Playground, page 3
I READ THE BOOK every day for two weeks. When I finished, I started it again from the beginning. The book sparked endless living experiments inside my head. Every page animated the incalculably large and inexplicably bizarre universe beneath the ocean’s surface. Each sentence was a blue-black mystery populated by creatures more fantastic than any role-playing dungeon crawl.
Thirty thousand kinds of fish. Fish that migrated their faces across to the sides of their bodies as they grew. Fish whose barrel heads were transparent, revealing their brains. Fish that changed from male to female. Fish that grew their own fishing rods out of their heads. Fish that lived inside the bodies of other living creatures.
But the book insisted that even the oddest fish was still my first cousin, compared to the other beings down there. The ocean teemed with primordial life—monsters left behind from evolution’s oldest back alleys—ring-shaped, tube-shaped, shapeless, impossible plant-animal mash-ups with no right to exist, beasts so unlikely I wondered if my beloved author invented them.
Evanston was nothing. Chicago was nothing. Illinois and even the U.S. were a joke. There were insanely different ways of being alive, behaviors from another galaxy dreamed up by an alien God. The world was bigger, stranger, richer, and wilder than I had a right to ask for. The trauma of Keane Castle faded. Life on land couldn’t hurt me anymore.
Throughout the book were pictures of the tall redheaded author diving, gracing the decks of ships in her wet suit, or cavorting with dolphins and giant manta rays. She’d had more adventures than any superhero, communing with sharks and mapping wrecked battleships on the floor of the Pacific. She was fearless and free, and her dives set off the weirdest cascade of tingles through my ten-year-old body. The pictures of her on her expeditions filled me with a happy distress, the advance warning of sensations I didn’t know existed. Reading her, I felt like something unspeakably wonderful was just about to happen to everyone. I loved the gawky explorer more than I loved my own mother, in an inchoate way I couldn’t understand. True, deep, embracing first love.
I saved up my dimes and bought another copy of the book. I cut out the pictures and hung them all over my room, reserving the space above my tiny student desk for images of the author. I wanted to read every word she had ever written, and it crushed me to learn that this was her only book. But I had this one. I had the ocean. From then on, there was nothing for me but the endlessly inventive, unfathomable deep.
I checked out every book about the oceans in the school library and the district’s bookmobile. I consumed every book with a 551.46 number in the Evanston Public. I checked out books I couldn’t yet read, just to run my fingers over the mysterious words. I studied the charts and cross-sections. I quizzed myself on the different kinds of corals and memorized which creatures lived at which depths. I learned the names of a dozen sponges. I mastered the difference between cnidarians and echinoderms, though I couldn’t pronounce either word.
I vowed to spend the rest of my life the way my love did. I would give myself to the ocean, that wilderness that made the land seem an afterthought. I would dive in all latitudes and descend to all depths, and in each place I would find whole, new, impossible kinds of life.
WE HAD TO WRITE three paragraphs for Mrs. Haga in fourth grade about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I wrote about everything I would do when the world let me become an oceanographer. I spelled the word wrong but got an A anyway. She circled the grade and wrote, I could learn something from you! The proudest moment of my entire education.
My father called me Water Boy. Like I’d willed myself to become the most pathetic child he could have birthed. I would come to him with the tale of some new, outlandish creature, and he’d just shake his head. “Whose son are you, guy?”
I wanted to know that same thing.
I’M FIFTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD. My net worth puts me in the top five hundredths of the top one percent. I created a platform from scratch that ended up with a billion devoted users. One of my former companies is on the verge of announcing a breakthrough that will rush an unsuspecting humankind into its fourth and perhaps final act. What more do I have to live for?
The answer is simple: to be buried at sea.
Makatea’s crags rose straight up from the waves. The whole island floated two hundred feet above a narrow beach and the rim of cerulean shallows just beyond. None of the eighty low-slung islands of the Tuamotus remotely resembled it. Only ten such uplifted plinths existed across the entire Pacific, and Makatea was the highest.
