by Pam Houston
Stand-up paddling is my new favorite sport. It’s both aerobic and meditative, it helps my balance and, most important, it gets me out on the water, under my own power, surrounded by all that gorgeous aquamarine. Unlike most of the outdoor sports I’ve fallen in love with, it’s hard to break a bone doing it. I’ve seen those gray braids out on their boards in Hawai‘i, and it’s my plan to take paddling all the way to the grave.
Last winter, on a downwind paddle off the coast of Moloka‘i, in conditions that were a gnarly (not in a good way) combination of wind chop and swell, I fell so many times and so many different ways I lost count of them. Most falls were of the standard off-the-side-of-the-board variety, but once I went backward, ass over teakettle, and another time, when a wave I wasn’t expecting swamped the board from behind, I fell forward, face planting right onto the surface of the board, before I bounced like a wooden plank and pitched off the side. I was so tired by the end of that day I could barely heave myself up on the board after what must have been fall number fifty, but the next morning, I wasn’t even a little bit sore.
In Islamorada, out on my board, I saw several big spotted rays, one with a wingspan larger than mine, two reef sharks in the three-to-four-foot range, a baby sea turtle and dozens of tropical fish. In a mangrove basin in a back bay, I nearly paddled right into a four-foot alligator sunning himself on somebody’s dock, and at the hotel pool the biggest iguana I’ve ever seen—at least four feet long—with the most complicated and colorful face armor imaginable, walked right under my lounge chair and out the other side. Later that night, a white heron, in his full mating plumage, preened himself on my balcony as I sat in a lawn chair, reading about the recent releases from Lake Okeechobee.
The dike on that giant lake is not stable, and the lake is filled with poison from central Florida’s agriculture. The Everglades would clean that water right up for Florida and send it back into the ocean, as it did for millions of years before people started polluting it, but Big Sugar owns the land that would have to be reflooded to allow it to happen, and Florida’s governor is in bed with Big Sugar.
So each winter, when the lake gets full to bursting and the dike threatens to break and poison all of central Florida in the process, the Army Corp of Engineers sends ten billion gallons a day of poisoned water down the St. Lucie Canal to the Atlantic, creating massive algae blooms that kill fish by the thousands, making the ocean beaches dangerous to swim in, and driving several species, including the Cape Sable sparrow, one step closer to extinction. That very week people up the coast were posting pictures of seawater the color of black tea.
I realized, sitting on my balcony, making eyes at the white heron, that I loved Florida particularly and precisely because the apocalypse has already happened there, is happening daily, and yet the animals are still there, going about their business. The building of the Tamiami Trail, the damming of the Everglades, the filling of the swamps, development after development, with little or no environmental protections enforced, and the animals make the best of it, amid the beer cans, the half-finished dream homes and the Jet Skis.
In the middle of downtown Islamorada, on Highway 1, which these days sees 24/7 wall-to-wall traffic and is currently in the midst of a widening project, on top of an especially tall power pole, sits an osprey nest. Stopped by flagmen, I looked up to see the osprey couple peering over the side, watching the bulldozer and the backhoe, listening to the back-up buzzers. Nobody told them it was an inappropriate place to raise a family, and perhaps by these standards it isn’t. Florida animals are adaptors. And something about them gives me hope.
I know there’s a different way to tell this story. I could enumerate the animals lost (individuals and entire species) because of the greed and corruption that has run rampant in Florida for years. That story is here too, running right alongside the one I have going about resilience and against-all-odds survival. But sometimes, this other story is the one I need, the iguana at the hotel pool, the gator on the patio. It makes me believe that when push comes to shove, maybe the creatures of the earth will fight back.
On the final morning of my trip, I went out for one last paddle. It was 8:00 a.m. and I only had ninety minutes before I needed to leave for the airport, and because I beat the sport fishermen and the Jet Skiers and the party boaters out there, the water was as clear as glass. I paddled along the shoreline into what little wind there was, with the idea I would swing offshore some distance, ride the small swell back and see if I could find any creatures. After thirty minutes, I made my turn out to sea, and in front of me, something humped itself momentarily out of the water. A ray? a dolphin?
