JANUARY 2, 2000
It’s an hour before dawn and the cove lies in blackness, shielded from the moon by a bank of low-lying clouds. The two tour boats are silent—still and dark. But on the Symbol there is movement, a single figure, Bico, choking the throttle to start the engine. Robert and Sebas stir in their sleeping bags out on the deck alongside the surfboards, regretting now that they chose to sleep under the stars rather than squeezed down below with the others. The night air is so cold they can see their own breaths.
As the inboard coughs to life, the boys do their duty, lifting the anchor while Petra brews coffee on the small galley stove. By the time streaks of pink pierce the sky to the east, the Symbol has left Santa Fé, slicing full sail through a gray, choppy sea, bearing southeast toward San Cristobal. The island is hardly in sight, a smudge on the horizon, but Jason is already worried that they may find no waves. The clouds, the breeze, the feel of the ocean—it just doesn’t look good, not to a surfer.
He peers off toward the sunrise, where the sky now glows tangerine. A flock of storm petrels sweeps past like a cloud of mosquitoes. But Jason hardly notices. He’s thinking about waves, and their fecklessness. With all the technology wrapping the planet today, with satellites downbeaming data on wind speeds and directions all over the world, with ocean buoys hundreds of miles at sea rigged to record passing swells, with surf-forecasting Web sites like “Bluetorch” and “Swell.com” broadcasting on-line reports from all over the globe, it would seem that wave hunting is no longer an art but a science.
But Jason knows better. No matter that the forecast looked good when they set sail yesterday. The surf gods are fickle; they’ll turn on a dime, and Jason is nervous about what lies ahead. This trip took some planning, and money to boot, and his parents weren’t happy with him leaving the store for four days. If the waves are as hoped for, it will all be worthwhile. If they’re breaking the way they so often do, at Corolla and Tonga, where the shaped thirteen-footers have become legend as word has crept out during the past couple of years, and the Galápagos have become the latest frontier among the “surferati,” the way Bali became just a decade ago, then everything will be fine.
The boys are excited, Sebas and Robert, chattering about the crew from Surfer magazine who came down not long ago, bringing cameras and writers and four world-class champions to see if the buzz about these islands is deserved. Joel Tudor, Brad Gerlach, Kahea Hart, Chris Malloy—Sebas pronounces the pro surfers’ names as if they are holy. He still can’t believe these guys actually stayed at the Hotel Galápagos for a couple of days before heading out to Seymour and Baltra and Las Palmas, where they found green, crystalline tubes that they surfed with the sea lions, the animals riding beside them as they shredded the waves for the cameras on shore. It was all that the big shots at Surfer had hoped for. The piece was published in the slick magazine, and the video was broadcast on cable TV in the States and Australia and all over the world, building the buzz even louder, which is a worry to those who’d like to keep this Galápagos surfing a secret. But right now, thank God, at least as far as Jason and his friends are concerned, these waters remain largely unpeopled, pure and pristine.
And, also, unfortunately, flat at the moment, as San Cristobal comes into clear sight.
To the left, about four miles north, looms the outline of León Dormido, or “Kicker Rock,” as it’s called in most tour guides. If there is one image of the Galápagos Islands recognized by the rest of the world—besides the iguanas and tortoises and Bartolomé Island’s breathtaking “Pinnacle Rock”—it’s this volcanic spire. A steep, sheer slab of stone, it juts five hundred feet from the surface of the sea, like the fin of a herculean shark. Eons of waves and wind have split the formation top to bottom, creating a channel—no more than a crack, really—barely fifty feet wide, through which a tour panga can pass when the ocean is calm. Tourists love to shout and delight in their voices echoing eerily off the vertical faces of the soaring stone walls that flank them. It’s called “Kicker Rock” because, to some, the split stone has the look of a boot. But to Galápagueños like Sebas, who points toward the formation and shouts out its name, it is León Dormido, “the Sleeping Lion.”
Sebas’ excitement is not shared by the others, who stare ahead toward the island, where the sea gently laps at the black lava coastline. There are typically waves here of ten to twelve feet; strong, muscular breaks that curl then explode off those rocks at Corolla. Or off to the right, at the spot called “Canon,” because of the old gun emplacement that sits on that point. The weapon has never been fired, but the Ecuadorian Navy, which maintains a small base here (for God knows what reason, laugh some of the townsfolk) insists that the rusted old cannon remain. So it does, and right now it is aimed at an ocean as smooth and flat as a mirror.
“Vamos, Corolla!” Andrew shouts at the motionless sea.
“We are looking,” says Robert, running a hand through the ringlets that cover his head, “at shit.”
