To Sea Lions!

I

I SHOULD like to sing an ode to sea lions. But the only form that could convey the delight and thrill of their motion would be the simple spontaneous chant of a three-year-old. You can’t freeze this movement in a classic shape.

I’ve been watching one, on and off all afternoon, in the little cove next the house. At first I thought it was just Spring that made it caracole so gayly. Such leaping, springing dives, his body arched, and cutting down again in beautiful spirals and curves! He is perhaps seven feet from whiskered mouth to stiff, fanlike tail — dark and liquid-sleek — and at the moment he is my ideal of beauty.

The sea has been brava for three days. The ocean races up the cove with foam flying, and the waves break on the shingled beach with crash and shatter. In the breathless seconds of calm, foam wreaths float down from the rocks on the dark green-blue water. Then the swirling sea comes racing in again, curvetting on the rocks, and pouring back in great scrolls and flourishes — and through the swirling water and the curls of foam I can see the swifter swirl of the lobo, down and up and leaping, and down and around. Now he flies through the waves toward the bank, turns like a racing swimmer, and for one sharp bright second I see the gleam of a silver fish in his mouth. So it wasn’t Spring! But nothing could convince me that he isn’t enjoying something more than the taste of lisa.

A desert island may seem a strange place in which to become suddenly enamored of movement — unless one wants to be facetious about getting off it. But perhaps it isn’t only facetiousness — perhaps, whether one knows it or not, there is an inner sense of physical restriction, so that the sharp contrast of vigorous activity has a special punch, in the best theatrical sense of the word. I think I never saw motion so distinct and lovely and satisfying as I have seen it here.

I used to think of it as a blurred something that went with cities, and crowds of people and machines. And in the country there was a slightly intoxicated, and intoxicating, kaleidoscope of windy leaves and light and too quick birds. But here on Isla Chincha Norte, on this bare white rock, the world is so stripped one can almost see its parts pure. Color as straight as cognac, in the sunset. Form, in the jutting castled rocks against the sky. And motion — always, and always different in the sea; then in the birds; in the unexpected, ever-exciting whales; and in the sea lions. Even most human beings here on the island seem not to have worried and constrained and pretentious attitudes, but move simply and sit quietly.

Nor am I the only one to feel the peculiar pull of motion. I see my ornithologist husband stop in his note taking, with that lifted look and imminent smile that have nothing to do with temperatures and microscopes. The island guardians sit watching the terns sweep in and out in mock alarms from the caves. The cook leans his black knotted arms and white apron against the railing, and stares at the sea in long absorbed meditation. And when a whale blows! Were we a boat, we should capsize with the rush of humanity to the rail.

‘Ballenas!’ the shout goes up.

‘Allá!' cries the mayordomo, pointing shoreward. ‘Señor! Señora!’

'Allí están!’ shrieks the cook’s wife.

'Allí!' we echo with delight as the fan of spray blows.

Often a pair of them will include us as one of the points of interest in their promenade for several days running. They aren’t very big, and they seem to be playing — but such slow and stately play! Surely nothing can equal, for serenity and confidence, the large ample leisurely movements of a whale. One rolls and dives, and then the other after him — like a round. And then one turns a complete somersault with great dignity, the white underside of his tail sinking majestically out of sight.

II

But for steady enjoyment and guaranteed thrills give me lobos. Whales are niggardly with their performances. After that opening fountain exhibition they are quite capable of showing you nothing else, and the first excitement becomes tempered with a certain irritation after searching a dazzling deceptive sea for ten minutes or so without results.

But sea lions are nearly as good in the wild state as their cousins in a zoo. Their private lives, in the dark recesses of echoing caverns, may be full of domestic strife and tribal wars, but when they appear in the amphitheatre of the sea for our benefit they combine all the delights of a circus — including the clowns.

I first met one face to face on my second or third day on the island. I had been launched by Blanca in the little rowboat, with much ceremony, and I pulled firmly out of the deep purple shadow of the dock into open sunlight and a delphinium sea — calm as satin and laced with broken silvered ribbons. I could see Blanca clinging absently to the rope ladder, with prehensile toes and a casual crooked arm. He had assumed I was going to be rowed. He looked after me now with profound skepticism, so I took great pains to dip and feather my oars in my best Central Park style.

I had the loveliest sensation of being on a spree — a boat all to myself, and a calm sea. The Water Rat and I have always seen eye-to-eye on such things: ‘There is nothing — absolutely nothing

— half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’ I pulled exultantly out and away and along the shore, looking up disdainfully at the long veranda whence I had been looking down. The little beach came into view, and the houses disappeared behind the promontory — and I was alone on the Pacific.

