JANUARY 10, 2000
The airport at Baltra is on heightened alert. The soldiers on duty, who typically man their positions by napping in the shade of the baggage claim area or laughing over beers at the open-air snack bar, are in full combat readiness. UZIs are slung over their shoulders and grim looks are fixed on their faces as the first flight of the day taxis up to the terminal.
It’s the tenth of January, and already the confidence proclaimed by President Mahuad when the new year began is crumbling to pieces. The sucre is still free-falling, tumbling ten percent daily, down to 29,000 per dollar just yesterday. Inflation is up, close to seventy percent. Since Mahuad assumed office seventeen months ago, ten banks have shut down, wiping out the life savings of thousands of depositors.
The protests in Quito have grown frightening, with thousands of Indios streaming into the city during the past several weeks to join the students burning fires in the roads to block traffic, the bus drivers and teachers and farmers on strike, and the oil workers threatening shutdowns of the nation’s most profitable industry. Demonstrations have erupted in Guayaquil, too, and in the city of Cuenca as well, to the south. The protesters are demanding nothing less than Mahuad’s resignation and the dissolution of the nation’s Congress and Supreme Court.
It is those Indios, more than anyone else, who trouble Mahuad. They have long been mistreated: exploited for cheap labor, ignored as second-class citizens, robbed of their ancestral land in the mountains and jungles where most of them live. As late as the 1960s, advertisements in newspapers were still printed that offered rural haciendas for sale with Indians included, as if they were cattle or horses. Just last year, when Ecuador’s per capita annual average income was tabulated at a woefully slight $1,600, the same figure for Indians came to $250.
Much of the land that once belonged to these Indios, deep in the rain forests of east Ecuador’s Amazon basin—the river-laced jungle watershed Ecuadorians call the Oriente—has now become a denuded grid of oil-fouled roads and industrial pump stations operated by the state-run corporation PetroEcuador. The wells are drilled by major companies from all over the world such as Texaco, which first found oil under the Oriente in 1967.
It took Texaco five years to build a 300-mile pipeline up over the Andes and out to the Pacific coast. In 1972 the tap was turned on, the oil began flowing, and the industry—the petroleros, as the Indians call them—moved in with a vengeance. ARCO, Conoco, Mobil, Occidental Petroleum—they all began slashing and dynamiting thousands of acres of forests and soil, fouling rivers and fields with tens of thousands of gallons of spilled or dumped oil, bulldozing crude roads through Indian territory, driving the natives and wildlife from their forests and homes as billions of gallons of crude petroleum were pumped into the pipeline and out to the coast. The onslaught continues today.
For two decades the Indians—the Cofans, the Quechua, the Siona, the Secoya…more than a dozen tribes, more than 150,000 indigenous Amazonian peoples—suffered and stayed silent in the face of this assault. But by the mid-1990s, the seeds of political awareness planted among the Indios by outside activists and Western church volunteers started to sprout. The natives began to rise up in numbers that could not be ignored. Those numbers have swelled exponentially in the past several years as the Indians have organized and begun to press for their rights. With a fierce sense of identity, dressed in ponchos, feathers, and beads, carrying spears even on the downtown streets of Quito, speaking their own ancient languages rather than modern Spanish, the activist Indios have aroused their city-bound brethren, the dirt-poor Indians and mestizos who have been driven from the jungle and now crowd the streets of Quito’s “old town,” begging tourists for coins or hoisting huge sacks of vegetables and fruit on their backs, hoping to sell them at market.
It’s for good reason that the Indians frighten Mahuad the most. Full-blooded Indios make up nearly half of Ecuador’s thirteen million people. That figure is closer to ninety percent if the mixed-blood mestizos are included. Most of these natives have nothing to gain from the existing government and nothing to lose if they fight it. The language their leaders speak is that of revolution, of a sweeping restructuring of the nation’s political power—power that has traditionally rested in the hands of a small number of wealthy aristocrats, most descended from white European stock.
It is a well-known fact that more than half of Ecuador’s wealth is controlled by the tiny sliver of the nation’s population who are white. The Indians want this to change. They do not hesitate to use the term “revolution,” and indeed, voices have emerged among them which, like those of past Latin revolutionaries—Fidel Castro, Ché Guevara—have the passion and charisma to capture the people.
“We are beyond angry,” said one Indian leader just last week. “And the shamans say change is coming. They say we are entering the Age of the Condor. They say that the Red Warrior has returned.”
Mahuad’s response to such warnings has been to forge ahead with the notion of dollarization—dumping the sucre and adopting the United States dollar. But that can’t be done without a loan from the International Monetary Fund—about $250 million—and the IMF won’t give Mahuad a cent until he convinces them that the money won’t disappear down the same bottomless hole as the sucre. The only way to do this is to stop spending, to cut government services, and to ask all Ecuadorians to tighten their belts; quite a request when so many of those people are already starving.
It doesn’t look good for Mahuad. His approval rating is a pathetic nine percent. The past week has seen a cascade of events which, while meant to indicate calm and control, reveal panic more than anything else. Rumors of a coup have grown so strong that Mahuad responded, meeting two days ago for seven hours with his military leaders, who emerged from the room with a pledge of allegiance. The generals even took out a full-page ad in the nation’s largest newspaper, El Comercio, vowing their support of the president—a signal to the more cynical that the end must be near.
