Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (6 page)

Over time, his feelings began to change. The perspective that many young people get from experiencing unfamiliar terrain was delivered to Carlito through the travelers he encountered. He says, “I started to wonder: Why, when people come here, do they say it’s so beautiful? Why don’t people want to leave? I changed my view to see a tourist view. People come wanting to know a local like me, but I want to know them. How do they see this place?”

We’re nearing the end of the mangrove tunnel. Carlito sweeps his hair into a loose bun on his head and continues, “Before, I didn’t understand that you don’t need money for the most beautiful things. A smile? Free! The beach? Free! Surf? Free! Free things for me are enough. That’s what people come here for, what they really need—the free things. My island isn’t developed, and that is a good thing.”

When we exit the forest, Carlito says, “When I started working here I didn’t know how these wonderful trees worked. Everything here is important . . . All my life changed when I starting sharing my island. I’m no
santo
—how do you say, saint? But I’m a better person since I got to understand this place.”

We’re in full sunlight now, back in the open waters of the bay. Carlito turns his boat to make sure that the rest of the group has made it out of the mangrove. After he’s counted the brightly colored crafts to make sure everyone is accounted for, he resumes his course, falling silent as we paddle a snaking passageway crafted by trees.

The water becomes choppy as we round cliffs of white coral on our way to a small beach accessible only by boat. When I drag my kayak onshore, I plant my paddle as a flagpole. A middle-aged man, who’s in Vieques as part of a trip around the world with his wife, pulls up beside me and does the same. We sit in the sand as Carlito and Michelle sort out snorkeling equipment. Around us, bits of sun-bleached coral lie scattered about like bones thrown from a fortune-teller’s hands.

The man, well-traveled and obviously well-heeled, says, “It’s unbelievable this place is still here.” But it’s really what
isn’t
on Vieques that’s amazing. Even now, eight years after the navy stopped bombing the island, there are no chain restaurants or stores. No fast-food restaurants. No golf courses. He says, “It’s like the whole island is fifty years behind.” He pauses, glances around the otherwise deserted beach, and reconsiders, “Or maybe it’s fifty years ahead.”

 • • • 

Visitors to Vieques are warned against collecting shells—mortar shells, that is. A major portion of the eastern end of the island is closed due to unexploded ordnance and cleanup efforts. Disconcerting, to be sure, but at the moment my major concern is finding a safe place to step, not out of fear for my own safety, but for that of the coral below. One false move could snuff out hundreds of years of growth. Preventing this sort of catastrophe is harder than it might seem to a seasoned snorkeler. Though I’ve grown up around water, I’ve never taken to flippers.

As I flail, I watch Carlito’s movements under the water, learning. He turns his head slightly to look at me, and he moves his hands to indicate that I’m trying too hard. I’m moving too fast. In order to last in these waves, this far out, I’ve got to relax. The world is muffled as I plunge my head into the water. I stop my desperate kicking. I don’t have the energy to keep fighting. Slowly, I catch on. My hands fall to my side, and I gently propel myself forward. I’m not exactly graceful, but I’m in transit.

A good portion of the coral at the mouth of the Bio Bay is dead. Unfortunately, it’s not a surprising discovery. Unusually warm waters have led to the death of roughly 40 percent of Caribbean coral over the last decade. But there are signs of life on the sea floor here. Brain corals, named for their uncanny resemblance to one of the most complex and least understood parts of human anatomy, appear every few feet. They are small specimens of a species that can grow to be six feet tall. I wonder if the reef also suffered during Hugo, if these marigold-colored corals are a hopeful sign of its regeneration, but Carlito is too far away to ask.

To me, the bottom of the sea floor looks nearly barren—small bits of sea grass and kale-like plants growing from a chalky bottomland. To Carlito, it is still a place of bounty. He reliably finds less-than-charismatic living creatures to share. When he pulls a small sea urchin from a piece of coral, he asks me if I’d like to hold it. I study its spiny surface and extend my arm. Its weight reveals a surprising density beneath its spiny appearance. When the creature presses into my palm, I feel anchored, grounded, despite the fact that I am not tethered to terra firma. Carefully, I hand the urchin back to Carlito. He passes it around until everyone willing to hold it has had a turn. Then, he slips beneath the waves to return it to its home.

