The Flight of the Iguana

by David Quammen

  What the maps call Big Water Lake is really a liquid canyon through tall cypress, a long blade of open water running on for three miles but never more than about forty yards wide. On each side, beneath the cypress, are little coves of still water carpeted over with spatterdock. The current moves north to south, steady enough to carry a canoe but so smooth that the water never forfeits its texture of polished ebony. With the light angled low, we could see from thirty yards back the tiny wakes of whirligig beetles as they proceeded before us along the surface. In the course of a couple of miles, paddling quietly, we also saw the wakes of a dozen alligators, wakes that were larger but not much larger than those of the beetles: nothing but nostrils and eyes protruding to cut the water, tail working powerfully but invisibly. Most of these alligators slid away as we approached, moving off downstream and then, if we gained on them, diving; they could easily stay down, if they had to, for half an hour. But some were more curious.

  In one of the spatterdock coves we stopped to explore the possibility of a fish dinner. Crawfish unwound the line from his cane pole and flopped out a hook baited with salami—the higher technology of angling has not yet come to the Okefenokee, nor is there any reason why it should. In a minute Crawfish’s bobber was bobbing tentatively. I held our canoe below Crawfish’s boat, in the tail of the eddy, giving him room, while the Red Ace’s camera went clickety clickety. We found ourselves whispering. Last shards of sunlight breaking through the cypress, and we both felt the same tranquility and pagan reverence as if we had been sitting the afternoon away in the cathedral at Chartres. We watched Crawfish working his hook and line—and in that we weren’t alone. A large alligator had come out of the spatterdock, sliding up quietly near Crawfish’s canoe to see how the fisherman was faring.

  Crawfish twitched the cane, then lifted a small sunfish up and into his boat. We whooped encouragingly, Crawfish said nothing, and the alligator came a couple of yards closer.

  Only its eyeballs and snout were visible, but the spacing between those suggested an animal about seven feet long. It was holding position, patient and very attentive, less than ten feet off Crawfish’s starboard bow. He could have tweaked it on the nose with his fishing pole. Instead he just ignored it. Caught another sunfish. The alligator moved still closer. I had thought at first, unavoidably, about Captain Hook and the croc-with-the-clock, but this alligator, it became clear, did not represent the slightest menace. It had more the demeanor of a shameless mutt at the back door of a butcher shop.

  “He’s waiting for a handout,” Crawfish said across the quiet water. “Been around too many fishermen at this spot.”

  Crawfish offered the gator no handout. We understood why. That would have only reinforced its false and dangerous misapprehension of the nature of the human species. Still, it took a person of will as well as principle to say no to such a beautiful animal.

  • • •

  Another story, this one of will and principle.

  Back in 1968, about the same time Red and I were being terrorized by that gang in Chicago, Crawfish was enrolled at Armstrong College in Savannah; he was also working part-time as a herpetologist for the Savannah Science Museum. Herpetology being his real true love, he gradually began to spend more time at the museum than at Armstrong. When this fact became known to the members of a certain civic body, John Crawford received a draft notice.

  The year 1968 was of course a very lousy time to be drafted. Furthermore, Crawfish was opposed on grounds of conscience to the war in Vietnam.

  So he enlisted in the Navy, thinking this might be a partial solution. He was trained, then assigned as an electrician’s mate to a submarine support ship based in Bremerton, Washington. Pulled duty down through Panama, at the Guantánamo base on Cuba, and at a submarine base in Key West. His ship was still there in Key West when word filtered through the ranks that a large antiwar demonstration would be held soon, just outside the gates of the sub base. If he had leave that day, Crawfish thought, he would like to participate. He was in no position, at that point in his life, to foresee which way the waters would flow.

  The Navy brass at Key West were concerned that there might be trouble from those demonstrators. So they planned to assign a few men to stand guard with rifles, just in case things got out of hand. A finger was pointed while a voice said, “You, you, you, and Crawford.” It brought to Crawfish the clarification that until then had been muddled and delayed. He thought, “I can’t do that. I might be asked to shoot my own friends.” And not just friends, but people with whom he was in political and moral agreement. So he filed for status as a conscientious objector.

