Creature Comforts
This is an expanded version of a piece that was originally published in enRoute, October 2007
By Craille Maguire Gillies
Something is staring at me in the warm salty water, its wide-set eyes dumb and blank and yet scrutinizing. He hovers there, this striped brown fish the length of a football, swimming not in a school but alone near the shore. Perhaps, like me, he is assessing the risk: Is she dangerous? Apparently not. After what is only a few seconds but feels longer, in the way that floating underwater seems to stop time, the fish turns glides away. We’ve had a moment, whether he knows it or not. This is what you seek in the Galápagos: Big Important Moments.
I am snorkelling in the Pacific Ocean off Santa Maria (a.k.a. Floreana) Island. It is a thousand kilometres west of Ecuador and many thousands more from my landlocked home. The water is murky from my feet shuffling across the bottom. In truth the water is shallow and the shore is only a few strokes away. The yawning jaws of the Pacific Ocean, which stretches beyond this point to the horizon, seem capable of swallowing a person in one quick gulp. Here, though, the water is tepid and calm.
The 18 Galápagos Islands, with their barren remoteness, are the iconic evolutionary laboratory. But the real action is under the lava-crusted moonscape, beyond the acres of unchecked brush, a wedge of green in the vast blue wilderness and past the knobs of islands that pop out of the sea like little volcanic burps.
The islands sit on the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire, which is responsible for the islands themselves. (British Columbia and the Yukon are also part of this seismic network.) The 100-kilometres-round pillars of molten rock called mantle plumes rise from their submarine base, perhaps deeper than the crust of the Earth, about 2,900 kilometres down. Magma shoots up from a stationary hotspot, creating an underwater island that gets bigger and bigger with every eruption. These submerged mountains eventually become new islands. The Galápagos, as one of the books in the cruise ship’s library puts it, rose from the ocean floor – they were never connected to the continent. The island’s volcano dies, new islands form, the cycle of life is repeated at a yawning pace as the continental shift pushes the islands away from its life source. They’re like Cheerios in a cereal bowl, sailing off into the distance.
I inhale through my nose in a kind of graceless reversed snort to suction the snorkelling mask to my face. The pressure from the mask and from clamping on the bit causes an immediate headache. Peering down in the shallow water, a penguin the size of a large duck dive bombs off the cliff and shoots past me underwater as though it had just jumped out of a Pixar movie. Big Important Moment #2. I spin around to follow the penguin but see only dirty water and other peoples’ flippers. Paddling a few metres, I keep an eye out for the penguin but instead have intimate views of bare legs and bright swimsuits. The irony of the Galápagos is that you travel to the middle of nowhere to come face to face with Nature and you end up swimming in a school of people. Then, I glance down to see a gelatinous mass shifting under me – a stingray. Seconds later, a three-foot reef shark glides by, impervious. Big Important Moment #3. They’re harmless, I’m told, but still I get out of the water and entertain myself by staring at a colossal pelican perched in a tree on the beach.
That so few creatures have managed to populate the islands makes the ones that did all the more remarkable. The origin of species wouldn’t have been possible in this forsaken place without this volcanic rock. As we hear on our nature walks, all wildlife and organisms originally floated, swam or flew from the mainland. Many were lost, many perished –the ones that survived truly are accidental tourists. Still, Galápagos real estate is not bad. The blue-footed boobies, frigates and Sally lightfoot crabs seem to prosper. The fat, blubbery sea lions simply loll around all day. Eventually, “they’ll retire, eat some sardines, get some sun, take it easy,” says Roman, a native Galápagonian. One afternoon, I watched the fast-moving form of a sea lion surfing through a wave and then swimming out to do it again. For him, there was nothing doing. Even the Ecuadorians – mostly men, mostly young – who come to work 12-hour days every day for six weeks straight on the cruise ships, have found an easier life than if they’d struggled to find work on the mainland in Guayaquil, the biggest city at four million.
