Non-Fiction
El Lugar de Los Sueños / Isaac Yuen
Image by Lela Sankeralli.
I once traveled to the Gulf of California on the trail of a dream, a dream that was mine but also another’s. In The Log of the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck wrote that trying to recall the Gulf was like trying to re-create a dream. On the eve of the first anniversary of my visit I found myself wishing to return in spirit, to retrace the contours of that initial journey, to map again its borders of desert and sea and sky, to revisit in place and imagination what I had gleaned and what I am still formulating. These are the things I think about when I conjure up the Gulf.
First and always, the touchstone. I have reread The Log more times than I can count. I know that it was a joint creation between John Steinbeck and biologist Ed Ricketts. That it remains one of my favourite travelogues, a pioneering work in intertidal ecology. That a woman that was part of the expedition was erased from its pages. These are the things I keep in mind when I think about the book.
There were limitations in my attempt to retrace the voyage. Instead of six weeks I had six days. Instead of dozens of sampling points, only four islands en-route. Gone was the private purse seiner charter of yesteryear, replaced by a party boat filled with middle-aged Montanans. This was not a biological expedition in search of new specimens, but a vacation for breast cancer survivors seeking sun and reprieve. With the modern advantages of hindsight and digital photography I tried my best to witness, record, confirm. How the wind carves across the face at the front of the prow. The way the slick sheen of tuna water breaks upon the hull. How at the sight of the tilted tongues of jutted isles one shrinks against such forlorn grandeur. These were the realities Steinbeck had once deemed unassailable. They are the foundations I now use to ground myself in my re-creation, this remembering.
1.
Isla Espíritu Santo. Isla San Francisquito. Isla San José. In the anchored bays by each desertscape life roils and abounds. As I scroll back through the carousel of underwater images, I find myself trying to heed the advice Steinbeck and Ricketts once gave themselves, to attempt to go my own way and not fool the self with conventional scriptures. Looking through each image I jot down notes out of impulse, in response, as accompaniment, the following creature captions:
Sergeant Major (Abudefduf saxatilis): Most common fish. The best name.
Finescale Triggerfish (Balistes polylepis): Sentimental favourite, for its ability to exist without making sense shape-wise, fish-wise.
King Angelfish (Holacanthus passer): Good interspecies social skills; able to slip in solo and be at ease into any school configuration. Some jealousy here.
Cortez Damselfish (Stegastes rectifraenum): Somewhere, there is a metaphor in how juveniles are electric blue while adults grow to become dull brown—except for their eyes.
Three-banded butterflyfish (Chaetodon robustus): How I associate it with deliciousness, partly because of growing up in a fishing village, partly a misreading as “butterfish,” combining two favourite foods together.
Now this: How easily one projects and imposes a worldview onto these sovereign creatures, branding them kings and soldiers, saviors or the distressed in need of saving. How even while recognizing this practice I myself engage in it, weighing the worth of each lifeform by their assigned names, slotting them into trophic hierarchies or clinical taxonomies, reducing them to classes of ships, leaves on a genetic tree, words in a line of text.
How to go behind the thought and the instinct that sparked it, to break through, as Ricketts tried to do all his life, to see life as it is, connected and whole. I sit back and close my eyes, straining to tune into an eight-decade-old conversation that might have taken place between author and biologist as they sipped their weakly chilled beers and waxed philosophy aboard the deck of a boat once known as The Western Flyer, sailing through that same waters I now inhabit.
2.
I keep being drawn back to the passage in The Log: Chapter 12, dated March 23. Steinbeck detailed the existence of an isle named Cayo, with its main trait being that it possessed a strange “burned quality”. The clues he laid out in the ensuing page and a half painted an irresistible mystery: The land’s charred look when viewed from afar. The presence of iron rings and chains set in stone with no seeming purpose. A lack of firewood and any freshwater. A single heap of turtle meat placed neat, freshly diced. “Something strange and dark had happened here,” the author wrote, “or that it was the ruined work of men’s hands.”
For years I had wanted to visit this isle, to discern the secrets of whatever curse or softly whispered nightmare that may still linger. Yet while on course to Isla San José we had passed Cayo without acknowledgement or fanfare. When I asked the onboard naturalist Paulino, he smiled and shook his head.
“There’s nothing special about Cayo,” he said. “Steinbeck was drunk when he wrote that part.”
