by Barry Lopez
Some mornings I stop at the shipyard to see how repairs are going on a fishing boat that’s got a rotting keel. Or I walk up to the Charles Darwin Research Station to use the library. One morning I borrow a small rowboat and cross Academy Bay to keep an appointment with Karl Angermeyer, whose family has been in Puerto Ayora for many decades. When we speak, he offers me some particulars of Galapagean history not in the books I’ve read, going over the particulars of scandalous events in the 1930s on Isla Santa María, for example, or relating a bit of folklore about Darwin that I know not to be true. As a paterfamilias in Galápagos, Mr. Angermeyer resembles other people I’ve spoken with in villages in South America or Asia who are simply trying to keep track of what is important to remember, a worldwide effort in small settlements to keep one’s people from slipping off into caricature or oblivion.
Another morning I catch a ride with someone headed for the airport. My aim is to visit a resident in the highlands I’d met on an earlier trip, a man I’d taken an immediate liking to, Steve Divine. I hadn’t been able to walk the extent of his finca in the highlands back then. Now I could. The narrow road north from Puerto Ayora to the airport takes a traveler to the north shore of Isla Santa Cruz, where a narrow seawater breach—a natural canal—separates it from Isla Baltra, where the airstrip is. The road first ascends into agricultural areas in the highlands, passing through the small settlements of Bellavista and Santa Rosa before descending again to a great plain of dark a’a and pahoehoe lava, a land hostile to nearly every seed and spore that falls upon it.
My acquaintance drops me off at the gate to Steve’s farm. When we ran into each other a few days before in Puerto Ayora, Steve invited me up for a walk in the scalesia forest around his place. He’s very well informed about the biology and ecology of the islands, someone with an attractive attitude of allegiance to the country all around him. As I’ve pursued my reading about the archipelago, both the popular literature and the scientific literature, and become more conversant with its basic geography and natural history, my conversations with Steve have offered helpful clarification and surprising connections, the type of insights only a residency, a true apprenticeship, can offer. He calls the palo santo tree, which conserves moisture by shedding its leaves in the dry season, a “hard to die” tree. And it was he who told me that on the islets of Plaza Sur and Plaza Norte, off the eastern shore of Isla Santa Cruz, I would be able to see swallow-tailed gulls flying backward against a headwind to land gracefully on their nests.
Steve is articulate about—and insightful regarding—smoldering resentments in the islands, most of these due to tensions between the staff of Galápagos National Park (about 97 percent of the land in Galápagos and virtually all the archipelago’s near-shore waters fall under the jurisdiction of the park) and a group of settlers in the islands who feel the park’s boundaries shut them out. They want their hunting and fishing activities to extend into the park. At the time I spoke with him, these resentments were particularly strong in the settlement of Puerto Villamil, on Isla Isabela, where residents had deliberately started forest fires inside the park’s boundaries and had established illegal commercial fisheries in near-shore waters. Steve could see both sides, but had no respect for the villagers’ violent way of registering their complaints. Too often in the past, when settlers have entered the park to hunt feral cattle or cut down large matazarno trees for lumber, or when they’ve defiantly ignored catch limits and harvesting seasons for lobsters, sea cucumbers, and other marine life, the shouting and insults voiced at town meetings have turned into fistfights. Once, villagers stormed the Charles Darwin Research Station, the symbol of scientific research in the islands and the strong international interest in the islands’ protection, smashing windows and destroying years of scientific records. On other occasions they’ve deliberately killed tortoises living in the park. (The image of the giant tortoise, the park’s iconic animal, appears on the park’s logo.)
The root of this disagreement is class resentment. A relatively small, well-educated, conservation-oriented group of caretakers finds itself in direct conflict with a much larger group of working-class fishermen and subsistence farmers, mostly Ecuadorian nationals, who until they reached the islands were largely unaware of the international movement to conserve the islands’ ecology. Its ideals are almost incomprehensible to them. Like the American colonists who arrived at Isla San Cristóbal aboard the Western Trader in 1960, these Ecuadorian nationals arrived in Galápagos with unrealistic ideas about an archipelago that has very little freshwater or arable land, and only minimal municipal services. Basic commodities like flour, cooking oil, and paper products are expensive and in limited supply; the infrastructure to support health care is primitive; there are few paying jobs; and thousands of well-to-do tourists, innocent of the economic and social complexities here, arrive every week. The visitors’ money is eagerly sought, but many residents consider their presence a nuisance.