As we begin to propel ourselves toward land, it becomes apparent that the tides have taken us much farther than I realized. We’re far from shore and my flippers have, once again, begun to seem like a burden. I feel hopelessly restrained, and I’ve lost sight of Matt in the crowd, identities hidden by masks and the bulge of mouth spouts that look like dorky headgear. My legs are cramping, and my throat is burning. Michelle is following the group in a kayak to provide emergency assistance, but I don’t want to call her over.

The water is shallow, but if I put my flippers on the coral below, it will die. I’m seconds from admitting failure, calling for help, when I feel a hand on my back. Matt has seen me struggling, and he has reached out without being asked.

I have the oddest feeling, a realization, really, that I’ve been wanting him to do this for over a year. He’d long been telling me that I should take a night, go out to dinner with friends, hand Archer over without guilt, but I couldn’t. The confusion over what my life had become—the sleep deprivation, the hormones, the resentment—had been too much for me to navigate on my own. I’d wanted him to step up, to not make me feel like a failure for asking. I had blamed him for not noticing that I was drowning, but I should not have been afraid to ask for parenting help any more than I should have been embarrassed by my need for a little tow from Michelle’s kayak. Matt and I make eye contact through our plastic goggles, and we nod in unspoken understanding. He keeps his hand on my back until we reach shore.

 • • • 

On the beach, we dine on sandwiches that have been stowed in soft-sided coolers. Michelle pours guava juice into small plastic cups, and I mention that I’m disappointed that I haven’t yet tried fresh coconut milk on the island. Carlito, overhearing, says, “Coconut? We can have that here! This is freedom island!” He turns on his heels. “Come with me!”

A few other interested parties trail behind, including Michelle. “Nobody can climb a tree like Carlito!” she announces. We walk down the beach, over patches of dried sea grass that crunch under our bare feet. When I point out a tree with large coconuts, Carlito says, “That’s a good one!” Then his eyes scan the bottom of the tree. He says, “Looks like it’s been protected by some scary stuff.”

The understory around the tree is the most prickly and daunting I’ve seen on the island. Bits of hardened, dead reeds appear as chest-height nails. Still, Carlito is deterred for only a moment. By the time the rest of the group reaches our spot on the beach, he’s already out of sight. I point to the brush.

“He’s in
there
?” Michelle asks, concerned.

Suddenly, Carlito’s head rises above the reeds. He puts his arms around the tree—as if he’s asking it to dance—and he lifts himself, so that the pads of his feet are against its trunk. Then he begins to climb. He’s a blur of hands-feet-hands-feet. His movement is so fast, so graceful, I almost don’t have time to admire his form until he’s in the upper area of the tree. He tosses coconuts over the brush so that they roll down the embankment, all the way to the beach. They each come to a halt at our feet, unharmed. Michelle looks up at Carlito in admiration: “That kid likes a good challenge.” She gathers the coconuts under her arms, and we head back to where we’ve left the boats.

Carlito emerges from the foliage without a scratch. He takes the smallest coconut and pounds it against a piece of driftwood that has been doubling as our dining table. Finally the green outer layer breaks, and he peels it back to reveal coarse, cream-colored fibers. Carlito cracks the interior shell with his thumb, pressing in as if he’s opening a tabbed soda can. He hands the coconut to me. “Anything in there?”

I take it with both hands and hold it over my head. Nothing. I lean back farther and hold the coconut higher. It’s dry. Carlito looks disappointed. “We will try another,” he says.

Michelle hands him a larger coconut. “It’s heavy,” he says as he hits it against the silvered branch. When its leathery green skin hits the wood for the second time, the coconut begins to spray, liquid shooting in every direction. Carlito jumps up and brings the exploding orb over my head. Coconut water shoots into my hair and onto my face. “Drink!” he says.

