Swell

by Liz Clark

  Sometimes the switch flips back quickly, and his wonderful, loving, talented, and fun self lights up again. Other times the blackness drags out over an entire day, even two. Every incident seems instigated by jealousy, or fear of losing me. Gradually, I stop calling my male friends. I go back to dressing like a tomboy. If I can just show Rainui how much I love him, maybe he’ll feel more secure.

  Part of the problem is that he doesn’t have his own income, and it’s killing him to use my money to continue voyaging. I explain over and over that all his help is actually earning us cruising money, because it frees me up to write blogs and articles, contact sponsors, and sell photos, in addition to allowing me more creative time for writing, thinking, yoga, and meditation. I teach him to use my camera and he takes photos for the blog and sponsors. He fixes, paints, hauls, fishes, and cooks, but it still doesn’t feel right to him to use my money to buy dish soap or diesel.

  After some island friends show us how to chop and dry copra, we come across an uninhabited islet perfect for the task. I help Rainui gather fallen coconuts and he splits them open and places them in the sun. After he dries six burlap sacks’ worth, we haul the copra twenty miles across the lagoon to sell to a cargo ship headed for Tahiti. He earns 65,000 francs. But by and by, even with cash in his pocket, his darkness resurfaces. I start marking his bad days on the calendar to try to discern a pattern. I don’t want to send him home, but boat life quickly becomes hell when you’re sharing a tiny floating space with an unhappy human, no matter how heavenly the surroundings.

  Underwater Neighborhood

  I retreat into myself more often. On daily anchor checks I practice my breath holds and spend time with my underwater neighbors, dissolving into the liquid world. At one island, we build a mooring in a small false pass and I find myself in a living masterpiece beneath Swell. I kick down to the bottom each morning through the slicing beams of sunlight that dance across a myriad of coral forms. Invisible currents swirl while I hold the mooring line near the bottom.

  At close range the detail intensifies. The blue spotted grouper comes out to patrol his zone, looking as serious as a nightclub bouncer. The yellow tangs waft over the reef together in a flock, grazing on algae like sheep at pasture.

  “Lionfish! How do you fit in that hole with all those long delicate fins?” I ask him. He looks like he’s stuck in an uncomfortable Halloween costume. I feel my diaphragm contract, look over the mooring line for signs of damage, and then jet back to the surface.

  Rest, hover, breathe, relax ... then down again.

  A school of nervous, black-striped jacks approach, looking like they just made a jailbreak. I reach the bottom, gripping rock. The shy red squirrelfish stay deep in the holes of the rocks, peering out curiously with one dark round eye. The butterfly fish and Moorish idols engage in a never-ending beauty pageant, flaunting their stripes and fancy fins. Anemone fingers flow in watery wafts of the current, and the corals—soft, hard, fingered, smooth, and purple to lime-green—stack upon each other like a colorful pile of dirty dishes in a kitchen sink.

  My lungs burn and I shoot for the surface. The baby ballyhoos greet me, their long pointy snouts wiggling just out of reach as I catch my breath. From the top I notice a barracuda prowling. I fill my lungs with air, and go down again.

  Parrotfish munch on coral. Gobies squat on their pectoral fins, chatting together like old ladies. A triggerfish bumbles by like a belligerent clown. A cowfish passes looking like she just left the salon with a bad haircut. From afar a great Napoleon wrasse, the king of the fishes, cruises slowly toward me with his thick lips pressed together smugly. The surface glistens above. I acknowledge my stinging lungs, let go, and float up through a scattered group of unicorn fish twirling their horns to gather plankton in the upper currents.

  Deep breaths. Body renewed. Mind reset. I climb back into the dinghy tied to the stern of Swell, high on the incomprehensible complexity of the underwater world—its fervent, sumptuous stew of life the result of an unimaginable time span of evolutionary fine-tuning.

  But what will be left here in a hundred years? Will this ecosystem survive the rising sea temperatures and levels, overfishing, and pollution? As remote as it feels in these islands, I shudder, thinking again about the inescapable impacts of climate change that will likely kill both the coral and the coconut palms. The atoll peoples will inevitably be displaced.

