by Steve Hely
Darwin, you deserve it all, dude.
Memory of a Nerdy Childhood
As a teen boy I used to read The New York Times Book Review every Sunday. Listen, I’m not saying I was a cool teen. But reading that thing every week allows you to gloss through summaries of all the best new books out there. Before long your talents at intellectual bluffery will be through the roof and you can fake your way through college and on into highbrow cocktail parties with ease.
When I was fourteen a book came out called The Beak of the Finch. The writer was Jonathan Weiner, and the story he told was about two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, who’d been studying the varieties of species of a kind of small bird called Darwin’s finches. For twenty years they’d camped out on an extinct volcano in the Galápagos, examining and measuring these birds. They took drops of blood from every finch on their island, measured their legs, and photographed their beaks. Their study took in more than 20,000 birds. What they found was that evolution was even more dramatic and fast than Darwin realized.
Life is tough for these birds. There are droughts and dry years. What the Grants discovered was that their finches would adapt quickly. A new generation would have bigger beaks, for cracking open the hardest seeds. If it flooded, the next generation would have smaller beaks, to collect lots of tiny seeds. Out in the wild, they’d found and shown evolution at work.
At the time Weiner wrote this book, almost half of Americans didn’t believe in evolution. He carefully and patiently described it happening and showed how it worked. It’s a great book. Weiner won a Pulitzer Prize for it.
When I heard about this book, I didn’t care about finches. I still don’t, really. To me, finches are in the bottom half of Galápagos animals in terms of overall coolness and interest. But ever since I read about it, I wanted to go to the Galápagos.
Half the people on the boat to the Galápagos had a story like that. They’d seen a documentary when they were kids, they studied wildlife photography, they’d dreamed about the Galápagos for years.
Now we were here.
Good Company
Strange and wonderful creatures are what you go to the Galápagos to see. Just in case, I’d brought two with me. My favorite thing about sailing around the Galápagos was hanging out with my friends Alan Tang and Amy Smozols.
Amy Smozols* is small in size, has a deep voice, seems to subsist entirely on alcohol and cigarettes, yet she is never tired nor does she ever speak in anything less than perfect, articulate sentences that are almost always insightful and funny. Weak men and women are afraid of her, and strong men and women are attracted to her. If you are someone truly badass, like a billionaire biotechnical entrepreneur who rock climbs or like a brilliant surgeon who is also charming, Atul Gawande or something, get in touch with me and perhaps she will judge you worthy of her. She started out as a high-powered New York lawyer but hated lawyering and became a comedy writer and producer. She helped to launch Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show. Despite intense drive and a cool steeliness, she is one of the most sentimental people I’ve ever met. She loves Christmas and friendship and presents and animals and families and children.
One night on the boat, she ran out of cigarettes. She went into the office of the ship’s bursar, a serious Ecuadorian.
“Someone on this boat has cigarettes. I need to buy them.”
The bursar of a ship is a powerful guy. He’s in charge of the money and supplies. He doesn’t take orders from just anybody. Usually just the captain. But the voice of Amy Smozols is a voice of command.
The bursar looked her in the eye, picked up the phone, and issued some terse commands in Spanish. Within sixty seconds, some poor sailor from the bunks below scurried into the bursar’s office with a pack of cigarettes. The bursar told him to give Amy his cigarettes, for which she gave the sailor forty dollars.
Amy Smozols and Alan Tang are two of the greatest conversationalists I know. They will both stay up as long as people are drinking and laughing and being funny. If they’re around, that will be like three a.m., minimum. A word that no comedy writer will ever use without some irony, but which is sadly useful, is riffing—picking up and playing with an idea or a joke and seeing how far it can take you down exploratory roads of comedy. A fancy-pants way of saying “joking around.”
That was the best thing we did in the Galápagos—riffed and joked around.
There are all kinds of boats that’ll take you to the island. We were traveling in style for five days at sea. At the stern of the boat was a bar, and in the evenings, there would be a red-jacketed barman who spoke no English and was one of the coolest men I’ve ever seen. Every night after the day’s activities, we drank and talked and laughed and looked out over the water. One night at two or so in the morning, an officer of the ship invited us to the bridge. He showed us everything, and then he took us out on the deck and pointed out the constellations of the equatorial sky. We stayed awake to watch the sun come up. An incredible marriage or some magnificent kids or some epic love affair will have to come along before the memory of that night gets knocked too far out of the top slots in my Best Times Ever file.
For all that drinking, I promised I wouldn’t miss a single activity on the boat. Every day, there were little expeditions. We’d climb into a motorized panga and head out on an away team mission to the day’s crazy island.
Hungover, it could be tough, but when I stared at a baby sea lion rolling itself around happily on the wet sand, my body seemed to agree this was terrific and pull itself together.
Second-Best Thing: Snorkeling
As wonderful as the land life on the Galápagos is, more stunning still is to jump in the water with a mask on your face and look down. In one single look one morning, my eyeballs could see five sea turtles at once. There were hammerhead sharks and octopi and fish by the thousands, Galápagos penguins darting through the water, and shelves and walls of coral for a hundred feet down. Thousands of pounds of biomass acting out their lives in a single glance right in front of you. And there diving for his supper, shooting through the water like a conscious torpedo, a Galápagos penguin.
