The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (50 page)

But many Réunion surfers had come to believe something different: the bulls were
learning
that surfers were easy prey. So they wait, these killer sharks. Hidden. Elsewhere. You never see them when the sea is calm. Then the waves come—a symphony to their senses, the big pounding swell. The swell churns up the bottom, the sand in solution creating that murkiness through which they navigate with the ease of the blind, like great bats. Then—voilà!—the food arrives, arranged just beyond the breakers, a dangling banquet of human limbs.

On July 23, 2012, at Trois-Bassins—traditionally the safest surf break on Réunion—a third surfer was lost. Alexandre Rassiga, a handsome 21-year-old actor-bartender, took a bite below the knee—a nonfatal injury—and then suffered a second bite to the upper thigh that severed an artery. At this point, something seemed to snap in the minds of Réunion island surfers. Aubert. Schiller. And now Rassiga. The surfers were losing their friends, losing their pastime. Boucan Canot and Trois Roches remained shut down. Now the mayor of Trois-Bassins closed
that
venerable surf spot. Robert Boulanger, president of the Ligue Réunionaise de Surf, described the mental state of his constituents as
“psychose.”

Three days after Rassiga died, some 300 surfers and fishermen marched on the capital, St. Denis. Carrying surfboards painted with slogans, they chanted “Open the Reserve now!” The protesting surfers believed that the Marine Reserve, in which commercial fishing is banned, had become like a “larder” for sharks. They were no different from criminals, these
bouledogues!
, as one furious surfer put it, except that they had the Reserve as a hideout and a refuge, a sanctuary like a medieval cathedral.

Ten days after the protest march, on August 5, Fabien Bujon was mauled at St. Leu, the island's signature break. If Rassiga's death lit the fuse, the St. Leu attack created the explosion. An angry mob of about 100 surfers and fishermen tried to break into the offices of the Marine Reserve, where they were forcibly repulsed by police.

The mayor of St. Leu, Thierry Robert, promised a shark cull. The cull would be good for business, this pro-development mayor of a tourism boomtown might have reasoned (not unlike the panicked mayor in
Jaws
). Instead the plan made international headlines, and the backlash from animal rights groups was immediate and effective. In France, Brigitte Bardot (as head of her eponymous animal welfare group) wrote a letter to the prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, attacking the decision to kill the sharks. “The sea belongs first to marine life,” the group announced. “We can't condemn sharks to death just to please surfers. It's ridiculous.”

A minister in France bigfooted the St. Leu mayor with a compromise. Two professionals would be hired to fish the Marine Reserve for 20 sharks, bulls and tigers, which would be tested for ciguatera, a potentially deadly food-borne toxin, to see if their meat could be marketed. It was a grotesque solution, as Frédéric Buyle might've said, since the fishermen were targeting the same sharks CHARC was attempting to tag. And angry Réunion surfers were far from satisfied. But for anyone watching with dismay the endgame of the earth's last large charismatic animals—the dangerous ones, the difficult and inconvenient beasts of the shrinking wilds—Réunion island's reluctance to cull marked a long-overdue check on human arrogance.

Meanwhile, as the Réunion shark controversy boiled, signs and portents of nature's revenge—call it “bite-back”—continued to emerge around the world. Last August, scientists in the diminishing Everglades captured a record-setting 17
½
-foot Burmese python—an invasive species swallowing whole populations of native mammals. In southern India, the desperate poor were moving into the national parks, foraging for food, and grazing their cattle on land set aside for elephants. The elephants, tenuously confined in what one writer called “animal concentration camps,” responded with rampages through towns and villages. About the same time, a lioness and her three cubs were captured in a Nairobi suburb. She was staking out her territory in backyards and vacant lots. A biologist for the Nairobi National Park said that he believed the survival of the species as a whole depended on “successful fencing.”

There's a troubled history of fencing off the reefs of Réunion, where wave action makes shark netting difficult, and where the situation is further complicated by the near-invisibility of the predators. Sardon Courtois, the prophet who balefully warned me—“They taste the men, and they learn to eat them”—had gone on to say that there was no magic solution. Then he gave me his blessing to go forth and surf.

