Harley and Me (25 page)

As we enter the bay near Temae, I keep missing the paddle changes, too depleted and body-fried to sustain focus. The Hawaiian in the seat behind tries to cue me when to change. But I'm off. I don't care. I'm still paddling. We glide over the blue-green waters that make Tamae one of the most gorgeous beaches in the world. And still, we paddle. By the time we come ashore on the sandy lagoon, we have paddled for four hours and covered some fourteen miles. My head aches from
the steady concentration, my shoulders are searing in pain, my palms are raw, and the joints of my legs, I'm certain, are permanently fused. But we did it. I did it.

Crossing the Sea of the Moon via outrigger canoe had never been on my bucket list. But neither was learning to ride a motorcycle and riding from L.A. to Milwaukee. Nor climbing Mount Whitney. Nor surviving a divorce at age forty-nine.

• • •

My sojourn in Tahiti is running out and Frank is distressed that we haven't done more. A few weeks ago, we took a group of high school students visiting from New York City to Tetiaroa, Marlon Brando's private atoll, and camped there a few days. The Brando, an all-inclusive, super-green hotel, is preparing to open soon and we lived among the construction workers and learned about the delicate ecology of the atoll. Brando's son, Teihotu, took us to Bird Island, one of the smaller motu (or “islets”) of Tetiaroa, to see where some of the most rare and beautiful pelagic and shorebirds nest. While there, we were caught in a tropical downpour and had to seek warmth by stripping down to our bathing suits and submerging in the lagoon water until the storm passed. Then a “cyclonic event” diverted all air and nautical travel with its battering winds. Those of us sheltered in tents had to join the students and teachers in the dorms.

When the storms passed, we learned about the novel system for cooling the luxury hotel that pumped cool, deep water from the ocean and transferred its coolness to fresh water that is then circulated through the buildings. In downtime, I watched lemon and whitetip sharks circle in front of the communal cantina, awaiting scraps. They show up daily after mealtime, just beyond a sign:
INTERDICTION DE NOURRIR LES REQUINS
/
DO NOT FEED THE SHARKS
.

Tetiaroa and the paddling adventure, Frank decided, weren't quite enough. Next, Frank and I should make plans to go to an outlying atoll, Rangiroa, 225 miles away, where we'll dive the atoll's celebrated
coral reef. It's logical that Frank, with his background in marine biology, has been scuba diving most of his life. As a kid, he used to dream about breathing underwater just fine. Anytime he dives now, he tells me, it's that same experience again: Breathing underwater feels totally natural to him, like returning to a normal state he doesn't get to experience in his land-based life. I, on the other hand, took classes to become scuba-certified when I was twenty. I panicked the first time I was asked to stay at the bottom of a swimming pool and breathe with a tank on, certain I was going to run out of air and die. I finally completed the two required dives to earn my certification but never dived again. Thirty years later, can I remember how to do this? Do I even want to?

I sign up for a refresher dive on Mo'orea while Frank makes plane reservations. The dive master is a retired Frenchman who is patient when we make our outing into Opunohu Bay. We start to descend and the panic grips me again.
I can't stay down here! I'll drown!
I give the thumbs-up gesture for us to return to the surface. “Something wrong?” he asks when we surface.

Okay, this is it. Either I decide I can and will dive, knowing that I'll be okay, or I decide this is too much for me. Which will it be?

“I just needed to calm myself,” I tell him. “Let's try again.” I try to slow my breathing and we descend. Five feet, ten feet, twenty feet. We swim along the bottom of the bay, looking at coral, tropical fish, sea cucumbers. I work to keep my breathing even and calm. After forty minutes, he gives me the thumbs-up. I can't lie: I'm relieved it's over. When I climb aboard the boat, though, I'm swelled with a feeling of accomplishment.

A few days later Frank and I take a ferry from Mo'orea to Papeete, then fly to Rangiroa, one of the largest atolls in the world. The lagoon's exceptionally clear water and the diverse marine fauna make this a major diving destination. We're staying with Frank's friend and fellow ecotour guide Ugo in a little cottage. Ugo recommends a local dive company and we make arrangements to do a drift dive through Tiputu Pass, one of two places where the larger ocean flows into
and out of the Rangiroa lagoon. We will dive as the tide is changing and be carried by the current, viewing coral, sharks, barracuda, and amazing fish.

