JANUARY 1, 2000
Almost noon, New Year’s morning, and they haven’t left yet. Not that it’s the end of the world, but Jason would have liked to have lifted anchor when planned, which was six hours ago. Now that it’s this late, there’s no way they’ll make San Cristobal by sunset, not with a seven-hour sail in front of them. And that means they won’t make San Cristobal at all, not today. No way would anyone in his right mind try entering that island’s harbor in darkness. First, there are the reefs: wicked black outcrops larger than the ships that they threaten, lurking a mere meter beneath the sea’s smooth surface. Then there are the currents, cyclones of seawater sweeping this way and that, churning with the force of submerged river rapids. It’s with good reason that the harbor at San Cristobal is known on the charts as Wreck Bay. Its murky bottom is strewn with two centuries of good reasons, their masts grown green with algae, their holds now home to fish.
If the group had left when they intended, more than half the journey would be behind them by now. But the Balfour brothers, Andrew and Robert, were still in bed when Jason called there at eight. And the Cruz kid, Sebastian—Jason just got off the CB with Sebas’ mother, Georgina, and she says he’s still packing. So now they will have no choice but to drop anchor this evening at the island of Santa Fé, about halfway to Cristobal, and spend the night there.
Not that Jason minds. Half the point of this trip, as far as he’s concerned, is just getting away from this town with all of its people, just surrounding themselves with the dolphins and seabirds and no sign of man. There are moments right here in Puerto Ayora when Jason feels like he’s back in the city of Quito, where Christy and José-Luis sent him to boarding school the year he turned twelve. There are nights, with the clubs and the discos that crowd Darwin Avenue, when Jason feels like he’s back in the States, up in Chattanooga, barhopping with his college pals.
Now those Tennessee boys could drink. Night after night they’d sit in their frat houses and pound bottles till they passed out or puked. Jason never cared much for that. Even the language they used—“smashed,” “trashed,” “wasted”—didn’t sound like much fun. But eating good food, that was fun. After growing up on this island with nothing to eat some days but beets and carrots and carrots and beets, to arrive in a place where there were dozens of restaurants and cafés to choose from, with hundreds of items on their menus—anything you could imagine—well, it was as if Jason had died and gone to heaven.
He eats well these days, in his harborfront house there on Pelican Bay, with its lofted living room and vaulted ceilings, its wine rack stocked with cabernets and merlots, the espresso machine beneath Jason’s rack of restaurant-grade skillets and pans, a flamenco guitar CD cued up on his state-of-the-art stereo system, and the bed—oh yes, the bed—facing out toward a drop-dead view of the sea.
And behind all of this, the garage, which Jason has set up as a gym, with a weight bench in the corner and an inversion bed for his bad back, and six surfboards mounted on the wall, in bright neon colors, three made by Klima himself—Roberto Klima, the top surfboard shaper in all South America.
Across from the boards, on a wall of their own, are tacked autographed photos of Miss Argentina (“A terrible shot,” Jason will tell you. “She looks so much better in person than that”) and Miss Brazil (“Geez, she has everything. Fascinating. Fun. I didn’t sleep for a week after I was with her”).
Ah yes, the women. They are like food, Jason says, so many flavors to choose from. He admits they’re his weakness. His ex-wife was the most gorgeous thing in the world, at least through his eyes. Six years they were married, and it still hurts when he speaks of her. He still calls her the love of his life, though that’s long past him now.
Now there is Monica, to whom Jason swears he’ll stay true this time around. No more straying. She’s taken him back more than once in the past, but she’s made clear in no uncertain terms that this is Jason’s last shot.
Jason loads two of his boards and a tightly stuffed pack in the back of a pickup and heads down toward the wharf. A samba beat drifts through the trees from some homes up the hill where parties are still going on. The remains of the bonfires have been swept in neat piles to the side of the boulevard—a half-burnt mask here, a charred sneaker there—but people are nowhere to be seen.
As Jason pulls up at the wharf, the water taxis sit tied to the dock, empty and bobbing in the bright morning sun, with pelicans perched on their bows. The only souls in sight are Jason’s pal Bico and Bico’s girlfriend Petra, loading supplies into a gray, rubber dinghy. It’s Bico’s sailboat, the Symbol, anchored out among the large tour ships, that the group will be taking to San Cristobal.
They’ve known each other almost all of their lives, Bico and Jason. Their fathers worked together building the road to the Research Station, back before either of the boys had been born. To this day the whole island knows that by all rights and logic, Bico Rosero should never have been born. Or his mother, at the very least, should never have survived.
