I Am a Rock - Simon & Garfunkel
There’s a dog lying by the side of the road. It’s been dead for a bit. Its belly is already swollen with the gases that inevitably announce rot and decay; its dead ears, filled with hatching maggots, are no longer twitching at the buzzing of the flies. Our driver looks at it without much interest as we curve past it on our way to the hotel. She looks over her shoulder and says, “You probably want to keep to the side of the road when you walk around here at night.” We are on St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands off the coast of Puerto Rico.
St. Croix is America. Only it isn’t. No open plains or wide skies or skylines here: the tiny island is crammed to the brim with nature wrestling over top of itself to be noticed by the sun. It being an island and all, the bright blues and greens of the Caribbean, the palm trees and hibiscus strewn about, the rain forest and sandy beaches, banana daiquiris and sunsets indicate this could be paradise. And it is. The beach area off St. Croix and, at a stone’s throw, Buck Island, was voted Top Ten Most Beautiful Beaches (In The World?) by National Geographic, we are told. Largest living coral reef in the Caribbean, we are told. The Friendliest People you’ll ever meet, we are told. And indeed, people everywhere on the island greet us so often and heartfelt that we start to think, at some point, that they must get a monthly allowance for every “Good morning” they pitch at a tourist. Or maybe they get beat on with a stick for every visitor they forget to greet. It’s hard to tell from the expressions on the faces.
We get a giggly “A’ight” in unison from three flawless teenage girls. Sitting the way only girls in hot climates can sit together, on the steps to the porch of a tiny house, they can’t be more than fourteen, maybe sixteen years old. Beautiful: what the smell of hibiscus would look like, if the smell of hibiscus were three girls. One of them breaks the surface of her stunning face into a smile as we walk by, revealing the near-toothless, cavernous mouth of a seasoned meth addict – or maybe she has simply been foolish, refusing to follow the island rules of tourist engagement one time too many. Again, it’s hard to tell.
Best snorkeling ever, we are told. Sea turtles nest here by the bucket load; shark nurseries cradle curious lemon sharks, and docile nurse sharks. Cute, like kittens, and perfectly safe to swim next to, we are told. Like kittens. The stingrays ‘round here never poke their stinger right in your heart or anything. They just ray, their puppy dog faces beaming up at you in wagging tail delight. In the bluest waters you’ve ever seen, parrot fish crunch their buck teeth down chunks of hard coral; endless shoals of yellow wrasses envelop the diver by the millions – swirling, sparkling, shooting up and down and sideways around him with that choreographed mixture of simultaneous push and pull, this half-conscious centrifugal force, they place the diver – awkward, sluggish, his pink meat still giddy with the new sense of weightlessness: out of his element – at the center of their shark feeding frenzy waiting to happen.
It’s a pretty good sound. The sound parrot fish make when they break off a piece of coral, I mean. I was half expecting it to be a wet sound, it being under water and all. I was expecting it to be a sound as wet and warm as the sound rabbits make when they munch on a carrot. That’s one of the best sounds in the world, the sound of a bunny rabbit munching on a piece of carrot. It’s the sound of safe, of succulent and soft and pink and carefree.
Curiously enough, the sound parrot fish make underwater is as dry as the crunch of potato chips. It’s a familiar sound, the sound of an evening curled up on the couch to watch a movie you’ve seen three times before, so it doesn’t matter when you talk all the way through it – only underwater the crunch is taken completely out of context. It’s a sound that belongs on land; when you hear it underwater, two conflicting elements collide with such immediacy that it makes you jerk your head, instantaneously aware of the fact that you, much like the sound, are very much out of your element.
You tell yourself, I’m 80% water, how can I feel out of my element? Your scientist sweetheart says, Really, salt water is very much your element. Listen, he says, Salt water is so much like our own body juice that when you start bleeding underwater, your body won’t even send out a signal to stop the bleeding because it thinks the water surrounding you is part of you; the salt water tricks your body into thinking no wound is actually there – no skin has been punctured, so no blood is lost. And he’s off again, exploring ever deeper waters, fearless, comfortable.
Leaving you with the tiniest seed of this horrific idea, taking up root in the darkest room of a secret vault inside your head, that the water around you is somehow alive – that it’s not just a platform accommodating life, but its own conscious being, the world’s largest living organism with tides for a heartbeat, and currents for a bloodstream – the world’s largest predator, actually smart enough to lull the human body into unwittingly hemorrhaging out into its gaping mouth. The whispering break, its soothing sway of wombs forgotten, inviting you to crawl right in, fetus up, close your ears, let go, forget: all a trick!
You know how some people say they love their dog (or worse, their cat) over people, because animals never lie to you? Those people suffer the gross misconception that nature is somehow true (and that people somehow are not part of nature). They say things like, Nature might be cruel, but that’s in its nature. Or, worse, True coral needs no painter’s brush. I don’t trust those people at all. They are the kind of people who can stand by and watch, with greedy interest, their fat, empty faces screwed up so as to not miss a thing, whenever something particularly cruel happens in nature.
