Yucatan Diary Day 22
Merida, Celestun, Campeche, Celestun
by Ben White
posted 02/03/05
Merida Norte moves in. Strong enough to cause the Ewing to pull in their killer gear? Donīt know. My son and I go looking for bodies, talking to fishermen. Iīve exhausted what I can do here. Iīm going home to get ready for the next one.
Ben jr and I awake at dawn in Celestun to meet up with Hector and his barca rapida for a long trip along the coast. Like all lucky morning mariners, we walk under Ulyseeīs rosy fingers spreading across the baby blue sky. True to his word, even after I advanced $60 for the fuel, Hector is waiting for us on the beach, hands us a couple of life vests and we are off. Great little boats, fiberglass, long and narrow, the ones for tourists fitted up with a steel canopy frame and a tarp advertising Sol beer laced onto it to keep the sun from the pale arms and bald spots of delicate gringos. They get in gingerly holding their cameras high with promises of flamingoes, crocodiles and the ojo del agua- the eye of water where fresh water bubbles up into the mangrove swamp and colorful fish swim by, backlit by pure white sand.
The fishermen use the same boats but without the canopies. They are already as brown and wrinkled as it is possible for human skin to get. Their complexion, I suspect, is the least of their concerns. Our morning mourning journey along the northwest corner of the Yucatan is an odd one in which I both hope to succeed and hope not to. We are looking for the bodies of sea turtles, whales, dolphins or fish left by the nights receding tide.
The Research Vessel Maurice Ewing, the deathstar of our story, runs its explosive transects to the northeast of Celestun, around the corner of the Yucatan which we were about to search. If the Ewing killed anyone, and fishermen reports include dolphins and turtles, then they might go west on the current and eddy around to this coast. Or go straight out into the gulf. Or just sink. Or maybe, miraculously, there were no large creatures anywhere around and the only ones that got pulverized were the ones that couldnīt swim away on the bottom.
By now, most of you have probably heard about the recent mixed species stranding of whales on the coast of North Carolina that just happened to 'coincide in time and space' with the testing of some unnamed Navy sonar. But it couldnīt have been them, they say, because the whales stranded over 200 miles away from the test. Funny, that is the same thing that the Ewing said about five years ago when their was a mass stranding of beaked whales onto the Galapagos Islands right after their seismic sound bombing.
The area off North Carolina, is the same place the Navy wants to put one of their two sacrifice areas for the testing of their word-shakingly important active sonar devices. This is a critically important place for the life of the Atlantic, where the Gulf Stream turns and mixes with the coastal shelf water, causing a lot of life to bloom. Big place for dolphins and migrating whales, even Northern Right Whales. And this is where they want to play with their sonar.
The other area is in the Channel Islands of California, not exactly bereft of life either. AWI is just now gearing up for this fight. The first move will be to challenge the Environmental Impact Statement the Navy will try to get us to swallow.
We fly across the water in the barca rapida, sitting in those cheap white plastic yard chairs that have spread around the world, but these have their legs cut off and are tied, too loosely, to the boat, so we bounce around a bit. We pass as close as we can to the beach without going aground and still stall out the outboard a few times. Clouds of pelicans, cormorants and terns explode upwards around us. Terns can just leap from the water directly into the air, but the cormorants and pelicans struggle, flapping hard and running as fast as their feet can move across the top of the water before they can launch and get a full wingfull of air on the downbeat. I ask their pardon for our intrusion.
Just out of Celestun, around the corner from the Ewing, the birds are clearly fishing successfully. Pelicans soar with noble and aloof strokes until they spot a fish, whereupon they open their enormous long mouth with the weird baggy bottom, point it around the silver shape beneath the waves and just follow it down, collapsing all of an instant, neck awry, jabbing at an awkward angle, and slamming into surface like a ton of bricks. The terns spear the sea from such a height and speed that I wonder how such a little body with so little muscle can take it. Every time, when I catch the splash out of the corner of my eye without noticing the preamble plunge, I think it is a little whale blow, or the spurt of water, the roostertail, that comes up from the dorsal of a Dalls porpoise on the move.
The birds arenīt the only ones fishing. We pass clumps of men stringing nets out from the beach and then pulling them in hand over hand. Others are just coming into the shore when we leave, having been fishing all night. You can see their lights like a shiny necklace at night, every few degrees along the horizon from Celestun.
Even though these men kill for a living, and its my job to protect the lives of sea creatures, I feel like I can relate to these men. Maybe its because my grandfather was a boatbuilder and my other grandfather was a guide to duckhunters and fishermen in Back Bay, Virginia. Maybe it is because I would choose a life of relative freedom of catching fish over the imprisonment of an office, or the servitude of the tourist industry. We stop and talk to them. Everyone has heard about the Ewing and my attempts to get out to the boat. Hector brags that I am the escudo humano. They shake my hand in thanks with gnarly paws toughened by passing hundreds of miles of net across their palms.
At meetings of the International Whaling Commission and the Convention for International Trade of Endangered Species there is a great lie being pushed by those who want to keep uncontrolled their use of wildlife or the trees they live in (such as Disney, the pet trade, the lumber industry, Anhueser Busch, zoos, Japanese hanko stamp (ivory) makers, the trade in exotic medicines). The lie says that any attempt by the likes of folks like me to improve the lot of wildlife internationally is a form of cultural imperialism.
