Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  The Mayas possessed accurate calendars and a knowledge of astronomy; they created brilliant sculpture, exquisite pottery, and architecture we find almost alien in its symmetry. They reached the Classic period of their culture between a.d. 250 and 850. About the year 900, for reasons no one has ever been able to explain, the Mayan leaders abandoned their magnificent structures and the race fell into an inexplicable decline. During the Classic period, experts estimate that there were more than two hundred people per square mile living in El Peten. Today you can divide that number by one hundred.

  Early travelers to the region were stunned by the size and complexity of the ruins and concluded that such wondrous structures could not have been constructed by the ancestors of the indige

  nous Mayas. They were thought to be the remains of a lost and superior culture. Some postulated a wandering Israeli tribe; others assumed the ruins had been built by Tartars or perhaps Welshmen. Even today, a popular pseudoscientific theory holds that these Meso-American Indians were assisted in their labors by extraterrestrials—ancient gods in spaceships.

  It is mystery itself that generates such absurdities, or so I thought as we walked back down to the boat. I had already seen a restored temple at Ceibal, near Sayaxche. It stood in a grassy courtyard, ancient and alien, strange in its symmetry, and the hard local stone, newly polished, glittered under the jungle sun. How splendid it was—how splendid the people must have been— but the mystery was deeper and darker at Aguateca. It expanded inside the chest and left me feeling helpless with wonder.

  Coming back across the lake to the lodge, I found myself feeling just a bit dizzy. The sun broke through the clouds then, and I saw the tarpon of Lake Petexbatun. They were slashing through a school of baitfish, feeding greedily, dozens of them clearing the water in startling silver leaps. They set the lake aboil. We cut the motor and paddled into the feeding frenzy just as it was ending. I tossed out my line to straighten it for the first cast. A good-sized tarpon took the fly. The fish have bony mouths, and to hook them you must yank hard, but I stood there in an entirely loopy manner while the tarpon rose out of the water and shook the hook from his mouth.

  He had been a big one, an inutterably ancient-looking beast; his kind had been alive during the time of the dinosaurs. Tarpon had traveled up the Usumacinta since time immemorial—they had seen the Maya come and go—and now this fish had spit out the best fly I had. So much for the snobbery and science of flyfishing.

  The tarpon simply disappeared. The dark water was silent and the reflections of massive clouds drifted by under the boat. I cast for another hour or two, but the big one had gotten away. This is not unusual for me, and at least I had seen him surface, this great silver anachronism. I would have released him anyway: Tarpon are not particularly good eating. But he had thrown the hook

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  himself, preserving his own mystery just as the jungle had embalmed the mystery of the Maya. Both the tarpon and the Maya, it seems to me, are impervious to the challenge of science. Albert and Conrado and Liko and I drank to that idea that night as the rain applauded, distantly.

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  Baja (lower) California is a fierce, sun-blasted land, a narrow strip of desert, eight hundred miles long, that separated itself from the Mexican mainland in a slow tectonic slide about 20 million years ago. The Pacific Ocean rushed in to fill the void, forming the Gulf of California, the youngest of the world's deep-water gulfs. This vast arm of the Pacific, two miles deep at its mouth, was once known as the Vermilion Sea, and indeed, under a rising sun, the warm, tranquil waters shimmer like pale blood.

  The mountains are stark, ridged, and crenelated and bare. The land supports a variety of obdurate and malicious flora: There are thistles underfoot and cardon cacti towering overhead. Every growing thing, or so it seems, sticks, stabs, or stinks. The sere desert, with its tortured red rock mountains, is little given to agriculture or ranching. There are red dirt roads branching off the paved road that bisects the peninsula, which was built to attract American tourists. The rough, rutted secondary roads lead to dusty towns where generators provide electricity for two hours a day.

  The eastern coast, north of the town of Loreto, is unpopulated, undeveloped (for the most part), and harshly serene. A vast, ringing silence owns the land, except where the sea, driven by afternoon winds, explodes against rocky headlands and points.

