Kook

by Peter Heller

  THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE

  Conejo means rabbit. Punta Conejo, Rabbit Point. We heard about it from an excitable Italian in the La Fonda parking lot. He slept curled up in the backseat of his car. He had a flamboyant accent full of flourishes. He lived in San Diego, did some vague business where a sense of style was mandatory. Never stopped moving. I mean, I had the sense he was always in motion, even when talking to me. He talked and untied his seven-foot board. Talked and climbed into his wetsuit. Talked as he jogged away toward the beach. Didn’t make a lot of money, but it seemed that with that accent, and with never stopping, any difficulty in life could be surmounted, endured, talked through, and walked around. He was one of those people I couldn’t imagine ever getting down in the dumps. Or if he did, he would wear it in such a charming, dramatic way, his despair would look a lot better than most people’s happiness. A long silk scarf tossed around the neck. Ah, Italians.

  I got the sense he wasn’t a very good surfer, though he caught a lot of waves and cut a lot of turns. He was capable, but I was just learning that to be good required something else I couldn’t yet articulate. It was something to do with grace and working with the wave. A surfer could stick a fast wave and cut dozens of turns, but the best swooped with the natural rhythms of a water creature. Anyway, in the parking lot, reaching into his backseat and shoving aside his sleeping bag and pillow, he told me that if we really wanted to go to a place that was not crowded, that had a long, long left that was easy to catch, we should go to Conejo. Where was it? Way in the south, Baja Sur, just this side of La Paz on the Pacific coast. Worth the drive. He said that sometimes when he knew there was a good swell coming he would go there straight from his house, something like eighteen hours driving fast and all night.

  He asked to see my map, traced the highway through Constitution, slipped his finger down a dotted branch road, tapped on a jutting of the coast. In the middle of nowhere. No village on either side, no nothing.

  “Ah, sí, right here. The Rabbit. I brought my wife here in May. The wave, it is a left off the point, long, you can get on it anywhere. She is a beginner and she got very long rides.”

  That was it, the image was enough. The prospect of long, easy waves sounded like the ticket for both of us.

  We packed up in minutes, jostled past the big water tank where surfers were showering, turned onto the highway, and headed south. An hour to Ensenada, a crowded city where we got our passports stamped, and then we navigated back out to the two-lane blacktop. The Beast snorted and roared, vibrated, shuddered, made a great show of power, and crawled up a long hill. Sweet Beast. We fled civilization. Civilization obliged us by vanishing minutes out of Ensenada. A few miles south and we were in the Baja desert, the one I had seen in my sleep for months, the one that lays itself out under the sun and couldn’t care less. The one that shrugs off the bones of travelers and horses, that rolls over in its dreamless, star-singed sleep and pierces you with a thousand thorns. Where after an hour you wish that beyond the shoulderless road there was just a little sign of civilization here and there.

  Oven-hot air poured through the windows. Could not speak over the roar. The road shot arrow-straight across the flats, through plains of tufty tree yuccas green from recent rains; it squiggled over the steep hills in tight switchbacking loops decorated with shrines to the dead.

  It was a good road. Travelers complain about the terrible Baja Highway, the potholes and cracks, but this was a proud, mostly smooth, well-maintained highway. It was just, well, skinny. Your lane is bordered on the outside by oblivion (cliff) and on the inside by death (oncoming semis). The outside has no shoulder, just a sharp edge of broken pavement and a dropoff of anywhere from a foot—enough to roll us—and a tenth of a mile off some cliff. The steering in the Beast was a bit loose, and we did not under any circumstances wish to lose concentration and drift a few inches to the outside on a left curve. The person who did that now has a miniature chapel shaded by a thorny mesquite where the only sermon ever heard is the wind whistling along the little concrete eaves and the only listeners are the ever-mute Jesus, the plaster Virgin, the photograph of a young man in a cracked frame, a fallen bouquet of faded pink plastic orchids. The ones that really got to me were the shrines that held two or three pictures, a brother and sister or husband and wife, or cousins, or toddler siblings, protected by a Calvary of three somber crosses in a line. Half a family obliterated in one instant of inattention.