We are a group of six divers, one dive master, and a videographer to capture it all. I pair up with Frank as my buddy. The dive master warns us to be alert to the ascending current we'll hit about two-thirds of the way through the dive. We need to make sure we don't accidently ascend with the current. Ascending too quickly causes decompression sickness, also known as the bends, which can lead to severe joint pain, unconsciousness, and even death. As we descend I stay focused on the magnificent coral and sea life. Frank, on the other hand, dives as though he's moving through his natural habitat, and I try to emulate him. The shifting tide carries us gently; it's like being on a ride in Disneyland with beautiful plants and creatures gliding past. I keep checking over my shoulder to make sure Frank's with me.

I'm pleased with how the dive is going, and the panic is just background noise. The dive master takes my hand. He guides me to a large rock and presses my hands on it, gesturing for me to stay put. Next, he brings another woman from our group over to the same rock and puts her in place as well. I don't know what's going on, but I'm sure it'll all make sense in a minute.

But a minute stretches into two. The girl looks equally puzzled and raises her shoulders.
Why are we here like this?
I glance around to locate my dive buddy. I don't see him.

I can't find the dive master either, nor the rest of the group. Just this girl next to me. I look up at the surface above. It's a long way up but I can still see the light streaming down through the layers of water. My depth gauge reads twenty-six meters. Eighty-eight feet. I've never been this deep.

What if the dive master doesn't come back for us? Maybe something happened to Frank and that's why I can't see him. Maybe I should make a break for the surface. But I breathe deep and try to rationalize. The dive master is a professional. He knows what he's
doing. Frank has done this a million times. He's fine. I'm fine. I have enough air. Look at that coral over there. See how that fish has asymmetrical stripes. I focus on my meditation breathing. All is well. All is well.

It feels as though hours pass, though it's maybe only three or four minutes. Finally, the dive master returns and motions for us to follow him. I'm flooded with relief. I won't have to decide about making a break for the surface. We follow and before I know it, our group is reassembled and moving into a trench-like area where the current is moving much faster. We blend with the flow and are swiftly carried along. I am still struggling with surges of panic but also learning to relax. There are more sharks and barracuda and some of the weirdest fish I've ever seen. A Napoleon, also known as a humphead wrasse, swims by. A prehistoric cartoon fish, he's as big as three men, sports massive lips and looks like he belongs on
The Flintstones
. I'm so caught up with the strange creature I don't notice I'm ascending. The dive master catches my hand. He gestures for me to go back down. He points to the ocean's surface, awfully close.

Eventually, we ascend, stopping a few meters below the surface to acclimate for five minutes before heading all the way up and finding our boat. When I break the surface, I'm buffeted by waves and wind, but I'm excited. Yes, I was scared and nearly panicked, but I did it.

Back on the island, walking to town for lunch, Frank is harsh. “You need to pay more attention to your depth,” he scolds. “If the dive master hadn't come and got you when you hit that ascending current, you would have been toast. That was a major fuckup.”

I shrink an inch with each word. At lunch, I learn that during the period when I thought I'd lost Frank, he was right behind me, a few feet away. I couldn't see him because my tank obscured my vision. He had an eye on me every moment of the dive. And his scolding, I finally realize, is rooted in concern. If something happened to me, if I had ascended fully, I could have been seriously injured, maybe even killed. And he felt responsible. Still, I am deflated from our conversation and we have another dive scheduled for this afternoon.

We dive again after lunch and I agree to keep closer tabs on my depth. For once, I don't panic on the descent. I stay level with Frank and the dive master and pay closer attention to what's taking place all around me.

The next day, on our third dive, I'm really getting it. The day is stormy with showers. We are dropped off from the boat in the middle of massive waves and pelting rain. I descend without a problem and find the undersea world calm and disconnected from all the ruckus going on above.

•
    
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
    
•

EVOLVE OR DIE

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

—ANDRE GIDE

My time in French Polynesia has continued my “coming out” as a risk taker. I've determined, for instance, that I'm a dopamine fiend, willing to do almost anything to get that brain chemical that's fired up these new and novel experiences. For me, that highly satisfying risky-business neurotransmitter keeps me perpetually on the lookout for a new way to attain it. At the same time, though, as a result of a quarter century spent care-giving and nurturing, I am uncomfortable indulging this drive, as if it's something to be ashamed of.

While here on Mo'orea, I hang out at the UC Berkeley Gump Field Station, sharing space with students from universities around the world and their professors studying coral-reef ecology. I love the research vibe as teams of marine biologists study the effect of aggressive damselfish on the coral reef, and whether ocean sediment on algae makes a difference to the herbivorous fish that eat it. Others study the amazing coral regeneration currently taking place right before our eyes.