I paddled toward the spot where the hump appeared, right on the end of a point I had paddled around several times that week, and when I got there I saw, maybe thirty yards offshore and just below the surface, a big tan mottled rock that I had somehow missed on the other days. Coral? conglomerate?
The nose of my board was right on top of the big rock when it finally moved, unhumping its back and lifting both rounded nose and paddle tail out of the water simultaneously. The noise he made was more sigh than blow, as he slowly pushed himself out from under the shadow of my board.
Is there anything in the world more vulnerable than the manatee? Anything slower, sweeter, more deserving of our care? I paddled along beside him and he turned his gentle eye on me and rolled over on his side in a kind of greeting. We moved at the same pace for a little while, when out of nowhere, a backward-hatted frat boy and his girlfriend came roaring up in a speedboat behind me. The manatee reared up and dove as deep as he could, given the shallows we were in, which was almost no depth at all.
“No!” I screamed, and waited for the blood in the water.
The frat boy cut his engine. “Did you see it?” he asked his girlfriend who was picking her fingernails. She shook her head and with a giant surge of gasoline to his massive twin engines he spun his boat and roared off.
There it is, I thought. There is Florida.
I stood perfectly still on the water with my paddle resting on the board and waited for the manatee to resurface, which he did, after about a minute, and we began moving again. He was taking me, it seemed, into a private boat basin, one with eight or nine houses and a medium-sized sign that said Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted to the Fullest Extent of the Law. I briefly considered whether that rule applied to paddleboarding trespassers—and decided it probably did, but I could already see, in front of me, five other manatees in the boat basin, including a mother and very small calf.
I drifted in slowly and silently several yards behind my friend, barely using my paddle. I didn’t have time to get arrested that morning. If anyone yelled at me, I reasoned, I would just turn around and go. The other manatees raised their heads out of the water to greet their friend. The calf was no more than a foot long; the biggest manatee, its mother, more than ten feet from tip to tail. I watched them hang and bob a few minutes, before turning and paddling, as quietly as I could, back out of the private boat basin.
During that January week I spent in Hanalei with Cheryl, she introduced me to a woman named Hob Osterlund, a writer who has dedicated much of her life to an albatross population, one that has only in recent years returned—one bird at a time—to Kaua‘i. In 1971, after the species had been absent from Kaua‘i for a hundred years, a single albatross flew a thousand miles past her fledgling ground on Midway to reclaim the island her ancestors had called home before tourism developed. When I was there, in 2016, there was a thriving colony, fastidiously protected by Hob and others.
Cheryl told me she and Hob had talked at length about mother loss, and the potential power of the wilderness to mitigate, if not heal it. I liked Hob instantly. She’s a no-nonsense woman who can make mystery and manifestation seem as everyday as lawn care, a practical sort who isn’t the least bit afraid to talk in the same sentence about science and the human soul. She told me about her “impractical” decision to move to Kaua‘i twenty-two years ago, when a deceased ance
stor visited her in a dream and said Hob’s life’s purpose was to pay attention to what the albatross was trying to tell her about living on the earth.
I told Hob about the ranch, about how even when I am away from it, my horseshoe of mountains holds me, have held me most all of my adult life. I told her how the surface of the Rio Grande turns to mercury every afternoon, an hour before sunset, and how in that roiling silver surface I have always been able to see some version of what people call God.
Hob invited me to her house for a chat and a shower, before I’d catch the red-eye back to the mainland. While she made us guacamole, I went for a walk out the back of her Princeville house onto the sprawling golf course behind it, past several signs warning me the paths are for golfers only. Since the golf paths were the only way to access the sea cliffs, I decided if somebody needed to fine me for wanting to look out on the ocean one last time before I left Hawai‘i, I would gladly pay.
