Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  The Yamal was running north, to the Pole. At about 84 degrees north, the ice was an incredible, unexpected fifteen feet thick, and we had slowed to five knots. The Yamal did not plow its way through the floes but rode up over the surface of the ice, while jagged cracks spread out from the bow in a series of sharp angles. As the ship’s full weight of twenty-two thousand tons came to bear on the floe, it finally fractured, and huge blocks of ice, thirty feet long and fifteen feet thick, turned up on edge somewhere around midship, then settled back into the sea in the broken wake of the Yamal.

  The ship did not pitch forward as the floes fractured. The bow was always riding up on new ice, and the Yamal held steady: so steady that I was in little danger of spilling my drink.

  I was, in fact, toasting the Yamal’s ice master, Andrei Masonov, who was dressed casually in jeans and a ratty black sweater. He had the preoccupied air of a highly focused techno wonk as we sat in front of his computer.

  “My task,” Masonov said, struggling with his English, “is map route, is plan strategy.” A fixed-wing aircraft had already made two flights to the Pole and back, giving Masonov a choice of four separate routes. The plane brought back a radar picture of the ice about eighty kilometers wide along each route.

  Using a computer imaging program, Masonov enhanced the radar pictures along our current line of travel. The screen looked like a mass of gray clouds set against a moonless midnight sky.

  Masonov laid a grid of thin red lines, latitude and longitude, over the picture and tapped a few keys. “We can make assumption about age of ice from these picture,” he said, “and these assumption tell us about thickness of ice.” Multiyear ice can be up to five meters thick and is deep blue in color. One-year ice is dark green and about one meter, eighty centimeters thick; new ice is light green and about thirty-eight centimeters deep.

  On the computer, thick multiyear ice turns up looking white; newer ice is gray; open water is black. But radar and the computer can’t read the thickness of the ice. It is only experience that can do that, and Masonov had spent twenty years comparing visuals from the bridge with computer pictures.

  I asked Andrei Masonov if he hated ice or saw it as an enemy.

  “No,” he said. “I love.”

  “You love ice?”

  “Of course,” he replied, a phrase that English-speaking Russians often use in place of an emphatic yes. “Is beautiful.”

  Masonov thought it best to show me. Several hours later, we were sitting in the helicopter, flying north ahead of the Yamal, on a three-hour ice reconnaissance mission.

  At four thousand feet, the floes, these great plates of ice, looked thin, almost fragile. The sea had a vaguely congealed look, like the skim of fat atop a pot of chicken stock cooling in the refrigerator. The largest floes I saw covered several square miles, and they were separated by leads, thin riverlike areas of black open water. There were tiny globules of ice floating in the leads themselves.

  In those places where wind and current had driven floes together, pressure ridges, sometimes twenty and thirty feet high, had formed. These ridges were often half a mile long, and they wound over the ice in sinuous patterns. Hummocks—blocky spires of ice that had formed when floes smashed together at a single point—rose off the white plain of snow, often near the end of some snaking pressure ridge, so that the formation as a whole looked like one giant, illiterate question mark.

  There was a single iceberg rising in the distance, and an officer marked it on his map. He also noted the position of major pressure ridges, the size and thickness of the floes, and sketched out the location of the largest open water leads.

  Masonov, with his computer-enhanced radar pictures, had mapped the overall plan of battle, but the helicopter was an essential tool in planning day-to-day tactics.

  Fifty miles north of the Yamal, the sky cleared and the temperature jumped ten or fifteen degrees. There were blue meltpools everywhere. It looked like the map of northern Ontario down there, like some summer place called Chain O’ Lakes.

  The sun was burning up a bank of clouds on the horizon. It emerged through a double halo so bright that I found myself suddenly squinting. A great slanting shaft of blinding golden light fell across the ice so that, for just a few minutes, the world below was a glittering, gaudy panorama. The meltpools were gold, flashing like mirrors in the sun. The snow was silver, sparkling silver, and there were deep purple shadows behind the spinning pressure ridges.

  Andrei Masonov shouted over the clatter of the helicopter.

