The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel

by Peter Benchley

  Her feet touched bottom, a hard, slick rock ledge near the island, and though she wasn’t sure how she had gotten there so fast she was glad to be home.

  Bottom? She shook her head and looked at the pirogue and at the horizon and at the softly rolling sea swells. She was in at least ten, maybe twenty, fathoms of water. Then what was she standing on? For, there was no question that she was standing on something. She drained water from her mask and put her face down and saw that the manta had come beneath her and had risen, like a balloon, until it rested just at her feet.

  Did it want something? Was it injured again? Paloma took a breath and knelt on the manta’s back, and, very slowly, it began to move. She stood, and the manta stopped. She knelt, and it started to move again; she stood, and again it stopped.

  It’s behaving like a dog, she thought; it’s waiting for me. But that, she knew, was impossible; the animal didn’t have such “higher” instincts. And she was reluctant to impute to it “higher” qualities as motives.

  And yet she was impelled to respond, even if only to the appearance of a motive. So, disregarding the contradiction of all she knew or reasonably believed, she hyperventilated and dropped to her knees on the manta’s back and gripped with her hands.

  This time the manta did not start slowly—it dived fast, shooting for the bottom. Within a few seconds, the top of the seamount rose before Paloma’s eyes. She expected the manta to slow and level off and cruise among the canyons, but it didn’t. As it neared the upper rocks, it banked, like a fighter plane beginning a roll-over dive, and aimed down the sheer side of the rock wall toward the blue mists.

  Paloma’s ears were popping, for she had never descended this fast or this far, and though she was nowhere near a crisis of oxygen, the strange new pressures in the strangely cold water made her pulse pound. She wanted to let go, but she didn’t dare: She wasn’t sure she could make it to the surface, however far it was.

  At the edge of the darkness, down deep where there were no more reds or yellows or greens, where the blues looked indigo and the indigos violet and the violets black, the manta suddenly leveled out, banked sharply to the left, and entered a canyon in the wall of the seamount.

  It slowed and stopped and hung above a sand bottom, its wings almost touching the rock sides of the canyon. Paloma looked up and could not see the surface—no sun, no shafts of light, just a vague lightening of the gray of the water—and a tic of panic shook her chest, the same kind of panic she felt when she looked down from a very high place. She lowered her eyes and told herself not to look up again, for there was no point: She would either go up with the manta, or she would not go up at all.

  What was this place? Why had the manta come here? Perhaps it was to places like this that mantas came for refuge—deep, cool, away from the sun and the surface, protected by the canyon walls from the open-sea currents.

  Below was sand, above was water, on the sides were walls of rock like any other rock, except … Something was strange about these rocks. They seemed to be themselves studded with countless small stones.

  She wanted to get closer, to see more clearly this place she could never dive to on her own. She rose away from the manta, praying that it would not now suddenly decide to abandon her, and kicked quickly to one of the walls.

  She reached out to touch one of the stones, and before her fingertips had made contact she knew what these strange walls were made of: Each of the stones was not a stone at all, but an oyster.

  At first they had been unrecognizable to her because they were larger than any she had ever seen—out of reach of all fishermen, they had been allowed to mature completely—and because they were camouflaged—out of the sweep of the currents, they had been covered with living vegetation.

  She reached immediately for her knife, but it was not there. She didn’t stop to wonder why, or to search for it further, but instead she gripped an oyster with her hand and twisted and pulled until it came away from the rock face of the canyon.

  Her fingertips were scratched and shredded, her palm bleeding from little cuts, but she felt no pain. Using both hands now, she grabbed and twisted and pulled the oysters free and stuffed them into her dress, dropping them down to her rope belt. When her front was full, she pushed the oysters around her sides to her back, not feeling the sharp shells slice her skin.

  Finally, she fell off the wall, exhausted and aching for breath and stuffed fuller than a roasting chicken. She landed on the manta’s back. Had it been a horse, she would have spurred it on, for she needed to go now, and in but one direction—up.

  And the manta took her up, flying with the swift grace of a bird seeking the sky. Soon she saw sunlight and blue crystal.

  At the last second, the manta slowed so it would not leap clear of the water, and like a whale it rolled through the surface and lay with its back in the air. And on its back lay Paloma, with her arms spread wide and blood running between her fingers.

  The manta stayed with her until she had rested and swum to her pirogue and climbed aboard and emptied her dress of oysters. It stayed still as she knelt in the pirogue and watched it, silently, reverently.

  And then, as the leading edge of the red swollen sun touched the horizon, the great ray flipped a wing and dipped its head and kicked its tail in the air, and was gone, leaving a ring of ripples that spread across the twilight water and were soon gone, too.

  For a long time, until the sun had sunk and the sky had darkened and the first stars were faintly seen, Paloma continued to kneel in the pirogue, letting the tide take her.

  Far away in the night, she heard the voices of Jo and Indio and Manolo, and the words she could discern across the still water were contentious and bitter and accusing, for now they were safely floating and no longer feared for their lives. Later, she would get a motorboat and retrieve them. She thought they would no longer be eager to return to the seamount.