Dropping dynamite or cyanide on coral reefs as a way to go fishing isn’t unheard of in the world. That’s a pretty blunt example of the freakish power humans have acquired for ourselves over the Earth. A coral reef in the Galápagos could take a hundred years to develop, supporting thousands of creatures in webs of intertwined dependence and development. A bad oil spill or some dumped chemicals could kill it all in a few hours.
Luckily, that doesn’t seem too likely. The Galápagos is a protected national park. Our power as a species is exponentially out of whack with all the other species. We’re a freakish development. Unless we’re freakishly good at understanding that, at controlling ourselves, we’ll wipe the whole world out and ourselves with it.
Everybody knows that, of course, any kid could tell you that we have to take care of the Earth and all that. But we have to remind ourselves about it, over and over again. Seeing the complex miracles of life on Earth that are all over the Galápagos, you’re like “Riiiiiiiiiiiiight, insane harmonious, blossoming tapestry of nature, wondrous but fragile, got it, got it. Remind me again later, but I see it now. We can’t screw this up.”
Witness to a Heroic Deed
On this boat were many retired people, from England and the United States. Our best friend was a former photographer for the US Postal Service. I hadn’t known that the US Postal Service had photographers, but this man explained that over a long and happy career he’d photographed post offices, and postal workers on their rounds, and postal excellence, generally. He was charming and ebullient and had great stories, and a loving partner, who’d knitted him thin gloves to protect his hands from the sun when he was out photographing.
There were only two young kids. They were with their parents, a handsome English executive and his Czech-born wife, a veterinarian. They were like a family from some
fantasy about families, the kids curious and thoughtful, the parents attractive and healthful.
One day we were out in the panga motoring through a mangrove forest, when the wife tipped her head back and lost her sunglasses.
Our guide, a terrific Galápagos-born naturalist, tried to fish them out with a long pole. He could spot them but not quite grab them.
“Too bad,” said the wife, accepting the loss gracefully. “Those were my favorite.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, the English father took off his shirt, looked to the guide, who shrugged a permission, and dove headfirst into water full of rays and fish and all kinds of unknown creatures. He disappeared, and then he popped back up thirty seconds later with his wife’s sunglasses.
It was such a manly act, so decisive and brave and competent, that the whole boat applauded him. He was assured, coyly, by his wife of a reward to come in private. His sons looked at him, burning into their brains a memory of their father demonstrating exactly manhood at its most valiant. While by no means unique to England, deeds like that are what made Britain great, I thought. And for all the neat and freakish features of the animals of the Galápagos, there’s not one that would do that.
I doubt I’ll ever see that guy again, nor do I know his name, but I think about him every so often, as he gave me an example of how to be.
“Going to Town”
There are some people in the Galápagos. Galápagonians is not what they’re called, I don’t know why. Some European settlers in the 1920s and ’30s tried to make it, canning turtle meat or in various eccentric lifestyles, but it’s not an easy place to live. Poor farmers and fishermen from mainland Ecuador moved there, looking for a better life. Some of them found it. Our main guide grew up in a big family of kids of the Galápagos. When he was a boy, he had to hide on the boat over because his mother didn’t have the money for tickets for all of her children. Now he tried to train other young people to be naturalists and guides and make a life sharing and protecting the wildlife of the islands. A lot of the crew of our boat were native Galápagonians.
One night, late at night, Alan, Amy, and I were up drinking, as usual the last passengers awake by far, when we saw some of the crew get into a panga boat. They were going to a little town on the island of San Cristóbal.
In a frenzy I hollered over the side and waved and asked if I could come with them.
There was a reason for my passion: I’ve always been fond of the phrase “going to town” to mean really going nuts. Like “Last Saturday night a bunch of folks came over to my house and we got out the whiskey and just went to town.”
These guys were literally going to town. What kind of next-level island debauchery were they going to get up to in their one night off?!
Of course, the last thing they probably wanted was to chaperone some gawky tourist on their one-night shore leave. So they acted like they didn’t understand and smiled and waved and launched the boat as fast as they could.
Fair enough. Still. When I remember the Galápagos, I’m haunted a little by my failure to truly go to town. Animals are great and all, but what humans get up to—that’s what’s really great to be a part of.
* * *
A few days later we were back in Ecuador. My friends went back to their regular lives, and I went on to finish my trip down South America.
I didn’t have much time. In two weeks I had an appointment in Santiago, Chile.
But first: Bolivia.
Oompa-Loompa Hunting
World travelers, people who have an addiction to the rush of going places, find each other. They find me, at least. I meet them everywhere I go, even at home.
When two of these people cross paths, what can happen next is a game of “where’s the weirdest place you’ve been” poker. A one-upping of trips or adventure. You must play with caution in these contests. Plenty of people have mic-drop trump cards. “I took the Norwegian mail boat in winter.” “I spent six months cooking at a research station in Antarctica.” If you inflate your tale even a tiny bit, you risk getting trumped by your competitor: “Oh, you took the Trans-Siberian Railway? Were you in second class? Everything interesting happens in the second-class cars,” etc.
