Essay: Let's See Them Before They Are Dead
Essay: Let's See Them Before They Are Dead
Searching for coral reefs in the Caribbean
These reefs were beautiful twenty-five years ago, as you would imagine them: colorful fans, sponges, and coral heads overwhelmed by rainbows of fish. I remember. Now, we are looking at the bleached columns of brown rock. We are diving off the Florida Keys. The fish are still here, but their schools are thinned by the pandemic of human disregard.
Healthy reefs still live elsewhere, but they need to be found, no longer abundant, only spots of brightness amidst the fields of brown rock. “Let’s go find them before they are all dead,” I tell Alex. We rent out our home and set sail to seek the reefs.
Around five hundred reef systems brighten the oceans. You may have heard of a few: Great Barrier Reef, Florida Reef Tract, Red Sea Coral Reef, Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, although only the first is a household name. For millions of years, they thrived and suffered in a cycle of survival, fighting for their own perch on the tree of life.
They survived ice ages, overactive volcanos, the Triassic Extinction, dinosaur-killing asteroids, and riding to death on the tectonic plates that ambled to destruction back into the hot furnace of Mother Earth. The coral clawed back from extinction each time, over millennia. First with a tentative foothold in an altered ocean and then with fortitude and tenacity to build archipelagos from their tiny bodies.
But will they survive the tailpipes of our SUVs?
They might. They may cling to life in crevices where our destructive paws do not fully reach. They will vanish from our view, hide from our descendants, then resurrect millennia after we cook ourselves and perish in worship to our greed.
The Bahamas, my friends tell me, still have some lovely reefs. Andros Barrier Reef, Ábaco Barrier Reef, the coral fields of Exumas. We listen and sail across the Gulfstream to find what is left. For forty-five days, we meander the islands. The individual coral heads are everywhere, mostly in the shallows, hiding feet below the surface. They are big enough to sink our boat but not of the size to satisfy our imagination of what the reefs should be.
Eventually, In Warderick Wells, Exumas, we strike gold. The reef is in thirty feet of water, deeper than most we dove. We tie our dinghy to a dilapidated dock. I rub the anti-fog on our masks. Alex lays out the long free-diving fins. I put on my weight belt with a diving knife for stray fishing lines that may catch us or stray barracudas confused by our shimmer. No wet suits in the warm tropical water, just an upper rush guard. We fall over the side and swim to the reef a hundred yards away.
The water is clear. It is hard to judge the depth; the details on the bottom are visible ten feet below as well as at thirty. Only the subtle change in the hue of the coral and the apparent speed of the fish hint at the depth.
I bob on the swell and observe. Alex is next to me. We dive in turns, one person resting on the surface and watching the other. Then we switch.
I inhale deeply, expand my lungs, and when all available space in my chest is filled with air, I slowly dive with gentle strokes of four-foot fins. Even with weights, my body is buoyant at the top, but the fins push me deeper.
The pressure squeezes my ears with each foot of descent. It is a sharp pain. I click my tongue against the roof of my mouth in a specific way to push the air into the sinuses to equalize. Frenzel technique, they call it. Once per second is enough to clear the ears on the way down.
The water pressure also pushes on the mask and creates a growing differential with a single atmosphere of air inside it. It becomes like a vacuum which sucks my eyes out of their sockets. I blow a little air through my nose into the mask to equalize and find relief.
The pressure also works on my lungs. It shrinks them to a smaller volume, squeezes them into tight balls that lose their buoyancy. Around forty feet, the pressure compresses the lungs enough for the body to continue sinking without the aid of the fins. Past that point, you will not float back to the top but sink into the abyss, no matter how deep, to the dead bottom. I am only at thirty feet, but with weights, my neutral buoyancy threshold is there.
I nailed it with weights today. As I reach thirty feet, my body hangs between two coral heads, inches above the sand. The depth no longer tries to expel me, nor does the gravity insist on pulling me further down. I am suspended. It is effortless, weightless, unearthly.
I stare into a crevice under the coral head. Three pairs of alien eyes stare back at me, a family of lobsters, tightly together, their antennae out. These Caribbean Spiny lobsters are three feet long. They have a bluish tint. Majestic creatures, but fearful. They back further into the crevice when they see my face in front of their home. I am motionless, so after a half minute they relax and edge out to their former spots.
I have to take a breath. I swim to the surface but return in a minute for a photo. No one believes me when I describe their size, and for a second, I am tempted to pull one out and photograph the three foot creature against my hand. But that feels wrong. It is the impulse of trophy hunters I so revile. Instead, I just watch them, happy they have their colorful home.
A movement from another crevice draws my attention, and I float two feet to look inside. Two groupers are eyeing me from their hole. I move my hand by the entrance to stir them and see if there are more, but they are still and unimpressed.
I turn over and look up. Alex is bobbing at the surface on the swell. She is my safety, and I am hers. I see her wave thirty feet above me and point. I follow and see a barracuda slowly moving to my right. They can be fast but seldom are, for they are creepy lurkers, floating like silver logs, spying for a shiny thing to bite. They don’t attack people, only their fingers that glisten in the water with the shine of a wedding band. They bite the rings and bloody the waters. Marriage can be a dangerous thing. We wear no jewelry. We were forewarned.
We dive through fans and between rocks and sponges, and brain coral mounds. We dive through schools of fish so thick we can reach for their shiny skins, but they scurry, always an inch away, swimming in bands, painting contours in space. We follow rays on their glide across the fields and onto the sand, where they bury themselves beneath to wait for their dinner.
We don’t want to leave, but a Caribbean Reef shark arrives with an entourage of pilot fish, and circles. Closely. The heartless beady eyes keep us in their range. No need to tempt it, we think, and leave the reef to its eponymous overlord.
Back at the boat, we cheer to the afternoon, thankful for the beauty we witnessed. But we raise the glasses with a tint of sadness, for this beauty is ever harder to find. Maybe, in a generation or a few, the children watching their future version of Planet Earth can only imagine the majestic reefs but never see them with their own eyes.
We are handing them the short end of the stick, snapped by our addiction to fast fashion, fast cars, and fast food. And by our need to buy, my need to buy, another thing of things that I already own — a cycle of consumption and production and burning, each Amazon delivery notching the Fahrenheit ever so slightly up the gauge.
Can we even save the reefs? Some say we are too late, but even if they are right, we ought to try. Even a tiny sacrifice — three pairs of shoes, instead of four?