My experience over the last six weeks with Mayan fishing families reminds me of the intense and personal love of diversity and nature that I have found before with indigenous folks. It is not a hands-off love. They see no contradiction between both loving and using. Loving the fish and killing it to eat. But at their core, it appears to me, lies an overriding biophylia - love of life. I believe that this point of view is our home - all people, where we belong and where we feel most at ease. In a position of daily adoration of the world. It seems to me, at the risk of offending my purist abolitionist friends, that we are missing a great opportunity globally to embrace subsistence farmers and fishermen as allies throughout the world in opposing the corporate industrial monster that is eating the world.
If your desire is to decrease the suffering of creatures at the hands of mankind, the most screaming urgencies are those posed by massive, industrial operations: Smithfield farms replacing family pig farms that use straw for bedding with 500,000 pigs in huge buildings with concrete floors that get hosed into toxic lagoons; dragger fleets that pull massive rollers across the Alaskan ocean floor, destroying whatever lives there, Japanese logging operations that peel the trees like living skin from South Pacific islands; the grab for oil or the power from dams, no matter whose homes or fields or fish get in the way.
The wise users at these meetings cry that, say, by stopping the killing of elephants for ivory we are taking food from the mouths of the poor. But increasingly, it is the poor, like the villagers in the Philippines taking tourists out to see whale sharks, that are profiting from the protection, the 'non-lethal use' of the glamorous megafauna that they are lucky enough to live near. But my thought is that, at base, all people originally share an instinctive love for life, nature, this magical home we have been given. The idea of protecting it comes from their oldest remaining elders- not from outside. Au contraire, it is the Americanized Mexicans, who seem to have the least time or patience with giving respect either to the other beings they share the world with- either two legged or four or finned.
The Distant Neighbors book I was reading about Mexico says that nowadays Mexico is uncomfortable because it has a new (Americanized) head grafted on a very old body of ancient tradition and beliefs. And that the key to whether Mexico will thrive as a vital and unique place will depend on how much it will be able to honor the old body, and the old sacred ways which are still the glue of the society. Tom Hayden (yes, that Tom Hayden) has a great book called the Lost Gospel of the Earth in which he shows how all of the worldīs major religions had their beginning as religions of the Earth.
What we see now is the corruption of many of these into the protection of wealth and power. But there are lots of glimmerings of hope and the renaissance of the original religion- animism- the belief that everything is alive. A few years ago a Christian evangelist group called the Noah Project was formed to help protect the Endangered Species Act. Their premise was that the parable of Noah says that every creature was made by God and therefore every single one must be protected: that it is a sin for human beings to allow the disappearance of something we had no hand in making.
Despite searching for hours, scrutinizing every rock and rolled up seaweed for signs of turtleness, Ben and Hector and I found nothing. Two days later, during a rainy noreaster now blasting the coast, I gave one last walk along the beach looking for one of my dead friends, Nope. I am frankly just as glad. Iīm going home. I have covered this coast like a blanket for six weeks. The fishermen can look for bodies much better than I, and they would love to nail the Ewing as much as I would.
The Port Captains have all been talked to, all the way south to Campeche. And there are lots more screaming crises pushing in at the door. Two notes from frequent readers and friends: Bryn Barnard, amazing graphic artist, green propagandist and buddy from Friday Harbor sent this back about snapping shrimp: "They create bubbles that implode, a process called cavitation, the sudden collapse of gas bubbles in a liquid causes temperatures and pressure to soar inside the shrinking orbs. Under such extremes, the gas inside the bubbles momentarily incandesces and reaches temperatures as high as 20,000 degrees centigrade. They use snaps to fight rivals (take that), find mates(?) and even stun prey."
And Jim Cummings of the excellent Acoustic Ecology Institute sent in this about acoustic daylight: "It's not just that the turtle 'blocks' the static, but that all of the ambient noise bounces off everything (like light bounces off trees and hills and Frisbees) and offers and acoustic picture by way of the echoes. It is also known as ambient noise imaging." Cool.
I have been so overwhelmed by how far this diary has gone and how many people it has apparently touched. Thanks to all the teachers and their students that have found something in them to value. Thanks for Tom Munsey for sending it to the papers in Friday Harbor, Thanks for Susan Tomiak of the Animal Welfare Institute for receiving the first blush, editing it only for major spelling errors and major gaffs, Peggy Sue and Janet for bucking me up when I needed it, Edie for giving me the voice of a friend over so many miles, Ann for keeping the a safe place for the kids, my kids for their forbearance at my perpetual absence, thanks to my Mexican colleagues Rosario Sosa Parra in Merida, Araceli Rodriguez in Cancun and Homero and Betty Aridjes in Mexico City. Thanks for those able to send, or pledge, the bucks that rented the cars and boats and printed up the leaflets.
Goodbye coway birds that come screeching into the little park by my hotel every evening. Goodbye to the drummer kids and the clowns. Goodbye to the old ladies selling oranges will chili powder. Goodbye to the old shriveled man sitting in his own shoeshine chair. Goodbye Yucatan clouds that look like those in the opening credits of the Simpsons. Goodbye open faced, old soul fishermen. Goodbye, I hope, perpetual stomach ache. Goodbye Yucatan. Goodbye moon.
Hello to the soft and rainy San Juan Islands, where family and dog and friends and building project awaits. Based on the reception of this series of diary entrees, I intend to do it again the next campaign. Those interested can keep in touch with me through the Animal Welfare Institute. Hasta la Victoria Siempre. Or, more likely, until the next fight.
This campaign has been dedicated to my friend Yolanda Alaniz, longtime champion of the ocean creatures of Mexico. Long may she shine.
Love and Revolution, Ben
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