Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival

by Carl Safina

  JOHN JORGERSON, the plant’s manager, shows us around. The plant was founded around 1900 as the Alitak Packing Company, has been sold a couple of times, and has grown to house and employ up to two hundred workers during the height of the summer salmon. season The facility’s freezer holds just under two million pounds of fish, stored at -38° Fahrenheit. The plant has machines that remove salmon heads, guts, fins, and eggs, or “roe,” which is made into cavar. In Jorgerson’s office a sticker reads, FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS EAT FARM-RAISED SALMON. But the question of who gets to eat what is a little more complicated, because every Sockeye Salmon that comes here goes to Japan, like every Sablefish. Every single one.

  Back at the boat, Cal asks earnestly, “So, what’s it like being shown around by the president of the Alitak cannery?” Mark gets a satellite e-mail from Carl Vedo, Shaun’s stepdad. Carl is bucking fifty-mile-an-hour winds and still has twenty-five miles farther to crawl to get to shelter. Even at the dock here the wind has come up, driving flying snow and whitecaps across our tiny harbor. Suddenly there is so much wind it begins to bang Masonic rhythmically against the dock. All of us are very happy to be safely in port. Outside the harbor the weather must be savage indeed.

  Here at this secure outpost of civilization, Mark offers to take Cal’s dirty clothes up to the washing machines. When Mark disappears up the steps out of the galley, Cal remarks to me, “That’s a first!” He’s a bit flabbergasted that the captain has just taken his laundry.

  Though I’ve often thought that the perfect antidote for being cold and wet is to be warm and wet, I’ve been here several hours and still have not bothered to find the hot showers. I guess I have become schooner trash indeed. Mark stops to make a phone call to his wife and daughters from a bank of stand-up plywood phone booths at the top of the dock. I decide to make a couple of calls, including one to my mother, because we’ve fished through Mother’s Day. I’m not the only one with that idea. A crewman from the other boat is in the adjacent booth, talking so noisily I wait for him to finish before I dial. His voice is coming loud and clear through the thin walls of the phone booth, saying, “I didn’t realized how much time I spend on women and it’s really—you know—super unproductive … . Well, I wanted to wish you a happy Mother’s Dav … . Yeah, Mom … . Well yeah, I did meet this girl from Georgia … . No, I haven’t done anything with her … . No, not yet … . Jeez, Mom. No, just a little kiss for fun … . Yeah, I really miss women, but … . Yeah, but it’s really good to come to a place so different from what I am. You gain a lot of perspective. Okay, Mom, well, happy Mother’s Day. I love you.”

  A dinner whistle sends us and all the workers into the common mess hall, where dinner is chicken, potatoes, rice, string beans, Swiss chard, bread, cookies, lemonade, and water. The workers exchange few words, and the hall remains remarkably quiet—just the clacking of silverware on plates. And although the dinner bell sounded at five o’clock and everyone can eat as much as they want, at 5:20 we are the only people left in the dining hall. Everyone else has returned to work. Mac is engulfing his third helping of rice.

  THE FURIOUS GALE CONTINUES kicking the boat against the pilings all night, jarringly enough to make sleep difficult even at the dock. Around midnight Mark gets word that Shaun’s stepfather has finally reached safety.

  We spend the first layup day loading bait and ice. Mark hoped to get out fishing again tomorrow, but new storm warnings will keep Masonic pinned in port. Continued reports of bad weather mean more time away from family and loved ones. And as the crew gets pensive “the demon tobacco” racks new sales, until Mark is smoking heavily again.

  We hear a boat while Cal is cooking. Pete Schonberg has just brought the Equinox in through very bad weather. He’d been running in ahead of the same weather we were fleeing. But he was about two hundred miles southwest of us, and though he started in earlier, the storm caught him.