There is one consolation for those who have a certain timorousness. They can achieve the sense of adventure, the thrill of danger, very cheaply. Whereas your lionhearts need at least a parachute, or an Alp, or a charging elephant, the large family of Caspar Milquetoast can get the same result by taking the canoe out of sight of camp.

I leaned on my oars and contemplated a virgin world — when all at once, out of the tranquil sea six feet in front of me, a head rose slowly: a sleek, dark head, with great curious eyes and long whiskers, set on a long, long neck, the whole effect incredibly Andy Gumpish. I am sorry to say his composure was greater than mine. I jerked upright and the oars splashed, and my inquisitive neighbor sank in reproachful ripples.

I now hoped violently — with what I am told is typical feminine psychology — that he would come back. But I broiled my arms for nothing. My lobo was wary of creatures that move so unexpectedly.

This, we have found, is the greatest barrier to being truly aficionados of sea lions. They will pay our watery front yard unexpected and delightful calls, and stay for hours on end. They will inspect us inquisitively from a close but safe distance when we are out in boats. But they will never let us approach them very near — especially when they are on land (with one exception, as we found later). They have a long racial experience of the menace of men. Only in sickness does the instinct seem to weaken and the animal turn toward man

— or, perhaps more accurately, away from his own kind. Twice a dying lobo has come for refuge to the rocks near our house.

These are tragedies one seems to have no resources to meet. There is nothing one can do to ease even one’s own pity. To approach the animal for any reason is to drive it painfully back into the water. And, as we face the event starkly for the first time, the deep feeling arises that our insulated modern lives, in protecting us from unpleasant sights, have deprived us of some vital iron — like soil that has never known leaf decay.

A female sea lion in parturition came to the rocks near us one morning. She had been wounded — mortally wounded, by what must have been a ship’s propeller. And in her fatal weakness she could not complete the parturition. She tried to help herself in every possible way

— and the most poignant thing was that she made no sound through it all except occasional deep gusty sighs for breath.

As we watched her from across the little cove — and it was impossible not to watch and hope for her — the first unbearable sick horror changed to an anxious long suspense, and then, as we knew how it must end, to profound pity and sadness. But somehow the pity and sadness touched bottom — some solid bottom of irrevocability. The heart wept for it, but the spirit accepted it. That was part of the difference, one realized, between tragedy and frightfulness. She slipped back into the water at last, and disappeared.

III

One of the guardians told us that in the wide beachy caves of Chincha Sur — the wildest and ruggedest of our little group of three islands — the sea lions bred, and lived during the season of cría. He said that on a calm day we could come very close to the herds from the sea, in a rowboat.

It was a most enticing prospect. Not only ‘for to admire and for to see,’ but to add more pieces to the biological jigsaw puzzle, and to make a record of them with the cameras. My husband’s work is ornithological, but the smallest crustacean in the Humboldt Current and the biggest sea lion on the Chinchas are bound up irrevocably with the lives of the birds.

So we consulted with old Peña, the chief of the island’s guardians. He has lived on guano islands all his manhood ; he has a most intimate knowledge of guano birds, and sea creatures, and young wardens with a tendency to sacar la vuelta. (The nearest literal translation of that island slang seems to be ‘to give someone the run-around.’) And after sixty-five years he delivers the weight of his judgment with a most beguiling salty humor.

For our benefit he adds gestures. His Iea dialect, his sparse teeth, and his sealion whiskers added up at our first meeting to something nearly unintelligible for the gringos. By now we’re expert at catching what he means, but he is still convinced — to our delight — that he must act out everything he tells us.

‘Sí, Señor!’ he answered emphatically. ‘In January there will be bastante lobos,’with that invariable lingering and marveling emphasis on the second syllable of bastante; ‘big lobos — small lobos — chi-quititos.’ Having begun with his powerful sun-black arm well over his head, he had now arrived squatting within a foot of the ground.

‘But can we get really close to them?’ we asked — ‘close’ for a guardian’s eye and ‘close’ for a camera lens having two distinct meanings.

‘Cómo no? In a rowboat, with two guardians to row you’ — at which Peña rowed us all briskly across the storehouse floor. ‘In the caves of Chincha Sur they give their babies to the light.’ (Why haven’t we as pretty a substitute for our obstetrical terms? But then the Latin has a special feeling about these things.) ‘And all day they sleep’ — and Peña pillowed a leathery cheek on his folded hands and slept cherubically for a convincing second. He never skimps his dramatic effects.

