Hold the Enlightenment (28 page)

Moving overland, up and down the drainages, was impossible. I allowed the slope of the island to lead me down to the ocean, where there were sandy beaches to walk upon, for a time. The beaches all ended in rocky points, projecting far out into the ocean. I tried climbing the piles of jumbled rock that separated one beach from the other, but decided in the end that I didn’t care for all the screaming involved in the effort.

Without pause, or even a great deal of conscious thought, I waded out into the ocean, still wearing my open-topped rubber boots, which immediately filled with water and weighed me down. I felt I needed the boots and didn’t want to lose them in case I had to walk again.

And so I swam around the rocky points, despite the 50-degree water. It took five or ten minutes to get out beyond the breakers, which were exploding off rocky headlands. Beyond each point, there was another sandy beach. Once I built a driftwood fire and warmed up. I swam three times.

Meanwhile, my kayaking companions had initiated a search, and they found me toward dusk. I was out at the tip of one of the rocky points, dragging driftwood logs to a central location for what I hoped would be the mother of all signal fires.

Back at the camp, I lay down for a while, then found I couldn’t walk, not at all, not without assistance.

My first wife was named Susan, and, toward the end of her life, she couldn’t walk at all. She used to say she was five feet twelve inches
tall. I think she was five-thirteen, because that is how tall I am and we saw eye to eye. We were together twelve years. Later, after the divorce, a disease she didn’t deserve twisted her fingers and wrists; it dissolved the bones of her legs and left her confined to a wheelchair. She wrote poetry and published a small book. When the local paper ran an article about her that she found sentimental, she sent me a copy, with her own fanciful headline: “Crippled woman writes poetry!”

Doctors replaced her ankles, her hips, and each operation was less successful than the last. When I last saw her, she could still lift herself from the chair and even walk a few steps. I held her and her head lay on my chest. She had lost six inches to surgery. The doctors had just told her she had six months to live.

She wouldn’t consider assisted suicide. As a poet, she wanted to realize the sheer astonishment of death. It was rumbling toward her, like a big, slow freight train, growing ever larger in her field of vision, and she couldn’t keep her eyes off the son of a bitch. “I will be more than I once was or am now,” she wrote, “fully unprepared to be dust.”

After my last visit I drove back toward home through a town where the president of the United States was giving a speech. There was a massive traffic jam, stop-and-go traffic at noon, cars on either side of me. People glanced in my direction, then shifted their gaze. I was crying, in that helpless fashion in which your forehead contracts as your mouth expands. Here’s a guy, I imagined people thought, with an incredibly low tolerance for heavy traffic.

The physical therapist got me up quickly enough, and though the incision hurt, as well as the places where they’d whittled on my spine, the nerve no longer sizzled and popped. I was walking upright for the first time in six months.

“Will I be able to do my work?” I asked the surgeon.

“Should be able to,” he said. “If it hurts, don’t do it.”

The doctor was named John Lonstein, and he is a genius, or, as another surgeon explained, “the guru” of the sort of operation I needed.

“I’m supposed to fly to Chile in two weeks,” I said. “It’s a thirteen-hour flight.”

“It should be no problem.”

“There’s a glacier. I want to walk up to the face of it.”

“Stop if it hurts.”

“When can I take off these stockings?” I was wearing a pair of tight white support-hose-type stockings given to surgical patients to prevent embolism.

“Take them off when you can walk a mile,” Dr. John Lonstein said.

Three days after the operation, I went to a nearby mall, without my stick. I could walk, at least on an even surface. Hey! I could walk! But the muscles in my legs were atrophied, and I was moving at a slow, shuffling, geriatric pace. Boisterous teenagers, bouncing off one another and laughing, terrified me. I hugged the walls for safety. A mile would take an hour. Maybe two.

The surgeon said all had gone well, that I could return to my accustomed work, and that a little caution now and again would not be out of order. I took one step, one breath. One step, one breath. And now one, two, three, four, five steps in a row. I stood balanced on two legs, gasping as if I’d just run a four-minute mile.

In the past, I’d dreamed of walks like this: some nightmare bogie behind me, gaining on me, and my feet tangled in tall grass, in beds of string. Now I knew what that dream had always been about, and why I dreamed it. I put together another set of five steps, fully unprepared to be dust.

