Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (5 page)

“It wouldn’t last,” Garry says. “It would just be water in a glass if you took it away from this place. They call this a microbial stew . . . It’s special because of what’s at play. It’s just like with people: You’re going to thrive if you’re where you’re supposed to be.”

He straddles his boat and recounts a childhood trip to La Parguera, a bioluminescent bay on mainland Puerto Rico that has nearly lost its luminosity due to degradation. “La Parguera has been dead for a long time. Even when I was a kid, the closest you could get to the water there was when they poured it bucket-to-bucket to show you the glow,” Garry says. “At some point, it might not be possible to touch the water here anymore.” The group is quiet as we turn our boats toward land.

We paddle close to shore and wait in a swaying cluster as Garry calls us in, one by one. A woman who has revealed she’s staying at the only gated resort on the island says, “I’m a hopeless paddler. My nails were getting in the way and I didn’t want to break one.” Behind us, a fish jumps and lands in a pool of light. Coquí frogs whistle from the surrounding wetlands. When Garry indicates that it’s the hopeless paddler’s turn to say good-bye to the bay, her voice softens. She says, “He’s right, you know. It’s amazing that we’re allowed in here at all.”

 • • • 

The next morning, at Garry’s suggestion, I walk along the picturesque main boardwalk of Esperanza—the smaller of the island’s two towns—until I reach the Vieques Conservation and Historic Trust, an unassuming building set back from the road. I make my way through a museum of indigenous Taino artifacts before entering an educational center maintained by the trust’s director of community affairs, Mark Martin Bras. He emerges from a side door holding a giant stuffed squid, which he cradles under an arm when he reaches out to shake my hand.

Mark’s duties at the trust include educational programming and acting as liaison for the organization’s research partnerships with universities, but he moonlights as a guide for Island Adventures, one of the most popular guide companies on Vieques. “I’ve seen people get religious about the bay. I’ve seen people cry. Adults start to talk like children,” he says. “They’re not losing intelligence, they’re just disarmed. Nature has the power to completely disarm people. Most of the time we live outside of that power, but the bay returns it to us.”

Mark, who grew up on the main island of Puerto Rico, still remembers his first visit to the bay. He was eight years old. He says, “I’d been to beaches, but I’d never seen anything like that. It challenged what I knew of the world. I remember a disappointment in the future that not all water glowed.”

I follow him into a tiny dark room with a giant wooden submarine in the middle of the floor. The room was created to teach local schoolchildren, some of whom have never had the opportunity to float in the bay, about the natural history of bioluminescence. He says, “It’s difficult to get people to care about something they don’t understand.” During his educational presentations, Mark often shares a slideshow featuring some of the earliest written observations of bioluminescence—including quotes by Aristotle and Pliny the Elder, an early naturalist who observed, in AD 77, “There are sudden fires in the waters.”

Pliny is often credited with the first human use of bioluminescence, though natives of the West Indies—who stuck bioluminescent beetles to their toes as ground-level flashlights—may have beaten him to the punch. Still, it’s impressive to think that, while Pliny’s countrymen were walking around Rome with open-flamed torches, he was free-spirited enough to illuminate walking paths with a stick rubbed in glowing jellyfish slime. Fellow Romans were not always kind at the sight of this eccentricity. “He wasn’t hanged or anything,” Mark says. “But they thought he was strange. Really, he just saw nature differently than other people at that time.”

Mark turns on a black light and the room becomes a psychedelic fantasyland. He points out a black-and-white photograph of a dinoflagellate that has been enlarged under a microscope. The image has a purplish-pink tint under the black light. I study the plankton for a minute before exclaiming, “It looks like a human heart!”

He walks over to examine the familiar shape. Finally, Mark says, “You know, it does. It really does!”

 • • • 

Near dusk, Matt and I join Mark on one of Island Adventures’ repurposed school buses. We’re on our way to the bay’s main entrance, which is located inside the public beach compound of Sun Bay. The sides of the bus screech out as branches claw at paint. When the vehicle finally reaches its destination, a clearing roughly twenty feet across, a woman in front of me says, “Those would have been great sound effects for a horror film! Actually, this whole trip would be a great plot for a movie.” She changes her tone to that of a mock announcer: “They went to see the dinoflagellates, and they never came back!”