As they enter the harbor—Bico carefully weaving his way through the razor-edged reefs—they see flags of all nations on the masts of the yachts and sailboats at anchor. Greek, Italian, French—the pennants hang limp in the still morning air. It is not yet nine A.M. and already the temperature is edging into the nineties. The sun, hardly higher than the brush-covered hills that slope down to this sleepy port village, is relentless, baking the air, the sea, and the ground.
The town is called Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, and, on paper, at least, it’s the hub of these islands, the provincial capital of the Galápagos, which sounds fairly important. But in reality the place is no more than a small, dusty village, home to perhaps five thousand people. The houses and small businesses that rim the brief waterfront are dreary and sad, painted in muted hues of sea green, blue, and beige. The palm trees that bend over the seawall and wharf are sun-beaten and brown. As Bico settles the Symbol in place to drop anchor, not a soul is in sight on the shore.
“It’s always like this,” Robert says as a dog’s bark breaks the silence from somewhere in the village. “This place is creepy.”
Darwin felt much the same way when he first set foot on San Cristobal on the morning of September 17, 1835. He was twenty-six years old. It had been four years since the HMS Beagle set sail from England for what was intended to be a two-year expedition to survey the South American coastline. The Beagle would not return home for yet another year after this.
San Cristobal was the first island Darwin explored during the five weeks he spent in the Galápagos. And he was less than impressed, as he wrote in his journal:
Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance. A broken field of black basaltic lava…is everywhere covered by a stunted, sunburnt brushwood, which shows little signs of life. The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noon-day sun, gave the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even the bushes smelt unpleasantly.
There were no people living on San Cristobal at that time, at least none who were mentioned in the diary Darwin kept during the six days he spent roaming this island. In fact, the only humans who had lived anywhere in the Galápagos up to that point had arrived here by accident or had been brought against their will.
The very discovery of the Galápagos was sheer happenstance. There is evidence that ancient Incans encountered the islands while riding rafts made of balsa in pre-Colombian times. Author and archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl concluded as much after studying pottery shards on the beaches of Santiago, Floreana, and Santa Cruz in the summer of 1953, on the heels of his fabled Kon-Tiki voyage.
The Incans were most likely first. But the man who is credited with “discovering” the Galápagos is a Spanish priest and Panama’s first bishop, a man named Tomás de Berlanga, whose ship was becalmed then swept away from the west coast of South America in the winter of 1535 by a current that carried it into an uncharted part of the Pacific, where it drifted for six days before encountering land. Actually, “land” is a generous term, considering de Berlanga’s own account of first seeing these islands. “It seems,” wrote the bishop in a letter addressed to his lord, the king of Spain, “as though some time God had showered stones.”
Before the end of that century, this shower of stones had a name, galápago (from the Spanish term for a cleated saddle, which the shells of the giant tortoises resembled), and it now had a place on navigational maps as well. Over the next two hundred years, those maps became a bit confusing as British buccaneers, prowling the South American coast for slow-sailing Spanish ships heavy with treasure, turned the Galápagos into a home base of sorts: a place to rest, heal their wounds, and stock their holds with live tortoises before setting sail for more plunder.
An odd sense of patriotism compelled these pirates to give British names to the islands. To this day, Floreana is also called “Charles” by some, San Cristobal is sometimes called “Chatham,” and Santa Cruz is occasionally called “Indefatigable” by those who are able to pronounce the word.
Although the buccaneers spent a good deal of time searching these islands for food and hiding from pursuers in hundreds of small coves and inlets, the only people who actually lived here were castaways, mutineers, and other miscreants whose punishment by their brethren was to be left alone on these godforsaken, freshwaterless shores.
Some legends have it that Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish sailor upon whom Daniel Defoe based Robinson Crusoe, spent his four years in exile on a Galápagos island. In truth, Selkirk was actually marooned far to the south, on an atoll off the coast of Chile. But he did visit the Galápagos soon after being rescued by a shipload of British buccaneers in 1709, who carried him with them on a raid of Guayaquil’s harbor. From there they retreated to the Galápagos, where Selkirk and his new shipmates regrouped, then moved on.
