JANUARY 6, 2000
It’s been a bad morning for Roz Cameron. Never mind the two-man film team from England who dropped in first thing, looking for permits to visit Española, where they want to shoot footage of some relocated saddlebacks. Or the Korean TV crew that “just popped up,” as Roz puts it, last week and has been camped at her door ever since, hoping to get out to the westernmost islands. Or “some blokes from Canada” who have also appeared without notice, and she’s not even certain what they want. Then there’s that frigging e-mail complaint that arrived sometime last night from someone in Germany who’s upset about not getting credit in that IMAX film.
None of this niggling nonsense is what’s bothering Roz. It’s all part of her job. As the Darwin Station’s director of public relations, her role every day is to act as a traffic cop at an insanely congested intersection of scientists, tourists, and reporters. Besides steering and shepherding the hordes of writers, photographers, and film crews who ceaselessly descend on the Galápagos from around the globe, Cameron must also keep track of the work of the researchers—the students, professors, and field scientists who shuttle in and out of their stints at this Station like foot soldiers in Vietnam.
At any one time, there are roughly two hundred Research Station personnel at this compound or out among the islands. More than two thirds are staff and volunteers; the rest come and go through grants, fellowships, and salaries paid by universities and research labs all over the world. Wherever they come from, for whatever reason, before they head out to the hinterlands of the archipelago, every one of these men and women must first check in at the Station. If the Galápagos Islands are a field scientist’s Vietnam, then the Charles Darwin Research Station is its Da Nang. And Roz Cameron is the one with the clipboard, waiting on the tarmac to deal with the press and the public and anyone else who wants to know what these scientists are doing.
But that’s not what’s driven her out to the porch of her barrack-like office this morning for her third—or is it her fourth?—cigarette of the day. It’s that shitstorm on the continent: the rioting in Quito, the tear gas, the arrests. Not that Roz gives a rap about politics per se. She couldn’t care less about Jamil Mahuad or anyone else in that presidential palace. Don’t get her wrong, Mahuad seems like a good enough fellow, better than any other leader Ecuador’s had since Roz got here. And God, she says, taking a deep drag on her Marlboro, there have been so many “leaders.” Four in one day, wasn’t it? Yes, she nods, that’s right. Four presidents in one bleeding day, back when Bucaram was tossed out.
She stubs out her butt on the porch railing and surveys the vista around her—the dry brush and cactus in every direction, the ocean spread below like a bright-blue carpet, and the road, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the entire Galápagos, a narrow mile-or-so stretch of dirt and gravel winding from the east edge of town (where the cobblestones of Darwin Avenue end), past Roz’s office near the ocean, to that dusty encampment of cinderblock lodges, classrooms, and office buildings just down the way, ground zero for the world’s students of natural selection.
It’s not just the scientists themselves, pedaling back and forth on their beat-up bicycles from here into town, who make that dirt road so busy. There are the Park Service trucks as well, grinding their gears as they come and go from their own headquarters back up in brush to the west. Eliecer Cruz and his people have got 150 or so staff and wardens up there, plus 250-some guides who are constantly checking in at that Park Service compound of buildings and garages.
Then there are the tour groups, on port call from their boats, trudging past one another in packs of a dozen or so, each led by a guide who, once they arrive here at the Station, invariably steers the flock directly to Lonesome George’s pen, where the tourists set up their cameras and tripods while the guide tells them about efforts to coax George to reproduce. For years now, the scientists here at the Station have been trying to find George a mate, but so far the seventy-some-year-old “bachelor,” as the tour guides describe him, has not been responsive. At this point in the lecture, someone invariably makes a crack about Viagra, and the guide laughs politely. How many times has he heard that joke? He points out that George still has quite a few years left to become a father. This species, the guide explains, can live to 170 or even older, the longest lifespan of any creature on Earth. And George should be able to procreate until the day that he dies.
The reporters all want to know about George, just like the tourists. And Roz doesn’t mind fielding their questions, the same questions, over and over. She loves this job. She believes in this place, the Station, and its purpose. As for the islands themselves, she’s lost none of the awe that compelled her to sink her roots here eight years ago. That’s something Roz wants to make perfectly clear before she even begins to discuss the downside of what’s been happening lately, both in her own life and to the life of these islands.