  “When they go, we go,” a Puamotu grandmother says to me one day when I ask her about the struggling coconut palms on her land.

  Napoleon Breakdown

  Much has changed since my first pass through the atolls a few years before. There is a surge of wealth among the local people because they are now selling fish to the more populous islands whose waters are fished out. Day after day, we watch thousands of pounds of fish harvested in traps, shot by spearfishermen, and caught in nets to be stacked in coolers and flown or shipped out. The local people have built stronger homes and bought trampolines and Xboxes for their kids, but at what cost?

  The “tragedy of the commons” plays out before my eyes a few days later while anchored near a village. I watch a father and son fishing for Napoleon wrasse on handlines, hauling out fish after fish. These noble fish, which can grow to more than six feet long and 400 pounds, are highly sensitive to overfishing and have been completely eliminated from the more populated islands. This loss contributes to the burgeoning population of the crown-of-thorns starfish, which feeds on live coral and is destroying large areas of reef. The Napoleon wrasse is one of its few predators.

  The great wrasses appear to be spawning in the pass, and for four straight days the father and son haul them out of the sea. On the way back from a dive, we stop to say hello. How can I explain the potential risk of overfishing them? I can’t. It’s not my place, nor can I judge their need for money. I need to get by just like them, and who is to say what my negative impacts are? As we drift beside their boat, they wrestle three gorgeous fish up from the bottom and proudly lift the floorboards to show us the eight or ten others they caught before we arrived. One is not even a foot long. An old man in the village explains that the father and son sell the fish to the passing cargo ships for the equivalent of a dollar a pound.

  As the day goes on, I can’t get the Napoleon wrasse off my mind. I learned in my Environmental Studies classes that the largest species in an ecosystem are historically the first to be exploited. The others fall victim to the next rung of human impact: habitat loss. If an animal isn’t edible or valuable, we bulldoze its territory or poison its waters. For the first time, human activity is to blame as we near the sixth great mass extinction on Earth.

  I’ve seen troubling scenarios playing out island after island. Rainui and I just came from an atoll whose entire population of lagoon fish are contaminated with ciguatera because a shipment of chemical fertilizer—left on the dock in the rain overnight—leaked into the lagoon. This caused a massive bloom of the algae that’s linked to ciguatera in fish, cutting off the islander’s main food source and bringing the local fishing economy to a screeching halt.

  Here too, the Napoleon’s plight is painfully tangible. I feel woozy over our loss of connection and reverence for the systems on Earth that give us life. For millennia, here and beyond, the natural world was seen as a dynamic, interconnected web of life in which humans participated fully, not just as an object of exploitation that primarily exists to meet our needs. But the islanders we talk to feel like there’s no other choice—they must adapt to the new ways or be left behind. If they don’t catch those fish to sell, someone else will.

  That night I sit up on the bow of Swell looking up at the Great Shark stretching across the sky. I suddenly start to cry. My tears come first for the Napoleon. And then for the other reef fish that will be sure to follow. I cry for the next human generations, who might only see a Napoleon wrasse in a photo, and for the children, not only here on this tiny island, but those all around the world who will suffer from our negligent choices.

 
The next day I go to the local elementary school and ask if they would like me to do a presentation about my voyage and the environment. They agree eagerly, and I show up the following day with a bag of different sorts of local trash and explain approximately how long it takes for each piece to biodegrade. We talk about plastic pollution’s effect on marine life, and I use my sailing trip to help explain where currents and winds carry plastic that finds its way into the ocean. I’m thrilled to find the kids highly enthusiastic. I leave feeling more hopeful, and vow to continue doing talks in schools at other islands we visit.

  Simply Divine

  It has been almost five months in the low-lying atolls with only sporadic Internet and infrequent phone use. Our bodies are lithe and strong.

  There have been no hot showers, no fancy supermarkets or gourmet chocolates, no magical faucet spouting an endless flow of water. Provisions and comforts are modest, but my spirits are surprisingly high.

