The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

by Carl Safina

  * * *

  To the extent that connections have been severed, ligaments cut, and our understanding thus hobbled, the coming endeavor must be one of reconnection, religation. Religare means to retie, or to gather to bind, as with a sense of obligation. Thus “religation”—reconnection—is one root of the word “religion.” Here again worlds converge. Ecology, family, community, religion—these words all grope toward the same need: connection, belonging, purpose.

  Albert Einstein said our task is to “widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” I get a little hit of that in talking with my neighbors along our shifting shore, in the buoyancy of birds, in the sinking weight of reading the newest entry on the roster of threatened beings, in stories of refugees from places that have killed their reefs, their grass, or their neighbors. Unity of need becomes unity of purpose. To deflect disaster, this is where we must be headed next.

  So I guess what I’m trying to say is that, though I’m a secular person and a scientist, I believe that our relationship with the living world must be mainly religious. But I don’t mean theological. I mean religious in the sense of reverent, revolutionary, spiritual, and inspired. Reverent because the world is unique, thus holy. Revolutionary in making a break with the drift and downdraft of outdated, maladaptive modes of thought. Spiritual in seeking attainment of a higher realm of human being. Inspired in the aspiration to connect crucial truths with wider communities. Religious in precisely this way: connection, with a sense of purpose.

  If you don’t like the word “religion,” I understand. Think of it this way: it’s imperative to have something to believe in that both centers and expands your life. Call it what you will, or call it nothing and pursue it.

  This kind of spirituality feels like thirst for human potential, and finding it comes like rain on the tongue; a little makes a big difference. Is belief in the power of guiding principles—like reverence, devotion, compassion, and hope—ever less than “spiritual”? Is striving toward ideals, working toward a larger purpose, ever less than religious? It’s often more.

  Think again of Einstein’s radiating circle of compassion. And if you’d like to know what’s in it for you, Confucius is credited with saying, “He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.” Albert Schweitzer observed, “One thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.” Let Adam Smith reel in his grave.

  * * *

  A blanketing snow has come to add its white weight to the beaches and woodlands for one lovely, silent night. Upon the lighthouse hangs an enormous wreath, part of the annual aspiration to a world of peace. The foghorn blows its warning to a wet morning. The drizzle puts a slick ice plating on the shoreline rocks, making the footing hazardous.

  I’ve come to see whether the Point’s great annual winter duck conflation has returned. But the long swells roll to the Point sparsely populated. So wide a sea so void of ducks makes me question why I rose predawn to subject myself to an iced drizzle. Kenzie looks like she’s questioning my judgment, too.

  One Common Loon, one Red-throated, bob near shore, then lean into the sea and vanish. A smattering of gannets gleam white in the slanting dawn. I see only a few dozen ducks, strung in the tide like a frond of kelp, waving in the undulating swell. I find none of the rarities: no King Eiders, no Razorbills, no Dovekies.

  But in the time it takes me to scan, the surf begins to stock Common Eiders. A glance offshore reveals long scarves of scoters flying into the rips by the hundreds, and soon the bobbing dozens become thousands. Black, Surf, and White-winged Scoters, a few Red-breasted Mergansers.

  I’ve often wondered how they spend the long winter nights. Now the answer arrives in an icy dawn drizzle: they drift for hours on the tide, and by first light they’re miles away. Here they come, trains of commuters starting their workday.

  I never regret pushing out of bed early; it’s satisfying to have learned something with so much of the day left. By eight A.M., when it’s time to go find a hot cup of liquid and start the holiday, the sea ducks are still piling in, by the hundreds.

  * * *

  Four days till New Year’s, and in the Cut several fish rise and swirl. I’ve never seen that kind of activity this late. Then again, it’s usually not this warm. But what are they? Small bass? Sea robins? The winter morning retains time and mildness sufficient for a comfortable walk, and Kenzie and I intend to use it well. The Cut holds Long-tails and several uncommon Common Goldeneyes.

