Pecked to death by ducks (21 page)

Just before noon the wind began to pick up, and we pulled in to a wide beach protected from the wind by a high, Gothic-looking point two miles to the north.

We swam and snorkled and set up our tents. Kimmer came over to give me a hand, and I waved her off. Something about human males that has never been very clear to me. I never ask directions when I'm lost either.

There was another boat in our party, a twelve-foot motorized sailing craft that carried provisions and was available in case of emergency. Steve Audett, the captain, a sometimes musician and electrician out of Anchorage, had brought his family along for the ride. His wife, Shine, was a midwife. Their son, Loghan, was six and his sister, Oceana, was three. The family seemed beneficent and happy, like Deadheads at a picnic, and indeed Shine had once taken the Grateful Dead on a wilderness tour of Alaska.

I ran into Loghan down near a lagoon and tried to show him how to skip stones, but he waved off my instructions. "I know how," he said in some pique. Human males.

Kimmer said that Ageya got all kinds of clients. Some people had never been in a kayak before, others were experts. The experts, she thought, came along on organized tours for the companionship, for the people they would meet.

And so, sitting by the fire after dinner, with the sun setting behind coastal mountains and spreading purple shadows over the beach like great puddles of ink, we chatted amiably. Loghan sat by Martine and explained that he had six girlfriends in school. He named them off in the order that he liked them best, and the women around the fire reacted, in tandem, with amused horror. Human males. They raised their eyes to the sky, which was a dark red-black bruise.

Loghan misinterpreted the gesture, put his arm around Mar-tine, and explained that she could be his girlfriend on this trip. Since she was here.

"It's in the genes," Martine said of human males.

Oceana, the three-year-old girl, was sitting in my lap. "I don't have any boyfriends at all," she said in some sorrow.

"Then," I said grandly, "I'll be your boyfriend."

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 178

Oceana laughed a tinkly little laugh that went on for an uncomfortable length of time.

"What's so funny about that?" I asked, aggrieved.

"I can't be your girlfriend," Oceana said. "I'm too little."

The next morning I rose early and walked down a gravelly wash lined with cardon cacti and bushes that were still green in what had been a wet spring for Baja. The wash led into a box canyon whose walls caught the light of the rising sun. In the clean, clear air they looked like pale pink watercolors rising on all sides. Above, the western sky was blue-black. There was a sound I had been hearing for some time, a distant buzz, as of hundreds of people murmuring softly, but now the buzz took on a sharper, harder-edged resonance.

The canyon ended in a kind of expanded horseshoe shape, and I could see green trees and bushes standing against the reddish walls that rose 150 feet on all sides. The buzzing echoed against stone and reverberated and filled me with an as-yet-unspecified dread. Two more steps and I saw them: thousands upon thousands of long, thin wasps swarming around a single tree in such numbers that it seemed to be covered with a thick mass of shifting yellow flowers. In the half-light of early morning, in the cool shadow of the canyon, the wasps seemed slow, nearly somnam-bulant. They moved on the tree in turgid masses, like viscous globules of some thick liquid. The buzzing seemed to be getting louder, and I abandoned the rest of my walk.

That day we paddled against a brisk wind, north to the point, which was named for a kind of small octopus that swarmed the nighttime reefs there. Dave and I were paddling well together, and we seldom clacked paddles. A kayak paddle is a single shaft with two blades set at right angles to one another. The shaft is twisted in the hand at each revolution so that the upper blade cuts the wind.

There was a small sea stack ahead of us, a spire of rock that rose from the water like the twisted battlements of some ancient fortress. A dozen or more pelicans had taken up positions on a series of ridge lines, and there were hundreds of western sea gulls

interspersed among them. Dave and I studied the current a bit, then let the kayak float near these populated spires. A few gulls circled overhead and shrieked at us in their self-righteous manner. Two of the pelicans stood atop the spire, facing the north wind with their wings extended. When the evaporative effect of the wind had dried them sufficiently, they leaned into the wind, fell two full feet, then swooped into the air.

"Look down," Kimmer called from her kayak. There was a school of bait fish moving under our boats. A pelican crashed into the surf ten feet away, then rose into the sky with its neck bulging and something jumping under the skin there.