A
recent
New York Times
story blasted dolphins right out of the water. “Evidence puts dolphins in new light, as killers,” the headline read, with a zinger of a subhead: “Smiling mammals possess unexplained darker side.” The story, a long front-page science-section offering, was continued seven pages later, under the subtly refined headline, “Evidence reveals dolphins in a new light, as senseless killers.”

Nothing in the article was inaccurate—this was
The New York Times
, after all—and the evidence in question wasn’t particularly new, though the prosecutorial zeal was certainly novel. There were three major allegations in the
Times
indictment:

The First Count: Certain bottlenose dolphins often kill their smaller cousins, harbor porpoises, seemingly for fun.

(Some definitions here: The terms “dolphin” and “porpoise” were used interchangeably by scientists and the general public until the late 1950s, probably to avoid confusion with the coldblooded dolphin fish, also called the mahimahi, a member of the mackerel family. These days, when scientists talk about “true dolphins,” they are referring to toothed whales, cetaceans, of the family Delphinidae, which contains thirty-six species, ranging from the five-foot-long Hector’s dolphin to the majestic, thirty-foot-long orca male. True dolphins have curved dorsal fins, conical teeth, and are often beaked. Porpoises are of the family Phocoenidae: they are mostly smaller than true dolphins, chubbier, have triangular dorsal fins, and generally lack beaks.)

Dolphins and porpoises often occupy the same territory. Off the northeast coast of Scotland, bottlenose dolphins sometimes surround a group of harbor porpoises, single out an individual, and ram it repeatedly, using their beaks to toss the unfortunate creature in the air. The porpoise dies of multiple causes, including skeletal fractures and severe internal injuries. Scientists have observed similar interactions between bottlenose dolphins and harbor porpoises off the Virginia coast. The contest is manifestly unequal. Male bottlenose dolphins can reach a length of thirteen feet and weigh in excess of 1,400 pounds, while harbor porpoises are among the smallest of the cetaceans, averaging about four feet nine inches in length and weighing 130 pounds.

Worse for the reputation of the bottlenose—our pals from the movie
Day of the Dolphin
and the television series
Flipper
—scientists don’t believe the two species compete for the same food. The aggression is not territorial but apparently a form of deadly, bullying play.

The Second Count, and more damning still: Observations in both Virginia and Scotland confirm that bottlenose dolphins often kill bottlenose infants in the same way. Infanticide is a common reproductive strategy among mammals, especially in those species, such as bears, lions, and dolphins, in which females are not sexually receptive while rearing young. Female dolphins become sexually attractive to males within days after losing a calf.

The Third Count: Dolphins don’t like humans that much and never have. In fact, people who have been in the water with wild dolphins have been bumped, rammed, bitten, and, in one case, even killed by dolphins. The permanent smile on the faces of some species of dolphin is purely anatomical, no more indicative of the animal’s state of mind than are the tusks on an elephant. You moron.

I received half a dozen copies of the article by mail, fax, and e-mail from those friends who knew that I was working on an IMAX documentary movie about dolphins (
Dolphins
, Macgillivray-Freeman films) and a companion book (
Dolphins
, National Geographic Books). The scientists among my correspondents—and there were
many, all of them consultants on either the book or the movie project—found the article “sensational,” and the headlines especially inflammatory. It wasn’t that we were unaware of the information in the
Times
piece, or that any such material had been excised from the book. To the contrary, it was all there, mostly in a single boxed article, written by Bernd Würsig, professor of marine mammalogy, director of the Marine Mammal Research Program, and codirector of the Institute of Marine Life Sciences at Texas A&M University. The article was titled “Reality Check.”

This material was folded into a larger context, and our error, I now saw, was that we supposed our audience was composed of people who were aware that dolphins are wild animals and fierce predators. The
Times
piece supposed that its readers loved dolphins uncritically, and was designed to shock the mush-minded.

Like my scientific colleagues, I found the headlines incendiary—even irresponsible—but as a journalist, they stuck like a burr in my brain. In fact, as I reviewed my notes, I was besieged by a mind swarm of new and even more disgraceful headlines, many of which would not be suitable for
The New York Times
.