  Baymen are taking their fish-trap poles home from the boat-launching ramp. Several piles of their discarded netting have been lying in heaps there for the last few years. Our public ramp is their dump. It’s just the way they’ve always done it. But considering their determined reluctance to return a wave from a stranger, it’s hard not to infer a passive-aggressive, resentful sense of place. Deep family roots don’t count for much when outsiders and the price of fish conspire to push the cost of homes beyond reach of their children. Walled off in a dying tradition, their surliness is understandable.

  * * *

  With our season marching into winter, it’s time for me to visit a place just coming into summer on the other end of the world.

  TRAVELS POLAR:

  COPA CABANA—ANTARCTICA

  “We haven’t seen a weather map like this for a long time,” a passing officer tells me with word-to-the-wise conviction. “It will be a rock-and-roll party—trust me. Once you get your stuff tied down, try hard to stay in your bunk.”

  From an already spray-drenched deck in an already howling wind, I watch a Wandering Albatross, its wings ten feet across, disappear into the darkening maze of mountainous waves; then I head for the stairwell. At ten P.M. crew members distribute anti-nausea pills throughout the ship and hang seasickness bags from all interior handrails.

  The Drake Passage lies squeezed between two oceans and two continents. Serving too many masters, this unquiet stretch pinches and intensifies the winds that come screaming around the bottom of the globe, making it the world’s most punishing crossing.

  I stuff duffels under one edge of my mattress and pull the other edge partway up the wall. The goal is to make a mattress taco, be the stuffing—and stay there. This is not about sleeping. It’s about taking cover in a padded way.

  All night, the ship rides up the mountains, falls off the tops of waves, and shudders into deep troughs. Destination: a fractured arm of rock and ice called the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica.

  * * *

  Morning. My head … foggy. The wind continues a dull roar over the still-rocking ship. The vessel plods slowly toward a long, sloping coast where crystal mountains rise in crystal air.

  We enter a large bay where pods of penguins porpoise along like tuna, seemingly neither fish nor fowl. Unbirdlike birds. Across the bay, black cliffs plunge to freezing water and surf blasts rock with cruel, elemental energy.

  Weeks of gear and three people crowd into two Zodiacs. We zoom to a gently curving beach nearly a mile long, bounded by two rocky headlands.

  Wayne Trivelpiece, his wife, Sue, and I splash ashore on King George Island as a wave swamps our boat and dozens of cans of food break through sodden cardboard. Wayne looks up and down the shoreline and says, “Ah. Home.”

  * * *

  Penguins line the beach and speckle the slopes. Up from the dark sand stands a long plywood hut, green-painted, tin-roofed. Whale spinal disks as wide as stepping stones line the path to the hut door. A whale rib hangs over the central window. Sue, gesturing ta-da!, says cheerfully, “Welcome to Copa Cabana.”

  The hut is tight and spartan. Its four rooms include a mudroom, two small bedrooms, and a kitchen doubling as office and radio room. The unpainted plywood walls bear maps, penguin pictures, a Minnie Mouse clock, a dartboard—all brought thousands of miles.

  We’ll hang our parkas on pegs; boots go on a rack. Pots, pans, and dishes are in tho
se boxes. Shortwave radios, computers, a CD player, and stacked notebooks crowd the kitchen shelves. Out there—that’s an outhouse without the house. It’s called “the Box.”

  * * *

  Wayne is a large man, just this side of stocky, with slightly graying hair and a neat grizzled beard. Sue is slight, bright, of medium build, and keeps her dark hair longish. They met at a conference, got married a year and a half later, and started coming to Antarctica for half the year. The kids stay with Grandma. Before starting in the Antarctic, they both did research on the effects of oil on gulls—in Svalbard. Small world. “Under no circumstances would I have done this without Sue,” Wayne says. “It is way too abnormal a life.”

  This station’s “refrigerator” is the air outside. Want an egg, or leftovers? Just reach out the window; they’re on the shelf. That wouldn’t work in the Arctic, but Antarctica has no bears, no foxes, no four-footed animals. We will sweep no spider webs, contend with neither moths nor mosquitoes; there won’t be rats or mice to trouble the food stores, nor maggots in the meat. Just keep those eggs covered, or skuas will take them.