 

The next morning at my hotel, I can hear the rhythmic booms as waves unload on the barrier reef. The swell has begun to build. I wonder if that drumbeat is really summoning the
bouledogues
to feed. The surf is probably triple-overhead at Pointe du Diable (way too big for me), double-overhead at St. Leu (but the local surfers have posted a sign asking visitors not to surf). I decide to try my luck at L'Hermitage, a reef-pass break in the Reserve that's still open for surfing.

As I'm wading into the lagoon, about to begin the 300-yard paddle to the barrier reef, two lifeguards on a Jet Ski come blasting across the flats to confront me. “You surf alone?” one asks. “Why do you make this bad decision?” I want to answer that in a place where to surf or not to surf has become a political decision, my politics tell me to surf. But that sounds pompous, even to me. So I just shrug. One lifeguard shakes his head, glowering, dismounts from the Jet Ski, and wades ashore. The driver returns my shrug and says, “I have to apologize for my friend. He was there, you know, when Mathieu Schiller was killed.”

Soon I'm out alone in the channel, watching the waves, with just a sea turtle for company. It blows its nose, cranes its neck, and regards me skeptically. We're the perfect test for the mistaken identity theory, and I'm feeling nervous. Mostly, though, I'm worried about the waves, which make a fearsome tearing sound like crashing timber as they explode onto the reef. This is no surf break for out-of-practice middle-aged men. Still, I can recall the old compulsion, the restless nights before an expected swell, the sheer joy and the camaraderie of the wave-riding tribe. I know what it must be like to have to give it up when you're in the throes of early passion for the sport—and I was just a surf-starved pup from flat-city Florida. To be a young surfer with the skill to ride
these
waves—dude, it's gotta suck.

But while many surfers are simply sitting out the crisis, a lot of others are organizing and developing tactics to get back in the water. Loris Gasbarre, a close friend of Mathieu Schiller, has started Prévention Requin Réunion, pushing for a selective culling but also fund-raising to buy Zodiacs and hire security for surf competitions. Christophe Mattei, a technologically inclined big-wave rider, is developing a smartphone app that would work in conjunction with shark-tagging data to provide real-time info on shark locations. Réunion island surfers are beginning to realize that the loss of safety is long-term and that they are going to have to adapt.

One sunny afternoon, Mat Milella dons mask and fins and slips into the water of the St. Gilles harbor, within sight of the shark warning flags flying over Trois Roches. Milella is a paid
vigie requin
(shark lookout), part of a new CHARC “securitization” program that has begun patrolling surf breaks that remain open. With a quick prayer to the surf gods and a quicker “fuck it,” I splash in after him.

The 32-year-old waterman is well suited to the task: whippet-thin, with piercing eyes and golden hair, he's Rowdy Gaines reborn. We kick out of the murky harbor, heading south, away from Trois Roches, thankfully. We're within the Marine Reserve, among knobs of bleached coral. There are a few bright tropicals, various tangs and angels and parrotfish, but no sharks, no barracudas, no mackerel or grouper. Not much of a “larder,” not here anyway. Milella dives down to 20, 30 feet, hanging motionless, working on his lung capacity and free-diving technique. If this were an actual lookout shift, Milella would be paired with a fellow waterman, ready at the first sign of danger to blow a whistle and clear the water. For the worst-case scenario, the
vigies
have a trauma kit and the training to use it.

With a last look around for sharks to disperse, Milella heads for shore. Though the waves are small today, they are surprisingly powerful and disorienting through a dive mask, the swirl of sand all but blinding, and I'm greatly relieved to take off my fins and wade through the shallows. As we trudge through the sand back to St. Gilles, Milella readily expounds, in fluent if heavily accented English, on the crisis. As a surf instructor and former competitive bodyboarder, he favors selective culling, but if the culling can't happen, he's still looking forward to a new era of surfing on Réunion, one that's both more careful and more hard-core.

Milella waxes persuasive about overfishing from long-liners creating starvation conditions, the local fouling of the ravines, bad water management, and faulty water-treatment plants discharging sewage into the sea. At St. Pierre, in the south of the island, there was a bad-sewage-treatment plant right in front of the break. “And
bouledogues
follow the shit,” Milella says. A friend of Mat's, Vincent Motais de Narbonne, was surfing nearby when a bull grabbed his leg, dragging him down and beating him against the bottom. “He was praying his leg would go so he wouldn't drown,” Milella says. Miraculously, Motais, who lost his leg at the hip, survived.