So on a sunny Sunday afternoon in January, when the sea was sleek and tame and purring on the shores, we got into the long rowboat, with the movie camera, two still cameras loaded with color and black-and-white, exposure meter, binoculars — in short, the usual festoons that make a naturalist and his wife look like display frames of ocular goods. I am often impressed with the innate politeness of our staff. How can they help laughing at these two tall longlegged creatures, topped by enormous straw hats, wearing wide dark glasses, and seriously going about these extraordinary occupations! But they don’t. They even participate in our seriousness.

One reason is that my husband always tells them what he is going to do, and, as simply as possible, why he’s doing it. And they respond with the most faithful help and the most fascinated attention. In fact, the attention is often so wholehearted it has to be pushed back a few steps out of the light.

Blanca and Luis were our oarsmen that day. Alcibiades acted as dispatcher, and I thought I detected a look of wistfulness on his face — but I can never be sure what his slow faint changes of expression may mean. He is not a volatile Latin. I once supervised his scrubbing the floor of the salita, and the effort to read the thoughts behind that low placid brow exhausted me much more than the scrubbing exhausted Alcibiades — and that was a good deal! I know he would much rather have spent the day carrying 200-pound sacks of guano.

We were rowed out to the remolcador and tied on firmly behind. The motor started, the rowboat lifted its bow from the sea, and we slid across the calm water. Next to sailing, this is one of the pleasantest ways to travel on the water — provided there are no waves. It can also be the wettest way, outside swimming!

But that afternoon was calm. We slid past Chincha Centro, and out between Centro and Sur in the general direction of China. Then we turned back around Chincha Sur, the remolcador stopped and threw us our rope, and we started off propelled by Blanca and Luis.

IV

What is more exciting than a cave! The old answer is still right — two caves. And here were a row of them — great sea caverns scooped out of the whitened striated cliffs, with fantastic outposts and pillars of raspberry rock. The jagged islets rose like stalagmites from water so calm there was only a thin piping of white along its edges. We all agreed the sea was like a taza de leche — a cup of milk being the local cliché equivalent of our millpond.

‘ Muy mansa,’ we chorused complacently, ‘mansita!’ (If we had only known then ... as they say in the mystery stories — a device I disapprove of, but find irresistible here.)

From the great dark mouth of a cave ahead of us a roar reverberated crashingly, and another roar answered it. It sent a shiver of delight up the spine. A pelican flapped slowly away with a pompous look at us that said, ‘Of course this isn’t a question of being afraid — I just don’t like your company.'

The boatmen swung the boat parallel to the cliffs and we moved along slowly, peering into dark interiors where light shapes flickered obscurely and blurred the sight — the white breasts of penguins, perhaps, or the bleached bones of sea animals.

An enchantment of light and color and shivering reflections bathed the cliffs and caves and us. None of us spoke. The sun was low enough to reach halfway into the grottoes, and the gently pulsing sea threw shadows on the walls, so that the golden light was dappled and alive like the water, and the dark caves quickened to Aladdin colors — malachite and emerald, jasper and ruby and topaz; and, deeper still within them, cool depths of endless green. I wished that one could take and keep that cold briny air, that deep green peace in which the eyes stretched and rested — as one takes and keeps a picture.

There might be sea lions in all of these caves — but what we needed were both sea lions and light. We came to it at last — a bay in the cliff, and at the end a wide shallow cave and a white beach, light enough for pictures. And on the beach, myriads of sea lions!

There were great mountainous grandfathers like old elephants, opening the red caverns of their mouths and bellowing defiantly, majestic in their grizzled manes. Around them were harems of slim Quaker-colored females, and little black shapes that must have been new pups. In the surf was a bevy of honeycolored and fawn-colored slim young things that watched us with round brown eyes, and dipped and swam together and swayed back and forth in the spray, very much like an Aquacade ballet.

And coming steadily from the beach in a solid wall was such a stench as I had never encountered anywhere before! Sea lions must have lived and bred and died on that beach since the Adam of all sea lions. We clasped our noses and opened our eyes and shook our heads. We marveled that the boat went through it. But it did. And, amazingly enough, our lungs went right on functioning. After all, here we were approaching near enough to a herd of lobos to take their pictures! What was a smell?

There were waves running in here. Our boatmen kept us miraculously just beyond their breaking point, and I held cameras and passed them on request, while my husband feverishly took notes, ground out movies, clicked out candid shots, with the boat bobbing and straining against the oars, in the pull of the sea. We murmured invocations that the boat shouldn’t bob too much, that there should be enough light to catch the colors shining in the roof of the cave. But we had that lovely sure feeling that the exposures were right — that we really had something this time!

We backed out at last, skirting the rocks. Three large plump males followed us for quite a distance, bobbing up for curious and disapproving inspections of us from various angles. With their droopy moustaches they looked so very Victorian we called them ‘the uncles.’