There was no bona fide doctor on the island back then, not in 1964. The only man who came close was a villager named Moises Brito, and that was because Moises knew how to make do. He was a schoolteacher by trade, but his hobby, if you could call it that, was surgery. As a mechanic tinkers with carburetors or a fisherman feels for the depths and the tides and the shape of the shallows, Moises Brito just had a knack for healing hurt bodies. If you needed a tooth pulled, or a bone set, or a baby delivered, you sent word for Moises, and you hoped he was sober.
Which he was not on the night Bico was born. There was actually an intern on the island that month, a medical student sent out from the mainland to finish his training. The student was young, unseasoned, and nervous. By the time he arrived at the Roseros’ house, Bico’s mother was in great pain. She needed a C-section, which the student had never done. He tried, but he panicked, slicing the knife across the infant’s face as he cut into the womb. To this day, Bico wears that scar on the side of his cheek.
With the bleeding baby finally pulled out, the doctor hurried to finish. He sewed up Bico’s mother and all but ran from the house. Bico’s father, Abraham, sat by the side of his wife, who was still in great pain. As her pain grew even greater, Abraham realized something was wrong. So he rushed to find Brito.
But Brito was not home. He was up in the highlands, at a party in the small village of Bellavista. The only way there was by burro, and so Abraham went. It was a five-mile ride, and when he arrived, he found Brito stinking of puro. It was hard lashing a drunk on the back of a donkey, but Abraham did it, and by the time they arrived back at Abraham’s home, Brito’s eyes were open and his mind was half-clear.
That was enough to do what was needed. Brito had no surgical instruments, so someone found him a razor. When he reopened the belly of Bico’s mother, he saw that the intern, in all of his haste, had neglected to sew up her uterus. She was hemorrhaging badly, but still hanging on. Brito stitched the womb closed, and the bleeding subsided. He then restitched her belly, and Bico’s mother fell blessedly to sleep. Brito slept too, once Abraham helped him home to his own bed.
It’s been thirty-five years since that night. Moises died years ago from a bad liver. There is a street by the lagoon named after him, and the story of Bico’s birth is still told now and then by almost every person in town except Bico himself. Bico has never been much of a talker. As a boy, he would sit with his friends among the mangrove trees by the water; four or five of them waiting for hours for a tug on their fishing lines, hoping that one of the yard-long robalos swimming lazily by would go for their bait. Jason and the boys would go off to play soccer or go belly-boarding out at Tortuga, and Bico would be there among them, but he hardly would speak. Not that he had nothing to say; he was just not one to waste words.
And in the way that silence so often can do, it brought Bico Rosero a strange kind of respect. When he returned to the islands in the mid-1980s, after leaving for high school and college in Quito, it was to work as a guide. His timing was perfect. Ecotourism in the Galápagos was exploding, and a guide’s salary (plus tips, and tips are where the big money is made) put to shame what an electrician like Bico’s father was paid, or what any man earned at a traditional job on the islands. Competition for guide jobs had become fierce among the Galápagans.
Bico had no trouble getting hired because the tour operators knew he was one of those islanders to whom every inlet and cove, every insect and animal, was a familiar and deeply felt friend. The operators respected him, they wanted him, and they paid top dollar to get him. After less than a decade, Bico was at the high end of the Galápagos guides’ pay scale, earning more than five hundred dollars some weeks. By then he and his girlfriend, Petra, had saved enough to buy their own boat, and they had no doubt about the particular vessel they wanted.
The Symbol. A solid thirty-nine-footer, with a hull made of carvelplanked pine and a deck of sweet teak. Its hatches and portholes were trimmed with cedrela the color of cocoa, with a galley below and berths that slept seven—the perfect size for the kind of tour-sailing Bico had in mind when he bought it. He knew what those big boats were like, the 100-foot yachts and the huge, steel-hulled cruise ships with their squadrons of uniformed cooks, maids, and maintenance men, and their battalions of guides, herding the passengers ashore as if they were cattle. Bico wanted something smaller, more intimate. Six guests, no more, sailing the islands a week at a time, he or Petra at the wheel, the passengers eating meals that Bico and Petra cooked, sleeping in beds Petra made, going ashore to hike the same ocean cliffs Bico hiked as a boy—the Symbol was perfect for that.
As Bico and Petra toss the last of the supplies into the panga, Jason unloads his boards and his backpack, climbs in beside them, and the three race full throttle out to the sailboat.
The boys—Andrew, Robert, and Sebas—are all there with their own boards and gear by the time Bico’s dinghy pulls up. The Symbol looks stately, its white hull striped red at the waterline and the deck. The list of its previous owners reads like a who’s who of the islands. Among them is old Karl Angermeyer, who fled with his three brothers to the Galápagos in 1935 to escape Hitler’s Germany. After the Angermeyers came the Wittmers, whose name is entwined with stories of sex slaves and scandal and death on the island of Floreana. It was from Rolf Wittmer that Bico and Petra bought the Symbol in the autumn of 1995.
