Blog From the Sea of Cortez 2

                                             

I was sorry to miss the chance to travel recently with our friends, Angus (you may remember him as one of our first crew members) and his brother Graeme. Graeme is a whale biologist (a whale magnet actually) and over the twelve days I was gone, the boys on Circadia managed to spot tons (literally) of whales: pygmy sperm, humpback, pilot, fin and blue (including a baby the size of a city bus).

Blue Whale (photo, Graeme Ellis)

Each day, my thoughts turn more to the next phase of our journey, the Pacific crossing to French Polynesia. I trust the boat and I trust our crew (Tavish, also an early crew member, and his twin sister Farlyn will be sailing with us). Yet, I am anxious. Recently I read an interview with a woman climber. When asked how she overcame her fear, she answered that she didn’t, she just went anyways. I guess I can accept that; I can drag my fear along with me, like a bad knee, like a lost chance, something I’ll never get over.

Brown Boobies

But I am also curious. Flying home from Honduras, the earth seemed animate from above—veins of rivers, spines of mountains. But impossible to know, except in its small and particular wrinkles: a garden, a street, a beach. I’ve always wondered how it would feel to move slowly over a whole sea, to be intimate with immensity.

But I have no idea whether these poetic sentiments will sustain me. I’m pretty sure I won’t find the lack of fresh food or bathing difficult. I can go feral with the best of them. What I’m not sure of is what will happen to time. Will the days drag by or will they melt into one another? Will I be bored? And space—will I feel trapped, or could I be “…bound in a nutshell and consider myself a king of infinite space”.

In the meantime we have had one last interlude in the Sea of Cortez, with Kim’s brother, Doug, and his two small sons.
It is a simple landscape, this hot red stone and cool turquoise water. One where a person could go to remember themselves. Or forget—burn things off, wash them away. But mainly, where you are reminded of patience—how slowly everything here grows, decomposes, erodes.

Palo Blanco

I will spend the next week in Cabo San Lucas. A week of terra firma and time with my best girls, Jude and Darcy, who are flying down from Canada, before I take off on the next leg of this journey. A week to compose myself, maybe finally do some reading on the South Pacific, around the pool.
Frankly, I’m still a little hazy on the geography of our next destination. Not the best strategy, to wade into life’s unknowns perversely unarmed with knowledge. But the truth is I think there is only so much we can do to prepare for the biggest crossings, real and metaphorical, in life. You have to wait and see what happens and when the time comes, as we say in Canada, “just give er.”

Honduras sketches

Pico Bonito, Honduras

                                             the Lodge at Pico Bonito

I first fell under the spell of tropical forest when I was in my twenties and set off to spend three months in the Amazon. In those days, among biologists, it was known as a good gig—room and board at one of the first jungle lodges, the Explorers Inn in Southeast Peru, in exchange for a little guiding and a modest research project.
So I got myself a South American bird book (which weighed about three times as much as my North American guide) read a little about tropical ecology, and decided that my research project was going to solve the mystery of the relationship between certain canopy fruit eaters and seed dispersal. I had been working at a botanical garden and had years of experience as a park naturalist in BC. Piece of cake.
It took about two weeks for it to dawn on me that I had been seriously deluded. First, to put it simply: in a 4 square mile piece of a coastal BC forest, 2 or 3 species (of conifers) dominate the landscape; in a tropical forest you could easily find 200 species of trees and that doesn’t even count the tangles of lianas, the ferns and orchids encrusting trunks, the great aerial pools of bromeliads, the under story of heliconias, herbs, and grasses. This is something like opening a mixed chocolate box—it’s better to have a key.
I had neither plant keys, nor botanists to consult. I would walk the dark forest floor, gazing up at the sunlit canopy, picking up strange fruits and flowers, with no idea what I was looking at. Sometimes a mixed foraging flock would wash around me and shake down the forest and I would flip through my bird book trying to get all the field marks before they rushed off again. Then I would simply lie on the trail on my back with my binoculars plastered against my face. I had a biologist’s existential crisis—if I couldn’t name things where did that leave me? Was taxonomy dead? Eventually I became lethargic, undisciplined, entranced. I would set off, telling the other naturalists that I was going to do research and simply wander the trails, watching.
Every time I’ve set foot in a tropical forest since, I start resolved and am seduced again. I lose my edges, start to melt into the whole thing.
This week though, it was different. I was on task—I was with BIRDERS—at the Pico Bonito Lodge, one of my favourite places in the world. The lodge nestles at the edge of a huge protected area, which cloaks the high steep flanks of the Pico Bonito Range. Looking at the wall of this forest from below is like looking at a beautifully stitched tapestry, rich with the many textures of the trees, occasionally embroidered with flowering canopies. Waterfalls feed rivers, which pause from time to time, in clear cool pools.
My companions were a mixture of writers, local guides, biologists, and eco-tour company owners. Neither a fleeting feather, nor a faint call was lost on them. I followed them happily, though often I felt like one of those foreign correspondents, slowed by their feed—mine being the time it took me to actually find the birds in the dense layers of forest. The final list was long and included some uncommon species. All in all a respectable piece of field work. Yet, it still feels more like love than science.