  “You see?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is beautiful?”

  “Of course.”

  One night at dinner, due to a timing error on my part, I was seated with the Dreaded Couple Who Did Not Share My Political Opinions. For a change, we found ourselves discussing the matter of chasing bears with icebreakers. The man was an amateur video buff, and I had supposed—since he was wrong about most everything else—that he was in favor of the practice. “Don’t like it” he said. “It’s not right.”

  I was surprised. “You can’t film much at six hundred yards,” I said.

  “Little shaky white specks on the ice,” he agreed. “We could just tell folks it’s the rare Arctic termite.”

  Later, I began asking around. The Man Whose Luggage Was Lost had complained to the tour director about chasing Bears, as I had. Several people, it seemed, had lodged the same complaint—individually—all of us supposing that it really didn’t matter to anyone else. I think I was proud of our little group.

  There was, however, one strong voice in favor of getting up real damn close to any and all wildlife. “We paid good money,” argued the Man Who Didn’t Get It.

  The Yamal was cracking through fairly thin ice that had opened up into numerous leads: wide black rivers winding over flat snowy fields. We were close.

  I went up to the bridge and checked our position on the GPS (Global Positioning System): 89 degrees, 59 minutes. Just one more minute of latitude: about a mile. The longitude reading swung from 122 degrees (which runs through Los Angeles) to 70 degrees (New York) in about five minutes. The Yamal went spinning around the world in this fashion for forty-five minutes. Then the GPS scanner read 90 degrees north and nothing else.

  On the bridge, people were standing around drinking champagne or pointing camcorders out at the patchy ice, at the GPS, at the captain, at each other: men and women standing camcorder to camcorder in a series of Japanese standoffs at the geographic North Pole.

  But we were on thin ice here on the top of the world, and the Yamal circled the earth for a few more hours until the captain found a floe solid enough to be used as a dock. We were actually about four miles from the Pole itself, at 89 degrees, 55 minutes, and 79 seconds. Passengers and crew poured down the gangplank and onto the ice.

  The newly fallen snow, on its fields of ice, was much lighter than the sky and it seemed as if the floor of our world was aglow, as from within. There were confused jumbles of blocky ice in the distance, and one low snaky pressure ridge that cast a faint sinuous shadow. The larger meltpools were freezing over before my eyes: surfaces ridged in static ripples so that I could read the signature of the wind scrawled in blue.

  There were preparations for a party and barbecue going on at the port side of the ship. I walked around to starboard side to sit alone, in silent company with seven or eight other passengers, each of us seeking solitude, and not getting it, here at the loneliest spot on earth.

  I saw the Shy Japanese Man and the Woman Who Climbed Kilimanjaro at Seventy. I wondered if they were thinking, as I was, of the people who gave their lives to get here, thinking of those who said they had made it but offered no conclusive proof: Cook, Peary, Byrd. From the party side of the boat I could vaguely hear the now familiar strains of a stand-up organ. “Those Were the Days.” Polkas at the Pole.

  We all gathered about to listen to one of the tour directors read a quote from Chief Seattle: Man is only a strand in the web of nature. Bob He
adland, of the Scott Polar Institute, gave his estimate of how many people had stood on the ice at the Pole, including us: 2,804, he said, give or take a dozen.

  Captain Andrei Smirnoff, slender and erect, with neatly trimmed white hair and a severe face, talked about the gathering as a group of people from many nations and how it cheered his heart to see all the flags flying together. And, as if all this weren’t enough to be cynical about:

  The happy couple came down the gangplank arm in arm while people threw colored streamers, and the two smiled helplessly as they became the first human beings ever to be married on the ice at the North Pole. The couple was Australian, and Captain Smirnoff read the vows in halting English: promises of eternal love spoken into a bitter wind. The sun was hidden behind bleak gray clouds. I stared into the sky, with the wind in my face; my eyes were tearing. From the wind, I told myself. I’d only just met the newlyweds.

