 |
FIRE AND ICEBY PHIL TRUPP |
THERE IS A FULL MOON, AND HERE AT Tutukaka where New Zealand juts into the far South Pacific,
the horizon is broken by a maze of pinnacles they call Poor Knights Islands. They are 20 miles away, but in
the absolutely transparent night air they are vivid as the pillars of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain.
How did these monoliths come to be? We are here to understand the powers that gave birth to Poor Knights,
to the whole of this land of contrast and secrets.
New Zealand: An island nation of 103,747 square miles, one of the most civilized countries on earth, the place
where dawn first rises on the world, being just west of the International Date Line. There are 3.5 million
people (living mostly on North Island) and 70 million sheep. It's a society of art and culture and high
technology, and yet the latest maps still carry that evocative word you don't expect to see in the last decade
of the 20th century: unexplored.
It's a word that can be applied to virtually all of New Zealand's underwater terrain and the waters of its
mountainous uplands. As yet, relatively few touring divers have visited the country. The water is chilly-60FS
even in the subtropical north-but the rewards for those who want to be the first to challenge the unexplored
are vast. There are thousands of miles of coastline, including a single unbroken beach 90 miles long. Vast
tracts of this sea have hardly been touched since the landing of the 17th century British navigator James
Cook, who, for some reason, didn't think much of this last great paradise and brushed it off.
In New Zealand's glaciated Southern Alps there are rivers white as milk, and deep lakes above the clouds;
fjords carved by prehistoric glaciers cover a third of South Island's west coast; rivers of jade that have never
been touched even by the most daring high-country explorers. And there are submerged mountains older
than even the glaciers.
We wonder: can we do in two weeks what two centuries of European habitation has not? Can we overcome
the daunting landscape and come to understand New Zealand's ocean, how it was formed and what it is? That
seems as impossible as moving the boulders at the base of the mountain range they call "The Remarkables."
But that's what makes it exciting, and Poor Knights, off the northeast coast of New Zealand's North Island, is
a fine beginning.
Tomorrow, I inform Amos, our photographer, we go chop-chop for two weeks to cover most of this last great
paradise.
There will be green valleys so deep they appear as sunless rivers. Forested mountains standing above the
clouds and accented by pink saw grass. Rain forests lush and primal silhouetted against the snowy Alps. The
one constant is juxtaposition of the unlikely: seawater barely tasting of salt and tropic seas that look
wonderfully warm but are icy to the skin-fire and ice.
PRIMITIVE JEWELS
Three hours out of subtropical Tutukaka, the marine reserve of Poor Knights rises from the South Pacific
like the fingers of some timeless god. The primary monoliths-Tawhiti Rahi and Aorangi to the north, and
High Peak and Sugarloaf rocks to the south- reach out of the very deep sea.
Cook charted Poor Knights and named them after chess pieces which, to his mind, appeared to have fallen
into the gold and green surface of the Pacific. It is an illusion. Poor Knights is a maze of volcanic upthrustings
so prolific it conceals harbors and caves big enough to shelter ocean-going vessels. Every twist of the rudder
brings another monolith-some deep, some shallow-and each arch filled with life as exotic as the islands.
We gear up as Captain Going navigates into the lee of a sheer rock face, and his mate, Isi, a Tongan farmer
who is very young and shy and capable, helps us place the cameras in the water.
We zip ourselves into a quarterinch shroud of neoprene with hood and mitts and take the plunge. The chill of
this topaz-colored sea is unexpected, a little stunning. I work against the 60F water and swim fast to get
under the Northern Arch, a 700-foot-high skyscraper of rock falling to a sandy bottom 120 feet below. The
cool water is like the sweet-tasting, jogger-friendly air of New Zealand, the air that Sir Edmund Hillary used
in preparation for Everest. The chill becomes pleasant. And soon I'm swimming as easily as the schools of
pink and blue maomao coloring the surface with their scales. I drop into a forest of kelp, absolutely pristine
and lovely in the surge. Like the mountains, the bottomography is something out of the deep past, like a time
warp. Volcanic scars on the rocks appear just as they were at some moment in the Devonian period, when life
arose in the sea, and the scars are fresh and unhealed. It will be a long time before the kelp softens them.