The Galápagos’ own Robinson Crusoe was an unfortunate Irishman named Patrick Watkins, who was set ashore almost a century after Selkirk, in 1807, on the island of Floreana, where some quarrelsome shipmates left him to die. Watkins refused to oblige, surviving on meager crops of potatoes and—of all things—pumpkins, which he traded to passing ships in exchange chiefly for liquor. During the War of 1812, when the U.S. warship Essex arrived in the islands with orders to wreak havoc upon the British whaling fleet sailing these waters, its captain, David Porter, was so intrigued by the stories he heard of this man/beast named Watkins that he set down a detailed description in the Essex’s log:
The appearance of this man, from the accounts I have received of him, was the most dreadful that can be imagined; ragged clothes, scarce sufficient to cover his nakedness, and covered with vermin; his red hair and beard matted, his skin much burnt from constant exposure to the sun, and so wild and savage in his manner and appearance that he struck everyone with horror. For several years this wretched being lived by himself on this desolate spot, without any apparent desire other than that of procuring rum in sufficient quantities to keep himself intoxicated, and, at such times, after an absence from his hut of several days, he would be found in a state of perfect insensibility, rolling among the rocks of the mountains.
This is what the Galápagos can do to a man. By the time Porter wrote these words, Watkins was four years gone from the islands. He hijacked a shore party of five sailors with their longboat and made his getaway to Guayaquil, where he arrived, noticeably alone, in the summer of 1809. Rumors persist today that Watkins’ meals during that journey to the mainland consisted of his hostages’ bodies.
That left those British whaling crews as the only humans who set foot on the islands during that time. And they—or more precisely, their ships—were what the Essex had come for.
The first whaling ships had arrived in the southeastern Pacific in the late 1700s, from Great Britain and New England. Sailors in this region had long known that large baleen whales—fins, sperms, and humpbacks—were abundant in these waters. The sailors were also familiar with a remarkably strong ocean current that swept up from Antarctica along the Peruvian coast before bending west at the equator—a swift, frigid stream of seawater that ran straight through the Galápagos. That current was eventually charted by a nineteenth-century oceanographer named Alexander von Humboldt. Scientists thereafter quickly made the connection between the Humboldt Current, which was cold enough to support rich swarms of plankton in the heat of the equator and the proliferation of plankton-devouring whales in this region. Some biologists, including Darwin, went on to make the further connection between that current and the odd sea and animal life found in and around the Galápagos, creatures that simply do not belong, such as the penguins that still roam the western islands of Fernandina and Isabela.
But those British and New England whalers had no interest in science or penguins. What lured them to this part of the Pacific was the oil to be found in those whales, which were hunted and harpooned with a fury. By the start of the War of 1812, dozens of American whaling boats roamed the eastern Pacific, with as many British and European vessels hunting alongside them. The crews of those ships, who were at sea for months, sometimes years, at a time with no refrigeration to preserve meat or produce, typically ate nothing but salt pork and biscuits. Once they learned of the tortoises that abounded on the Galápagos, many weighing as much as six hundred pounds—six hundred pounds of meat that would keep itself fresh inside an animal that could survive for a year without food or water in the hold of a ship—a slaughter began on the scale of that which would soon visit the American buffalo. By the end of the nineteenth century, entire populations of tortoises on several Galápagos islands were extinguished. When the whalers first arrived at the turn of the 1800s, several hundred thousand tortoises roamed the Galápagos. Today there remain perhaps 20,000.
In much the same way that the whaling crews preyed on the slow, witless tortoises, David Porter and the crew of the Essex had their way with the whalers. No sooner did Porter arrive in the Galápagos in April of 1813 than he headed straight for the island of Floreana’s “Post Office Bay,” so-called because of a crude mail system set up on its beach. It consisted of a box nailed to a pole, into which passing ships would deposit, as well as pick up and eventually deliver, letters addressed to all points on the globe.
Porter’s plan was quite simple: Raid the box, study the letters, deduce which whaling ships were in the area, and attack them. It was not an intricate strategy, but it was effective beyond Porter’s wildest hopes. Hoisting British colors, which allowed it to approach its targets without causing alarm, the Essex captured three British whalers within the first month without a shot being fired. In the four months that followed, nine more ships were as easily taken. So successful was Porter that he soon found himself as fabled back in the United States as John Paul Jones. He also soon found himself as the Essex’s only officer. The others had gone, each having been awarded the command of a British vessel the Essex had seized. Among those young officers was Porter’s adopted son, a twelve-year-old midshipman named David Farragut, who would later become the young United States Navy’s first admiral.
Porter eventually lost the Essex in a vicious battle with a British frigate off the coast of northern Chile in late 1814. He was returned to the United States as a “prisoner on parole,” which somewhat dampened the glory of his Galápagos exploits and which might explain why his suggestion that the United States annex the unclaimed Galápagos Islands—a suggestion he urgently made both to his naval superiors and to Congress—was met with utter disinterest.
That left the door open for Ecuador to annex the islands some eighteen years later. It was three years after that that Darwin arrived on board the Beagle. When he stepped ashore here at San Cristobal, he encountered what he described in his journal as a “Cyclopian scene” of slaglike lava and odd little finches “so tame and unsuspecting,” he wrote, “that they did not even understand what was meant by stones being thrown at them.”