  Sometime later, I went time traveling four or five feet under the surface of the Arctic Ocean. I recall the complete absence of light, the familiar taste of seawater in my mouth, the incredible elasticity of time. It was all very dark, very languid, very pleasant.

  Quite suddenly, however, I was walking barefoot on the ice, looking for my pants and feeling just a tad … irritated. The wind was unreasonable. Time was zipping right along again. Nikolai Druzdov was standing at the brink, wearing a swimming suit and about to take the polar plunge.

  “Is it cold?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I said.

  In Honduras

  He Who Laughs

  Once upon a time, in the past and in the future and even now as you read this, in a place not so very far away—indeed, in the Central American country of Honduras, about three days’ drive south out of Texas—there lived and continues to live a monstrous fish, named Wasa, who laughs. Wasa reigns in the Cocoa Lagoon, twenty or thirty miles out of the town of La Ceiba, and is said to be allied with monkeys who howl and … well, what these monkeys do is not precisely unspeakable, and if they are not doing it to you—if they’re doing it to someone like Grant Thompson, for instance—it’s even pretty funny. Whiz, splat: Take that, eco-tourist!

  There were four of us paddling sea kayaks on Cocoa Lagoon. Grant Thompson runs Tofino Expeditions, a kayak touring company out of Vancouver, Canada. He and one of his guides, Rob VanEgmont, were scouting the second largest Central American country, looking for places to take paying clients. Mexico, they felt, was saturated with kayak companies, and one of their favorite campsites in that country had just been sold to a major resort developer.

  It was, Grant thought, time to move on. Scout some new locations. Costa Rica had more than its share of eco-tourism. Belize was developing a similar reputation. But Honduras, with its forbidding comic-opera reputation for coups and its proximity to various war zones, had effectively repelled tourists for decades. The country was pretty much virgin territory in eco-tourism terms. Worth a look, anyway.

  Photographer Ted Wood and I were along to chronicle the scouting expedition.

  We had been in Honduras for several days before we encountered Wasa and the monkeys. Flights inside the country had been extraordinarily inexpensive—the equivalent of twenty dollars or so, one way—and everyone aboard each flight crossed himself at the same time, just as the aircraft revved up for takeoff. It was like a holy drill team, and it worried me just a bit. Maybe we weren’t paying enough to keep the plane airborne without divine intervention. A man with a Catholic education envisions Sister Norma, the World’s Most Terrifying Nun, angrily cataloguing the tortures endured by various martyrs: sufferings we fourth graders had caused by snitching candy and fibbing to our parents. Martyrs were always crossing themselves before they were pierced head to toe with arrows or burned alive or eviscerated or fed to lions or …

  Or maybe this was just a very, very foreign country. In 1969, for instance, tensions between Honduras and neighboring El Salvador erupted into a fierce five-day war after a soccer match between the two countries: the Soccer War.

  Listen:

  Soccer.

  War.

  A war over a game in which it is illegal to use your hands?

  In addition, Honduras is a country with a history of political instability, mostly having to do with … well … with bananas, arguably the world’s silliest fruit. For almost fifty years, Honduras led the nations of the earth in the export of bananas. It was a place where rival U.S.-owned fruit companies—and the CIA—had attempted, often successfully, to control the politics of the country. Honduras is the banana republic.

  And Hondurans, I imagined, had every reason to resent visitors from the United States, yet people on the street in the major cities were easygoing, friendly, relaxed. There is a certain Latin grace about the country. In the resort town of La Ceiba, for instance, there is a shady canal where lovers stroll hand in hand at dusk and police officers drift by on mountain bikes, with automatic weapons clipped below the crossbar, while large carp circle slowly in the water below.

  In the town square, caretakers throw garbage pails full of cow guts into a cement wading pool, which immediately comes alive with caiman five to seven feet long. The caiman, alligatorlike carnivores, seize the long white streamers of guts, then twist and turn, impressively, until most of them are shrouded in internal organs. A crowd of La Ceibans watches with the disinterested amusement of long familiarity. The caiman, satiated, pull themselves up on concrete slabs, and bask there in the dusk, looking smug and content with slanting catlike eyes and curled smiles.

