Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  Evenings at sea aboard the Beagle III at this time of year are mostly warm, and some of us forgo the bunks below to sleep out on the decks, where the Milky Way is particularly dense with stars on a clear night. On the morning I’m thinking about, our itinerary has us anchored at Isla Rábida. The engines have been shut down for a while; a few Galápagos doves are asleep on the ship’s railing. No movement, no gas or electric light is visible ashore. The silence here is a presence, like the air inside a large rotunda. It’s finally rent by the sound of a knife blade stopped by a cutting board—the cook, preparing cantaloupe for breakfast.

  We’re at Rábida to visit a colony of greater flamingos living at a salt lagoon. They feed in the shallow water on a type of crustacean that makes their feathers pink, and the females lay their single white eggs on small heaps of mud on a salt pan nearby. They’re among the wariest of the islands’ birds, and having heard the boat’s engine earlier, they are arrayed on the far shore of the lagoon when we arrive via a short trail. Something about the arrangement of space here and the scheme of simple colors—the broad turquoise lagoon, the deep blue of a high-pressure sky, the long pink line of distant flamingos in front of a wall of green mangrove trees—induces silence in the eight or ten of us standing there. We move like tiptoeing parents in the bedroom of a sleeping child. Outside of the soft puff of an intermittent breeze against my ears, the only sound here is the bleating of the birds, a sound like the honking of geese. The overall impression is that the birds are pink, but with my binoculars I can separate out individual feathers: salmon, vermilion, scarlet, coral.

  We’re downwind of the birds and the intermittent breeze brings their floating feathers to us over the water—breast and nape feathers, coverts and scapulars—floating curves, turned up at each end like a child’s drawing of a canoe. The stately hesitation of flamingos feeding and the trembling of hundreds of feathers on water lapping the lagoon’s edge create an opening that was not there when we arrived. Vulnerability and a feeling of friendship—with the birds and among the people I’m traveling with.

  We return to the boat carrying that eloquent silence.

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  WE’D SPENT THE last part of one afternoon around Isla San Salvador swimming with fur seals and hiking up to an old saltworks. We were en route to Isla Genovesa when I saw something unusual on the water inside San Salvador’s Buccaneer Cove, near Cabo Cowan. The sun was setting and its last low rays were reflecting on splashes on the surface water, about a thousand yards away. At first I thought these were the plunge dives of blue-footed boobies, which feed near shore and dive straight into the water, like pelicans. The pattern of the splashes, however, never changed. Not boobies, then, but animals struggling in the water. Caught in a net. Galápagos sea lions (Zalophus californianus wollebaeki).

  Our guide, Orlando Falco, prevailed on the captain—who was reluctant to get involved—to change course. Orlando knew that Galapagean fishermen had started using sea lion carcasses as bait to catch sharks, and that Asian factory ships had been calling at villages like Puerto Villamil that year, offering to buy shark fins and supplying fishermen with nets. The entire business—factory ships putting in at the villages, netting the sea lions, killing the sharks, selling their fins—was illegal, but the park had neither the funds nor the personnel to stop it.

  When we got closer, we could see that about fifteen sea lions were tangled in the net and drowning. Some were bound up together in the mesh, each one fighting the others to reach the surface to breathe, before being driven back under by their companions fighting for air. A crewman lowered a boat for us. Working from one side of the panga, Orlando and I began cutting the animals out of the net with our dive knives. Three other people, counterbalancing the boat on the other side, were holding flashlights for us to see. The most desperate of the sea lions were trying to clamber aboard the boat. The boat driver was using an oar blade to keep them from biting the two of us or turning the boat over. It took about forty minutes to free them all. As well as we could determine in the dark, all but one of the fifteen were able to swim away.

  In the melee, Orlando and I had cut each other’s hands and arms, and when we got back aboard the Beagle III, we saw that our shins were black and blue from banging against the panga’s gunnel. Strangely, each sea lion seemed to understand at some point what we were trying to do. As I moved to cut the last few strands of green line from around a sea lion’s head, it stopped fighting me and trying to bite. It rested calmly in the water.

  Two years later, when I returned to Galápagos, I saw the carcasses of thirty or forty finless sharks cast up like driftwood on a dozen beaches. The fishermen’s practice then was to throw them overboard and leave them to die after cutting their fins off.

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  AS WE CRUISED through the islands and went ashore one place and another, I began to recognize patterns of color and the presence of shapes and forms that, taken together, suggested this setting and no other. On the northeast coast of Alaska is a place called—in the Iñupiaq language of the Iñupiat there—Naalagiagvik, “the place where you go to listen.” The name refers to the practice of a particular Iñupiaq shaman who visited this area regularly to listen to the voices of animals and to voices not audible to others, like those of her ancestors. From this ensemble she built up the guiding stories her people steered by, the stories that gave them a direction in life and kept them from harm.