I looked over the edge at the waves crashing below me, and then offshore at a relatively quiet sea. Record-setting waves had hit Hanalei Bay all week, delighting the surfers, making my daily swim a bit too exciting, but now the storm had moved on.
I trained my eyes on as much sea surface as possible between me and the horizon and settled in for a wait. Finally one spout, and then quickly another. Then a few more farther out. Then a giant splash closer in, then two more in quick succession. I swallowed tears as three more spouts rounded the corner of the island. The skinny whales had made it from the Great Bear back to Hawai‘i after all.
A lady walking her dogs on the golf cart path (surely an even bigger violation than mine) approached me, grinning. “Did you see them?” she asked.
“Yes!”
“It makes me so happy,” she said, and I realized there were tears in her eyes too. “I’ve been so worried. I hadn’t seen them yet this year.”
“I heard they left Canada a little late,” I said. “But here they are.”
I walked back to Hob’s house to report my sighting. We talked about the skinny humpbacks, the warming ocean and the shrinking ice cap, the methane leak poisoning a whole subdivision in Southern California, the fracking fields in North Dakota where I’d just been to write a story, the bumper sticker I saw in the man-camp there that read I Crack Whores.
“These are the conversations I find myself having every day,” I said. “Soon no one will want to invite me over for guacamole.”
“It always hurts to lose your mother,” Hob says, “no matter how old you are.”
I looked up at her startled, thinking she was having a senior moment, that she had somehow gotten me confused with Cheryl.
But when I met her eyes, I saw not only that she knew it was me in the room with her, but that she understood me better than she had any right to, given the brevity of our acquaintance.
“It does,” I said. “It hurts a little every single day.”
September 2014 found my friend Tami and me on a boat with an ice-enforced hull in Nunavut, Canada, on the north side of Baffin Island along with a hundred paying passengers and a thirty-person crew of scientists and researchers. The plan was to start in Resolute Bay and travel west and south, following Sir John Franklin’s historic passage on a seldom-used route through the Fury and Hecla Strait—known to early explorers as the Northwest Passage—and arrive fourteen days later in Nunavut’s capital, Iqaluit.
Sir John Franklin sailed from Britain in 1845 leading 129 men and two ships—HMS Erebus and HMS Terror—to try to open that route for trade. The expedition’s disappearance became one of the great mysteries of Victorian exploration, leaving experts to speculate that the ships became locked in the ice near King William Island and the crews abandoned them in a desperate attempt to save themselves. The Inuit fishermen living in the area at that time reported the starving sailors resorted to cannibalism before they died. Franklin’s wife used her own money to launch an unprecedented five ships from England in search of her husband, telling the sailors to leave cans of food on the ice hoping he would somehow find them.
Since 2008 the Canadian government has redoubled its efforts to find Erebus and Terror as part of a strategy to assert Canada’s sovereignty over the shipping lanes that are suddenly becoming accessible due to rapidly melting sea ice. In a stroke of uncanny timing, the announcement was made that the Erebus was found in the waters of Victoria Strait just days before Tami and I flew to Resolute Bay, and some were calling it the biggest archaeological discovery since Tutankhamen’s tomb.
I suppose, given all that, we should not have been surprised when we woke on the first morning aboard to find our boat, the Sea Adventurer, frozen hard into the pack ice, nor when we had to wait until almost noon for it to release us. When it happened again on the second night, our expedition leader, Alex, along with our Greek sea captain, decided that to stay the course for Fury and Hecla could lead to the same kind of trouble that found Sir John Franklin, and we therefore needed a new itinerary. We would go around Baffin Island (at nearly 200,000 square miles, the fifth largest island in the world) to the east, instead of to the west, a decision that infuriated the history buffs among the clientele, but excited the crew’s geologists and biologists, for whom the east side of Baffin Island and its many deep fjords were wholly uncharted territory. Tami and I were so happy to be on the trip at all, east or west seemed equally good to us.
