The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds

by Diane Ackerman

  “I used to look around when he’d talk like this, and I’ll tell you, it would go dark. You’d be standing in the wheelhouse and it would go dark, and you were scared to look back at that huge wave following us, because on a crayfishing trawler most of the equipment was on the front end of the boat and there was only a big platform on the back. If any of that water had actually caught up with us and cascaded down over us, it would have pushed the stern straight under and we would have been sunk. Time after time the waves broke and we would have six feet of water crashing onto the deck. We would be standing in three feet of water in the wheelhouse and George, still at the top of his voice, would be screaming, ‘You don’t scare me, nothing’s going to sink us, we’re going to get there. If you think you can do it, try! This ship is better than any wave you care to send. Next one, send me the biggest. Give me your best shot, and I’ll show you!’ And I was saying, ‘George, George, don’t you think, don’t you think you ought not to tempt …’ And Big John was just standing there, worried, smoking a cigarette. Then two big waves hit us close together and even George lost his footing, and we all ended up falling, and there was water all around us. I thought we’d sunk. I thought, This is it; get your boots off and start swimming. We were all topsy-turvy, and George was still laughing like hell and saying, ‘You bastard, you missed, you missed!’ Over the radio, we heard: ‘George, what the hell’s going on there? Are you afloat? Are you swimming? George, where are you?’ And George got hold of the radio and he said, ‘Nothing’s big enough to sink me. This is quarter-inch steel plate. I built this boat with my own fucking hands, and water is not taking me to Davy Jones!’

  “I’ll tell you, it took us about three hours to do that eighteen miles. It was awesome. There was a small pass behind Pukenai, and when we came through it everybody was on deck—from a mile out you could hear them cheering. We came in there and we were heroes. We were men in a man’s world. The storm petered out that afternoon, but we spent two days drinking and getting absolutely paralytic. We went home after two weeks of fishing, having caught only four and a half pounds of crayfish. Now that was a storm.”

  The sencho leans deep into the cabin, whispering “Torishima, Torishima!” and pointing off the stern of the boat. In a rush, Peter and I climb over the sleepers and out onto the deck. The night is iced with stars, stars in a wilderness of stars. The lights of four distant fishing boats twinkle off our port side. Then I begin to see a greater darkness in the night—Torishima bulging up right in front of us. Peter and I look at each other in joy and disbelief. We are here, actually here at Torishima, after so many months. But it is still a mystery. And where are the birds?

  “Camp,” the sencho says, pointing to one side of the island. We follow the line of his hand, which indicates a direction, but no land or safety, only a trail into deep space. Our base camp is invisible, in the foothills of the coming morning. This should not surprise us, being so much like life itself, but it does.

  We nod, thank him, and stagger back to the cabin; it is like crawling into a low, floating cattle shed. Peter arranges himself against one wall, and I against the other. We close our eyes and try to sleep. There is no use waking Hiroshi. There is nothing anyone can see or do until daybreak. After a few minutes of silence, a brief, mournful call strikes across the waves.

  Peter’s eyes flash open; he sits up, whispers excitedly, “Hear that? Short-tailed albatross!” Then he lays his head back down on his fisherman’s sweater, against the large clock, below the ornate gold mirror, next to the set of large fuses, and falls asleep, smiling.

  At first light, we rise and stumble out onto the deck again; this time we see the black, nugget-shaped island clearly. We have drifted a little in the night, and the sencho quickly climbs up and actually stands upon the wheel, steering it with one naked foot. Hiroshi wakes up and joins us with a broad smile. “Torishima!” we cry in unison, arms open wide, like opera singers frozen in the midst of a great aria.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Making many Zodiac runs, the sencho drops us off, with fifty boxes and heavy sacks of food, water, and camera equipment in a steep, boulder-strewn inlet. We wave good-bye to him and turn and face one another as if for the first time. Hiroshi unpacks tall jugs of Chinese tea and orange juice, and we pass them among us, along with sweet rolls. Neither Hiroshi nor I have eaten for twenty-four hours and we are hungry, but this is, implicitly, a token meal, a chance to pause a moment at the island’s rim and break bread together.

  “Torishima,” Peter says quietly, nodding as if in answer to a question.

  “Torishima,” I say, feeling some of the same cold thrill I felt the first time I looked through a telescope. There was Saturn with its broad sherbety rings and all its radiant moons in tow, exactly where it was supposed to be. A hidden world.

  “Torishima,” Hiroshi says, with the pride of an innkeeper unlocking a mythic realm.

  High above us, on a promontory jutting out from the sharp, twisted tumble of black rocks, stands the small cement garrison that will be our home. Getting there means climbing up fourteen stories of almost vertical rock. The men carry the heavy loads, silently, though their faces groan. Puffing hard, I balance lighter loads on my head, as women do the world over, and carry sacks draped around my body. At an especially awkward point, we work together—Peter tosses boxes up to me, and using that momentum, I toss them higher, to where Hiroshi lifts them higher still. Before long, everyone’s hair is slicked down by sweat.