  Inspired by this act, and by the enormous metaphor it was, the composer John Luther Adams, an Alaska resident then, designed an installation for a room at the Museum of the North, at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, called “The Place Where You Go to Listen.” A continuous stream of precisely modulated electronic sounds flows from a suite of speakers here, tones created by the dynamics of Earth itself. Seismographic, geomagnetic, and meteorological data from outstations across Alaska feed into computers in Fairbanks, which using Adams’s algorithms create a “whole cloth” of intricately woven tonal values. The viewer/listener at the installation sits on a bench facing a set of five glass panels. The panels change color according to the season of the year, the weather, and the time of day. The pattern of changing color reinforces the sensation of being present to a real landscape, one made richer by the translation of Earth’s constant micro movements and phenomena like the northern lights into the patterns of a singular sonic landscape.

  For many years John and I have exchanged ideas about the nature of music, language, and the natural world, and how combining them in various ways can tell us where we are, literally and figuratively. Prompted by John, I’ve tried, wherever I’ve gone, to stay attentive to the sounds that emerge from an environment, believing with him that each place offers a unique pattern of sound, arrangements that change over time, depending on the season, the temperature, the humidity, the strength of the wind, and the hour of day in that locale. I’ve long been attracted, too, to the work of other artists who have a gift for patternmaking—painters, choreographers, composers—and who respond to the world that lies outside human control. Each singles out components from what’s available—tones, hues, movements, progressions. Brought together successfully, these components offer us art so well integrated, so seamless, we call it beautiful, in the way the particle physicist’s singularity or the Greek philosopher’s Theosophos can be said to be beautiful.

  When I look at a landscape as a traveler, if I’m diligent, I can sometimes make out an inherent visual pattern, a sort of topology of lines and colors, into which movements fit—a bird gliding downwind across a brindled cliff face, above a dark ocean, say, or a range of treeless hills shadowed by a passing storm. Within the pattern, the separate pieces—sound, color, movement—all inform one another. In the end, whatever the components, it seems impossible to separate them again into single elements. They fit together so well that an analysis of exactly what is going on, rather than an uncritical appreciati
on of the phenomenon, is likely only to distance one from the scene.

  Recalling my conversations with artists about the guesswork associated with creating a pleasing pattern frequently enables me to see better what is before me, see it not so much as art but as essence—the essence of a place, for example. In Galápagos it was—to pick something at random, seen from a passing boat just offshore of an island—a white ramulose horizontal strip of leafless palo santo trees, barely separated from a parallel strip of white beach below by a matte black line of lava, and then a dark ocean below that, holding a bright white line of surf against the lesser white of the beach, all of this surmounted by a pointillistic forest of scalesia trees on a slope above, with the dark ocean weakly reflecting the land and sky.

  The image did not have to have meaning. This was only the presence of the place, in the middle of a March afternoon on the equator.

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  ON ONE OF the last days of our excursion aboard the Beagle III, our group landed at the foot of a trail on the east coast of Isabela. The trail here led up to the rim of el volcán Alcedo, a climb of about 3,700 feet. I was eager to climb Alcedo for several reasons. The largest undisturbed population of giant tortoises in Galápagos lives inside its crater, and the daylong hike to the rim takes one through all of the islands’ vegetation zones, from the coastal plant communities up through the transitional dry zone of the scalesia forest to the wet-zone communities and the pampas around the crater. In addition, because the climb is physically taxing and requires making an overnight camp in the wet zone, few visitors attempt it. It’s one of the least-visited approved sites in the archipelago. It still has the look of the Galápagos Darwin found.

  If the giant tortoise is the archipelago’s most iconic animal, the shield volcano is its most iconic landform. Molten lava, periodically bursting through the Nazca Plate from a hot spot in Earth’s mantle, flows out across the ocean floor and cools, creating a shield that slopes away gently on all sides. Each succeeding lava flow adds another layer of molten rock to the shield—more height, more breadth—until the flows breach the surface of the ocean. The flows continue, but at this point what began as an underwater volcano is now a volcanic island. As the Nazca Plate advances eastward, the stationary hot spot bursts through at another site in the plate, eventually creating another island, the islands eventually forming an archipelago. (The oldest island in Galápagos, Plaza Sur, is to the east of Santa Cruz. Among the youngest is Fernandina, far to the west. The hot spot sits today between Fernandina and Isabela, close to La Cumbre, which is an active volcano.)

  Once a Galapagean volcano becomes extinct, like some of those on Isabela, its vent begins slowly to collapse, forming a dry crater. (The ancient disintegrating crater on Genovesa has collapsed so completely that it’s flooded today by the ocean.) The most spectacular craters in the islands are those of the still-active volcanoes on Isabela like Cerro Azul, and of course the crater of La Cumbre, which is filled with glowing lava, not tree ferns, bromeliads, and liverworts.

  Earlier, on a visit to Puerto Villamil, our guide had hired a man with a stake-side truck to take us up to the rim of el volcán Sierra Negra, at 4,890 feet. From there we’d have a spectacular view of Santa Cruz to the east and, to the northwest, of Fernandina. Ten of us were standing on the truck bed, leaning against its wood railings, as the vehicle left Villamil and began laboring up a steep grade in first gear. Suddenly the engine quit. The driver quickly put his foot on the brake. He then informed us that because he had no starter motor, he was going to have to jump-start the truck by rolling backward down the dirt road and then easing the clutch in. Which he did. A few minutes later the engine quit again, just as he was coming through a curving section of the road. As the truck began to roll backward through the curve, it became clear that for some reason the driver wasn’t able to engage the clutch—and that he had lost his brakes. A few of us made moves to jump off the truck, but we were too late. It was gathering speed and fishtailing. Twice it rose up on one side, threatening to flip over, before rolling to a stop in a barrow ditch by the side of the road.