The sea gulls on the spire were calling to one another in a voice I'd never heard before. It sounded like mad laughter, and the pelicans lifted off the rock, one after the other. On all sides they were plunging into the surf, sometimes sending up five-foot-high plumes of spray.

And then the current drove us on, toward a lonely white glittering beach on the lee side of the point. We pulled in for lunch. A trail led to the summit of Octopus Point, which looked to be about seven hundred feet high. The wind was fierce up there, and I watched a small fishing boat rounding the point. It was pitching violently and rolling from side to side. Wouldn't want to be down there in a kayak, I thought.

There were dark moving spots on the sea stacks that fronted the point, and I could hear the echoing bark of sea lions. There must have been another school of baitfish in the area because the sea lions slid off the rocks, pelicans crashed, and blue-footed boobies dived like fighter planes. I could just make out the boobies' neon-blue feet and see them as they folded in their wings, hit the water, and left a slanting trail of bubbles fifteen feet deep.

Later we paddled out to the point to meet the sea lions. Mar-tine kept us close to the shoreline cliffs, out of the churning water to the north. The sea lions basked on the rocks and regarded us with the mild curiosity humans reserve for, oh, cows ambling across a suburban lawn: I know what that is, but what's it doing here?

There were several perfect arches jutting out from one of the

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A l8o

sea stacks, but they were a bit north, close to the nasty water at the point of the point. Martine and Shine, in a two-man kayak, paddled near the arch, timed the rush of water through it, then paddled through. Fast.

Dave and I watched from cowardly safety. Several of the sea lions were circling our kayak. One was floating on its back, flippers in the air. Two others stared at us with dark, impenetrable eyes. They had the friendly faces of golden retrievers. Perhaps half a mile out to sea, a series of black fins rolled one after the other. Killer whales will attack sea lions, but this pod seemed to be moving south at about thirty miles an hour.

The point was the most dangerous place we would have to negotiate in the kayak. It was also a great confluence of life, and this combination of peril and substance sent the spirit spinning off into various ethereal regions, in which a man might be tempted to commit philosophy.

Oceana did indeed become my girlfriend. She sat with me at night around the fire as the adults talked. Her father, Steve, warned me never to get her excited after eight o'clock. "She'll sleep then," he said, "but if you get her going, she'll be up all night and it'll be a horror show, guaranteed."

Dave, the scientist, said that there was "a lot of geology going on" around our campsite. He could see upthrust and erosion, all of it looking as if it had just happened yesterday, by which he meant in the last 2.5 million years, in the "the Quaternary."

"What's that?" I asked.

"The most recent geological period. It includes the Pleistocene and the Holocene."

"Oh," I said, "that Quaternary."

"I used to have me one of those," Steve said. "I never could keep a clutch in it."

We played a game in which a person told two lies and one truth about himself. Kimmer said that in the sixth grade she could throw a ball farther than anyone in the school, that at age nineteen she had won an arm-wrestling contest, and that she had a twin sister who died at birth. We all nailed the twin as a lie. No

one picked out Martinet lie, and she had to explain that no, the Czechoslovakian climber hadn't actually proposed to her near the summit of Mount McKinley. He had only propositioned her. Both versions were ioo percent believable.

It was getting late, and Oceana was fading, but she was so sweet lying in my arms, so fresh, that I couldn't help asking her if she remembered what it was like in the time before she was born. Oceana misinterpreted the question to mean did she remember being born. "I was borned," she proclaimed—everyone was listening intently—"and I went 'wah wah wah wah wah wah wah.

After the twenty-fifth "wah" or so most of the adults had absorbed the point.

". . . wah wah wah . . ."

"But, Oceana," I said (here Steve caught my eye and shook his head, please no, but I was too far into my question to stop), "do you remember anything else?"

"I was borned and I went"—Oceana was enjoying this immensely— "WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH . . ."

The adults regarded me with a combination of loathing and animosity.