In almost every public meeting place in Puerto Ayora, you can hear the discussions about unemployment, class privilege, disputed jurisdiction around park boundaries, and schemes to circumvent or solve these problems. The fundamental disagreement among island residents is over the relative importance of the biological integrity of the islands. The disagreement is exacerbated by differences of opinion over the place of conservation in a human community with high unemployment, and it is further complicated by disagreement over the need for economic growth and development in the islands. Too, some Ecuadorian nationals deeply resent the investments international conservation groups are making to preserve the park.
For many years park custodians have argued, unsuccessfully, for a limit on the number of visitors to the island. (Most all visitors sleep aboard tour boats and take their meals there. They may come ashore, sometimes just briefly, only at a restricted number of sites in the islands, where guides try to ensure they don’t wander off the established trails, disturb animals, take souvenirs, or discard trash.) When I came to the Galápagos for the first time in 1986, the annual limit, set by the Ecuadorian government, had just been raised from 18,000 to 25,000. The actual number of visitors that year was 32,000.3
Part of what motivates Ecuadorian nationals to move to Galápagos can be found in Ecuadorian folklore, the widespread idea in mainland Ecuador that anyone can make a fortune from “tourism” on “the Ecuadorian frontier.” The fortunes to be made here, however, are mostly made by business acquaintances of politicians in Quito, who decide who will and who won’t get a license to operate a tour boat in Galápagos.
The deeper one digs into the phenomenon of Galápagos, the more one finds the kind of thievery and injustice that infect ordinary life wherever in the world economic opportunity and political malfeasance drive “progress.” My sympathies in the Galápagos, I found, lie both with the misled Ecuadorians who arrive here on government-subsidized flights from the mainland with a defective dream, and with members of the park’s staff, an underfunded and underpaid group of dedicated scientists and conservationists trying to control illegal hunting, fishing, and timber theft and to mitigate the impact of more visitors than they believe the park can support. And my affection lies with immigrants like Steve, who are sympathetic to both sides of the conservation issue and who try to encourage in visitors the same degree of wonder they themselves feel about protecting the islands from economic exploitation. Some visitors to the islands have considerable economic and political power in their home countries, and people like Steve hope they will bring those strengths to bear on behalf of the archipelago.
* * *
—
ONE MORNING, on a previous visit, when Steve and I were having coffee on his porch, a friend came by to catch up on local news with him. While they spoke, I began making notes on the conversation Steve and I had been having. My attention, however, soon shifted from the page in my notebook to a patch of darkness developing on the surface of the ocean. It was taking shape in the middle of a
vast sheet of incandescent light. The ocean, some miles away and far below us, was visible over the canopy of a forest sloping away from Steve’s house. A huge vertical mass of gypsum-white cloud was sliding over the sun, dimming the polished silver surface of the water. My glance took in the great sweep of Isla Santa Cruz’s southern coastal lowlands, where Puerto Ayora was, the treetops nearby, and finally an open grassland that abutted Steve’s compound. Here beside me was a pond, on which a pair of white-cheeked pintail ducks were feeding. My eyes then settled on the glitter of an orb weaver’s web, ballooning in a light wind. The sunlight was so strong, and the air it moved through so clear, that even at a distance of several feet I could see perfectly the tiny distinctive spines on the body of a yellow-and-black star spider.
Steve’s friend departs. We sit in silence. The weather, despite the threat of a storm rising on the southern horizon, is conducive to well-being. The coffee excellent. Neither of us tries to voice a thought about the state of our ease.
* * *
—
I WANTED TO GET BACK to the hotel in time for lunch, so I said goodbye and set off down the road, hoping for a lift.
