Yucatan Diary Day 20
Merida, Sisal, Chuburna, Progreso, Telchak Puerto, Celestun, and Merida, Yucatan
by Ben White
posted 01/31/05
I´m shut down, grounded, screwed, blued and tattooed. Scientific experiment turns into military occupation of 1,600 square miles of ocean. Fishermen report dolphins and turtles dead on tide. Two more turtles on beach. Begin deathwatch. Fishermen royally pissed off.
Hit the road on Friday from Merida, checked out of hotel and loaded up wetsuit and picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe and cameras into the midget rentacar and headed out of town. Our rented legal tourist boat was on its way from Holbox. I wanted to ask along the coast coming toward them from the west what the latest rumors of the Maurice Ewing were among the fishermen.
My first stop was Sisal, a town only reached by sea or a road all to its own that cuts north through the mangroves from Huacma, near Merida. Driving right to the partially destroyed wharf, I had the good fortune to immediately find Sisal´s harbormaster and port captain. This is a man who not only knows a lot about the local fishing, currents, political machinations of Pemex (the Mexican national oil company and major polluter) but who has had fourteen years in the job to think about how things fit together.
For example, showing me a really good map of the Gulf of Mexico hanging on his wall, complete with ocean depths, he gave me his theory that the meteorite that caused the Chicxulub Crater was actually centered dead on in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, and had raised the Yucatan up out of the sea, thus explaining the depth of the water and the shape of the whole thing, a big hole with one side almost joined by the convergence of Florida, Cuba and the Yucatan. He also said that the currents come in from the east to the west both along the north coast of the Yucatan and around the bottom of Florida headed toward Texas. And that there is an area in the middle of it all where the tides feed in and do not escape. Mariners have always avoided the spot, he says, keeping to the coastline whenever possible. One yachtsman, boat wrecked by a storm, was caught in the hole for days. Every direction he went, the currents pulled him back.
Oh, and the captain said that the Ewing was last spotted about fifteen miles off Progreso headed west. Some of the fishermen from his port found themselves close to the Ewing the night before, wondering what the heck it was. The Ewing responded by smacking them with a bright searchlight and telling them to get away quick, that they were not allowed to be there, that the whole area was closed.
Then I pulled into Chuburna to talk to the Commissario of police, who I was told was a big advocate of the anti-Ewing movement. He wasn´t at the office. One of his officers went off peddling his bike to find him, while I sat on the little wall to shoot the breeze with the guys hanging out there. One drove one of the myriad little vans that take Chuburnians to their jobs in Merida and back to the little coast town every day.
When I started up about the Ewing his eyes got big. "Are you against that ship?" he asked: "Sure I am," I said. He jumps up, runs across the sandy street to his van. He said he had a pamphlet to show me. I figured it was one of ours and was happy it had gone so far. No. Even better. It was one he had written up himself to both send into the paper and agitate the folks he transported in his van.
He asked me to read it to tell him if he had all the facts right. It basically said, at this time with all kinds of problems and uncertainties with the oceans and the fishing families, why allow this ship to come into our midst? Great job. I saw he had my name listed as the escudo humano who had come to stop the ship. I pointed at it and told him it was me. He was so happy to meet me I felt like Mohammed Ali.
I pulled into Puerto Telchac right after Captain Alberto Santanna, the other skipper whose name I never learned, and Juan Carrateca, had docked our spiffy rental boat, the Cecy. The hungry press had already been notified to meet us at the port at 8 in the morning. When I drove in, they were talking to the port captain of Telchac, obviously nervous. They called me into this office to talk through a little open rectangle in the thick bank teller type window. He asked my name. I told him and waited until the next question. Trying to look like all the world like another stupid gringo just wanting to go for a boat ride. I watched the guy on the other side of the window. He didn´t asked me anything else, but just very carefully outlined my name again on top of the first time with a pen. Then he did this a third time. Not a good sign. I was beginning to wonder if I had taken a wrong turn and wound up in Moscow, or Washington DC.
