Ocean Journeys: Beginnings. Brandon Southall

itself (a miniature version of Washington’s obelisk) was less of a memorial to Cook than the profound spectacle of the bay itself. As we crossed, pods of spinner dolphins milled quietly, surfacing slowly in graceful half-slumber, their tight, hydrodynamic fins, flanks, and flukes glistening as they rolled in azure columns of light from the tall sun. The animals tried in vain to ignore tourists in dolphin-watching boats. Despite their obvious infatuation with the animals, they failed to understand that these animals, who feed mainly at night, came into the Bay to rest during the day. Viewing them passively from an idle kayak seemed a more sensitive and rewarding experience than blasting after them with outboards. It was also perhaps more respectful in the eyes of the ancients buried in the volcano above.

      Kealakekua Bay was where Captain James Edward Cook’s legendary world-circling voyages came to an end. Cook and his men landed briefly on Kaua’i in early 1778 while searching for the Northwest Passage. When Cook returned to Hawai’i that November, he was mistaken by natives at Kealakekua Bay for Lono, the white god of plentiful harvests. The locals began to suspect that the white men were less than divine when one of them died and they had sex with native women, despite Cook’s orders against it. They left after several months on peaceful terms, but a mast on one of their ships snapped and they returned. The locals were suspicious, wondering what they had done to displease them and Cook was killed in a skirmish that nearly set off a full-scale battle. His fellow sailors buried him in Kealakekua Bay before returning to Britain with news of his death. As they introduced the western world to the Hawaiian Islands, Cook’s bones were slowly incorporated into the living foundation of the same reef I had come upon two centuries later.

      I eased away from the black tunnel, down the steep slope toward deeper corals. Huge black triggerfish sparred and a sea turtle pushed past an array of large fan corals waving in subtle undercurrent. From the deep I noticed a flash, followed by several more. A school of cold blue bonito were feeding along the outer walls of the bay. Their streamlined bodies seemed sculpted by a mechanical engineer, with an emphasis on power and speed. As I drifted over the feeding school, they darted below me at a feverish clip. Their dark backs were nearly invisible as I looked down on them against the dark bottom; not accidentally, anything looking up at them against the bright sky would have similar difficulty detecting their light bellies. “Countershading” is a simple adaptation upon which many open-water marine animals have converged.

      I lost the school against the darkening bottom as I drifted into a hundred and fifty feet of water. I slowly ascended and the current ceased pulling me out to sea. After the free ride out, I had to swim back and it would be easier at the calm surface. I pumped by BC full of air so I was completely positively buoyant and could direct all my energy to pushing forward. Swimming in dive gear is not the easiest thing in the world, but the panoramic view and warm, calm water helped me along.

      The spinner dolphins were revving up in the bay, preparing for the evening hunt and I thought about the boats we had seen hounding them earlier. The ecotourism intrusions into their mid-day resting habitat raised an important and complex conservation issue. As people continue to expand their footprint and desire to see animals in their natural environments, wild places for wildlife continue to dwindle. The dolphins, like the falcons and grizzlies I myself intruded on in wonder at Glacier National Park, would no longer experience life as their ancestors had. On the other hand, it’s unquestionably better that people were chasing them with cameras and fascination than with harpoons. Some people want to try and shut off all human contact with the animals. Others oppose any restrictions on the number and nature of interested people around them. As was becoming increasingly common for me, I saw the most logical approach as an educated balance where animals would have meaningful and enforced protection, but people could experience their beauty in a way that might make them care more about conservation.

      I swam back toward Cook’s monument and the sun dipped into the tranquil ocean behind me, drawing shadows on the green coffee fields and dairy farms stretching above the bay. Wispy clouds pulled along high black ridges where centuries-old lava flow spilled, but above them I could see the backside of Mauna Loa’s summit.

      As if the rich history and full scenery of the deep blue bay and looming volcano in the setting sun were not enough, flying fish (“malolo”) began to skitter around me. They kicked the huge bottom lobes of their tails as they pressed off the water, extending modified pectoral fins as sails. They skimmed busily just above the water twenty, forty, eighty feet before subtly ducking back into it. The malolo buzzed around me and spinner dolphins continued their acrobatics in small groups passed by me moving out of the golden-red bay as evening settled on the gentle coast of the Big Island.

      ~~~

      My time there was a tranquil dream, an ebbing flow of encounters and emotion. Elizabeth and I found a seemingly endless stream of peaks, valleys, lava rock, reefs, and bays with bright sun and verdant mountainsides around every corner. Warm water and Tonka’s rumbling masked painful memories of our past trouble and an equivocal future that she was pushing me hard on. In many ways, our time in Hawai’I was a fundamental turning point. Typical of youth, I made life-changing choices without fully realizing their scope or consequence. The most difficult was to simply avoid choosing about our future, which was a tacit selection of an inevitable eventuality. In a bitter irony, we were never closer than our times in Hawai’i yet we began to diverge – largely because of the ocean.

      A clear outcome of those early tropical Pacific journeys was the course on which my career became set. There were certainly future events that would steer my path. But I arrived in Hawai’i with a love of the water, a general interest in biology, and a desire to work in some aspect of conservation; I left a marine biologist.

      A constant I have found is that really major challenges are rarely met with utter resolution, but somewhat paradoxically with many more questions. A whole new world opened up to me in the ocean and its study. My scientific umwelt had been sculpted by the plains and mountains, by conservation issues related to agriculture, mining, logging, and the ecology of rivers and streams. Things are more easily controlled and studied in terrestrial and freshwater systems than in the ocean. It felt a daunting and somewhat intractable realm to attack, but marine life had infected my passion and curiosity. I soaked in every ounce of the warm sea and found answers to life-altering events transpiring around me, but more questions than guidance emerged. What parts of this massive field should I pursue? How would I find my way into this nebulous and ultra-competitive area of study that so many professionals and friends were advising me to avoid? How would I separate myself from the countless others who felt similarly compelled? Would this choice lead me away from Elizabeth? And perhaps most pragmatically – how in the hell was I going to progress in marine biology as an undergraduate student in Missoula, Montana?

      Many experiences in the islands faded to warm memories upon my return to the snow-capped peaks, but captivating journeys had altered me forever. The connection between river, lake, ice, and ocean had been fused. One frigid day, high in the Bitterroot, I found this:

      Water rushes around a stone a thousand chance ways,

      Each white-cold in February’s ice-mingled fingers.

      Filling tiny dimples on its face, Earth’s blood pushes hard

      For change…for action, until rigid grip slips into motion.

      Each dynamic bed lies down a maze of possibilities,

      Moss-slippery steps, pouring aquatic cries to the sea.

      Landlocked and snow-bound, I continued my studies with a radically different perspective now that my life’s path had been steered to the ocean. I became intensely determined to prove wrong all those advising me I would never make it in this field. My choices, goals, and experiences were now bent through a marine lens. The journey began in earnest.