"It is lovely, so strong," Amos says, standing dripping wet on deck with Kerri, our model.
"Up there," says Captain Going. "The formation." He points to a crest high overhead. "Appears to be a
woman with a pack on her back."
"A dinosaur," Kerri suggests.
Captain Going motors slowly around the point of Northern Arch into a calm bay surrounded by stone
monoliths. Dead ahead a cave opens black and sightless. It's easy to imagine the volcanic cataclysm that
fractured the earth's crust and formed these primitive jewels. Primitive, lovely, and a little eerie. The
Polynesian Maoris who settled at Poor Knights for a time found themselves in a tribal war that ended in a
terrible massacre.
Later, in yet another surround of monoliths capped by red pohutukawa ("Kiwi Christmas trees," Captain
Going explains) and alive with the living fossil tuatara lizards, we dive through a shallow arch. The current
zaps us through the portal and out into the open. And it is there, in the sun, I see a sight that, at first, might be
one of those quirky plays of light. But it's real.
The water is swarming with medusas, translucent filaments accented by a series of royal blue "eyes." The
water is thick with them, and some are long as a man's forearm. In this suddenly gelatinous sea other
medusas appear. The jellyfish are all trailing tentacles and glowing red centers. The red pulsates in a slow
cadence, the sea is white with medusas and there is a faint glow of red and blue.
I feel them covering my body, attaching to my faceplate. I ball up my hands and feel them soft in my palms.
For a moment, eyes closed, I think I can actually hear them living and dying in a whisper all around me.
We dive other spots, and at Anne's Rock and Mao Island we search for the fabled bright red urchin, the
Diadema palmer. In the beds of kelp we search and search. The big saucer-sized green urchins are
everywhere, but no matter how much air we burn, the
Heading in finally to Tutukaka Captain Going shouts from the flying bridge. "Dolphins! Must be thousands
of 'em."
To the horizon the water is white with the dolphins leaping, their dorsals and flukes churning the topaz water,
and arching over the surface with them are big black pilot whales. They're at the stern and in the bow wake,
skimming just below the surface, and we can see their long gray bodies moving without effort below the
surface.
We drive north from Tutukaka to Paihia and the Bay of Islands, normally an hour's journey, but not for us.
We negotiate breathtaking hairpin turns while driving on the left with the steering wheel on the right. If sheep
aren't crossing the road, it's the scenery that pulls us over. Every five minutes, it seems, were standing
outside the van.
Nearly a half-day later we arrive, camera-weary, at the village of Paihia with its lovely commons, sheltered
coves and fir-covered mountains rising against the sea, and from where we will dive the Bay of Islands. a
preserve on the northeastern coast.
The Bay of Islands is a seascape of large and small rocks and islets between Cape Brett to the south and
Cape Wiwiki to the north. The geography is consistent: volcanic cliffs and uplands falling into a huge basin of
wide-open sea. The color of the water is fascinating. It is topaz in an unbroken plain. So brittle-looking at the
surface that it seems jumping in
We are steaming eastward on a chilly gray morning toward the resting place of the former Green Peace
flagship, Rainbow Warrior. In 1985, she was bombed by French intelligence officers in Auckland. It was an
outrage that shook eco-sensitive New Zealand and sparked a great deal of undiplomatic language. ~j
"The rotten gall," says Mike Zehnpfennig, a German diver living in New Zealand. He explains how ~i the
bombed trawler was raised for forensic investigation, then hauled out here, through the Bay of Islands to the
Cavalli Islands in what is called the Northland.
On Dec. 13, 1987, Rainbow Warrior was scuttled in 90 feet of water on a sandy bottom off the southwest
coast of Motu Tapere Island, coming to rest under the shadow of an old Maori fortification where a
monument and the ship's bronze propeller now stand.