  Amazingly, we’ve used less than a gallon of gasoline for Swell’s daily energy requirements, including refrigeration, lights, computer, music, and the water pump. The atolls have no mountains to block the sun or trades, so the solar panel and wind generator constantly replenish the batteries. We catch rainwater and wash our clothes by hand.

  It’s simple living and hard work, but this modest lifestyle awakens gratitude for even the smallest pleasures. If we exist in complete ease, with unending options, I think it’s harder to truly enjoy luxuries and extravagance. “It’s important to distinguish needs from wants,” Barry used to say. Contrast helps develop gratitude. Even though Western society idealizes luxury, to me too much comfort is caustic.

  Out here, simple things evoke such abundant gratitude—finding a safe anchorage after being at sea, savoring a just-caught fish, the rare real shower, sleeping in clean sheets, the unexpected kindness of a stranger, or finding a little wave to glide on! Moonbeams on the sea at night make me feel richer than any diamond ever could.

  But by contrast, things with Rainui are far from simple. Some days he presses me to my limits, torturing me with words, and acting so unfair that I lash out. I can tell he likes it when I get upset, as if it assures him of my love. Sometimes when his foul mood crowds the cabin, I go ashore.

  I try to meditate, or sometimes I cry a little, but usually I just end up sitting silently on a beach beside the lagoon or reef, watching the creatures around me: hermit crabs, bees, ants, circling terns, fish along the shoreline, flies, mosquitos, crabs, spiders, trees, vines, long-legged sandpipers. I realize that they all have messages for me—patience, hard work, perseverance, slowing down, relaxation, letting go, being still, or getting a higher perspective. They remind me that mine is one among the millions of life dramas going on all over Earth. Near them, I feel less alone. I hear a voiceless voice telling me that today is an exquisite phenomenon.

  Urchin spines wave in the flow of the water over the reef. I watch flying fish wiggle free of the sea surface and hover a hundred yards with their wings glowing golden in the evening light. A baby humpback whale breaches nearby. Frigates circle and scissor in the tempestuous trades. Sharks patrol the shallows at sunset. Palm fronds dance on and on in the wind.

  I don’t know what it is about the direct contact with wilderness that nourishes me. Maybe it’s what others feel in church or making art. I feel so drawn to its purity and unfathomable intelligence, its seemingly individual parts all working together as one. Its rhythms and extremes. Shadows and light. Serenity and chaos. Beginnings and endings. I recognize the same things going on inside my own little universe, and I know that I am That. Namaste!

  Barry, too, knew the deeper value of wild places and the lessons they offer, returning to wilderness as often as he could. Like him, I cherish seeing the waters, the plants, the animals in a wild and free state—just how I love to be the most. They are perfect that way. Perfectly divine. Recognizing that we are all interdependent somehow makes me part of this grand and unexplainable miracle. All of us spark from the same Infinite Spirit, Source, God, Jah, Allah, Mana that connects everything.

  If we can see everything as sacred, we may have a chance at healing the planet. Personal healing contributes too. And like Barry mentioned in his final letter, eco technologies could provide healthier ways to respect the planet while upholding modern lifestyles—electric cars mean cleaner air; grassroots movements like “permaculture” and urban gardens mean food production without the use of agro chemicals; wind and solar farms and bioplastics mean greener homes and cleaner living. Expanding compassion to include all life might mean less suffering, and might allow humans to live more meaningful lives.

  Looking out at all the sacredness surrounding me, I fear that if we never have these sorts of close encounters with open spaces and wild creatures, if our only contact with wilderness and animals is through a television and our pets, we risk not caring whether they exist at all. We risk not feeling our spirits stirred. We risk losing a vital part of ourselves and a vital avenue to knowing this extraordinary feeling of connection.

  “God” is no longer a distant mystery to me anymore. I feel the Divine within me and every time I look out my window.