Prior to 2008, the coral reef surrounding this small triangular island had been subject to relatively few natural disturbances. The well-developed reef and lagoon were almost undisturbed. Then a pair of events changed everything. First, the migratory crown-of-thorns sea star,
Acanthaster planci
(many people know sea stars as starfish), moved into the area wholesale and ate all the coral it could get its greedy little teeth around. As a result, the sea star population swelled. When all the coral was gone, the crown-of-thorns population crashed with no remaining food source. Then in 2010 Tropical Cyclone Oli veered close to the tiny island, churning up the bay and destroying what few coral holdouts might have escaped the sea star invasion. The researchers were in a panic. Was this the end of the coral reef?

These two events radically changed the fragile ecosystem that supported not only the reef fish and mollusks that lived in the coral, but also the countless people who fed on the sea life and the fishermen who made their living catching them. A coral reef is basically the nursery of the ocean. Doom here foretells a much bigger problem.

But as the researchers came up with increasingly radical plans to try to change events, the elders on the island knew better and tried to tell the researchers that the story doesn't stop here. Don't fish in the lagoon, the elders said, and wait.

As a result of the devastated coral, the algae began to take over, thriving in sudden abundance where the coral had once been. Because of the massive, new surge of algae, the population of herbivorous fish who eat the algae was the next species to explode. Those same fish that the elders said to stop fishing in the lagoon then ate the algae back, thereby clearing the surface for a new generation of coral to take root in the fertile beds now free of the crown-of-thorns sea star hordes.

Sure enough, biodiversity began to reassert itself. The coral was coming back.

The scientists here set out every day with questions in mind and a plan of observation and experimentation to see if they can answer them. During the rainy season, work is suspended with the torrential
downpours. But when the downpours calm and the silt settles and the waters clear, it's back to business studying life on and around the coral reef.

I love watching and talking with the scientists. I'm thrilled by the questions they ask, and the fact that they keep going out into the bay, time and again, until they either prove or disprove their theories, hoping, more than anything, to understand something new about the coral ecosystem. What I love most is the way they value their own curiosity and consider their explorations part and parcel of what they do. I want to adopt that attitude more in my own life, to not be so hesitant to step out of what I
do
know to explore what I don't.

I spend evenings in the open-to-the-elements house, draped in mosquito netting, watching TED lectures on my iPad. One night I happen on one by George Monbiot, the same journalist who wrote about the “era of loneliness” for
The Guardian
. His lecture focuses on the rewilding of Yellowstone National Park. This takes me immediately back to that stunning visit Rebecca and I shared last summer on our motorcycles, the grasslands and mountains and elk and bison we saw, the magnificence of the place.

Rewilding, like the natural regeneration taking place on the coral reef, speaks to me of rebirth and my own personal evolution. I start to see my risk-taking adventures as more than just crazy dopamine fixes I crave. Perhaps I am rewilding my own ecosphere.

Humans, Monbiot points out, evolved during times a lot more threatening than now. “We still possess the fear and the courage and the aggression to navigate those times,” he says. But in our safe and comfortable lives, we don't get to experience that wilder side of ourselves. The dominant aim of industrialized societies has been to conquer uncertainty, to know what comes next. “We've privileged safety over experience and we've gained a lot in doing so, but I think we've lost something too.”

He considers Yellowstone. During the seventy-year absence of wolves in the region, the elk population took over the park and ate almost all vegetation despite human intervention to control them.
Then, the wolves were reintroduced in 1995 with a pack of fourteen wolves at first, then seventeen more the following year. That was it. Thirty-one wolves added to the mix of this iconic park encompassing nearly thirty-five hundred square miles.

When the wolves were reintroduced, they hunted the elk, exactly as scientists had predicted. What wasn't expected was how the wolves' presence changed elk behavior. The elk now avoided parts of the park where they might be easily trapped, like valleys and gorges. Those places, in turn, started to regenerate. The valley sides, previously razed by elk, now sprouted forests. Songbirds and migratory birds returned, great flocks of them. The renewal didn't stop with the trees and the birds. The new abundance of trees meant more beavers, who in turn built dams that then provided a habitat for other creatures: otters, muskrats, fish, ducks, reptiles, amphibians.

In addition to culling elk, the wolves also stalked coyotes. The animals that are naturally prey to coyotes, like rabbits and mice, experienced population growth. In turn, they attracted hawks and weasels, foxes and badgers. The birds of prey were not far behind, happy to feed on the carrion created by the wolves. Bears, too, increased in number, also drawn by the carrion and new berries produced by the regenerating shrubs.

