Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  It was as Dr. Chesher had said: The community clam sanctuary was "a beginning, a way of raising consciousness."

  I dived on the Falevai Circle and counted nineteen juvenile T. derasa in two breathhold dives. I visited the clam in question: the one Dr. Lucas had identified as T. gigas. No doubt about it, it was T. derasa: the smoothness of the shell, the number of interlocking teeth, the size.

  The largest T. derasa lay open on their backs, exposing their mantles to the light. Some of the mantles were bright or dark blue, with a yellow pattern that looked a bit like the whorls of fingerprints. Most had yellowish tiger stripes on the rims of their shells. They were colorful and interesting and not very cuddly.

  Later I dived at nearby Port Maurelle, looking for more juveniles thrown off by the Falevai circle. The water was shallow, and I could see waves breaking above me as I drifted through multicolored corals where such scenic fish as Moorish idols, butterfly fish, and great schools of blue jacks were busy making a living.

  I was scanning the bottom for juvenile T. derasa, concentrating fiercely and ignoring the schools of jacks that were swimming past my face in the way that flocks of birds sometimes swoop in front of your windshield. Suddenly, the bottom dropped out of the ocean, and a black abyss opened up below. Whoa . . .

  After the first few hours I found myself not really looking much anymore. Searching for clams a couple of inches long and buried in deep coral is hard work. I listened to the rain hiss on the surface above, powered out over the drop-offs for a quick adrenaline rush, and swam at top speed toward coral knobs, pulling up at the last minute like a jet just clearing the trees at the end of the runway.

  That's what I was doing, pulling up with my mask inches from the coral, when I saw a tiny T. derasa everyone had missed. Rick Chesher swam over, measured it with calipers, mapped its position, and said that this six-month-old tridacnid bivalve mollusk

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS i Il6

  would be known, henceforth, as Tim. Tim, as might be expected, was not a fubsy individual.

  I spoke with Dr. Lucas on the phone. It took quite some time to explain Rick Chesher's ideas about sabotage. Chesher had told me that he had no objection to the Lucas-led clam mariculture project and indeed believed that a mariculture program and the clam-circle concept complemented each other. He had, however, been stunned when Lucas wrote to Earthwatch.

  "Dr. Chesher," I said, "wondered why you didn't write him, instead of his funding organization."

  "I was interested," Lucas said, "in journalistic accuracy."

  "But you were wrong about the picture of the clam," I pointed out. "It was T. derasa, not T. gigas."

  Lucas said that he had made a mistake, and that the photograph, taken with a wide-angle lens, had made the clam look larger than it was. He seemed to regard this as some kind of trick, although he said that after another look at the picture, he had written a second letter to Earthwatch apologizing for his earlier inaccuracy. (Mark Cherrington, the editor of Earthwatch magazine, described that letter as "one of the most ungracious apologies I've ever read.")

  The meat of Chesher's accusations, I explained to Lucas, came down to money. Chesher's own project wasn't cheap: $106,000 from Earthwatch for the four-year start-up. But his was not, he said, like many traditional South Pacific aid programs that "recycle" money between the aid program and the donor governments without much of it reaching the people. His project was simple, it involved the community on a grass-roots level, and now that the clams were breeding, he could do what he had said he would do: walk away and leave it all to the people.

  Lucas's mariculture project, funded jointly by the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and James Cook University of North Queensland, was, Chesher charged, somewhat more complex. I knew that the initial re-search-and-development phase of the project (involving Fiji, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea) had been approved in March 1984 and that expenditures for the first three years were

  estimated at $836,245 Australian (about $650,000 U.S.). Lucas's current budget for another three-year phase was reportedly $1.8 million Australian (about $1.4 million U.S.), split among maricul-ture facilities in five South Pacific nations. Chesher thought that this was a lot of money— even if the Tongan hatchery in Sopu received only a portion of it—and that Lucas saw any successful clam-conservation project as a threat to his funding.