All Birds All the Time-The Mesoamerican Birding Festival

No, I didn’t sail here. In fact at the moment I’m landlocked, watching a fine rain fall on the hibiscus and citrus gardens of the Finca Las Glorias Hotel, on Lake Yojoa. This week, while Kim sailed off into the Sea of Cortez, with friends Angus and Graeme, I flew into Honduras (where I used to guide an eco-tour every February). I haven’t been back for a couple of years and so I jumped at the chance to re-visit some of my favourite places.
I’m here, as a writer, for the first Mesoamerican Birding Festival, so I thought I’d “fly” (sorry) some of my first impressions past you, dear readers.
First, let’s be clear. I am not in the same league with the birders here. I am far too sloppy with my birding details to be a real birder. For example, this morning, in a reserve up in the mountains, I watched Violet Sabrewing hummingbirds. Someone asked me if I had ever seen this species. If a Violet Sabrewing flew into your kitchen right now you’d remember it forever (and not only because that would be a very unusual event) but because it is a wondrous thing. It is the size of a swallow, wrapped from head to tail in iridescent purple lamé. (If birds are the earth’s jewels then tropical birds are its bling). You might even have what one of my co-birders here called a “birdgasm”.

female Violet Sabrewing

But I couldn’t remember if I’d seen a Violet Sabrewing. I can’t account for this lapse in my bird memory. I could put a good spin on it by saying that I get gob-smacked, side-swiped by beauty and slip into an altered state, in the way you forget the details of a conversation when you are falling in love.

Great Kiskadee

But even though I am not the most diligent lister, I am passionate about birds. 

Once I went to a teapot show at a museum. There were rooms and rooms of teapots of every shape and material used in the past, and more rooms of artists’ conceptions of teapots; teapots shaped like human hearts, where tea poured from the aorta, nautilus teapots, where tea spiralled from inner channels; bejeweled, enameled, scaled, tiled, hammered, hand-painted and hand-blown teapots. It seemed that an explosion of possibilities was contained in the vessel of the teapot.
I think this is part of the delight of birds. But making the delight more perverse, more interesting for the mind and heart to reconcile is that this sheer extravagance, this endless ingenuity has been fashioned by the slow, indifferent hand of evolution.
I looked up the meaning of beauty in the Oxford Dictionary: a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. But also, a combination of qualities that pleases the intellect or moral sense.
It’s difficult, this meaningless beauty. And it always leads me to something I can only describe as the inherent morality of nature. A morality which is not utilitarian, but complete in itself. Beautiful.
By the way, I checked my notes. Turns out I have seen the Violet Sabrewing, not here in Honduras, but ten years ago in Costa Rica.
Cecropia leaf on umbrella

recent images

Post Script-Flaneur Dog

I returned to La Paz yesterday to find that my little black friend has been adopted, by a gentle older man.  He has named her Lady's (he's a she) and her eyes already look brighter, her coat brushed and gleaming. I was almost sorry, as a friend of mine had already written to say she'd love her. But a happy ending nevertheless...

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Bones

Dried Triggerfish on the beach

One of the pleasures of walking on the beaches in the Sea of Cortez is picking through the tide line. Mounds of coral tinkle like china, bleached porcupine and triggerfish with calcareous grins lie among shells as big as dinner plates, the femurs and skulls of pelicans—like leftovers from a great feast.

Frigatebird Skull

Perhaps because the salt and sun desiccate everything as soon as it dies, these leavings aren't gross. Even in the city, people here don’t seem to mind dead things hanging around longer than they should. A road-killed cat between the marina and town grew drier with each passing day, until it became flat and papery, a blueprint of a cat.
On first glance you might think the Mexicans have a laissez-faire attitude towards death. As I mentioned in my last post, they don’t seem to find it as serious a topic as we do. On the two days around the Christian All Souls day, they celebrate the Day of the Dead. They have parties to remember friends and relatives, visit their graves, sometimes sleeping there, and leaving special food and drink for them to enjoy.
I like the playful “Catrinas”, skeleton dolls sold for these days and as reminders all year that underneath our finery, even in our prime, we are bone; the only part that will last—for a while.

There’s something impersonal about bone; its mineral indifference makes you feel that you are built on some bureaucratic biological specs rather than lovingly designed; that you are a form letter rather than a handwritten note.
Still, maybe it’s us with the laissez-faire attitude towards death, ignoring it, or poking at it with science. For instance, here’s “Kim’s skull” (you may remember it from my first blog post). Kim acquired it many years ago, from a hospital shelf where it had been languishing un-loved. In Canada it is almost impossible to examine a human skull (as it is illegal to sell them). Whenever I see this skull I wonder who he was, where he grew up, why he died so young (as his perfect teeth suggest). What would he have thought of the idea that one day he would be passed from hand to hand, opened up with neat hinges?
One thing is for sure, his skull will never become part of the joyful decay we see on the Baja beaches, or depicted in this Day of the Dead Skull I found in a shop in La Paz.