Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (7 page)

This lightning-born fear and awe runs throughout history and cultures. Thoreau wrote: “The ancients called it Jove’s bolt, with which he punished the guilty, and we moderns understand it no better . . . Science assumes to show
why
the lightning strikes a tree—but it does not show us the moral
why
any better than our instincts did . . . Men are probably nearer to the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science.”

Romo seems to agree. He hasn’t come to Lake Maracaibo for scientific answers. His push for discovery is of a spiritual sort. “I was that storm,” he says of his last encounter. “I lived in it, through it. My grandmother was with me that night. I thought to myself, the nest of that phenomenon must be close to here.”

His terminology brings to mind the mythic thunderbird and its lightning-shooting eyes. Giambattista Vico, a philosopher in the 1700s, suggested that humankind’s earliest notions of God arose out of lightning and subsequent thunder. It was thunder, he thought, that first introduced early humans to a greater power. Joseph Campbell believed that lightning was one of the first divinations of nature and the all-encompassing cosmos, an early symbol of divinity.

Romo plays with his necklace, a brass medallion just visible in the mass of white hair that’s bursting forth from his half-unbuttoned dress shirt. The circular necklace is divided with four lines, the cardinal directions. He flips it in his stubby fingers and says, “Being in the lightning that night was like being in an earthquake. It seemed to come from the ground.” He shakes his head, remembering. “There were moments that night when it felt like the lightning was coming from everywhere.”

 • • • 

In the village of Puerto Concha we find men sitting in dusty jungle clearings, playing cards. We’ll travel by boat from here, tracing a dark river into the lake. Our group clusters on a cement pier that has a large hole in the middle. I can see water sloshing below us, shining through exposed rebar. Ferns grow around rough cement.

In the flurry of e-mails exchanged when planning this trip, Alan told me that he was going to hire three boats, though we needed only two. He thought it would be safer. Bandits roam these waters, and they’ve been known to rob fishermen in the middle of the lake.

One of the small boats Alan has secured features a motor covered with a large red T-shirt. It might be intended to block out the fading sun, Alan explains, or it might be to make the new motor look less desirable, you know, to
pirates.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “nobody’s ever stolen a motor from a tourist boat.” In classic form, he adds, “Not a lot of tourists go out here, though. They get nervous because of guerrillas and drug trafficking, but that’s on the Colombian side of the river.” This offers little comfort since there’s nothing but lawless jungle and open water between us and the border.

Loaded in our vessels of peeling paint and webbed fiberglass, we move away from the fish-scale-littered streets of Puerto Concha onto a narrow river swathed by jungle. The sun, the air itself, is so hot it hurts. I adjust my weight on the boat’s seat, which has been padded with broken down cardboard boxes reading “Country Club Brand Whisky.” We begin to move at a steady clip.

Romo looks at me and puts his fingers to his mouth and kisses their tips. “
¡Delicioso!
” he says of the breeze. And it is tasty. My skin begins to cool. I lean back and scan the trees for monkey tails that hang from low branches like strange, coiled fruits.

In the distance, a boat approaches with a driver wearing a long-sleeved shirt tied around his head to obscure his face, like a mask. All three of our boats’ motors start kicking exhaust as we slow to move through an area of the waterway that’s nearly overgrown with hyacinth. The motor fumes are thick. I begin to cough.

“That’s a black-tailed hawk,” Alan shouts, pointing to a bird soaring through the haze.

I don’t follow his gaze. I’m a little more interested in the motivations of the
bandito
who’s barreling toward us. I gesture toward him and Alan says, “The sun is brutal to the guys out here. They wear shirts over their faces to protect themselves.” The masked man speeds past us, and all around, the river screams with life, thousands of insects appearing as shadows on the undersides of leaves.

“Near the horizon line,” Alan says, “you can see a few storms beginning to form. It’s rare to see a storm in the Catatumbo Delta during the day.” This is a place that saves its secrets for after dusk.

We follow the Puerto Concha River to its mouth, where we bound over waves into an ocean-size lake. There is no pleasant zipping. We’re wave hopping and my less-than-swashbuckling attitude is experiencing even more of a setback. The boat moves
zoom-boom-boom-boom
across the water. I grip the side of the boat and Matt’s leg, crouching down as if to make myself more aerodynamic. It doesn’t work.