Just yesterday, Mahuad delivered a twenty-minute speech on national television, declaring that the shift to the dollar will proceed. That decision did not go over well with his cabinet, all fifteen members of which promptly resigned. Mahuad’s response was to warn the nation’s banking executives—those whose banks haven’t already shut down—that he will convene a special session of congress and fire the lot of them if they don’t go along with his plans. A national state of emergency has been declared—the third time troops have been dispatched to the streets since Mahuad assumed office—and that’s why the UZIs are out here at Baltra.
The tourists stepping off of this late-morning flight don’t seem worried. Their cameras are busy snapping photos of the moonlike landscape around them as they cross the hot tarmac and step into the terminal. There they line up to each pay a Galápagos National Park “entrance fee” of $100, cash only. No wrinkled or torn bills are accepted. Ecuadorians have a phobia about foreign currency. They will take only bills that are crisp and unmarked.
Once the money is paid, the tourists pick up their bags and are ushered toward a bus by smartly uniformed cruise boat guides. The bus is sleek, air-conditioned, with soft, cushioned seats. It will carry them down to their tour boats, which are parked like floating taxis in an inlet nearby. For the next week or two, those boats will be home for the tourists as they roam the islands. They may make a port call, at Puerto Ayora or Baquerizo or even Floreana. Or they may not. Some tour operators don’t take their passengers near the inhabited parts of the islands. There are tourists who have visited the Galápagos and left with no idea anyone actually lives here.
The people who do live here are boarding a bus of their own in the terminal lot. It’s dented, rusted, with hard narrow seats, and the windows are shoved open for the blessed relief of an occasional breeze. This is the bus the locals all take, along with anyone else bound overland for Puerto Ayora. Mainland businessmen and government officials, relatives and friends from the continent, the mochileros—backpackers traveling solo or in pairs, with their bandannas and guitars—are the riders crowding onto this bus.
It’s standing room only by the time the driver climbs aboard. A huddle of Park employees are squeezed in the back, laughing, chatting in Spanish. A couple are swigging cold bottles of beer. After several tries, the diesel engine rattles to life and the bus lurches forward, toward a ribbon of asphalt stretching into the distance, up mist-shrouded slopes and over a mountain, to Puerto Ayora, twenty-five miles south.
After only ten minutes, the bus reaches a canal, the southern border of Baltra. A small ferry bobs in the sparkling water. The passengers unload, grab their bags, heave them atop the roof of the ferry, then climb aboard. In the time it takes a young woman at the rear of the vessel to smoke a single cigarette, the ferry reaches the far side. The travelers squeeze into yet another bus and soon are headed uphill into the highlands of Santa Cruz.
The temperature rapidly drops as the road angles skyward. The stark saltbush shrubs and red-barked opuntia cactus that cover the shoreline give way to stands of thin, skeletal trees, their silvery trunks glistening like chrome in the bright midday sun. A rider asks one of the Park rangers if he knows of these trees.
“Palo santo,” says the ranger, pointing his beer at the forest.
Palo santo. “Holy stick.” The trees are a hallmark of the Galápagos. The lower slopes of the larger islands are thick with them. Their branches, rich with a perfumed sap, are prized for their aroma. The twigs are lit as incense in churches here and on the mainland. They’re also burned on the patios of homes to keep the mosquitoes away.
Salsa music crackles from the driver’s tinny radio as the bus climbs higher and the forest grows thicker. Soon the road is surrounded by high-canopied scalesia trees, massive cousins of the sunflower, their ample trunks fuzzy with moss and lichen. Dew-dappled ferns carpet the moist forest floor. The woods grow deeper and darker. Garúa clouds gather above. A light drizzle begins to fall. The ocean below fades from sight as the bus moves into the mist.
The bus climbs still higher, and now the forest thins out and the landscape turns tundralike, a lonely expanse of wet, undulant fields, sedge-covered cinder cones and soft, spongy bogs. Dark, moist, menacing, the vista looks and feels like a Scottish moor. Only the occasional palm is a reminder that this is the tropics.
Now the bus reaches the top, slowing as it passes a gaping volcanic sinkhole. The crater’s diameter is the length of a football field. A crude fence has been built at its rim to keep people and animals from tumbling in.
Here the road bends downhill, out of the clouds. A horse stands alone in a small grove of balsa trees, worn stirrups dangling from its riderless saddle. The bus passes a hut, the first to be seen since the airport at Baltra. It is fashioned from cinder blocks, rimmed by a fence made of twisted tree branches. A little girl plays in the mud by the gate.
The sky is now clear, the sun shimmering. A road sign appears.
PELIGRO—CRUCE DE TORTUGAS: “Danger—Tortoise Crossing.”
Now the ocean comes into view, a crescent of blue on the horizon below. A pickup approaches, roaring uphill, three Galápagan boys perched on the roof of the cab, their bare legs splayed on the truck’s broken windshield. The kids hoot and wave as they shoot past the bus.
More traffic passes: a rusted sedan, a dump truck, a motorcycle. The homes grow more numerous, clusters of cabins and sheds and small gardens. One of those sheds, fashioned from bent sheets of tin, is painted with words whose letters drip toward the ground: SE VENDE ESTA FINCA, “Farm for Sale.”