One by one the uncles dropped behind, and we relaxed, and piled the cameras in a dry place, and sat back to enjoy the high precipitous cliffs moving slowly past us. At intervals up the sheer wall were piquero nests, shaped like semicircular tapering little pulpits glued to the rock — begun undoubtedly from a minute ledge, but almost pure sculptured guano by now.

I took off my dark glasses to see the colors better — the emerald grass at the water line, the wet rose, and the verdigris and saffron stains rising in the white. The boat rounded a point of rock toward a small high-walled beach. I looked back over my shoulder toward the cliff — and I saw a wave. It rose diagonally in a long seam from the point of the cliff and it increased in size with remarkable rapidity.

‘That wave’s going to wet us,’ I remarked clearly and with no conviction whatsoever, but I hunched my shoulders. Before anyone could answer, there was a wet hearty blow on my back, a rush of foam over my head, and I felt myself sailing lightly through the Pacific Ocean in a kind of slow-motion picture.

I thought two things with great distinctness: ‘I hope I don’t come up under the boat!’ and, trusting relic of some childish swimming lesson, ‘If I just hold my breath I’m sure to come up!’

I did come up — after a much longer time than that early coach had ever led me to believe. I came up spluttering and bleary. From somewhere near, my husband’s voice shouted encouragement and his hand appeared. I grabbed it and was hauled in limply to the side of the boat that lay bottom up, one end pegged to a rock, and the other bobbing in the waves. For there were waves! I wish some oceanographer would tell me how the rest of the Pacific could have been like a cup of milk and this little saucer of it behaving like a churn.

‘Are you all right?’ we shouted simultaneously, over the roar of surf. ‘Fine!’

Luis, clinging in a daze to the stern of the boat, looked at our grins with complete bewilderment — as well he might, since we found later that the tholepin had given him a nasty blow on the head. We looked toward shore, and for one second took in a world like the frame of an arrested movie film: perhaps a hundred feet away, a small narrow beach, with a white wave about to break on it, and wet rocks piled in places like a barricade; the steep white cliff touching the blue sky high above it; and on the edge of the beach — on the edge of flight, attack, what? — a battalion of sea lions. For a hair slice of time the frame stuck — and then the reel went wild.

A wave broke and washed us off the slippery keel without half trying. The sea lions galloped into the surf in a body. We made a struggling dash back to the boat. Blanca was swimming in a dizzy circle with the official notebook in his mouth, looking like a spaniel we used to have who loved zwieback. I thought hazily, ‘One should take one’s shoes off when shipwrecked,’ and started to wriggle out of one with the help of the other. Then the water around us suddenly boiled with sea lions, and I reached down hurriedly and pulled the heel back on.

The lobos were swimming frantically around us, since we were in the passage to the open sea. They were close enough to touch — bounding sleek bodies, and great whiskery heads and flopping tails and fins. By some extraordinary effort I got myself up on top of the boat — to hear my husband say, ‘Let’s make for the beach!’ What an appalling idea!

Blanca had piled an assortment of hats and notebooks and his own shirt on a rock — from which they were promptly washed away — and he swam back now, shouting encouragingly, ‘No muerden! ‘

So, not at all reassured that they wouldn’t bite, but with uncomfortably suspended judgment, I slid back into the water. We scarcely swam. The waves pushed us with astonishing velocity. Fortunately the point we arrived at was strewn with rocks only knee-high, so we stumbled up to the beach with nothing worse than barked shins. There were still some die-hards left of the battalion on the beach. A great caimán —as they call the old males — was perched on a ridiculously small rock and roared at us angrily. His mane was thick and long and yellow, and it gave his fat shape the most absurd coyness. He lumbered off into the water, and another younger male followed him. There were left three little black wrinkled pups that flopped their flippers in bewilderment and emitted long lamb-like ‘ba-aas,’ with another great caimán standing guard over them.

We didn’t even say, ‘What a picture!’

We looked at each other mournfully and sighed. The cameras had been piled in such a dry, safe place! And, to cap my disgust, I looked down and found myself still clutching my sun glasses!

Out beyond the welter of surf and sea lions, in the calm Pacific, the remolcador rocked gently — tranquilly unaware, from all appearances, of what had happened to us. It was finally decided that Blanca and Luis should stay. The rowboat had been washed off the rock, and they were to tow it out into still water, right it, and paddle back to the remolcador — with whatever salvage could be found! We were to climb up the cliff and meet them at the dock on the other side.

