The Best American Sports Writing 2014(114)
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 17½-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.