I have two hours to go, and I’m losing my mind. I know this for certain when I hear strange music tingeing the whipping static of wind. Classical opera. It’s coming from behind me. I have feared kidnapping bandits. Instead, I got Romo.

He’s pulled his chest-length white hair back with a bit of leather twine, and he’s wearing a wide-brim straw sun hat tied under his chin in a neat little bow. His voice is strong and dramatic. I laugh through clouds of my tangling hair. This rough, butt-bumping, pirate-braving voyage has turned into one of the finest, oddest, most refined moments of my life.

When Romo stops singing, Matt leans in and says, “I can’t hear very well. My ears still haven’t popped!” We’ve descended thousands of feet in elevation over two days, and the barometric pressure outside of his ears is greater than that inside. It’s a sensation that serves as a reminder that our bodies are constantly neutralizing our relationship to the atmosphere. But, sometimes, it’s hard to keep up.

Alan’s mentor, scientist Julio Lescaburo, believed that unique barometric pressure systems, or atmospheric pressure, in the Catatumbo Delta are the origin of its namesake phenomenon, and Alan does, too. Nearly every morning, according to Alan and Julio’s observations, winds reliably blow off Lake Maracaibo onto the Andes. While aloft, they cool on mountaintops cold enough to host tropical glaciers. Then, just as reliably, in the evening, the changing pressure systems of the lake call the winds back, where the cool pressure system of the Andes meets with the warm, moist pressure system that has been simmering in sunshine. When they converge over the lake:
Kaboom!
Lightning.

One popular counter-theory is the idea that high concentrations of methane gas over the lake somehow increase conductivity in the air. This idea, formulated by Ángel Muñoz of the University of Zulia, has been adopted by one of the Catatumbo’s most vocal promoters, Erik Quiroga, a Caracas-based environmentalist.

Quiroga has introduced legislation that would make the Catatumbo lightning the first UNESCO World Heritage Weather Phenomenon. It’s a request that received quite a bit of international press when the lightning temporarily disappeared in 2010. The incident made the lightning itself seem suddenly endangered, though no one could reliably identify the threat. Alan maintains that the lightning’s disappearance was because of an El Niño that created drought conditions that extended the dry season, when the phenomenon reliably takes a brief annual hiatus. Quiroga, for his part, thinks deforestation and subsequent erosion along the Catatumbo River—which alters ecosystems—might have had something to do with the historic disappearance.

During the phenomenon’s hiatus,
The Guardian
reported that UNESCO had no plans to declare the Catatumbo region a World Heritage site because “electric storms did not have a site.” But in the case of the Catatumbo, this isn’t true. It may transcend the terrestrial and our understanding, but if there’s one thing—and there may be only one thing—that’s known for certain about the Catatumbo lightning, it’s that it has a home. We’re almost there.

 • • • 

“Welcome to water world!” Alan shouts as we enter the village of Ologa, home to 300 perpetual seafarers. We’re in a shallow, where houses are perched above the lake on wooden stilts. They look like water-walking spiders. Most of the unexpected structures are built with plank lumber, floors nearly falling into the lake-sea. Others are constructed of rusty tin and branches covered in bark that looks like elephant skin. The pre-Columbian homes encountered by early Spanish and Italian explorers weren’t all that far removed from what we’re seeing here today. They reminded the Europeans of the canals of Venice, Italy. This is how Venezuela, or Little Venice, is popularly known to have gotten its name.

In the distance, beyond the stilt houses of Ologa, there’s a swampy island full of coconut trees. It’s roughly as long as a football field and as wide as a suburban street. Beyond that, there is only the flat line of the horizon, punctured by the outline of a distant oil platform. All around the village’s stilted homes, in what amounts to watery front yards, there are men standing in waist-deep water. They’re shaving in broken shards of mirrors, and some of them have chests covered in soap suds. Children splash each other below platforms full of frothy fishing nets. A woman stands in an open doorway, raising her hand in greeting.