  He joins us at our sundown dinner aboard Masonic but doesn’t eat. Where he was a few days ago, he tells us, he saw an amazing thing: twenty-seven Short-tailed Albatrosses around the Equinox; 2 percent of the entire world population around one boat at one moment. That wasn’t all. “We had just an absolutely humongous amount of every kind of albatrosses. We had a couple of hundred Laysans around the boat at once. They were so hungry they weren’t even letting the fulmars get in for the heads.” The ravenous albatrosses were disallowing the fulmars their force of number, denying them the popular vote. They were asserting dominance, pulling rank, throwing their weight around, reconfiguring the pecking order. “They were doing things I have never before seen birds do in all my life,” Schonberg continues. “They weren’t afraid of the bird buoys. And they were cooperating; a couple would pick up the gear and the others would strip a hundred hooks clean. These birds live a long time,” he says, “and they’ve learned what to do. They weren’t just engulfing the hook and all, but just trying to pick off the bait. But we killed three of them that did get hooked. I didn’t like that,” he says, putting up his hands. “It’s always been considered bad luck to kill an albatross. And with all the Short-tails around—. So after that, our care factor went way up. We posted a guy full-time to scare them. But it was like nothing I’ve ever seen. They were like they hadn’t eaten all the way from Hawaii. Just incredible voraciousness. I mean, the noise—. I’m telling you: they were not scared of anything. So then we decided to set the lines only at night. It’s the only way to avoid hooking the albatrosses there right now.”

  The rest of the talk is about consumer confidence in Japan, the resilience of the Japanese economy, the dollar/yen value. Schonberg says, “Good weather is horrible for the halibut price. Last trip we got a good price because we fished during a storm when no one was delivering. So pray for bad weather, I guess.”

  Mark chuckles. “No, I’m sorry—I’m not praying for bad weather. I like nice weather.” Schonberg gets up to leave and reminds Mark, “Well, I came to give you a warning. Set at night when you get down there toward the Aleutians. And whatever you do—don’t kill any Short-tails. That’s bad news for us all.”

  Jim has slept through dinner. At midnight, Mark finally rises from the table and says, “Well, I’m going to turn on to reefer and go to bed.”

  “Pardon me?” I ask.

  He repeats himself, and this time I hear him correctly: “I’m going to turn on the refer”—short for the refrigeration unit in the hold.

  “A line like that,” I say, “could easily be misquoted.”

  AN AMPHIBIOUS PLANE LANDS with its pontoons in the choppy bay, and the pilot runs its wheels up the small, smooth, black pebbles of the shore. Mark helps me with my duffels. The pilot turns the craft back into the bay. Through the window I watch Mark, and Cal in his yellow slicker on the black beach, and Tim standing on the dock with his hat fastened tight around his ears and a mug of tea in one hand. All of us waving, waving, waving. The plane lifts off heavily, like an overburdened albatross, thrashing from the water with spray streaking across the windows. We leave the whitecap-salted inlet and rise against the landscape, the great shimmering sweep of pond-pocked tundra and the massive white mountains whose steep snow-robed slopes suddenly rise into our eyes the moment we get above the first low hills.

  Amelia’s Travels April 29-May 13

  MIDWAY

  AMELIA IS DOWN to a lean, athletic weight, fit and tuned. She has invested the last trip—two weeks—in her chick. During this trip Amelia ranged “only” about eleven hundred miles from her nest, to the southern edge of the subarctic frontal zone. She’s pursuing an eminently reasonable strategy: intermediate effort for intermediate rewards that will be invested mostly in the large chick’s rapid growth. If she stayed close, she wouldn’t find as much food; and she needs more food for a chick that’s now so big—big enough to wait the extra days. But if she went on month-long trips each time, she’d benefit at the expense of her chick, who would be left to contend with her prolonged absence, disproportionately dependent on Dad. So during this last
foraging trip she traveled an immense, clockwise, roughly circular searching flight: northwest up to the frontal zone, a few hundred miles eastward along the front, and then home. The nourishment was spotty and fleeting, and she kept moving. Like a parent working a second job to pay for her kid’s college, Amelia doesn’t really think much about how hard it is; she just does what she has to do. Amelia’s restlessness is contagious, and I’m feeling it. I’ve kept moving too, this time to the outer reaches of this island chain.