  “Friends,” Hiroshi says, pointing to a second inlet, not far from the one in which we landed, where the government team of ten men has begun unloading their supplies, too, and climbing like a long caravan of ants up the mountain. Some carry stacked boxes in front of them; others have plastic baskets roped to their backs. We wave to them and haul our first supplies over the last ridge to the garrison. Set back from a patio of rock where the remains of a cannon sits, the building has one doorway and windows no wider than a rifle barrel. In front of it lies a curious heap of neatly arranged lozenges. Long ago, bags of cement became wet, lique fied, and hardened. In time their outer sacks weathered away, leaving this array of stone pillows.

  Hiroshi walks inside the building, looks around, picks up a half-decayed rat with a gaping mouth, tosses it outside, says, “Yes, this is home.”

  Greeting the government team halfway down the mountain, we combine forces and spend the next hour hauling up all the supplies. When some of the men finish, they unpack small amber-colored bottles of a stamina drink and down the tonic in a toss. The cook they’ve brought with them has already begun preparing rice, as the men see to their knapsacks. Inside the bunker, the sleeping arrangements follow a strict protocol. A low wall of boxes runs down the center of the room.

  “You eat away your privacy,” Peter says, laughing, as he helps to stack the boxes filled with everything from dried seaweed to tinned squid.

  Ropes divide our space from that belonging to the other ten. Hiroshi, Peter, and I will be sleeping in one corner, barricaded by boxes, with me between the two men. This arrangement conveys a clear unspoken message: she’s being guarded. We don’t expect any trouble. But I am the only woman in a camp in the wilderness with twelve men, and our provisions include alcohol. Best to take extra precautions. As we begin to unpack some of our personal items, Hiroshi presents me with a green sleeveless poncho made of nylon. Light and voluminous, it falls in drapes to the ground, and it has one elasticized hole at the top. He reads the puzzlement on my face.

  “To change your clothes,” he explains, smiling. “It’s what women use in canoes.”

  I shake my head in amazement. He has thought of everything.

  By now, some of the men have set up a low wooden table on the ground in front of the building and rolled up a log at either side, and we all sit down for a quick breakfast of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, cheese, fish, and rice. Hiroshi hands Peter and me plastic nesting bowls and red enamel mugs. His own mug is black-and-white with a green kingfisher on it and t
he slogan We love bird-watching. After breakfast, the three of us stand near the edge of the cliff, drinking coffee, regarding the opalescent dawn light over the sea; suddenly a dark form appears above us and arcs across the sky. Peter swings round and cries, “Short-tailed albatross—immature!” Hiroshi and I do a small war dance with him, and then formally congratulate him.

  “Eight thirty-eight A.M.” Hiroshi notes, checking his watch.

  Peter has seen his ultimate albatross, and he puts one hand to his chest, where there is a sweet jubilant pain. Joy floods his face. For ten years, he and Hiroshi have been exchanging letters about his coming to Torishima; Hiroshi had warned him not to wait a lifetime. And now here he is, standing on a rock outcropping once occupied and abandoned by feather hunters, a garrison, and a weather station, seeing his first short-tailed albatross. This one was immature, in its brown colors. He longs to see the adults with their golden crowns and their pink bills, and we decide to set off at once.

  As everyone prepares for the hike across the island, we indulge in small good-luck rituals—retying our shoes, adjusting our helmets, tucking our pants into our socks as protection against scree. Then thirteen of us set out in a long caravan, climbing behind the garrison, past the abandoned weather-station barracks, over a steep meadow of grasses and low, bunchy, yellow chrysanthemums. Below us, skirts of frozen lava ripple toward the coast, where they once enveloped a whole village. Making our steepest climb in the early part of the day, we cut across the mountains more obliquely, walking up a glacier of crushed lava, and over ground singed with bright yellow sulfur salts and hot black scabs. By midmorning, we reach the flattest place on the island, at the base of Sulfur Peak. There a field of lava rocks—missiles ejected from the volcano—has turned the narrow col into a wind-blown moonscape of starkest black and white. Moon Desert, Hiroshi calls it. He points to an emptiness at the end of the col, where the land drops away and the entrance to the cliffs begins.

  “We’ll be able to see the albatrosses from there,” he says excitedly.

  Everyone else rushes on ahead, but Peter and I walk slowly as before. At last we cannot make the moment wait any longer. The col opens into an explosion of tall pinnacles and wind-ripped cliffs, where rock walls spill down through twisted chasms. There before us stands the fortress of the ahodori. Far at the bottom, down an impassable set of interlocking cliffs, a small flock of brown-and-white birds dot the grass. They look like handkerchiefs someone has dropped onto a lawn. An invisible fist knocks the breath out of me and I sigh out loud. There are so few of them. It is heartbreaking to see the last remaining nesting short-tailed albatrosses on earth. Over the breeze, we can just make out their whistles and whinnies, and their castanets, which sound like hollow wooden pipes hitting one another. The scene throbs with color—the bulging, oxidized orange cliffs, the green grasses below, on which the albatrosses nest, the tan rock face, the golden ochers, the black lava. Through binoculars, I see the yellow crowns of the birds, so close now, but still so inaccessible. Above them, a fantasia of albatrosses sails across the sky. Men built a garrison at the other side of the island, but nature built one here that is far stronger—almost impenetrable. Because of this natural fortress, based entirely on the bad temper of rock, the birds have survived the onslaught of humans. Peter stands at the lip of the cliff, one hand lightly pressing his binoculars against his chest, his eyes damp with emotion.