Alan lives, part time, in a house that sits a little apart from the others. It has a cement floor, which makes it a luxury accommodation among the mostly recycled-wood huts. When we dock, the boatmen busy themselves, unlocking the recycled-metal shipping-container doors of the house and separate kitchen, which is the size of a small closet. It has a rare patch of walkable swamp behind it, connected to the stilt house via a small cement bridge.

Coolers—filled with solid blocks of ice picked up at a factory alongside the road to Puerto Concha—are our only refrigeration, and water comes from a blue rainwater tank that’s located on the backside of the house. One of the teenage boys in the group suggests that we could bathe in the lake like the locals do, but I can’t get past the fact that the house’s sewage system—like that of all the houses within sight—isn’t actually a system at all. It’s a hole in the floor. This is something Alan aims to change. He’d also like to add solar panels to limit the need for the generators that provide huts with electricity.

“You feel that the wind is different now,” Alan says, taking off his mesh sun hat. “It’s beginning.” He points toward the lagoon side of the house, which has a wraparound cement porch. The wind is coming from the mountains now. When Alan is in Mérida, he can tell what time of day it is by watching the town’s flags. He knows it’s late evening when they start to blow toward the lake.

Alan instructs everyone to gather around him in the plastic chairs that the boatmen have brought onto the porch. We oblige and he pulls out a laminated topographical map of the lake. A small strait connects it to Tablazo Bay, which leads directly into the Gulf of Venezuela.

“These are NASA readings of lightning,” Alan says, holding up a tie-dyed-looking chart. “This is the first show.” He points to a red splotch over the mouth of the Catatumbo River. Then he directs our attention to the second show, which is centered on the lake. “See that dot in the center?” he says. “That’s where the lightning is concentrated.” It looks like a bull’s-eye. “January, February, March, you don’t see much lightning, but the rest of the year this storm is here.”

Quiroga and others have touted the Catatumbo as one of the greatest ozone producers on earth. But this only serves to sully the phenomenon’s reputation in many scientific circles, since the type of ozone produced by lightning is a greenhouse gas. This tropospheric ozone—like methane and fossil fuels—is a player in global warming. Though there’s no clear connection, the fact that all three of these are present at the center of Lake Maracaibo—in amounts that might be greater than anywhere else on the planet—is something no one has seriously looked into as far as Alan and NOAA and NASA representatives know. Now, I’m no scientist. In fact, I’m about as laid out as a layperson can get. But I find this downright flabbergasting.

I initially felt crazy for putting the Catatumbo on my must-see list, but I now think it’s sort of insane that more people aren’t out here with me—especially people that might have the background to figure out what the Catatumbo has to teach. Even I feel confident in declaring that there’s something magnificently interesting happening here. And I have yet to see my first lightning bolt.

Alan would like to host researchers at his stilt house, but he has thus far not received many inquiries from scientists or even storm chasers. He’s contacted some well-known American meteorologists in the States to garner interest, but they often dismiss him. I suspect that they might actually think he’s a little crazy.

He shuffles charts against the rough cement floor of the porch and begins to ramble in Spanish that challenges my basic language skills. I become distracted by a wooden boat full of children. They’re inching across the channel between Alan’s house and the rest of the village, navigating open water. A boy, who looks no older than seven, is pushing the craft over to us with a long stick. When they reach the house, the boatmen circulate bread stuffed with dry cheese and guyabano jelly, and the children accept their servings hungrily.

They cluster together on the cement floor and lean into Alan’s words. Alan has observed the Catatumbo phenomenon to have two episodes and epicenters. NASA satellites have, too. It’s actually the second storm, which is located near the center of the lake, rather than the one over the river, that’s the strongest.

A little boy—face smeared with jelly—starts to whisper to his companions, but one of the girls shushes him. When Alan finishes his talk, the children turn their attention to the charts scattered on the ground like debris. They are not unfamiliar with the world beyond Lake Maracaibo. Few houses other than Alan’s have lightning rods, but many of them have circular satellites for television. Still, the telenovelas from Mexico and sitcoms of Hollywood give a skewed perspective of what the world beyond the lake is really like. The children, all siblings and cousins, are in agreement: The idea of year-round, uninterrupted darkness—a deadened night sky—is amazing. And, maybe, just a little bit scary.