They had met—Bico and Petra—just eight months earlier, on the rim of Isabela Island’s Volcán Alcedo, where they were both leading tour groups. Bico’s guests happened to be German—one of three languages he speaks almost fluently—and Petra perked up at the sound of her native tongue. She herself was from Cologne, had an Ecuadorian ex-husband—“a lawyer,” she says, spitting the word out as if it were dirt—whom she left back in Quito when she came to the islands six years ago. She’s been here ever since, hooking up with Bico soon after that Alcedo trip. They’ve done it all together: the finances, the crewing, the guiding. In the most pervasive sense, brought together both by what they desire and what they can’t stomach, Bico and Petra are a Galápagos couple.
As they unload the dinghy, passing supplies and surfboards up to Andrew and Sebas, a man and a woman emerge from the boat’s cabin.
Jason smiles and shouts. “Hey, Lobo!”
The man turns, lets go the woman’s hand, and reaches down to help with the loading. “Jason,” he says, lifting two backpacks, “how you doing?”
Jason had heard Lobo and Mariana might be coming along, but he’s surprised to see that they’re actually here. It’s been only two months since the accident. The shock, for many, has still not worn away. People pass Mariana on the streets of the village and sometimes they cross to the other side. Or they just look away, as if they don’t see her, because they don’t know what to say. What can be said after such a terrible thing?
There are some who blame Mariana, and Lobo as well, for leaving the baby at all. Yes, it was just for a few days, while they went to the mainland for a short vacation. And yes, Mariana’s mother assured them not to worry, that her precious nieta, her little granddaughter, would be fine in her care. But couldn’t that vacation have waited? Or couldn’t they have brought the child along? After all, the little girl was two years old, certainly able to travel.
There are those on the island who say it was simply God’s will, punishment for some sin Mariana must have committed. That’s what the priest told Mariana when she went to see him after the death. It was God’s will, the priest said, that Mariana’s mother went to work that morning at the school where Mariana’s father, Carlos, is the principal, and took the baby along and left it alone for just a few minutes in that room with the old piano. Who could guess that the child would go to that instrument, move it in some small unseen way, and that the old awkward upright would fall over, the baby beneath it?
The baby was not Lobo’s; Mariana had been married before. But Lobo loved the little girl as his own because he loved Mariana so much. It tore at his soul as deeply as it did at hers to come home to the child in that coffin. But Lobo was the one who had to be strong because Mariana was falling apart. She could not take it, the guilt that the priest made her feel, the urgings from her mother to have another child, quickly, and her father berating her because she was acting so weak.
No, Jason did not expect to see the two of them here. But somehow Lobo had swung a few days off from his guiding. And Mariana agreed that this might be a good thing, to just get away. And so they have come, stowing their gear in a berth down below, next to Bico and Petra’s.
Now they are ready, the sun just past one, the harbor sparkling as it does almost every day at this time. Robert and Sebas hoist the anchor, lifting the slick, heavy chain hand over hand. Bico kneels over the boat’s stubborn engine, adjusting some screws until the motor sputters to life. Lobo and Mariana have gone back below. Petra is down in the galley, putting away groceries, and Jason and Andrew are setting the sails.
Before they have even reached Punta Nuñez, past which lies open sea, Bico has cut the engine to near-idle, and the sails are filled with a following breeze. The teens, Robert and Sebas, and twenty-year-old Andrew are sprawled on the foredeck, wearing nothing but swim trunks, the sun beating down on their darkly tanned skin, floppy hats shading their eyes as each lies back and opens a book. Jason is camped near the mast, the spray from the sea sprinkling his legs as he leafs through an old musty volume—A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry—from his mother’s home library.
The ocean, so translucently turquoise in the still of the harbor, is now deep, dark, and inky beneath them. White puffs of cumulus clouds billow on the bright blue edge of the distant horizon. To the port side, a sea lion surfaces with a fish in its mouth. Off the bow, hardly a foot above the ocean’s swells, skims a red-billed tropic bird, its tail feathers trailing behind like white ribbons of lace.
“Now that’s something you don’t see every day,” says Petra, watching the creature sail past. “ You’ll see them nesting on South Plaza and flying around there, but feeding out this far, you don’t see that too often.”
As Santa Cruz recedes to the stern, the craggy outline of Santa Fé takes shape ahead. In the most recent El Niño, only one year ago, the cliffs of Santa Fé, normally gray, brown, and barren, were awash with cascades of tumbling water. The entire island was nothing but sheets of white rapids, spilling down to the shore with a roar that could be heard by ships miles away. The ocean surrounding that island, normally crystalline blue, turned concentric circles of dark red and brown as the washed-away mud made its way out to sea. With a strong pair of binoculars, you could stand on the back patio of the Hotel Galápagos and peer toward the southern horizon at what looked like Niagara Falls.