  It was the wrong time to do that. Convincing the U.S. armed forces that you are a conscientious objector after you have already enlisted in the Navy—and with a Catholic upbringing, which is supposed to make you well fit religiously for war—is only a little more difficult than driving an alligator through the eye of a needle. While his application was pending, Crawfish took abuse from the noncom officers. He was given the nickname “Rabbit.” He was razzed late at night by patriots stumbling in drunk. A large and solid fellow, Crawfish explained to them in his mild way that, though opposed to war, he had no objection whatever to fistfights. They backed off. And he argued his way successfully to the CO discharge.

  Escaping the Navy at that juncture led him to a very different sort of life in the Florida Keys—a little commercial fishing, lots of diving, wildlife photography, lobster research, and eventually some free-lance biological consulting. That experience led back to Savannah, where in 1973 he and two friends started an enterprise called Wilderness Southeast, a nonprofit institution providing outfitted and guided wilderness trips with a strong emphasis on ecological education. Crawfish never suspected, early on, that he would ever earn a living from what he loved best: mucking around in places like the Okefenokee Swamp, one eye peeled for reptiles. But eleven years later the business was flourishing.

  After the Red Ace agreed to come on a swamp odyssey, it was Wilderness Southeast that I called. “The Okefenokee,” I said. “Have you got a good guide? Somebody who could show me the reptile life?”

  They said, “Do we ever.”

  • • •

  There was more. There was much more swamp and many more stories and quite a few other arrestingly beautiful reptiles. We drank all the antivenin. The Red Ace and I did a reprise of “Never Hit Your Grandma with a Shovel,” first performance in eighteen years, and Crawfish, having sat through it, was made an honorary member of our high school class. Late at night, as we lay on a platform near Big Water, we heard the unforgettable bellow of a very large alligator, throaty and low and prolonged. It was a deep bass rumbling, so deep that we felt it through the planks of the platform almost as much as we heard it, and at first Red and I took it for the sound of a big outboard motor held at very low idle, in the distance at least a mile off. Then it was answered by another outboard, much nearer us. This wasn’t anyone’s low idle. It was a living sound, a sound with the same magisterial quality as a lion’s roar heard after dark on the East African savanna. And for the Okefenokee, it was the precise equivalent: king of beasts.

  After five days we had completed our loop and were headed out. Somewhere in one of the prairies south of Big Water we had turned against the current and begun paddling back upstream, toward the point of division between those waters destined for the Gulf of Mexico and those waters destined for the Atlantic—but it was impossible for us to know just where that divide stood. We never saw it. From where we sat, so close, this was a single mandala of black water, moving around counterclockwise. That’s always the way it is at the time.

  Finally, reluctantly, we swung the canoes out through a gap between bushes and onto a wide thoroughfare called the Suwanee Canal—which was, being man-made, the least attractive stretch we had seen in the swamp. The Suwanee Canal would carry us straight back to the blackwater cove at Harry Johnson’s gift shop and boat landing.

  The canal was too deep for Crawfish to pole a
gainst the bottom, so he was reduced at last to using a paddle. Paddling his canoe up beside ours, he told a last story:

  In October of 1889 the Georgia legislature passed a bill that decreed that the Okefenokee Swamp be sold to the highest bidder. It went for twenty-six and a half cents an acre. The buyers were a consortium of businessmen calling themselves the Suwanee Canal Company. Their plan was to cut a canal from the east edge of the swamp to the St. Marys River, a monumental engineering feat that was supposed to result in draining the Okefenokee like an unclogged sink. The waters would rush out to the Atlantic, leaving behind thousands of acres and millions of dollars’ worth of timber and fertile land. The digging began in 1891 and continued for four years. The main canal was cut thirty-two feet deep and eleven miles long, including the stretch along which we three were presently paddling.

  Then in 1897 the work ceased. The project was abandoned, never to be revived. In those days some few things were still beyond the technological will of humankind. At roughly the point in the effort when water was expected to begin surging toward the St. Marys, toward the Atlantic, widening out its own channel with the inexorable force of its call to the sea, the opposite happened. The waters began flowing back into the swamp.

