In my room, I find a mattress on the floor covered by a cherry-red comforter and a white eyelet sheet. Thanking Eke-san with a small bow, I bid her good night and hear her sandals clatter gently down the stairs. It is a bright, airy, square room with two sliding doors at one end. Each door contains twenty thin, opaque paper panes. On the opposite wall, a wide window, covered by two sliding shutters of twenty small panes of paper, glows a wheat color in the moonlight. Grass mats line the floor. At the tops of walls decorated with a design of tall, blue, leafless trees, a carved wooden trellis opens onto the adjoining rooms. In one corner of my room stands a black lacquer clothes tree in the shape of a Chinese rune. In another corner a television set sits on a low table. Otherwise, the room is bare. Overhead, a square carved-glass light fixture, containing three fluorescent bulbs of different sizes nested one into another, offers various settings of light.
Lying on my bed, I listen to the sound of a cricket chirping somewhere behind a panel. The hallway light shines through the paper panes of the door, which glow softly. The wind blows against a shutter, making it grumble. The carved lattice of pine at the top of the wall allows one room to breathe into another, and I can hear the gentle soughing and occasional snores of my fellow travelers. Tonight I need do nothing but sleep. No worries about chores or appointments to keep. Hiroshi has arranged everything. There is something wonderful about this looked-afterness, which returns us to the world of childhood, when life was a bustling fairground, a thick bloom had begun to develop on one’s curiosity, everything felt startling fresh, and all of life’s arrangements, the petty worries about directions and payments and meals and timetables, were handled by adults. One was left alone with wonder in an astonishing world. By removing all the fret and bother, Hiroshi has returned us to that freedom.
A violent thunderstorm rattles in during the night, and the winds, shifting suddenly, sound like silk kimonos snagging in the trees. At eight-thirty, Peter and Hiroshi and I meet downstairs for a breakfast of miso soup, fresh-cooked salmon, a raw egg, bread, rice, cabbage, and coffee. A red lacquer box in front of each of us contains strips of dried seaweed.
“Well, what do you think, Hiroshi?” I ask, as I wrap a length of seaweed around a ball of rice and raw egg.
“I don’t think so,” he says, shaking his head. “Do you play golf?” he asks unexpectedly.
“No,” I say.
“I was thinking this morning,” Hiroshi says, “about golf. In golf, if you get a hole in one under par it is a birdie, two under par is an eagle, but three under par is an albatross.”
“How would one get an albatross?” I ask.
“You’d need a long hole—at least a par five—and you’d have to take two strokes …”
Hiroshi and I begin to laugh as the same image dawns on us. From Tokyo to Hachijojima is the first stroke. From Hachijojima to Torishima is the second. We are on an invisible fairway. Fate is choosing its irons.
Eke-san takes two vases of orchids and carries them, with bittersweet and a stalk of bird-of-paradise, into a nearby room. A moment later, a bell rings and incense fills the house. When she returns to the kitchen, I follow the incense trail into the room she left and find a large, ornately carved wooden shrine. In the center of the cabinet, a golden Buddha stands with one hand lifted, flanked by a purple-and-pink candle and a brass key on a yellow thread. Eke-san has left five large persimmonlike fruits as an offering, along with two vases of flowers, a glass of water, and some joss sticks. Brown prayer beads lie on a low table. The carvings of the cabinet all depict birds—cranes and azure-winged magpies—winging forever through the soul of the wood.
