Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [15]
The fog folded over the remaining canoe like a death shroud, and the scouts dug back out to deep water as a new set of even bigger waves thundered down behind them. The raven turned an arc in the clear air above the mist and flew back to the black rock. He planned to circle around in the updrafts with the cormorants and eagles, gaining as much elevation as he could, and then aim for Kinkipar, whose summit he could plainly see in the distance.
The scouting team had ventured out to the edge of the world, to a sacred realm where the mortal dared not tread. They had, it seemed, reached the defined limits of human exploration. If the younger scouts were very lucky and made it home, their tale of the strange islands and their perilous journey might be told around Kinkipar firesides for thousands of years. If they never reached Kinkipar, the raven would help the shaman divine the details. Amid the wailing and heartbreak, heated debate would surely ensue. The cautious would argue that the islands were the sole domain of the Gods and the chief should pronounce them forever off-limits. The daring would make the case that the islands promised adventure and riches, and besides, what if someone had survived and was still out there? Regardless, the deadly islands surely continued to call to the Kinkipar like sirens even as they slowly slid into a rising sea.
Eventually, the islands were buried by the waves and faded into Kinkipar legend. Yet humans did eventually return, using bigger, stronger boats that made it possible to approach a mysterious lost shoreline and to taunt a giant rising from the depths. Like the Kinkipar, they simply couldn’t help themselves from wanting a closer look.
Chapter 3:
PAWNS
TO Bishop
ROCK
“I must shun this island of the Sun, the world’s delight. Nothing but fatal trouble shall we find here.”
—Odysseus, from Homer’s The Odyssey
In the eons after San Clemente Island was first settled, massive melting of the Greenland and Laurentide ice sheets poured trillions of gallons of water into the oceans. It became impossible for Kinkipar to land atop Tanner Island perhaps eight thousand years ago. When the Great Pyramids were completed, around forty-five hundred years ago, all that remained of Cortes Island was a wave-scoured dome perhaps ten feet high and a half-mile wide. By the mid-nineteenth century, Kinkipar culture had essentially disappeared. So had Cortes Island.
Through these millennia, this uplifted mesa a hundred miles from the mainland transformed from a tantalizing destination for possible human settlement into a fisherman’s eden and a perilous shipping hazard, one that produced a truly frightening wave. Just how many ships might have been destroyed, before the mid-1800s, by some combination of enormous waves and the Bank’s shallow seafloor is, and probably will always remain, unknown. The first mapping of the California coast began with the seminal trek of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo in 1542. But no Spanish map seems to have recorded the existence of either Cortes or Tanner Banks. In the 1981 printing of Shipwrecks of the Pacific Coast, James A. Gibbs noted that the gold-laden galleon Santa Rosa met her fate in 1717 atop the Bishop Rock in a nightmarish specter of foam and splintering wood. The book’s first 1957 edition makes no mention of the wreck, so how Gibbs later received this information, and its veracity, is one of the Bank’s innumerable mysteries.
Indeed, even when