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Across a Desert Sea
http://www.pbs.org/pov/borders/2004/talk/cs_193.html
Carl Safina
Mar 26, 2004
Sandy and I are at the Tucson airport, where jets are roaring into the morning and the desert's brown ridges ring the sky in weightless silence. A few
years ago Sandy formed the non-profit Environmental Flying Services. By non-profit she means, "I charge only for trip expenses. I never charge
anything for my time. These researchers' projects would be impossible otherwise; they have no money to pay a pilot." And so today we will fly to La
Paz, Mexico, near the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula. There we will meet Laura Sarti, the Mexican scientist conducting this aerial
census of leatherback sea turtle nests.
We lift into the desert sky, climbing to 7,500 feet, acquiring a vulture?s-eye view. Soon we cross the Mexican border at the twin cities of Nogales
Arizona and Nogales Mexico, different as night and day.
After customs formalities in Hermosillo, we prepare to strike east toward that finger of ocean in the desert known as the Sea of Cortez or, more p.c.
nowadays, the Gulf of California. Since we'll be making a prolonged water crossing, Sandy shows me the safety equipment. She has a newly re-inspected,
re-packed life raft on the seat. "I've added a little paddle and there's goodies to eat and water packets and new flares, and I told them to put a
flask of brandy in place of the Bible the raft comes with." We'll wear belt packs containing auto-inflating life vests. Sandy says she flies so many
over-water hours, it's not a matter of if she has to ditch, but when. Her engine once stopped while she was crossing the Gulf, but she was able to
restart it. "If we have to ditch over water, keep the door closed until we hit. Then, you grab the raft and throw that sucker out the door. It's got a
40-foot cord attaching it to the plane, and if it isn't already inflated you just jerk that cord. Once we're floating, you're the captain, not me."
Why does the passenger become captain, Captain?
"Because I don?t know s*** about being on water. You do."
After fueling we head west from Hermosillo. And soon the miracle of Earth reappears: saltwater. This licking tongue of the Pacific Ocean is a jade
sea, rather opaque, streaked with plankton blooms like pollen on a pond. We cross 70 miles of Gulf. The wrinkled sea surface is beautiful, like the
grain in fine wood is beautiful. A few miles from shore we turn south, paralleling Baja California's massive, timeless coast, floating there in blue
haze.
I notice a boat that dives. Sandy says, "Yes! ? feeding fin whales!" She descends too rapidly for my groundling stomach. "Look at that guy coming up
vertical." But I'm already watching one angling downward, its jaws massively agape, vast pleated throat distended, dragging a comet of bubbles into
those jade depths.
Sandy circles as I open the window at 115 miles an hour for a literally breathtaking photo op. She says suddenly, "Oh god ? a blue. I'll put her on
your side, but she's going down." The blue whale is the largest creature ever to have lived on Earth ? and I don't see it. "She looked great," says
Sandy, as though talking about an old friend.
Sandy has seen, it is safe to venture, more than most people. She flies researchers studying everything from plankton to whales, people who really
know nature and understand where to find it and how to see it. So I'm surprised when she suddenly says, "I miss a lot from up here. I mean, it's a
surreal existence. Like, I've flown thousands of miles of turtle surveys and," she turns to face me, "I've never watched a turtle lay eggs."
I understand, but I'm not about to start feeling sorry for Sandy. She found her true calling. She's been a social worker, ran a farm-like center for
runaway kids, earned extra money as a belly dancer, been a librarian. "I did a lot of things that interested me, and when they stopped interesting me,
I moved on. Flying is the only thing that has never stopped interesting me."
We pass Loreto, with gorgeously striated red-rock desert cliffs plunging on our immediate right. Sandy nods shoreward saying, "This should be a
national park." I wonder if she means just the land. I think it would be cool to have a Great Whales National Park. On land we've designated national
parks for observing nature's spectacles, and wilderness areas, closed to motorized use, for wild things and diligent people willing to lose sight of
their car. No less at sea, we need just a few ocean parks for ocean-loving people, and a few untrammeled ocean reserves for sensitive ocean wildlife.
But only a tiny fraction ? well under one percent ? of ocean area is protected. That's as true in the U. S. as it is worldwide. We need to move the
concept of zoning into the sea, so that various places might be zoned for various uses, from oil drilling to different kinds of fishing to ocean
refuges, to help people understand what uses can be expected and what places can be protected.
