Graham Mackintosh Baja Books

Chapter 14

Solace of Marine Biology

It is easy to remember when we were small and lay on our stomachs beside a tide pool and our minds and eyes went so deeply into it that size and identity were lost, and the creeping hermit crab was our size and the tiny octopus a monster. Then the waving algae covered us and we hid under a rock at the bottom and leapt out at a fish. It is very possible that we, and even those who probe space with equations, simply extend this wonder.

John Steinbeck — The Log from the Sea of Cortez

After so much strenuous physical activity and exploring, I was ready for some down time to enjoy the comforts of my camp. The wind dropped. I recorded: “I’ve got the shade up and I’ve got my chair underneath, and what is really heavenly is just sitting here and doing nothing, just listening to the silence and relaxing.” I studied an isolated cloud sitting above Smith Island. It was also doing nothing—it seemed strange and lonely, just hovering there like a white hat in an otherwise clear blue sky.

There was a small plane somewhere high above the Ballenas channel. Even though I couldn’t see it, I turned on my marine radio and monitored channel-16 for a while.

The low tide provided a marvelous opportunity. Lifting and rolling the boulders in the lower intertidal was unbelievably productive. The sides of the rocks were covered in algae and anemones, and gloriously colored sponges. The crawling, slithering, squirting, flailing world beneath a single boulder could keep a marine biologist busy a week. Limpets, chitons, bivalves, gastropods all caught my eye… as did crabs, sea stars, the abundant writhing brittle stars, sea cucumbers, tube worms, and all the flat worms flowing mercurially over the rock. Hermit crabs and other boarders were recycling the suitable abandoned shells. There were even little, big-headed clingfish (Gobiesox) somehow living under the boulders.

I was able to temporarily fill up a large white plastic bowl and create my own aquarium for photographic purposes—and how intriguing it all looked under a modest macro lens, how wondrous to spy on the fascinating detail of that strange world.

I gently replaced the boulders from around which I had collected, and carefully slipped the creatures back into the sea. Most of the soft-bodied creatures quickly disappeared again beneath the rocks, those protected by shells or other devices took their time about it. Certainly there were a few casualties, a little collateral damage, but I consulted my conscience and didn’t think my disturbing those five or six boulders would make an iota of difference to the multi-billion boulder ecosystem of the island. A few worms and brittle stars might have disagreed. Some happy gulls and fishes were on my side. But losing myself in that adventure in marine biology made a huge difference to me.

I recalled when I was a kid in England, a typical inner-city future hooligan. My life revolved around concrete and tarmac, bricks and cuss words, roaming the streets with my mates, minor brushes with the law. I was about ten; never been on vacation; never seen the sea; then I had the good fortune to go on a summer holiday with a friend’s family to the “seaside”—two weeks along the wild and wonderful Atlantic coast of North Devon. The ocean backdrop was magnificent. My playground was now rocky shores and tide pools. Hour after hour as the surf rushed and pounded nearby, I found one treasure after another. I was never happier or more absorbed by anything in my life. Naïve and distracted, I ended up with a terrible sunburn and blisters the size of eggs on my legs and back.

It was a mind-expanding turning point in my young life. I wanted to return to those fish and eels and crabs and anemones and the hundreds of other creatures I played with, caught, and studied. The sense of freedom was total. The adventure was something I didn’t re-live for years, but it remained with me as a hope, that one day I would find myself back there again, on the rocks, by the tide pools, wading the streams, left alone to smell the clean ocean, feel the warm sun and the cooling spray, touch the creatures along the shore, follow my heart and listen. Listen not to the cacophony and the dictates of the inner city, not to the voice of man, or to a fellow cussing kid, but to the voice of nature… and to my own inner voice.

And perhaps all the months and years I’ve spent alone along the Baja California coastline have been an extension of that dream, that youthful hope… a simple attempt to relive the happiest days of my life.