They are the kind of people who set up foundations to rescue stray dogs in Rwanda. People who care about other people only in the most abstract sense. Love Thy Neighbor. We Are The World. They are the same people who say that people are different from the rest of nature in the respect that man knows how to deceive, to lie, to manipulate – conveniently eclipsing the notion that that it’s not just in man’s nature, but in nature’s very own nature not to stay true to its nature – that nature is an instinctive deceiver. They think when their dog raises its hackles, or when the chameleon at the zoo changes color, it’s just the cutest thing. Silly nature!
In the meantime, you wouldn’t believe the massive swindle that’s going on in nature. I mean really, it’s that bad. Nature will lie to your face any change it gets. Take, in this particular case, nature below sea level. Forget about fish that puff up to pretend they’re twice their actual size, or marine predators that pretend to be seaweed to lure in their prey. Those disguises at least have some human scale to them: the organism plays tricks on itself, and once exposed the deception is obvious. I’m talking about the water, that most treacherous of all that is nature. Water doesn’t merely pose as something it isn’t; it tries to trick you into thinking you are something you’re not. It tells you straight-faced that you are water, and it will claim you the second you let your guard down.
Of course the water is not just trying to claim you, the hapless tourist; it is incessantly trying to reclaim all things earth – on St. Croix it is trying to swallow the entire island. Tides nibble endlessly at the shores, turning rocks and glass bottles into sand at an imperceptible pace; hurricanes tear off entire stretches of land in a violent split second and haul them back into the sea. Water fuels the rain forest as it rambles overnight across the already unkempt roads, egging it on to usurp. Nature is like that, always trying to take back, expand, conquer, colonize.
People tell you nature is fragile. Man needs to protect it. On St. Croix people tell you not to touch the coral. It will die and never recover and you will be responsible for killing an entire ecosystem. The real reason not to touch coral is that coral, when it punctures your skin, will continue to grow inside you, latching on to your bones and infecting the hell out of your body. It being half plant, half animal, it knows how to do that. Posing as pretty plants and pretty rock, coral will overtake you when given half the chance. Fragile, my ass. Did you know the coral in the Red Sea found a way to survive and thrive in the ever warming waters caused by global warming? I saw it on TV. Oceanographer Philippe Cousteau and his team of implausibly beautiful people took a sample and rejoiced.
They continued to talk about figuring out the Red Sea coral’s survival technique and using it to rescue all the corals of the world. Man protecting nature so nature gets better at eating him alive. Have we learned nothing from all the genetic horror movies we’ve seen? Jurassic Park, Deep Blue Sea, Mimic, Splice. They tell you one thing: man should never, ever, ever try to give evolution a hand. It will end badly. Right this moment, the Red Sea coral is gearing up to survive in body temperature, and the second it can, no swimmer or diver will ever be safe again. Of course, man’s response to coral infused manplantimals roaming the earth will probably be to genetically enhance parrot fish to get rid of the problem. We never learn.
An old man comes up to us at the gas station, asking for change. Right under his milky left eye, three bright green somethings are nestled, comfortably burrowing into is cheek and sponging off him like the barnacles on the back of the loggerhead turtle we spotted earlier. I can avert my eyes just long enough to see the proliferating tumor protruding from the front of the man’s stomach, a foot long arm of living coral softly punching his overstretched skin against the inside of his t-shirt. The man says he has lived on the island for over 30 years now. I don’t know if he ever goes into the water, but it is trickling into him; the water has been slowly overtaking him since day one.
Water, that most treacherous of all that is nature. After only a week on the island, you’ll feel the water’s soft tidal sway tugging at you whenever you are on land; you have to make an effort to walk straight. After only a week on the island, when you are not in the water, you have to consciously tell yourself to get up and go to the bathroom whenever you have to pee, instead of just letting it go. After only a week on the island! That is how colonial the grip of water is. You must never forget that it will masquerade as just about anything in its attempts to possess you, feed off you: a womb, a safe haven, a warm lull, a place to get away from it all. It will trick you into feeling like you belong there; doesn’t the flow of the water, the effortless ease of underwater movement, feel so much more natural than walking? Nobody ever gets seasick in the water. Didn’t we originate from the oceans, in long forgotten times? Why not go back and stay?
Come back to me, leaf corals beckon you closer. You remember this, don’t you? Come back home where you belong, they coax, We missed you. The pop in your ears when you start to dive under is more businesslike. Want the pain to stop? Just cut that umbilical cord already, and be born again. 80% of your body’s already down here; your reverse birth will be only 20% discomfort. Want the pain to stop? Then stop deceiving yourself and come back to me. You clear your ears and let yourself sink towards the ocean floor. It does feel like coming home. Should you give it a try? Remove your mouth piece and take a deep breath, your lungs filling with water instead of air. The struggle, yes, but only for a minute or so, and then – 80% of your body starts singing, Yesss, yess, yesss, we’re going home, almost there… Right before your survival instinct kicks into overdrive to force the rest of you to come up for air – arms flailing, floundering, clumsy once more – the biggest lie the water tells us is truth.
You have to keep telling yourself, with every breath you take through the umbilical cord of your snorkel, I am not water, I am land; I am not water, I am land. With every inhale and exhale, you need to betray 80% of yourself to remember your truer nature. That fundamental deceit is all around us. It is in us. We breathe it. It is who we are. I am not water; I am rock. I am the island.