“Look,” she says, sweeping her blond bangs out of her eyes. “I adore this place. The power of it. The enormity of that visceral feeling you get sitting alone out on one of those beaches or up in the highlands with the tortoises. Connecting with a place on a plane that has nothing to do with being a human, feeling that vivid sense of just being, that’s the essence of these islands, at least for me.”
She pauses to answer a call on the two-way radio she keeps clipped to the pocket of her shorts. Her hair is pulled back in a tight, no-nonsense braid. Her tanned face is freckled. Her Station-issued sportshirt and shorts are a dark navy blue. “Ruddy” is a word that would aptly describe her. But don’t make the mistake of asking if that accent of hers might be British.
“Australian,” she snaps, with a mixture of disdain and delight.
She pulls out another cigarette and apologizes. She doesn’t mean to be brusque, but this is a bad time right now, the worst she’s been through since she first came to the islands. And she’s been through a lot. There was, of course, her former husband, who couldn’t shirk what Roz calls his “Latin ways”—his drinking, his visits to Quatro y Media, his trysts with other women—and so she finally threw him out of her life. But he still comes around almost every day to visit their son, Mason, who’s now nearly seven. The locals look at Roz like she’s some sort of freak, this gringa who has actually dug in and stayed, rather than fled like the rest of the foreign women who have their fling with an island man, find themselves pregnant, then go back where they came from once the relationship fails. And who could blame them? Why in the world would anyone want to stay here in such circumstances?
But Roz has stayed. She even bought her own piece of land, back up in the village, where she had planned to build a nice cozy cottage for Mason and herself. But that was before the economy went down the sewer. The estimate she got from the builder just two months ago to begin construction has now doubled. That’s how crazy it’s gotten, and what’s worse is Roz couldn’t cash in her chips even if she wanted. Her life savings are stuck in an Ecuadorian bank, which has frozen all assets and denied access to depositors. She doesn’t even have the sucres to pay for her bleeding divorce, which is a moot point at the moment because there’s no judge on the island to finalize it. There’s been no judge for almost a year now, ever since Avellan was tossed off. But then that doesn’t surprise Roz either. The Ecuadorian bureaucracy on the mainland has more pressing concerns at the moment than replacing a provincial judge in the Galápagos—concerns such as saving its own skin.
Roz would laugh if it all didn’t hurt quite so much. Still, she’s not about to bail out. For all that’s gone wrong here, there’s no place on the planet she’d rather be. She felt it the first time she set foot on these islands, late in 1991. She’d arrived out of sheer curiosity, just a side trip while traveling across South America. She was thirty-two at the time, restless and searching, though she was not sure for what.
Her whole life had been like that, from the time she turned nineteen and took off with a girlfriend from her home in southern Australia. Just the two of them, with all that they owned jammed in Roz’s light green sedan—“a Datsun, belonged to my mum”—headed east across something called the Nullarbor Plain. It was a wasteland; a dry, treeless extension of the Great Victoria Desert. Roz and her buddy drove four days straight through, hardly a human in sight, nothing to get them across but a bucket of cookies crammed between the front seats, and Santana and the Sex Pistols screaming out of the stereo.
That was the beginning, says Roz. By the time she turned thirty, she’d been all over the Australian continent, from the small mining town of Karratha on the northwestern coast—where she worked as a barmaid, then spent three years driving salt trucks—to the village of Kempsey on the coast north of Sydney. There, she built her own house, busted her bum at a small local hospital, grew her own food, and, toward the end, learned how to surf. She took side trips to Nepal and Egypt and such, but it was not till she came to the Galápagos, on no more than a whim, that she realized she’d finally found what she was searching for. Which, even today, is a hard thing for Roz to put into words.
“I can only describe it as the culmination of twenty years of inner exploring,” she says. “Something touched me here. It wasn’t a person. It wasn’t a thing. It was just this energy. Something resonant and real. Something raw, crude, and timeless.
“It wasn’t what’s here that did it,” she says, looking out at the road and the Station and the town to the west. “It was out there, in those places where you can be all by yourself, in the highlands, on those islands.”
What struck Roz as strongly as the sense of this place, she says, were the people she found here, men and women from all over the world who shared feelings like hers, who were expatriates in the same sense that she was. They were people for whom the term “counterculture” meant just that: They had fled from, for whatever reasons, the cultures they lived in, and had come here to live on their own terms, not unlike those Norwegians who first settled these islands in the 1920s.
