strange to human senses, they seem extraplanetary. Moreover, many animals—sea fans, hydroids, wire corals, for example—look like plants. Other animals, such as encrusting corals and scorpionfish, look like rocks. Even fish, the easiest animals to identify, can be perplexing—juveniles of various species of reef fish frequently look nothing like their parents, and other species change shape and gender over time. And a single organism, such as a sea nettle, may look no different from a colony of animals, such as a Portuguese man-of-war.

  A diver in sixty feet of water, checking to see how much air is left and how long she or he has been down and where dive partners may be, does not readily hit upon any good approach to these mysteries.

  Most scuba divers at Bonaire’s dozen or so resorts—about 29,000 a year fly in, more than double the island’s indigenous population—anticipate balmy, hospitable weather and plan to make two or three dives a day for a week or so. Developing a refined sense of what one is actually looking at underwater doesn’t seem called for; to be able to talk about it in any detail seems, for many, to run vaguely counter to the idea of a vacation. The experience, principally, is to be thrilled by. The reefs are to be genuinely appreciated and, perhaps over cocktails, are conceivably meant to provoke. One is prompted to wonder, for example, what’s happened to this kind of profusion, this density of life, in the rest of the world? Aside from enclaves of birds in the jungles of Ecuador and Peru or wildlife in isolated parts of Congo, few undisturbed terrestrial spots remain for any late-twentieth-century observer. But then one might also be moved to wonder a little about Bonaire. Sections of its reefs have recently been closed to diving in order to “rest” them. They have begun to show the scrapes, breakage, and fatal smears of small animal life associated with intensive tourist diving. (Barely fifty years old, scuba diving has already had a marked effect at some localities. Reefs in the Florida Keys, for example, have been severely damaged in spots by thousands of dive-boat anchorings, by the snatching and impact of divers unable to control their buoyancy and drift, and by divers carelessly kicking out with their fins.)

  When I emerged from Bonaire’s waters each day, I would enter in my notebook the names of the fish I had seen on Leonora’s Reef or in one of the other places where ten or twelve of us dove at a time: cornetfish, smooth trunkfish, yellowhead wrasse, long-spine squirrelfish, balloonfish, midnight parrotfish, honeycomb cowfish, whitespotted filefish, lizardfish—and then the crabs and snails, the eels, the sponges, the corals, until I was worn out, paging through the reference texts and inquiring among the divemasters who supervised our excursions.

  One afternoon, walking back to my room from the boat dock, I stopped next to a frangipani tree in which a single bird, a bananaquit, was singing. I imagined the dense thicket of the tree’s branches filled with forty or fifty kinds of singing, energetic birds, and that I had only a few moments to walk around the tree, peering in, to grasp some detail of each to memorize. I had no paper on which to write down a name or on which to sketch. Then, I imagined, they flew away. Who were they? How could I know where I was, really, if I didn’t know who they were? It was like that every day underwater—an unknown host, confounding and esoteric as the nine choirs of angels.

  THE REFLEXIVE HABITS human beings must develop to stay alive underwater with scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) are inherently risky. They have largely to do with controlling the rate at which pressure on the body’s tissues changes. Divers who are physically fit and diving under supervision in a benign environment like Bonaire, and who possess even amateur technical diving skills, rarely experience a problem. Still, diving is dicey, strange. The stress the human body is subjected to by the change in pressure at a depth of only 16 feet compares with the effect of a change in altitude of 18,000 feet on land. Releasing the increase in pressure too quickly can be fatal. In holiday circumstances like those prevailing on Bonaire, one can be lulled into thinking nothing will ever go wrong—with the salubrious weather, the magnificent reefs, or one’s own dive technique. It is the feeling, of course, one vacations in search of.


  The divemasters on Bonaire cautioned us repeatedly, in a friendly way, not to dive deep, not to go below one hundred feet. It is not only inherently dangerous (four atmospheres of pressure at that depth is enough to precipitate nitrogen narcosis and disorientation), but for most, unnecessary—the density of marine life drops off quickly after about sixty feet. As much as anything, their cautions were a reminder to pay attention to air consumption, to the time you spent at each depth, and to your rate of ascent to guard against decompression sickness, the so-called bends.

  Few scuba diving accidents occur at depth. Most happen at the mysterious surface, a wafer-thin realm where air bounds water, where light suddenly changes flux, ambient sound changes register, and the body passes through a membrane fraught with possibility or, coming the other way, with relief. When water closes over a diver’s head, a feat that once had seemed implausible, to breathe underwater, seems suddenly boundless with promise. There is often little indication at the undulating, reflective surface, the harrowing transition zone, of the vividness, the intricacy, the patterns unfurled below.

  Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. (Doctors subjecting volunteers to greater atmospheric pressure in hyperbaric chambers don’t find the increased flow of plasma beta endorphins—the “buzz” hormones—that divers frequently experience.) Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; nor the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “left” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely the exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not just a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet, what Jacques Cousteau called “l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs.”

  It is some complicated run of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror, exhilaration of another sort entirely. I have felt such terror underwater twice, once when I was swept away in a deep countercurrent in the Gulf of Mexico, and another time beneath the ice in Antarctica, when a piece of equipment froze and a sudden avalanche of events put me in a perilous situation. Afterward, I was not afraid to go back in the water, but I proceeded with more care. The incidents made me feel more tenderly toward anything at all managing, in whatever way, to stay alive.

