Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  I rolled out of the panga and kicked hard for the dark bottom I saw below. The bottom that came into focus, however, was not a continuation of lava flows from the shore of Bartolomé—it was a huge school of orange-eyed mullet. Before I could halt my descent, the schooling fish parted, rising up around me in the form of a hollow cylinder. As I continued downward, the fish below me parted to reveal a white sandy bottom at about thirty-five feet. When I turned over to look back up at the fish from below, I saw that the elongated school stretched off more than a hundred feet in both directions. The lowest layer of this lens was about five feet off the bottom. The mullet were swimming in tight synchrony, veering and milling.

  Thousands of them moved in unison above me, like a single thunderhead.

  When I needed to ascend I put my hands together over my head like a springboard diver, kicked, and started moving up through them. When I glanced down, I saw the white bottom wink out beneath me and slowed my rise. Wherever I extended my hands now, the fish moved gracefully aside. When I pulled in my legs and hugged them to my chest, the fish came in closer, and for a few moments I was entirely surrounded. When the last layer of fish divided above me I saw the white bottom of the panga through about ten feet of water.

  That minute and a half with the orange-eyed mullet was an experience my body as well as my mind continued to remember. Here, for me, was the edge of the miraculous. In every corner of the world there was such resplendent life, unexpected, integrated, anonymous.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE LAST DAY of our ten-day excursion, the Beagle III put in at Puerto Ayora. We had a dinner of sea bass, rice and beans, and a fresh vegetable salad. The evening air was beginning to cool. We said good night to one another and headed for our rooms at the Hotel Galápagos, me to cabana numero cinco to begin sorting out my gear, to shower and pack. In the morning we’d all board a bus for the overland trip to Baltra and the flight out to Quito.

  I wasn’t ready to go. I picked at my belongings, indecisive about what to put where. My mind was surging in several directions at once, trying to align Darwin’s catalytic history here with environmental degradation today in the islands, and with the future of possibilities for Homo sapiens. Somewhere the Australian philosopher Val Plumwood has written that humanity’s task now is to “resituate non-humans in the ethical and to resituate humans in the ecological.” Having an ecological—rather than a solely political or economic—view of Homo sapiens and knowing that the physical environment exerts a selective pressure on the human genome lead to a straightforward observation: to care for the environment is to care for the self. To run roughshod over the environment is to subscribe to the belief that humans are free to remain indifferent to their physical environment, that natural selection doesn’t apply to them. That humanity’s biological future lies, instead, I suppose, not with natural selection but with genetic engineering, with the edited genomes of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) babies. Designer children.

  From the small window in my bathroom, after my shower and after I’d turned out the bathroom light, I could see the palisades of the night standing on the plain of the Pacific. What would Cook and Darwin have said to each other about the grids each man had used to navigate? How might they have defined that word archipelago? And what might Darwin have offered us if he’d sailed with Cook and not with the fundamentalist FitzRoy? And what might either of them have said to the crew of the Hōkūle‘a, after being apprised of the Pacific islanders’ trust in “navigator birds” to help shape their course?

  * * *

  —

  I’D BROUGHT ALONG to the Galápagos a three-by-four-and-a-half-foot navigational chart published by the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency Hydrographic Center, in 1978, which incorporated a sequence of fifteen revisions. Based on British Admiralty chart 1375 (which is based in part on FitzRoy’s sounding in the Galápagos in 1835), it was entitled “Archipiélago de Colón” and rendered in a scale of 1:600,000, meaning an inch here equaled about 9.5 nautical miles. The islands were represented in shades of gray, and a series of concentric lines revealed the topography of each one. The waters between them and the ocean surrounding the archipelago were white and hatched with lines of latitude and longitude. A navigational grid of thin green and maroon lines, based on magnetic compass bearings, was imposed over the other lines. Random stretches of water were stippled with numbers designating depths and with tiny, feathered arrows showing the direction of currents. Numbers atop the arrows indicated the average speed of these currents.