  The sandy arroyos were littered with the weather-stripped and rusted hulks that still held a memory of their original colors. What did the living think these memorials did for the dead anyway? Some were obviously well tended—freshly painted, laid with fresh artificial flowers—and the relatives must have driven long distances to get here. Or maybe they had been dropped off the side of the road by some express bus, carrying their bag of paint, new glass picture frames, a bottle of water, chicken tortillas wrapped in a towel. What a strange vocation, repainting a little chapel high above a gully in the empty afternoon. While the sun and wind who care about nothing push and pull at you, your only company the shadow of the rock mountains to the east, a frayed vulture, some silent stones. Mother of God, everything reminds us of our mortality. And the memories, of course, to keep you company, of the child or spouse, not even memory anymore, just a stone in the gut like a calcifying pearl.

  Grief is the thing we run from and toward our whole lives. Judging by all the shrines, Mexicans are much better at it than we are. It struck me, driving down the road past all these crosses, that a midlife crisis, maybe even a surf trip, was just another response to grief. Grief this time at my own flash-in-the-pan brevity. Suddenly realize I am only here for a short, very short while, getting shorter by the minute. What do I do? Surfing seemed like a reasonable if immature response, maybe a bit outworn, but better than buying a convertible. My less aquatic, forty-something friends were becoming Buddhists in droves. Which was all about acceptance. They meditated for weeks, months. I really respected them. They were not running pell-mell from mortality, death. They were not the figure in The Scream.

  The figure in The Scream with a surfboard under its wavery arm.

  Me, I just couldn’t sit that still.

  The Baja Highway keeps itself a safe distance from the sea, from the jaws and horns of the coast. The road, challenged enough in the desolation of the desert tries to stick to the longitudinal valleys that run beneath the cordillera. Now, in late August, the rainy season was in session. Rainy season is a grandiose moniker. It means that now and then the rock peaks are shrouded in black thunderstorms. The rain rings off the stones, thickens, beats into the crevices, pries open the seams, burrows into the gullies. The rain sweeps over the thirsty silent basins of yucca and mesquite and cardón cactus, over the slopes of ocotillo and acacia. The friable soil sucks it up with an almost audible hiss. The flinty scarps shrug it off. It braids and twines and tumbles into the wash and the wash swells with a muscular torrent that gathers speed with the unhurried inexorability of a freight train that blows no warning whistle when it crosses—and takes out—the road.

  At 5:15 p.m., past our curfew, we pulled into Guerrero Negro, about halfway down the Pacific coast. The sleepy main street was lined with motels and restaurants all named Ballena this, Ballena that. Whale town. Laguna Ojo de Liebre, or Scammons Lagoon, one of only three breeding spots in the world for the California gray whale, is just outside of the city. We didn’t see any whales, but on the sea side of town we saw miles of industrial salt flats and we saw dogs. There were dogs in the street and on the low rooftops. Dogs under the cars. We went into Pollo Loco for some crazy chicken and the matron had an air rifle in the corner to shoot chicken-hungry dogs. At the RV parking spot behind the Las Ballenas Motel there was a shepherd puppy under a picnic table, who looked at me over its shoulder with a pleading, dire hope, and thwomped its scrawny rat tail so hard in the dirt it made a little dust cloud of endearment. I wanted to adopt her more than anything. She squirmed and wriggled under
my hand in such an ecstasy, and her odds of survival here seemed so short that I tried in my mind to play out every way to keep the thing and couldn’t make it work. To get home in October for two months we were planning to fly, and then what? Our house sitter couldn’t keep her when we returned to Mexico to surf again. Kim and I had our hands full just trying to get on friendly terms with this harsh country and with the sea, which we really knew little about. Which was true. But I wish we’d taken her aboard still.

  Dogs and whales. Whales fascinated me. For the past few years I had been learning about them. How so many species are on the verge of extinction, how they embody the plight of the ocean itself. And if you’ve ever surfed with dolphins you know that cetaceans are the original surfers.