I open my mouth to catch the mild, earthy streams. “Somebody hand me a cup,” Michelle says. I gulp the water for a moment before stepping back so that she can gather some of it. This isn’t exactly the sort of relaxed, colorful-umbrella-garnished, sipping-out-of-a-straw sort of coconut experience I’d expected. It’s better.

 • • • 

Launching kayaks into a churning ocean at dusk doesn’t seem a terribly safe idea, but it’s the move we’re making. I can barely see the silhouettes of my fellow boaters. They’re moving forward in sync, paddles like clock hands ticktocking us into the future.

As we paddle toward the Bio Bay, fighting currents to stay on course, I can make out Mark’s pontoon boat. I also see a series of red lights slipping across a distant portion of the bay, an indication that Garry has already arrived for his evening paddle. But our group is still out of reach of the bioluminescence. These waters, at the bay’s gulping mouth, are still more ocean than mangrove.

I put my hand in the water and let it act as a rudder for a moment. No light. The breeze of the beach disappears as we move into the bay. The waves also cease. When we’re in range of the mangrove forest’s spindly root system, our rocking world becomes serene. Just as I am lulled into appreciating the bay for its simple, everyday beauty, just when I get a little too comfortable, the dinoflagellates appear. Despite all my previous encounters with the water, I’m startled by its presence, so mysteriously lovely that it’s hard to accept as an earthly scene.

“See the glow?” Carlito says. “It’s starting!”

When the entire group is in earshot, Carlito asks, “What would you do if you were holding a coconut and it suddenly became one hundred times bigger than you?”

“Drop it?” someone offers.

Carlito laughs. “Well, you’d probably get scared and run away. That’s what happens here. The dinoflagellates use the light as defense, making themselves look bigger than they are so things will leave them alone.” He puts his hands together to form the rough shape of a dinoflagellate and starts to chant: “Defense! Defense!”

This is one of the explanations scientists have derived for the phenomenon. Other hypotheses include the idea that the shock-and-awe reaction is actually intended to attract large predators so that whatever is threatening the dinoflagellates will be eaten before it has a chance to chow down on them. There’s also a small contingent of scientists that believes dinoflagellates’ bioluminescence is an evolutionary holdover made unnecessary by environmental changes. I find this scientific footnote particularly enthralling. It’s not often that you find a single-cell organism creating beauty for no reason at all.

The group goes wild, mocking fans at a sporting event. They echo Carlito’s cry: “Defense! Defense!”

Our boats knock with dull thuds as we attempt to break loose of each other. I lower my hand and let water pool in my palm before lifting it at an angle so that it flows down my arm, which is temporarily transformed into the tail of a shooting star. Then I lean against the kayak’s neoprene seat to study the sky. I’m pleased to see the Milky Way with unmistakable clarity. It feels like a crack in my consciousness.

My moment of quiet reflection is broken when Matt, who’s behind me, hits his paddle against the water’s surface—roughly, as if to splash an invisible foe—spinning plankton rain down on the bay’s glassy surface like an explosion of fireworks in a moonless sky. The eruption is bright and surprisingly far-reaching.

“Do it again!” someone shouts in the distance. He obliges.

A chorus of wonder follows: “Look at that! Oh, my! Incredible!”

At first, I’m a little contentious. But when I hit my own paddle against the water at the request of another boater, I am rewarded with a parade of sparklers, and I forgive the disruption. In fact, I am suddenly and unexpectedly grateful for it.

Others join in with their paddles—their own magic wands—and we become a flotilla of Roman candles set ablaze. Our rumpus splashing drowns out the voices of other groups on the bay, and the aura of pollution over Esperanza seems to dim in comparison. We watch as nebulous rings of living light ripple out, beyond our line of sight, adrift in an expanding universe.