  Bait for Breakfast

  As cyclone season approaches, we ready Swell to sail north to the safer latitudes in The Land of People. After a trying eight-day passage to the mountainous archipelago where Mom and I first arrived, Rainui and I straggle into an uninhabited bay to dry out, rest, and reorganize. It still amazes me how the thrill of landfall can so easily erase the misery of a difficult passage.

  The tall surrounding cliffs, sprawling valley, and echoing bleats of mountaineering juvenile goats overwhelm our senses. While ashore to stretch our legs and explore, we find loads of wild food, and the locals in the nearest village assure us that we are welcome to help ourselves. After months on islands that can’t support such tropical lushness, the wild oranges, papayas, mangos, limes, pumpkin, red bananas, grapefruit, guavas, and even taro and sweet potato are the sweetest treasures. We sit in the shade of a loaded mango tree up the valley, stuffing ourselves on golden flesh until it hurts, and then float down the cool river back to the beach.

  But apart from the edible bliss and tranquility of the valley, there is an unmistakable aura of tragedy in the air. Remnants of the ancient civilization that once blossomed here are all around us. Stacked stone foundations of homes line the river for the length of the valley. The ancient Polynesians who lived here were skilled masons. Like Hiva’s father had explained on my first pass through these islands, the Land of People supported an estimated 100,000 inhabitants before the catastrophic population collapse.

  In the sixteenth century, the French took forceful claim to the islands in a spirit similar to European settlers’ horrific treatment of Native Americans. The islanders lacked natural immunity to introduced diseases. Despite pleas from foreigners living here at the time, France refused medical assistance to the native peoples, taking them for “savage cannibals.” But which is more barbaric, the occasional human barbecue or infecting an entire race of people and leaving them all to die? The population shrunk to under 2,000 by 1925. Today, many native descendants have moved out of isolated valleys like this one to be closer to schools, stores, imported supplies, and more opportunities for work.

  We enjoy hopping around the islands, until one afternoon after chatting, an older local man scribbles down the name of a bay.

  “You will like it here,” he says with a convincing smile, and hands me the paper. We arrive a week later to find a deep bay with two nice waves, a big open-air copra storage area that’s great for yoga, a shower spigot nearby with potable water, surrounding mountains to forage, and a quiet beachside community. Kids follow us on fruit-hunting missions and we take them out and push them into waves when the conditions are right. We pluck bunches of watercress from streams, surf and bodysurf, fish in the nearby waters, jump off the cliffs, and make friends with local families. They teach us to cook traditional delicacies and weave palm-frond hats
. Rainui pursues wild pig and goat with hunter friends, while I enjoy peaceful mornings in the galley after a surf—making fresh juices and jams, fermenting vegetables, sprouting seeds, or baking.

  After more than a month anchored here, we start to uncover more details about life in the bays, hills, trees, and rocks. It occurs to me that regional plant and animal knowledge was commonplace in native cultures worldwide, and now most of us don’t even know that we don’t know our local plants. I ponder the effects of this widespread alienation from our nearby environments. Could it be contributing to the increased rates of anxiety and depression? Chronic disease and staggering drug use?

  Rainui and I don’t go to the store with a list; we go to the hills with gratitude for whatever the earth has to offer. The beauty and the surprises found in the hills make me want to leap out of bed each morning. Rainui’s moods seem more stable too. Again, the process of collecting food feels rewarding in itself: the sticky sap on my fingers, learning how to tell when fruits are ready to be picked, feeling that burst of adrenaline as I stretch out on a branch hoping to reach just one more mango. I see my food alive and thriving, versus buying it in a market. All of this reminds me of the complex processes and daily miracles that happen before the food goes in my mouth. That appreciation transfers into our meals, and food continues to take on rich new dimensions.

  On an afternoon exploration, we meet Mami Faatiarau, a courageous seventy-nine-year-old woman living with her disabled grandson in an empty valley at a nearby bay. She’s fit and spry—still hunting wild pigs, raising goats, collecting shellfish, harvesting her own fruits, cooking in the traditional underground oven, and walking four miles each way to the closest village. Maybe doctors should prescribe fresh air, nature, and gardens to treat more of our modern ailments?