  THE SIPHUNCLE

  Chambers of Memory in the Ocean of Time

  The past is not dead, Faulkner told us, it is not even past. Or words to that effect. I’m quoting from memory. Memory believes before knowing remembers, Faulkner told us, another way of making the same point. It was his central and abiding theme: The past is not dead, is not gone, cannot ever be completely escaped or erased or forgotten; the past is. This of course was the heresy of a self-educated Mississippi crank, an axiom more Confederate than American, but probably (and despite the fact that Freud agreed) he was right. William Faulkner himself has been in his grave twenty-five years now, and he certainly isn’t dead or gone. I got to thinking about—got to remembering—his words this week as I considered the chambered nautilus, an animal that carries its own past evermore forward through life and history, sealed off behind a wall of pearl.

  For a living nautilus, the past literally provides balance and buoyancy. And the animal stays in touch with that past, remotely, inextricably, through a long tubular organ known as the siphuncle. This nautiloid siphuncle is a conduit of blood and memory.

  The nautilus itself is a staggeringly ancient beast, a marine creature that has remained almost unchanged over 450 million years, since before life on Earth had even climbed out of the oceans. Five species within the genus Nautilus survive today, last remnants of a line that once produced 10,000 different species to dominate the ocean environment as emphatically—and at the same time—as dinosaurs dominated the land. This ancestral line was the chambered cephalopods, including nautiloids and their close relatives the ammonoids. They seem to have been the first successful marine predators, preceding such other cephalopod predators as the squid and the octopus. Like the squid and the octopus, though, nautiloids were soft-bodied animals with multiple tentacles. Long before backbones and toothy jaws and scales came into fashion, the nautiloids and their kin had solved the problems connected with making a living as carnivores in the ocean depths. They did it by secreting ingenious shells.

  The shells were most typically spiral in shape, flattened on both sides and coiling gracefully outward from an axis, very much like the shells of surviving Nautilus species. The animals secreted these structures progressively as they themselves grew—adding wider extensions to the spiral, vacating ever outward as they needed more elbow room, living always in only the outermost chamber and closing each earlier chamber behind them with a calcareous wall. Of course the shells afforded protection, for the early nautiloids, but they also did something more. Like the wings of the first true bird, those chambered shells allowed nautiloids to rise up off the substrate, defying gravity.

  Controlled buoyancy may seem a modest feat to us, by hindsight, but the extent to which it expanded nautiloid horizons would be hard to overestimate.

  The shells of living Nautilus species serve the same function today. Actually they perform less like a bird’s wing than like a hot-air balloon. The successive chamber walls are known technically as septa, and behind every septum is a space filled with either liquid or gas, or with some balance of both—depending on whether the individual nautilus is seeking to rise or descend through the levels of water. Behind every septum is a sealed chamber representing either ballast or lift. Behind every septum is a phase of the animal’s history.

  But the seal isn’t absolute. At the center of every septum is a small hole. Only the siphuncle penetrates backward in space and time.

  • • •

  In July of 1962 William Faulkner died suddenly, under somewhat mysterious circumstances involving whiskey and a steep flight of stairs, possibly also a heart attack or a stroke. He was buried quickly and rather quietly (for a Nobel Prize winner) beneath blasting summer heat in the town of Oxford, Mississippi, where he had lived his life. Roughly a year later an article entitled “The Death of William Faulkner” appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. I remember seeing it. There was a photograph of a fierce-looking little man with a stiff mustache and the eyes and nose of a peregrine falcon: this person Faulkner, evidently, of whom I knew nothing. I was fifteen. In the background of the photo, I recall, was a house that looked imposing behind its tall neoclassic columns. I read the Ogden Nash in that issue of the Post, and probably much of the rest, and glanced at the cartoons, but I ignored the article about the dead man, whom I understood only vaguely to be some sort of notorious curmudgeon, maybe a segregationist governor. I was chiefly preoccupied at the time with football and bass fishing and the banjo, and no one had yet so much as forced me to read even “Barn Burning” or “The Bear,” thank goodness. The article was by someone named Hughes Rudd, which fact I took note of not at all.