It had started out as a flat-topped seamount hidden for an eon beneath the ocean’s surface. For fifty million years, tiny sac-like animals in partnership with single-celled dinoflagellate algae fringed the mount, building miles-long underwater cities. The limestone dwellings of these corals accreted on the seamount until they broke at last above the ocean’s surface as an atoll.
For fifty million more years, mats of cyanobacteria fed on sunlight in the shallow ponds of this creature-created island. The energy they harvested went into all of life’s enterprises. One of these processes involved extracting phosphate from seawater and sequestering it in the layers of the bacteria’s own cells. As those cells died, the island’s pools filled up with phosphates.
A rash of volcanoes 150 miles to the southwest belched up the islands of Mo’orea and Tahiti. The weight of those sudden landmasses pressed down like a mallet slamming a high striker at a carnival. The seafloor bulged and lifted the fringe atoll of Makatea high into the air.
Hundreds of feet of limestone coral skeletons dissolved in two million years of tropical rain. But the phosphates did not dissolve in water. Instead, they concentrated into dense deposits, veining the shrinking column of island with a substance that human beings would come, in time, to need.
MAKATEA’S FATE WAS SET in stone in 1896, a few years after France annexed the island and added it to its growing Pacific empire. That was the year when Sousa wrote “The Stars and Stripes Forever” for a country that had just committed to separate-but-equal. The year that Daimler built the first gas truck, Röntgen snapped the first X-ray, Puccini premiered La bohème, and the soon-to-be Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius published a paper showing how rising carbon dioxide levels would soon cook the planet’s atmosphere.
In that year, a ship called the Lady M, sailing under the flag of the Pacific Islands Company, made a brief stop on the atoll of Nauru, twenty-five hundred miles northeast of Sydney. On Nauru the ship’s supercargo, a man named Denson, stumbled across a mysterious rock that he mistook for petrified wood. He pocketed the rock with vague plans of carving it into marbles for his children. The game was growing in popularity, and Denson and his children loved playing it.
Instead, Denson’s weird rock ended up as a doorstop in the Pacific Islands Company’s Sydney office. It sat there for three years, a chunk of Rheingold hidden in full view. One day, Albert Ellis, a prospector who worked for the company, came to Sydney. The doorstop caught his eye, and he sent it to be analyzed. Chunks of phosphate rock had just been found on Baker Island, two thousand miles southwest of Hawaii. Ellis suspected that more magic stone had to be out there, spread across the stray, tiny periods that punctuated the vast blank page of the Pacific.
The analysis came back. Ellis’s hunch was right. The strange doorstop contained the substance that now fed the world.
Phosphate went into making all kinds of things: detergents, construction materials, and munitions. But its effect on crops was world-changing. For fertilizer, nothing matched it. With phosphate, food yields everywhere shot straight up. Without it, civilization faced a Malthusian die-off.
The Pacific Islands Company traced its chunk of doorstop back to Nauru. Overnight, the worthless flyspeck turned into precious real estate. Nauru became a cash machine, although the residents saw little of the profit. More phosphate turned up on Banaba, not far away. The hunt for the rock that would feed the world spread south of the equator and thirty-two hundred miles east before it came across a third great lode. There, in the middle of the Pacific, lay Makatea—farther from Nauru than San Diego was from Montreal.
Makatea had reefs, soaring cliffs, and spectacular caves filled with underground springs. It teemed with insects, snails, fish, and birds, including species that existed nowhere else in the world. Fresh water abounded, a rare thing in the Pacific. Its virgin forest crawled with coconut crabs, the largest land invertebrates in the world and a delicacy on par with lobster. But the swath of phosphate running diagonally across the island trumped those other gifts and doomed them all.
Only 250 people lived on the island when the foreign joint venture came ashore in 1911 to take the magic rock. No one on Makatea who turned out to greet the invading Popa’ā knew what hit them. The Europeans promised the islanders one franc for every coconut palm destroyed, two francs for every breadfruit tree cut down, and one franc for every thousand kilograms of phosphate hauled away.