  Hiroshi joins us, and we three stand silently and behold the fortress for some minutes. It is utterly astonishing that Hiroshi has been studying the birds in such an impossible locale for the past ten years, that he has managed to bring out news of them and even on rare occasions to take the outside world down below for a closer look. That the birds are increasing in number is a great testimony to Hiroshi’s work and to the support of the Japanese government. It’s comforting to think that in a high-speed world, where people sometimes content themselves with shallow efforts, naturalists like Hiroshi are devoting their lives to saving one species. What a rich remembrance, to know that you preserved a miraculous form of life from disappearing forever from the planet.

  “Let’s go,” he says at last, and we set off along the east side of the walls. Hiroshi has marked a large O in white paint on some of the more secure rocks along the way. It is a steep, slippery descent down sheer four-hundred-foot cliffs. When we come to a particularly awkward plunge of rocks near the edge, Hiroshi attaches a rope to a rock. Passing the rope behind the waist, and holding one section in the right hand, one section in the left, a strong climber can lean back against the rope and use it to slip and brake his way down without using a harness. I have never climbed with ropes before, but I like the feel of the rope as it slides and rasps through my hands. Leaning back, I try to lower myself slowly, but my foot swivels, and suddenly I skid downhill toward the cliff edge, clinging to the rope. Loose stones clatter below. Everyone freezes. Above me, I see Peter, Hiroshi, and the ten other men transfixed to the rocks, watching me suspended over a four-hundred-foot chasm, all the emotion smashed out of their faces. There is no point in looking down. My mind fills with a single thought: Don’t let go of the rope. Hanging on with my left hand, I bring my right hand around, find a handhold, and pull myself back up. Once I find my footing, I continue across a rocky bridge and let the rope loose for the next person. Above me, people begin to move normally again. The next climber takes the rope, becomes confused, freezes midway across, and will not go on. Peter climbs down after him, at last coaxing him along. Despite their knapsacks full of photographic and surveying equipment, the rest of the team gradually work their way down the first section of cliff, and then we angle across to a more severe plunge. Here Hiroshi has hammered four pitons into a rock at the top, from which he has hung a rope. Peter and Hiroshi have both been rock climbing for many years, and I understand at once how seductive it can be. At each station along the way, you feel hawklike, perching high in towering freedom to pause and look out over the valley below and the ocean beyond. But I especially like the puzzle of figuring out which rock will make a handhold; what tablet, pyramid, or silo of earth to cling to; on what slender ledge to place my foot. At times, you are violently gripping the bones of the planet, and at others tiptoeing down the shallowest stairway. It is a strange, tentative searching with all of your limbs that unites you, as nothing else could, to the core of the planet, to the violence that forged it, to the thrust and fall of the rock frozen forever in the memory of a mountain. Rocks have veins and faces. And there is the texture of rock—in one moment raspy, spiky, and brutal; in the next gentle, forgiving, and smooth. There are the colors of blood, midnight, and autumn. There is the steep persuasion of gravity, drawing you down its rocky spine. Again I misstep and, holding on to the rope, slide back into a ledge, collect myself, and continue down to where Hiroshi, seeing that I’m all right, leaps into a hill of deep sandy lava and cascades with it clear down to the bottom. Peter does the same, and I follow. Then we scramble up a small dune and suddenly find ourselves staring straight across a plateau at two bustling colonies of short-tailed albatrosses.

  Nesting, yawning their wings, romancing, tending their eggs, bickering, they go about their normal ways, only two hundred yards from us, far enough not to be frightened by our presence. Vibrant white, with radiant yellow heads and coral-pink bills tipped in blue, the adults are unbelievably beautiful. A subtle wake of shadow runs behind each dark eye. Glossy, elegant, smooth as wax, they stretch their airy wings and, even while sitting, embrace the wind. The adolescent birds are brown or have mottled plumage of brown and white, some with striking white epaulets. All wear small, discreet colored bands around their legs—a present from Hiroshi so that he can identify them. Each color denotes a different year. A white band, for example, was put on the right leg of each of the forty-seven birds hatched in 1986. The two colonies of birds are separated by a black, swirling drape of lava, which is narrow enough for the birds to walk across. Young birds sometimes take a mate in the other village and settle there. Depe
nding on the wind, a bird may land in the lower village and climb up to the higher one. The older birds (with whiter plumage) prefer to nest in the center of the colonies, the younger birds near the edges. Some are sitting on eggs. Occasionally a bird will stand, rearrange its feather petticoats so that the egg nestles tightly against the warm brood patch, and then, with a twitch or two, settle down deep into its soft haunches again. Two eggs lie outside of nests, which means the chicks within will have died. In a species as rare as this, where every newborn counts, that is a tragic sight.