The next morning, as we broke camp, the wasps that had been confined inland invaded the beach. There were all over everything, like a biblical plague, and they stung the children and the adults without mercy. Dave and I jammed our gear in the rear storage compartment without regard to weight distribution. I had been stung on the right forearm and would have felt intensely sorry for myself, except that poor six-year-old Loghan had been stung twice, once on the neck.

Out on the water, a good distance from shore, we lost the last of the great horde. A few stragglers crawled over the kayaks, settling on the brightly colored spray skirts buttoned around the rim of the cockpits. We had a long paddle, four straight hours, I figured, and the exertion was pumping poison into my stung forearm. I had begun to swell, visibly. I didn't want to think about

the awful . . . sensation ... on my legs. It felt like, well, like some kind of . . . bug . . . crawling up my leg. Under the spray skirt. On my knee. Up the thigh . . .

It was all imagination, of course. I was acutely aware of wasps only because my right arm was beginning to look like Popeye's.

And now, on the way back past our first campsite, we had to round another point. It was late for paddling, about noon, and the wind had picked up to fifteen miles an hour. Large, regular waves about four and five feet high were washing in toward the beach at an oblique angle, so that the kayak wanted to take them broadside. Which was what Martine called a "capsize situation." Dave and I had to paddle fast in order to keep our poorly packed kayak maneuverable. My right forearm was bigger than my bicep. It felt like a water balloon.

And there was no stopping now, because the point was ahead of us and the water was getting choppy. Paul Dix was paddling alongside us, but I could only see him in slow-motion strobo-scopic bursts. He'd sink into the trough of a wave and disappear. And then, suddenly, the bottom would drop out from under our kayak, but there was Paul, on the crest of a booming wave, towering eight feet above us.

And goddammit, if there was a wasp under my spray skirt it was crawling up my shorts, and this was intolerable, it would not happen, and in the mushy-handling kayak, between what seemed to be monumental waves, I pulled off the spray skirt, and yes, a long yellow wasp crawled out onto the deck of the boat just as a wave hit us broadside and splashed up onto the deck and washed the wasp into the Gulf of California. There was a wave of adrenaline, a shot in the belly, that sensation of falling before you actually fall. . . .

We leaned over close enough to kiss the sea, but managed to right the kayak and work up enough speed to regain control. We headed in, lickety-split, toward shore and the campsite. The point had given everyone else some trouble, too, and we were all talking at once on the beach.

"Dave," I informed the company, "was crying the whole way."

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"Tim," Dave pointed out, "kept using his bilge pump for something."

And then people had to laugh about the wasp in my shorts for entirely too long a time. It wasn't that funny at all.

"Tim," Dave said, "knows some very colorful language."

"Latin terms for wasp," I explained.

Some time later, I opened a plastic sack containing several different kinds of cheese. A wasp staggered out onto the rock, woozy from the heat. It was so full of cheese that it couldn't fly, and I stomped it flat.

"POPEYE MY ARM, WILL YOU, YOU SON OF A BITCH!"

I jumped up and down on the wasp, and screamed at it and cursed it and stomped on it in a mad jig of murder and vengeance. It occurred to me that there might be people about, and that I could be overreacting. Indeed, Loghan and Oceana were staring up at me with large, innocent eyes.

"Wasp," I said, nodding at a yellow smear on the rock.

"It's dead," Oceana pointed out.

"It was dead a long time ago," Loghan added.

"What's a basser?" Oceana asked.

Our campsite was set on beach that fronted a bay shaped like an hourglass. The water in the inner bay was calm and blue-green, and there was a lot of geology going on everywhere. A large, sloping flat-topped rock stood in the middle of the inner bay. Grasses and shrubs and cacti grew at the summit, but the rock was crumbling away on all sides. Calm water arches under the fallen rock framed the sea beyond.

There were four Mexican fishermen camped nearby. Paul Dix and I went over to talk with them, and they offered us fresh clams with salt and lime. You dive for these brown-shelled clams at low tide, the men explained, out near the rock. One of the fishermen said that eating such clams made a man very virile. We all laughed at that, as men are supposed to do. I translated the phrase "lead in the old pencil," and we all laughed some more, in an obligatory way, though I found myself wondering what good