Back then, in 1998, I knew that everything we enjoy is part of nature. Goodness - the beauty of women, if that's not evolution at its finest, then what is? Sport - our desire to be in free flight - that's our hunting and foraging instinct. That cheese and wine - those are the relationships between ewe's milk and mold and fungus and time and the grass that is grown in the gentle valley, and the aging of the grapes in the oak barrels. It's all the same - iPods and digital music and computers - these are good things but the joys of life go on - basic, and animal and good.
I knew that then - I knew that nature is life, and humanity cannot escape it, no matter how much our modern world resembles something separate from it. We are bound to it and it encompasses what it means to be human.
I knew that, but I did not know how important an unimportant fish would become to the future of the world. Now I am back in Death Valley with Jane. Out of the truck and into the heat, she is saying why don't you ever take me somewhere cold! But I know she'll light up when we see the fish. The little buggers will do her in.
That morning after my seafood dinner, I decided to carry along under the giant mountains above. Telescope Peak, looming above the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere, is over 11,000 feet high. This is Death Valley - geologically, it's a regional case of crustal sinking - where the valley center continues to sink as the east and west mountain ranges get pushed higher by the pressure.
Wandering around, I came to a small river. It's really not even a creek. It's about an inch of water, trickling along. But it is flourishing...with fish.
But enough about me, let's talk about the pupfish.
That's what the rangers call them. Pupfish - smaller than a minnow, a saltwater fish in the desert. In spring-time, the males adopt a bright blue hue on their backs. There are not just a few of these tiny fish here and there.
There are hundreds. Thousands of pupfish.
The temperature of Salt Creek couldn't be less than ninety-five degrees fahrenheit. Maybe more. But these tiny creatures have survived the centuries in inches of steaming water.
I remember walking in the three-inch shallows of the brackish Marls - a mangrove system in the Northern Bahamas, and wondered about the tiny fish that darted between my feet in that impossible place.
How did they survive in water that would subside to mushy sand by the next low-tide? How did they survive in hot stagnant water? And now here, how on earth did these mini-fish get here? How does this genus survive both here in Death Valley, and in places so far away, like the Bahamas?
Questions like these will be raised by the Supreme Court. Until then, let's step back in time.