  And the sea is an exuberant celebration of life. Swarms of baitfish go about their business and are pursued from above and below by all manner of predators. Pelicans and blue-footed boobies attack from the air; pods of killer whales roll and breathe on offshore patrol; colonies of sea lions strike out from rocky points. Manta rays, some of them weighing in excess of one thousand pounds, erupt out of the shimmering sea: great black batlike plankton feeders in flight four feet above the surface of the water. They are like images seen in some inexplicable dream, and the water cascades off their huge black wings in iridescent sheets.

  The Gulf of California, this great arm of the Pacific Ocean, is a giant fish trap, a fecund sea in the middle of the Sonaran Desert. It is this contrast—the living sea in proximity to harsh, unforgiving land—that so intoxicates the Baja coastal kayaker.

  These days, sea kayaking along the coast of Baja is a big business.

  I had chosen to paddle with Ageya, an Alaska-based kayaking outfitter, primarily because the company's trip seemed less structured than those of the other operators. They were new in Baja, didn't have a lot of clients, and their itinerary wasn't set in stone. My friend photographer Paul Dix and I could go off on our own, provided the guides felt we weren't putting ourselves into potentially mortal waters.

  Paul and I, for our part, had kayaked the Alaskan coast, alone. We had surfed our fragile crafts on waves thrown up by calving tidewater glaciers in Glacier Bay, and camped under the northern lights while wolves howled mournfully through the night. More to the point, we owned a two-man kayak. Neither of us had much experience enduring organized tours.

  Still . . .

  It was a four-day drive from our homes in Montana to the Baja. We would have to buy food, pack tents and sleeping bags, inquire as to legalities of various campsites, scout the coast ourselves, then arrange for someone to watch our vehicle and to pick us up at our eventual destination. A private expedition would cost us three weeks in return for one week of paddling. The monetary cost would be about the same, but with Ageya, we'd spend all our time—seven days—on the water: in and out, just like that.

  That was the lure of the organized tour.

  The drawback, as I saw it, was a dismal lack of adventure. I don't much care to have someone else in charge, someone who knows what he or she is doing. The trip goes too smoothly, stuff falls into place, and you never end up, oh, swimming for your life through savage seas. You never wake up half-drowned in some small Mexican village where there are no telephones, where there is no electricity and, of course, no doctor. On organized trips you seldom find yourself being nursed back to health by a beautiful Mexican woman whose long black hair brushes your sweating chest as she feeds you another spoonful of mashed bananas. Her large dark eyes burn with desire, and there is a stirring in . . .

  Naw, what happens on organized trips is good, clean, safe fun. I suppose.

  After our morning orientation in the motel pool, Ageya's five clients piled into a van driven by a Mexican cabdriver who drove with staggering caution (yes, staggering caution) about forty miles north along the paved road. We turned on one of the red dirt paths that led to the coast and stopped at a broad, curving beach that served as a camp for the fishermen of Loreto.

  We set up our tents near a place where the fishermen dumped gutted fish. Sea gulls shrieked in the dump, and they strutted among feeding vultures. There was a bad odor when the wind shifted.

  Martine said that this would be her first outing as head guide. Kimmer Ball usually took the head guide's position, and she was coming along in an advisory position. Kimmer
, like Martine, was in her late twenties. She looked as if she might have pumped some iron in her time, like a woman who did a lot of reps for tone. Both women were strong and confident. They seemed competent and likable, thoroughly professional, achingly attractive, and sadly unavailable.

  As we set up our tents for night, Martine warned us to check our shoes for scorpions in the morning. The little bastards were nocturnal hunters, and when the sun rose, they sought any available source of shade: a shoe, a pair of pants on the ground, a sleeping bag containing a sleeping human being. In the day the scorpions tended to be in the bushes, which meant that a person had to watch where he walked.

