Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (31 page)

Word spreads that John is doing something unusual. The lunch crowd has gone, so the women from the kitchen, heads wrapped in bold-print
kanga
cloth, come over to watch. Under their supervision, John looks at me, he looks at the wood, and he giggles a little to himself. This is the first time he’s ever used a live model. And the first time he’s ever used soft cypress for a human form. It is the color of almond meat, the shade of my skin.

One of the cooks looks at me, shakes her head, and exclaims she has never seen anything like this. She motions for John to hand over his work-in-progress, and he complies. The wood darkens under her fingers, still wet from washing dishes. She looks at me, looks at the wood, and then nods approvingly.

“I have been carving for forty years. It is my heart,” John says.

He gives his handiwork one last look. Then, he hands me myself.

“A gift,” he says.

I stare at the cypress with the sort of concentrated awe I had when I looked at my son in the months after he was born—his skin somehow my skin, his eyes somehow my eyes. Through John’s hands, I have received a sharp nose, deep-set eyes, a long forehead. Lips that appear puckered. One eyebrow is slightly raised, as if I’m getting ready to ask a question. For my hair, he has used the straight lines he usually reserves for a lion’s mane. The indentations run down to the middle of my back.

My voice joins those of the cooing cooks, praising his work. John smiles demurely at all the attention, but he remains humble. He reminds us all that the figure is still only a scrap, a discard of his larger works—lions, elephants, wildebeest, cheetahs, the animal armies that come marching out of this hut.

Humans and chimpanzees share 98 percent of the same DNA. We’re 79 percent the same stuff as whales and hippos. Despite our superficial differences, humans—here, there, everywhere—are, by genetic design, 99.9 percent the same. And you, and I, and everyone we know, share a substantial amount of DNA with any given oak tree.

There is a Maasai creation story that addresses this sort of interconnectivity, an only-told-by-the-fire narrative of cross-species creation. In the beginning, man found himself alone. But, unlike biblical Adam, he did not wait for an unseen god to get to work. Out of loneliness, in hope, he did all he knew to do: He started to create.

That first man on earth carved the first woman out of wood, and set her by his front door. In the morning, when the sun rose, the figure came to life and became his wife. In this cosmology, man and mystery were partners. It was from a tree—not a man’s rib—that woman was born. And in the soft flesh of cypress, I have been born again.

Polepole
, it is said in Swahili, like a mantra, on nearly every climb of Kilimanjaro.
Slowly, slowly
. This is the pace of evolution, the movement of these woodcarvers’ hands, the way of the migration. It is how I will make my way home, back to Matt and Archer.

Jeremiah gestures toward the fragile human form cupped in my palm. “You can show this to your son,” he tells me. “You can say to him: ‘Look! This is your mother. Your mother that comes to you from Africa!’”

November 2012

ARCHER HAS BEEN TELLING PEOPLE I
’
M IN AUSTRAFRICA. THIS IS
actually a pretty good description of the lingering, confusion-laced jet lag I’m experiencing in Cairns, Australia. The headline of today’s local paper reads:
ECLIPSE FEVER GRIPS REGION
. It’s no exaggeration. The November 14 event is nearly a week away, but roads are already packed. Since I’m coming off a needed travel hiatus, this trip has arrived at just the right time—for me, if not for coral spawning.

I’ve spent the last couple of days with James, my Arctic Circle buddy, and his friend Kate Russo, an eclipse-chasing psychologist. They ended up joining me on my ill-fated quest to see the spawning. At some point, hundreds of coral species will synchronize the release of their eggs on the Great Barrier Reef in a confetti-style celebration of new life. But not yet. Spawning predictions, a local biologist explained, are not an exact science. The moon was—as per usual—right on time, but water temperatures were still too cold. The general word among dive operators is that the event will occur a few weeks from now in a rare split spawning, with two smaller episodes rather than one big explosion.

But, really, no one knows for sure.

The failed attempt—which required night swimming with sharks—was somewhat disheartening, but I knew the projected dates were ambiguous. So did James. When I bemoaned, preflight, that I might be traveling around the globe for something that wasn’t going to happen, he responded via e-mail: “Perhaps you won’t see the great coral spawn. Such is the nature of Nature. Do not neglect the aspect of being denied . . . The hunter sometimes comes home empty-handed, yet each time learns some valuable insight to improve his hunting skills.”

I suppose this way of thinking helps when your primary focus in life is chasing two-minute phenomena. Weather predictions for the eclipse have, so far, been bleak. There’s a chance James and I are going to miss not one but two wonders here in the Southern Hemisphere.

Saying good-bye to James before the eclipse feels premature, but—in the uncertain months leading up to this trip—we made our own plans. His include a few days of what he calls “reconnaissance,” which entails comparing Google maps to in-person coordinates. Mine include heading up the coastline to wait out the eclipse, which isn’t as simple as it might sound.