Later on from the fishing village of El Pardito I looked northwest to snap a distant photo of Cayo. Under the glare of the afternoon sun, the flat-capped scrap of land seemed a shade darker than the rest of its surroundings.
~
Over the five days on board, Paulino and I talked often, whenever the others were topping off their margaritas or tanning on the sundeck. Paulino knew many things: How the skeleton on my t-shirt was of a blue whale; the proper way to use the hand and Cassiopeia to find the North Star; how Carol Steinbeck was written out of The Log save for one mention of lemon pie. He talked about how Cortez and his conquistadors were baffled by the people of the Gulf, not comprehending the notion that they had no lands to steal, no properties to seize, and nothing to pillage. He spoke of how a culture that had endured ten thousand years of desert and drought eventually fell under the sway of a dream, the grand promise of daily bread and eternal salvation.
At our last meeting before returning to the port of La Paz, Paulino told me of one dream of his that was not meant to be. He had once been invited to sail across the Pacific, a route that would take him down south to the Galapagos, southeast to Rapa Nui, and then to French Polynesia, and possibly finishing up north in Hawaii. The deal had fallen through at the last minute. “One day,” he said, his eyes gleaming.
Before parting I gifted him one of the three books I brought along. Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands is itself a collection of dreams, of real places most can only reach in imagination. Opening up the tangerine tome and flipping through the azure pages, Paulino locked his gaze onto one island out of fifty—Isla Anublada, also known as Socorro Island, located three hundred and seventy miles off Mexico’s westernmost coast.
“I know this place,” he said, looking up. “Someday I will return there, my friend.”
“After I fix up my boat,” he said, looking down. “One day.”
3.
Our tour guide Lela promised daily that our lives would be changed once we got to swim with a whale shark (Rhincodon typus). I thought about what it means to have one’s life changed, the handful of times that has happened in mine through an encounter with a person, a creature, a landscape. How that on each occasion a sort of welling up and surging forth of joy would come unlooked for, linked always with the fear and thrill of falling through what was once certain ground. But on the morning of our trip out to meet the sharks, Lela informed us that the season for diving with them remained closed due to a lack of sightings in their normal feeding area.
“We can still go out and try to spot some from the boat,” she said. “Cross your fingers and pray, people.”
~
On the catamaran ride out to the bay of La Paz, we passed by a series of buildings at the far end of the El Mogote sandspit. Named Paraiso del Mar, it was a development that began construction a decade and a half ago. The initial vision promised three thousand deluxe villas and condominiums, two exclusive golf courses, and a private marina. By the time construction was halted due to improper permits and ecological concerns over building on top of a mangrove, only ninety-one homes and a hundred and twenty condos had been finished. From the distance I could not make out whether the 19th Hole, a restaurant built to serve one patchy public golf course, still remained open. I learned later that the development locals now call “Fantasy Island” can still be accessed through an unpaved road or a regular ferry service. Boats still run but all the fancy furniture that greeted guests at the promenade had long been sold off. Potable water is still provided by a private on-site desalination plant. The on-site buildings are still maintained by the 170-strong homeowner’s association. Those who bought into the dream of owning a piece of paradise wait still for a reputable buyer to take over.
~
Five minutes before we arrived at the lookout location, the radio call comes in to declare the whale shark season has officially opened. Each group is permitted two hours for the visit. Six swimmers are allowed in the water at any given time. As part of the third cohort I slipped into the water with a 15-foot juvenile. To avoid the extra fuss and hassle I ditched my flippers and snorkel in the approach, and for three minutes and forty seconds I swam side-by-side and eye-to-eye with the largest fish in the world. Then it veered right and dove into the deeper waters of the bay.
There would be more chances to swim with other sharks, but I stay on the boat. What had I been expecting? A connection of spirit. A bridge forged across the gulf of being. Yet the shark had revealed nothing. Its gaze was remote and alien. My life was not changed. Why should it? From this initial disappointment arose a certain lightness, a loosening of a burden, a freeing in the mind that comes from the acceptance of another without need to understand or connect or relate. “A thing is because it is,” Steinbeck had written. The shark was, is, shall be. Its dreams remain its own.
4.