  Dogs and whales are supposed to share a common ancestor. Some sixty million years ago this four-legged progenitor took one last look at the flinty ground, at the stingy hills, and said, Screw it, and went back into the sea. I imagine that the transformation from sea dog to whale did not take place in one afternoon. But I can also imagine the dog’s relief as she felt herself lighten in the water. The burden of carrying around this heavy carcass, of falling forward foot to foot, was relieved. She wriggled her hind end, dog-paddled, and shimmied forward. Her limbs shrank, her vertebral column became cabled with muscle and got stronger and stronger and more flexible, and she grew flukes to harness this new power. Food was everywhere. Every other hour she swam through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The food came at her like weather fronts. The best protein on earth. If she was a toothed whale, like dolphins, orcas, sperm and pilot whales, she was besieged by fish, the bait balls rolled by like those dim-sum carts laden with treats. If she was a baleen whale, like blues, fins, humpbacks, minkes, and the local Mexican gray, then she only had to open wide as she swam through clouds of krill and plankton, sifting the bucketloads with her sieve of baleen. Hunting had never been this easy on land. Why hadn’t she thought of this sooner, coming home to the ocean? And a curious thing began to happen. Maybe it was the easy availability of all this high-protein food. Maybe it was that she had always been a bayer, a cryer, a barker, a singer, and now the delight of song carried so easily and far underwater and prompted pitched and echoing answers from so far away—her dog brain got bigger. It grew and grew. It got massive. To accommodate it, and the mouth to catch all that food, too, her head, her front end, became gargantuan. But her brain did more than increase in size. I imagine it self-delighted. The gift of song, the auditory cornucopia, the ease and grace and speed of movement in the buoying sea, the freedom from all but a couple of predators, this was a true, green, light-diffusing paradise. Her brain evolved with the speed of euphoria. It folded in on itself. It wrinkled, got convoluted, it’s crenellations multiplied. It increased its surface area like the Maine coast. These folds are thought to signify intelligence—more equals smarter. The brain of a whale is the only animal brain that has more sulci, or convolutions, than a human’s. The whales also developed spindle neurons—specialized brain cells once thought only to exist in humans and some higher primates. It welcomed complexity and divided into four lobes. (Humans have three.) It grew some more.

  Thirty million years ago, when human ancestors were still hopping around in trees, screeching over a fruit, the whales were communicating over vast distances, calling each other by name, referring to a third whale by name (these behaviors all well documented), and singing songs of unplumbed complexity.

  Cetaceans today, with their demonstrated capacity to experience emotions and to be self-aware (there is an objective test for this, using a paint spot on a whale and a mirror), must be feeling levels of grief and bewilderment unknown to their preindustrial ancestors. Their home has changed radically. Abandoned fishing gear—ghosting drift nets tens of miles long, lobster traps, longlines—entangle and drown upward of three hundred thousand sea mammals every year. Ship engines and props mangle the quiet depths and turn the sea into a cacophony in which the old, long-distant whale songs are lost. Midfrequency active sonar used by the U.S. Navy, the loudest underwater sound produced by man, ruptures the delicate hearing mechanisms of whales and wrecks their navigation systems, and they wash up on shore hemorrhaging from their ears and disoriented. Pollution—especially mercury, PCPs, and other heavy metals that are a by product of industry—precipitates into the sea and is absorbed by krill and plankton. Baleen whales eat so much of the stuff that their tissue is often too toxic to eat. Other small organisms are eaten by fish, and the pollutants concentrate up the food chain so that the toothed whales at the top are so poisoned that when a bowhead washes up on the shores of the St. Lawrence it is treated as toxic waste. Fishing and warming are wiping out food resources. Last year, when the gray whales returned to Mexico from their wintering grounds in the Bering and Chukchi Seas, scientists were alarmed that many were emaciated.

  And as if all this weren’t enough, every year the Japanese outright slaughter twenty-two thousand small cetaceans along their coasts. Dolphins, pilot whales, false killer whales, porpoises. The Japanese also send a commercial whaling fleet each year to Antarctica, in brazen violation of a 1986 worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling, to kill over a thousand whales, including endangered fin whales.