I threw a wistful look at the bleating pups. ‘I should love to pet a lobito!’ I suggested hopefully. My husband, with his shoes already tied around his neck and his toes dug into the sliding cliff, looked at the glaring caimán and looked at me, and said very gently, ‘I don’t think I would if I were you.’ And for once I was not disposed to argue.

V

Ah, such excitement, such compassion, such dramatic retelling of the event as met our return! Give me a Latin-American household for a really satisfactory audience. You can find no translation for the word ‘empathy’ in Appleton’s dictionary, and perhaps it is because the participation in each other’s emotions is such a constant and common thing that they’ve never thought to isolate it and name it.

(But there’s no doubt that it is a trait of Latin-American temperament that bothers many Northerners to the point of exasperation. Being used to neighbors that leave them emotionally alone, except for the prying few, they cannot imagine a whole continent of people who enjoy living in emotional publicity and intimacy. They suspect them of all manner of malicious curiosity, of invidious comparison and criticism, of calculating purposes; when, as a matter of fact, what may seem to us the most outrageously personal questions arise only out of a very natural desire to fit us into their world — which happens to be a very personal, sociable, emotionally warm, and gregarious world.)

So when we climbed up to the dock, damp and slimy and rolled in guano dust like well-crumbed scallops, Roca threw up his eyes and hands and all but beat his breast for not having discovered our plight a mile away and had hot water ready for us. To and from the bath, we received visits of condolence, and felicitation over our miraculous escape. The guardians one and all came down from their hill, the kitchen staff and family all came out, and we were cosseted and posseted to the hilt of those comfortable snug words. Luis, too, had his share of attention, with a large flourishing bandage around his head and a great deal of limelight.

There were few ill effects — a restless night or two, in which tall and unexpected waves played an important part for me; and recurring pangs whenever we thought of the notes and the lecture material gone to Davy Jones. Fortunately the financial loss was lightened by the insurance we carried. We felt, on the whole, more gratitude than regret, because there was an infinity of accidents that we had missed. It might have been one of us to hit the rocks, instead of the bow of the boat that came back shattered. And the special Providence that looks after naturalists must have kept that particular rocky beach free of the bayonet-like barnacles that infest this coast.

But I think the most heartening consequence, to me, was the accolade I received by way of the kitchen. I was told they had heard that the Señora was as ‘serenita como una palomita.’ The compliment on my serenity didn’t count, — only the actor in such an accident knows how much his serenity depends on numbed senses and the rapidity of events, — but the diminutives did. With all the wistful unsatisfied longings that go with being nearly five feet eight, I relished that ‘ little dove. ‘

VI

Yesterday afternoon I walked across to the side of the island fronting Chincha Centro. There is a small shingled beach there, and little long rock islands in the surf, where penguins come to sun themselves sometimes — turned toward each other like sociable but silent pygmy people. A large rock juts out from the beach into the sea, and at its land end there is a place where one can sit in the sun and see the waves run up on either side, and feel cool spray, and look over into another beach that can only be reached by wading. There are narrow high sea caves in the other beach, marvelously and curiously cut; and above them pelicans — bachelor pelicans? — lead a lazy, carefree life, rising and settling on air currents, their long legs dangling, and riding the winds with easy broad pinions.

I came to the little slope that takes you down — and there, in the sandy passage to my rock, were two sea lions courting. He was a magnificent young creature, seven or eight feet long, very dark and sleek, lion-like through the chest and head, and well-maned. She was mole-gray, and slim and small.

Despite my carefulness, they saw me. She became frantically alarmed — or, on the other hand, was she not entirely enthusiastic over her suitor? Anyway, she tried to flee. With his flippers and the weight of his body he stopped and held her. He turned his head sideways and looked at me — such a plain battle of emotions! I was a very likely menace. But was I really dangerous enough for him to interrupt the pleasures of dalliance?

She made another break for safety, and once more he stopped her — still watching me in the lulls. I ventured a few steps closer. Ah, that was a mistake! She wriggled violently to free herself, and the lobo, with a last look of anger and exasperation at me, grasped his lady’s tail firmly in his mouth and pulled her out of sight into the rocks and surf.

Telling it afterwards, I protested, ‘But I want to get really close to the lobos — and not have them run away from me!’

‘You were once,’ my husband chuckled.

‘But not in the proper frame of mind,’ I mourned, ‘for contemplation.’

So now I have a plan. When the young pelicans and cormorants are on the wing, and we can walk freely through their territory, I shall have a blind carried to the other end of the island. There, fronting the open west, is a deep bay in the cliffs, and hundreds of sea lions live there. And I shall set myself at the little window of the casita, and watch sea lions to the saturation point. Then, perhaps, I shall know how to write them an ode. But I suspect strongly that there is no saturation point.