  II

  ONE DAY, walking into town from the resort where I was staying, I saw a man making a wall of coral stone, three feet high, two feet wide, and hundreds of feet long. The wall would separate the grounds of a new resort condominium from the public road, Kaya Gobernador N. Debrot. He controlled the definition of this stretch of space by fitting randomly shaped stones in a rulerstraight wall with its edges perfectly square. We didn’t speak. I did not stare while he worked but came back in the evening to appreciate the lack of error in what he’d engineered. He had the firmest grasp of this reality.

  No such attentiveness marked the resort meals available where I was staying. They so lacked imagination in their preparation that after one or two dinners one had experienced the whole menu. Nothing was to be found under the surface. Seeking an alternative, I began to walk into town with my dive partner Adam Apalategui, an American Basque, to see what we could find. Kralendijk, meaning “the place of the coral dike” in Dutch, is the largest of Bonaire’s two towns, and locally more often called Playa. We located a good spot there, a small pub and restaurant named Mona Lisa. One evening, after the chef had elaborated in English for us on his French-language menu of the day, he suddenly offered to make something special, a medley of local wahoo, barracuda, and dorado, brought in fresh only an hour ago. At an adjacent table he went over the same menu again, speaking Dutch. The meals he served were set out beautifully on the plate, distinctively flavored, punctuated and savory. His appreciation of the components of the meal that night intensified for me moving images of the three species of fish. As we ate I imagined one thread of succulence tying the Dutch chef, our dives, and the indigenous fishes together. The chef, lingering with us as he had in his initial description of the meal, meant the connection to be made, to enhance the experience of Bonaire.

  In most every settlement or rural village I’ve visited in Africa, in China, in Australia, I’ve taken a long walk in the late evening air after such a pleasant meal. Sudden bursts of domestic noise, the sprawl of sleeping dogs under a yard light, the stillness of toys on pounded earth, the order in wash hung over a line—all compel a desire to embrace the unknown people associated with these things, as if all the unwanted complication had gone out of life. One evening, as Adam and I strolled north along the main road back to our resort and rooms, I ruminated silently, and quite presumptuously, on the Bonaireans.

  In a book I was then reading called Politics on Bonaire, Anke Klomp describes the evolution of a system of political patronage that characterizes the island. (The Netherlands Antilles are autonomous within the kingdom of the Netherlands. The five islands form a parliamentary democracy, with parliament sitting in Willemstad, Curaçao. Each island also has its own legislative and executive bodies.) Among the more interesting things Klomp discusses is the curious history of egalitarian society here. Because it could never support banana, sugar, coffee, cotton, or tobacco plantations, Bonaire never developed either a class of gentlemen planters or an agrarian working class. As a result, social distinctions based on ownership of land, on race or ethnicity, remained relatively unimportant, as they did not in the rest of the Caribbean. (The building of oil refineries on Curaçao and Aruba early in the twentieth century brought an influx of North American and European managers and divided those previously analogous societies more sharply along racial and class lines.) Bonaire exports very little today save salt (much of it bound for the northeastern United States, for use on winter roads); and it is without an agricultural or manufacturing base. Since all goods must therefore be imported, and because government is the major importer, politicians on Bonaire are in effect, in Klomp’s phrase, “ ‘gatekeepers’ par excellence.” Further, since Bonaire’s population is small, the imposing personality of a single politician can have a major impact on political expression on the island.

  Where this has led and how patronage operates on Bonaire are the central subjects of Klomp’s book. Observations in her introduction, however, cause a reader to reflect on the ethnic and racial accord apparent today in the streets and shops of Kralendijk and Rincon, Bonaire’s second town. And to wonder what changes have come since 1983, when Politics on Bonaire was written. The number of resorts and condominiums to accommodate divers has greatly increased since then; and, to hear local people tell it, the conspicuous wealth of North American and European visitors and their abrupt, suspicious public manner have subtly altered the unconscious atmosphere of equality that once characterized Bonaire.

  The situation, of course, is more complex than this worry. One gains some insight into social subdivisions, and into the island’s history, by listening to where and how people speak. English, the language of tourism, is spoken at the airport, in gift shops and resorts, and in many of the restaurants. In the schools and in banks and government offices it is Dutch. On the street and in homes throughout the island (as on Aruba and Curaçao) it is Papiamentu, a creole developed from the Portuguese pidgin of slave traders and influenced by Spanish, Dutch, and West African dialects. In the open-air vegetable market near the Kralendijk docks, and on a popular radio station, it is Venezuelan Spanish. Bonaireans politely and easily compliment each other by saying so-and-so speaks three or four languages, lending the island a cosmopolitan aspect, but this is rarely true
. What some people learn in addition to the language they are born to, which of course they may speak poorly, is almost always the “supermarket idiom” of another language, a tropeless speech of commercial transactions and declarative conversation—unengaged, impersonal, pleasant. It is the language of international air carriers, phatic and anemic. To listen closely to its banalities, or to hear no other, fuller language spoken in place of it, is eventually to become terrified. It is the language that matches the meals served at my resort.

  One evening, after Adam and I had walked back from town, after the silence of my room had replaced the night drift of human voices along the road, I grew restless and went out again. I stood on the resort’s plank dock by the water, near an open-air restaurant where the last patrons were throwing pieces of bread to schools of fish racing frantically back and forth beneath the illuminated surface of the water. Forty miles to the west the lights of Willemstad glowed on the horizon. Above the penumbra of that glow, Venus sparkled in a deep Prussian-blue sky. Higher overhead huge cumulus towers scudded west.

  I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life on the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand; named images, nouns. How were they related? What were the verbs? Which syntaxes were indigenous to the place? I had asked a dozen knowledgeable people. No one was inclined to elaborate—or they didn’t know. “Did you see the octopus!” someone shouted after a dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was there, just then? Why?