September 2011

I AM GETTING READY TO WIRE HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS INTO
the Miami-based bank account of a guy who knows a guy in Venezuela. This sounds beyond sketchy, I know. And the worst part is, it very well may be. My resolve to follow through isn’t exactly fortified when my bank teller leans in and says, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“No,” I say. “But I don’t know what else to do.”

There are no hotels in the shallows of Lake Maracaibo, where the Catatumbo lightning—a near-continuous nocturnal lightning storm—rages more than 300 nights a year. But there are stilt villages, or
palafinos
, near the mouth of the Catatumbo River, which feeds the lake. They house populations that see more lightning than any other humans on earth. This is where I need to be to really experience Catatumbo lightning, the next phenomenon on my list. But navigating in-country airlines and booking passage with Venezuelan fishermen, who live hours away from landlines, presents a problem.

Naturalist Alan Highton is one of the only tour operators in the country that travels to the Catatumbo region. The American expatriate, who settled in Venezuela after marrying a national, has earned the nickname Alanconda due to his prophetic abilities to find snakes in murky water. He’s offered to buy my domestic plane tickets and boat passage if I send him fees in full. He’s also suggested that I wire some extra spending money. After all, Caracas has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world. Do I really want to show up in one of the most dangerous cities in Latin America with wads of cash in my pocket?

In his e-mail requesting half a month of my teaching salary, he wrote: “Of course, that takes trust . . . It’s an option.” Sure, good faith is always an option, but not necessarily an attractive one.

Miraculously, I’m able to send the funds because—just after beginning my quest in earnest—a publisher accepted a book proposal outlining my pilgrimage to wonder. A few months ago it seemed I’d never write again. Now, I have the opportunity to write nearly full-time.

The protective bank teller rat-a-tats on her keyboard, glancing up every so often, as if to make sure I haven’t come to my senses. I imagine how her concerns for my sanity would soar if I told her about the typhoid pills I’m taking with my dinner this week or the sore spot on my right arm from a yellow fever vaccine that came with a legally required warning from a nurse, who towered over me yesterday, saying, “This could be a lethal injection.”

This banker thinks I’m reckless, and she doesn’t know half of what I’m up to. But I’ve been feeling increasingly brazen lately. And my newfound courage is changing me in ways I’d never expect—at home.

I’ve been letting Archer explore more intrepidly, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed. At a recent dinner party, Matt told our dinner companions about finding Archer standing on top of the kitchen table, shouting with the unfettered enthusiasm of an explorer who’d just reached the top of a previously unscaled mountain. “I opened the door and Leigh Ann lunged toward him so I wouldn’t see what she was letting him do,” he said. “It was so out of character!”

I’d been embarrassed for Matt to see me let Archer run wild, afraid of being judged a bad mother. Unfortunately, I’m afraid the story made our friends, parents of two, think just that. “I once had someone’s five-year-old climb on our kitchen table,” the mother said, shaking her head. “You just can’t let that sort of thing go on for too long.”

But what if I let it go on forever? Archer is going to learn social norms and the limits of risk—I tell him about them every day—but I’d like him to know what it means to challenge himself as much as what it means to challenge me.

Before I left for Puerto Rico, Archer had weaned himself. He’d started talking. He’d begun sleeping through the night. But I was still in mourning for a life I’d thought I’d lost, the sacrifices I was making. It wasn’t until I went to Puerto Rico that I began to imagine that my life might actually have the potential to become larger than it had been pre-pregnancy, and I don’t just mean because of the joys of parenthood.

When I came home from that trip, something was different. I cried when I saw my son with his fine, golden-halo hair. The tears were, at first, of the how-could-I-have-left-him, look-at-what-I-missed variety. They soon turned to something else. Relief. He had allowed me to go. He would let me leave again.

When my father handed Archer to me on that first day back, I kissed his cherub-soft cheeks. And, for the first time since we locked eyes seconds after he emerged from my womb, I felt like he saw me. Something had shifted. I was no longer an appendage. I wasn’t his right hand, he seemed to realize; I was his right-hand woman. That day, I accepted that occasional absences, journeys that allow me to be true to myself, my spirit, have the potential to make me a more present mother.