There were no people on this island at the time Darwin arrived, and, from what Jason and Lobo and the others can see as they lower themselves into the Symbol’s dinghy to paddle ashore on this still Sunday morning, there is no one here now.
The empty pangas they pass, bobbing in the bay’s sparkling, green water, have coils of barbed wire or sharp, naillike spikes attached to their sides to keep out the sea lions, which infest this harbor like pests. The creatures have a habit of crawling up into unprotected dinghies and ransacking the contents, not to mention relieving themselves on the boats’ interiors.
Onshore, a young girl appears, sucking a bolo (frozen fruit juice in a clear plastic bag) as she strolls past the wharf. A teen in a soccer shirt pedals by on an old beat-up bicycle. Four young boys appear at the far end of the bay, diving into the shimmering water without making a splash. Petra smiles and remarks on their Huck Finn–like innocence. Bico responds with a smile of his own. “They’re probably diving for pepinos,” he says.
Climbing ashore, the group splits apart. Jason and the boys head off to sniff out the surf conditions while Bico hikes uptown to locate some relatives. Lobo, Petra, and Mariana find a tiny, two-table café on a narrow sidestreet and sit down to order a late breakfast of three cold cervezas and three bowls of ceviche. There is only one item on the café’s small chalkboard menu: ceviche. There is nothing, the trio agrees, like good, fresh ceviche—the raw octopus, shrimp, sea snails, and fish, all taken fresh from the ocean that morning, chopped up and sprinkled with fresh lime and vinegar. And there is no ceviche in the world, they insist, like that found in the Galápagos.
The seafood arrives, with a side basket of popcorn, for 8,000 sucres apiece—about forty cents each. Outside, the bright sun beats down on the sloped cobblestoned street. Across the way, a small, lightless shop displays sacks of rice, bottles of ketchup, and fresh mangoes and limes. The cracked, broken sidewalk is empty of tourists, empty of anyone. Block after block of half-finished buildings—concrete and cinderblock pillars and walls rising jaggedly like rows of bad teeth, corrugated asbestos roofing held up by long bamboo poles—lead to the north side of town, where a hard, red-clay road winds up a hill to an unlikely “visitor’s center” overlooking the bay.
The center was built with money raised by a group based in Spain. There are buildings all over these islands built with money donated by nations beyond Ecuador. This one is modern, octagonal. With cathedral ceilings and walls made of fresh cedar, with broad, plate-glass windows, clay-tiled floors, and Park Service maps mounted behind panes of clear glass, the place would fit well in Yellowstone or Yosemite, where crowds of tour groups would line up at the door.
But there are no crowds here, not at the moment. And not in the past several days, according to the register that sits by the front entrance. A short list of signatures was entered on New Year’s Eve: Janice Bonaparte from Milton, Massachusetts; The McGaughan Family from Washington, D.C.; the Nelsons from Manchester, Massachusetts. The first entry on January 1—the first official visitors of the new millennium to the island of San Cristobal—are Joan and Thomas Rice from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
By the time the ceviche is finished, Jason and the boys have returned from their mission. The surf, they’ve been told by a couple of Brazilians at a bar down the way, is not bad up past the airport, at a spot called La Lobería—“the Place of the Sea Lions.” And so they head in that direction, their boards under their arms, while Petra returns to the boat to join Bico for an afternoon nap, and Lobo and Mariana see about catching a truck for an afternoon drive into the highlands, where maybe they’ll go take a look at the ruins of El Progreso.
El Progreso. Lyrical labels like this have been laid upon dozens of ill-fated ventures launched all over these islands during the past century or so. Ranches, farms, communes, resorts, plantations, mines—the litany of doomed enterprises in the Galápagos is as sad as it is long. In some cases, it is savage as well. Forced labor, torture, and killings without conscience were as common here in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as they were at other so-called frontiers on the planet. There are phantoms all over these islands, ghostly wisps of past pain and unspeakable suffering curling into the air like the smoky remains of burned-away memories. Nowhere is that smoke any thicker than at the nightmare they called El Progreso.
Soon after the Galápagos were annexed in 1832, Ecuador dispatched a renowned military officer, a general named José Villamil, to govern the archipelago’s first colony, on the island of Floreana. The “colonists,” such as they were, consisted of two hundred or so political prisoners and prostitutes shipped out from the mainland. Their purpose was to ostensibly harvest a wild moss called orchilla, used to make dye. But in reality the place was no more than a penal colony. It was christened Asilo de la Paz (“Haven of Peace”) by the government, but within a matter of months it was better known as Reino Perro (“the Dog Kingdom”) because its governor could go nowhere without the protection of a large pack of hounds.