The road winds past dirt drives leading off into other farms, the remains of the land the Norwegians first cleared, the Hornemanns and Graffers and old Alf Kasteldan. That land now belongs mostly to cattle ranchers, people like Christy and José-Luis.
There’s a weed-ravaged soccer field off to the right, then a clutch of bodegas. And now the bus enters Bella Vista, a small hamlet in the hills above Puerto Ayora. If not for the tortoises lumbering through those trees by the road, and the frigate birds floating over the shoreline below, Bellavista could be any dusty crossroad in rural Mexico. The people who live here try to farm if they can, but most of them work down in Puerto Ayora, if they work at all.
The bus stops here briefly, pulling up to a curb by a small, unlit grocery. A half dozen people climb out, trudging off toward their homes as the bus pulls away.
From here it’s a straight shot to the sea. The bus picks up speed, hurtling downhill past unmarked dirt drives that wind into the brush. One of those drives leads to Mary’s place, the Quatro y Media.
Finally, after an hour-long journey, the bus pulls into Puerto Ayora.
The driver parks at the wharf and cuts off the engine. The passengers step out into the glare of the sun and the noise of the traffic. Some walk off toward their homes, others to their jobs. A few—the travelers—grab their bags and head toward the closest café to sit down and take stock in the shade with a drink.
That bus ride, from here to the airport and back, is a trip every local knows well. Most take it at least one or two times a year to visit family or friends on the mainland, take care of business in Guayaquil, do much-needed shopping in Quito, see a doctor or dentist, or simply to get off the islands. Jack Nelson will be taking that bus sometime next month to begin the long journey to pick up his father in Thailand. Gayle Davis will be on it next week, when she flies up to Quito for her eye operation. Even the poorest of the villagers here in Puerto Ayora are able to occasionally fly to the continent, with round-trip tickets that cost just $30 for colonos—Galápagos residents—a tenth of what tourists pay for the same flight.
It’s those tourists that Lobo will be greeting tomorrow when he begins a three-month stint of guiding. Tonight is his last night at home, and it’s his mother-in-law’s birthday as well, Mariana’s mother, Blanca. They’re throwing a party at the house Lobo shares with Mariana and Blanca and Blanca’s husband, Carlos. Mariana is visiting a friend and won’t be here tonight. So Lobo is spending this last evening in town without her.
It’s pitch-dark as he picks his way through the sharp stones and volcanic cinders that line the narrow path that leads from the road to the back of the house. Most of the homes deep in the village have yards just like this—cinders and rocks. Most are about the same size: small, simple bungalows with two or three bedrooms, walls made of cinder block, and, if the owners are wealthy, roofs made of ceramic tile.
There is music ahead, around the corner, and the golden glow of a porch light. As Lobo steps out from the darkness, two small girls, his nieces, run to give him a hug. A dozen or so adults are arrayed in a circle of chairs on the back cement patio, with a hammock above them, strung near the ceiling to make room below.
There is Mariana’s brother, Mario, and Mario’s girlfriend Delilah, who was once Miss Galápagos. Mariana’s sister, Sandra, sits beside her boyfriend, Fidel, who just got off work from his job as port captain. Fidel is thirty, the same age as Sandra. They both look like young professionals, he in his pressed slacks and starched polo shirt, she in her tropical dress with her blond, highlighted hair. They’ve been together about half a year now, ever since Sandra broke up with her former boyfriend, the mayor. She was the woman the mayor pulled out of the disco that night and beat.
It’s Blanca’s fifty-third birthday. A table is loaded with platters of empanadas and barbecued carne. There are cold Coca-Colas and bottles of beer, and a dish of fried nuggets that only the brave seem to be eating. “Bolitas de advenedar,” says Blanca when asked what they are.
“Guess-what balls,” explains Lobo in English as the group bursts into laughter.
The man in the chair beside Lobo’s does not laugh. He is older, lean, with jet-black hair and a severe, narrow beard running the length of his chin. The beard, with no moustache, makes him look Amish. The man is Mariana’s father, Carlos Dominguez, the principal of one of Puerto Ayora’s four high schools. He’s not happy with what he’s hearing from a woman in a chair across from him. The woman’s name is Lijia Parédes. She works for INGALA, a government agency created in 1980 to oversee services here on the islands. Until six years ago, INGALA ran everything in the Galápagos—schools, roads, medical services, utilities. But then the government changed, and power was shifted, sliced up like a pie, with pieces going to sectors that were all given a say in where the money would be spent. Tourism, fisheries, farming, the Park Service, merchants, the military, even the mayor—they were each given a voice and a vote in a new governing group called the Provincial Council. The result has been, as the head of INGALA, a man named Michael Bliemsreider, frankly puts it, “a bureaucratic monster”—a free-for-all of conflict and competing self-interests, with each group blocking the others over almost every decision, all of them fighting for their piece of that pie.
The pie is not small. More money flows through the Galápagos than through any province in Ecuador. Last year, tourists spent more than $120 million here on the islands, from boats to hotels to restaurants to shops to the Park Service entrance fee. With sixty thousand people visiting the islands last year, the entrance fees alone generated more than $4 million (only foreigners pay $100; Ecuadorian visitors pay less), which has raised questions as to why sections of the road down from Baltra remained unpaved until late last year.