"Go to your hotel," he finally told my "hosts", ‘we will come give you our answer in an hour after we check with our boss--in Progreso’. We went to the little cinderblock hotel with the torn curtains and the imprisoned parakeets and waited. An hour went by. Two. The deformed waning moon rose like a bright blood orange. Three hours. Finally someone from the captain’s office came and picked up Captain Santana and Juan. Another hour or so passed, and they returned with the bad news. The wait was for a representative of the Port Captain of Progreso to drive to Telchac Puerto to personally handle the situation. This was the word:
1. No way in the world would permission would be granted. A forty mile by forty mile exclusion zone had been imposed around the Ewing and was being enforced by the Mexican Navy. Nobody enters, not to fish or anything. So there.
2. They were ordered not to take any estrangero (foreigner- tourist) out on their boat until the Ewing leaves on February 20!
3. The Captain was not even inclined to let them leave the port of Telchak to go home to Holbox until at least Monday, a two day wait for nothing.
4. Whenever this king-of-the-seas decides they can leave, they need to radio him from every fueling port on the way home to show him they are really on their way home.
Juan was furious. Said the government was the Mafia and treated them like children. Over the long wait, I had already gotten used to the news and decided to head to Celestun the next morning to look for bodies. My trump card was gone. Actually the only way they could stop me from shutting the Ewing down by getting in the water was to close the whole area. I could fight the ship and win, or so I thought. But I couldn´t fight the whole Mexican Navy. There is still a chance we can shut it down by finding enough dead bodies, but it looks increasingly like it will have to be a very high number. Two more turtles were reported yesterday, one in De Colorados and one in Progreso.
I called Rosario in Merida and cancelled the early trip to the port by the press.
The whole drama made me think about to what extent the Ewing, and the National Science Foundation and the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of the Columbia University is willing to exert military and diplomatic muscle to push through their seismic blasting over the will of the people who live nearby. Remember the salt-gathering scene from Gandhi? The men he had led hundreds of miles reached the sea and began illegally gathering salt, and the British police clubbed them down one by one. And they just kept coming and kept getting clubbed to the ground and then dragged off and nursed. Martin Sheen plays the reporter on the scene filing his report from a phone, aghast at what he was watching, saying that the British Empire just lost India. And indeed they had. His perception was the Brits did not have the stomach for the brutality they would have to exert to subdue the ocean of people Gandhi had mobilized to march. Peaceably, sure. But by the thousands.
Right now the people who live on Sakhalin Island off the Siberian coast are taking to the streets to protest the devastating effect the search for oil has had on their island and the fish they depend on. The seismic blasting and rig construction and leaks also threaten the rare population of Western Gray Whales- numbering less than a hundred. All over the world, it is fishing folk and whales against big oil. Next week sometime, it looks like there may well be an angry ‘planton’ (demonstration) by the fishing men from along the north Yucatan coast who are, like me, being made to watch the daily bombardment as they are kept to shore. If the Ewing, and every other seismic ship is dogged by protests every time they apply and then every time they show up, with the permits from the government and the opposition of the locals, and they must apply to the Navy for protection, how long will they continue this kind of global siege? How long can they justify it?
After the bad news in Telchac, and saying goodbye to my Holbox friends, I drove to the other side of the coast to Celestun. Walking the beach, I found the place I wanted to stay, a really simple Mexican hotel called Maria del Carmen with a third floor room that looked through an Australian pine and a coconut palm down to the beach. Some places just have a good feeling from their kind owner, and this was one of those. Upon arriving, I told Carmen who I was and what I was up to and she immediately gave me this room- at no charge, and blessed my efforts. I walked upstairs, looked out the window, and fell fast asleep for four hours. Must have needed it.
This morning I rented a small boat with driver and scoured the coastline for bodies from Celestun down to Arena del Campeche, quickly becoming aware of the complexity of the search. Much of this section, and the next section down to Campeche, is mangrove thicket. Even cruising ten feet away or flying above, I wouldn´t be able to find a body.