Within thirty years that colony was abandoned, a pathetic failure. Not long thereafter, in the late 1870s, a new one took shape on the neighboring island of San Cristobal, with orchilla again to be grown, and sugarcane, and coffee as well, on a much larger scale than the previous effort. This time there was no pretense that the setup was anything other than slavery. A businessman named Manuel Cobos was given free rein over boatloads of conscripted workers shipped from the continent, who sweated in his fields under satanic conditions. Floggings were routine, as were shootings by firing squads. When Cobos was in one of his fouler moods, he would order a marooning on one of the surrounding small islets, where an unlucky soul would be left on the rocks to cook in the sun until he or she died.
The place was called El Progreso, and it actually prospered through the turn of the century, until the prisoners, who by then numbered more than four hundred, finally revolted on a January morning in 1904. Cobos, clad only in his underpants as he sat in a rocking chair on the porch of his villa, was confronted by a small group of convicts who had surprised his sentries and seized their weapons. They shot Cobos twice—in the stomach and chest. Staggering, still alive, he retreated into his bedroom, where he was struck twice in the head with a machete, and finally fell dead. A month after that, a ragged sloop with no papers and flying no nation’s flag drifted into the port of Tumaco on the southwestern coast of Colombia. Eighty-five hollow-eyed men and women helped one another down the gangplank to shore, relating their horrific ordeal in bits and pieces. The story shocked all of Ecuador, as did the trial, where the cruelty of Cobos was revealed and all but two of the defendants were set free.
The remains of El Progreso are mentioned in most Galápagos guidebooks, which tell tourists to look for the ruins on their way up to a lake called El Junco, the only significant freshwater source in the entire archipelago. The lake sits atop the island, where over the eons a volcanic crater has turned into a rainfall-fed reservoir. That water was one reason Cobos chose this location to build his plantation, and it would seem a good reason—besides being the Galápagos’ provincial capital—that Puerto Baquerizo and not Puerto Ayora should be the hub of these islands today.
But it’s not. And the reason, the watershed moment, the single event that set the course for the future of San Cristobal—and for that matter, of the entire Galápagos—was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
As early as the mid-1930s, the U.S. Navy was nosing around the Galápagos, scouting the archipelago’s coves and inlets, surveying suitable sites for an air base, preparing for possible war in the Pacific. Franklin Roosevelt stopped by to visit in 1938. But by late 1941 no ground had been broken and no troops yet deployed.
That all changed with December 7. Four days after that, several squads of U.S. troops, dispatched from the Canal Zone, arrived on the islands. The decision now had to be made, and quickly, where to build that air base.
It would have made sense, at least at first glance, for the base to be built at San Cristobal. There was fresh water. This was where most of the Galápagos’ 800 or so residents lived at that time, centered around a fish-processing plant built at Wreck Bay in the late 1920s by a group of Norwegians.
But San Cristobal was simply in the wrong place. The base’s primary purpose was to serve as a spotting station, a warning post against a possible Japanese invasion of the Panama Canal. If that attack came, it would arrive, of course, from the west. San Cristobal lies east, as far east as one can get in the Galápagos.
So the Americans decided on Baltra, more centrally located and conveniently flat. Construction began there in February 1942. Within two months a mile-long landing strip had been blasted out of the lava. Around it stood more than 200 structures, including barracks enough to house the roughly 1,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors assigned duty there.
For the ensuing four years, Baltra, the little lunarlike island just above Santa Cruz, became the heart of the Galápagos. It was called “the Rock” by the GIs who were stationed there, and their duty was dead serious. Indeed, if the Japanese had prevailed at Midway a mere seven months after those first U.S. troops arrived here, the Galápagos would have been the next battleground.
But that didn’t happen. And so the soldiers and sailors who lived in this desolate compound of barracks and Quonset huts wound up with little to do but drink beer and shoot iguanas. So much beer was consumed by the GIs on Baltra that the Army sent down a team of investigators to see if their boys weren’t selling the brew to the locals. The investigators found that while the troops occasionally did trade tins of Spam for fresh fruit and vegetables from their island neighbors, the soldiers kept the beer to themselves. To this day, if a visitor steps to the edge of one of the hundreds of cracks and crevasses that split the stony, brown-and-black fields flanking the airstrip at Baltra, he can peer down and see the sunlight glinting off the remains of broken beer bottles, tossed off more than half a century ago by bored U.S. GIs.