The reason is simply that too many hands are laid on that cash as it supposedly makes its way to the people. Most of that $120 million goes straight to the mainland, to the companies who own most of the tour boats. As for the $4 million in Park entrance fees, it’s doled out in percentages to seven different agencies, ranging from the Park Service itself, which gets forty percent, to the naval base, which gets five. The port captain, Fidel, receives five percent to pay his staff of marines. The Provincial Council gets ten, which its members haggle over and divvy up. The municipal government, including the mayor, gets twenty, from which community services such as health care, schooling, and sanitation wind up with crumbs. That, say a large number of townspeople, is a transparent sin. The mayor, for example, is paving the streets while the majority of homes, lacking an adequate sewage system, spill their waste into decrepit septic tanks that leak onto the cinders and stones in the yards.
It’s the road paving that’s got Carlos Dominguez upset at the moment. Miss Parédes is describing the good work being done by INGALA, the new construction all over town, the trucks lined up at the wharf, all those sacks of cement. Carlos can no longer stay silent.
“What about the schools?” he says, still looking out at the night. “Why does education get so little?”
Education is a woeful issue throughout all of Ecuador, with archaic teaching methods (rote recitation and memorization) used in outdated, overcrowded classrooms. In Puerto Ayora, it’s even worse. More than a fourth of the town’s population are children, from kindergartners through high school students. The schools are lacking in space and in quality teachers, who are paid far less than what even the legitimate fishermen earn down on the docks.
“Why do we get nothing?” asks Carlos, whose teachers’ salaries, as low as they are, are nearly twice what teachers are paid on the mainland. That fact only points out, says Carlos, how pathetic the entire nation’s educational system is.
Someone mentions the mayor. Carlos flicks his cigarette’s ash in disgust.
“He has cobblestones for brains,” he says. Fidel cracks a smile. Sandra takes a sip from her drink.
Carlos did not want to come to these islands when his father first sent him as a young man from Cuenca in the late 1960s. But he grew to love the Galápagos, he says. He has since taught linguistics and philosophy at universities on the mainland. He has read Hesse, Kafka, and Steinbeck—“in Spanish, of course.” He has written a poem, “A Hymn to the Galápagos,” which he says the critics in Quito reviled.
It has never been easy teaching school here on the islands, Carlos says. But at least there were rewards in the past—rewards that are rarer today. There were students of his who grew up to be parents who sent their own children into Carlos’ classrooms. There were those who went on to school on the mainland, to universities and professions and success for which they sometimes sent back notes of thanks. But now, he says, the schools, like the town, are awash with strange faces, floods of children of migrants who come and go in a blur. The sense of connection, much less of completion, is eroding away.
“There is no longer any Galápagos,” says Carlos. “I don’t think I want to stay.”
Blanca stands in the doorway, a dish of food in her hands. The children have been put to bed. The porch is still, a soft breeze from the sea riffling the leaves of the trees overhead.
“Well,” says Lobo, breaking the silence. “Can you give me your house then?”
Everyone laughs and the party resumes. A new music tape is put on. More beers are brought out. The tinkle of wind chimes drifts up from the darkness, from the porch of a neighbor. It’s late, well past midnight, time for Lobo to get some sleep. He’s leaving at sunup to go meet his tour group. Mariana’s not home yet, but he can’t wait any longer. He stands, bids his family and friends good night, closes the door to the back room beyond them, and turns out the light.
By eight the next morning, Lobo is gone. A team of road workers is out not a block from Carlos and Blanca’s back porch. The men carry shovels and picks. One wields a jackhammer, digging the dirt and breaking the rock so the stones can be laid to pave the street. His face is coated with layers of dust, as are the faces of the workers digging beside him.
They stop for a moment as a man pedals past on a bicycle, a slim, bespectacled white man. The workers nod and wave, and the white man nods and waves back. Clearly they know him, and he knows them as well. He doesn’t look like a tourist, but he doesn’t look like the standard Galápagos gringo either. The scientists and deep-rooted locals like Jack Nelson, Christy, and Roz all dress like laid-back islanders, in shorts and T-shirts and sandals and shifts. But this man wears pressed slacks, a button-up shirt, laced shoes, and socks. Least likely of all, he’s got a bicycle helmet strapped on his head. No one in Puerto Ayora wears helmets.
The man makes a turn toward the waterfront, where he maneuvers into the morning traffic swelling on Darwin Avenue—the taxis and work trucks, the tour groups trudging up toward the Station, the local pedestrians with their sacks and their satchels. At a bend in the road, not far from the boats docked at Pelican Bay, the man turns up a side street, a narrow, tree-shaded lane that climbs back into the village. He passes a closet-sized hairdresser’s salon where the proprietor sits in the shop’s only chair, reading a magazine and drinking a soda while a soft breeze blows in through her screenless front window.
The pavement stops here, and the road turns to dust and sharp stones, through which the bicyclist weaves before pulling up to a small wooden gate. Around him are houses, askew, as if thrown down on this slope like a fistful of dice. The houses are small, close together, their rocky yards littered with refuse and weeds.
The man takes off his helmet, opens the gate, and steps onto the concrete veranda of the largest structure by far in this part of the village, the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The portico that leads into the church itself is off to the left, but the small screen door against which the man is now leaning is the door to his home. He removes his shoes before stepping inside.