  IN LANGUID LONELINESS at the extreme center of the vast North Pacific Ocean lies Midway Atoll. It’s farther from just about everything than just about anywhere. Virtually no island is more distant from the peopled continents. Or more worth the trip.

  I’ve come with the award-winning Canadian nature writer Nancy Baron to see the world’s largest colony of Laysan Albatrosses—several hundred thousand exquisite masters of the art of air, a feathered nation convened to breed, cramming two small islands.

  Parts of this island bloom with thousands of chicks per acre. Five-month-old chicks nearly the size of geese so jam the sandy landscape that it resembles a poultry farm. They’re at an awkward stage, half puffy down, half feathered.

  Midway is a classic Pacific atoll; mostly shallow lagoon clasped by a thin necklace of emergent, broken reef. It has two main islands, Sand and Eastern. The larger, Sand, is about two miles across at its widest. The atoll’s lagoon is about five miles across. Midway’s emergent lands total a little over two square miles (compared to Laysan’s 1.5 square miles and Tern Island’s mere thirty-seven acres). Seabirds of fifteen species nest here.

  Though exotic, Midway Atoll feels strangely familiar. Midway is like Small Town, U.S.A., plus two million seabirds. The odd Leave It to Beaver familiarity derives from the structural remnants of a U.S. military presence that spanned the Second World War through the Cold War. Sand Island’s gravel streets connect a network of houses with very American lawns, a very American bowling alley, a tennis court, a small theater, dorms, several small stores, and a workers’ bar called the All Hands Club. Energizing the infrastructure is a power-generation station built for up to five thousand military personnel. The power station currently serves only one-twentieth its capacity for the following reason: on June 30, 1997, the last of the navy occupants pulled out, unneeded buildings started coming down, and this became Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge.

  ON ALL THE LAWNS, and lining the airport, and on every grassy slope are so many albatrosses; they are everywhere you look. Every few feet on every street or path. Outside every window: albatrosses.

  The youngsters are everywhere. You have to walk around them or zigzag your bike to avoid them. Whether you’re going to the cafeteria or the beach—wherever you’re going—you need to get around albatrosses to get there. If you’re walking with someone, you must frequently part to step around albatrosses.

  At the outdoor Christian chapel—where a round fluorescent bulb serves as Mary’s perpetually lit halo—a Fairy Tern drifts by like a tiny moving cloud, seemingly sanctified and blessed in all aspects and regards. It hovers over the statue like a visitation of the Holy Spirit. With appropriate reference and reverence Nancy gasps, “Oh my God.” She says the Fairy Terns seem so ethereal they could be the souls of babies. The chapel is surrounded by a low white picket fence, to keep the albatrosses out. The albatrosses don’t mind; they get closer to God on their own power.

  The albatross chicks have by now grown large, their sleek body feathers mostly in, but their heads still fluffy. They’re still unsteady, and you’ll sometimes see a big, regal-looking chick suddenly lose its balance like a hiccuping drunk. Nancy and I trade impressions of the big chicks crowded all across the open landscape: “They look like little lions.” “Like fuzzy pumpkins.” “Like feathered Sphinxes.” “Like chocolate poodles.”

  Nancy squeezes my arm and laughs. “This is the most fun place I’ve ever seen. We’re so lucky to be here.” Tourists have been able to come to Midway on commercial flights from Honolulu since the military left. The number of visitors is limited to a hundred. But civilian travel to Midway isn’t unprecedented. In 1935, Pan American Airlines began operating the China Clipper, a large flying boat whose island-hopping itinerary—from San Francisco to Honolulu, then to Midway, Wake, Manila, and finally Macao—was the fastest and most luxurious route to the Orient. But a Clipper trip cost three times the average annual American salary. Only the wealthiest industrialists, and luminaries like Ernest Hemingway, had the honor of meeting the “gooney birds” face-to-face. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, its first Hawaiian venture since the feather-poaching days, ended the China Clipper era. On Japan’s next visit, Japanese forces showered their attention on Midway itself. A monument commemorating the Battle of Midway reads:

  Where the most decisive naval battle

  in military history was fought.