  The reasoning went like this: Mariculture works, but it is expensive and complicated. There are a land-based hatchery and cement raceways to be built, maintained, and guarded twenty-four hours a day. Clams grown in the raceways must be returned to the ocean in plastic-mesh containers ("predator exclusion trays") to grow a bit larger before being released onto the reef. But any time you put an unnatural concentration of living things on the reef, you will attract predators. In addition, the little buggers in the ocean nurseries are susceptible to certain parasitic organisms that must be picked out by hand, twice a week in some seasons. These clams, as the experience in American Samoa has shown, are also objects of temptation to local people. They get pulled up in their plastic boxes and eaten for lunch.

  These are problems Lucas's mariculture project would address. But research money is hard to come by. What if ACIAR saw a relatively cheap, effective alternative that, not incidentally, raised the awareness of the local people and created a de facto system of marine reserves? Chesher believed that Lucas saw the clam sanctuary concept as a threat to his funding, to the millions of dollars that had been put into the program in Tonga and elsewhere.

  To defuse that threat, Chesher believed, Lucas had attempted to discredit Chesher with Earthwatch and, most galling, to undermine the program with the people it would benefit.

  Dr. Lucas denied these allegations and said his actions involved scientific credibility and journalistic accuracy. Truth was very important to him, he said. And indeed, after consulting with Rick Braley, he said that Braley had never spoken with Vanisi Fakatulolo, aside from asking him for permission to dive at Falevai.

  Then who was this Australian scientist that Fakatulolo had been talking about?

  Lucas didn't know. But, he wondered, what did it matter, anyway? "If Dr. Braley had seen little evidence of giant-clam recruitment and reported this to a local authority, would it have been wrong for him to be telling truthfully what he had seen?"

  Well—completely aside from the fact that Dr. Braley had never seen the baseline studies and that he would be basing his report about a four-year program on one half-hour dive—yes, one would think it would be wrong.

  I spent my last day in Tonga back on Tongatapu with Tevita Helu, who took me to the southern coast of the island to see the magnificent Houma blowholes just at sunset, as the tide was pounding into the shore. The beach was a raised coraline limestone platform that extended ten feet above the level of the sea. As the waves came in, they pounded into the cliff face, where there were a number of natural vents. Great plumes of water erupted out of the top of the limestone bench. There were hundreds of them, some a hundred feet high. They reminded me of the eruptions at Old Faithful in Yellowstone, except that they all fired at once, all up and down the deserted beach for miles. When the sea fell back from the wall, the spouts faltered, and there was the sound of a hard rain falling.

  Mr. Helu wanted to know what I had learned in Vava'u. I told him about the clam circles and about Dr. Chesher and Dr. Lucas. Helu had once taught in the Tongan school system and felt he knew something about Tongan attitudes. People would simply take the clams, for that's the way it was in Tonga. He said this with some sadness. The people just wouldn't understand. It would take a generation before Tongans grasped the concept of a marine reserve, much less the idea of an inviolable brood stock.

  But, I explained, the sanctuary at Falevai was intact. People were not taking the clams. Indeed, the success of the project at Falevai had been noted throughout Vava'u. Ten other villages had asked the government for assistance in creating their own clam circles. On the island of
Taunga, one village had arranged its brood-stock circles in such a way that they spelled out a word.

  "What word?" Helu asked.

  "Ongomatu'a," I said.

  Helu stared at me for some time, shaking his head, as if in disbelief. A slow, proud smile pulled at the corners of his mouth, and suddenly his face lit up brighter than the setting sun.

  Ongomatu'a.

  Parents.

  Another breaker hit the cliff, and hundreds of waterplumes took on the gaudy tropical colors of the sky.

  "This Dr. Lucas," Helu said, "I think he is an evil man."

  There was the hard patter of falling water as the sea pulled back from the land.

  "No, not evil," I said. "Just a bit of a ratbag."

  LeckucjuitL

  I loved this little room, one thousand feet below the surface of the earth. It had been my home for four days, and these last black seven or eight hours would be my final chance to savor the wonder. Alone.