Others come here searching to for something, and because of the islands’ near mythic status it’s easy to find meaning in everything. Nowhere is the ridiculousness of life, of the human condition, more apparent than when stumbling down a trail to find a bottleneck of about 20 people gathered to watch all of civilization on show. A pair of exhibitionist blue-footed boobies perform their mating ritual in the middle of the path, oblivious to us as they open their wings in a heart shape, fanning and cawing. They peck at each other’s beaks, and not for the first time flirting looks an awful lot like fighting.
After taunting and teasing, the male flies away out into the ocean and is gone.
It’s all a bit of a cattle call. On arriving at Baltra Airport, on the main inhabited island, the Galápagos National Park [Parque Nacional Galápagos] office handed out a questionnaire asking which activities visitors were most interested in. Solitude was one of the options. But on package trips solitude is practically impossible. Our twice-daily nature walks are divided into brief parcels of highly organized tours down a few hundred metres of shoreline. On an hour-long desert walk on Santa Cruz (“It looks like Baja,” someone says), we see the jawbone, perhaps of a land iguana, placed just so on the side of the trail. Our guide picks it up and waves it in front of us. “This was from the last group of tourists,” is his well-rehearsed sound bite.
The landscape is not so much barren as it is minimalist. The islands edges are gritty and messy and smelly. The cliff side of Punta Suarez on Española Island, home to a colony of blue-footed boobies and chick-snatching frigates is coated with feces and feathers and bones and sandy dirt. There are no smooth edges, except perhaps the endless sky or the occasional basin of glittering water. Despite their Edenic reputation, the islands are brown most of the year. Flamingoes, masked boobies and jellyfish with their electric blue whips are bright spots in a mass of muted plants and animals. On San Cristobal, lichen hangs from trees as though it were the film set for a spooky cobwebbed mystery – Galápagos Gothic. The hardened lava moonscape on Santiago Island looks menacing, but underfoot the volcanic rock sounds tinny and light. In a crevice, what looks like ice but is hardened salt forms a pool. Nearby, a miniature rainbow crests in the slipstream of a crashing wave. This gives way to desert on Santa Cruz, punctuated by patches of forest that stolidly marches up hills.
Nothing is midline—the islands are either monochrome and unremarkable or vastly awesome. Even the concept of time seems insanely outsized. The oldest island, Española, is between three and five million years old. The youngest, Fernandina, a mere 700,000. Here, tortoises can live a year without food and their life expectancy is 200 years. A six-year-old blond girl named Agnes is led around under a large black umbrella to protect her from the Ecuadorian sun. At the other end of the scale, slightly bewildered blue-footed boobie chicks wander around the rocks on Suarez Point, their wispy bleach-white feathers not yet slick and smooth. Age hardly seems relevant.
Seeking quiet, the night before we leave I retreat to the empty top deck of the cruise ship. I’m laying on a wooden chaise longue, slowly rocking to sleep. As the boat sways left and right, the entire star-marked sky appears to be sliding back and forward to the tick of a metronome.
The next morning, I have my last Big Important Moment. A colony of sea lions has congregated around the makeshift dock where we wait. An eight-week-old sea lion nudges its mother’s belly for food, but she isn’t serving. The pup flops around, trying another lion, but gets barked out by his mother. The pup, still fuzzy and lean and naïve, furiously inches over the rock as the mother tries to block it like a goaley. The mother barks and groans, but still the pup tries to get to the water. So the mother picks up the pup in its moth and hauls it a couple feet across the rocks. The pup is determined, and crawls again over the rock, making it to the cliff face as the mother follows.
Then the mother inexplicably heads to the water. The pup, now alone, totters on the cliff’s edge like a car in one of those slo-mo scenes in a film when you wait to see if the balance will tip toward safety or catastrophe. If it ends badly I don’t want to know. I cup my hands over my ears and turn away. I watch the waves crash against the rocks. I turn away, already in my mind getting ready for the trip home.
