Copyright © 2016 by Robert Wintner
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Jacket design by Laura Klynstra
Jacket photo by Fernando Lopez Arbarello
Print ISBN: 978-1-63158-105-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63158-111-3
Printed in the United States of America
For Ziggy, a reefdog
Author’s Note
Special thanks to the waterborne of Maui, Tahiti, Fiji, Palau, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Great Reef, the Virgins, Cuba and on around who share one reef love.
Thanks to the troops digging in to save reef critters and habitat around the world, whatever it takes.
—RW
PROLOGUE
Halfway Out to Sea
A lean and sun-browned man slithers in the shallows easily as an eel after fry, till he draws his legs under and stands, taller than the first organisms walking out of the sea but with original intent—to improve his niche, on land.
With his hair wetted to his neck, a scant loin pocket, and a scruffy beard dripping below swim-goggled eyes, he makes the amphibious transition, up and out.
An emergence from an hour or two of reef repose makes him wonder. Ankle deep, he watches two children and a dog playing naked in the waves. The girl of ten sweeps her long, black hair out of the way childishly with both hands. Composed as a tropical cameo one moment, she surges with energy the next, yelling at the boy to eat: “Manges! C’est une tempête en mer, et tu dois manger à rester fort!” It’s a storm at sea, and you must eat to stay strong!
The boy sits on a paddleboard. She pulls it by a rope among the shallow waves. The dog barks, finally clambering aboard, where he teeters, facing the back to watch the boy.
The boy eats from a plate on his lap: baked yams, carrots, and pineapple. Little wave-tops season his lunch. The dog whines. Leihua pulls the paddleboard to waist depth and points it into the surf, then gives it a push, commanding him to eat.
Justin eats, piercing the short break, focused on the pineapple saved for last along with a piece of taro for the dog.
The man says, “Mes enfants,” as a statement of being, a navigational fix on terra firma. He slogs up a sandy path, no longer buoyant. The kids and dog gravitate and follow toward the house, leaving the paddleboard high on the beach.
At the house they’ll rest through the hot afternoon. They might doze. In two hours the boy and girl will tend to schoolwork while the man prepares dinner. He may process images on his computer for a while before the woman arrives from the hospital.
Meanwhile, on the way up, they pass a mound of dirt topped with smooth rocks, the topmost a marker engraved: Skinny. It’s a final resting place, but its reluctant tenant would rather use it as a perch. She jumps to the top and wobbles off, so the man picks her up and sets her on top again. The old, feeble cat with the baby face suddenly sees him and speaks her catch-all word to the omniscient one who insists that she keep living, that she keep processing moments as she has for the last twenty-two years.
When the man and children pass, she leans forward to swat the dog on the butt but falls off trying and meows again, falling into the procession up the path.
Compared to What?
It’s a shorter flight from Hawaii to Tahiti than from Hawaii to LA—only twenty minutes shorter, but the difference felt profound, as if Tahiti could be more accessible than its exotic name suggested. Though closer to Hawaii in miles, French Polynesia seemed far more distant than LA.
French Polynesia couldn’t possibly have a Wal-Mart or a Sam’s or a Costco, gridlock or freeways wending to “affordable” neighborhoods nestled among power pylons, transformers and oil vats from the land of Gargantua.
Could it?
Tahiti did not surge forward but rather lingered in the imagination as an outpost of Paradise.
Tension with the French seemed nominal, a minor distraction along with crumbling roads and dirty gutters—minimal development allowed things to age like whiskey. No golf courses, no rush hour, no road rage and no franchise burgers or all-you-can-eat array of American conveniences gave it a bygone feeling. Absence of stuff set a tone of simple goodness. What’s that sound? It’s the soft voice of the unencumbered world, where growth is still vegetative. French Polynesia still glowed, a tropical oasis isolated from a world of strip mall clutter, a world failing to keep up with a population unconstrained in its propagation and needs.
Where Oceania was French-flavored with an abundance of fish in aquamarine clarity, Hawaii seemed removed from tropical simplicity, building out. Greed and power had things dumbed down deeper than any time since the wagons first circled—or since Captain Cook got banged on the head at Kealakekua.
Hawaii felt more like Santa Monica than Hawaii.
That was Ravi Rockulz’s assessment. He’d never been to French Polynesia, but he’d read and heard about it. He thought of it sometimes first thing in the morning, if the tourists would allow. Most often they interrupted his reverie on the way out to the dive site.
Like the tourist who stood nearby at the rail watching the bow cleave water so clear it hinted at meaning just below. The tourist spoke of his friend in LA who had a nasty rash on his arm with oozing sores to the elbow. The doctor prescribed one unguent and another to no avail until the strongest ointment in the world didn’t work. Finally, the doctor broke the news: Another line of employment would be necessary because working for the circus, planting elephant suppositories up to the elbow, would keep the rash coming back. The friend in LA asked, “What? And give up showbiz?”