And motherhood, in turn, might just be making me a braver woman.

Watching Archer discover the world is my greatest joy, but I’ve still got some discoveries to make outside of the ones he has to show me, in places that are not child friendly. The fact that I’m not planning to take him to Venezuela is perhaps the only part of my upcoming travel plan that seems sensible. He’ll be taking nature walks and making county fair visits with my parents while I’m out of the country—accompanied by even-keeled Matt, who agrees I might actually have some valid concerns about this particular trip.

The State Department’s warning for Venezuela is one of the diciest I’ve read. The cautions start at the airport and don’t let up: “The embassy has . . . received multiple, credible reports of victims of ‘express kidnappings’ occurring in the airport. . . . The road between Maiquetía Airport and Caracas is known to be particularly dangerous. Visitors traveling this route at night have been kidnapped and held captive for ransom in roadside huts that line the highway.”

Huts. For kidnapping.
Are you kidding me?

The Catatumbo leg of my journey is just beginning, but it’s already reminded me of something important that I tend to forget: Foolish acts and bold adventures almost always appear, especially in the beginning, to be the absolute same thing.

 • • • 

Matt and I have been with Alan Highton for two days—slowly working from the peaks of the Venezuelan Andes to the shores of Lake Maracaibo—when he nearly poisons us. We’re dining in a restaurant that is completely open to the diesel-powered street, at a large wooden table with leather-upholstered chairs. Alan ordered, going to the counter alone, and we were presented with chucks of chicken on silver platters, small tamales wrapped in green leaves, and mounds of boiled yucca, a starchy root vegetable.

Alan—who has shaggy salt-and-pepper hair and lips that are almost always lined with the brown residue of
chimo
, a pre-Columbian tobacco paste—gestures toward the communal plate of yucca as I stuff another bite of it in my mouth.

“That’s toxic, you know.”

The dense, mealy root suddenly turns bitter. I’m poised to spit it out. “The skin, it’s full of cyanide,” he continues, as I gag. “You have to peel it and wash it well to make it eatable.”

Luckily, Alan assures me, it seems the restaurant has done a fine job preparing our feast. I attempt to regain composure. I’m still getting used to his guiding style. He has a way of making me feel simultaneously well taken care of and completely on the edge of catastrophe. He puts everything out there, all the time.

This supremely forthright nature, I now realize, might be one of the reasons I chose to go with him in the first place. His promotional materials include lines like: “It is not a tour for those who look for luxury or rest. The climate is hard and the activities, of long hours, cover day and night.” We signed up anyway. So did several nationals, including Romo, a seventy-something theater professor from the highland city of Mérida.

After lunch, we pile back into a passenger van to roll past plantations of palm trees and pastures where water buffalo flick flies with their beef-stick tails. When we come across a flag representing the state of Zulia, which bears a lightning strike, a member of the group explains that it was the lightning he witnessed in Miami, Florida, that inspired him to seek out the Catatumbo. It is known to nearly all Venezuelans as a point of national pride and is credited for its heroic role in several battles, including the nation’s war for independence, when the lightning revealed invading ships to allow patriots to defeat Spain.

“Ah,” Alan says, “Florida is one of the world’s lightning hot spots.”

An estimated 1.4 billion lightning flashes occur on earth each year. Roughly 30 million of them flash over the United States. Florida has the highest number of strikes, Alaska has hardly any. The Democratic Republic of Congo in Central Africa has more than any other nation in the world, but recent National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) studies have revealed that no inch of earth gets more lightning than the Catatumbo Delta.

Benjamin Franklin is credited with being the first modern scientist to systematically go about proving the electrical nature of lightning. But despite his extensive studies, he conceded that he didn’t understand how clouds became electrified. Franklin thought bioluminescent waters—like those of Vieques—might actually be electric, an earthly source of energy that fueled lightning in the sky. But subsequent research led him to believe that living organisms were producing the waterborne light. He reasoned, in 1747, that “it is indeed possible, that an extremely small animalcule, too small to be visible even by the best glasses, may yet give a visible light.” This hypothesis, furthered by the generations of scientists that came after him, provided a basis for modern bioluminescent science.

