Eight
The First Intruders
They had to move forward, Friedrich urged. They could not afford to sit idle and fret about prying neighbors back in Berlin or newspaper headlines or who might next arrive on the island. Privately, though, he confided his own frustrations in his notebook: “Nothing was further from us than to ‘bother’ anyone—let alone the general public—with our purely personal hermit life…. How poor in experiences the life of civilization must be that it disturbs the beloved loneliness of two people.”
He and Dore made one concession to their new and unwelcome circumstance, sending word to the German consul at Guayaquil that any visitor should “call or yodel” when approaching Friedo to give them time to dress. As an extra precaution, they erected a sign on the path leading to the house: “Knock strongly, and enter when 3 minutes have passed.”
Dore took Friedrich’s advice, vowing to push the external world from her thoughts. They began work on their new house, which would stand next to their existing shelter. It would be much grander and more spacious and implement Friedrich’s “egg” philosophy, with a clear view to the coast of Isabela Island seventy miles away—a reminder, Dore wrote, “of how near we were to our fellow man, and how far we were from them.” The roof would extend beyond the house to form a porch, which they would furnish with a large table and five chairs. Their beds would be protected from insects by screens of wire netting. There would be a dedicated study area, where they would read and write after long days toiling in the sun, sitting on furniture they fashioned from curved sticks.
For the new house to have their desired views, it had to be set on pillars about nine feet high. They excavated blocks of lava and carted them off. The sharp lava rocks prevented them from going barefoot, and they worked in wet shoes. Bananas and papayas had to be uprooted and replanted in the limited strip of land that was watered by the spring. The invasive wild cats and dogs prowled, closing in. To protect their chickens, they built an enclosure deep within the crater walls, but several were still killed.
Dore expected the exhausting work to ravage her body, but it caused equal damage to her mind. “It is a romantic error to suppose that in the building of our house and the creation of the garden we translated drudgery into terms of spiritual significance,” she wrote. “Nothing could be farther from the truth. On the contrary, the ceaseless and excessive manual toil dulled the edge of our whole spiritual life for me, and spoiled all its freshness.” At night, she thought about the foolish squabbles that occupied too much of their time, and the various ways Friedrich undermined her. He never failed to voice his disappointment when she struggled, and seemed to have “eternal dissatisfaction” with everything she said and did. When she lashed out in rage, he justified his coldness by citing his “high ambition” for her. He had faith that she could be an extraordinary woman, if only she allowed him to instruct her.
The rainy season came late, after the new year, arriving in the night with a ferocity that startled Dore; the pounding of the drops on their iron roof sounded like a thousand drums. She awakened with a sense of terror and saw Friedrich in the same state, both of them wondering if a cache of uncovered dynamite had been set off by someone or something unknown. Holding an old umbrella, guided by Friedrich’s lantern, they hurried outside, where Dore found a piece of tar paper she could set atop the dynamite to prevent it from getting soaked. Just as suddenly as the downpour had started, it abated, and they looked at each other, both in sodden nightclothes, Dore dragging the tar paper behind her like a bedraggled cape, and indulged an emotion they hadn’t felt in quite some time, doubling over in laughter.
With the rain came a frantic burst of life in the garden, as well as a savage plague of cockroaches and mosquitoes and beetles and lice and caterpillars and ants—the last of these especially vicious and seemingly immune to extermination. Even the very idea of the ants enraged Friedrich; they lived and operated against his philosophy. “The socialism of the ants,” he wrote, “is nothing more than a systematic common robbery of all other life.”
The next intruder was human, and someone they already knew: Captain Bruun, who arrived on the Manuel J. Cobos in the spring of 1931 with an explanation about the mysterious theft at the Casa. Dore and Friedrich weren’t robbed by a roving band of marauders. Bruun himself had dispatched a boat to collect his own belongings, and the crew accidentally took their possessions as well. Perhaps, Bruun suggested, they had expected Dore and Friedrich to be living at the Casa and, when no one was there, concluded that they had abandoned Floreana for Isabela Island, the largest in the archipelago.
Dore was skeptical. “It’s all very well,” she said, “but what about the little rowing boat?” That was a clear sign that they had not gone to Isabela, she argued. What had he done with the boat, and when might he return it?
