Telling Our Way to the Sea: A Voyage of Discovery in the Sea of Cortez
Aaron Hirsh
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 1250050316
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL OUTDOOR BOOK AWARD FOR NATURAL HISTORY LITERATURE
A FINALIST FOR THE WILLIAM SAROYAN INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WRITING
A SEATTLE TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
When biologists Aaron Hirsh and Veronica Volny lead twelve college students to a remote fishing village on the Sea of Cortez, they encounter a bay of dazzling beauty and richness. But as the group begins its investigations―conducting ecological and evolutionary studies of the area and its natural inhabitants; listening to the stories of local villagers; and examining the journals of conquistadors and explorers―they realize that the sea is but a ghost of what it once was.
And yet there is redemption in their difficult realization: as they find their places in a profoundly altered environment, they also recognize their roles in the path ahead, and ultimately come to see themselves in a new light. By turns epic and intimate, Telling Our Way to the Sea is a profound meditation on our changing relationships with nature―and with one another.
usurping Ace’s voice, perhaps his very being, the game feels different, but I think its function might be the same: Strangers to one another in the parking lot, the students have quickly discovered some ground that is not only common but also—maybe more important, as our Expedition careens now toward a foreign border—soothingly familiar. When highway signs warn us that we are about to leave the country, the students grow briefly louder—the game’s last gasp—and then fall silent. Larger signs warn
glare across the surface—of that we can remember the fact, but not the exact unfurling curves, much less the million little flares that compose them. Or again, we might remember well that Guardian Angel Island, the distant boundary of the channel, appears to be made of sand in many different colors—pinks and grays, blacks and beiges—layered one upon another. But we could never recall the actual pattern of sedimentary bands, or the places a layer below erupts upward, or one above spills down to
happened, the mutineers struck Baja, and thus became the first Europeans to set foot on Californian soil, as well as the first to be bludgeoned to death by Californian natives. When Cortés got word, from a few lucky fugitives, of the other mutineers’ demise, he immediately declared that he himself would captain a return to the same shore. But why? Why such dogged pursuit of a hostile desert headland, when he’d already conquered the greatest city of the New World? It was as if he really thought
the phone with a ceremonious, “Bahía de los Ángeles,” as if you could ask to speak with anyone in town. And I suppose you could. She’d just send her knobby-kneed son running in flip-flops to find whomever you asked for. As we pass the bright billboard overhanging the driveway for Guillermo’s beachfront restaurant and bar, I let it go without mention. And where the road bumps straight into Casa Diaz, turning right then to head up the hill, I tell them about the Diaz grocery, where they can buy
contradictory views. If we can adopt such a pluralistic cast of mind, we might not be fated to the half-light, after all. PART IV Leptalpheus mexicanus LISTENING TO OTHERS 1 One way to make sense of what Cortés did or did not see is to understand seeing as an act performed not by an individual, but rather by a group. What he saw depended critically on what others had prepared him to see, and on what he, in turn, wanted others to see. In this sense, Cortés’s view of the New World is the