Returning to the dining room, I learn that the captain has phoned with a dreary sky report. Who knows how long this storm system may blow. So we find ourselves weathered in on Hachijojima, with nothing to do but sift down deeper into its culture and wait for a calm. In this new climate, we sometimes feel as if we are too heavily dressed, and we take off the overcoat of a cherished custom in one spot, leave the sweater of a familiar habit in another. We no longer use Western cutlery, beds, or toilets. We have stopped consulting watches. Peter and I have both begun speaking courtesy words in Japanese, which we have picked up along the way. The only basic courtesy word we have not learned is the word for “No.” We have not yet had any need for it. When we are offered food, we accept it gratefully and eat with much relish. When we are offered drink, we accept it, too, and drink heartily. When we are led along a wharf or through a town or into a store or past a shrine, we follow, feasting our eyes on the panorama as it unfolds around us. We automatically fall into the repertoire of bows, which are social currency. Some require only a small tilt of the head; others are deeper—for instance, when one sits at a table, holding it with both hands, and rocking forward and back. Ten months and five days after we first began planning our trip, we still have two days to travel before we get to Torishima. There are more supplies to purchase, the weather maps to consult like the entrails of a giant bird. Ours is a strong sense of pilgrimage, and just as an initiate must take an arduous religious journey to find what is sacred, we will take many unavoidable steps and endure many hardships on our quest. In ancient times, people went on quests to behold a sacred relic or other artifact. The journey was as important as the goal, more important, in fact, because it was meant to anneal the soft metals of the soul. In Japan there is a traditional art of sword forging in which the metal is heated, folded over, hammered, heated, folded over, and hammered again many hundreds of times. With each step, the metal becomes thinner but stronger. So it is with pilgrimages. When we finally arrive at Torishima, we will be sailing in at night and will have to wait until morning to see the birds. And there will be the cliffs to climb. Few people have ever seen the birds; very few were Westerners; no women. Hiroshi does not subject his graduate students to such a trip; it is too dangerous. Although I am going to Torishima for many reasons, I go in part to stand witness. Life-forms such as these need to be beheld and celebrated. That is my privilege, as an earth ecstatic, but it is also my duty as a member of the species responsible for their destruction.
Seeing a short-tailed albatross has become a burning obsession. In dreams, I have felt the breeze from its huge slow wings, and pressed its soft, doomed breast to my face. For ten months solid, it has lured me like a winged siren, split open my calendar, drenched my imagination, made me tipsy with excitement, flown wild in my dreams.
Peter began his life in a seaman’s orphanage, along with a twin brother and a sister, in Brixham, a small fishing village on the south coast of Devon, in the southwest of England.
“It was a wonderful place,” he says, as we sit on the floor in the dining room, listening to the rain fall on a metal roof across the street with a sound like that of quietly played snare drums. “People say, ‘Isn’t that a shame—growing up in an orphanage and all.’ But let me tell you, it gave us all a great start. It was a big granite building, with big gables, green paint, and lots of boys—about fifty or sixty boys—and it was wonderful inasmuch as it taught us how to live. Most of the boys ended up going into the Royal or the Merchant Navy straight from the orphanage. Because it was a seaman’s home, we were taught all about the sea. We had a library full of sea books. On weekends and evenings we’d go out sailing with whalers, big whalers. You can imagine what that was like for a nine- or ten-year-old. We used to go sailing, hiking across the moors, doing navigational stuff, rock climbing.
“Just beneath us was a cliff full of breeding seabirds, a place called Berry Head. On Saturdays, we often used to explore the place. You know how boys are. They used to let us out and we just ran wild, exploring everywhere and hanging on cliffs. In the winter those cliffs were absolutely deserted—bare, gray rock. Yet come spring, when the wind was blowing with a hint of ice on it, these birds who had been out at sea would come back and start reoccupying their nesting colonies. If you have an artist’s eye, you can draw birds, and you suddenly realize that although you have a common bird, the more
you look at it, the more you discover that it’s an individual. You start to see little differences in each one. And so it was I got used to certain birds that came back, especially common murres and shags, and I knew which birds were the same ones from last year and the year before. Two years when you’re a child is a lifetime. So the return of the breeding seabirds was a big thing in my year. I wanted to see who’d survived and how. I guess at that very early age I fell in love with birds.”
Peter left school at fifteen, without any qualifications or certificate, but went on to get an art degree from London University. Then he landed a cushy job as an architect. His wife worked in the next building, and they could walk to work. They had a house, cars, paid holidays, and a pension; life was convenient, predictable, and secure.
“But there came a time,” Peter says, “when I said to myself, one day I’m going to be sixty and look back and wonder what I did with my life. I will have held down a job and all that sort of stuff, but what did I really do? With that in mind, we just threw everything up—sold the house, sold the two cars, bought a Land Rover—and I convinced my wife to go round the world. We thought it would take four years to visit all the seabird sites of the world. There really wasn’t a good, authoritative seabird guide, and I decided to write one. The four years turned into seven years, and we traveled everywhere, getting jobs all over. Most of the jobs were on boats, since that’s the best way to be near seabirds. I worked on all sorts of fishing boats and trawlers and research boats. When we got back home, we were destitute, and I had a family to support. So I took a job as a fish filleter. I used to get up at five and go down to the Fish Gate at six and fillet fish until about midday, wash up, go home, get the book out, and start writing and illustrating. I spent four years working eighteen-hour days. I’d often work beyond midnight. It took three years alone to do those sixteen hundred illustrations of seabirds.”