When the overloaded airport bus comes into view, swaying drunkenly on its ruined shock absorbers, I can see that the luggage rack on the roof is already crowded with people. I find a place on the rungs of a ladder mounted on the rear bumper. By the time we reach the village, I’m covered with dust. It’s caked on my skin because of the heat and humidity. I ask the hotel’s proprietor, Jack Nelson, whether I can take a brief shower, my second of the day, freshwater being at a premium. Sure, he says—and he’ll set some lunch aside, including fresh vegetables from Steve’s finca, delivered the night before.
The interwoven nature of quotidian life in Puerto Ayora—Jack’s sister, Christy Gallardo, runs the town library—makes me feel comfortably situated here. But wary.
Returning to my room, I give the manzanillo tree in the courtyard a wide berth. Its milky sap causes skin to blister and itch, like a brush with poison ivy. My room, cabana numero cinco, I had noticed the day I arrived, is across the road from the cemetery. Because volcanic soil is so difficult to excavate, most of the graves there are sarcophagi, with minimal decoration. The whitewashed concrete coffin boxes rest squarely on the hard ground. A few are elevated on pier blocks.
Always a caution, a cemetery.
On that first visit to Galápagos in 1986, I was so transfixed by the range and extent of bird and animal life on the islands, and by the inshore life that overwhelmed me as a snorkeler—by the seeming miracle of it all—that I missed initially how thoroughly and intimately life and death are mixed here. Paddling through mangrove thickets along the coast or pushing through heavy vegetation in the highlands, one is acutely aware of the living: small birds twitter and flit constantly in the understory of the scalesia forests. In sheltered lagoons, visitors float on transparent water above pods of spotted eagle rays undulating slowly past below. On coastal shores, flocks of ruddy turnstones and sanderlings probe the beach in search of food, along with black-necked stilts, oystercatchers, and yellow-crowned night-herons, and sally lightfoot crabs make short scampers across the surface of the water. On clinker plains in the lowlands, where there is little vegetation, death is a more striking part of the tapestry of life. My initial encounter with life’s insistent companion, as I mentioned to the colonist that day, came on Isla Genovesa, the remnant of a volcano’s collapsed rim, an island less than a fiftieth the size of Santa Cruz.
We had arrived at Genovesa on an overcast day. The motor yacht anchors in Bahía Darwin and the small group of us make our way up the Prince Philip’s Steps trail to a lava plain that forms the island’s flat summit. A strong onshore wind sweeps through the chirping of birds nesting among bare, mute-spattered rocks—thousands of red-footed boobies, masked boobies, great frigatebirds, and wedge-rumped storm petrels. The gaunt plain is strewn with sun-bleached palo santo twigs, with the castings of short-eared owls, and with the skeletons of large birds, stripped of their flesh by Galápagos hawks. The air is ripe with the odor of fish, which adult birds are disgorging for their chicks at hundreds of nests.
Clots of entwined cinder-colored marine iguanas, each the image of the stygian imps some sailors once thought they were, stare across this hysterical landscape, still as gargoyles. Mockingbirds snatch booby chicks, kill and eat them only a yard or two from the patch of pea gravel where an impassive parent sits. Short-eared owls emerge from crevices in the lava to savage the young of petrels. The wind sends frigatebirds, surprised by a sudden change in its force or direction, cartwheeling across the ground that surrounds their waist-high nests in clumps of saltbush.
The skeletons of birds deceived by the wind hang like auguries in the limbs of trees. Masked booby chicks, gorged on fish to the point of stupefaction, and lacking the muscle tone to bring themselves erect, lie sprawled on rocks beneath the trees. The larger booby chick in a nest occasionally kills the smaller one.
Above it all maneuver adult birds, just in from foraging in the ocean, dazzling in their acrobatic management of the shifting wind. The marine iguanas drop from the rocks into the same rich waters, like seagoing lizards. Tenacious cacti and muyuyo and lantana shrubs have found footing in interstices in the lava rubble and are thriving. The extent of death here burnishes life, and the vivacity of the living diminishes the tyranny of death.