  I wanted to fix this third journey to Galápagos in my memory. I was using the chart as a framework in which to envision the events of the trip and to establish the sequence in which they had occurred. I noted each of our landfalls: the dive at Roca Redonda, where it was not possible to step ashore; the route of our climb up the eastern flank of Alcedo, above el Canal de Isabela; the crossing of Bahía Isabel, where we’d seen the dolphins slipcased in phosphorescence. It was an exercise for me in recollecting and imprinting.

  As I walked around the room, folding clothes, putting notes in manila folders, cleaning the residue of ocean air from the lenses of my binoculars, I would step over to the map spread out on the bed and fix on it from memory the place where something else I’d just recalled happened. It was mildly disconcerting to me that Bahía del Correo was actually north and east of Margret Wittmer’s Black Beach, not to the south of her holdings, as I had pictured it. And Isla Darwin and Isla Wolf were much farther north of the main islands of the archipelago than I had imagined them to be.

  When I had everything ready, I prepared to roll the map up and slip it into its protective case. As I brought the large sheet of paper across the bedside lamp I was suddenly reading the archipelago as if it were lit from beneath. The weak lightbulb was the volcanic hot spot under the Nazca Plate, venting through La Cumbre and Cerro Azul.

  I removed the cactus-skin shade from the lamp to make the hot spot more intense. And then suddenly I saw the situation in reverse—the bulb was the sun and I was looking at it from the ocean floor, not seeing the islands in an overview as the peaks of a cluster of volcanic mountains but seeing them from below as floating objects on the surface of the ocean, like volcanic cinders. To enhance this illusion, I rotated the chart, swapping top for bottom. What was the “upside down” of this place now? And if that was sunlight I saw dimly through the surface of the ocean, backlighting the islands but revealing no detail, was it now all right that west was on my right and not my left? If I rotated the map end for end to put the west back on my left, the “bottom” of the archipelago was now apparently its “top.”

  What would be the correct orientation for a navigator at the start of a voyage through Galápagos? What alternatives might there be for a mariner steering here by conventions other than port and starboard, east and west? What would the navigator in the Hōkūle‘a suggest here?

  In a corner of the navigational chart I saw the following in purple letters: “WARNING: The prudent mariner will not rely on any single aid to navigation.”

  Like Cook, Darwin wasn’t navigating in Galápagos with an existing map. He was making a map.

  Jackal Camp

  Turkwel River Basin

  Western Lake Turkana Uplands

  Eastern Equatorial Africa

  3°06'08" N 35°53'18" E

  We’ve come down from the north on the dirt road from Lokwakangole, five Kamba men and myself, riding in a couple of long-wheelbase Land Rovers. One of the Rovers, outfitted as a utility vehicle with a cargo bed behind the cab, carries a bulky load of camp gear under a dusty green tarp. The others are all older than I am, in their fifties. Here in Lodwar each of them shakes hands with a young Turkana man who’s been waiting for us. A tall, shoeless fellow in gray shorts, he wears a dark blue short-sleeve shirt with vertical stripes of small yellow triangles. His forehead, cheeks, and chin are neatly ribb
ed with small cicatrices.

  The Turkana man helps two of us, Onyango and Nzube, untarp the load in the utility vehicle and the three of them roll two 45-gallon plastic water barrels over to the town well to fill them. There is a polite exchange among them in Swahili, the Kamba men asking the Turkana man about the quality of the water before they start pumping. The head Kamba man, Kamoya, accompanied by the other two in our group, leaves to visit small shops scattered along the disjointed, uneven lanes of the village, and I follow. Kamoya is looking for flashlight batteries, millet, a single roll of black-and-white film, and cigarettes. I pause before a shop window to study the reflection of my face. Rivulets of sweat cut through the dust caked there. It glistens on the bosses of my cheekbones and pools at the base of my neck, filling the shallow depression between my clavicles.

  The village simmers in the afternoon heat. I adjust my wide-brimmed hat. In every direction I turn, someone is looking at me.