  New studies suggest that present-day great whale populations are 1 to 3 percent of what they once were before man really began messing with the oceans.

  Gnawing on my Crazy Chicken leg, I was thinking that if the water dog way back then knew what was coming, she might have kept her legs. But then, mammals on land aren’t faring that well, either. A few weeks earlier I had read about the big IUCN census report that found almost one-quarter of all mammals on the planet are in grave danger of going extinct. Because of yours truly. It was a mess whichever way you looked.

  Us humans are certainly crackerjack smart. I mean, who else could think up mortgage derivatives? But if you measure intelligence as an ability to survive millions and millions of years as a species in harmony with one’s environment, then whales have it all over us. They make us look like crazy chickens.

  One bright spot in all this was the drug gang in Constitution, the town to the south that we would drive through tomorrow. They were called the Tomates. I told you how the California gray whale was born in only three lagoons on the Baja. (The Western Pacific gray whale, at last count, consisted of just over a hundred individuals.) Well, Mexicans therefore consider the cetaceans Mexican citizens and are very proud of their whales. A Baja whale expert told me that the leader of this drug gang gave a significant amount of money to gray whale protection. Whenever I feel that the world is going to total hell thanks to Homo sapiens I think of this cartel protecting its whales and it cheers me up.

  Since we were heading to Punta Conejo, we were also becoming aware of rabbits. We knew there were rabbits because Kim and I had seen them. Darting off through the cacti at dawn. Frozen in the shadow of an acacia. Munching sparse grass at the edge of the RV parking lot. We also knew there were gray foxes, opossums, coyotes, deer mice and cactus mice, wood rats, hoary bats, bobcats and mountain lions and desert shrews and ground squirrels, mule deer, jackrabbits—because the guidebook said there were. We marveled. We were still supposedly in the rainy season and it was so dry and hot. Not a spring anywhere. Not a lake. The rivers were rivers for a few hours: the flash floods steamrolled down the gullies and within a day the arroyo was mute sand and gravel reflecting back the glare of the sun. Stuttered with the tracks of these animals. How did they live?

  We suspected it was the dew. It came from somewhere every night, and every morning before the sun had any heat it clung to the tips of thorns, the feathery leaves of the mesquite.

  Kim said, “Maybe the foxes go plant to plant like hummingbirds, you know, tonguing up each crystal of water.”

  “That is so frigging poetic. Hummingbirds with fluffy tails. Write that down, write that down.”

  “Oh, really.” She smiled, unabashedly proud, erect in the passenger seat.

  For some reason
, Kim and I still had some of that formality you find in new couples, though we had been together for a couple of years. I think it was maybe because she is Asian, and I have noticed that her family, her culture, is much more formal than my own. I liked it. Formality is one way of not taking something for granted.

  As we drove south, I marveled at her as I did at the water-gathering mammals. She was never afraid to show her appreciation outright. Either at others, at something in her day, at herself. Her attention went leaf to leaf, gratefully, like the desert fox-bird at dawn. It seemed at once childlike and more mature than anyone I knew. She was very easy to please, because she took joy in the smallest things, but exacting, too, because that small thing must be authentic, and wondrous in its small self, and not any kind of bullshit. She could detect bullshit from a hillside away. But then she took people at face value and expected the best of them until proven otherwise. Which is a great talent. She was very complicated. Very simple, really. She awed me a little. As we drove south, as she covered her window-side arm with a towel and insisted I do the same, and made me a peanut butter sandwich, I was filled with a gratitude that almost scared me, and I realized that I was a lucky man. When we got to La Paz, after Conejo, I was thinking of asking her if she wanted to get married. You know, elope.

  The metal sign for Punta Conejo was hard to read, the black letters faded and almost obscured with surf stickers. It was late afternoon when we turned off the highway onto a rough dirt road that the guidebook said was twelve miles long. It cut off through the acacia scrub and paloverdes. This track was so rugged—who knew how often anyone came down here? When we turned onto it we were committing ourselves in a way we hadn’t yet.