Ravi didn’t get it at first. Hardly a dim bulb, he couldn’t see why anyone would want to stick his arm up an elephant’s ass just to make a living in showbiz. No joke is funny once parsed, and this joke, too, failed to rouse a chuckle. Rather, Ravi wondered how the irony underlying most humor actually comes to pass. At least he understood the point of the joke, relative to showbiz, money, and festering lesions.
He thought he understood LA, with regard to volume exchange in an urban setting. That is, pressure increases by one atmosphere for every thirty-three feet of depth below sea level. Nitrogen and oxygen remain proportionate at depth, about 80:20—but pressure at sixty-six feet is tripled, so content triples in volume too. The critical factor is that the bloodstream absorbs nitrogen much faster than it can leave, and excess nitrogen causes the bends if ambient pressure decreases too quickly. The gas tries to escape through the joints, and they twist.
Just so, with world population doubling again, pathogens increase proportionately. Percentages remain stable, though raw numbers rise to toxic potential. Human behavior with no ambient constraint is similar to human joints infused with nitrogen: bent.
LA looked bent, and the rest of the world was squirming.
•
Ravid (rah-VEED) Rockulz was born when Basha Rivka was thirty and beyond hope for a decent match. Still single and already elderly by community standards, a willful, anxious woman, she got by in her hometown, Haifa, and would have spent her days till that no-goodnik came along. And what happened? Schtupi mit no chupi is what. He left, and good riddance—but don’t think this cloud was not silver-lined because it was. Mother and son became friends, seeking solace or venting frustration, as mother and son will do. When he doubted the future of the natural world, she recalled the early 1950s when she was a girl and people lived far from each other and were glad to meet. Now, ass to elbow, they defend “personal space.” As a true elder, Basha Rivka shared her son’s doubts on the future, and frankly she wouldn’t miss this mess—after 120 years, of course.
They commiserated. She said the next generations could better cope with their needs and consequences in a world of twelve billion people minus one when God chose to call her, which could be tomorrow, or tonight, or, God forbid, in the next minute or two. But she thought she had a decent shot at 2040, given her general health, genetics, diet, and exercise. She walked every day to the market so things would be fresh, even if overpriced by the heartless mamzerim who had the freshest produce.
Beyond that she was an old lady who didn’t need so much dark talk from her only begotten child, who was young and had his whole life ahead of him in a world surely destined to be his oyster.
“What kind of talk would you prefer, Mother?”
“You know, something else. Not the depression talk.”
“Do I sound depressed?”
“Don’t tell me how you sound. I have ears.”
Then she asked when he planned to move to LA, where he would meet his own kind, including a girl who would give him a reason to live, and her too, with a family to remember him and his mother when they both were gone—after 120 years.
Ravi asked why he would live in LA. He asked the thin air, the blue sea, and Basha Rivka, whose answer was a wife for him, grandchildren for her, and a profession that would provide for his children and his old age—and maybe hers, too, because at his current pace she wouldn’t be able to relax for another sixty years.
When would old age begin? Ravi watched flights coming in steadily, each delivering hundreds of cold tourists craving the tropical balm. Traffic thickened. But no matter how overbuilt the rock became, the question persisted: Compared to what?
Any flight could bring tourists needing guidance into the depths. A dive leader makes a boat’s reputation, so he could be viewed as the object of choice. Besides competent guidance, a tourist or two may also need guidance in those other depths craved by the footloose tourist women. “Yes, it’s okay. Call me Ravi.”
Ravi’s smile reflected the skill and success that made him happy. No argument there, but Basha Rivka’s concern was practical, with less blue-sky, blue-water razzmatazz and more of what a mensch must do to secure a future for his family—like wearing a suit and tie, for starters, and working in an office, contributing to society, getting better pay than a water boy. So the suit wouldn’t be top-drawer goods at the beginning. Never mind. Quality goods will come. You’ll see.
“You mean I should make more money?”
“And what’s wrong with more money?”
“Nothing, Mother. So why can’t you find someone to pay the best dive instructor in Hawaii more money?”
Then came the sigh and tongue clicking. But he got the point, and they both knew it, even if he didn’t share his mother’s motivation. Still, she was on his side, and the nudge would cease if only… Or it would not, though she defended him in the clutch when he quit the military on the grounds of opposing the military mentality. “I don’t get it. You’re one of those objectors? A fellow with a conscience?”
“No. I don’t think I am. A conscientious objector doesn’t want to kill anyone. I think I wouldn’t mind killing someone if I had to. The population should be thinned, but I don’t want to kill any thing—anyone who is not human. The military is so stupid. Many stupid people have many stupid meetings where they say stupid things and come up with stupid plans for stupid behaviors that kill many things. I want out. I want no part of it.” Which was Ravi’s explanation, to which his mother had the good sense to stay mum.