By four p.m. we're 1200 feet over the Bay of La Paz between Baja and the island of Espiritu Santo, talking to the tower and preparing to land. A
Caracara watches from the runway as we smear some rubber.
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Stranded Angels
http://www.pbs.org/pov/borders/2004/talk/cs_231.html
Carl Safina
Apr 5, 2004
Sandy had mentioned that despite her hours aloft she'd never watched a turtle laying eggs. And so we are on the ground. Our destination is the beach
camp at Barra de la Cruz. Laura comments, "I like Mexiquillo very much, but it is dangerous."
It's a warm soft night and the waves sound delicious. There's a faint trill of insects and the smell of vegetation and the sea. It's a wide flat beach
of powdery sand and gleaming breakers. Laura's colleagues greet us warmly -- and say there's a leatherback down the beach.
We hop onto an ATV with Laura driving, and streak along in the night wind, running the harder wet-packed sand near the hissing waves, following the
shore's contours about a mile. This beach impresses as a very remote place. I see no human-made light, not up or down the beach, nor back into the
shadowed hills.
The turtle is up on dry sand, already well into her body pit. I've seen these turtles on beaches before, and Sandy is suitably awed, repeating, "I
don't believe it. I don't believe it."
Sandy looks and looks at the monster in our midst, then says, "I didn't expect her to appear so... real."
I say, "She's a little surreal."
When she manages to collect herself a bit, Sandy says, "She looks like a Stegosaurus -- or some kind of -saurus." Inspecting more closely, she
observes, "I didn't understand that the ridges on her back were so pronounced."
Not far away, another gleaming female is emerging from the ocean. Sandy says, "Think of how astonishing it must be. For all the time it has been
growing, it has wandered a world in weightless motion. And yet after years in this deep, moving world, it drives itself to shore. And in an instant
this weightless being suddenly weighs half a ton. What in the world is she experiencing?"
The great leatherback before us has finished clearing the site and digging the "body pit" and is settled down into the more humid sand, into which she
is now drilling a perfectly cylindrical egg chamber. She does this with her rear flippers, her work perfect and unseen, the work of a blind
watchmaker.
She seems on autopilot, as though channeling directions from a higher source. We seem to be witnessing sheer instinct. Something in her is directing
bone and muscle movement and her exacting fine-motor manipulations. And thus she digs the precious chamber she was born to dig, her rear flippers
alternating, her whole posterior shifting for each perfect scoop.
And in equal measures absurd and yet appropriate, I suddenly hear Aretha Franklin in my head, singing,
"Rock steady. Rock steady, baby.
Let's call this song exactly what it is (what it is, what it is).
Just move your hips with a feeling from side to side.
Dig yourself a body pit and go for a ride --
While you're moving rock steady. Rock steady, baby..."
Here on a wild night beach with a booming surf for a rhythm section and a nesting dinosaur from the deepest reaches of the planet, the greatest
mystery is how we've gotten here all together.
Laura says that if we don't take her eggs to the hatchery, poachers will get them. I ask, "What poachers?" As far as I can tell, there is no one else
here.
Laura laughs. "They are here. Already, they know she is here digging. Just before I went to get you, a man was here with a bucket for her eggs. He
said to us, 'OK, you found her first.' There is a village, not far. And a path, there." She gestures to a cleft in the nearby dune that leads into the
vegetative shadows. "They are like ghosts. You don't see them. But they are here. Always here."
And so one of the turtle crew produces a large plastic bag and collects her eggs as they fall, for deliverance to the hatchery.
The turtle has no idea. When she has finished her task she covers her empty egg chamber, suspecting nothing. It's just another of the acts of faith
that link the chain of her long life. And in her next act of faith she chugs heavily down the beach, into the waves. The moon-pulled surf is running
hard and high. The first wave that hits her is big enough to float her off her belly, and she begins swimming. And in the next wave she is gone.
Laura drops Sandy and I off at 3:18 a.m. so we can spread our blankets on the beach and dream of giant turtles. Laura herself zooms back into the
night. She knows there will be more eggs, more leatherbacks to save.
--
Image: Sandy with the leatherback
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