We leave the bus and stumble to find our footing as we’re guided, in single file, onto narrow metal boards leading us onto an electric pontoon boat. Once on board, people seem desperate to photograph the bay, though the bioluminescence is not yet visible. Mark asks guests to turn off their flashes and warns, “There is a gap in technology and the bay.”

There are very few photographers who have been able to document these waters in a meaningful way, and rarely do they achieve good results without digital alterations. In a world of Google maps—when it’s possible to virtually fly over the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Canyon on your lunch hour—the bay remains a you-had-to-be-there experience.

Mark raises his arm to gesture toward a hilltop neighborhood visible from the water, saying, “Light pollution is one of our greatest enemies here.” Street lamps obscure the bay’s brilliance, just as they do stars in the night sky.

One tourist—who is still struggling to photograph the bay despite Mark’s comments on its elusiveness—calls him over to ask if he wouldn’t mind turning up the boat’s lights a little. She doesn’t yet understand what she’s looking for, but she doesn’t want to miss capturing it when it appears.

Mark says, “That’s not coming from the boat. That’s the bioluminescence you’re seeing out there.”

The woman, still struggling with the concept, says, “There’s no light?”

“No
artificial
light,” Mark says.

From the boat’s perspective, high above the water, the bioluminescence reveals the back-and-forth patterns of fish swimming, squiggly lines drawn in their wake.

Mark points toward the surrounding mangrove forests, which shed nutrient-rich leaves, help maintain the bay’s heightened salinity, and build islands as they strain sedimentation. He says, “Mangrove trees actually create land.” He directs our attention to the silhouette of a hillside and says, “See that? It used to be water all the way up to the mountain.” A level mangrove forest, creeping into the bay’s placid waters, is just visible in the evening’s fading light.

Someone asks, of the bay’s narrow, ocean-gulping mouth, “Will the mangrove ever close the opening?”

“Well, it could, but humans would never let that happen,” Mark says.

He continues: “There is a story. I don’t want anybody to think I agree or believe in the story, but it goes like this: When they came here, the Spanish thought this was the devil’s water, so they put rocks around the mouth to keep the devil in.”

Two chemicals that produce the plankton’s light—luciferin and luciferase—were named after Lucifer, the fallen angel. Mark says, “Historically, most people who were writing things down were thrown toward evil more than good. They had the idea that bioluminescence was too surreal to be natural.”

He gives a small sigh and continues: “I know people have a desire for mythology—and it has its own beauty—but I think that story takes away from the mangrove and nature. It gives humans the credit for creating this.”

Our slow-moving pontoon comes to a stop. It’s time to swim. We quietly stargaze as we wait our turn to use the boat’s ladder. When a cloud threatens to cover a section of sky to our left, Mark pulls a laser pointer and shoots it into the heavens: “Before it goes away, there’s the king of the gods—Jupiter! And there’s Orion’s torso!” He traces its body—celestial belt, outstretched sword—and then, without pause, he abandons his set course to trail a shooting star with his red laser.

“Do that again!” someone calls out, as if Mark might be able to manipulate the sky above.

I approach the edge of the deck to see swimmers kick their legs and flail their arms. They appear as iridescent butterflies shimmering in an inky sky. I clip a slender piece of foam around my waist and enter the darkness. The water is warmer than the air. It feels near body temperature, and when I am fully submerged, I am surrounded by a cloud of liquid electricity. I am speaking to the water through movement, sign language, and it is responding with visual cues.

Not far from where I’m treading in a tornado of light, a man—clean-cut and seemingly not prone to saying words like “dude” and “awesome”—is carrying on as if he’s on hallucinogens, shouting, “Look at the hairs on my arm! Look! The hairs on my arm!” He dips his arm in the bay and lifts it for everyone to see. His hair has become a catchment of flickering pulsars. “It’s so weird! Like I’m covered in stars!”

When Mark announces that it’s time to get out of the water, a collective groan rises. I’m saddened and slightly relieved, given that, despite the overwhelming magic of the experience, I’ve squandered a little too much of my swim envisioning how we might all look from the depths below. I streak my way across the bay, climb the boat’s ladder, and grope around for a towel.

