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She was captain of the first team of women to live beneath the ocean's surface; the five aquanauts spent two weeks in an underwater laboratory off the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1970. She has gone on at least 50 expeditions and spent more than 6,000 hours undersea, including a record-setting solo descent to 3,000 ft. in a submersible craft known as Deep Rover. In the 1979 dive that gave her the royal nickname, she became the mirror image, and the equal, of the moonwalkers.
In her book Sea Change and before legislators and others in power, she argues that the ocean gives us a 4 billion-year-old legacy--the living history of the world--and that we are blithely squandering our inheritance by way of pollution and overfishing. What is more: there is so much left to see in the oceans. The few existing manned submersibles can reach only half their depth. The benthic, or bottom-dwelling, plants and animals represent the least-known ecosystem on the planet. Earle feels personal responsibility for the ocean's future and safety. She takes fish personally. She once bumped into "a grouper with an attitude."
All this she discloses as we drive the ledge of the coastal highway, the road chipped into the mountains by convicts in the 1930s. She gives me wrong driving directions time and time again. I begin to understand why she spends so much of her life avoiding land.
What I am able to see on this chunk of the Pacific is a minute fraction of what there is to see. At Point Lobos in Carmel, the mist creates false mountains over the water. The waves are humped like porpoises. Kelp, giant forests of seaweed by which Darwin was enthralled, shows only at the top. These plants, which can grow at a rate of 20 in. a day, reach down 100 ft. to granite reefs. The kelp is tethered by stipes-stems, structures that connect the base, or holdfast, to the leaflike blades. Gas-filled floats at the base of the blades keep the fronds standing upright.
Surrounding the kelp is a dense and delicate garden of tentacled plants that sway in unison, like backup singers. Pink, orange, rose, green, lavender. Plants with Einstein's hair, plants with Don King's and Phyllis Diller's--all kept graceful by the water. The garden is vertical as well as horizontal. On its floor sea stars crawl on their bellies like fat recruits in basic training. Above them swim the gulping bells of the jellies. In the intertidal zone limpets and other mollusks graze on algae in the rocks. Cancer crabs attack hermit crabs. An anemone divides to reproduce and becomes its own sibling. On the surface the kelp flattens into canopies, 3 ft. thick, that weaken the waves and provide otters with hammocks, where they snooze and eat.
Otters! Is there anything in nature so ridiculously content? Not enough that they wear leather sleeves; they are their own dining rooms. From the shore I watch a few of them do the backstroke while cracking clams open on their chests. They wrap themselves in leaves so as not to drift away while sleeping. First Russians, then Americans killed them for their fur, and they became almost extinct by the early 1900s. Declared endangered, they now number more than 2,000 along California's central coast. Earle tells me she once saw an otter opening clams with a Coke bottle.