  In the Cacao Lagoon, where Wasa dwells, twenty-five miles or so from La Ceiba, there were said to be caiman as well. The water was black, a strong tea brewed out of fallen leaves and rotting vegetation. The lagoon was surrounded by mangroves that dropped branches down into the brackish waters, so that there were no banks anywhere, only a vertical wall of green. We paddled our kayaks around the verdant periphery in less than two hours.

  It was Concepcion Martinez who told us about Wasa. He was our guide for the day, a young man from the nearby village of Cocoa, who often fished the black waters and knew them well. Several small, sluggish rivers fed the lagoon, and we turned our kayaks up one, which was very narrow and slow-moving. There were butterflies, sometimes in clouds of yellow and orange, and all about we heard strange birdcalls: melodic whistles and sibilant songs interspersed with various horrid strangled croaks. The temperature stood near 100 degrees and the sky above was a hazy, cloudless blue.

  We were in fancy folding kayaks, double Feathercrafts, and Concepcion was paddling along in a wooden dugout. I asked if there were monkeys here, and just as Conci said yes there were, I saw a big one moving through the branches overhead. It was brown-and-orange, about the size of a cocker spaniel. And then a mother with a baby clinging to her back ran up over a nearby branch, and suddenly my eyes adjusted to the presence of monkeys. There were at least a dozen more in the bright green foliage.

  “Howlers,” Conci said.

  And, sure enough, the monkeys began to howl, or at least one of them did. He sounded like a big, very hoarse dog with a lot of gurgling phlegm in his throat.

  Ted Wood, who’s heard howlers before in Central American forests—heard them from miles away—said he has always thought there was strange subaqueous quality to the sound.

  “It sounds like fish laughing,” he said.

  “Really loud great big fish who live in trees,” I offered.

  “Maybe,” Conci said, “they howl to tell Wasa we are here.”

  Wasa, according to lagoon legend, is a fish. The name, loosely translated, means “he who laughs.”

  “What kind of fish?” I asked.

  “Big,” Conci said, and he gestured to describe a fish considerably larger than I am. Apparently, Wasa is dangerous. He lives where the narrow river we were paddling flows into the lagoon and where, Conci said, the waters are muy profundo, very deep.

  “How do you know the water is deep?” Rob asked. “Did you drop lines?”

 
; “No,” Conci said. “Everybody knows it’s deep. The whole world knows it’s deep.” And now we did too.

  “Are you afraid of Wasa?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Conci said, and then he laughed. “Yes, maybe a little.” He pondered the idea for a time as we drifted under the overhanging branches, with monkeys scampering and chortling overhead. “Wasa is thirty years old,” he said.

  “Have you ever seen a manatee in this lagoon?” I asked.

  Yes, Conci said, there were manatees in the lagoon, and you didn’t see them very often but—and here Conci indicated that he understood the thrust of my question—he damn sure knew the difference between a monstrous laughing fish and a manatee.

  “It sounds,” Grant said in English, “like something a bunch of mothers dreamed up to keep young kids out of the lagoon.”

  I liked the idea of myth as baby-sitter, but it seemed to me that the caiman could do that equally as well. You only had to watch them scarf up cow guts once to get the idea.

  Grant and Ted, in the lead kayak, moved carefully upriver, where the water was shallow and strewn with fallen branches. The forest canopy formed a shady green archway, a tunnel of vegetation, and the monkeys were agitated, scampering overhead, keeping pace with our slow-moving kayaks.

  “Back up,” Grant shouted suddenly, and with some urgency. Immediately, he and Ted Wood were paddling backward, rather comically I thought, as something like rain fell around the bow of their kayak. There was more solid material as well, stuff I was able to identify as an astonishingly large number of howler-generated fecal depth charges. Our primate cousins sought to display their profound appreciation of our visit.

  “The big one,” Grant said later, “didn’t even take aim. Just ran up on a branch and let fly—bang—like that. Incredibly accurate, considering he had to have his back to me.”