• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN •
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.