When his guide was finally published in 1983, after eleven years of research, he took a job lecturing for a cruise company, whose ships have become his floating villages. Because they tend to go into remote and exotic locales, they allow him to thicken his life with adventure. He has been to the Antarctic dozens of times. Even on standard voyages, there can be surprises.
“I always tell the passengers,” Peter says, “ ‘If you catch any birds on deck, just chuck them into my cabin.’ Well, once, it was a long night at the bar, and when I returned there were forty-two birds flying around my cabin!”
Although he is not a “lister” (a birder who keeps a compulsive tally of sightings), he has seen 315 of the 320 species of seabirds. The only ones that remain to be seen are the short-tailed albatross, the Chinese crested tern, the relict gull, Barau’s petrel, and the Fiji petrel (which has been sighted only twice in the past ninety-nine years). By disposition and opportunity, he spends seven to nine months each year at sea. When he’s home, he works on large paintings, mainly of seabirds. Most of his time he spends as an ornithologist-guide, renowned for his high spirits, banter, appreciation of the opposite sex, and hard drinking, as well as his stubborn refusal to let anything—rocks, glaciers, storms, deserts—stand between him and a bird. Whenever he lands anywhere, he climbs immediately to the highest point. A year ago, on the observation deck of a ship in the Antarctic, when Peter had just gone downstairs, I heard a woman say to her neighbor, “It’s amazing the way the ocean becomes a desert when Peter leaves.” But a day rarely passes during which he isn’t sketching, painting, or envisioning something.
Finally, one morning the day breaks calm and sweet. We pack hurriedly, eat a huge breakfast, and rush down to the wharf, where a tall, thin sencho welcomes us aboard his fishing boat. For hours, Hiroshi has been a combination of intense excitement and absolute dread. Indeed, it is a testimony to his devotion to the short-tailed albatross that he feels willing, even joyous, about making this trip time after time, although he knows it will poleax him with a seasickness whose blades are forged in Hell. Mal de mer is a grief he suffers diabolically—always has, and always will. The ghost of seasickness stalks him for days before every trip to Torishima, and, as he knows, November promises colossally high seas. On board the boat, the first thing he does is take a soporific antiseasickness pill and claim his favorite bunk, while Peter and I climb up to the top of the bridge deck and sit on a hatch. Waving good-bye to Eke-san, Toma-san, and a line of well-wishers, we pull slowly away. A reddish-brown sea turtle swims by like a stepping-stone leading us back to a safe harbor. A line of fishing boats appears on the horizon with scoop nets for catching sardines. Soon Hachijojima shrinks away from us, until it becomes a small gem set in the bevel of the ocean. The boat rolls from one side to the other. A blue mast swings against the paler blue sky. Thick golden ropes hang like military braid down to and around a dark green mizzin. Other ropes lie loosely coiled on the deck like sleeping snakes. In one corner of the poop deck, large white plastic jugs of water rattle against their restraints. Narrower at the top, the mast quivers in the wind. On this six-foot sea, the waves run wild and choppy, but there are no large open swells yet. A stretch of puffy white clouds, quilting the horizon, tells us of an island somewhere below them but too distant for us to see. As the swells become stronger, wave spume looks fluorescent white against the glazed blue of the deep sea—colors familiar in Japanese art. Occasionally the boat jolts—like a drawer slammed back into a desk. Then the sea foam becomes hooves of panic horses.
Peter climbs down to the poop deck and stands at the rail, binoculars pressed to his far-ranging eyes. As the boat careens, he puts his hands in his pockets, bends his knees, and remains perpendicular to the horizon as one side of the boat and then the other swings up—he is the moment arm around which the boat rolls. We enter a realm of swarming fishing boats, each white, with a small, vibrant green mizzen sail at the stern.
“We’re out of the shade of land now and into the open sea,” Peter says cheerfully, as he climbs back up to the top deck. He looks relaxed and happy. The sea is as familiar to him as a motto. “There is a rhythm to the sea,” he says, “a rhythm often missing from one’s life. The sea obliges you to adopt its rhythm. You haven’t any choice. So I sometimes think of the ocean as the heartbeat of the world. If you stand anywhere on any shoreline, even if it’s at a lake, and just listen, letting the stillness descend around you, it doesn’t matter where you are, there’s always a rhythm, a beat. I love being part of that bigger self. The ocean is a living thing … it’s fragile, it teaches us how vulnerable we are as a species. But for me it’s also an escape route; I find it hard to be in one place.
