Of course terms like Late Jurassic and Cretaceous mean little to nongeologists, and numbers of years ago like sixty or eighty million mean much less to mortals such as myself who can’t account for yesterday. Suffice to say this limestone underlay composed of the skeletal remains of barnacles and other immobile organisms—minuscule wildflowers pressed between the pages of a tome—has existed for an incomprehensibly long period, and today measures nearly five miles in thickness.
Eventually this slab became so dense that it began to subside under its own weight at a rate of roughly four centimeters per thousand years. For eons, though, the seafloor simply spread warm waters farther and farther inland. This was back when all the world was hot and humid, awash in salty water. Huge toothy creatures swam here, stomped the boggy shorelines. They ate foliage and each other, gnashed bloodied teeth. They moved loudly and terribly, or so we imagine and conjecture. We know them by their coveted bones and fossils, and though the record of their massive comings and goings is faint, we hear echoes of it in the roar of heavy breakers rolling shoreward.
Then, like something out of a story I might tell my children by the fire—something sudden, meant to terrify—a large, audibly flaming object plummeted from the sky, rent the ground, and put an end to these creatures and to most breathing for a while: to the braiding flights of birds and the small mammals birthing nursing babies, to most green and flowering things.
But the water remained water, just as the rock, though scarred, remained rock. Over another unfathomable stretch of time, under great tectonic force—a tremendous focalization of subterranean energy—the earth’s crust buckled like pond ice ceding to warm rain. The seafloor shifted, configuring banks, and when the seas finally receded, the highest ridges formed islands atop endless limestone shallows, the Gran Bajamar, as the Spanish sailors called them millennia later, “Great Shallows,” and eventually the Grand Bahama Bank.
By and by rain fell on the exposed bedrock and dissolved its bonds, the falling water absorbing traces of atmospheric carbon dioxide as it descended. When rain met limestone, they brewed a strange tea of weak carbonic acid that chewed through parts of the rock. Gem-blue holes were carved in the karst, adorning the seafloor with deep pools divers would covet centuries later.
More importantly from a biological perspective, a relatively thin but essential freshwater lens formed when the rainwater that had seeped through the limestone’s surface collected below sea level, floating atop the denser salt water. This seminal meniscus of groundwater would come to comprise the majority of naturally occurring potable water in the islands, a fertile layer of liquid in which marine organisms large and small flourish. Its existence allows a would-be moonscape to morph into one of the world’s most fecund habitats, a place where plants like mangrove trees thrive.
Amphibious trees that root in the unfriendliest of shoreline soils where no other tree can, mangroves can live for a hundred years. Subject to the conditions a mangrove endures daily—muck, salt, tidal fluctuations—an ordinary plant would wilt within a week, but mangroves don’t only survive, they transform and soften the elements around them. Serving as natural head-walls, their banks protect inland ecosystems from rough seas and filter the negative constituents from the water, increasing the quality and volume of the freshwater lens. Inevitably salt permeates the trees’ root systems, but they simply store it in old leaves, which they shed. And the mangroves’ roots breathe, literally snorkeling for air while simultaneously anchoring the trees in tide-shifted mud. Crabs and snails climb and fasten themselves to these roots to avoid predators; these filter-feeding organisms also clean the water that flows back and forth over them, so that the tide can rush out cleansed into a thriving sea.
In the hour-long film that is Earth’s history, we humans make our cameo in the final second. Perhaps that’s why a phrase like a rate of roughly four centimeters per thousand years falls on deaf ears. We may never possess the genius of the mangroves and their adaptive ingenuity, but we may still have time to recognize our minuscule role in the order of things. The close study of a landscape such as this union of bedrock, tree, tidal flux, and fertile water is a start, and might lead us to move with the measure of the waters and the islands themselves.
A fish together with other fish invariably knows what is on each other’s mind. Unlike humans they are not ignorant of each other’s intentions.
—DOGEN
I sat often at my computer looking at the picture turned screen saver that Miller had sent of me holding my first bonefish, my eyes beaming over soon-to-be-sunburned cheeks. Though I’d caught thousands of fish in my lifetime, I’d doubted I’d ever been so elated about one that so closely resembled a minnow. Lacking the dangerous stiletto-shaped allure of a barracuda, say, or the simple polished-penny sheen of a redfish, or the azure panache of a dorado’s dorsal fin, the bonefish possesses the beauty, rather, of certain mirrors or windows.
Despite its homely appearance, its mouth shaped, in one writer’s words, “like a rechargeable vacuum cleaner,” and its relatively modest average size, the bonefish has attained sport fish–royalty status due largely to its fickle manner and unsurpassed acceleration. With sturdy caudal fins fanning winglike from its flanks, the fish is built for departure. Tail tip to sloped nose, its belly is nearly level, recalling, in profile, Pterrichthyodes, “the first fish,” which swam early seas 350 million years ago.
Weighing only a third of a pound in salt water, a fusiform bonefish of six pounds shuns its element. Fleeing boat or boat’s shadow, a lemon shark or a conspiring pair of barracuda, the bonefish can reach speeds of up to twenty-five miles per hour swimming in water that is 760 times denser than air—I would have to sprint at an equivalent speed through waist-deep Jell-O to experience similar resistance.
When not fleeing danger, the bonefish avoids it by means of intricate disguise, its shadow nearly always more visible than its body. Over white sand, the fish appears the color of watered-down skim milk; over turtle grass, on a knee-deep subaqueous prairie, the fish jewels up, turning the color of some yet-to-be-discovered gem; traversing coral heads or mangrove roots, the fish goes sepia, the density of the pigment cells beneath its fingernail-shaped scales varying from moment to moment to match its environment.
Because of its considerable speed, the bonefish is rarely pursued in blue water by its predators. On the flats, however, the more herdable bone becomes a mark for teams of blacktip sharks, bonnetheads, and lemons. Ospreys traffic the air above shallow saltwater acreages, but rarely seek out adult bonefish when easier game abounds. The archipelago’s first people netted bonefish, making the quarry keener to shore-walking humans’ thudding vibrations—vibrations sensed in the fish’s lateral line, a thin, tail-to-cheek organ that detects movements in the water. Centuries later the disturbing plop of a bell sinker followed shortly by the slightly quieter but equally alarming smack of a shrimp-threaded bait hook were added to this list of affronting sounds, the many suggestions of imminent death.
If desperate for safety, the fish seeks out like company: more eyes to watch for danger, more sensory organs alert. Despite its tendency to school, Linnaeus named the bonefish after a solitary mammal, and a conspicuous one at that: the white fox. The eighteenth-century naturalist, of course, had never seen an actual bonefish, and must have focused on sketches of the fish’s canine nose. In Central America the bonefish is called ratón for the way it scurries briskly from the minutest piscatory failings. Among anglers, gray ghost is the preferred and