I completely understood why Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, in the midst of a war, with the tide of battle turning violently against his sacred Empire of the Rising Sun would prefer to find escape in the field of marine biology. It is a preoccupation so absorbing and so capable of whisking you into another cosmos… into a timeless and more real universe that will still be extant a hundred million years after the last human has taken his final breath.

As Steinbeck wrote in his Log:

We had been drifting in some kind of dual world—a parallel realistic world; and the preoccupations of the world we came from, which are considered realistic, were to us filled with mental mirage. Modern economies; war drives; party affiliations and lines; hatreds, political, and social and racial, cannot survive in dignity the perspective of distance.

If total defeat pervaded my life I would be found along some lonely shore, no doubt by the Sea of Cortez, gazing humbly at the wondrous diversity of life, putting everything into a larger perspective.

After returning all my specimens to the sea, I spent the middle part of the day reading about marine biology in the shade.

Then my mind turned again to the conundrum that was Emperor Hirohito, the 124th Emperor of Japan. A small, thin, moustached man, he ascended to his imperial throne in the 1920s, and dutifully settled down to the task of being God-emperor. Some say he was burdened with a child-like innocence. He wanted his reign to be known as Showa—Enlightened Peace—because “I have visited the battlefields of the [First] World War, and in the presence of such devastation, I understand the need for concord among nations.”

He developed an early passion for natural history, for marine biology in particular. He had a laboratory constructed on his palace grounds in Tokyo, and often collected specimens in and around Sagami Bay, where he had his imperial vacation villa. Shortly after becoming emperor he was given a small bust of Darwin, which graced his study, even through the war years.

Those troubled years found him particularly fascinated by the study of fishes. He perhaps took greater pleasure in them than in his public duties and the delicate task of dealing with the military. Many of his army and navy commanders were exasperated by his scientific endeavors and tactfully chided him for playing with fish while they were playing with fire and grand imperial designs. One of his senior advisors implored him to conduct his marine biology discretely in a way more befitting a god.

And even while Japan was increasingly devastated by war and facing the anathema of total surrender, even in the midst of urging his admirals and generals to further efforts to destroy the enemy, he kept his scientific soul aloof and pursued his studies.

He continued to partake in and lend support to the field of marine biology to the end of his life—Hirohito passed away in 1989—by which time almost 30,000 specimens of marine life had been sent to him from every part of the world. He was a recognized authority on marine hydrozoans—jellyfish and their kin.

It was reported that he was buried with his microscope. His imperial successor, his eldest son, Emperor Akihito, is also a marine biologist. His specialty is the study of gobies, about which he has published 28 papers in the Japanese Journal of Ichthyology. He is also the co-author of several books including The Fishes of the Japanese Archipelago and Fishes of Japan. His other son, Prince Hitachi, is another specialist in marine biology; his main field being the cancer of fish.

The emperor also intrigued “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, who conducted a mail bomb campaign that terrorized academia, airline employees, the business world, and the media from May 1978 till his arrest in April 1996. His targets included anyone he thought working for an establishment and a system that he detested. In his long rambling “manifesto,” which was printed in the Washington Post and the New York Times, he states:

Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent… But not every leisured aristocrat becomes bored and demoralized. For example, the emperor Hirohito, instead of sinking into decadent hedonism, devoted himself to marine biology, a field in which he became distinguished. When people do not have to exert themselves to satisfy their physical needs they often set up artificial goals for themselves. In many cases they then pursue these goals with the same energy and emotional involvement that they otherwise would have put into the search for physical necessities. Thus the aristocrats of the Roman Empire had their literary pretensions; many European aristocrats a few centuries ago invested tremendous time and energy in hunting, though they certainly didn't need the meat; other aristocracies have competed for status through elaborate displays of wealth; and a few aristocrats, like Hirohito, have turned to science.

How could it be? Hirohito—on the one bloody hand, up to his wide open eyes in the brutal and vicious business of imperial destiny, on the other enthralled by scientific discovery and fishes, and passionately seeking a reign of enlightened peace and harmony among nations.

