High Tide in Tucson (18 page)

In another courtyard, a small temple held the remains of wives of the tenth ruler, Glélé. When a king died, the guide explained, forty-one of his wives were also killed, to keep him company. (“Would those have been his most or least favorite?” I asked; the guide said, “Probably the prettiest.” So. A high price for beauty.) We crossed the compound, past a long row of cannons bought from the Portuguese for fifteen slaves apiece, and arrived at the tomb of Glélé himself. I was asked to remove my sandals, out of respect, before ducking through a doorway into the dim clay room. A fabric-draped bed marked the burial spot. On market days, townspeople bring food here to leave as offerings.

I returned blinking to the bright courtyard, wondering what it could be in this ferocious history that still inspires devotion. African political scientists point out that tribal wars are a legacy of colonialism, with its doctrines of cultural superiority and its habit of roping different cultures together inside arbitrary borders. Undoubtedly this is true, but Abomey stands as a testimony to precolonial horrors. Silently I walked past piles of charred animal bones left behind from a recent ceremony. Yesterday's rain had settled the dust, and in the palms above me even the birds seemed subdued.

 

Ouidah, the historic point of departure for most of the slaves sold from West Africa, had been chosen as the noisy heart of the International Vodoun Festival. The old Portuguese fort, which houses a museum on slavery, I found crowded with African tourists participating in what mostly resembled a street fair.

On the edge of town, just out of earshot of all the hubbub, was the Sacred Forest, a shadowy glen where fetish chiefs are buried. Huge statues of
vodoun
divinities had been erected there among the trees, for the tourists. I walked among them, stopping to admire Legba, a household protector: he sported the horns of a bull and a huge, erect penis. A woman standing beside me was wearing the image of Pope John Paul II all over her body—a special edition of wax cloth commemorating the recent papal visit. She fanned herself in the steamy heat and rested a hand on Legba's giant bronze foot.

As the only Yovo in sight, I'd attracted a crowd of children. One of them cried whenever I looked at him. Several asked for money, and another wanted to know if I'd marry him. “How many wives are you going to have, total?” I asked. He thought six. “Then forget it,” I said.

My entourage and I left the forest and walked through the outskirts of town. I heard a deep boom like a foghorn, then saw, emerging from a doorway, a six-foot, writhing haystack. The children screamed, “
Feticheur
!” and we followed him as he boomed and danced through Ouidah's narrow back streets. In the plaza our fetish joined other dancing haystacks, one of whom had a devil's head. The dancing would go on into the night.

I wandered behind the fort and by pure dumb accident stumbled onto the
vodoun
market. Dozens of fetishers had laid out their wares on the ground: rows of animal skins and bird bodies, turtle skulls, dried chameleons, dark monkey hands lined up in a beseeching row, palms up. I was horrified by this trade in literal flesh and bone (wondering how much of the pharmacopeia was rare or endangered), but also enthralled by the sense of secret business. For nearly an hour I eavesdropped on customers as they recited their maladies and received their prescriptions.

Eventually I collected my nerve and approached the young apprentice of a fetisher. “Something for my love life,” I told him. “
Ah oui, mademoiselle
” he said, nodding, with the precise demeanor of a young physician. He introduced himself, asked some diagnostic questions, then led me into a small tent. My heart began to pound. Inside, lined up museumlike, were hundreds of
gris-gris
. There are different types, he explained clinically, for success in business, for improving the memory, for safe travel. He briefly assessed his inventory and produced my love charm: two small sticks bound to a piece of bone, stained dark with blood. This is a powerful one, he said, blessed in a fire ceremony at the temple in Abomey. It has
la force Africaine
. He provided me with extremely complex instructions, promising that if correctly used my
gris-gris
would repel all the wrong sorts of men, attract the right one, and keep him interested. Then he produced a bell from some hidden place, rang it forcefully in my ears, and sang an elaborate chant from which I could pick out only my name, repeated three times. He touched the charm to my collarbone, and then it was mine. For approximately three dollars I walked away with a guarantee of future bliss.

Back at the street fair, in the smoky heat among vendors of souvenirs and street food, a flock of kids danced around a boom box playing Lionel Richie. In the shadow of the Portuguese fort, the history of slavery, and the dark thunderclouds attracted by too many fetishers in one place, this carnival atmosphere struck me as bizarre, if not outright glib. I had a beer at a makeshift café and met a university student, Soulemaine Moreira, whose last name came from the Brazilian family that owned his grandparents. I asked him, “Don't you think about the people who got sent out from this port?”

“We think of them, of course,” he replied. “We couldn't for
get. Slavery was a terrible tragedy. But look at how it contributed to the cultural development of the New World.”