  The hut stands between the curving shoreline and a curving mountain. Gentoo Penguins—their markings suggest white earmuffs—occupy about a third of the open ground. Adélie Penguins, prefering high slopes, stand along the mountain’s ridges. The temperature hovers around the freezing point and the windchill approximates 5 degrees Fahrenheit (−15°C)—but the penguins are eating snow to stay cool. Some sit on their heels with their webbed feet splayed to dissipate heat, like Hawaiian albatrosses. Everything’s relative.

  Wayne has documented deep penguin population declines, down roughly half since 1980. Far more worrisome: in that same time, the regional populations of their main prey, shrimplike krill, have shriveled—down nearly 80 percent. Penguins can still catch full loads and care for their chicks, but it takes them a lot longer and they must work harder.

  * * *

  At three-thirty in the morning, venturing outside to pee, I hear what I think is a Black-bellied Storm-Petrel’s single high note, a thin spare whistle, elemental and lovely. The sun’s already glowing like a red ember at the horizon. The Adélie Penguins’ workday has already started; long columns of commuters are coming down the slopes. Every few feet, another well-worn penguin on-ramp merges to the coast highway. Penguins walk bumper to bumper along the beach.

  They disappear two-thirds of a mile away, where the shoreline bends. Always reluctant to enter water, Adélies would walk to the feeding grounds if they could. Large groups mass along the shore, no individual wanting to go first. Eventually, they take the plunge in large groups. Their fear: Leopard Seals.

  It is pleasant to be near the Adélies, their subtle head crest suggesting that the interest is mutual. The Adélies are black-backed, white-bellied, with a short reddish bill. The white around their black pupils gives them a stuffed-toy appearance, like sewn-on eyes that jiggle. The three penguins in the region—Adélie, Gentoo, and the elegant Chinstrap—all build pebble nests. With an exaggerated bow and much ceremony, a penguin delivers a stone to its mate. If a nest is unguarded, a neighbor may walk over to steal stones from it. As that neighbor walks over, its neighbor starts stealing stones. And so on, down the line.

  * * *

  We all know that penguins dress in tuxedos and waddle like plump nuns. Granted, they’re charming, but real penguins are creatures of fearsome durability and endurance. Even the shy Gentoos dive to depths of around five hundred feet. (Emperor Penguins reach fifteen hundred feet.) An animal capable of routinely diving to crushing, numbing depths that would instantly kill any human, living day and night in these waters, and bobbing up for breath in hurricane-force winds is no cartoon. These represent an extreme in the evolution of “bird.”

  The morning’s throngs enter the sea, leaping toward the distance.

  * * *

  In late morning, I scan the bay but see little sign of those leaping penguin herds. They’ve traveled beyond sight. By late afternoon a forty-knot wind is driving rain sideways in billowing curtains like smoke. Yet in a bay full of spume I see penguins again, undaunted. The water seems alive with them, porpoising shoreward.

  They come bursting through the fangs of waves along the beach, streaking the shallows, riding panes of water on their bellies, their feet churning for purchase as the retreating wave tries to rake them back toward the sea. New birds squirt out of each wave, walking up beyond the wiping water.

  Wayne pioneered penguin tracking, and he’s found that penguins don’t go any farther than they must to find krill in sufficient numbers. As the season progresses, krill begin moving inshore, penguin foraging trips get shorter, and the krill get bigger. Earlier in the season, foraging trips last twenty-four to thirty-six hours; now, twelve to eighteen hours.

  Hundreds of penguins, paused by their exertions, line the beach, preening, rewaterproofing their feathers. Then up they go, in long defiles, waddling and hopping up slippery gravel slopes to their improbably high nests and their big, hungrily waiting chicks.

  Meanwhile, at nesting sites, noise! The penguins’ various calls sound like rusty sheep, braying donkeys, growling puppies. Chicks squeal. Adults waving flippers point skyward, trumpeting like cranes, saying, “I’m back; this is mine.” When fights erupt, adults batter each other, their stiff flipper-wings slapping and smacking. It’s a rich vocabulary for so spare a place.