Those fields are still studded today with the cement foundations of what was once a small city. Besides its barracks, hangars, and office buildings, the Baltra base had an outdoor beer garden, a chapel, a cinema (which the troops dubbed the “Rock-Si”), a bowling alley (added after Eleanor Roosevelt visited the base and bemoaned the horrid conditions), and a mess hall, where the soldiers ate fresh local vegetables and fruit, including, apparently, watermelons. Now, as then, it rarely rains on Baltra, but when it does, small green melons sprout as if by magic from the spots in the rocky soil where those sailors and soldiers once spat their seeds.
Wild goats roamed the islands even then, left by the buccaneers a century before, and Baltra’s communication system often went dead, the result of the goats chewing through the cables that snaked from one building to another. Despite a wealth of Army-issue fishing gear and free time to swim and sun, the men based on the Rock suffered from the same grim realities as the locals on surrounding islands. A dispatch cabled from a Time magazine editor covering the outpost’s closing in July of 1946 described a vista as bleak as any battlefield:
Dysentery laid many low. Dead were buried in graves blasted out of the volcanic rock. Loneliness also took its toll. Stories abound about the way men called the rocks by name and greeted goats as friends.
No sooner did the Americans move out, formally leaving the base’s stripped-down remains to the Ecuadorian government, than the Galápagueños on Santa Cruz began arriving by boat, peeling the precious wood from those buildings and carrying it back to build their own homes. There still stand rickety structures in the town of Puerto Ayora that were built with what the locals lovingly, laughingly, call “Baltra pine.”
The air base at Baltra sounded the death knell for San Cristobal, though the bell didn’t actually ring until thirteen years after the base was shut down. That’s when the Galápagos National Park came into being, in the summer of 1959, with outlines for a purposeful tourist industry, a plan that included taking that abandoned runway at Baltra and turning it into a modern airport—modern, at least, by Ecuadorian standards. When the airport eventually opened for regular, once-a-week flights in 1970 and a roadway was put through five years after that, running twenty-five miles from Baltra south over the mountains of Santa Cruz to the village of Puerto Ayora, the fate of San Cristobal was sealed.
One last pathetic attempt to “colonize” Cristobal was made in 1959 by a group of Americans from Washington State lured by a newspaper ad that read:
Wanted: Swiss Family Robinson. Is your family one of the 50 adventurous families with the spirit of America’s early pioneers needed to establish a model community on a beautiful Pacific island?
The ad was placed by the founder of a sketchy utopian organization called Filate Science Antrorse (“Together with Science We Move Forward”). More than one hundred men, women, and children answered the ad, with plans to occupy the old fish-processing plant left by the Norwegians from the 1920s. They envisioned a lobster fishery there, and a working farm as well, on the land that was once El Progreso.
They didn’t get far. Upon their arrival, they found the processing plant in ruins, virtually useless. Their feeble attempts at gardening were destroyed by wild pigs and burros. On the Ecuadorian mainland, where a national election was taking place, the Americans on San Cristobal became an issue. A Communist Party candidate warned in a campaign speech, “Ecuadorians awaken! The small band of Americans in the Galápagos is but a prelude to a major-scale invasion. Yankee imperialists are about to take our islands.” One Ecuadorian newspaper editorial was headlined: “Don’t Let the Same Thing Happen to the Galápagos That Happened to Texas.” By January of 1961, all but one of the American “colonists” had returned to the States.
A few tourists today still arrive in the Galápagos at San Cristobal, but not many, not compared with the jetloads that land twice a day at Baltra. While dozens of cruise ships crowd the harbor at Puerto Ayora, only a small handful are anchored at Wreck Bay. And the one flight that arrives each morning at San Cristobal’s airport, which was opened in 1987, is sometimes filled with no more than a couple of bureaucrats, come to take care of dreary government business.
A nicely paved, two-lane road runs from Wreck Bay up to that airport. The airport’s terminal, like the one at Baltra, looks like a large picnic shelter, an open-air pavilion, where ocean breezes blow past passengers and baggage waiting to be processed.
There is no one in sight on this morning. But there is a faint noise, the soft sound of music drifting out from behind a closed door beyond the closed snack bar. Move closer to that door and the music takes shape—Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”
There, in a small, wood-paneled office, a large, middle-aged man in a shirt with no tie, nice slacks, and shined shoes peers through spectacles at some documents stacked on his desk. An air conditioner hums in the room’s only window, above a small CD player, which, when Sinatra is finished, shuts off. A woman sits alone at a desk by the door, answering the telephone when it rings, which is hardly at all.
