a prescient shiver of recognition: the young woman was the child Mary presently carried, somewhere in the future, alive, healthy.
I lurched up in bed as if commanded, and stepped across the cool terra-cotta tiles to the door. Outside I walked a hundred feet to the shore at the island’s south side. Low on the barely lightening horizon a little ceja moon, new, was about to set, Venus winking to the east. Dawn was nearing, the humid air saturated with the wild din of peepers and crickets in their final act paired with birds announcing light’s arrival.
I felt light, disburdened, and reasoned beyond logic that such a potent dream could have been bestowed on me only by this place, which now seemed vaguely familiar. I did what seemed appropriate: shucked my T-shirt and dunked—full immersion—three times, in the warm shallows. I looked out across the sheer flat for a sign of the fish I had journeyed so far to catch—from foot to horizon, the water looked like a tablet with utter nothingness carved into it.
I had eaten dinner with a man who I reckoned knew more about that tablet than I could ever guess. He had given me one tale. I wondered what more he might be inclined to share.
The fashioner of things has no original intentions.
—WANG WEI
Always the tide: two low, two high each day. Rising tide climbs into flood, which flushes into high, when the moon above is at its zenith, or passing underfoot at its nadir; then falling tide recedes into ebb, which bellies out to low, before the heavy pause that is slack tide, before the moon begins to tug again, a distant rock stirring water that stirs sand that once was rock.
Back home in Montana I unfolded the map of Grand Bahama frequently, and imagined the water pushing inland, then falling back from the mass of land that looked a little like a swordfish with an upturned bill, minus a fin or two. Near the bottom tip of the fish’s crescent tail sat East End, where David had resided for an epoch. Even my puerile three-course undergraduate geology background, though, reminded me that the limestone platform on which he walked had existed far longer than he, or even the bonefish, could fathom. I dug back into my old textbooks, stole off to the library and thumbed through the vacant stacks like a student with a prof’s merciful offer to retake a flunked final exam—not to raise some long-forgotten grade, but to give some footing to the water’s story, some ground to a compelling man’s steps. Tell me the landscape in which he lives, in other words, and I will tell you who he is.
Of course terms like Late Jurassic and Cretaceous mean little to nongeologists, and numbers of years ago like sixty or eighty million mean much less to mortals such as myself who can’t account for yesterday. Suffice to say this limestone underlay composed of the skeletal remains of barnacles and other immobile organisms—minuscule wildflowers pressed between the pages of a tome—has existed for an incomprehensibly long period, and today measures nearly five miles in thickness.
Eventually this slab became so dense that it began to subside under its own weight at a rate of roughly four centimeters per thousand years. For eons, though, the seafloor simply spread warm waters farther and farther inland. This was back when all the world was hot and humid, awash in salty water. Huge toothy creatures swam here, stomped the boggy shorelines. They ate foliage and each other, gnashed bloodied teeth. They moved loudly and terribly, or so we imagine and conjecture. We know them by their coveted bones and fossils, and though the record of their massive comings and goings is faint, we hear echoes of it in the roar of heavy breakers rolling shoreward.
Then, like something out of a story I might tell my children by the fire—something sudden, meant to terrify—a large, audibly flaming object plummeted from the sky, rent the ground, and put an end to these creatures and to most breathing for a while: to the braiding flights of birds and the small mammals birthing nursing babies, to most green and flowering things.
But the water remained water, just as the rock, though scarred, remained rock. Over another unfathomable stretch of time, under great tectonic force—a tremendous focalization of subterranean energy—the earth’s crust buckled like pond ice ceding to warm rain. The seafloor shifted, configuring banks, and when the seas finally receded, the highest ridges formed islands atop endless limestone shallows, the Gran Bajamar, as the Spanish sailors called them millennia later, “Great Shallows,” and eventually the Grand Bahama Bank.
By and by rain fell on the exposed bedrock and dissolved its bonds, the falling water absorbing traces of atmospheric carbon dioxide as it descended. When rain met limestone, they brewed a strange tea of weak carbonic acid that chewed through parts of the rock. Gem-blue holes were carved in the karst, adorning the seafloor with deep pools divers would covet centuries later.
More importantly from a biological perspective, a relatively thin but essential freshwater lens formed when the rainwater that had seeped through the limestone’s surface collected below sea level, floating atop the denser salt water. This seminal meniscus of groundwater would come to comprise the majority of naturally occurring potable water in the islands, a fertile layer of liquid in which marine organisms large and small flourish. Its existence allows a would-be moonscape to morph into one of the world’s most fecund habitats, a place where plants like mangrove trees thrive.
Amphibious trees that root in the unfriendliest of shoreline soils where no other tree can, mangroves can live for a hundred years. Subject to the conditions a mangrove endures daily—muck, salt, tidal fluctuations—an ordinary plant would wilt within a week, but mangroves don’t only survive, they transform and soften the elements around them. Serving as natural head-walls, their banks protect inland ecosystems from rough seas and filter the negative constituents from the water, increasing the quality and volume of the freshwater lens. Inevitably salt permeates the trees’ root systems, but they simply store it in old leaves, which they shed. And the mangroves’ roots breathe, literally snorkeling for air while simultaneously anchoring the trees in tide-shifted mud. Crabs and snails climb and fasten themselves to these roots to avoid predators; these filter-feeding organisms also clean the water that flows back and forth over them, so that the tide can rush out cleansed into a thriving sea.
In the hour-long film that is Earth’s history, we humans make our cameo in the final second. Perhaps that’s why a phrase like a rate of roughly four centimeters per thousand years falls on deaf ears. We may never possess the genius of the mangroves and their adaptive ingenuity, but we may still have time to recognize our minuscule role in the order of things. The close study of a landscape such as this union of bedrock, tree, tidal flux, and fertile water is a start, and might lead us to move with the measure of the waters and the islands themselves.
A fish together with other fish invariably knows what is on each other’s mind. Unlike humans they are not ignorant of each other’s intentions.
—DOGEN
I sat often at my computer looking at the picture turned screen saver that Miller had sent of me holding my first bonefish, my eyes beaming over soon-to-be-sunburned cheeks. Though I’d caught thousands of fish in my lifetime, I’d doubted I’d ever been so elated about one that so closely resembled a minnow. Lacking the dangerous stiletto-shaped allure of a barracuda, say, or the simple polished-penny sheen of a redfish, or the azure panache of a dorado’s dorsal fin, the bonefish possesses the beauty, rather, of certain mirrors or windows.
Despite its homely appearance, its mouth shaped, in one writer’s words, “like a rechargeable vacuum cleaner,” and its relatively modest average size, the bonefish has attained sport fish–royalty status due largely to its fickle