As a result of this handful of wolves, even the waterways changed because the regenerating forests stabilized the banks so that they collapsed less often. That meant that the rivers became more fixed in their course. “So the wolves, small in number, transformed not just the ecosystem of Yellowstone National Park, this huge area of land, but also its physical geography.”

Hearing this, I can't help but wonder about the changes in my own life that have occurred in the past two years, allowing similar regeneration. By leaving my comfortable life and striking out on my own, I opened my life to predators against which I had set up barriers, barriers that I had in place my entire adult life. Now I would have to confront those predators. How would I pay the bills as a single mother with kids in college? What was I going to do about
that rat under the sink? How would I deal with a broken-down car? Who was I going to talk to at 3:00
AM
in the wake of a nightmare? How was I going to navigate my sexual behavior as a newly single woman?

Even to get to this place of questioning took wholesale destruction. But then again, the coral was all but destroyed by the sea star. The elk were culled by the hungry wolves. I left behind the family structure I'd spent twenty-five years building. Everything, decimated.

Looking out on the bay today takes me back to being a kid in Sequoia National Park. We camped there every year and trailed national park rangers as they taught us to distinguish between sugar, Jeffrey, and podgepole pines, identify the various birds, and understand the complex web that made up the coniferous forest. My favorites, of course, were the giant sequoias, the world's most massive trees. Even as a child, I felt a great affinity with them; something about my red hair seemed to connect us. I learned that tannin in the sequoia's bark gave it its distinctive red hue and protected it from insects and fire. The effects of past fires can be seen whenever you walk in a sequoia grove. Black scars, in some cases centuries old, mark every one of the larger trees, though I picture them as a badge of honor. I've seen several with the entire heart of the tree burned out, a cavity large enough to stand inside and look up through the shell, like a giant chimney, and view the sky. And yet, those burnt and disfigured trees continue to live. A ranger once told me that as long as one centimeter of the cambium layer running up the side of the tree remained unharmed, the tree could still regenerate. These trees are massive, the largest living things on Earth, and it takes only one unharmed centimeter for recovery.

Yet it has been man's misplaced efforts to enforce an unnatural degree of security that harmed the sequoia groves more than anything. Going back to the 1900s, the National Park Service mandated fire suppression. It was assumed that fire is a bad thing, a source of death and destruction. But life and nature are much more nuanced. It's hard to find things that are simply good or bad. We accept that
water is the source of all life. Without it we die. And yet, through rain, ice, snow, and erosion, it's probably the most destructive natural force on the planet. The key role fire plays in the survival of sequoias (like the key role risk and sensation seeking play in my own life) was not apparent for a long time. But the truth is this: Without fire, sequoias cannot survive.

First, fire clears out excess underbrush, allowing sunlight to reach tiny sequoia seedlings. Then, in order to release their seeds, sequoia cones need to dry and open. Fire is the most effective agent for this process. Finally, the remaining ash makes a perfect natural fertilizer, creating the ideal soil bed for the newly released sequoia seeds.

Here on Mo'orea I experience wonderful write-the-folks-back-home kind of moments: swimming with sharks and stingrays, snorkeling the coral reef, drinking coconut water straight from the nut. There are also challenges, like the rains that wash the road away, requiring my help to rebuild it, mosquitos that swarm with their irritation and potential for Zika virus, the persistent stink of mildew. Fun in the sun and challenges in the rain come together, as happens in all of life. If I had come here as a tourist, I could have stayed in a deluxe hotel and insulated myself from much of the havoc. But I didn't ask for a tourist's experience of Mo'orea.

And I don't want a tourist experience of my life.

To partake in a rich life, I need biodiversity. I need both the respites of security and the moments of risk. The times I say “fuck it” and the times I buckle down and get to work. The times I sacrifice for my children, my job, my loved ones, and the times I claim my own moment in the sun. One side without the other is not balanced. My life, until now, has been one long surrender. That isn't good for me, for my children, my family, my friends. I have been only half alive. The only way to be truly present, I am learning, is first to be truly present to myself. To experience my wildness fully. To reintroduce risk and biodiversity. To ask question like the researchers. To not know. To risk the wolves, the fire, the sea stars. To be willing to evolve or die.

Any motorcyclist knows one truth as a fact of physics. When trying to make a tight turn, you cannot pull back and you cannot go halfway. If you fail to lean your full body weight into the turn, you will not make it. To survive, we have to take the counterintuitive approach. Lean into what scares you with all your might. Throw your body into that turn even when it feels like it will kill you.