But it was a fine morning. I stood in the bow and tried to let the wind blow away my sadness, my frustration, my anger at the brute strength of the state allowing a bad thing once again, my feeling of impotence at being reduced to petitioning one of two unhearing governments with the pathetic remains of their slaughtered wildlife, like holding up the head of John the Baptist. Tellingly, there is no one down here looking for bodies in the direction the current would take them. There is no one ready or able to perform necropsies if bodies are found. And the US/NMFS/Ken Hollingshead rule is if you can´t prove it was the ship beyond any shadow of doubt, the status quo rules and the ship keeps blasting. Don´t like it? Sue. Who do you think you are, son? Were the guvment!
Ever see flamingoes flying? What an improbable sight! Nothing can have a neck that long and crooked in front of legs that long and crooked. And both white and brown pelicans, (the birds that remind my daughter of my mom because of her great love for them) come flapping toward us just a foot off the water, and then when they glide, it is as close as possible to the waves, like their chest feathers and wingtip fingers are just lightly trailing in the water. Skimmers with their heads hanging down, ospreys struggling with silver fish, hundreds of frigate birds spiraling, and every hundred yards or so along the beach, tall irritable great blue herons standing like put-upon schoolmasters irked with the general intransigence of the world. Couldn’t agree more.
Been thinking about the power of words and what they mean, how they define how we see the world. I have three friends trying, on a little scale or big, to change our use of a word. My friend Mac probably ten years ago told me that he tried not to use the word ‘animal’ because it had the immediate implication of ‘the others’ instead of ‘us’, and that it accentuated that phony separation. I decided he was right and now avoid the word. Elliott Katz, the gutsy director of In Defense of Animals (who once backed my successful trip to Japan to cut loose whales and dolphins caught in the drive fishery slaughter and destined for amusement parks) is working on getting people to stop calling the creatures they delight in sharing their houses with ‘pets’ and replacing it with ‘companion animals’. (Which calls to mind a bumper sticker I saw a couple of months ago near Seattle that said ‘ALL MEN ARE ANIMALS, SOME JUST MAKE BETTER PETS’- which combines both words needing change.) Then there is my Friday Harbor friend Jim Nollman with his campaign to get people to start calling Sperm Whales by their original and much nicer appellation- Cachalot.
I need the help of your collective minds to invent a new powerful use of words- a new ‘meme’. At the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES), and at other important international fora where decisions are made that protect or doom species, the measuring stick by which harm is measured is whether or not the use of the animal or plant in question is a ‘sustainable use of a natural resource’. So, our side (the side of good, diversity, and Nature) is relegated to arguing whether or not the use is sustainable or not, which to me is like arguing about how exactly to divide the body- not about saving the life. We are playing on a field whose goalposts and rules are made by the wise-users, and using their definitions. Therefore even when we win it is at the margins. Where does one argue that the wild creatures of the world, are not resources at all but self-aware tribes worthy of protection for their own sake, not because their demise may mean ours someday? Seems to me the only things in Nature not considered resources (here to be used by humans) are those considered sacred.
So we need a different way to measure harm to wild creatures and their habitats which is centered on them not us and embraces their sacredness. Let’s see, how about-you can use that mahogany, or those caiman or whale sharks if you, honor their culture, ask permission of any incursion, accept their advice, and control our own numbers and activities on a sustainable basis.
I am now trying to decide what I do now in trying to defeat the Ewing. I am not sure if this diary will be interesting enough to all of you without a major showdown looming on the horizon. I will write at least one more diary entry as a culmination if I decide to stop reporting on a daily basis. The fight goes on. And on and on. Love to all.
Oh yeah. Major norte predicted for the coming week, which could both shut down the Ewing at a very good time and shuffle some bodies to the beach. So blow, blow Mariah blow.
This campaign, and my salary, is being paid for by the Animal Welfare Institute. Tax exempt contributions will be happily accepted at Animal Welfare Institute, Box 3650, Washington, DC., 20027.
Love and revolution,
ben
|