Lionel Richie picked up a new beat, and a woman grilling meat nearby began to dance, elbows out, her fork in the air. Like the Moreira family, this music had made a long, circular trip home. I tried to imagine an America without Michael Jackson or Magic Johnson, without jazz, Motown, break dancing, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Taj Mahal, George Washington Carver, James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou. I couldn't picture it—anymore, I'm sure, than Soulemaine Moreira could imagine a Benin without Peugeot taxis. The legacy of colonialism is a world of hurt and cross-pollinated beauty, and we take it from there.

In the gathering dusk I walked through town watching drummers work in tight knots beneath overarching trees, driving their rhythms through crowds who swept with bare feet the dirt floors of these secret amphitheaters. Women moved with babies on their backs. No one kept still.

Finally, very late, I left Ouidah to return to Cotonou in a bush taxi. There were eight of us wedged in. Incredibly, we took on a ninth. In the way of oxygen we had to accept each other's exhalations. Conversations erupted in at least three different languages. I found myself pressed—too tightly to draw a full breath—against the shoulders and thighs of two handsome men. My love charm was burning a hole in my pocket.

It's a hot place, Benin, where everybody has a different story to tell, but every creature has its rapport with nature. It's best to be prepared.

In the darkness before dawn I stood on the precipice of a wilderness. Inches in front of my toes, a lava cliff dropped away into the mammoth bowl of Haleakala, the world's largest dormant volcano. Behind me lay a long green slope where clouds rolled up from the sea, great tumbleweeds of vapor, passing through the pastures and eucalyptus forests of upland Maui to the volcano's crest, then spilling over its edge into the abyss.

Above the rimrock and roiling vapor, the sun was about to break. Far from the world where “Aloha Oe” whines through hotel lobbies, I stood in a remote place at an impossibly silent hour.

But pandemonium had an appointment. Grunting, hissing, a dozen buses pulled up behind me and threw open their doors. Tourists swarmed like ants over the tiny visitors' center at the
crater's edge. Loading cameras, dancing from foot to foot in the cold, they positioned for the spectacle. “Darn,” a man griped through his viewfinder. “I can't get it all in.”

“Take two shots, then,” his wife advised.

In the throng I lost and then relocated Steven, my fellow traveler. In his hiking boots, sturdy fedora, and backpack, he apparently struck such a picturesque silhouette against the dawn he'd been cornered by a pro and enlisted as foreground. “Perfect for a wilderness catalog,” the photographer testified, while his camera whirred meaningfully.

Sunrise over Haleakala is a packaged Maui tradition: tourists in the beachfront hotels can catch a bus at 3
A.M.,
ride the winding road to the summit, witness the daybreak moment, and return in time for a late breakfast. As religious experiences go, this one is succinct. In fifteen minutes the crowd was gone.

I wandered a hundred yards back to the parking lot, where a second troop was assembling. For about $120, intrepid sightseers can get a one-way bus ride to the summit for a different thrill: outfitted with helmets, Day-Glo safety vests, and rental bikes, they speed back down to the coast in a huge mob, apparently risking life and limb for a thirty-eight-mile exercise in handbraking. The group leaders, who presumably knew the score, were padded from head to toe like hockey goalies. As they lined up their herds of cyclers, they delivered flat monologues about hand signals and road conditions. “Ready to go play in traffic?” demanded a guide, straddling his mount. “Okay, let's go play in traffic.” With the hiss of a hundred thin tires on a ribbon of asphalt, this crowd vanished too.

I blinked in the quiet light, feeling passed over by a raucous visitation. Now the crater lay deserted in the howling wind, by all but one pair of picturesque stragglers. The toes of our boots turned toward the rim and found purchase on a rough cinder
trail called Sliding Sands, which would lead us down into the belly of Haleakala. The price: a $6.95 waterproof trail map, and whatever else it might take to haul ourselves down and back again.

Entering the crater at dawn seemed unearthly, though Haleakala is entirely of the earth, and nothing of human artifice. The cliffs absorbed and enclosed us in a mounting horizon of bleak obsidian crags. A lake of cloud slid over the rim, wave by wave, and fell into the crater's separate atmosphere, dispersing in vapor trails. The sharp perimeter of cliffs contains a volcanic bowl three thousand feet deep and eight miles across as the crow flies (or twice that far as the hiker hikes). The depression would hold Manhattan, though fortunately it doesn't.

We walked and slid down miles of gravelly slope toward the crater floor, where the earth had repeatedly disgorged its contents. Black sworls of bubbling lava had once flowed around red cinder cones, then cooled to a tortured standstill. I stood still myself, allowing my eye a minute to take in the lunatic landscape. In the absence of any human construction or familiar vegetation like, say, trees, it was impossible to judge distances. An irregular dot on the trail ahead might be a person or a house-sized boulder. Down below, sections of the trail were sketched across the valley, crossing dark lava flows and green fields, disappearing into a velvet fog that hid the crater's eastern half.