A particular form this can take is seeking out the most exotic, remote, and strangest people. Curious people are interested in curious places, that’s a terrific thing about humans. But this search can enter odd territory. It can become Oompa-Loompa hunting.
Oompa-Loompas, you’ll recall perhaps, are the green-haired, orange-faced small people or creatures who work at Willy Wonka’s factory in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. I’m talking about the 1971 movie here—there are Oompa-Loompas in the book, too, but seeing them on screen is what made so traumatizing an impression on so many children of my generation and beyond.
Wonka tells us the Oompa-Loompas come from Loompaland, which is nothing but “desolate wastes and fierce beasts.” “A Wangdoodle would eat ten of them for breakfast and think nothing of it,” says Wonka. The orange-faced little people appear relieved to be locked in a factory making candy instead.
“Oompa-Loompa hunting” is a phrase coined by my friend Professor James McHugh. I wouldn’t mess with him when it comes to exotic adventure. Professor McHugh teaches Sanskrit at the University of Southern California. When he’s in Los Angeles he’s always being invited as the faculty guest by blond girls to sorority dinners. When the school year’s over, he’s dodging snakes in the basements of ancient Indian temples while he looks for forgotten manuscripts. Hard to say which setting is more full of pitfalls and hazards.
One night we were eating at a Thai restaurant in LA, and we were talking, as one does, about Laos. I asked Professor McHugh if he’d ever been to Laos. Seemed like a reasonable thing to ask: On top of Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Thai, Spanish, and French, it wouldn’t be that odd if James had picked up Lao.
He hadn’t, but he was interested, like I was. Landlocked Laos was strange enough before it was colonized by the French. The blended culture preserved there sounds like it must be worth a trip. In Vientiane, Laos, you can find exquisite shops making French pastries in the middle of the steaming jungle. You can visit the Plain of Jars, where there are thousands of mysterious basins carved from huge stones. The best guess of archaeologists is this was once some prehistoric graveyard that sprawled for miles.
“Man, I’d like to go to Laos,” I said.
“FORGET Laos, dude,” said a stranger to my left. Professor McHugh and I turned abruptly. “Sorry to interrupt. But Laos is over.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s done. I thought it’d be cool, too. It’s not. They put a friggin’ highway through the whole place, man. Now it’s just like any other place.”
I doubted that very highly, but we thanked the guy for the tip and saving us a trip to Laos. He went off into the night.
“See, that drives me BATTY!” said Professor McHugh. He’s allowed to say that, he’s English. “That’s Oompa-Loompa hunting.”
Professor McHugh pointed out that Western adventurer cool guys and girls can be so insistent on finding the weirdest, oddest, most backward people.
“But everywhere is interesting!” said Professor McHugh. I couldn’t agree more. “People say they hate Bangkok because it looks like LA. ‘Get out of Bangkok,’ they tell each other. Well, sure, on the surface, Bangkok looks like LA. But then in some strip mall you can find a temple where people worship the embalmed corpse of a middle-aged woman who died in, like, 1998. Why do you have to go out to the jungle looking for people in funny costumes?”
* * *
Professor McHugh makes a great point.
On the other hand: It’s tempting. Who isn’t interested in what happens to people who are isolated, remote, left in their own deep valleys and rugged countries, only glanced at, at most, by the rest of the world? Who doesn’t want to see the last holdouts against a global monoculture?
When we hear of some pocket of people preserving their culture, how can you not root for them, a little?
Not if they’re, like, ISIS, I guess, lighting people on fire and so on.
Maybe worshipping the vulnerable cultures of the world might be a luxury and fetish of people who are safely part of the dominant forces and culture that are making traditional cultures so vulnerable.
Who knows? I’ll tell you this much: If you’re looking for strange pockets of preserved culture, you will find them in landlocked countries.
Mongolia, Bhutan, Tibet, Afghanistan, Ethiopia: Landlocked countries are fucked. They don’t have any ports! Ninety percent of everything traded goes by ship sooner or later. For these countries, all those things are at least a full, possibly unfriendly country away. They can’t get stuff in and they can’t get stuff out.
Circumstances can get crazy in a landlocked country, fast. Nobody in the outside world might hear about or process the situation until it’s off-the-charts nuts. Switzerland and Austria seem okay now, but nobody can tell me they’re not pretty weird there. Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan are double landlocked. If you can tell me anything about what’s going on in either of those countries, I’ll be impressed.
Landlocked countries, especially the rugged, mountainous ones, can preserve cultures like time capsules.
Bolivia is landlocked. Whole swaths of the country are a swamp, and whole swaths are salt pans and desert. The part that’s all mountainous is, like, the best part. That’s where they put their semi-capital, La Paz. Their real capital is in Sucre, closer to the silver mountain of Potosí, but after they’d stripped that out, the government took off, I’m told.