Few Makateans wanted to work for the Popa’ā. They liked their lives and found this new kind of labor barbaric. The whites had to look elsewhere for their miners. The island swelled with scores of Japanese indentured laborers. Hundreds more arrived from China, Vietnam, and islands throughout the Pacific. In time, the Compagnie Française des Phosphates de l’Océanie hired thousands of miners to excavate an island four miles wide.
Makatea turned into an anthill. The miners used no gear more advanced than picks and shovels. Each man was lowered down into a hole where he spent the rest of the day loading hand-cut phosphate rock into a bucket and breathing the dust into his lungs. Above the pit, a partner hauled up the buckets and dumped them into a wheelbarrow. When the wheelbarrow was filled, the surface man wheeled it across the growing chasms on a network of bouncing planks to a conveyor belt that fed a train whose route grew to half the length of the island. In this way, a third of Makatea became a moonscape of jagged rock pitted with cavities several feet wide and a hundred feet deep.
For decades, the island boomed. Makatea was French Polynesia’s only cash cow, and it grew into one of the most developed spots in the colony. It had electricity and plumbing, shops, billiard parlors, a bistro, tennis courts, a soccer field, and even a movie theater. It also had miners succumbing to lung disease and children dying from contaminated water.
The course of civilization is carved in ocean currents. Where sea layers mix, where rains travel or wastelands spread, where great upwellings bring deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters to the energy-bathed surface and fish go mad with fecundity, where soils turn fertile or anemic, where temperatures turn habitable or harsh, where trade routes flourish or fail: all this the global ocean engine determines. The fate of continents is written in water. And sometimes great cities owe their existence to tiny ocean islands. For a while, Makatea fed millions.
When the mines shut overnight in 1966, Makatea crashed. The large imported labor pool moved elsewhere. Many people chased jobs seven hundred miles away in the islands near Moruroa, where the French began their next ambitious Polynesian venture: blowing up atolls with nuclear bombs. The population of the island shrank to a fraction of those who had lived there before the CFPO arrived. The only enterprise left was a jungle set on revenge.
Some people of the Pacific like to say: Every island is a canoe, and every canoe is an island. When the phosphate mines closed, Makatea capsized.
TO MAKATEANS, LAND—FENUA—IS SACRED, the soul’s house. But the land of Makatea ended up all over the Pacific Rim, boosting crop yields in several distant countries. Boosted yields meant rising population, and rising population powered all the breakthroughs, inventions, and miraculous discoveries of the next twelve accelerating decades. Humanity’s suite of hockey-stick graphs required phosphate rock. Makatea helped Homo sapiens subdue the Earth. But in the process, the island was consumed.
Everyone needs to eat, but few people are aware of who sets the table. Makatea l’Oublié, a few books call it: Makatea the Forgotten. But that’s a misnomer. You can’t forget what you never knew.
........
DAY AND NIGHT, the final pages of Clearly It Is Ocean haunted me. I couldn’t stop rereading them.
In the last chapter, the woman I crushed on with all my ten-year-old heart told of a research trip she had made off the coast of Eastern Australia. She stopped one day in the middle of a dive to watch a giant cuttlefish near the mouth of its den. This tentacled mollusk, kin to squid and octopus, was performing a long, wild color-dance for no one.
It flashed complex patterns of every imaginable color, cycling through its designs as if sending a desperate, interplanetary broadcast. It seemed to be struggling to say something, but what? The diver’s presence didn’t alarm the cuttlefish, nor was the creature responding to anything else nearby. It simply looked out toward the open ocean and went on singing in colors. The signals were long and patterned, varied and unpredictable—a burst of messages that my diver author could not decode.
I wondered if the creature might be praying. But even to an excitable child, that didn’t seem like a very scientific hypothesis.