The strange topography of Haleakala Crater makes its own weather. Some areas are parched as the Sahara, while others harbor fern forests under a permanent veil of cloud. Any part of the high-altitude crater can scorch in searing sun, or be lashed by freezing rain, or both, on just about any day of the year. Altogether it is one of the most difficult landscapes ever to host natural life. It is also one of the few places in Hawaii that looks as
it did two hundred years ago—or for that matter, two thousand. Haleakala is a tiny, threatened ark.

To learn about the natural history of Hawaii is to understand a story of unceasing invasion. These islands, when they first lifted their heads out of the waves a million years ago, were naked, defiant rock—the most isolated archipelago in the world. Life, when it landed here, arrived only through powerful stamina or spectacular accident: a fern's spore drifting on the trade wind, a seed in the craw of a bird, the bird itself. If it survived, that was an accident all the more spectacular. Natural selection led these survivors to become new species unique in the world: the silversword, for example, a plant that lives in lava beds and dies in a giant flowery starburst; or the nēnē, a crater-dwelling goose that has lost the need for webbed feet because it shuns the sea, foraging instead in foggy meadows, grown languid and tame in the absence of predators. Over the course of a million years, hundreds of creatures like these evolved from the few stray immigrants. Now they are endemic species, living nowhere on earth but here. For many quiet eons they thrived in their sequestered home.

Then humans arrived, also through stamina and spectacular accident. The Polynesians came first, bringing along some thirty plants and animals they considered indispensable, including bananas, taro, sugar cane, pigs, dogs, chickens. And also a few stowaways: rats, snails, and lizards. All of these went forth and multiplied throughout the islands. Each subsequent wave of human immigration brought fresh invasions. Sugar cane and pineapples filled the valleys, crowding out native herbs. Logging operations decimated the endemic rain forests. Pigs, goats, and cattle uprooted and ate whatever was left. Without a native carnivore to stop them, rats flourished like the Pied Piper's dream. Mongooses were imported in a harebrained plan to control
them, but the mongoose forages by day and the rat by night, so these creatures rarely encounter one another. Both, though, are happy to feast on the eggs of native birds.

More species have now become extinct in Hawaii than in all of North America. At least two hundred of the islands' endemic plant species are gone from the earth for good, and eight hundred more are endangered. Of the original cornucopia of native birds, many were never classified, including fifty species that were all flightless like the dodo—and now, like the dodo, all gone. A total of only thirty endemic bird species still survive.

It's quite possible now to visit the Hawaiian Islands without ever laying eyes on a single animal or plant that is actually Hawaiian—from the Plumeria lei at the airport (this beloved flower is a Southeast Asian import) to the farewell bouquet of ginger (also Asian). African flame trees, Brazilian jacarandas, mangos and banyans from India, coffee from Africa, macadamia nuts from Australia—these are beautiful impostors all, but to enjoy them is to dance on a graveyard. Exotics are costing native Hawaii its life.

Haleakala Crater is fortified against invasion, because of its protected status as a national park, and because its landscape is hostile ground for pineapples and orchids. The endemics had millennia to adapt to their difficult niche, but the balance of such a fine-tuned ecosystem is precarious, easily thrown into chaos: the plants fall prey to feral pigs and rats, and are rendered infertile by insect invaders like Argentine ants and yellow jacket wasps, which destroy the native pollinators.

Humans have sated their strange appetites in Haleakala too, and while a pig can hardly be blamed for filling its belly, people, it would seem, might know better. The dazzling silverswords, which grow nowhere else on earth, have been collected for souvenirs,
leis, scientific study, Oriental medicine, and—of all things—parade floats. These magical plants once covered the ground so thickly a visitor in 1873 wrote that Haleakala's slopes glowed silvery white “like winter in moonlight.” But in 1911 a frustrated collector named Dr. Aiken complained that “wild cattle had eaten most of the plants in places of easy access.” However, after much hard work he “obtained gunny sacks full.” By 1930, it was possible to count the surviving members of this species.

The nēnē suffered an even more dire decline, nearly following the dodo. Since it had evolved in the absence of predators, nothing in this gentle little goose's ground-dwelling habits prepared it for egg-eating rodents, or a creature that walked upright and killed whenever it found an easy mark. By 1951, there were thirty-three nēnē geese left living in the world, half of them in zoos.