I recall here a musical term: motet. Suspended over all that I saw was a thick cloud of birdcalls, raucous to some ears. A cacophony. A motet is “a vocal composition in polyphonic style on a text of some sort.”
What text is this, here on Isla Genovesa, with the exuberant peeps of satisfied hatchlings and the squawks of those whose lives are ending?
* * *
—
SOME EVENINGS I skip dinner at the hotel and eat in one of the cafés in Puerto Ayora, hoping I might meet someone from one of the other settlements in the islands, Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on San Cristóbal or Santo Tomás on Isabela, which I have not been able to visit yet. I can also practice my miserable Spanish and try to get the run of Ecuadorian Spanish, different to many ears from Cuban Spanish or Argentine Spanish. One night I meet one of the park’s guides for langostinos (prawns). The following morning, he tells me, he’s taking a small group of volunteers by boat around to Tortuga Bay on the south coast of the island, a stretch of beach where endangered Pacific green turtles regularly lay their eggs. The group might see females coming ashore or even burying their eggs; but his main intention, after walking everyone through a lesson in the ecology and conservation of green turtles, is to have the volunteers clear the beach’s wrack lines of jetsam, the garbage thrown from passing ships.
I’m welcome to join them, he says.
We do not see any turtles that morning but locate a number of pits where females have recently laid their eggs and covered them with sand. According to the guide, each pit shelters hundreds of eggs. The hatchlings will emerge at night, when darkness gives them a better chance of crossing the exposed beach below the high tide line. Once in the water, though they’ll still face other predators, they’ll be safe from mockingbirds, Galápagos hawks, and ghost crabs.
We leave the beach by boat at midmorning, carrying several dozen bright yellow bags filled with trash and feeling very good about our work.
That night I decide to return to the beach using an overland trail. I hope to see hatchlings emerging. The two-mile route leads to the beach over rocky ground and is flanked by dense shoulder-high brush. The air is muggy, but I can make out the trail easily enough in the light of a waxing moon. I don’t need to turn on my flashlight. (In the half dark, a flashlight beam would only make the visible world smaller.)
Just as I step onto the beach, I catch movement at the water’s edge. Mockingbirds. In the minutes before I arrived, a group of hatchlings had apparently tried to cross to the water. There might have been a scene here then a
s brutal, on a smaller scale, as tyrannosaurs attacking a scurrying herd of herbivorous ankylosaurs in an open grassland. There are no hatchlings now on the beach. A few moments and then the mockingbirds are gone. I find the pit the hatchlings came from above the high tide line and sit down on the sand nearby, where I have a view of open ground to the left and right. An hour passes. The absence of light and color make the beach even more still.
I’m adrift in memories of dark nights spent watching for animals in other places when I see, moving past my hip, a disk darker than the sand and half the size of my palm. I rise quickly and scan the beach near it methodically with my flashlight. It seems to be alone. The line of its advance is a determined strike for the water. I walk alongside it. No birds are aloft, but I soon see a ghost crab, then another, scuttling toward us. I fend them off with my foot, but they’re as determined as the young turtle, circling behind me, charging in. I consider carrying the hatchling to the water, but this feels immediately like crossing a line—too much interference. How is one ever to measure these things? I stay with the skirmish, protecting the turtle until it’s safely away in the surf.
I’ve seen what I’d come to see at Tortuga Bay and now turn back for Puerto Ayora, feeling suddenly very tired. A long day, and I’ve made it even longer with the hike out here. From time to time a cloud crosses the face of the moon, and it becomes so dark I have to feel ahead with my toes for secure footing. I don’t want to turn the light on. At some point a large animal thunders past me. A dog. I hear its panting as it passes. The ticking of its nails on the rocks suddenly stops up ahead. It’s looking back at me. I sense something else coming up behind me. Gooseflesh runs up my back and I swing the flashlight that way. No eye shine. An empty back trail. I shut the light off, to keep the outer dark from getting darker, and continue on. I don’t hear the dog ahead anymore and am sure he’s gone.