The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (17 page)

But futile though her gesture might prove to be in the long
run, it had been the right thing to do. Jobim would have approved. He would have told her that she had struck a blow for life. And she knew that to strike such a blow himself, he would have gone to almost any extreme.

O
nce or twice, he
had
gone to extremes. She recalled now a story he had told her about an incident he described as one of the most important, and dangerous, of his life. He was telling her, he had said, to teach her that there were times when you had to take big risks over matters of principle. And he had sworn her to secrecy because if the truth were ever to surface, it could start a war between Santa Maria and some of the other islands in the Sea of Cortez.

Late one summer, the fishermen of Santa Maria had discovered that one of their prime fishing grounds—a deep seamount in open water far from shore—was fast becoming barren. Every day it was more difficult to get a fish on the line, and what few fish there were looked scruffy and battered.

Their first thought had been that one of their number was using nets, but it was pointed out that huge nets were impractical in such deep water. None of them had a boat equipped with the powerful electric winches, the wide cockpit, and the support structures necessary to handle the nets.

Then they had concluded that some water-borne plague was killing all the fish. Every now and then, the depths of the sea would spawn and spew up clouds of poisonous microorganisms that contaminated hundreds of thousands of fish—either making their flesh toxic to human beings, or killing the fish themselves. But again, someone pointed out that if the fish were being killed, they would float to the surface and be
seen, and if the fish were being made poisonous, surely by now people would be aware of someone falling sick or dying, either here or in La Paz.

So it had to be something else, something new and strange and alarming. A few people insisted that it was God’s way of punishing the fishermen for being careless over the generations, for taking too much too indiscriminately.

Jobim knew that it had nothing to do with God. As usual, people were turning to God because He was a quick answer for unanswerable things. The more Jobim saw and heard, the more he smelled the scent of man.

Contributing to the fancies of the other fishermen was the fact that not one of them had ever seen the top of the seamount. None of them dived, none knew anything about what underwater terrain actually looked like. They assumed that fish lived somewhere down there, waiting, presumably, for the chance to bite a baited hook.

But Jobim had seen seamounts, if not precisely this one, and he knew what to look for, and so one afternoon he had paddled out to sea and anchored. Even if he hadn’t already known why he had never dived on this seamount, his anchor line would have told him: The killick dropped straight down and shot past five fathoms, past ten fathoms, past fifteen and eighteen and twenty fathoms (the last marked spot on the anchor line) and stopped, at last, at twenty-two fathoms—132 feet.

Jobim could not dive that deep. No one he knew could dive that deep. In fact, as far as he knew, no normal person could breath-hold dive to 132 feet. To dive that far would be like crawling down a tower made of two dozen men standing on one another’s shoulders, or like falling from the top of the tallest building in La Paz. There would be no bottom visible
for more than half the way down, and when and if you got more than half the way down, from there you wouldn’t be able to see the surface.

But Jobim knew enough about his own capabilities to be willing to try—not to go all the way, but to go far enough so he could see the bottom. So he hyperventilated and sped hand-over-hand down the anchor line, toward the blue-black mists, through the gloom where there was no up and no down, until he could see the top of the seamount far below.

He went farther, waiting for the body signs that would tell him to stop, and before they came he had been able to see enough to need to see no more. From 90 or 100 feet he had seen most of the top of the seamount, and the landscape told an obvious tale.

The soft corals and sea fans were lying on their sides, ripped up by their roots like a tree in a
chubasco
. Many of the hard antler corals were broken into small pieces among the rocks. The vegetation of most of the bigger rocks was covered with a layer of sand. One brain coral the size of a bathtub was split in two, and its halves lay in a sand valley like slabs of melon.

There were fish—a few small ones darting in and out of the rocks, and a good-sized
cabrío
that looked healthy until suddenly it flipped over on its back and swam in frantic circles, and one moray eel, dead and wedged into a crevice as if by a swift surge of tide.

The seamount had been devastated by a series of quick, terrible storms whose force had killed nearly every living thing and had maimed the survivors.

Had nature sent the storms, Jobim would have been sad. But he knew they were caused by men, and he was angry.

Fishermen from another island—Santu Espiritu, a few miles away—must be coming here at night and tossing overboard
sticks of dynamite with long waterproof fuses. Long fuses were for the protection of the fishermen: A fuse too short would burn down too fast, and the dynamite would explode too close to the boat, cracking open the bottom and perhaps sinking the boat. But long fuses were a disaster for the seamount: They burned all the way down to the bottom, so the dynamite exploded not in open water (where its concussive force would kill the fish in the immediate area) but among the rocks and sand and coral, where pressures would build and channel and spread, killing animals in their dens and destroying the seamount itself.

Underwater, dynamite was a much more terrible weapon than it was on the surface. In air, a stick of dynamite—not packed in anything to contain and amplify the explosion, like rock or cement, not covered with anything to shatter and become shrapnel, like glass or pebbles—wouldn’t do much damage beyond about ten yards. It was said that the detonation of a single stick of dynamite underwater could be felt more than half a mile. It could cause havoc over an area of thousands of square feet.

After the explosions, the fishermen would spread nets on the surface and scoop up the corpses of the animals as they floated up from below.

This was a quick, economical, and final kind of fishing. No risk of damage to expensive lines and hooks. No need for baitfish. Everything on the seamount was killed instantly. No time-consuming wait for a fish to bite. Best of all, the fish came to the surface on their own; you didn’t even have to pull them up.

It was efficient and illegal and universally condemned as immoral, sacrilegious, and self-defeating, for everyone knew that it destroyed fishing grounds and could only hasten the day when whole communities would be forced by starvation
to become (the ultimate nightmare of them all) beggars on the streets of Mexico City. Even the worst louts among fishermen considered dynamite fishing beneath contempt.