The man’s name is Daniel Fitter. His wife, standing at the small kitchen counter just inside the door and squeezing fresh orange juice for their midmorning snack, is Tina. Her brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail. She wears shorts and a blouse, and her tanned feet are bare. A pot of chili con carne is simmering on the four-burner stove. The scent of grilled beef and seasoned tomatoes fills the tiny apartment. There are only two rooms: this narrow kitchen and sitting area, with its rough wooden table and sofa and chair, and off to the left, the bedroom, where Daniel goes to put on some music.
The floor is cement, painted green. The high, whitewashed walls are hung with brightly colored photos of seabirds and reef fish and finches and whales, photographs taken by Daniel. There are black-and-white snapshots as well. One shows a man, a woman, and two boys on the deck of a sailboat on a harsh wintry day. The younger of the boys, a blond-headed toddler, is Daniel.
“That was 1969,” Daniel says, walking out from the bedroom. He’s changed from his slacks into shorts and a neatly tucked T-shirt. His face is clean-shaven, his hair closely cut. His feet are now bare. The Byrds are on the stereo, filling the apartment with the chorus of “Turn! Turn! Turn!”
“It took us eight months to get here,” says Daniel, studying the photo. Eight months to sail from England (where Daniel’s father had purchased the boat in the snapshot) back to the Galápagos, where Daniel had been born nearly two years earlier in the summer of ’67. People around town say he was the first baby delivered in the hospital in the village, but Daniel demurs. “I think I was third,” he says, reaching past Tina to have a taste of the chili.
Sounds of sawing and hammering drift in from the bare, rocky lot next door, where a house is being constructed. Daniel and Tina will move into it when it’s finished come summer.
“Our first actual home,” Tina says. “With actual windows,” she adds, looking up toward the ceiling, where, like a jail cell’s, this apartment’s small windows are set.
It will be nice, they agree, when that lot’s no longer vacant. More than once, Daniel and Tina have been awakened in the middle of the night by strange sounds and voices just outside their door.
“Don’t ask me why,” he says, “but people come to have sex there. We’ve gone out in the morning and found bras, knickers, condom wrappers, even mattresses. I’ve seen taxis parked for an hour out there.” He looks through the screen door as a young boy walks past the front gate.
“We should have laid down some mattresses ourselves,” he says, “and charged by the hour.”
Tina laughs aloud, shaking her head. Like Daniel, she wears eyeglasses. Like his, her accent is British. Like him, she’s upbeat, forthright, vivacious, as any Jehovah’s Witness would need to be in a place such as this. It’s not easy, Daniel says, knocking on doors and spreading the Gospel here in the Galápagos, especially with all the competition that’s been cropping up lately.
“The Catholics are very upset,” he says, smiling and taking a seat at the table. “It’s all marketing when you boil it down, and their ‘customers’ are leaving. And they’re not just coming to us. They’re going to the Seventh Day Adventists. They’re going to the Mormons. They’re going to the Pentecostals.”
He picks up one of a dozen or so seashells arranged on the table.
“We’ve got faith healers now, people speaking in tongues, whatever you’d like.” He turns the shell in his hand till it catches the light coming in through the window.
“I think there are at least ten different denominations on this island alone, and that’s not counting the odd Hindu, Buddhist, or Jew.
“Then,” he adds, with that same subtle smile, “there are the evolutionists.
“And then…” A pause. “There are the surfers.”
The shelves in the bedroom are lined with back issues of Watch Tower magazine, which Daniel and Tina and their fellow congregationists distribute all over the island twice every month. The magazine, Daniel is proud to explain, is translated into 128 languages, with more than 22 million copies of each issue shipped to Witnesses all over the world. Six hundred of those copies, printed in Spanish, arrive every two weeks at Daniel and Tina’s door, delivered by truck from the airport at Baltra.
Daniel is one of this church’s two “elders”—he and a fisherman named Hugo Ruiz. But he’s quick to point out that this is an administrative title, not a hierarchical one. The Witnesses don’t believe in hierarchy. And the door-to-door visits Daniel and Tina make throughout the village at least seventy hours each month—“There isn’t a door here that we haven’t knocked on at least once, if not fifty times,” says Tina—are not, Daniel adamantly insists, missionary work. He cringes at the word “missionary.”
“To me, that term has a tone of zealotry,” he says, “and we’re not zealots. We’re not fanatics. We’re reasonable people who are simply trying to apply the principles of the Bible to our lives. We enjoy our lives.”
An occasional beer cut with Sprite, for example. That’s one of Daniel’s small pleasures. Daniel enjoys the CDs back in the bedroom as well—Tracy Chapman, UB40, the Jayhawks—although there is some music he listens to that strains even Tina’s comprehension, such as the collection of “Kingdom Melodies” produced by the Witnesses as an eight-CD set, one of which Daniel has just put on in place of the Byrds. An orchestral swell strong enough to rattle the walls of a tabernacle consumes the apartment.
“I recall listening to two of my parents’ records over and over again as a child,” Daniel says, ducking into the bedroom to cut down the volume. “Peter, Paul, and Mary and the Soviet Army Chorus and Band. Those, and the sea chanties my grandmother would play on her accordion.”