  The passage itself was tubular, about eight feet in diameter, and it was perfectly white, very crystalline, so that the walls and ceiling all shone glittery bright in the light from my helmet. The heat from my body loosened a few of the crystals from the ceiling so it looked as if it were snowing in Lechuguilla Cave.

  The crystals were talclike gypsum, and the room was composed entirely of the stuff. I was sitting on my bed, an inflatable mattress, waiting until I stopped sweating.

  Lechuguilla is a hot cave. The temperature is a constant 68 degrees, and the humidity is over 99 percent. The smallest effort causes a caver to burst into a sweat, and I had found, over the past few days of strenuous exploration, that the sweating process continued for about forty-five minutes after I stopped moving.

  Because almost nothing lives in the cave—there are a few crickets near the entrance, no bats at all, and a host of invisible microorganisms—Lechuguilla was devoid of the familiar odors of life

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  and death that permeate the outside world. The air smelled clean, wet, and sterile, like freshly washed laundry, and it had a weight and feel to it, like the gentle caress of damp black velvet.

  I liked camping alone in the cave, in the gypsum snow. I had never had any trouble sleeping in the silence and absolute darkness of Lechuguilla, probably because I was always so exhausted at the end of each day. There were, I knew, seven other cavers nearby. Some slept in groups; some, like myself, preferred solitary camping on the hard, sloping rock floors.

  We had all eaten dinner together: freeze-dried food that we rehydrated and spooned up straight from the foil pack. My companions were among America's most noted cavers, and the topic of conversation was Lechuguilla Cave. We talked about "new leads," which might open up into huge undiscovered rooms. Such rooms could contain geological wonders that might keep the scientists at their microscopes for decades. These were quite realistic expectations.

  Lechuguilla was discovered only four years ago, and it was unique in its size, in its origin, and in the strange formations found in its immense caverns.

  I have been caving, in a desultory fashion, on and off, for about ten years. Still, Lechuguilla had been a surprise. It was so big, so hot, so intimidating, that it had taken me several days to come to something close to full comprehension of its marvels: Crystals the size of small trees, forests of aragonite flowers, huge-domed pits, rooms as high as a thirty-story building. That so many wonders existed in such profusion in one cave boggled the mind.

  My dinner companions gibbered on about what further marvels Lechuguilla might offer. For the eight thousand or so active cavers in the United States, exploring caves is often a life-consuming passion. Men like the legendary Colorado caver Donald Davis describe it as the only activity in which a person of modest means can actually explore the unknown. Davis, who has personally mapped much of Lechuguilla, calls it "the cave I have been looking for my entire caving career."

  It was, I thought listening to just this kind of talk over a

  gluey freeze-dried macaroni dinner, as if someone had discovered the Grand Canyon in this day and age. In the summer of 1990 it was a staggering idea. The entire surface of the earth has been mapped. Some few areas are little known, but they have been photographed from planes or satellites. The moon has been mapped.

  But here, under the surface of the American desert, on national park land, only three miles from Carlsbad Caverns, a new cave had been discovered. The only entrance to Lechuguilla is set in a spare desert canyon alive with low scrub: with creosote, prickly pear, and lechuguilla, which is a foot-high plant with pulpy green leaves so sharp they can cut through a pair of pants. The canyon takes its name from the lechuguilla plant, and the cave takes its name from the canyon.

  This new cave is big: It drops 1,501 feet and is the deepest cave in America. When I made my first descent, 48.1 miles of it had been mapped, but explorers—pioneer cavers, my dinner companions—add more passage to the map with each expedition.

  Exploring Lechuguilla Cave requires some technical rope work. There are free-fall rope ascents and descents of two hundred feet and more, and all this work is done in the dark.

  The entrance is a seventy-foot rappel followed by another very short rappel, and a downhill walk that culminates at Boulder Falls, a 150-foot rappel that drops free—the rope merely dangles in the darkness of underground space—for most of the way.