At that, Bruun argued that the rowboat had actually been his all along and then changed the subject. He had heard, he said, about the visits from McDonald and Astor and the other rich Americans, and the many generous gifts they’d left behind. He let this statement linger in the air, a tacit suggestion that he was deserving to share in those gifts. Dore could tell that Friedrich, too, was more amused than bothered by Bruun’s entitlement, but his next declaration angered both of them.
“I have decided,” Bruun said, “to give up this plying between the islands. This cruise is almost my last one in the Manuel J. Cobos. I’m coming here to live.”
Dore and Friedrich spoke at once: “What?”
“Yes, I’m going to start a fishing station. I shall live at the Casa and make it my headquarters. We shall be able to help each other. There’s a very good thing to be made out of fishing.” He went on to say he had a smart young partner in Guayaquil, a Dane named Knud Arends, who had very high hopes for a profitable fishing industry on Floreana. “No one’s ever yet tried to fish these waters for what’s in them,” he said, “but I’m going to, and you’ll see we’ll bring some life into this island soon.” Bruun sailed off.
Dore tried to put Bruun’s enterprise out of her mind, making feeble arguments to Friedrich: “Until he comes, Floreana will still be ours. Let us enjoy it all the more, if our undisturbed possession is to be short”—words that sounded false as soon as she had spoken them.
Bruun soon returned with his partner. Dore had expected Arends to resemble Bruun—grizzled, middle-aged, cynical—but instead found a young man, not more than twenty-five, dark-haired and, she wrote, “of more than usual good looks.” He and Bruun moved into the Casa at Post Office Bay and transformed the site into a sort of factory, with a group of native Ecuadorians standing at long tables cleaning and slicing fish, dumping the heads and entrails back into the water, drawing shivers of sharks.
Bruun was so busy he rarely ventured to Friedo, but, as Dore had expected and feared, others began to arrive. Five young German men came separately but soon banded together, sleeping in the pirate caves. Every Sunday they visited Friedo seeking camaraderie and advice. A woman from Berlin brought her husband, hoping the tropical air would cure his lung disease. She appeared at Friedo wearing a silk gown and matching stockings, bejeweled rings blinking from every finger, indignant at the reception she’d received from the cave dwellers. Surely Dore and Friedrich wouldn’t mind if she and her husband moved into Friedo? She and her husband should be very happy in Dore and Friedrich’s “little paradise.” Could they also accommodate her three pet monkeys?
It took several hours to convince the woman that Friedo was not a hotel and she could not stay with them.
“It sounds discourteous to designate our visitors as intruders,” Dore wrote, “yet pleasant as they were as human beings, most of them, we did at times resent their coming. It might be said that had we wished to seriously, we could easily have refused to talk to anybody or entertain a single stranger in our Friedo seclusion. Sometimes, indeed, we were almost tempted to do this, but when we thought of the sheer physical effort it cost to clamber up the rough hillside to us, we felt that to turn our backs on these well-meaning callers would be too churlish. So we never did.”
Friedrich’s account of how they treated these visitors is strangely different: “They came expecting to be treated like invited guests, and the only way we can deal with them is to make it clear in the beginning that we want to be alone and consider them intruders. We refuse to have anything to do with them.”
The dichotomy of their recollections would become an enduring theme, evidence that they lived in parallel worlds instead of jointly, as a private, unified couple who answered only to themselves. As time passed, and they felt increasingly compelled to explain themselves to the outside world, neither of them ever acknowledged the discomforting truth: They escaped civilization only to become obsessed with how society might judge them.
For one reason or another, the intruders soon departed Floreana. The five young men deserted the pirate caves. Captain Bruun died in a drowning accident when his cruiser, the Norge, ran out of petrol on the way to Floreana with supplies. Stranded, he tried to make the journey back in Dore and Friedrich’s rowboat but was battered by rough swells and launched against jagged rocks. To Dore and Friedrich’s relief, Bruun’s partner, Arends, shut down the fishing enterprise and left the island.
The woman in the silk dress departed more quietly than she came, leaving her three monkeys behind. She confessed to Dore that she’d only brought the animals to test the safety of Floreana’s wild plants before her husband consumed them. How ridiculous, Dore thought, to bring your sick husband all the way to the island hoping for a cure only to leave shortly thereafter, worried that you might kill him with poison.