You know the place. A movie, a book, an image caught hold of your imagination once, perhaps long ago. Your subconcious filled in the blanks and placed you in the picture in such a way that The Place lodged deep in your cranium, mostly forgotten, but occasionally resurfacing when you see an image or hear a sound that reminds you: This is a place you already know, and is a part of who you are even if you have never physically been there.

The Place for me that seems always to have been playing in the deepest corner of my mind starts with an image that blends water and sky into one. It is a place where the dawn is filled with great birds turning and calling, where the water is clean and clear and crayon-box blue. The kaleidoscope of brightly colored, oddly shaped fish and mysterious creatures surpasses the imagination. There is an air of mystery, of the ancient.  Over the years, when I wake from a good dream or when a twinge of deja vu prompts the illusion of memory, I never have a name, or even know if this dream is of a real location. I have never tried to seek it out, and have always been content knowing that someplace like it probably exists for real somewhere in the world.

When my sisters and I were young, our awesome parents restricted television to a daily ration of 30 minutes. Certain programming existed outside this universe, and we were lucky indeed that my parents saw no need to limit our viewing of the National Geographic television specials in general, and Jaques Cousteau programs in particular. Fifty years later, when I read in a sailing guidebook that Cousteau had filmed at Isla Isabel many times for several of his specials, I knew we had to go there, regardless of the rocky, anchor-eating bay and the vulnerability to weather from all directions. After all, how often does a person actually get to visit The Place?

And so, we prepared to leave the big city, planning to stop for as long as we could at Isla Isabel which lies 18 miles from the coast and about 85 miles nearly due south from Mazatlan. Our buddy boat friends had problems on their boat, so we waited. Then we waited for better weather so that we could stay at the island for more than a day. Then we broke an oarlock on our dingy and had to wait some more for a replacement, since our spare was too small for our beautiful new oars. On the eve of departure, someone stole our friends’ dingy during the night, and we spent a day helping them make the necessary reports. I ate at a sleezy tourist burger joint. I got food poisoning, but we left the next morning anyway, sad to leave our friends, eager to see what lay ahead. Sometimes The Place is elusive.

We enjoyed perfect sailing on a beam reach until late afternoon. Despite the benign conditions, I remained unable to eat or drink more than tiny sip of water every now and then. We motored through the night, making a perfectly-timed landfall with the dawn. Wade hooked and brought onboard a sparkling Pacific Sierra mackeral, golden-spotted and toothy.

We criss-crossed the anchorage, looking for sand and finding none, so we hooked a trip line to the anchor, said a prayer and laid it down in 48 feet of water over big rocks. Backed down, backed down hard, and it held. We weren’t going anywhere, which is good for sleeping, not so good for leaving, but we would deal with that later. It was time to be in The Place!

Except, I was too dehydrated and queasy to go ashore. It was humbling. It was frustrating. I was Here, I felt cheated, and my unfulfilled, ridiculous sense of entitlement was raging. I complained and felt sorry for myself. I curled up in a ball and tried to force myself to sleep, to drink water. Poor Wade.

In the hour before sunset, the heat inside the boat moderated and I perceived a change in the light. I stood up and found I could do so without needing to lie back down. I crawled out to sit in the cockpit, and I saw it! My Place!

Hundreds and hundreds of Magnificent Frigatebirds (Tijeretas, scissortails in Spanish) soared tens, hundreds, and thousands of feet overhead, above the island, swooping and calling right above our boat. Gulls, pelicans, terns, boobies both blue-footed and brown, swallows and tropicbirds (redbilled or whitetailed, couldn’t tell) dove and hovered, splashed and fought and fished. Rattles, screeches, trills and clacks made our own speech seem quite ordinary. The sky went to gold, then to dusk, and for the first time in quite awhile, I forgot to take a picture.

We stayed for three nights, and we did go ashore the second day to wander among the frigatebird colony. A slower, more labored hike I have never endured, and although my woozy condition certainly affected my mood, it is no exaggeration to say that on this remarkable island, where the finned and the feathered gather from across the seas to breed and make more of their kind, there is much death.

Everywhere we walked, lizards and iguanas rattled the dry leaves spookily as they scurried away. Even the staccato calls of the living Tijeretas added to the eerieness. Omnipresent was the sour, acidic, earthy smell that defines all bird colonies, but after a while we recognized another odor mixing with the guano fragrance of the living: the death stink of adult frigatebirds who had not survived the grueling 6-9 months it takes to rear their young.

Female tijereta flying, male perching, fluffy babies waiting for food, and a juvenile wondering where she fits into it all.

Each tree crown hosted a colony of ten or more birds, and each colony seemed to have at least one adult carcass hanging from the branches, or decomposing into the thin soil below. Bodies of baby chicks melted away and became parts of the canopy. This business of scraping out an existence in the middle of a salty sea is not for the weak. I was weakly grateful for our vessel stocked with a month’s worth of food and water.

In the end, even though I was unable to swim, even though I only managed to make it ashore for half a day, I feel priviliged to have visited Isla Isabel. A semi-permanent fishing village lines one shore, and from the amount of wood-cutting we saw in the forest, and from what I have read, I do not know for how much longer this place will retain its fecundity. The nightly avian spectacle, where hundrds of birds flew as high above and as far away as my eyes could perceive, bound and unbound by the blue sky that is the sea that is the sky, will stay with me forever.

The strangest feeling is this: I have been to My Place, and I find that my deepest memories have been augmented, not supplanted. I don’t believe it is necessary to find The Place in order to enrich your life. It is only important to have it, to desire it, to love it if only from afar. This is one aspect of why I so deeply believe that we must conserve Wilderness, and all the biologically-rich places left on this earth, not only for resources, not only for ethics and recreation and science and medicine, but for our dreams, for preserving the essence of who we are, whether or not the vagaries of life allow us a visit.

Motoring is always time for fishing. Took Wade 25 minutes to bring in this 20 pound Jack Crevalle. We set him free to make more little jacks.