Amazing, isn’t it, the things we find when we’re looking for something else?

Generations after Franklin hung up his kite and key, scientists still don’t know for sure what causes electrification in clouds. The running theory has long been that it’s due to charges created by ice particles colliding in clouds. The Catatumbo isn’t thought to be different from the lightning that splashes over Oklahoma City—or my very own home—in terms of physics or chemistry. But its reliability and geographic fixation set it apart. It is so consistent that locals depend on the atmospheric phenomenon—known colloquially as the Lighthouse of Maracaibo—as a navigational aid.

A few people have been watching this hot spot, the term for lightning-active places, from a distance. Steve Goodman, of NASA, is one of them. He is interested in lightning—be it in the Catatumbo Delta or elsewhere—because of its potential to save lives. Someday soon, scientists like Goodman believe, lightning might give early nocturnal tornado warnings. They might not know for sure what creates the sparks, but they’ve figured out that lightning-free zones in thunderstorms usually occur just before supercells start swirling, creating black holes in otherwise lit areas visible from space.

In 2015, NASA, in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has plans to launch a Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, which will have a real-time lightning mapper onboard. Goodman thinks severe storm warnings in the United States will be improved by 50 percent when it launches. This means that, in the 2011 storm season alone, lightning—which took 25 U.S. lives—had the potential to save 275 people from tornadoes with its Morse Code–like flashes. It is an ancient language we’re only beginning to understand.

 • • • 

Boys in plastic sandals chase our van, hawking coconut cookies. Behind them, shirtless men laze at roadside kiosks, gnawing on mangoes as juice drips onto bare skin. It’s several hours from Mérida to the shores of Lake Maracaibo and there are few corporate establishments along the way. Coffee is served via skinny teenage girls who stand in the center of the road with push-top metal containers. As we pass a dump truck full of artfully packed green plantains, Romo launches into a bit of local folklore that was passed down to him from his grandmother. “She was a peasant,” he says, “and she lived close to nature.”

His grandmother knew the old ways. Romo tells me she sipped water from dried, hollowed out gourds and sought the wisdom of shamans. She once explained to him that this region was full of lakes because of a forest sprite who came down from the highest mountain in the Andes with a clay pot, which he gifted to an elderly couple. “Take this,” the sprite told them, “and pour a little water as you walk between the mountains. If you do this, you will have eternal life.”

So, the couple spent the night pouring water. Their puddles, tiny offerings, grew to be lakes in the darkness. Villagers from all around awoke to find that the region was rich with water, sources of life. They wanted to thank the couple for what they had done, but in the morning, when the sun crested the surrounding mountains—so tall they were sometimes mistaken for storm clouds on hazy days—the elders were gone. Romo looks at me and says, “They’d dissolved into the lakes, understand?”

Plenty of things have dissolved in Lake Maracaibo. In 2011, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) named Venezuela the most oil-rich nation on earth. It has more oil than Saudi Arabia. Almost all of it lies at the bottom of Maracaibo, a virtual stew of prehistoric animal bones, zooplankton, algae, and long-lost dinoflagellates, the organisms that Franklin once thought might have the capacity to electrify. In death, maybe they do.

When Romo’s grandmother first told him about the Catatumbo, he searched distant horizons like a child looking for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, and with no less a sense of magic. Soon after he began to pay attention, he saw bits of light in the distance, explosions that appeared as if from another world. He hadn’t known to look for them, but they’d been there all along. It was a realization that forever shaped how he saw the world.

The last time he witnessed the lightning he was an adult, staying in a hotel a four-hour trip from here. Romo says, “I am not a timid person, but I felt a fear, a supernatural fear, like something coming from the collective unconscious that night.”