Daniel Fitter’s roots in these islands run deep, and they begin with his maternal grandmother, Emma Angermeyer. A first lady of the Galápagos, Emma was the wife of Hans Angermeyer, who sailed here in the mid-1930s with his three brothers to escape the horrors taking shape in their native Germany. Emma is still alive today, though just barely. She’s eighty-six, living in England with Daniel’s aunt, Johanna. Word came not long ago that Emma’s got cancer, a tumor in the stomach. Tina’s been on the phone all week trying to book a flight back to Heathrow for herself and Daniel sometime next month.
Daniel’s father, and his father’s father as well, just left the Galápagos last week to fly back to England after spending Christmas and New Year’s with Daniel and Tina. Daniel’s grandfather, R. S. R. (Richard Stanley Richmond) Fitter, has written more than fifty books on British wildlife, and at age eighty-seven he might not be done yet. Daniel’s father, Julian, following his own naturalist path, first came to the Galápagos in 1964 as a crewman on the Beagle II, a regal, three-masted brigantine brought from Great Britain to serve as the Darwin Station’s first research vessel.
In a memoir titled My Father’s Island, sold in the village’s souvenir shops and up at the Station when they can keep it in stock, Daniel’s aunt, Johanna Angermeyer, describes the wonder of watching the Beagle II sweep into Academy Bay on a spring morning in ’64. She recalls her girlish enchantment at beholding a blond, bearded, “bushychested” Englishman singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as he swabbed the boat’s deck. That young sailor was Julian Fitter. The young woman he would soon make his wife was Johanna’s older sister, Mary, daughter of Emma and Hans.
Emma Angermeyer’s route to the Galápagos is a book of its own. Born in czarist Russia in 1913, her parents brought her as an infant to America, where she grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. At the height of the Depression she met a dashing young pilot from Ecuador who was passing through town on a military training tour. Emma married the flier, Marco Antonio Aguirre, in 1936 and moved with him to Quito, where he was an officer in the Ecuadorian Air Force.
Less than two years after that, on a foggy, rain-driven morning, Marco Aguirre flew a light training plane into the side of an Andean mountain, leaving Emma a widow. She was still there in Quito two winters later working as a schoolteacher when she crossed paths with a young German sailor who was visiting the mainland from his home in the Galápagos. Emma had no idea anyone lived on those islands.
The sailor’s name was Hans Angermeyer, and not long thereafter, in the summer of 1940, Emma found herself married again. Hans took her home with him to the islands, but the stay didn’t last long. In late 1941, with Emma seven months pregnant, the couple came back to the mainland to buy a new sailboat. Their timing was terrible. They hadn’t been there a week when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, America entered the war, and Hans, being German, was forbidden to return to the Galápagos, where an American air base was now being built.
Two months later, in February of 1942, Mary was born in a Guayaquil hospital. Not long after that, all Americans living in Ecuador were ordered by the U.S. Embassy to return to the States. That May, Emma and Mary, despite Emma’s attempts to resist, were flown back to Nebraska without Hans. For the next three years, until the end of the war, the husband and wife exchanged letters between hemispheres.
In the fall of 1946, Emma finally flew down to Quito with the intent of bringing Hans home with her to America. It was too expensive and difficult a journey to take Mary along, so she left the baby with family in Lincoln. After a grueling five-day trip on a freighter from Guayaquil, Mary arrived in Puerto Ayora that December. During the voyage, she learned that Hans’ parents, along with the one Angermeyer brother who had stayed behind when the others sailed away, had been killed in the bombing of Hamburg. It was heartbreaking news for Hans and his brothers. Even more devastating was Emma’s discovery when she arrived on the islands that Hans was sick with tuberculosis and would not be allowed to come home with her.
Emma stayed with Hans for nearly a year before going back to the States, where she set out to convince immigration officials to allow her ailing husband to join her and their baby girl in Nebraska. There would soon be another baby for Hans to see—Emma was pregnant again, with the child who would become Johanna.
The following February, in 1948, with Hans still on the islands, Johanna was born in a hospital in Lincoln. Nine months after that, with Emma still fighting to find someone to take up her cause, Hans passed away in a clinic in Quito. He is buried today somewhere in that city, but no one knows where; his remains were lost years ago in a bureaucratic shuffle involving unpaid rent on a cemetery plot.
This is the epic tale Daniel was told as he grew up in the Galápagos. He heard it from Mary and he heard it from Emma, who returned to the islands in the early 1960s with her accordion and her daughters and a piano—the first piano the Galápagos had ever seen.
Even then, the place hadn’t changed much from the rugged paradise the Angermeyer brothers had known in the ’30s and ’40s. It certainly hadn’t changed over there, beyond the barranco, on “the Other Side,” where Hans’ brothers still lived. It was a world away over there, not just from the world that had moved into the post-nuclear age of Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, but from even the new Research Station being built just across the harbor and from the rustic little hotel run by the American, Forrest Nelson.