I read and reread the book’s mysterious ending, looking for theories that would explain that cuttlefish and reveal its mystery. Everything in me was moved to help my beloved author answer the question that eluded her. So when my father (pretending it came from Santa Claus) got me the year’s most astounding new toy for that Christmas, it seemed like part of a very large design.
I’d had my share of fabulous toys over the years: telescopes, microscopes, and chemistry sets. A stunt car that always righted itself after it flipped over and crashed. An electric pegboard and little colored peg lights you could paint with. A blue plastic clockface of nursery rhyme characters that spoke out loud the rhyme of any figure that you pointed the dial at. All my best and most mysterious toys eventually succumbed to dissection as I tried to discover the source of their power.
The saucer-shaped toy that my parents gave me could do what no toy in history had ever done. On its top were four large buttons—blue, green, yellow, and red. The device invented sequences of flashing lights and musical pitches, daring me to remember and copy them by pressing the colored buttons in the right order. When I did, the sequences got longer.
It was the creature from Clearly It Is Ocean, in electronic form. It was the flashing, strobing cuttlefish singing its epic song.
The connection thrilled me, but it also fanned all my anxious need for explanation. I went to my mother and asked her how the toy worked.
“Maybe there’s a tiny genie inside.”
She was mocking me, treating my needs with contempt. I wished her at the bottom of the ocean.
I brought the device to my father, who was lying on the floor of his study listening to psychedelic rock on his new high-end stereophonic headphones he’d bought himself for Christmas. His back still tortured him and he still took pills for the pain. I poked at him until he came out from under the pricey earmuffs. Indignant, I pushed the toy into his hands.
“How does it invent the patterns? How does it remember them?”
My father gazed at the toy in a happy stupor. He always had an answer. In all my childhood, I never heard my father say, I don’t know.
“Well,” he declared, buying time. “Computing. It’s complicated.”
For weeks, I trained my memory on that machine. I worked my way up to sequences of thirty-two colored lights and pitches, twice what either of my parents could manage. That was enough to beat the game on the highest skill level. But winning produced no answer to what the patterns meant or how the device made them. I had nothing left to do with the toy but autopsy it.
I went at it with a hammer and butterknife chisel. That made my father laugh and my mother tear up. I didn’t understand either reaction. People and their emotions puzzled me. They were stupidly complex, and there was no way to break them apart and see what was inside.
Cracking open my toy produced no answers. All I found in its guts was a green circuit board. It looked like a little city with metallic streets. In that city were two rectangular buildings, black, with eight pairs of silver legs. The buildings could not be opened or inspected. There was nothing more to take apart. There was no way to look deeper inside. The toy was dead.
I was stymied in my search for understanding until a few months later when, for my eleventh birthday, my parents gifted me a hulking black-and-white TV tube hooked up to a fat gray keyboard and a cassette deck. When I powered it up, nothing happened. In white all-caps letters at the top left of the screen, it read:
READY >_
“What is it ready for?” my mother asked.
My father looked unimpressed. “Not much, apparently.”
But Mr. First in Line knew. Everything inside my eleven-year-old brain was flashing: Ready or not, here comes everything.
WHO KNOWS HOW a boy’s thoughts work? Each hidden message led to the next. I loved the woman who wanted to know what the cuttlefish was saying. I had a toy that flashed in similar mysterious patterns. A brand-new present—this so-called personal computer—gave me a way to peer into that toy’s secret codes. And that might help me crack the cuttlefish’s wild song. The gray plastic box and keyboard were ready for anything. Clearly, they, too, were ocean.
Half a century later, as the rogue proteins eat my brain and rob me of my ability to remember, I can hold a five-inch flat black slab up to my face and ask, “What is the name of that old toy from the 1970s that created sequences of colored lights for you to copy?” And the little black monolith, always ready, remembers everything for me.
Didier Turi held his cell to his face in his office in the Town Hall, next to the open-walled community center. Le Maire listened, punctuating the words of the official on the other end with staccato bursts of, Oui, bien sûr—Oui, certainement. All the while he looked at the map on his wall and thought: Menteur! Liar!