It was this way on Isabela Island as well, where more than two dozen full-grown tortoises tumbled to their deaths down steep, flood-swept ravines and cliffs carved by the rain. But as bad as that was, those rains were nothing compared with El Niño of ’82. That’s the one etched in everyone’s memory, a deluge of biblical proportions. The water fell in sheets that entire spring and summer and fall—not a figure of speech, but literal sheets, sheer curtains of water. And when it subsided, after nine months of downpours, the flora burst forth with a lushness like never before.
“The palo santos,” says Petra, watching a bottle-nosed dolphin surface to the starboard side before sliding back into the sea. “You could smell them wherever you went, even out here, out at sea. They were everywhere. Everything was green, bright, bright green.”
Which was not a good thing, not in a place with such an anciently delicate balance of moisture and sunlight and the myriad forces that foster the rhythm of life on an island. The epic deluge and the subsequent drought, La Niña, drove the birds and the animals mad with confusion. Reports abounded during that climactic year of Galápagos finches gorging and overbreeding among vegetation run rampant and insects run amok. The birds reproduced manically, then stopped altogether the next mating season. Fire ants flourished, swarming and devouring young tortoise hatchlings in obscene numbers. Wild pigs and goats, protected from hunters by the mud and dense undergrowth, multiplied at a frightening rate.
Meanwhile, at sea, the rise of just one or two degrees in the temperature of the ocean was enough to wreak havoc. The carcasses of marine iguanas, starved by the sudden absence of the precious green algae on the sea-bottom rocks where they normally feed, littered the beaches and warm shoreline pools. The warmth of the water was astounding—disgusting, say those who compared it to swimming in urine.
The fragile coral that grow in the shallows were bleached by the warmth of those El Niño seas to a point where they could not recover. The mud carried down from the highlands and into the surf so clouded the shallows that the fish could not breathe. Driven to clearer and much cooler depths by the rising sea temperatures and tumbling mud, the fish left the sea lions with nothing to eat, and so the sea lion mothers left their babies to die on the sand. The sounds of those pups bleating for food could be heard by the tour boats passing at night.
Of course, it’s all part of nature, the cycle of life and death. That’s something Petra and all the guides make a point of showing their tour groups. Carcasses, casualties, the bones and flesh of dead boobies and seals are not tidied up in the Galápagos. They are left as they lie, a part of the landscape. This is the nature of things, the guides all point out. This is no Disneyland here, they say with tight smiles. It is not antiseptic. It is not manufactured. This is a place to ponder the awe of existence, the wonder of the creatures all over this planet, including ourselves, that have so far survived, and the lessons we can learn from the ones that have not.
Santa Fé is now near, its barren slopes glowing orange in the late afternoon sun. A heavy surf pounds at the jagged shoreline, spraying the guano-stained cliffs with geysers of seawater. At the top of those beige, sun-baked ridges, studded with opuntia cacti, the ground levels off, flat as a tabletop, like a New Mexican mesa. Up there live the last of a primitive species, the dull land iguanas, chewing on cactus pads, dragging their thick, yard-long bodies over the sun-hardened earth. “Like their brothers the sea-kind,” wrote young Charles Darwin in his seagoing journal, “they are ugly animals, of a yellowish-orange beneath, and of a brownish-red colour above: from their low facial angle they have a singularly stupid appearance.”
The shadows have lengthened as Jason and Robert haul down the sails and Bico restarts the motor and the Symbol glides into a small, half-moon cove. Two boats rest at anchor in the emerald water, one a small private ketch and the other a small cruise ship, its crew busy on deck as a panga approaches. Two rows of tourists—elderly, white, each wearing a bright orange life jacket—sit and face one another in the motorized dinghy as their guide stands at the stern, noting a booby diving nearby for anchovies. The group has been on the beach, a small spit of sand where a large, angry sea lion is now barking and bellowing, protecting his brood as all bull lions do. Sebas barks back, mocking the animal as he lowers the anchor.
The sky is pitch-black now, speckled with stars. The lights of the cruise ship dance on the water as faint music floats from its lounge. Petra uncorks a bottle of wine as the Symbol’s dinner is served—Bico’s signature chicken and rice. The group huddles around a small makeshift table—a hatch door laid over the steps to the galley. The wine is sipped from a hodgepodge of cups, and the chicken is eaten with fingers.
When dinner is done and the dishes are washed, Jason settles back down at his spot by the mast, looking up at the stars as he opens his book. Robert and Sebas nestle alongside him, inside sleeping bags zipped up to keep off the chill. Andrew has gone down below, as have Bico and Petra and Mariana and Lobo.
The boat gently sways as the surf washes the shore. Jason’s soft voice drifts out over the cove as he reads from a page:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
And the sea lions sleep on the sand.