  A chick rattles its bill against its parent’s. The parent leans over and opens its mouth. The chick buries its head up to its eyeballs into the adult’s gullet, jackhammering back and forth, chugging food. I see two large siblings curled against each other after feeding, resting peacefully.

  I absorb the Rousseauian peaceability of the place. But I know better.

  * * *

  At the highest penguin colony, I can gaze upon the sloping grandeur of timeless valleys, and upon every breeding penguin here—like any good predator. I watch giant petrels glide the ridges. My eyes fill with distant ice fields, the bay, the strait beyond. I savor the activity, the noise, the vital stink of it.

  One chick, just fed, chases its parent halfway down the slope, begging for more, before it finally gives up and the parent continues hurriedly to the sea. About fifty yards from its peers, the chick turns to trudge back uphill, toward group safety. For a young penguin, the known world ends at the edge of the guano-stained ground.

  A giant petrel with a seven-foot wingspan flies over, checks its glide, and spirals down. The two-way defile of adults stops as though the giant petrel is a traffic light that’s just turned red. The chick is in the middle of the intersection.

  When the chick attempts a left turn, the petrel locks its hooked bill into the young penguin’s plump, soft, just-fed belly. With its wings half open and its feet firmly in place, the petrel yanks backward while the penguin, frantically trying to pull away, hastens its own catastrophe. With a few quick jerks the petrel massively opens the chick’s abdomen. The doomed chick, still struggling, breaks free. The lumbering petrel grabs it again, and in moments the chick collapses and goes limp. The petrel glances around, its face drenched red.

  Soon several giant petrels, including a pure white one, land. But it’s a fat season and none of them seem very hungry. Eventually a couple of them peaceably share the carcass.

  As I head back, a large group of Adélie chicks, about forty of them, cluster tightly near a rock outcrop. Peering over the rocks with them, my gaze is returned by another big, bloody-faced giant petrel huddled over another large, freshly killed Adélie chick. A dozen other giant petrels also stare back.

  * * *

  Seeing giant petrels killing penguins was gruesome, I tell Sue and Wayne—as we sit down to a pork dinner. Each evening we take turns cooking, washing dishes, and sweeping. Each night at nine comes the radio call: Palmer Station, the main U.S. base in the region, checking in with the other bases to make sure all is well. Poland, the United States, Ecuador, Brazil, Uruguay, Korea, China, Argentina, and Chile all
have bases nearby. Some of the bases here amount to little more than territorial claims marked just for the sake of it. Where dogs would hoist a leg, men hoist flags.

  The calls bring news, weather comparisons, scientific questions, discussions of penguins and krill, menu comparisons, and spirited debates such as whether gumbo without okra is really gumbo. In Antarctica, food commands uncommon attention, even reverence. And when Wayne decides to do some baking, I pray aloud, “Give us this day our Adélie bread.”

  * * *

  Breakfast. Outside, it’s one degree above freezing. In a moaning gale, snow flying horizontally is coming thick enough to obliterate the bay. On such fierce mornings we all engage in a silent waiting game. On wide-open ground a mere fifty paces from the hut stands the Box. Even that is too grandiose a description for the stark reality of an utterly exposed Antarctic potty seat (outhouses blow away in hundred-mile-an-hour winds). Here’s the system: You put on the big red parka near the door so you are plenty visible. Make sure it’s got a roll of toilet paper in the pocket. Then just walk up to the box and mount the throne. What privacy there is—and this stretches the concept wafer-thin—comes from the cover of the parka itself. Privacy aside, nothing softens the hard fact that it’s cold work to put your bare ass on that seat first thing in the morning. And sitting there while your underwear fills with snow is one thing, but the Box is worst in heavy rain. If this morning’s temperature drops a couple of degrees, moreover, the first person will have to melt a glaze of ice. Consequently, the morning’s cheeky waiting game: Who’ll be the first seat warmer?