But Jobim knew enough about certain kinds of people, about how stupidity and brutishness and greed could combine to drive a person to do things that even a moment’s rational thought would perceive as destructive, to self as well as others. It was the promise of great profit at little expense and no risk, of quick money in the hand right now and don’t worry that there won’t be any more when the fish are gone. Someone else can weep over that. I’ll get mine while I can, and other people can worry about themselves.

It was the same mentality that led the company that made fertilizer in the city to pump its chemical wastes into the harbor. The company got rid of its wastes, which was economical and good. The government, however, began to think that it wasn’t a good idea to keep pumping chemicals into the harbor where people swam and fished, so it told the company to stop.

The workers had rioted and tried to burn down the government building, because they said the company couldn’t afford to haul its wastes elsewhere, and if it had to do so, some workers would lose their jobs and all would lose an impending raise in pay. The government backed down; the company continued to pump wastes into the harbor.

Two and a half years later, the harbor died. The chemicals had formed a poisonous sludge that coated the bottom and choked all the vegetation and shut off the oxygen in the water and killed every living thing. Guests at the luxury hotels, who swam in the harbor, began to come down with ghastly skin ulcers.

The government ordered the hotels to close and told the chemical company to stop pumping chemicals into the harbor.
But the chemical company had made no plans to haul its wastes elsewhere, and so, compelled to stop using the harbor, it closed down.

Because there were no longer any hotels to stay in or restaurants to eat at or waters to swim in, the tourists and vacationers stopped coming to the city, and all the gift shops and boutiques closed and pitched their workers into the streets.

The workers at the chemical company had gotten their raise in pay, and for a few months had enjoyed the money. But because of their insistence on that new money they had lost everything. And it was not just they who were punished, but all the other workers who had lost their jobs. And eventually, “all” became everybody, for the city was deprived of a reason to exist, and slowly but inevitably it ceased to exist.

Nowadays it was a dusty cluster of empty buildings in a ring around the still-dead harbor, with the skeleton of the chemical company standing on a promontory as a reminder to passersby of the fragility of things.

But such lessons were hard to learn and easy to forget, and right then, over that seamount, Jobim had proof that some people still hadn’t learned. Almost everyone in the islands had a cousin, or at least an acquaintance, who had chosen quick and easy money at one time or another. Perhaps he had sold the fishing boat his father had left him and taken the money to the city where he intended to go into business for himself, not realizing that he was already in business for himself, the business for which he had been trained and at which he was as good as any in the world. And when he got to the city he found that it was already full of businessmen who were all too eager to relieve him of his money (which was certainly not enough to start a new business anyway), so very soon his money was gone and he was begging for a job cleaning toilets in the city comfort station and smelling, instead of
fish and sea air, ammonium chloride that burned the lining out of his nose.

But those people, everyone’s cousin or friend, harmed only themselves and their families. These men from Santu Espiritu threatened to destroy the livelihoods of everyone on their own island, on Santa Maria, and on all the other islands as well. For they would not stop until they had cleaned out every seamount, every fishing ground they knew of, had heard of, or could find.

And Jobim knew what they would be saying to themselves, how they would be justifying behavior for which each of their mothers would have spat on them. They would say to one another, and hear one another say in reinforcing response, until they all believed it: If we don’t do it, somebody else will; people are no good, and the only ones who survive are those who look out for themselves, and survival, after all, is what life is all about.

Jobim would stop them, but he would have to do it alone. If he alerted other Santa Maria fishermen, and they all went out in boats and waited for the raiders from Santu Espiritu, the raiders would see their boats and would flee. There would be a chase and a fight, and a lot of people would be hurt. Or, if the raiders escaped to Santu Espiritu, they would deny everything and accuse the people from Santa Maria of making up stories to cover their own misdeeds. There would be a long and bitter fight between the two islands in which everyone would be hurt except perhaps those who deserved to be. And they, meanwhile, would be out at night in new places, destroying life on new seamounts.

So Jobim made a special trip to La Paz and went to see a boyhood friend, a man whose father had received and sold the fish for Jobim’s father many years ago. The friend worked
in a salvage yard, where ships and boats and machines and cargoes and all sorts of other huge metal things that had been raised from under the water or saved before they could sink were brought to be restored or cut up for scrap.

Jobim and his friend had a beer, then two, and while his friend kept saying (time and again but in different words) that he envied Jobim for being able to be his own man and work at his own pace and live his life on the sea instead of in a place where the noise and the dirt were enough to drive a man crazy, Jobim kept asking questions about the newest methods and tools of salvage—especially about new ways of separating metals underwater, things like hunks of steel or parts of ships.

He said, finally, that a ferryboat had sunk near Santa Maria and was becoming a nuisance to the fishermen because it kept snagging and tearing their nets. The ferryboat was too big to move, but he thought that if he cut it into pieces, perhaps he could tow the pieces into deeper water where they would be out of the way. Would he need to hire underwater welders to do this? Would his friend’s salvage company do the job for him? Of course, he couldn’t pay much, but …

“Thing like that, you wouldn’t cut it up,” said his friend.

“Oh?” Jobim had known that all along, but he was trying to lead his friend into giving him more information without his friend’s knowing why—in case what Jobim had planned went wrong and any part of it was ever traced back to his friend.

“You’d blow it up. The new stuff we use cuts sharper than a knife and a hundred times quicker than a torch. You mix it, prime it, set it, fire it and POW! The job is done.”

“What is this stuff?”

“They call it PLS. It’s a liquid,
two
liquids. You carry it in
two separate jugs till you’re ready to use it, because once it’s mixed it starts to generate heat and if it gets too hot it goes off by itself.”

“How much would I need to blow up a ferryboat?”