  The proprietor of a store where Kamoya purchases a 25-pound sack of millet asks where the four of us are from. Wambua and Bernard Ngeneo drift out the door with their purchases without answering. Kamoya remains behind to respond to the question. I dawdle, pretending to search for aspirin on a shelf of medicaments, but I am listening for Kamoya’s answer.

  Kamoya says they are Kamba, from the south of Kenya, and that they’ve been working for a white man up north at a place called Nariokotome. Does he know it? About fifty miles north of Lokwakangole? Oh, he knows of it, yes. It’s the famous place where Richard Leakey found the skeleton of a boy who lived there very long ago, the man says. Actually, the man who discovered the 1.53-million-year-old Homo ergaster skeleton known as the “Nariokotome boy” is standing right in front of him, though Kamoya doesn’t clarify this point.

  And what are you doing here? the man inquires, gesturing with his head toward the door the other two have just walked out. Kamoya says we’re going to be camping south of the Turkwel River for a few weeks, to the east of Lodwar. We’re going to be looking for rocks, to see how old they are. The country Kamoya refers to, the man is aware, is mostly scrubland, overgrazed by Turkana livestock—goats, camels, sheep, and donkeys. He reacts as if Kamoya is deliberately leaving something important out.

  Though he himself does not smoke, Kamoya buys a pack of cigarettes to mollify the proprietor, thanks him, and leaves.

  I leave without having bought anything.

  The others come into view up ahead at a petrol station. Kamoya’s longtime friend Nzube Mutiwa is waiting in the driver’s seat of the utility vehicle. Onyango Abuje and Christopher, the young Turkana, are topping off the diesel tanks in the Land Rovers. They’ve already filled the water barrels, rolled them up onto the ute’s cargo tray, retarped the load against the clouds of road dust they expect to face, and are now checking the tire pressures all around.

  I ask Kamoya, driving the other vehicle out of Lodwar across the short concrete bridge that spans the Turkwel River, about the conversation in the store, which had been conducted in Swahili. Why had he stayed behind to answer the nosy man’s questions, instead of leaving with the others? And didn’t it seem to him, too, that the proprietor was a bit suspicious? Kamoya says to the first question, “You don’t want to be rude someplace where people don’t know you.” He answers the second question with a flick of his left hand, a gesture of indifference.

  We cross the river on the dirt road that goes south to Lokichar, but almost immediately turn left onto another road. We’re headed east toward the western shore of Lake Turkana, about 35 miles away. This particular road will bear off to the south before it reaches the lakeshore, however, and afterward pass to the west of the Nachorugwai Desert. Lake Turkana, known informally during the British occupation as the Jade Sea, was also once called Lake Rudolf. It’s relatively narrow and fills a depression about 149 miles long, part of the East African section of the Great Rift Valley. It has no outlet.

  Our vehicles move steadily east. Nzube remains a ways behind us, to keep clear of the worst of the billows of dust, which hang nearly motionless in the still air above the road. Some miles east of Lodwar, we turn left at an unmarked place, gear down, and proceed north in four-wheel drive across rough tilted terrain. We negotiate the soft silt of wadi courses, push through stretches of thick brush, and cross small, hard patches of water-rounded gibber stone, finally coming to a halt before the rampart wall of a gallery forest, a line of old acacia trees marking the west bank of the Kerio River. Ten days later, when our water barrels are empty, we will dig in this dry riverbed for water to quench our thirst, to wash ourselves and our dishes, and to wash our clothing, of which the Kamba men have very little.1

  Kamoya directs the setting up of camp—the cook tent here, the sleeping tarp there, a worktable over in that spot under the trees, firewood in this spot. A clothesline is to be strung between those two trees. I look for ways to be of use. The others, moving quickly and efficiently through a familiar routine, politely accommodate my efforts. Wambua goes off to fix a flat tire. Onyango and Bernard walk off a ways to dig a latrine.