Because we are without sun the wreck is a bit gloomy. Its flanks curve into the dim visibility. I float over the
fantail, its metal skin flayed by the explosion near the keel on the starboard side. Under the fantail is the
fatal wound: a jagged hole big enough for two divers to swim through, with the strange shadows of wreckage.
I pull toward the wheelhouse. The Rainbow Warrior is still recognizable. A picture of a dove once adorned the
top deck, and a rainbow once crossed the hull midway between the wheelhouse and the bow on the port side.
These symbols are gone now, overtaken by anemones and yellow finger sponges. It's 140 feet from stern to
bowsprit. Many hatches are open. It's a touching wreck when you know about her, but she'd be a good wreck
even if you didn't know her history.
The next day we drive southwest 150 miles from the Bay of Islands to Auckland to catch a plane. We motor
through small towns and villages. They appear suddenly, and then disappear behind us in the shadow of the
mountains. It is a busy, sunny morning, and at Wellsford we stop for an energy-boosting cappuccino. Bakers
display fresh breads in the windows of the cafes, and the air smells of crisp sourdough and scones and cakes.
There are sandwiches of fresh tomatoes, sprouts, fete cheese, cucumbers and marinated eggplant on newly
made bread set out on the countertops.
From Auckland, we fly into Whakatane, a district of hamlets cradled in the Bay of Plenty along New
Zealand's upper east coast. In Maori, Whakatane means "to act as a man," and the following morning our
host, John Baker, explains the legend as we motor out on a glassy, windless sea.
During a 12th century migration of Maoris, the men swam ashore and left the women and the daughter of the
skipper in the canoe, he tells us. The canoe began drifting out to sea. Women weren't allowed to work the
oars; it was a man-thing, and no men were in sight. A high-spirited teenager named Wairaka turned tradition
upside down and shouted, "Ka Whakatane Av i Ah au!" (We are acting as men) and urged the others to take
the oars and pull for shore.
"Look, there," John Baker says, pointing to a statue atop a boulder at the entrance of the harbor. "Wairaka.
Saved the women. Men, too."
It is a long steam from the harbor to the volcanic Colville and Kermadec ridges. There are 10 active and
inactive cones rising from the submerged plateaus. They bear oddly understated names: "Rumbles" (I-V),
Clark and Tangaroa volcanoes, "Silents" (I-II). We will be in the waters off White Island, which is closer
than the others, and active, with steam and sulphur rising into the cool air, and a constant hiss cutting through
the morning silence.
This kind of excitement-the newness and unpredictability-is a true exhilaration. Here is the heart of the earth
and the sea, pounding and racing. With the earth so revealed, there is no time to miss the watercolor wash of
the northern coral reefs. These seas are truth stripped to essentials: granite spires and ridges roaring up out
of very deep water; the gods at work, as at Poor Knights, reaching out, seducing. You do not miss the pretty
watercolors when the earth is looking you straight in the eye and opening herself to you and showing you
what she-and you- are made of.
John Baker tells us what to expect. We will explore a series of submerged "needles" rising from a bottom to
within 60 feet of the surface.
We enter the water amid the circling greyfaced petrels and noisy gannets who make their nests in the
pohutukawa forests on the monoliths. One moment the air is shrill, and then it is utterly silent as we splash in.
The water is as clear as any I've seen. Diadema Rock is immediately visible. Sunlight sparkles on the
bottom, 170 below.
For the first time I am aware of just how different this far South Pacific can be. Of the thousands of fish
species in the world, only about 1,000 are found in New Zealand. Fewer than 25 percent of New Zealand's
fishes are native, and about half of these live in very deep water.
But it's lively today, and as I cruisealong the pinnacle with 22-year-old Richard Dunn, a boat builder from
Wellington, I make mental notes on the oddity-the sheer unfamiliarity-of these cold-water animals. There is
the cockabully, a spiky, grinning fish with dark scales and big yellow eyes; kelp-fish, gray and green with
white speckles and a long snout; the opalfish, long and slender as an arrow with iridescent markings; red
mullet with a big armored head and catfish-like whiskers; and bulky, football-sized scorpionfish everywhere
on the narrow shelves of the pinnacle.