During a Cabinet meeting in 1941, with his military commanders and ministers arguing forcefully for the inevitability of war with the U.S. and advocating a preemptive strike against Pearl Harbor, Hirohito brought proceedings to a standstill by suddenly reciting a poem composed by his grandfather, the great Emperor Meiji:

In a world

Where all the seas are brethren

Why then do wind and wave

So stridently clash?

As Herbert Bix a recent biographer of Hirohito put it, the emperor operated with two “conflicting moral visions and norms contained in the Confucian model of the virtuous, peace-loving ruler and the Japanese bushidö model of the ideal warrior… The tension between these two worldviews lay at the heart of everything Hirohito did.”

And in the U.S. it seems our current administration operates under a similar tension—that between the Confusion model of peace and virtue and the “mission-accomplished” George W. Bushidö model of the ideal warrior. Let us hope that the tension will be resolved with less damage to the American homeland than that which befell the Japanese.

The wind started to blow stronger. I decided to leave the tarp up to see how much it could take. However, the wind suddenly reversed direction and blew strongly off shore. That was a different story—the gusts got more under the tarp and bowed it violently upwards; something had to give. Not wanting to find out what, I took down the tarp while I was still able.

Feeling ravenous in the sea air, I cooked a wholesome veggie dish and added a full can of “sloppy Joe” sauce which made it disgustingly sweet. I kept adding pasta, and more veggies till the large pan was almost overflowing, but it was still far too sweet for me. I was amazed at the amount of sugar the manufacturers thought appropriate.

The tide had gone way out. Concerned about the return, I dragged the kayak up beside the tent and double tied it to the panga. I slept well till about 2 A.M. when I sat up hoping, almost praying, that was not a boat I could hear. I threw on a heavy jacket, unzipped the door, and went outside to look around.

There was a beautiful full moon. Across the glistening sea, Smith Island and Mike’s Mountain (above the town of LA Bay) stood almost as clear as day. Through binoculars I peered around my bay, up at the cardón slopes behind me, out to sea, looking for the slightest movement.

Perhaps martialing my thoughts again… I suddenly recalled a story my father had told me about how, one moonlit night in Italy in 1944, while he was on watch guarding the 7th Armoured Brigade’s newly-won front line, a German sniper put a bullet right through his beret and sent it flying. My father was not a big man. He always wished he were a little taller, but afterwards he thought that God had made him just the right height, and he remained throughout his life very contented with his five-foot-five stature.

Up until that moment the story had just been a story, interesting but forgotten, but suddenly the reality struck me, the full significance of an event that determined both my father’s and my existence… the tension, the deadly cat-and-mouse game, the incredible good fortune. The best snipers were not in the habit of missing.

An American study revealed that in the First World War it took about 7,000 rounds of small arms ammunition to kill a single enemy soldier. By the time of the Vietnam War, this had risen to around 25,000 rounds. The average sniper required 1.3 rounds.

Gen. J.H. Hay, Jr.

  Vietnam Studies: Tactical and Material Innovation.

Mathias Hetzenauer, the top German sniper of the Second World War with hundreds of confirmed kills to his credit, mostly from “penetrating enemy lines at night,” recalled after the war, that he could “guarantee” a head shot at 400 meters, and a chest shot at 600 meters, but preferred to get much closer to be certain of a kill with every bullet.

The high tide had filled the sea to within a yard of the tent, and I had the distinct impression that I was being watched as I checked the lines securing the kayak. I hoped it was a sea lion. The tide was so high it didn’t take much imagination to see one stealing my shoes from outside the tent door. I moved them back.

Half of the scenarios in my head were ridiculous, but alone and vulnerable I needed to think of everything. If only the American sentinels on the Hawaiian Islands in 1941 were half as vigilant, the Japanese attackers would have had a very different reception.