  Just past Boulder Falls, about hour or so into the trip, there is a block of gypsum the size of a twenty-story building laid on its side. From below, looking up, I could see that the hard white mineral followed the descending flow of the cave, like a glacier dropping out of a mountain valley. Smaller blocks of gypsum were falling away from the central mountain, falling away in the slow-motion vastness of geologic time; falling away like icebergs calving off a tidewater glacier. The room itself is called Giacier Bay.

  In ten years of caving I had never seen anything at all like Glacier Bay. My companions, Rick Bridges and Anne Strait, were veteran Lechuguilla cavers, and they dashed by the glacier with

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 12.6

  hardly a second look. There was, I thought, a clear implication of other, more awesome treasures below. In most American caves, Glacier Bay would be a destination, not just a sight to be contemplated in passing.

  The trail dropped out of Glacier Bay, and the big passages ended abruptly. Ahead, there was a great cleft in the mountain, a split that was often no wider than a man's shoulders. This area, the Rift, is set at an angle that varies from sixty-five to eighty-five degrees. I moved through it leaning to the left, climbing up over rocks that were wedged along the way. Where there were no rocks under us, we moved across narrow ledges, and when I looked down, my light was swallowed by the darkness. It was better not to look down.

  Nothing about the cave was terribly technical—not the rope work, not the climbing—but it never let up, never gave me a break. A typical move might be likened to, say, getting up on a small table, crawling across, then getting down. Easy, unless you have to do it fifty times in a row, in the dark, with a fifty-foot drop under you. My forty-pound pack was hateful.

  I found I required two headbands to soak up the sweat dripping into my eyes. There were sharp gypsum crystals under my soaking-wet T-shirt, and, worse, there were more crystals in my shorts. My eyes were already red-rimmed from salty sweat. I was, I realized, four hours into the first trip, badly chafed, and already totally exhausted.

  The passages led downward through a series of rope drops, a painful crawl-through passage called the Tinsel Town Maze, and a long stand-up passage that opened up into an enormous cavern, the Chandelier Ballroom. Immense crystals of gypsum hung from the sloping ceiling like baroque drunken stalactites. At their base the crystals were as thick as the trunks of small trees, and they swept down off the stone in ragged arcs. Some of them were eighteen and twenty feet long. They were powdery white at their thickest upper reaches, but down toward the tips, some of which were at eye level, they began bra
nching out, like elk antlers or claws. The tips were clear, crystalline, and there were tiny globules of water hanging from the ends of most of them.

  It is estimated that there are about fifty of these formations over ten feet long in the cavern called the Chandelier Ballroom. They are the largest such crystals to be found anywhere. The chandeliers are like the geysers of Yellowstone Park: They are the jewels of this cave, its world-class wonders.

  That first night I collapsed in my gypsum-snow cave, not far from the Chandelier Ballroom. Alone in the darkness, in the silence, I lay in a light jungle sleeping bag and slept for twenty hours. Lechuguilla required, I discovered, stamina as well as certain technical skills.

  When I was finally able to walk again, my companions and I set off to look for "leads" in some of the known rooms. Rick Bridges and Anne Strait took me to a cavern called Darktown, below the bright layer of glittering gypsum.

  "Look around you," Bridges said, and when I did, I could see hints of shimmering metallic glitter in my light. There were, I finally saw, thin strands of clear gypsum crystal, called angel hair, hanging all across the expanse of this huge dark room. The angel hair looked a bit like the tinsel you might hang on a Christmas tree, but it was clear, and some of the strands were thirty feet long. It was an incredibly fragile room, and walking too rapidly through it could create a breeze that might snap the delicate strands of angel hair. Nothing at all like these elongated crystals is known to exist anywhere else.

  On another day we left the Chandelier Ballroom through a low-crawling passage that led to the Prickly Ice Cube Room. The ceiling of the room was as high as a twenty-story building. The floor was littered with gypsum blocks that had calved off of another gypsum glacier perhaps thirty-five feet high. Drops of water falling from the ceiling had eroded away the tops of the blocks, creating little spikes that stuck up eight and ten and twelve inches. From above, the white blocks looked like huge prickly ice cubes.