High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [84]
At dawn the sun broke over the cliffs and parted the pink mantle of clouds, reaching down like a torch to light the tops of red cinder cones in the crater, one at a time. For half a minute, sunlight twinkled starlike against what must have been the glass front of the visitors’ center, all those miles away. I pictured the rowdy scene that must have been playing there. I found I couldn’t really believe in any other world but the perfect calm of where I stood.
The mist cleared. Fern trees dripped. nēnēs flew across the cliff face by twos and threes, in heartbreaking imitation of a Japanese pen-and-ink drawing. Birds called from the trees, leading us on a goose chase through soggy vegetation. We spotted the red ’apapane, the yellow Maui creeper, and the ’i’iwi, an odd crimson creature with a downcurved bill—all three gravely threatened species.
I would happily have turned over rocks in search of endangered worms—anything to postpone packing up and striking out. But we had eleven miles to go, all uphill, and the sun was gaining ground. I groaned as I shouldered my pack. “We can still do everything we could when we were twenty,” Steven pointed out companionably, “except now it hurts.”
We backtracked through the meadows on a trail that grew steadily less muddy. We rested under a crooked acacia, the last tree in an increasingly arid landscape, before taking a new, more northerly trail that would lead us back up and out. Like an old-fashioned hologram, the crater offered two views of itself that were impossible to integrate: all day yesterday we’d walked toward white mist and green cliffs at the crater’s wet eastern side; today we did the opposite, facing the drought-stricken western slopes. Planting one boot carefully in front of the other, we crossed acres of black lava flow, where the ground seemed to hula-dance in the heat. We skirted tall cinder cones whose sides were striped yellow and orange like paint pots. Several times I stopped and took note of the fact that there was not, in my whole field of vision, anything living. It might well have been the moon.
The trail graduated from rugged to punishing, and in the afternoon the mists returned. The landscape flowed from lava field to meadow and back again, until we were tossed up at last on the Halemau’u switchbacks. We spent the next two hours scaling the cliff face. With each turn the panorama broadened. We ascended through layers of cloud and emerged on top—nearly two miles above sea level. I invented new names for the Halemau’u trail, which I will keep to myself.
Back home again, still nursing a few aches, I found myself deflecting odd looks from friends who seemed to think a trek through scorched desert and freezing rain in Hawaii was evidence of poor vacation skills.
I would do it all again, in a heartbeat. There are few enough places in the world that belong entirely to themselves. The human passion to carry all things everywhere, so that every place is home, is well on its way to homogenizing our planet. The casualties are the species trampled and lost, extinguished forever, at the rate of tens of thousands per year.
It’s a painful, exhausting thing to try to argue logically for the preservation of all the world’s species—like trying to debate spirituality with your accountant. Causing extinctions, especially at such a staggering rate, feels dangerous and wrong, but proving scientifically that it’s wrong is ultimately very much like proving the existence of God. Commonly environmentalists fall back upon the “pharmacopeia” argument, and it’s true enough—any one of these small fallen soldiers might have held some magic bullet to save humanity, like the antirejection drug cyclosporine, derived from a peat-bog fungus, that has made organ transplants a matter of course, or the powerful new anticancer agents extracted from a yew tree. But this seems a pale, selfish reason to care about preserving biodiversity, and near sacrilege in the face of a power so howling and brilliant as life on earth. To love life, really, must mean caring not only for