Back on solid ground after six days at sea, my mind resisted stillness, continued to sway and shift. On the Sunday afternoon I meandered through La Paz. There was a familiar quality to the quiet hot streets; an air, a stirring, a flavour. I thought of how Steinbeck mused that he had never seen a town resembling this one, yet coming upon it was akin to returning rather than visiting. I lowered my head as I walked. Yes. I knew these closed shops with rolled down steel doors. The old men sitting on crates in front, fanning themselves. The chipped sidewalks with large uneven steps sloping towards the water. Then I spotted a sign that would cinch the connection—Bazar Hong Kong—and suddenly I am Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, describing to Kublai Khan in shared dreams all the fantastical places he had visited, like this La Paz, yet always through the lens of an initial city that remains implicit, through an unspoken homeplace, my version of Polo’s Venice.
Then, again, Steinbeck: “…there comes a pang, some kind of emotional jar, and a longing.”
Later on I will look up the coordinates of Hong Kong and La Paz in an atlas and discover that these two fishing villages turned cities lie within two degrees of latitude across the Pacific from each other. Later I will connect the initials of my current home province of British Columbia in Canada with the state where La Paz resides, Baja California Sur, each with their respective number of Gulf Islands. I will then draw a triangle spanning the same Pacific linking where I was, where I am, and where I have traveled to, perhaps in hopes of finding where I will go next. But all that comes later. Here in this moment are the shuttered doors, the soft heat, the wandering.
5.
All afternoon I looked for Paulino, wanting to grab the script he wrote for a doomed Powerpoint presentation to bored housewives. He had penned a beautiful introduction about the mirage-like quality of the Gulf. I had underlined the phrase “to dream or to wake” in my journal before getting distracted by a video of someone in the area swimming with a giant oarfish (Regalecus glesne). I had thought that I could get the rest of the passage from him later, but now back in La Paz he was nowhere to be found. I thought of how Peter Matthiessen never saw his guide again after completing his pilgrimage to the Crystal Mountain in The Snow Leopard, my other favourite travelogue and the last book I brought that I had not given away. Perhaps like Matthiessen with his Tukten Sherpa, Paulino only existed within the confines of one space, could only exist there, being part of the dream that fades as the dreamer steps back into reality, awakening, taking with him the very language used to weave the dream together, if only for a while, before vanishing forever.
6.
On the last evening in town I slipped away from the group dinner to walk down to the waterfront. A huge red sun slung low on the water. La Paz’s newly constructed Malecón stretched for three miles along the city’s shoreline, with bronze sculptures cast by local artists dotting the length of the boardwalk. I passed a cartoon Cousteau in full scuba gear and knitted hat looking out at the bay. A humpback whale breaching out of an invisible sea. A bust of two hammerhead sharks arcing around the dying light. As the skies darkened I found myself standing in front of a giant silver pearl, highlighting the Steinbeck novel that took place here. I did not linger long, and instead of The Pearl my mind traveled two thousand miles north, to an introduction of another story I will remember always:
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream…”
A dream.
I walked on. More sculptures in no particular order: A mermaid grasping the tail fluke of a speeding dolphin. An old man wearing a paper hat on his head and a second one around his waist. A half-ton, two-toned patina queen embedded inside a piece of vertebra. From these perfected visions I thought of other whispered ones that had fared poorer or had failed altogether. The stone ruins of a pearl farm up the coast by a frigatebird rookery. The city’s first and only high-rise sitting empty after a windstorm blew out the windows. A desalination plant that was supposed to solve the city’s critical water shortages, existing still only in old newsprint and press releases.
I chanced upon the whale museum I had marked down to visit, but El Museo de la Ballena y Ciencias del Mar had been shuttered two months prior due to a tenfold increase in rent. A baleen whale skeleton resembling the one on my t-shirt but smaller sat outside the gate. A grey whale (Eschrichtius robustus), most likely.
~
I headed southwards toward the end. There the boardwalk was marked off with orange flex fencing. Construction was ongoing to expand the Malecón; the vision was still a work-in-progress, not fully realized. By then night had fully fallen and white sodium lights had been switched on. I turned around and retraced my steps back north. The beach had come alive. Small boys took turns working through a goaltending drill to improve their recovery position. Practicing acrobats slacklined between palm trees above white sands. Seniors practiced tai chi inside a community room with windows that opened out to the street. A running group jogged past me in the humid night air.
When my feet grew tired, I stopped at a bench by the main port archway. It was painted pink and inscribed with the words, Bienvenidos: La Paz, Puerto de Ilusion. From there I looked northwest away from the glare of city lights, out to the bay’s dark water towards El Mogote. The night breeze felt warm on my face but cool on my arms. The hush of waves was regular, not loud. If I close my eyes now I can still make out the lone light coming from the apartment on the second floor, flickering across the sea.