Because I’ve had the good fortune to spend a lot of time above the Arctic Circle in Alaska, I thought I knew how beguiling travel in the eastern Canadian Arctic would be. I was mistaken. Maybe it was being continuously out on the water. Maybe it was because the September light was making constant magic with the rock and the ice. Maybe it was because I was with Tami, a friend who over the years has become a true sister, and we could therefore feel, without speaking of it, every time the wild beauty made our hearts want to burst. Maybe it was because we got to watch, at close range, a couple of polar bears toss a seal carcass around like a soccer ball, or because we got to lie, one afternoon, in an open tundra meadow for an hour while a small herd of musk ox grazed toward us, or because we got to kayak every day in front of calving glaciers, sticking our paddles into the pancake ice that was threatening to close us in. Or maybe it was our visits to the Inuit villages—how the mayor of Pangnirtung came out and shook each of our hands, how the teenagers in town put on a dance for us, how a lady sold us hand-knitted hats out of her kitchen in Arctic Bay, and how we played jump rope there with three little girls whose faces shimmered with the sea salt that had dried out of the air and onto their burnished rose cheeks. Or maybe it was the way our trip leader, Alex, a very young man to be in charge of such a major expedition, infected us all with his unqualified enthusiasm. I meet a great many people who love what they do, but Alex loved his job more than anyone I have ever met in my life. I spent the whole fourteen days in something close to rapture.
Alex ran the entire expedition—including the sixty-eight-year-old Greek captain and his staff—with a compassionate but firm hand. I was particularly impressed with how he handled the group of older male passengers (Tami and I nicknamed them “the Captains of Industry”) who couldn’t get over the fact that we turned away from Fury and Hecla. I liked his no-nonsense way of stressing the importance of following the rules.
“Today we will go ashore onto Beechey Island,” he began at one morning briefing. “We’ll see a memorial to Franklin, as well as an Inuit archaeological site. Our entire staff is trained in firearms and whenever we are on land there will be multiple sharpshooters stationed on either side of the corridor where we will be hiking. It is imperative that the group stay together and follow every direction from the team members. We are prepared to use lethal force if necessary to stop a charging polar bear. We will shoot in front of the bear first to try to turn it around. Our company has a perfect record in that we have never had to kill a bear to protect a passenger and, I can assure you, if one of my men is forced to kill one today because one of you has not followed my directions, the trip back
to Iqaluit will feel like the longest of your life.”
Tami and I fell instantly in love with Alex in what I’d like to insist was an innocent, noncougarish way, although we did record his morning message on our otherwise useless iPhones. He took to us too, and we met for a beer in the library almost nightly—Tami and I playing the role of moderately hip, outdoorsy mothers. He told us the story of meeting his fiancé aboard one of these excursions. How he dressed in his formal captain’s gear, knelt down in front of the girl’s father and asked for her hand. He told us Verité (her real name) was already pushing him to get off the water, to move to Toronto and settle down and have children, that he was trying to get her to compromise, to let him leave the sea gradually, that he was encouraging the employment of a five-year and a ten-year plan. We listened sympathetically, told him that while we knew Verité must be very special (for how could she not be?), it had not escaped our notice that he was living a life most only dreamed of and he was spectacularly qualified for the job he had. We suggested Verité most likely fell in love with him because of the way he stood on the bridge scanning the water, because of his unending love for whatever was on the horizon, for the way his voice caught over the loudspeaker every time he’d spotted a bear, or an orca, or just wanted us to come out on deck and see the way the icy clouds were reflecting off the surface of the sea.
Like the Great Bear Rainforest, Nunavut is being heavily pressured by the oil and gas industry, and even though it is less populated, much harder to access and many times bigger than the Great Bear, the eastern Canadian Arctic is every bit as fragile. One day, on our unplanned route, we saw in front of us an island where the charts indicated no such thing. As we got closer, the captain identified what we had mistaken for a landmass as what remained of the giant hunk of the Greenland ice sheet that had famously fallen into the sea in 2012—the largest break-off ever at the time.