  June 4, 1942, the day when the American spirit

  reached unparalleled heights and in so doing,

  saved democracy for the western world.

  Just as Midway’s albatrosses actually spend most of their time on the ocean, most of the Battle of Midway was fought at sea, far over the horizon from the atoll itself, between the attacking Japanese fleet and bombers from an ambushing American flotilla. The American ships were sent from Pearl Harbor after genius cryptanalyst Joseph Rochefort and his team cracked Japan’s war code, enabling the Americans to eavesdrop on the attack plan. By the end of the day-long battle nearly four hundreds Americans and some three thousand Japanese were dead. Japan lost four aircraft carriers, and its plan to wipe U.S. resistance from the Pacific had turned to a crippling defeat from which Japan’s war effort would never recover.

  Decades later, President Richard Nixon met Vietnamese leaders here for secret talks to end a dreadful war. Midway’s progress from triggering battle to facilitating conciliation was appropriate, because overall, this place is much more suited to peace.

  Now bombs and bullets are a distant memory. Noddies line the phone wires like starlings. Instead of sparrows, flocks of introduced yellow canaries flit from tree to lawn. Fairy Terns by the thousands load the lampposts, street signs, and trees. Wildlife, not warfare, is why people come here now. Eight out often visitors arrive for the birds; the rest, for fishing and diving. We’re here for a little of each.

  PETER PYLE IS A NOTED SEABIRD SCIENTIST whose research assistants at Midway are volunteers signed up through the Oceanic Society Some are seniors participating as part of an Elderhostel group. It’s an ideal way for a retiree—or anyone—to become an instant biologist during a vacation’s brief duration. Richard, early sixties, a former prison mail-room worker from New York, says, “It’s a phenomenal thing to see birds this up close that’re not scared.” Cordon Bennet, a California retiree, loves the birds and the snorkeling: “The fish are a lot like birds; it’s the same kind of beauty.” Another senior, Betty, adds, “I like seeing where the sweet Fairy Terns lay their eggs.” A high school teacher named Sandy is a bit apprehensive about the albatrosses’ snapping bills, noting, “That one grabbed Mark in the crotch.” Joyce King, here from Florida with the Sierra Club, can’t believe all the plastics the albatrosses swallow: “We do all this recycling, but—”

  Without these eco-tourists’ dollars to keep the planes flying between here and Honolulu, wildlife management and research would be sharply curtailed, and Midway would be like Laysan—lonely outpost, difficult to reach, many days distant from medical attention.

  The volunteers are assisting Peter in applying individually numbered leg bands to the big albatross youngsters. Such identification, fundamental to many wildlife studies, will be appreciated by the next generation of biologists who will come of age during these albatrosses’ long lives. Peter selects one large chick after another, applied a band to each chick’s leg, closes it with pliers, and checks it to make sure that its ends are smoothly joined and it can rotate freely around the leg without causing abrasion.

  At one point we
pause, astonished, to watch two downy-headed albatross chicks dancing—as though courting! They’re awkwardly head-bobbing, wing-flaring, sky-pointing, bill-fencing, and clacking, but without the usual vocalizations. Their moves are stiff, not fluid; but unmistakably part of the prepackaged courtship program. Like children in their first crush, they seem confused about whether their interaction is aggressive or not, frequently interrupting their shuffle to bite each other. After a few minutes, the love puppies lose interest in the romance dance.

  Nancy, enchanted and amused, remarks that the awkwardness of youth seems universal. But while we may delight in their youthful awkwardness, we would err to see them as comedy. Their mere existence is testament to their unlikely success up to now. However “cute” we may think them, everything about them is geared toward one unlikely gamble: surviving.