The article in question, for instance, didn’t include information about gang rape among bottlenose dolphins, because, while certainly sensational and shocking, the news probably wasn’t fit to print. In Monkey Mia, off Western Australia, some bottlenose dolphin herd females in estrus away from the group, where they, the females, are subjected to repeated and apparently unconsensual copulations. The males sometimes band together in what are called coalitions to fight off other bands of male dolphins, bent on the same rape themselves. (“Behind the Smile: Unspeakable Abuse.”)

Additionally, dolphins do not mate for life, as is sometimes supposed. The male’s contribution to rearing his progeny stops at conception. The paintings one sometimes sees of a happy dolphin family—mom and dad swimming proudly with a new infant—are not entirely accurate. The female’s reproductive strategy is to mate often and apparently indiscriminately. Monogamy is seldom if ever practiced, and each of a female’s offspring is likely to have been sired by a different male.

In the documentary I was working on, there is a brief and typical
mating scene: it consists of a few rapid pelvic thrusts and is over in a matter of seconds. Blink, and you’ll miss it. (“The Most Inconsiderate Mammal.”)

Nevertheless, dolphins are extremely sexual creatures. Before the orgy, however, they tend to eat like gluttons. Dusky dolphins, off New Zealand, for instance, often herd great schools of fish to the surface, which acts as a wall. They then swirl about the bait fish, concentrating them into a compact ball. The duskies take turns swooping through the terrified fish, snapping up several in a single pass. (“Dolphins Nip Marlins.”) After such a meal, the duskies in their hundreds will leap acrobatically, each one erupting out of the water sometimes dozens of times, as if in ecstatic celebration. (“Dolphins Fined for Poor Sportsmanship.”) After-dinner socialization consists of flirtations, mock copulations, and repeated bouts of actual sex, often initiated by the females. (“Slutfish Bang for the Halilbut.”)

Okay, okay. I admit to a certain mush-brained affection for dolphins, even a slight reverence. Stories of relationships between dolphins and humans are as old as the written word, and I am a sucker for them, the more sentimental the better.

Almost 2,500 years ago, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about a musician named Arion, a lyre player sailing home after a successful concert tour. The ship’s crew, music critics all apparently, tell Arion that they are going to take his money and toss him overboard. Arion is granted his dying wish and is allowed to sing one last song. His music summons friendly dolphins, and Arion steps over the side of the boat, only to be carried ashore on the back of one of the big cetaceans. (“Dolphins Steal One from Mariners.”)

In the first century
A.D.
, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote of a boy who rode a dolphin to school every day across the Bay of Naples. One day, tragically, the boy died. A few weeks later, the dolphin washed up on shore, dead, one is given to understand, of a broken heart. (“Boy, Dolphin in Bizarre Suicide Pact.”)

Now, the truth of the matter is, as the
Times
reported, many people who have tried to swim with wild dolphins have been butted
and bitten. Well, some people have been bitten by gorillas, and yet others sit in their midst unchallenged and unharmed. It is a matter of etiquette, and the protocols are different for each animal. Dolphins, for instance, find a direct approach threatening, not surprising in a creature that uses head butts to drive off sharks, discipline unruly members of the group, and sometimes kill. Rule One: Never, never, never approach a dolphin broadside and at a right angle. Let the dolphin approach you. Each encounter is taken at an oblique angle. Never chase. Don’t touch.

Generally, when the dolphin has had enough of you, it will leave. There are, however, certain signals that suggest maybe you might want to get out of the water right now. Just as you wouldn’t approach a dog that is growling and baring its teeth, you want to avoid a dolphin that is clapping its jaws, or that continually approaches at a right angle, or one that assumes a vertical, S-shaped posture.

I have found, in my encounters with wild dolphins, that one or two members of the group approach first, in a kind of sweeping torpedo run. Reconnaissance, probably. Others follow, and they will swirl about, in slow, oblique angles, inviting you to the dance. Now, I’m a former Big Ten swimmer—sprints and butterfly—but in the water with dolphins, I am entirely too slow, and have found that it is best for me to take the lead and let the dolphins follow. I swoop about in great loops, twenty and thirty feet in diameter, and the dolphins swim by my side, close enough to touch, and what I imagine I see in their round black eyes is a kind of gentle pity.