  The manta would not return, either. She felt certain of that, though she could not have said why she was certain. Perhaps it was part of having some of the good thing. Perhaps it was a feeling that nature had needed to restore a balance that had been set askew, and to restore it had used the manta ray and, to an extent, had used Paloma as well. And now that the balance had been restored, the manta was released to fly free.

  But what did she mean by nature? What was …

  She stopped thinking, and she looked at the spot in the sky where soon the moon would rise and hang like an amulet and cast its golden path on the water, and she smiled and said aloud, “Thank you.”

  BONUS CONTENT

  Note from Wendy Benchley About the Writing of Peter Benchley’s Favorite Novel

  Roughly thirty years ago my husband, Peter, took a wonderfully strange ride in the deep—a once-in-a-lifetime ride on the back of a giant manta ray that would compel him to write this, his favorite novel, The Girl of the Sea of Cortez.

  Peter chronicled the full story of how he encountered the manta and the exhilarating rides that ensued in his book Shark Trouble. He was filming an American Sportsman segment on the huge schools of hammerhead sharks that used to gather periodically in the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez, but the majestic manta ultimately became the center of the program’s cinematic attention and affection.

  In truth, manta rays are like floating islands, oasis sanctuaries that host a myriad of animals seeking shelter, protection, and sustenance from these grand giants. But they are very shy and almost never permit human contact.

  This magical encounter gave Peter the idea for an adventurous, dramatic, and poignant story about the tension between humanity’s ever-growing need for food and the enormous pressure that overfishing is putting on our oceans. The Girl of the Sea of Cortez was prescient in its message that the sea, like everything else on Earth, is finite and fragile.

  The fate of these beautiful mantas is in serious jeopardy. Because of their particular anatomy and the fact that mantas can’t swim backward, they are prone to getting entangled in fi
shing lines and nets. As a result, they often turn up as incidental fishing “by-catch” or, worse, they are deliberately hunted down by frustrated fishermen who have lost too many nets. And the alarming rise in the past five years of the use of manta gill rakers in Chinese medicine is devastating manta populations globally—putting them at risk of extinction.

  This excerpt from Shark Trouble captures the spirit of adventure, wonder, and fierce loyalty to the ocean that gives The Girl of the Sea of Cortez its soul.

  Enjoy!

  Sincerely,

  Wendy Benchley

  Advisory Trustee for the Environmental Defense Fund, President of the board of Shark Savers, international board member of WildAid, and Co-founder with Blue Frontier Foundation of the Peter Benchley Ocean Awards

  Excerpt from Peter Benchley’s Shark Trouble

  Twenty years ago I had an experience with a ray that changed my life. Literally. Not only did I hurry home and write a book about it—The Girl of the Sea of Cortez—but it altered forever my perception of animals, people, the sea, and the interconnectedness of everything on earth.

  I was in the Sea of Cortez, doing an American Sportsman segment on hammerhead sharks, which for reasons no one has ever been able to ascertain gather there periodically in huge, peaceful schools of hundreds, perhaps thousands, at a time. The gatherings seem to have nothing to do with either breeding or feeding; the hammerheads are simply there, in crowds so thick that, seen from below, they block the sun.

  The underwater cameramen on the shoot were old friends, Stan Waterman and Howard Hall; Howard’s wife, Michele, who’s now a producer, director, and partner in Howard’s film company, was along in the dual capacities of nurse and still photographer.

  One afternoon, when we returned to our chartered boat, the Don Jose, full of macho tales of death-defying diving among the anthropophagi, we were interrupted by a very excited Michele, who directed us to look beneath the boat.

  There, basking in the boat’s cool shadow, was the largest manta ray any of us had ever seen. (We’d soon learn that it measured eighteen feet from wing tip to wing tip; for the moment, all we knew was that it looked as big as an F-16.) Its unique cephalic fins, which would unfurl during feeding and become supple sweeps to gather food into the immense maw, were rolled up tightly now, and they looked exactly like horns—thus, the manta’s age-old traditional name, devilfish.

  For centuries the manta was one of the most terrifying animals in the sea: huge, horned, winged, with a mouth big enough to swallow a person whole and a proclivity for leaping clear out of the water, turning somersaults, and slamming down upon the surface of the sea, obviously daring any foolish sailor to fall overboard into its ghastly grasp. Equally obviously, such hideous monsters deserved no fate better than death, and spearing mantas used to be a popular sport among the few, the bold, and the brave.

  In fact, mantas are harmless. They eat only plankton and other microscopic sea life. They breach (soar out of the water) for reasons no one knows for certain, probably to rid themselves of parasites but possibly, as I prefer to believe, just for the hell of it.

  Usually, they avoid people, swimming—flying seems more accurate—slowly away from approaching divers. Sometimes, however, they seem to seek the company of people; witness the manta that now rested peacefully beneath our boat. Before any of us could ask, Michele told us how she had discovered the magnificent creature.