Back on shore, when people begin to make their way down the gangplanks, Mark shouts after them: “Don’t forget to tell people about the lights!” He isn’t talking about the soul-stirring bioluminescence. He’s reminding us to take inventory of our far-off corners of the world. “More light,” Mark says, “isn’t always better.”

 • • • 

During our last day on Vieques, Matt and I decide to take a daylight tour of a mangrove forest. We’re part of a large crew, but we’re attentive as Carlito Cruz Morales, a twenty-something with wavy black hair, gives a brief kayak paddling lesson. When he’s done, a fellow guide, Michelle McNerney, who’s sporting a slender hoop in her nose, disseminates life jackets.

Under the afternoon sun, deep areas of the bay look like tea that has just begun to steep. The group falls into loose formation as we travel to the far shore, a mass of mangrove. It’s unclear how we’re going to pass through the forest’s tight aerial root system. I am within a foot of the mangrove and still I do not see a clearing large enough for a human body, much less a boat, to pass through.

Carlito hops out of his kayak. The water barely reaches his chest. “Abracadabra, Rastaman! Open sesame!” he shouts dramatically as he moves a few dangling prop roots to reveal a tight passage.

He pushes the first craft through. The tunnel seems to close itself behind the kayak. The mangrove might not be home to a plethora of spiders, as one fellow boater had feared, but it hosts a healthy population of tarantula-size arbor crabs. They scamper along the roots as I pull my paddle into my boat.

This mangrove forest is relatively young, with most trees standing at roughly twenty-five to thirty feet. During hurricane Hugo, it lost many of its mature trees, some of which were more than sixty feet tall. “After Hugo, the bay didn’t glow for six months,” Michelle says. “The conditions just weren’t quite right.”

We’ve traveled roughly half a mile into the mangrove when we reach another open section, a watery roundabout. Clumps of spongy silt float up around us. Carlito jumps out and thrusts his hands into the water to produce a huge clump of earth, which he plops on top of his head as the group looks on, aghast.

He begins to work it into his long hair. “What’s good for the dinoflagellates is good for your skin and nails!” He continues his mud bath, clearly delighted by the group’s collective recoil. Each time he pulls a handful of muck from the water, a sulfuric stench wafts over our flotilla.

He looks slightly alarmed when a military-looking cargo plane flies by overhead. “I haven’t seen an airplane like that in a long time,” he says. Carlito grew up with the military presence. He says, “I used to sleep every night to the sound of bombs. Boom! Boom! It thundered every day without rain.”

When the plane is gone, Carlito dips back into the swampland. Still reminiscing, he explains that one of his favorite childhood haunts was a beach where purple and orange coral formed rainbow cliffs. To his chagrin, it was located in a former military zone. “Sometimes, when they were bombing, I wouldn’t go there,” he says. “Other times, they still said I couldn’t go there. I did anyway. But then the protests began.”

People opposing navy activities on the island—including well-known activists such as Al Sharpton and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—were regularly arrested for acts of civil disobedience between 1999 and 2003. The movement was spurred when a local man was killed by an off-course bomb, an incident that incited international rage. Carlito said, “When things got bad, I couldn’t go to my beach at all. I would have gone to jail if they’d found me there.”

Carlito hops back into his boat to lead us though the mangrove. As he paddles, he mentions that some of his friends are advocating a local movement to build a bridge to mainland Puerto Rico. “People always say, ‘I hope Vieques gets a Kmart’ or something like that, but I say take two dollars and go to the mainland on the ferry. It’s all there.”

He negotiates the mangrove passageway gingerly, moving root-to-root slowly, so that his boat doesn’t hit the oysters below. He says, “I know Vieques will change, but I want it to stay like this—quiet. A bridge would make the island different. If we have more people, we need bigger roads. Bigger roads mean bigger neighborhoods and more cars. Nature will disappear.”

A year ago, Carlito had a different outlook. He says, “I was sleeping. I was like ‘Nature, who cares about that?’” But when he heard Abe’s Snorkeling was hiring, he was quick to apply. He knew how to kayak because he’d grown up around boats, he knew how to snorkel because he was a fisherman, and he was familiar with most parts of the island because it was his home. Even so, when Carlito was hired, he still didn’t really see any fringe benefits to working outdoors.