  One other thing we should know: The Gulf of California could be a killer. It tended to be tranquil from the hours before sunrise until about noon, when the wind picked up and made paddling hazardous. You only had to look at the sea to make certain determinations. A ten- to twelve-mile-an-hour wind whipped up widely scattered whitecaps, and such waters were negotiable in a sea kayak. When the whitecaps were more closely spaced, the wind was probably blowing at fifteen to twenty miles an hour. You didn't want to be out paddling in that.

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  The most treacherous waters were found where rocky points projected out into the sea. Here currents and winds collided, and the sea was choppy, confused, dangerous. Sometimes you found yourself paddling out of a placid bay, around a point, and discovered that the wind on the other side was howling at twenty-five miles an hour. A well-known outfitting group had lost two kay-akers in such a situation several years ago.

  The sun rose over the Vermilion Sea, and a wispy pink fog drifted up off its mirrored surface. We were paddling north, just beyond the breakers, heading for a point about three miles away. It would have been faster to just cut across the bay, but Martine wanted us to hug the curving coastline. I was in a two-man kayak, paddling with David Risley, a geophysist from Anchorage, Alaska. We were both sealed into cockpits that were covered over with spray skirts to prevent a freak wave from swamping the craft.

  In the distance a raft of grebes bobbed on the gentle swell. There were several hundred of the small, drab-looking birds. The paddling party, which included Mo Hillstrand and Eric Hall, two emergency medical workers also from Anchorage, approached the birds, cautiously. They dived, all at once, and disappeared for what seemed like several minutes. And then they surfaced, all at once, a few hundred yards away. We were between them and the sun, and their eyes were an unworldly, lazarlike red.

  There were a set of foot pedals in my cockpit that operated the kayak's rudder, but the craft was mushy on all but the fastest turns. Dave felt it as well. We had probably overloaded the rear storage compartment to compensate for the fact that I outweighed Dave by twenty pounds or so.

  "We should put both tents in the front," Dave said.

  "Food's heavy too."

  The grebes stared at us with their lazar eyes, suckers for an existential conversation, I supposed.

  We were paddling in a sure, steady rhythm that had tired me for the first half hour or so. Now, I was on automatic pilot and sensed I had hours left. My forearms felt as if golf balls would bounce off them.

  Just before noon the wind began to pick up, and we pulled in to a wide beach protected from the wind by a high, Gothic-looking point two miles to the north.

  We swam and snorkled and set up our tents. Kimmer came over to give me a hand, and I waved her off. Something about human males that has never been very clear to me. I never ask directions when I'm lost either.

  There was another boat in our party, a twelve-foot motorized sailing craft that carried provisions and was available in case of emergency. Steve Audett, the captain, a sometimes musician and electrician out of Anchorage, had brought his family along for the ride. His wife, Shine, was a midwife. Their son, Loghan, was six and his sister, Oceana, was three. The family seemed beneficent and happy, like Deadheads at a picnic, and indeed Shine had once taken the Grateful Dead on a wilderness tour of Alaska.

  I ran into Loghan down near a lagoon and tried to show him how to skip stones, but he waved off my instructions. "I know how," he said in some pique. Human males.

  Kimmer said that Ageya got all kinds of clients. Some people had never been in a kayak before, others were experts. The experts, she thought, came along on organized tours for the companionship, for the people they would meet.

  And so, sitting by the fire after dinner, with the sun setting behind coastal mountains and spreading purple shadows over the beach like great puddles of ink, we chatted amiably. Loghan sat by Martine and explained that he had six girlfriends in school. He named them off in the order that he liked them best, and the women around the fire reacted, in tandem, with amused horror. Human males. They raised their eyes to the sky, which was a dark red-black bruise.

  Loghan misinterpreted the gesture, put his arm around Mar-tine, and explained that she could be his girlfriend on this trip. Since she was here.

  "It's in the genes," Martine said of human males.

  Oceana, the three-year-old girl, was sitting in my lap. "I don't have any boyfriends at all," she said in some sorrow.