  The air temperature was well above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The Don Jose was not air-conditioned. To keep bearably cool, Michele went overboard frequently, and on one of her plunges she had seen the enormous ray hovering motionless beneath the boat. She swam toward it. It didn’t move. As she drew near, she saw that the animal was injured: where one wing joined the body there was a tear in the flesh, and the wound was full of rope. Michele supposed that the manta had swum blindly into one of the countless nets set by fishermen all over the Sea of Cortez. In struggling to free itself, which it had accomplished not with teeth (they have none) but with sheer strength, it had torn its wing and carried pieces of the broken net away with it.

  Michele kept expecting the manta to ease away from her as she approached, but by now she was virtually on top of it and still it hadn’t moved. She was, however, out of breath; she decided to return to the boat and put on scuba gear.

  The manta was still there when she returned. This time she was emitting noisy streams of bubbles, and she knew that the manta would flee from them.

  It didn’t.

  Slowly, she let herself fall gently down until she was sitting on the manta’s back.

  Still it didn’t move.

  Michele reached forward and, very gingerly, pulled strand after strand of thick rope netting out of the ragged wound. She had no idea how—or even if—rays experience pain, but if they did, she thought, this had to hurt.

  The manta lay perfectly still.

  When all the rope was gone, Michele carefully packed the shreds of torn flesh together and pressed them into the cavity in the wing. She covered the wound with her hands.

  Now the manta came to life. Very slowly it raised its wings and brought them down again, and very slowly the great body began to move forward, not with enough velocity to throw Michele off its back but with an easy, casual pace that let her ride comfortably along. To steady herself Michele put one hand on the manta’s six-foot-wide upper lip, and off they went, with Michele’s heart pounding in her chest, elation filling her heart, amazement and delight flooding her mind.

  The boat was anchored on a sea mount, an underwater mountain whose peak extended to within a hundred feet of the surface, and with unimaginable grace the manta took Michele on a flying tour of the entire mountaintop. Down it flew to the edge of darkness, then up again to the surface light.

  Michele didn’t know how long the ride lasted—fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour—but eventually the manta returned to its station in the shadow of the boat and stopped. Michele let go and came to the surface: incredulous, thrilled beyond words, and knowing full well that we would never believe her because surely, by the time we returned, the manta would have long since returned to its home range, wherever that might be.

  But it hadn’t. It was still there, still resting in the cool, still apparently—impossibly!—willing to have more contact with humans.

  We decided to try to capture the manta on film. We knew we couldn’t duplicate Michele’s experience, but even if we could get some shots of the great ray flying away, with a human being in the same frame to give a sense of its size, we’d have some very special film.

  When Howard and Stan had filmed the ray itself from every possible angle, they signaled for me to descend, as Michele had, and attempt to land gently on the manta’s back. I had done my best to neutralize my buoyancy so that, once submerged, my 180 pounds would weigh nothing, and now I used my hands like little fins to guide me down upon the animal as lightly as a butterfly.

  As soon as the manta felt my presence on its back, it started forward. It flew very slowly at first, but soon its wings fell into a long, graceful sweep, and it accelerated to a speed at which I—in order to stay aboard—had to grip its upper lip with one hand and a wing with the other and lie flat against its back. My mask was mashed against my face, we were going so fast, and my hair was plastered back so hard that on film I look bald.

  I felt like a fighter pilot—no, not a pilot, for I had no control over this craft; rather, like a passenger in a fighter plane. Down we flew, and banked around the sea mount, and soared again. We passed turtles that didn’t give us a passing glance and hammerheads that (I swear) did a double take as they saw us go by.

  The world grew dark, and for a moment I was afraid—I knew we had gone very deep, but I had no way of knowing exactly how deep because I couldn’t let go with one hand to retrieve my depth gauge. If we’re too deep, I worried, I’ll run out of air, or get the bends on surfacing, or—

  Just then, as if to reassure me, the manta returned to the world of light. It r
ushed for the surface, gaining speed with every thrust of its mighty wings, and I had the sudden, terrifying conviction that it was going to burst through the surface and take to the air—and me with it—and when we slammed down again on the water I would be reduced to pudding. But long before it reached the surface, the manta swerved away and began to cruise twenty or thirty feet below the boat.

  Finally, it slowed, then silently stopped directly in the shadow of the boat. I let go and made my way to the surface.

  Like Michele, I didn’t know how long my journey had lasted, and there was no way to find out. My air tank was almost empty, and Stan and Howard had each run through a full load of film, which meant that I had been under water on that magical ride for at least twenty minutes. But how deep, and for how long, at what depth? The only way I would know how much residual nitrogen remained in my system—the villain that brings on bends—was to wait. If I came down with the agony of the bends, in my joints or my guts, I’d know I had gone too deep for too long.

  If I didn’t, I’d know I hadn’t. Simple as that.

  The manta, meanwhile, remained beneath the boat. Over the next three days, every member of the crew had a chance to swim with or ride on the manta, and always, without exception, the wonderful ray returned its passengers to the same exact spot beneath the boat.

  As soon as I returned home, I began to write, for a story had been born, entire, in my head. I wrote it at record speed (for me) and with thoughts, feelings, and perceptions I didn’t know I had.