It's pleasant to float through the schools of pink and blue maomao. At Poor Knights they were so thick they
changed the color of the surface water around them. A red gurnard lazes by, its black gill fins barely moving,
eyes snapping this way and that, as if on the lookout for a tailing carnivore. One of my favorites is a big red,
white and blue-striped parrotfish cruising alongside me.
If the open water isn't wall-to-wall fish, the shelves of Diadema Rock are thick with eels: yellow morays and
congers. It is not a good idea to "finger walk" along the pinnacle because they're jammed into crevices and
nooks beneath the kelp. The appearance of the ling-a red, eel-like deep-water swimmer-takes me by
surprise. What an odd sight: a fish usually found thousands of feet down snaking under my fins; here, it's
either on the hunt or running away from a larger predator.
I turn another corner, and I see why the ling is on the run. I tap Richard on the shoulder and point. There, at
the edge of visibility, is the gray, conical snout of a mako. Its jaw is slightly agape and I can see, dimly, the
awl-shaped teeth. The mako hangs in mid-water. Its eyes seem dead, but they are really quite good eyes;
good enough to make me stop and back against the rock face.
There are plenty of makos in these waters; great whites, too, though makos are more common. Richard looks
at the fish and shrugs. He's amazingly casual; and he wants to swim off and turn his back, and I do not think
this is such a good idea.
I can see Amos photographing below me. He's found a diadema, and the strobe makes colors appear and
disappear at the speed of light.
Meanwhile, Richard is impatient. I stay with my back to the rock facing the mako. The shark continues to
stare. Just then Amos swims by, the strobe goes off-zap! zap!-and when I look again the water is empty.
We leave North Island the following day, flying into the capital of Wellington, and from there over Cook
Strait and Cloudy Bay into Blenheim, on South Island. It is a lovely, bright morning, the Strait is ice-blue and
the shadows of big puffy clouds march across its surface.
We drive 68 miles from Motueka, on the northern tip of the South Island, to Nelson, where we hop another
flight into Christchurch. It is a flight that changes my perspective.
The big jet, making a last-minute decision to enter the great valley of the Southern Alps, yaws and pitches,
and outside the ports the mountains suddenly change color. The soft green forest is gone, and there is cold
stone and ice-ice a million years old.
We arrive in one piece, and the next day drive 75 miles to Milford Sound, on the southwest corner of South
Island. From the head of Milford Sound we can see the remains of the Pembroke Glacier and the "hanging
valley" that ends in Stirling Falls. The glaciers of three ice ages (from a million years to 15,000 years ago)
scoured out and polished river valleys that are now well below sea level. The evidence of advancing and
retreating glaciers is written in the rocks, leaving traces of five previous valley floors.
Fiordland National Park covers hundreds of square miles, most of it unexplored. There are high glacial lakes
and rivers running white with ground-up rock. There are valleys that have not been touched, and vast fingers
of ice blasted into hostile moonscapes by the wind.
We have as our guide Kathy Jamieson, two-time "Scuba Champ" of New Zealand. She is a bright,
quickmoving young woman with a blushed outdoor complexion. She has pale eyes and strawberry-blond hair
and a great store of energy.
We head into the maze of peaks and narrow passages. The early-morning sun is blocked by the cliffs, but
there are flashes of golden light in the firs and the strange black-bunked Wheki ferns. The cliffs show a
tortured history of fire and ice, of birth and rebirth, and there is a sense of more change to come.
"One day the sediments may fill up the bottom," Kathy suggests.
That's a lot of sediment. The fiords have an average depth of about 800 feet, though at Milford, which lies
between Yates and St. Anne Points, the depths are closer to 1,000 feet. At Caswell and Doubtful Sounds the
bottoms are 1,500 feet.
