Salon.com > Bill Belleville

Into the jaws of destiny

Fri, 26 May 2000 19:00:00 +0000

May 26, 2000

MONDAY

I have stopped telling my friends I'm going diving with sharks. Their reactions have been less than encouraging.

"Isn't that, ah, fairly dangerous?" asks one, a marketing VP. "You'll be inside a cage, right?" asks another, an editor. Lastly, from a left-brained attorney: "Sounds like a death wish to me."

My tack has been to smile inscrutably and explain that sharks are generally shy, that a cage won't be necessary -- and, indeed, I am more likely to be attacked and bitten by a domestic pig than a shark. "Jaws" did this to us, I remind them, portraying every sleek, dorsal-finned creature as a demonic eating machine with a pea-sized brain. In fact, I say, "Snouts" would be a far more realistic danger.

No one laughs.

To reassure myself, I call up a more reasonable and informed friend, Dr. John McCosker at the California Academy of Sciences. McCosker, a renowned ichthyologist, has co-authored a book, "Great White Shark," on the most dangerous of the breed. He sets me straight.

Snakes and rapids and paradise, Oh my!

Sat, 12 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

It is the season of the Cashew Rains, and a sturdy Amerindian in a black cowboy hat is leading me over a trail through the thick tropical bush of Guyana. "Ready to go to the brink?" he asks. We are already skirting the edge of a deep gorge, so I say, sure, why not.

A bank of cumuli steams overhead, sent up from this broccoli of wet jungle that stretches as far as I can see. The only interruption is the "brink," in which the Potaro River dramatically tumbles off a 740-foot-high scarp, down into a tumult of misty green. We head for a rock outcropping right at its edge.

These are the Kaieteur Falls, named for a long-gone Patamonas chief who, by legend, paddled himself in a dugout over the scarp to win the favor of the gods in a war against the ferocious Caribs. It worked.

My guide is Mike Phang, half-Arawak and half-Carib; he is the warden in charge of the land protecting these falls. We step across vast crevices in the terrain, dodge hanging lianas and spot carnivorous plants, waist-high termite mounds and a rare orange bird with a bit of a Mohawk, the Guyanese "Cock-of-the-Walk." It's no wonder Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional "Lost World," with its time-stuck ape men and dinosaurs, was set on Mount Roraima, not far to the west. Or that Sir Walter Raleigh once came looking for El Dorado, the city of gold. It still seems as if almost anything could be hidden here.

Searching for Mr. Watson

Sat, 16 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Just minutes after I leave my home in northeastern Florida to drive down to the Everglades to search for Mr. Watson, I zip past a wood stork. It is standing at the side of the entrance ramp to the busy interstate, looking at once noble and woefully misplaced -- like a lonely chess piece on a checker board.

The Glades with its vast subtropical wilderness is a good five hours away at the other end of the state. But the stork is here anyway. It is knee-deep in a drainage ditch -- cars whizzing by on their way to Disney World without a notion of whatever it can be -- and it is doing what wading birds like it have been doing in Florida since before anything like a human or a theme park arrived. It is sweeping its curved beak through the cloudy water, hoping to connect with something alive there.

My friend Terry, an old college pal who will paddle the other end of our canoe, misses the bird altogether, not because he is obtuse, but because he lives on the opposite rim of the country and his senses are already saturated with local exotica. It will take a mighty dose of melodrama to jar him.

"Wood stork," I say, pointing with one hand and driving us onto Interstate 4 with the other.