The man’s name, if you ask, is Abdon Guerrero, and this is his airport—or it may as well be. He’s the architect who designed it. When it was done, he became its manager, running the place for Saeta Airlines, whose planes are the ones that land here once a day. Compared with TAME, Ecuador’s only other air carrier, which is owned by the military and controls nearly all the nation’s flights—including those lucrative, two-a-day loops from the mainland to Baltra and back—Saeta is but a speck, a wink at the concept of competition. Every morning, Guerrero arrives at his desk half-expecting to hear that Saeta’s shut down and he’s out of a job.
Don’t get him wrong, he still has hope. This island might not be growing, he’ll be the first to admit, but it’s not dying either—at least not yet. He still believes, as he did when he moved here ten years ago with his wife and kids from their home in Guayaquil, that given the chance, San Cristobal could become something big, even if the tourism doesn’t work out. In the time that Guerrero has been here, he’s seen even the day tours dry up. The foreigners who land here are taken straight to their cruise ships anchored out in the bay. Those ships used to hang around for a day, maybe two, and their tourists would spend time in town, spending their money in the restaurants and bars and hiring taxis and drivers to take them up to the highlands. But in the last five or six years, those ships have gone straight out to circle the islands, taking the tourists and their money along with them. If they make a port call at all, it is over in Puerto Ayora.
But then, isn’t it like that everyplace? Guerrero sighs. The rich get richer, while the poor—well, just look around at the half-finished buildings, the hotels with no guests, the harbor with hardly a tour boat in sight. If it weren’t for the government and the navy base out on the point, there’d be no business at all here in Puerto Baquerizo, at least none you could count on.
What they really should do, if they had any sense at all, says Guerrero, is establish an institute here, a college of oceanography and biology and Galápagos culture, a real university with real professors and students, not a strange setup like the one they’ve got over on Santa Cruz, that Research Station, or whatever they call it. Guerrero doesn’t quite know how to say it, but the people who work over there, with their long hair and beards and their torn, dirty T-shirts, it’s like they’re…well…hippies, not scientists. What Guerrero would like to see, what would save San Cristobal and launch it headlong into the twenty-first century, he believes, would be an actual campus with buildings and classrooms to outshine that…that crude camp that they’ve got over there.
His wife says he’s a dreamer. So okay, he’s a dreamer. Is that, he asks, such a bad thing? The fact is, he feels lucky to live in this place, a place of such peace. But if, God forbid, he should ever lose this job, it would not be the end of the world. He’d go back to the mainland and find something else. It’s an option he knows most of his neighbors on this island don’t have, and he does not take this for granted. He’s lucky, he knows, to have lived the life that he has, to have taken his wife and his children to the United States, to see New York City. That photograph on his desk of the four of them standing in front of the World Trade Center, that trip was like a dream, says Guerrero. Like visiting another planet.
How, he asks, could anyone not love the United States? Frank Sinatra. “My Way.” Or how about that big band from the old days, from World War II, what was their name? Yes, the Glenn Miller Band, that’s the one. Now listen to this, he says, and he puts on a disk, and the strains of a clarinet pour like sweet syrup from his small CD player. When the Americans were here at that base over in Baltra, he says, closing his eyes and leaning back in his chair, this was the music they played.
It continues to play as the door closes shut, and the taste of the sea hangs in the hot air, and the afternoon breeze blows bits of paper and dust across the black tarmac runway, and the faint sound of the surf carries up past the cactus and lizards and rocks.
The surfing is pathetic. There’s no kinder way to put it. Eight people were here—four Venezuelans, three from Peru, one from New Zealand—when Jason, Robert, Andrew, and Sebas arrived late this morning at the clear turquoise cove that opens out to the breaks of La Lobería, just below the San Cristobal airport. Only the Venezuelans are still out there, bobbing like corks as they sit on their boards, peering toward the horizon and praying for something more than the soft, three-foot swells undulating beneath them.
The Peruvians are playing tag with a sea lion in the cove’s crystal shallows, while the New Zealander lies on the white, powdery beach, asleep on a towel with his girlfriend beside him. Jason tries staying upbeat, but he can’t hide his disgust. They could have stayed home and found better waves in Puerto Ayora, at Tortuga, or even up by the Research Station, at the break they call La Ratanera—“The Rathole”—where Jason first learned to surf.
After a couple of hours, they call it a day and unzip their wet suits, sling their packs on their shoulders, slide their boards under their arms, and trudge back up toward town. As they reach the top of the ridge, where the trail flattens out, Jason turns to take one last look down at the surf.
“Don’t,” says Andrew, as he grabs Jason’s arm and turns him around. “It always starts breaking when you stop and look back.”