The lives that these families on the other side led—the Angermeyers, the De Roys, the Divines, and, once they were married, young Mary and Julian Fitter—were the stuff of a tropical Eden. Rough but romantic. Days intertwined with the tides and the sun and the breezes and birds. Nights overhung by the moon and the stars and those high, looming hills. It was a place where crazy Gus Angermeyer—“The Tractor,” they called him, because of his enormous brute strength—quoted Nietzsche and Kant as he carried on deep conversations with the iguanas that crawled through his cave-like cottage overlooking the sea. It was a place where the men would hunt goats with hand-sharpened spears, the women lathered their hair with guacamole shampoo made from crushed avocadoes that fell from the trees, and where Emma pulled out the accordion whenever a party took shape, sending the dancers whirling across her home’s smooth, cement floor as the moonlight poured in through the oceanfront window.
This was the world in which Daniel was raised. While Julian took tourists for trips on his sailboat, Mary kept house and took care of Daniel. He was the quintessential island boy, his hair bleached almost white by the sun, his skin a deep bronze, and his bare feet like leather as he stalked the lava shoreline from morning to night, exploring the tidal pools where the octupi hid, the mangrove-draped inlets where the pelicans nested, and the small sandy coves where the sea lions slept.
His teachers were the kids he grew up with, and the grown-ups as well: his uncles and cousins and neighbors like the De Roys. There was Andre de Roy, the father, who had come here from bomb-ravaged Belgium in 1955; Andre’s son, Gil, who was like a big brother to Daniel; and Gil’s sister, Tui, who years later would capture the glory of the Galápagos with her camera as no one had done before, in photographs that are still published around the world.
By the time Daniel was six, he was rowing his little dinghy each morning across the harbor, a distance of a fourth of a mile, to join the children in town in the public school classroom. But that lasted only a couple of years. One afternoon when Daniel was eight, Christy’s son, Jason, who was a year behind Daniel, brought home his assignment, a sentence he’d been told by his teacher to copy fifty times in his notebook. The sentence read, “The sun is the largest planet.” That was all it took for Christy and Mary to pull their boys out of school and begin teaching them at home, which they did for the next four years. Each weekday morning, Jason rowed over to the Fitters’ place or Daniel rowed to the Gallardos’. If someone was sick or they just couldn’t make it that day, they hoisted a red flag outside their house.
Every two or three years Daniel and his parents would fly back to England to visit Julian’s family. The year Daniel turned twelve, they moved there to stay. Galápagos tourism, which had begun so quaintly in the late 1960s with most of the rooted locals enthusiastically running small tour-sailing operations, sharing their islands with pride and with pleasure—the Angermeyers selling berths on their sleek, black-hulled Nixe, the Nelsons doing the same with their Orca and Vagabond, and Julian Fitter making junkets on his gaft-rigged Baltic trader, the Sulidae—these seat-of-the-pants tour operations had by 1980 ballooned into a mass industry. When the flotillas of engine-powered cruise boats owned by mainland corporations began to move in, Julian decided it was time to move out. He didn’t leave the Galápagos behind entirely. Far from it. To this day, he’s the moving force, the founder and director of the British-based Galápagos Conservation Trust, an organization devoted to identifying and addressing the needs of the islands. As for Mary, she saw, just like Christy, that she had reached the limit with homeschooling her son. The boys needed a proper education. Christy sent Jason to Quito for his. Mary and Julian decided Daniel would get his in England, which he did, but not in the ways they intended.
“It was complete culture shock,” Daniel says, sinking into the room’s only soft chair. Besides the British obsession with grades, of which Daniel had no conception, and homework, which his grandmother Emma, who had taught school herself, abhorred—“School is for schoolwork,” Emma always told Daniel, “and home is to do what you’d like”—Daniel now found himself in a world defined by values he had never known on the islands, such things as status and winning and wealth.
“I felt like an alien from the very first day,” he remembers. “I’ll never forget the teacher going around the room asking each of us to tell her our birthday. I didn’t know my birthday. Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays. I had to go home and find my date of birth on my passport.”
Daniel’s religious faith—Mary had been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness and raised Daniel that way—faded as Daniel grew into adolescence in the Sex Pistols London of the mid-1980s. By the time he turned seventeen (finished with school but with no sense of a future beyond a yen for photography), his sense of himself as a Witness was nearly gone. He felt rootless, restless, hollow. And so, when a message arrived from Fiddi Angermeyer inviting Daniel to come back to the islands and work with him, Daniel leaped at the offer. Fiddi’s father, Fritz, was one of those four fabled brothers, and Fiddi now carried on his uncles’ tradition, running the most respected sail-touring operation in the islands.
So Daniel left England and his mother as well, who was dying of cancer. He wanted to stay, but Mary insisted he leave. “She said go, get out of here. Deep down, subconsciously, I think I understood that she didn’t want me to see her die.”
Two months after Daniel arrived back in the Galápagos in October of 1986, Mary Fitter passed away. Her funeral was held in England, in Dorset, but her ashes were then taken to the islands, where they are buried today in a small, tree-shaded cemetery up by the entrance to the Research Station, just across the road from the Hotel Galápagos.
And so, at eighteen, Daniel had reached a crossroads, a crisis, with the loss of his mother, the loss of his faith, and a sense of identity that was torn and confused. After a year on the islands as a certified guide, he went back to England to sort it all out. He rediscovered his faith, then crossed paths with Tina at a Kingdom Hall meeting. They married in 1993, with a firm stipulation from Tina that Daniel never take her to live in the Galápagos.