  "Then," I said grandly, "I'll be your boyfriend."

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  Oceana laughed a tinkly little laugh that went on for an uncomfortable length of time.

  "What's so funny about that?" I asked, aggrieved.

  "I can't be your girlfriend," Oceana said. "I'm too little."

  The next morning I rose early and walked down a gravelly wash lined with cardon cacti and bushes that were still green in what had been a wet spring for Baja. The wash led into a box canyon whose walls caught the light of the rising sun. In the clean, clear air they looked like pale pink watercolors rising on all sides. Above, the western sky was blue-black. There was a sound I had been hearing for some time, a distant buzz, as of hundreds of people murmuring softly, but now the buzz took on a sharper, harder-edged resonance.

  The canyon ended in a kind of expanded horseshoe shape, and I could see green trees and bushes standing against the reddish walls that rose 150 feet on all sides. The buzzing echoed against stone and reverberated and filled me with an as-yet-unspecified dread. Two more steps and I saw them: thousands upon thousands of long, thin wasps swarming around a single tree in such numbers that it seemed to be covered with a thick mass of shifting yellow flowers. In the half-light of early morning, in the cool shadow of the canyon, the wasps seemed slow, nearly somnam-bulant. They moved on the tree in turgid masses, like viscous globules of some thick liquid. The buzzing seemed to be getting louder, and I abandoned the rest of my walk.

  That day we paddled against a brisk wind, north to the point, which was named for a kind of small octopus that swarmed the nighttime reefs there. Dave and I were paddling well together, and we seldom clacked paddles. A kayak paddle is a single shaft with two blades set at right angles to one another. The shaft is twisted in the hand at each revolution so that the upper blade cuts the wind.

  There was a small sea stack ahead of us, a spire of rock that rose from the water like the twisted battlements of some ancient fortress. A dozen or more pelicans had taken up positions on a series of ridge lines, and there were hundreds of western sea gulls

  interspersed among them. Dave and I studied the current a bit, then let the kayak float near these populated spires. A few gulls circled overhead and shrieked at us in their self-righteous manner. Two of the pelicans stood atop the spire, facing the north wind with their wings extended. When the evaporative effect of the wind had dried them sufficiently, they leaned into the wind, fell two full feet, then swooped into the air.

  "Look down," Kimmer called from her kayak. There was a school of bait fish moving under our boats. A pelican crashed into the surf ten feet away, then rose into the sky with its neck bulging and something jumping under the skin there.

  The sea gulls on the spire were calling to one another in a voice I'd never heard before. It sounded like mad laughter,
and the pelicans lifted off the rock, one after the other. On all sides they were plunging into the surf, sometimes sending up five-foot-high plumes of spray.

  And then the current drove us on, toward a lonely white glittering beach on the lee side of the point. We pulled in for lunch. A trail led to the summit of Octopus Point, which looked to be about seven hundred feet high. The wind was fierce up there, and I watched a small fishing boat rounding the point. It was pitching violently and rolling from side to side. Wouldn't want to be down there in a kayak, I thought.

  There were dark moving spots on the sea stacks that fronted the point, and I could hear the echoing bark of sea lions. There must have been another school of baitfish in the area because the sea lions slid off the rocks, pelicans crashed, and blue-footed boobies dived like fighter planes. I could just make out the boobies' neon-blue feet and see them as they folded in their wings, hit the water, and left a slanting trail of bubbles fifteen feet deep.

  Later we paddled out to the point to meet the sea lions. Mar-tine kept us close to the shoreline cliffs, out of the churning water to the north. The sea lions basked on the rocks and regarded us with the mild curiosity humans reserve for, oh, cows ambling across a suburban lawn: I know what that is, but what's it doing here?

  There were several perfect arches jutting out from one of the

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A l8o

  sea stacks, but they were a bit north, close to the nasty water at the point of the point. Martine and Shine, in a two-man kayak, paddled near the arch, timed the rush of water through it, then paddled through. Fast.