When I stumbled onto the fever-gripped state of Queensland, I was already late when it came to accommodations. Hotels had been booked years in advance. Luckily, a sympathetic biologist connected me to John “Harry” Harrington, a Quicksilver Cruises boat captain who lives in Oak Beach, just outside of the resort town of Port Douglas. He has a room off his garage intended to shelter friends and family, and he’s offered to take me in.

The Harringtons live on three acres of rain forest that were once cane plantation. Their driveway appears at the end of a suburban-style development, then it disappears. The land was barren when they bought it, and their neighbors still live in open fields. But, over their two decades of residence, the Harrington family has planted 4,000 native trees on their acreage, making my fifty pines seem meager.

A coil of mosquito incense burns on the porch outside their traditional Queenslander home, drifting in and out of cranked-open windows. Harry’s wife, Tina, comes out to greet me. The corrugated metal outbuilding I’m being lent isn’t fancy, but it has wraparound windows that look out over gardens.

“I’ve put some bits and pieces in here for you,” Tina says. Most precious are three perfect tomatoes and several lady finger bananas from a neighbor’s yard. Her dog, Marley, leans against my leg. A phone rings in the main house. She jets off to answer it.

This is not my first time in Australia. I turned sixteen at the southern end of this country, while visiting as an exchange student. In a way, it is the place where I came of age—found independence, first ventured out on my own. Now, I’m back, half a lifetime later, and I’m pleased to find myself feeling like a thirty-four-year-old exchange student.

Marley takes up residence by my front door. He moves only when Harry—whom I’ve been corresponding with for months—returns home from a day on the nonspawning reef. He calls my name before approaching the backyard hut. I rise, greeted by the luxuriously sweet smell of lilies that have been placed in a vase by my sink.

Harry is a fit man with graying hair. I tell him of my immediate love of his place, and he says, “This region has the most prolific life on the planet. I like to live where there’s life, because I like to observe.”

He is trailed by his elder son, Jack, a preteen with skater bangs that fall over his left eye like a pirate patch. Something moves in the understory of a small stand of palms and Jack leans in to whisper, “There’s an emerald-winged dove!”

I’m shocked by his knowledge. It must show. “I believe you don’t just say, ‘That’s a bird’ when you’re showing your child the world,” Harry says.

“You might also see sunbirds with yellow chests,” says Harry’s younger son, Daniel, a little freckle-faced blond. “There are a lot of them around.”

The family graciously invites me over for dinner, bowls of homemade pasta served on a rough-hewn table. It is a welcome change from the culinary scene I’d been part of in Cairns: Me, subsisting on peanut butter; James, gnawing on salami every time I saw him, seeking out McDonald’s milk shakes, which he called “the cheapest nine hundred calories money can buy.”

The Harrington family already has their eclipse glasses ready. Tina bought them after seeing the transit of Venus earlier in the year, driving nearly two hours to procure them. The four glasses she delivered to the boys’ school ended up being used by nearly 200 children, who had previously had access only via a computer.

Harry walks me out with a flashlight while the boys hustle through their bedtime routines. As we dodge a walkway full of cane toads, Harry says, “The aboriginal people have been coming here for forty thousand years, to Oak Beach.” He has heard that one clan, from down near Cairns, used to travel through his very yard. “To me,” he says, “that gives a perspective of reality. It gives an overview, just like the sunrise or an eclipse.”

Before Harry says good-bye, Jack runs out of the house with two books on Australian birds. Because I’ve also expressed an interest in native trees, Daniel trails with a book on flora. As they approach, a bunch of loudly squawking birds flies overhead. The flock is obscured by palms, but the boys know them by their song.

“Sulphur-crested cockatoos,” Daniel tells me.

 • • • 

In nearby Port Douglas, I meet up with Kate, who has a girlish charm, not in small part due to dimples. She’s originally from Queensland, but she lives in Belfast, Ireland, now. She’s taken a six-month leave from her job as a clinical psychologist to be here for her eighth total eclipse. As it just so happens, she recently published a study about the psychology of eclipse chasing. She’s come up the coast to do some promotion for the book,
Total Addiction: The Life of an Eclipse Chaser
. James is one of the nine enthusiasts featured.

Her book signing table is set up in front of a posh restaurant facing a park, where an eclipse festival is set to rage. There are dozens of books that need to be inscribed this afternoon. She decides it might be best if we chat while she works.

I’m especially interested to hear what she has to say about eclipses as great cosmic coincidences. Because that is how people often refer to the phenomenon. Why? Well, the sun is 400 times larger than the moon. But, because the sun is exactly 400 times farther away from earth, the moon is able to cover its surface exactly. This perfection is so overwhelming, I’ve found that even the most pragmatic chasers have trouble dealing with it.

“I’m not a religious person,” Kate says, “but I find myself asking:
How can this alignment be a coincidence?
When people say that, they’re trying to find an answer for things that can’t be explained. This comes from a very core level. With religion, you’re entering from within an adopted framework. Spirituality, you’re trying to make sense of it for yourself. People draw upon Buddhist beliefs, Muslim teachings. It’s hard to put a language to it, and the language we have is within a religious framework.”