“I’d read My Father’s Island,” she says, “and it wasn’t pretty to me.”
So they took a stab at being modern British suburbanites. Daniel got a job in a photo shop. Tina worked as a nanny. They bought a car. Then a friend showed up at a Witnesses meeting, just back from his new home in Africa, and the friend told Daniel he was a fool to be joining this rat race in England when he had such deep roots in a place as rare and real as the Galápagos.
It took some convincing to persuade Tina to give it a go, but she finally relented and took a trip down to the islands with Daniel to see for herself what this place might be like. The bus ride itself, from the airport to town, was almost enough to send her home right away.
“I was shocked, utterly shocked,” she says. “When you’re a tourist, you don’t see any of what you see on that bus ride. You don’t see any of what this place, this island, this town, is really about.”
Tina stops for a second and waves her hand toward the kitchen window, through which the clustered slum homes of their neighbors can be seen. “You don’t see any of this!”
The squalor that has spread through the paradise Daniel grew up in is a strong part of what made Tina decide to agree to make the move, which they did in December of 1995. Their work as Witnesses is paramount for Tina. As for Daniel, he’s fashioned a balance between his faith and his passion, between spreading the word of the Bible and feeding his soul with the natural wonders that flowed through his blood as a boy. When he’s not Witnessing, he works as one of the islands’ most respected naturalist guides. His camera is always with him. He’s got a book due out soon, a photographic guide to the wildlife of the Galápagos, with pictures by Daniel and text by his father.
The guiding, Daniel will be the first to admit, is as close to his heart as his religion. But unlike his faith, which now never wavers, this profession of tour-guiding here on the islands has changed in ways Daniel dislikes, in the same kinds of ways that drove his father away.
“Guiding can be a dangerous thing, in terms of keeping a healthy sense of one’s self,” Daniel says. “It can really turn you into an egotist. You’ve got a controlled audience of people for a week or two who think you’re absolutely wonderful and who do anything you ask them to do. The pay is good, it can be very good. And there are lots of pretty girls, which I would say is the main reason probably sixty percent of the guides out there right now are doing this.”
Tina’s setting the table. The chili is almost ready.
“In the past,” Daniel continues, “most of the guides were truly keen naturalists. I mean, you could have paid them a buck a day and they would have done it. There are still some of those left, but now it’s much more for the money and for the, shall we say, fringe benefits.”
The two faces of Daniel—Jehovah’s Witness and naturalist guide—raise an obvious question, one he’s faced all his adult life. How, people ask, can a person so deeply steeped in fundamentalist biblical faith reconcile his religious beliefs with the tenets of biologic science, specifically the science of evolution?
“People ask me all the time, ‘How can you be a guide and believe in Creationism as well?’ I tell them, yes, I—we—believe that there is a Creator. He is the answer to the question of why, not how. The how, the mechanics of life, is left to the scientists, as it should be. At the end of the day, Adam was the first scientist, the first Park warden.”
He again picks up one of the shells. “I believe strongly in biologic evolution—the adaptation of species, survival of the fittest and such. But I do not believe in organic evolution, which is the evolution of life from nonliving matter.”
This synthesis of Creationism and evolution has found a small foothold in scientific circles in recent years, as well as a name: “intelligent design theory.” The process of natural selection, say its proponents, while valid and useful in studying and understanding plants, animals, and humans, does not answer all our questions about life on Earth, including the most elemental one: Where did it begin? That question, say intelligent designists, is answered only by acknowledging the existence of an intelligent designer, a Creator, a God.
Daniel leaps from his chair and grabs a book from a shelf on the wall. Hard-covered, with well-fingered pages, its title is Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, written by an American, a Lehigh University professor named Michael Behe.
“This man is my second God,” Daniel says, holding the book up with both hands, as if making an offering. “My first God is the God of the Bible, Jehovah. My second God is Michael Behe because he sums up so perfectly the principle of biochemical evolution.”
Lunch is now ready. Daniel puts the book back and moves to the table. One of the workers on the house comes to the door and asks in Spanish if he might have a glass of water. Tina answers in Spanish as well, as she hands him the drink. The man downs it in three gulps, thanks her, and returns to work.
“He used to be a drunkard,” Tina says, washing the glass. “He’d beat up his wife. They were in a really bad state when we began teaching with them.”
Now the man is a member of their congregation, as are almost all the crew working on that house. In the five years since they began Witnessing here together, Daniel and Tina have watched their congregation swell to nearly two hundred. But there’s still much work to do. They can simply look out their door at enough challenges to keep them busy for a lifetime. Such as the bus driver and his family who live just across the road.
“They shout and scream at one another all day,” says Tina, “with the TV going full blast.”
“We’ve got a pretty good sense,” says Daniel, “of the dynamics of that particular family. They’ve got a pretty primitive form of communication.”
And then there’s the “dope den,” as Daniel calls it, just up the lane.
“Sometimes it’s awful, sometimes it’s not that bad,” he says. “It depends on who’s renting it at the moment. The people who just moved out, they kept it a pothole. Constant music, and dope wafting out the windows. We knocked on that door several times.”
They’ll be out knocking on other doors later this afternoon. Then there will be more calls to make to firm up their flight plans to England to see Emma.
But right now it’s time for lunch, which means prayer.
And silence.
And the sounds of the sawing next door.