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| Devil's Hole, Death Valley National Park, Steve Brown 2025 |
We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a
little water world. And that isn't terribly important to the tide
pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with
overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species
so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological
balance of the whole region. That isn't very important in the
world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling on London
and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it
is.
--John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, 1941
I walk along the now familiar trail to the chain-link fence topped with six strands barbed wire and boasting a big, bright red, white and black sign warning RESTRICTED AREA: MONITORED BY VIDEO CAMERA. Off to the left is the much less noticeable normal brown and cream wooden national park service sign pointing to Devil's Hole Overlook. Behind the fence is a gravel slope with a few scattered tumble weeds. Beyond that is a big, chunky-rock hill covered with a scattering of blond grass. It looks like an enclosure of a chemical waste dump rather than part of a national park.
I walk along the fence until I reach the tunnel-cage opening, also topped with barbed wired. A gravel path completely surrounded by fence--top and sides--stops at a sign and four mounted solar panels somewhere before its natural vanishing point.
I walk through the tunnel to the sign, which has a picture of a little silver-blue fish swimming above some pebbles. White letters spell out A Delicate Balance. Below that a paragraph that reads as follows:
Existing for the last 10,000 to 20,000 years in isolation, Devils Hole pupfish have adapted to life in 92 degrees Fahrenheit water. They live just above a shallow rock shelf near the cave entrance, a zone critical for pupfish feeding and spawning. Only found in Devils Hole, this rare species is subject to natural high and low cycles. The population fluctuates between 100 and 500 individuals, depending on the seasonal availability of algae and the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water.
Pupfish were among the very first species listed under the Endangered Species Act, a 1967 law that established the concept of protecting species to protect the biological diversity of the planet. In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court took the additional step of establishing minimum water levels in Devil's Hole to protect pupfish against extinction, essentially restricting regional water mining. This is a well-deserved tribute to the tenacity of these Ice Age survivors.
I then read the next sign, which I don't believe was here on my last visit. It is titled A Tsunami in the Desert and begins as follows:
While Devils Hole is small, it is connected to a large cave system over 500 feet deep and of an unknown extent. Sensitive to earthquakes occurring anywhere in the world, the water in Devil's Hole may fluctuate five to six feet, with waves sloshing the cave walls like water in a bathtub.
What it doesn't say is that two earthquakes--a 7.0 magnitude one in December of 2024 off the coast of northern California and a 8.8 magnitude one in July of 2025 near Russia--almost wiped out Devils Hole pupfish, the population plummeting to 38 fish due to two to four foot waves sweeping away the algae these fish, who have endured since the ice age, feed on.
Luckily, for just such an emergency, a reserve stock has been raised in captivity and was reintroduced into the pool. Currently, the population is back to 77.
I walk farther down the path to a steel-grate bridge that spans the dry, light-gray limestone and dolostone crevis leading down Aegean blue pool way down below. I have timed it right. Previous times the pool was deep in shadow and the surface appeared as flat, black and slick as obsidian, almost unrecognizable as water. But today the sunlight is angled in such away I can see fairly deep into the pool. There is a series of white metal-grated platforms suspended from the rock walls for observation by officials and then there is the deep, currently seemingly completely still pool, and that is it.
This is the entire universe for 77 little blue pupfish, each living 10 to 14 months. Generations know absolutely nothing about the world beyond this pool. They most likely do not understand the occasional distant rumblings that rock their world without warning, although perhaps it is recorded in their myths passed by some means we don't understand. They likely know nothing of their distant origins and the vast, cold inland sea their ancestors inhabited unless that too was somehow passed down through their mythology. And they most certainly do not know about the tens of millions of dollars our government has spent to save them from extinction.
There are those of our species who cry what an incredible waste of money, funds that could ultimately prove to be for naught. To a mind that thinks only in numbers, one cannot make a good case for spending so much to save a little fish that if it went extinct would not affect us at all.
Yet, I think such a grand gesture of kindness gives our own species hope for survival, especially if, unlike our little pupfish friends, our little dot of blue water that we call Earth is not connected to something greater than we can comprehend, and no one is looking out for us, helping us survive against all odds.
Unlike those beautiful blue jeweled pupfish, we are not only in danger of extinction from distant rumblings; we have altered our tidepool to such an extent, there's a good chance we will destroy ourselves through our creations.
Personally, I absolutely believe there is a benevolence watching over us, spending far beyond what is rational in love that we too might continue to be. So for me, it only makes sense to do what we can do for the Devil's Hole Pupfish. It's a minute gesture of paying it forward. Yet, one need not believe in divine benevolence to make the connection between the little fish's predicament and our own. We both inhabit very isolated tidepools and for both species possible extinction is significantly real.
May our love save the Devil's Hole pupfish. May our love save ourselves.
In the end, for both, it will take a mighty good fortune and a supreme love that defies all logic.
I slowly walk away from this most isolated tide pool, one that John Steinbeck never saw, but one that would have fascinated him tremendously. And I absolutely know if he could have witnessed the lengths some people have gone to save those little fish, it would have given him hope for humanity. As he would say, "None of it is important or all of it is."
Perhaps some can understand the universe some other way. Who am I, no great thinker, just a wanderer of scattered landscapes and scattered thoughts, to say ultimately what reality is. But the only existence I personally can comprehend is one where everything is connected in a tapestry of glory beyond comprehension, one where either all of it matters or none of it matters at all.
I start the car and drive off into the glory of one.
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