In her clinical work, Kate works with grieving families. She’s seen that being with a loved one on the edge of life and death—or experiencing it for yourself—can bring into focus the idea of life as something precious. In those moments, there’s a shift in perspective that makes trivial concerns fall away. The eclipse, she thinks, has the capacity to do the same thing in a nontraumatic way.

She says, “Suddenly it’s not just the sun rising. It’s the sun in a universe that’s so much bigger. It allows you to feel it so powerfully, so quickly, so unexpectedly . . . The eclipse comes and goes. Life comes and goes, and you have to do what’s important and make choices for what you want to do, whether it’s eclipse chasing or something else . . . It’s not lucky that things fall into your lap, it’s lucky that you take advantage of opportunities.”

This is one of the key linkages between the dozens of eclipse chasers Kate interviewed for her book, which—through a phenomenological approach—explores the psychology of chasing by recording anecdotal experiences. All of the chasers have told her they are really lucky. But, according to Kate, this means they’ve made choices that allowed them to be in the right place at the right time.

To her dismay, it seems everywhere she goes on her eclipse-chasing book bonanza, she hears people saying things like
If I had lots of money I’d do this, too.
“But it’s
so
not about money,” she says. “I think people put restrictions on their lives. They perceive: I can’t do this because I don’t have the money. I can’t do this because of
whatever
 . . . But if you’ve got that passion, if you’ve made that choice, it will happen.”

I think of how, at every stage of this phenomenal project, it has seemed impossible.

Yet, I am here. So is Kate. So is James.

“The real issue,” Kate says, “is that people don’t feel free. They feel they have to live according to this script that’s there for everybody. And when they come across people who aren’t living according to that script, they think: ‘Oh that’s exciting,’ or ‘That person’s got lots of money.’ But it’s really just living in a different way . . . Ultimately, it’s about freedom of choice, when you feel free to live your life. It’s a decision you make.”

“And you think eclipses can give people a greater sense of freedom?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Kate says. “I think certain people are primed for it. They’re curious about things.”

Kate, like me, falls into the terribly ambiguous category of spiritual but not religious, and she finds eclipse viewing has a lot in common with mindfulness, a way of seeing the world that’s based on Buddhist principles. It is a practice of living in the moment, allowing yourself to experience things as they occur. She says, “Rather than living in our minds, it allows us to live in our bodies.”

“There’s a therapeutic aspect to observation, especially when it comes to anxiety, don’t you think?” I ask.

Kate has always enjoyed giving people perspective through counseling, and she thinks the eclipse has the potential to similarly change lives for the better. It’s a connection she’s never actually considered before. She says of eclipse evangelizing, midrevelation: “It’s really important to me to help them gain perspective through experience instead of through talking about things!”

With eclipses—with direct experience of all dazzling natural phenomena—transformation happens without a mediator. It’s therapy with no therapist. Religion with no leader. Spirit felt without the influence of a human hand. “Just let it happen! It’s technically a shortcut!” Kate says. “The experience is the thing!”

 • • • 

The day before the eclipse, I join Australian astronomer Fred Watson and a handful of other professionals who are leading a tour group inland. Clouds have already begun to threaten views along the coast. Halfway to our viewing spot at Maitland Downs—a cattle station chosen by tour manager Marnie Ogg because of its characteristic dryness—we stop off at a coffee plantation.

Immediately, I start cruising name tags.

Back in Port Douglas, when I told Kate about my plans, she realized two of her friends—Chris and Miranda Pigott—were going to be in my small group. I was pleased until I remembered that Miranda had been cited as a weather jinx in Kate’s book. I recounted the last line of the relevant chapter from memory: “[Chris] is anxiously awaiting to see whether Miranda is indeed a bad omen, as she will be accompanying him for the next total eclipse in November 2012.”

When I brought it up, Kate laughed. “You’ll find out too!”

I find Chris, a Scottish film producer, wearing a small gold chain and a spotless white shirt. Long gray hair splays at the nape of his neck like an Elizabethan collar. He has isolated himself from the group with a Sudoku puzzle. I introduce myself as a friend of Kate’s. Chris has attempted to bear witness to five total eclipses, starting in 2001 with Madagascar, and he’s seen more than half of them alongside Kate. Tenderly, I bring up the jinx. Chris turns to see where his wife, Miranda, is standing. Assured that she’s safely out of hearing range, he says: “Miranda is still a little sore about that. Jolly bad luck,” he says. The missed eclipse was in Shanghai, where clouds prevented catching even a glimpse. It was the only trip Miranda has accompanied him on, until now.

He turns in his seat to look around at the group, nearly everyone wearing matching tour shirts and snacking on precut squares of lemon cake. “Some people like collecting eclipses,” Chris says. “It’s like a badge. I thought I was nothing with six, but I’ve probably got more than all of these people. The more you’ve got, the bigger the swagger you have:
Well, I went to the Antarctic!
That sort of thing.”

“Are you going to try to see the next one?” I ask, thinking of the upcoming eclipse over the Faroe Islands.