  After the campsite has been squared away, Christopher brings glasses of lemonade from the cook tent and the six of us sit together on folding chairs in the shade of the tall acacias. Kamoya describes the country around us in English, occasionally in Swahili or Kamba. He wants to get everyone oriented. Three miles to the north, the Turkwel River. Directly to the south, the Napedet Hills. Off to the west, the Loima Hills. A thinly vegetated country of lava tuff and imbricated cobbles, of mudflows, sand depressions, and exposed gravel surrounds the camp. We will scour this landscape methodically, day after day, looking for fossil evidence of the ancestors of Homo sapiens—the ramus of a hominid jaw, an astragalus from the foot of an early human, a fragment from a pelvic girdle. Looking for any hint of human ancestors, of australopithecines, or early “maybes” in the human evolutionary family, like the hominid Ardipithecus ramidus, emerging from the rock and earth around us. These would be the deep and the very deep ancestors of all of us sitting beneath the acacias, not to mention the ancestors of Helen of Troy, of the seventh-century Chinese poet Du Fu, of the builders of Tenochtitlán, of Neanderthals buried at Shanidar in the Fertile Crescent, also of the three Turkana men now striding swiftly toward our camp from the west. Their haste causes their multicolored cloaks to flare like wings in the heated air. One grips a vimbu, a Turkana fighting stick.

  I had been helping Christopher gather and store bundles of firewood before we sat down for lemonade and to listen to Kamoya’s descriptions. I was studying birds in the acacia trees around us after Kamoya spoke, comparing them with images in a bird guide I had, and was making notes in a spiral notebook as the Turkana men approached. I was the last of the six of us to notice the men, after Wambua signaled to Kamoya by lifting his chin sharply, and Kamoya turned in his camp chair to see what had caught Wambua’s attention.

  I put my notebook aside and look around apprehensively at the others.

  In their left hands the three Turkana men carry their head stools, kitis; in their right hands two of them carry mkwajus, short walking sticks. They cross the camp’s perimeter line and quickly seat themselves a short distance from us, near an acacia.

  They have the indignant air of men who have been slighted.

  The tallest of them, wearing a thin wool cloak with wide vertical stripes of red separated from wide stripes of dark blue by narrow yellow stripes, begins to address Christopher, who is peeling potatoes in the shade of the trees. He jabs his vimbu repeatedly into the ground for emphasis. His hair is impeccably groomed: a chignon at the back of his head, a foreknot above his brow, and a skullcap of cornrows, the whole of it meticulously plastered with red and gray mud. A single ostrich feather is spiked vertically in the chignon. Steel bracelets on his wrists clink brightly in the dry air when he gesticulates. Thin metal hoops sway and jerk at his earlobes.

  While the man continues to direct his tirade a
gainst Christopher in Turkana, Kamoya begins to approach. He lifts his chair, moves it ten feet closer to the Turkana men, then sits down and waits. He does this several times until he is seated directly in front of the three of them, at which point he waves Christopher away, back to his cook tent. Kamoya begins speaking quietly, deferentially, in Swahili. The other man renews his berating, now in Swahili. Kamoya doesn’t interrupt him. Nzube translates for me. The men feel insulted. No one has asked their permission to camp here. But his anger and suspicion go deeper than this. The Turkana believe we are here to look for commercial gemstones and geodes. No, says Kamoya, we’re looking only for old bones, and we’re doing this work with the support of the government of Kenya. Kamoya, of course, is implying that he does not need these men’s permission, but he is respectfully receiving their objections. He listens patiently while the other man explains the tenets of traditional hereditary land ownership among the Turkana people, which, he finally comprehends, is not going to change Kamoya’s mind.

  One senses he and his ancestors have been losing this argument for more than a hundred years now.

  The other two Turkana men are younger, less emotionally involved. Only one of them wears steel and leather bracelets, steel ear hoops, and a sheathed wrist knife. His cloak is orange with tiny yellow decorative stitches. He has a wooden plug in his lower lip. His hair, too, is plastered flat and done up in a traditional way. He turns away occasionally during the conversation to laugh at the absurdity of Kamoya’s statements. The third man wears a cotton bedsheet for a cloak, dyed purple and brown in a sort of paisley pattern. Like the other two, he wears open leather sandals and his face is ritually scarred, but his hair is cropped close to his skull and he is balding.