“And then there are the incredible birds. When I see a seabird, sometimes thousands of miles from land, I’m always filled with a kind of a numbness, because I know that if you took any of us five miles from land and threw us overboard, probably none of us would make it to shore. And yet you can take a seabird that has a brain the size of a pea, take it a thousand miles from land, and it will not only survive, it will return to its original nest site.” Lifting one of his cameras, he takes a few shots of the fishing boats pegged like pillowcases against the horizon.
A sudden swell catches us, and our boat skids the way a chariot swivels around one wheel. The cobalt-blue waves grow thick with white lather, as if someone had taken a wire whisk to the ocean. The ship’s mate raps on the wooden hatch on which we are sitting. He hands up mugs of soup and noodles and two pairs of chopsticks. My stomach is also swirling, but there is nothing like a plunging sea to make your spirits level, nothing like the snort and lather of the waves to fill you with a galloping sense of adventure. Somewhere on the ocean, there is always a sun street leading to the horizon, a path of glittering light. Outbound, we sailed straight down it. By afternoon, the ocean has turned to obsidian, and the sun street stretches to our starboard side.
At three o’clock Peter spots a black-footed albatross to the east, and within seconds it has crossed the horizon behind and to the west of us at about seventy miles an hour, jetting straight up, then planing s
ideways and zooming down to the sea surface, only to wheel up again. Albatrosses sail in three dimensions. Dynamic soaring, it’s called, a phrase clumsy and mechanistic. An albatross can set in motion a flight so perfectly balanced and attuned to the compound marvels of wind and water that it needn’t land, or even flap its wings, for hours, for weeks, indeed, for months. Thanks to the reliable sorcery of physics, the wind right above the water blows more slowly than the wind higher up. If an albatross flying over the ocean wishes to go upwind but doesn’t want to flap its wings to get there, it starts a long, slow dive toward the surface of the sea, where it enters the slower-moving air. Suppose the bird is flying at twenty miles an hour in a wind of fifty miles an hour. When it flies in the direction the wind is going, it crosses the sea surface at seventy miles an hour. But when it dives down into the barely moving air near the surface, it has a lot of momentum left over, which it can’t shed. Finding itself with all this extra speed, it trades some of that seventy miles per hour for altitude, and shoots up even higher than it was before. It is still flying at twenty miles per hour, but at a higher altitude now, and so it turns downwind again, and continues its perpetual motion of swooping and soaring. Because it’s crucial to get into the air moving at the lowest velocity, as near as possible to the sea—every fraction of inch counts—albatrosses maneuver deftly, high-wire artists right at the sea surface. Sometimes you can actually see their feathers touch the water. Over the exploding, crazily tossing sea, albatrosses follow every minute fluctuation of the surface with their wing tips. And they have no need to flap. Indeed, an albatross flying six hundred miles will flap less than a sparrow crossing a narrow street. Almost certainly the albatross we are watching has flown from Torishima, and we greet it as a harbinger, following its swooning path until it finally disappears from sight.
Albatrosses often sail right up to a boat, to feast on cooking scraps or to fish in the freshly churned wake, and sailors welcome them. Of all the birds on earth, albatrosses have enchanted people of all countries through the ages. For one thing, they have colossal wingspans of over thirteen feet and can weigh twenty-five pounds. An eagle or a condor is a runt compared with an albatross. Exquisitely colored, they gleam like satin and are serene, gentle, regal. No wonder they appear in the magic and myth of many countries, as Coleridge knew when he turned one loose in his “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a poem that has done much to shape the albatross’s image as a bird of ill omen. Coleridge had never actually seen an albatross. In 1797, when he and Wordsworth went on a walking tour of Somerset, they decided to finance the trip by each one writing a narrative poem. But Coleridge fretted over a subject. Wordsworth, a lover of natural history, who had recently read an explorer’s account of sailing through Drake Passage, gave Coleridge the idea for his “Rime.” Baudelaire also wrote about this “monarch of the clouds,” which he saw as a metaphor for the poet, so often clumsy in the pedestrian world, but only because of his powerful, huge wings. In Ida, Gertrude Stein admired the ceremoniousness of albatrosses: “She had once heard that albatrosses which bird She liked the name of always bowed before they did anything.” The Maoris of New Zealand carve albatrosses into the bows of their boats to guarantee a peaceful voyage.
The Rarest of the Rare Page 9