Midway through the century, Hawaiians began to protect their islands' biodiversity. Today, a tourist caught with a gunnysack of silverswords would find them pricey souvenirs—there's a $10,000 fine. The Park Service and the Nature Conservancy, which owns adjacent land, are trying to exclude wild pigs from the crater and native forests by means of a fence, though in such rugged ground it's a task akin to dividing needles from haystacks. Under this fierce protection, the silverswords are making a gradual comeback. nēnē geese have been bred in captivity and reintroduced to the crater as well, but their population, numbered at two hundred and declining, is not yet considered saved. Meanwhile, the invasion creeps forward: even within the protected boundaries of a national park, 47 percent of the plant species growing in Haleakala are aliens. The whole ecosystem is endangered. If the silverswords, nēnē geese, and other colorful endemics of Hawaii survive this century, it will be by the skin of
their teeth. It will only happen because we decided to notice, and hold on tight.

 

Like a child anticipating sleighbells at Christmas, I saw illusory silverswords everywhere. I fixed my binoculars on every shining dot in the distance, and located a lot of roundish rocks in the noonday sun. Finally I saw the real thing. I was not prepared for how they would appear to glow from within, against the dark ground. They are actually silver. For all the world, they look like huge, spherical bouquets of curved silver swords. Cautiously I leaned out and touched one that grew near the path. The knives were soft as bunnies' ears. Unlike the spiny inhabitants of other deserts, the arid-adapted silverswords evolved without the danger of being eaten. Defenseless, they became a delicacy for wild pigs. Such bad luck. This landscape was so unready for what has come to pass.

I never saw “winter in moonlight,” but as we trudged deep into the crater we saw silverswords by twos and threes, then clumps of a dozen. Finally, we saw them in bloom. Just once, before dying, the knee-high plant throws up a six-foot flower spike—a monstrous, phallic bouquet of purple asters. If a florist delivered this, you would hide it in a closet. Like a torrid sunset or a rousing thunderstorm, it's the kind of excess that only nature can pull off to rave reviews.

The sun blazed ferociously. My pack was stuffed with a wool sweater, sleeping bag, and rain gear—ludicrous baggage I'd brought at the insistence of Park Service brochures. The gallon of water, on the other hand, was a brilliant idea. The trail leveled out on the valley floor and dusty cinders gave way to fields of delicate-looking ferns, which felt to the touch like plastic. Under a
white-hot sky, blue-black cinder cones rose above the fern fields. From the cliffs came the gossipy chatter of petrels, rare endemic gull-like birds that hunt at sea and nest in Haleakala. I envied them their shady holes.

When we topped a small rise, a tin-roofed cabin and water tank greeted us like a mirage. The Park Service maintains a primitive cabin in each of three remote areas of the crater, where hikers, with advance permission, can avail themselves of bunks, a woodstove, and water. (There are no other water sources within Haleakala.) We had a permit for a cabin, but not this one—we would spend the night at Paliku, six miles on down the trail. The next day we would backtrack across the crater by a different path, and exit Haleakala via a formidable set of switchbacks known as the Halemau'u Trail. Even on the level the trail was hard, skulking over knife-edged rocks, requiring exhaustive attention; I could hardly imagine doing this up the side of a cliff. I decided I'd think about that tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we flopped on a grassy knoll at the Kapaloa cabin, devouring our lunchtime rations and most of our water. Steven, my ornithologist companion, observed that we were sitting on a litter of excrement whose source could only be the nēnē. He was very excited about this. I lay down on endangered goose poop and fell asleep.

I woke up groggy, weary of the sun and grateful to be more than halfway to Paliku. We marched through a transition zone of low scrub that softened the lava fields. Ahead of us hung the perpetual mystery of fog that had obscured the crater's eastern end all day, hiding our destination.

Suddenly we walked through that curtain into another world: cool gray air, a grassy meadow where mist dappled our faces and dripped from bright berries that hung in tall briar thickets. We
had passed from the mouth of hell to the gates of heaven—presuming heaven looks like the Smoky Mountains or Ireland. Awestruck, and possessed of aching feet, we sat down on the ground. Immediately we heard a quiet honking call. A little zebra-striped goose materialized out of mist and flew very low, circling over our heads. It landed a stone's throw away, cocked its head, and watched us. “Perfect for a wilderness catalog,” it might have been thinking. In the past I have scoffed at anthropomorphic descriptions of Hawaii's state bird, which people like to call “friendly” and “curious.” Now you can scoff at mine.

Soaked to the bone and suddenly shivering, we walked through miles of deep mist, surrounded by the honking of invisible nēnēs. The world grew quiet, white, punctuated with vermilion berries. The trail ended in Paliku meadow. Beyond the field, a wall of cliffs rose straight up like a Japanese carving of a mountainside in jade. The vertical rock faces were crisscrossed with switchback crevices where gnarled trees and giant ferns sprang out in a sidesaddle forest. On these impossible ledges dwell the last traces of native rain forest. They survive there for only one reason: pigs can't fly.