  Six years later much had changed, and my life was spiraling around William Faulkner the way a miller spirals around a summer lantern. I had consumed all the novels and was well launched on an obsession that would go beyond appreciative rereading, beyond critical pedantry (and a graduate thesis describing “Centripetal and Contrapuntal Structural Patterns in William Faulkner’s Major Novels”), beyond the demented self-assigned task of trying to translate Absalom, Absalom! into a film script; beyond all that, I say, and straight on into cultic veneration. Junior in college now. Late one evening I got a call from a buddy who said I should scutter right down to a certain bar and meet this wild man from CBS News, who was waving tumblers of Cutty Sark through the air and talking about my favorite subject, Faulkner. The man’s name was Hughes Rudd.

  It turned out that this Mr. Rudd was now a correspondent for CBS, and that he was leaving soon for Oxford, Mississippi, where he would film a documentary about Faulkner and Faulkner’s country. Within the elapsed time of one Cutty Sark, I found myself hired. When I protested earnestly that I hadn’t come to ask for a job, that I was just genuinely interested, that I didn’t want to bust his budget, Hughes Rudd said: “Don’t be a fool, David. CBS has money falling off it like dry leaves.” And he fluttered his fingers through the air. “Dry leaves.”

  A few days later I was AWOL from college, camped at a motel in Oxford along with Hughes and a film crew. For two weeks there I lived the exalted life of an editorial consultant and gofer. I stood by while Hughes interviewed the chairman of the English Department at Ole Miss, a blindingly tedious man who considered himself chief curator of Faulkner’s memory but whom Faulkner certainly would have loathed and Hughes had no patience for either. I stood by while Hughes talked with Faulkner’s old hunting chums and the blacks who had tended his horses. I stood by throughout long days of filming inside the small ramshackle house on the south edge of town, beyond the driveway chain and the huge magnolias, the same house that from a distance looked so imposing behind its neoclassic columns. And sometimes, though not for many hours, I stayed at the motel to work on a script. But Hughes wasn’t really sh
ooting this program according to any script. He was shooting from his gut; he was shooting from his memory of what certain phrases, certain scenes, certain novels could mean to a person’s life. Clearly Hughes himself was still a writer at heart, despite the CBS business, and he cared about Faulkner in a way that no mere TV commentator ever would. Hughes Rudd was in those days (and remained) an anomaly in the sleek world of network news—a jowly man with a bloodshot glare and a fast, sardonic wit who stubbornly worked the fringes of American culture, the flea circuses and hog-calling fests and tattooists’ conventions by which he could illuminate, with his dour deadpan, the important truth that life itself was a benign but very ridiculous practical joke. And the notion of putting a thoughtful contemplation of Faulkner and Faulkner’s Mississippi before a prime-time CBS audience was itself so mischievously improbable that it suited Hughes perfectly. Meanwhile there was no need for a script. Faulkner himself had written the script; it was his words we would use. For now, Hughes just wanted to capture the flavor of Faulkner’s place—which happened to be rural and small-town Mississippi. Get a shot of those mules. Get a shot of that kudzu. Get a shot of this derelict plantation house with the roof fallen in and the columns awry and the thistles growing up between the porch planks. I stood by.

  We ate steaks every night and I learned to drink and Hughes and I talked about Faulkner. We talked about writing, the craft Hughes had abandoned and I was just hoping to begin. We talked about sleekness versus fringes. It emerged that my real job on this assignment was to keep Hughes good company and to prevent him from getting himself into trouble—so Hughes said—when the Cutty Sark piled up over his eyebrows. I was fired and rehired three times within the first week. One harrowing evening at dinner I sat between Hughes and Faulkner’s sister-in-law, a middle-aged woman still seething with outrage over something Hughes wrote in that Post piece six years earlier, and I was obliged to referee. Then it was over. I went back to college and heard six months later that the whole project had been scrapped, because CBS News was a half million dry leaves over budget.