Azores
Traveling through the Azores, one stops often at Miradouros, scenic viewpoints perched high on the volcanic slopes of the islands, commanding sweeping vistas of the landscape below. Often the view is quite pastoral, looking over a small village of whitewashed homes with red tiles roofs, stone walled vineyards and old windmills, long grace hillsides of lush green grass, but, in the background, always, is the sea. Other islands may appear on the horizon, the great conical mountain of Pico is visible through the central group of islands, but the wide, blue Atlantic still dominates the horizon. No matter where you look, it is always clear that the Azores are small islands, lost in the middle of a very large ocean.
Looking down into the seas that surround the islands, we see “but through a glass, darkly.” Even with the sophisticated cameras and lighting systems we use when diving from the Endeavour, technology, which allows to bring back images of remarkable clarity and color, we still find ourselves gazing into an alien world, full of mystery. Sometimes we see our terrestrial world reflected back to us with strange distortions, as though in a fun house mirror, while other scenes stretch our credulity and our definitions of what is normal in nature. What appears at first to be a garden of lovely flowers is revealed to be a thicket of predatory worms, stretching their feeding tentacles into the currents. Nearby a small female fish responds to the lack of a large male in her group by rapidly and completely becoming male herself. ‘Stranger than fiction’ does not begin to describe the mysteries of the sea; no human author has ever had a fraction of the imagination that evolution has shown in the original home of life, beneath the waves. In the Azores, this strange and beautiful world surrounds us and every view reminds us of its presence, quiet and enduring, waiting for our close attention to reveal more of its secrets.
Traveling through the Azores, one stops often at Miradouros, scenic viewpoints perched high on the volcanic slopes of the islands, commanding sweeping vistas of the landscape below. Often the view is quite pastoral, looking over a small village of whitewashed homes with red tiles roofs, stone walled vineyards and old windmills, long grace hillsides of lush green grass, but, in the background, always, is the sea. Other islands may appear on the horizon, the great conical mountain of Pico is visible through the central group of islands, but the wide, blue Atlantic still dominates the horizon. No matter where you look, it is always clear that the Azores are small islands, lost in the middle of a very large ocean.
Looking down into the seas that surround the islands, we see “but through a glass, darkly.” Even with the sophisticated cameras and lighting systems we use when diving from the Endeavour, technology, which allows to bring back images of remarkable clarity and color, we still find ourselves gazing into an alien world, full of mystery. Sometimes we see our terrestrial world reflected back to us with strange distortions, as though in a fun house mirror, while other scenes stretch our credulity and our definitions of what is normal in nature. What appears at first to be a garden of lovely flowers is revealed to be a thicket of predatory worms, stretching their feeding tentacles into the currents. Nearby a small female fish responds to the lack of a large male in her group by rapidly and completely becoming male herself. ‘Stranger than fiction’ does not begin to describe the mysteries of the sea; no human author has ever had a fraction of the imagination that evolution has shown in the original home of life, beneath the waves. In the Azores, this strange and beautiful world surrounds us and every view reminds us of its presence, quiet and enduring, waiting for our close attention to reveal more of its secrets.