Notably, Ravi’s resignation was from the Israeli military, that esteemed group held in awe and reverence, as if it were the Fertile Crescent’s very own boy band. These boys lived the credo, never again. Consensus on the credo was unanimous: Better to die fighting than in a fake shower with fifteen grams of black soap. Oh, they knew the score. The fans raved. Basha Rivka had been proud as any soldier’s mother but had suffered more than the usual angst; she was so worried, with the guns and bombs and the boys on the other side, some of them perhaps very nice boys, shooting at her son, whom they’d never even met. Once he quit the military, she could worry far less. “So. Let it be,” she’d said.
Quitting wasn’t simple but required a tortuous season of hearings, with accusations, character maligning, and questionable patriotism. Ravi had known he could win by accepting the foul names and not responding. He knew he was a patriot and would fight in a real conflict, killing people who hated him and came on to kill him. It would be natural. But it was tough—except in the context of gratuitous destruction called training and drills and practice for the real thing. That’s what grated on his conscientious values. He feared expressing these things, lest he be deemed insane or seditious. But Ravi Rockulz could not desecrate the reefs of Eilat in war games against an imaginary enemy that in reality warranted no response. Tearing up the reef with mines, dredges, and sundry incursions would not play out for an unlikely Jewish seal, a mere boy whose knees buckled under the burden of his first tank of compressed air, who already loved the coral down to the polyps.
Basha Rivka had asked when the little polyps would love him back. He’d assured her they loved him every time he saw them. How else could he feel so happy in their company?
•
That was some years ago. Since then, he’d settled in the tropics to live in sunshine on mostly calm seas among beautiful reefs. The US Navy tested sonar in the name of national security, blasting decibels that agonized the whales, monk seals, turtles, and fish for hundreds of miles. Ravi’s boat and a few others off McGregor Point one day witnessed humpback whales breaching incessantly, as if to escape. A whale breached over a small sailboat, sinking it. Navy rescue was there in an hour, though the passengers were picked up by then.
The story never appeared in the local media because the US Navy said it didn’t happen, that a tourist made a mistake in thinking a whale could actually fall onto a boat—they had investigated and concluded that the event never was. So military reality claimed another day.
Besides military incursion into Hawaii, where billions in defense contracts could advance political careers, other incursion also surged.
Tourism was up, what with terrorism threatening the world and filling the airwaves of America.
Immigration to the fiftieth state also rose. More tourists asked the simple, tough questions—and gave the answers in the same awakening. LA? Compared to Hawaii? Are you kidding? So they moved to the good life from LA—or Seattle, Alameda or Portland, from Bakersfield, Boise or Butte. Start out in St. Louie and go through Missouri. Oklahoma City is not so pretty. You’ll see Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico. Flagstaff, Arizona, don’t forget Pomona, Kingston, Barmaids, yadda yadda San Jalapeño… Life is not simple as a lyric, but still, it’s fun to sing along. And a catchy lyric helped distract from the thickening density of bodies, cars, and pavement.
Besides using distractions to avoid sadness, it was important to see how growth was good because more people meant more money. More money meant more material comfort in the good life in Hawaii. Why not live in the biggest ocean in the world and make more money? With the Internet, fax, cellular, s
treaming data, a wireless world and ever-broadening bands, it could be done.
Is this a great time, or what?
But the magic was bogging down in discovery of chic, hip, cool, and the new hot thing. Spontaneous raves could erupt anytime over whales or movie stars spotted in the offing. Often nothing remained to be seen but the ruffled surface, yet people stared in hopes of another view, with disbelief that such potential in nature and celebrity could converge in one place, and that normal, working stiffs could see these things so freely. Ah, Maui. Lucky we live, and so forth and so on.
The place felt more like somewhere else, somewhere generic, convenient and crowded. But it felt so right to so many, stepping onto the tarmac to claim victory over the freeway, drive-by, suburban miasma back home. Many commuters knew the dream could come true on arrival in the tropics, where the commute could continue in better weather. Glory got real when the Matson container arrived with the car not too much later. More Californians took the plunge, indicated by more Mercedes on the road with those clever vanity plates: MAWIBNZ. Perfection emerged—a Mercedes on Maui….
Could it get any better? Yes, if the top could go down. Wait! Is that a Ferrari? Oh… God!
Maui…
Ferrari.
As fantasy fulfillment ratcheted upward, the tropical magic faded. Ravi remembered his own first blush, feeling this landfall as arrival to his home. It had seemed lush and promising to a man with a reef instinct. More recent arrivals compared Maui to Orange County, Sacramento, or anywhere USA because this gridlock/strip mall aggregate was called Maui and seemed fabulous.
Honolua Bay not so long ago was full of living coral and reef fish. A few years later, it was ninety percent dead from red dirt runoff. Construction of mega-million mansions over the gulch left only a thin strip of living coral. Ravi watched a charter boat pull in with a crowd from a Christian dental convention. The first kids jumped in and came up sputtering, “Oh, gosh! Look at this! It’s unbelievable!” And so on, unbelievably, compared to Cincinnati, trending downward.
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