The hike home is a long one, the sun beating down on the dusty clay path. The boys pass a quarry, layers of red earth and black rock formed over the ages, now laid open and stripped bare. There are no men or machinery in sight, just a raw gaping crater, a violation somehow of a landscape where there still exist plateaus and slopes and ravines on which man has never set foot.
By the time the group reaches the village, the sun’s almost down. Bico and Petra are uptown visiting friends. Mariana and Lobo sit by the harbor, on a bench near a tree strung with bright Christmas lights. Across the road, on a cracked concrete wall, the words “FELIZ MILLENNIUM” are scribbled in paint.
Lobo shakes his head, smiling, as his defeated friends approach. They don’t know what they will do tomorrow, they say. Maybe they’ll stay here and hope to get lucky. Or maybe they’ll leave, who knows. Right now they’re heading back to the Symbol to change into some clothes. They’ll spend the night on the boat later on, after they’ve killed a few hours checking out a few bars. They wouldn’t mind a nice bed in one of those little hotels just up the way, but they don’t have the cash. No big deal, Robert says, shrugging, dancing away toward the wharf, singing aloud: “If I were a rich man…”
Lobo and Mariana didn’t make that trip up to the highlands. They couldn’t find a ride. Still, it’s been a good day, just being here, together, alone. Mariana’s even smiling a little, watching the villagers emerge to stroll the streets as the night coolness falls. She’s in her late twenties, but she looks ten years younger, her shining, black hair cut short and straight like a boy’s, her slim, shapely figure clothed in a tank top, gym shorts, and a pair of white sneakers. She’s talking right now, in clipped broken English, about an American man she wishes she could meet. His name is Leo Buscaglia. She has read his books, about grief and loss and the paths back to joy. She wonders where this man lives. She wants so much to write him a letter.
Lobo just listens. He wishes there were more he could do, but what might that be? He’s not a psychologist, and if he were, can a man be a therapist to the woman he loves? Can he answer the questions she has about the things that he does—or can’t do—that are so much a part of the problems she feels?
Mariana knows Lobo loves her. She knows he’s a good man, doing the best he can. But there’s no question this thing—the death of her daughter—is taking its toll on everything in their lives, including their marriage. It doesn’t help that Lobo’s job takes him away for weeks at a time, on those boats with those tourists, while Mariana stays home with the walls closing in. When they get back tomorrow, or maybe the day after that, he will leave right away on a six-week tour aboard the Santa Cruz. It’s as if Lobo’s a soldier, always going to war while Mariana stays behind to deal with the grief and the guilt by herself.
It’s been two months since they buried the baby, and Mariana hasn’t once been to the cemetery, though it’s only a few blocks from her home. She’s emptied the room where her little girl slept, thrown away everything, as if the child never existed. Her parents said that would help, but it hasn’t. Nothing has helped. Her friends tell her to confront what has happened, then move on. But she’s afraid to do that. If she faced this thing fully, gave herself to her feelings, she’s afraid she’d fall into those feelings forever. Just keep falling and falling.
She loves Lobo, there’s no question about that. But she doesn’t know if she can take this anymore. She doesn’t know what she will do.
Lobo sits quietly, sipping a beer, the evening breeze at his back. Mariana asks for a tequila, which he brings her with lime and some salt.
“Caliente,” she says softly, wincing and smiling after downing the shot. It makes her feel, how you say…dicha? Happy?
“Borracho,” laughs Lobo. “Drunk.”
Mariana lights a cigarette, but Lobo demurs. He quit not long ago. When he was a kid, no older than six, living up in New York, he and his friends used to scour the sidewalks and gutters, hunting for half-finished smokes. When they found one, they’d cross themselves, like good Catholic boys, before lighting it up. “Blessing the butts,” Lobo laughs. That’s what they called it.
By midnight everyone is back on the Symbol, asleep as the sea lions glide past the hull. In the morning, the boys give the surf one more chance, at the spot they call Tonga, up by the naval base. But the waves just aren’t there, and by midafternoon they’ve set sail in the direction home. It will be dark when they get there, but that’s not a problem. The reefs and currents off Puerto Ayora are nothing like those at Wreck Bay.
By dusk they’re beyond Santa Fé. For dinner Petra boils some shrimp and pulpo (octopus) and serves it with rice. Then they each find a spot on the deck and gaze up at the stars as the outline of Santa Cruz takes shape ahead. Less than two hours later they are there, the harbor aglitter with the lights of the tour boats, the sounds of traffic and music and laughter drifting down from the length of Darwin Avenue. The tourists strolling past the night-shadowed wharf hardly give them a glance as the ragged crew unload their surfboards and gear, hug one another goodbye, and head home to their beds.