We pass 5,000-foot-high glacial waterfalls, and as the sun rises higher they transform the light into rainbows
dancing across the face of the rocks. Opaque clouds fold into the declivities, and when the sun touches them
it looks as if the mountaintops have caught fire.
We can't feel a breeze, and the surface of the water is glassy except where the falls spill and make the
rainbows. Kathy says dolphins enter the fjords; in fact, just about every local species are in these protected
waters. "The dolphins come up and play at the stern," she explains. "We swim with them all the time."
Suddenly we're in an exposed area where the wind plays in. We go from dead-calm to white water in a matter
of seconds. "Pull out of this slop," Kathy tells the skipper, and as quickly as it came the wind is cut off by the
mountains and the fjord is again still as a pond.
The water column is an upsidedown thermocline/halocline-very appropriate here at the bottom of the world.
The top layer of water is from the melting ice of the high glaciers. This is dark, mineral-rich fresh water, and
visibility is poor. Below the fresh surface layer is the seawater, deeper, richer and clearer.
The boat backs up to a sheer cliff and we hit the water. It is dauntingly cold. Because of an ill-fitting hood I
can feel the water numbing the back of my neck. I flip over and head beneath the layer of dark fresh water. I
can see only inches. I'm heading down fast, rubbing my neck and clearing my ears and kicking hard, and
suddenly the whole world changes. It's like being in a darkened room and suddenly the lights are switched on.
The gloom vanishes, the water is warm, and you can see forever.
The seawater is deep topaz, a kind of brilliant twilight, and I can see the rock face dropping hundreds of feet
below. I'm stunned by the landscape, the sheer drama of a sea that has turned into a gigantic ballroom of
flickering light. Below my fins it is black as the dark matter of space.
I land on a plateau at 60 feet. Above and all around is a forest of black coral. Usually found in much deeper
water, the coral is governed by the atmosphere of cloudy water above, which is dim and tricks the coral into
thinking it's much deeper than it really is. The stands aren't towering, but they are rich and thick and have
never (thankfully) been harvested for profit.
Visibility is 80 to 100 feet, and I begin to work my way down. There aren't many fish around, but the boulders
on the narrow ledges reveal all sorts of odd creatures.
There is the bright-orange biscuit star, a starfish with five stubby arms, white dots big as jelly beans, and the
general appearance of a nicely baked scone. There are also lots of spiny stars, slender and happy with 11
long tentacles. Brittle stars are everywhere and active, and there are sea cucumbers that must weigh five
pounds.
Farther down, at about 100 feet, I find a field of sea mice-flat, armored creatures that look like jewelry. They
closely resemble the terrestrial leeches of the Caribbean and the extinct trilobites of prehistory. They have
broad | overlapping plates and the sea mice are I surrounded by opal top shells, about two inches long, with
zig-zag markings. The shells are more typically found among the kelp fronds, but here they're out in the open,
cozying up to the sea mice.
I can see the fault lines on the submerged cliff faces and the rusty wash of copper shimmering in the twilight.
I wonder what lives deeper down, in the blackness, and what mountain peaks are hidden by the very deep,
prehistoric sediments.
A day later, we will fly in an open helicopter to the summits of Fiordland. The icy blasts will toss us about like
a feather in a gale. We will look down into deep, ice-blue crevasses. We will see the falls carving the
mountains, spilling into the fiords, reshaping the monoliths that reach above the clouds. We will hover above
untouched mountain lakes.
How deep are they? What lives in them? Can we submit ourselves to such curiosity and exploration? High in
the mountains above the fjords, with the Pacific and unbroken rivulets of water and mountaintops and
serendipitous winds, the drama of fire and ice come together.
But for now, suspended in midwater, sensing my smallness, gazing into the eternal night below, I recall a
Maori saying: "A great mountain cannot be moved, but a giant wave can be broken by the prow of a canoe."
Perhaps we won't know all we wish to know today or tomorrow, but we will ask again and again. Our
intelligence, our curiosity, our willingness to seek- these are the prows that, at last, will break the giant
waves.
Unexplored is not forever.