  We decided to walk the rest of the way.

  The view from Sierra Negra that afternoon was theatrical, a vista encompassing nearly a thousand square miles in which not so much as the wake of a boat upset the illusion of the extent of space around us. It spread outward from droplets of dew on blades of grass on the crater rim to heavy surf breaking on the beaches of Santa María, fifty miles to the south.

  On our way back to Puerto Villamil, ever-trusting, we accepted a ride in the tip bin of a brand-new Hino dump truck. Bright yellow. We passed the aging Daihatsu stake-side that we’d started out in, still tilted precariously in the barrow ditch. I felt a pang of sympathy for the driver, standing there with hands in his pockets, facing expensive repairs, and with no sign of help on the way.

  I’ve been in situations like this before, a near miss and you walk away with a good story; but memories of this potentially fatal mishap remained unsettled in my mind for hours. The driver had accepted a fee without mentioning the marginal condition of his truck. We were lucky it hadn’t flipped when the clutch and then the brakes failed. We were miles from help in Villamil, and even farther from competent medical help on Santa Cruz—if we could raise anyone there on our shipboard radio. And yet here was this middle-aged man trying to make ends meet.

  What was he going to say to his family about the money our guide asked him to give back?

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  IN THE CRATER of Alcedo we would encounter giant tortoises on their own terms and, if we stayed long enough, see something of their way in the world—eating, resting, mating, sleeping, moving with determination on their elephantine legs, wallowing in drip pools beneath scalesia trees festooned with epiphytes, gazing into the distance with pensive faces, reckoning events impossible for us to imagine. The carapaces of the oldest of these are encrusted with lichens and used by hawks and vermilion flycatchers as observation posts.

  We spent a full day inside the crater, fogged in and chilly. Those without hats sported helmets of beaded moisture on their hair. The melancholy atmosphere encouraged a kind of brooding in me, about the finless sharks, the poverty in Villamil, and war zones I’d seen. The reaction of the tortoises to our presence seemed to unfold in slow motion. They were like wizened sentinels, waiting for us to pass on. Theirs were intensely local lives.

  The floor of the crater was pocked with volcanic vents encrusted with canary-yellow sulfur deposits. (We came upon a lone feral donkey here, remnant of a herd that once carried panniers of sulfur down to the coast for shipment to the mainland, another early effort, like the one at the salt mine on San Salvador, to develop an export economy in Galápagos. The animal was in good flesh, alert and wary, in great contrast to the bone-thin, scarred, limping horses standing abject and catatonic in the dirt streets of Villamil.)

  When we broke camp in the morning, I lashed a large volcanic cinder to my pack. I’d read that some creatures in the Galápagos might have originally dispersed through the islands by riding volcanic cinders carried by the archipelago’s strong currents and pushed by the wind. I had a hard time imagining a rock floating in salt water, and curiosity led me to break the park rule about leaving everything in the park undisturbed. The cinder was about three feet in circumference but it weighed little more than a pound. I carried it down from the crater rim to the edge of the water and flung it in. It sank with the impact but quickly bobbed to the surface, where it floated with about half its mass clear of the sea.

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  VILLAMIL. THE SETTLEMENT was like a fishhook in my mind. It’s easy to make the mistake when traveling abroad of finding only the good or only the bad in a place, easy to miss how complicated the weave of bad with good is. If archetypal goodness in Galápagos is represented by the idealistic park ranger who will not accept a bribe, archetypal ev
il is represented by those residents of Villamil who started the forest fires on Isabela, killed the sharks for their fins, and harassed and terrorized the family of a park ranger who tried to live there, driving him and his family back to Santa Cruz.

  The day the group of us returned from Sierra Negra, our guide told us that in light of the accident with the truck and his having to ask the driver to return the fee, it might be good to act in a friendly way in Villamil, to buy a few sodas and trinkets from vendors. We can take the time to do that, he said. Another plan came to mind right away. Could I find someone to escort me to the ruins of a penal colony west of the village?

  There are a few images in a poem by the American poet Robinson Jeffers called “Apology for Bad Dreams” that rise up regularly in my mind. Jeffers writes in the poem about the contrast between beauty and violence. He suggests that the world cannot be understood without accepting both. He says that it is not good to forget, in the pursuit of virtue, the degree to which immorality defines our condition and our history. In an essay called “In Defence of the Word,” the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano refers to the writer as “the servant of memory,” both his or her own memory and the memory that his people have of what has been done to them. Galeano is arguing, essentially, that a writer who lies ceases to be a writer; and that a writer is obligated to resist complacency and to remember the things the ruling classes hope will be forgotten. He is thinking, I believe, of writers like Rian Malan in South Africa or Bei Dao in China.