As I listen to Mat Milella, it seems to me that everything that's shitty about us
Homo sapiens
—literally and figuratively—is good for the bull sharks. And half-buried in the screed, I detect a grudging respect for the beast.

 

My last evening on the island, I meet with a local spearfishing legend, Guy Gazzo, at his family's
poissonerie
, their seafood shop, in a mall across the street from the beach at Boucan Canot. Gazzo, one of the world's best breath-hold divers, and still incredibly fit at age 75, has spent more time underwater with the sharks than anybody. He tells me that spear fishermen saw the problem coming—witnessing increasing numbers of bulls, which were becoming more aggressive. He recalls, back in 2006, diving off Roches Noires, when he speared a tuna and it took off, taking line. Then here it comes, back to him, with three sharks chasing it. But back then nobody took the fishermen's stories seriously.

Gazzo doesn't believe anyone really knows precisely why the sharks are attacking now, or why so aggressively. Nor why they have settled in the area. “When you choose a neighborhood,” Gazzo reasons, “you a want a
boulangerie
, a charcuterie, a chemist, bus stops. Many factors make for a good home. It is the same for the
bouledogues.
”

Guy Gazzo's surprising anthropomorphizing harks back to Buyle's most empathic speculations. Buyle believes that the bull sharks' social units are complex enough that the loss of a single individual could send a group into a tailspin of erratic behavior. It's also possible, Buyle posits, that if an influential individual were to be injured, the others might help it hunt for easy prey—and nothing could be easier prey than an oblivious land mammal on the surface. It's a leap of imagination to see the tragedy of the attacks in reverse perspective: a beloved bull (do they love one another?), suddenly wrenched from the water, vanishing into the sky; the grieving survivors (do they grieve for one another?) rallying together, making a necessary change.

It's a tragic change of behavior, for man and shark. Gazzo is pro-cull, but he doesn't want to see a shark massacre. And he believes CHARC had better hurry up with its study, or the surfers and fishermen will take out the sharks, poaching them by night. “All species have a survival technique, whether it's speed or size or coloration,” Gazzo says. “Ours is intelligence. What's incredible in this story is that we're using intelligence to protect a species that is killing us.”

Alas, we are both too smart for our own good and not nearly smart enough. Our manipulations of nature are perforce shortsighted: we are blinded by both its vastness and its proximity, its constant flux amid illusory stability. As the Marine Reserve scientists have pointed out, kill the bull sharks and you might get something worse. The world as we know it—and as we have loved it—depends on its predators for balance, yet we keep choosing the unknown world without them, the brave new world with as-yet-unpredicted monsters in it.

With our own monster fleets, floating cities hauling humongous nets, we have ransacked the seas, perhaps irreparably. Enormous catches feed our growing populations, and population increase means increased pollution. Our success predestines our peril. It's a bitch. Here on Réunion island, suffering its own successes, its steep volcanic slopes draining the effluvia of a burgeoning population, all the unforeseen dangers of bad stewardship of the environment are embodied in one beady-eyed, piggish thug of a fish. Which seems to be thriving, for a time, in our shit. Or maybe our sins aren't so much good for them as
survivable.
Like a macro version of a super-virus, bull sharks are a symptom, and a consequence. They're what you get in the sea when you've lost just about everything else: the last shark swimming.

FROM N+1

 

T
HE AIR SMELLS FAINTLY
of salt water, and strongly of bonfires, diesel fuel, and weed. Seagulls squawk, the sky on the horizon is just turning green, and the air is cold in that prankish West Coast way that's impossible to take seriously and pointless to dress for. Once the sun comes up and the fog burns off, it's going to be a perfect day.

It's 6:00
A.M.
, high tide, and I'm a 30-minute, eucalyptus-dense drive south of San Francisco in Princeton-by-the-Sea, a tiny village with some of the biggest waves in the world and not much else. Shadowy figures are perched in the beds of pickup trucks; they speak in low voices and occasionally take sips of coffee. I'm sitting on the ground in the near-dark, waiting for a surf contest to begin.