Night Songs of the Whales

I discovered the geometry of silence. I saw ferns as tall as houses, tree trunks as mighty and imposing as the columns of cathedrals, strangler figs locked in a furious embrace. Butterflies so fragile it was hard to believe they were real.

At last we were sitting on the promenade in Whitianga on New Zealand’s Coromandel Peninsula, eating our way through the offerings at the Oyster House, beginning with a red deer carpaccio dusted with roasted horopito (an herb from Māori cuisine) and mysteriously violet blossoms. The snapper came with a warm mango–kawakawa salsa. You watched me as I tasted the first bite, as though you were drawing more flavor from my palate than from your own.

Crayfish of an almost absurd tenderness. We shared a fruit platter garnished with lime honey. You slipped a piece of mango into my mouth and allowed yourself a grin that made me giggle. When the wind picked up, you draped your jacket around my shoulders and said:

“I wish I could preserve this. You, the evening, this taste of everything.”

I took the remark for veiled care. You didn’t want, under any circumstances, to come across as worried. I replied softly:

“You already have. I’m carrying all of it inside me now.”

And so it was. I never stopped loving you. To hike through a forest on the same day whose lines of vegetation reach back to the time of Gondwana, and later to dine regally overlooking the sea, filled me with a gratitude that toward you felt almost like a debt. Back then I thought of you as the magician in my life. That, too, was a failing toward myself.

I have to tell this differently. I could have experienced all of this alone, or with a less impressive companion. Yet I needed you to give things a magical dimension. In doing so, I overlooked that the magic lay more in me than in you. I was the sorceress, and you were only a man at the zenith of his possibilities.

Our hotel lay close to the coastal road at Mercury Bay. Dramatic glass façades, functional minimalist design. The bedspread with its maritime motifs on the king-size bed. I registered a hint of mango. Perhaps it was an artificial scent. My shirt clung to my back. I placed your hand on my chest. Our mouths found each other. Your knee between my thighs. You pulled my shirt over my head ... your idiosyncratic mélange of tenderness, irony, and an almost brazen sensuality that turned any romantic scene into something physical within seconds—always as though nature itself were winking at me personally.

Erosion as a Form of Truth

Eventually we landed in Guanajuato. Here, too, there were co-working spaces tucked into a picturesque, winding old town. Guanajuato was a freelancer’s insider tip. Influencers raved about authentic colonial ambiance and reliable internet.

The Mesón del Sol was crowded. We sat at a table on the sidewalk in front of the door, in the morning sun. You ordered café de olla for us. I watched you charm a smile out of the mesera. After a moment devoted to taking in our surroundings, you placed your phone face down on the table—a sign that you wanted to talk.

“We need to get something moving again soon,” you said. “Three weeks of letting the soul dangle is lovely. But now we need a plan that checks us back in.”

I was in my element.

“What do you think of interviews with women rangers from conservation parks all over the world?”

You: “That’s it.”

I loved it. You were also my editor and my executive producer. And I was your first reader, your accomplice, ready and operational 24/7. We weren’t just a couple, we were a system. And that system was permeable to desire, order, intellect, economy.

You knew my dreams as if you had dreamed them yourself. Oh, you my magician—sometimes I had to restrain myself to keep the church of my love in the village. We tackled a section of the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, marked as a hiking trail, in the hills of the Sierra de Santa Rosa, properly outfitted in hiking shorts, almost in matching partner looks. We passed a break in the slope, on a narrow, perfectly marked band between sky and abyss. The rock beneath our feet—Permian limestone—was 270 million years old.

The Camino Real (a textbook example of colonial infrastructure) followed an ancient courier path of the Aztecs and Purépecha. Porteadores carried messages and goods barefoot across unimaginably long distances. Perhaps psychoactive mushrooms (teonanácatl) also contributed to their endurance.

El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro came into being after the conquest of the Aztec Empire, to accelerate the transport of silver from the provinces to the capital. Under Philip II (1556–1598), the system was perfected: exploitation, logistics, and state control interlocked. The Viceroyalty of New Spain, founded in 1535, supplied the Iberian Empire with its most precious raw material—silver. The Juan de Oñate expedition, which in the final year of Philip II’s reign, 1598, advanced north from Zacatecas into what is now New Mexico, finally transformed the route into the colonial backbone.

I had seen enough in museums and on information panels. How conquistadors had “discovered” the land, how they had named it, measured it, divided it up. A hawk circled above us. At Corneta del Cielo we interrupted our pilgrimage. The lookout owes its name to the rock silhouette that rises into the sky like an elevated signal horn. We reached the Mirador del Asombro, named for all the oohs and aahs it draws from its audience. I saw petrified dunes, primeval river landscapes, prehistoric coastlines and river valleys. Erosion had created a super panorama—sheer walls, slanted flanks, overhanging rock noses. The grandeur of mineralized flow relief and oblique stratification millions of years old. The play of wind and time.

At the Mirador del Asombro, a canyon opens itself not only to the eye but also to consciousness. The landscape whispers in gradations of red, ocher, and gold: I am as old as nothing you have ever seen, and yet there is more life in me than in your brief journey around the world. Hikers reported online moments of deep emotion in the sudden confrontation with vastness and depth, both geological and emotional. Every movement corresponded to a line in an unimaginably detailed network. Our bodies and our voices extended these lines, confirmed them, and altered directions.