“I’ve always tended to gravitate toward hard places with a mishmash of interesting people whose real story you’ll never ever know,” says Roz. “Those kinds of people can be a mess, but they can also be so incredible. And this is a place where you find them. This is a place that tests limits, and a lot of people like it that way. Those are the kinds of people who pass through a place like this, who really pass through. They’re not your typical travelers.”
Money was the last thing on Roz’s mind when she decided to settle in Puerto Ayora. Money, in fact, was one thing she was trying to get away from. She’d had money before, more than she knew what to do with, back when she worked in the salt mines in the boomtown of Karratha. “Phenomenal money,” she says—$30,000 a year with no expenses, which in 1979 in rural Australia was no small amount. It was like the early days on the pipeline in Alaska, Roz says, spigots of cash flowing like oil. That’s what finally drove Roz away from that place, she says, all that money. It made her feel like a glutton, fat with excess and waste. “When I started buying color TVs for friends and flying a thousand kilometers to Perth every couple of months for a weekend break, just blowing away money because it was there, it began to feel wrong. It does not feel fulfilling.”
It bothers Roz that she has to worry about money now. But she does, if for no other reason than Mason’s well-being. She doesn’t need much, just enough to feel safe. But she doesn’t feel safe, not with the banks shutting down and the uproar in Quito, and the possibility that the talk of a coup might be more than a rumor. If that is so, then everything’s up for grabs, including the Special Law passed just two years ago, the fate of this Station, and the future of the Galápagos Islands themselves. Roz would never share such fears with the press—her job, after all, is public relations—but she’s not the only one here at the Station who’s worried.
“People are shaky, nervous, terrified,” she says of her colleagues and the stream of upsetting news from the mainland. “With the masses out in the streets there in Quito, and the military prepared to step in and take over, it’s the French Revolution all over again.”
For the time being, however, it’s business as usual, and right now Roz has to run. But a good person to talk to, she says, would be Godfrey Merlen, if you can catch him. He might well be at the library, she says, down by the Station dock, just a short stroll from here.
It’s not much to look at, the Darwin Research Station library, but it’s the repository for the world’s most complete collection of all that has ever been written about the Galápagos Islands. Thousands of research studies, periodicals, theses, and dissertations dating back more than a half century are squeezed onto the shelves that line the walls of this small, cellarlike room. The buzz of fluorescent lights and the hum of an air conditioner are the only sounds to be heard as one steps inside. On this particular morning, a young pigtailed woman sits at one of the room’s bare wooden tables. She is bent over a laptop. Across from her sits an older, Asian man, chewing the tip of his pen as he studies an unfolded map. Near the door, at a desk by a bin where visitors stow their backpacks and belongings, sits a slim bird of a woman who looks not unlike the finches perched on the fence just outside. She is Gayle Davis, the Station librarian, who also happens to be Godfrey Merlen’s wife.
In The Beak of the Finch, which won a Pulitzer Prize for author Jonathan Weiner in 1995, biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant are followed as they study finch behavior on the Galápagan island of Daphne Major. Weiner’s account includes a brief stop in Puerto Ayora, during which he spends several paragraphs describing Gayle Davis feeding rice to the finches, both here at the library and outside the house in town that she shares with her husband. Weiner describes Davis’ hair as “pulled back in a bun, tropical-librarian-fashion,” which is the same way she’s wearing it this morning. Weiner’s book now sits on a shelf behind Davis’ desk, where at the moment she’s logging off her computer before going to lunch. Beside the computer are stacked papers to be processed and filed—ongoing studies of four-eyed blennies and great blue herons, the mating behavior of marine iguanas, and the morphology of lava flows on the Volcán Alcedo.
Some 9,000 species of birds, animals, and plants live in the Galápagos, hundreds of which exist nowhere else on the planet, most of which have been studied and written about in one way or another by the scientists who pass through this Station. Oceanic island systems, because of their isolation and self-containment, have always provided ideal environments for the study of biology, oceanography, climate, and geology. Such islands are, as the Galápagos are so often described, “living laboratories.” There are precious few such systems left on Earth, certainly none with such an astonishing range of biodiversity surviving in such relatively undisturbed conditions as that of these islands. Hawaii, the Solomons, Guam, New Zealand, Micronesia—all these biosystems have been disturbed beyond repair by the invasion of humans. Only the Galápagos remain as a keyhole through which scientists can continue to probe into and understand the evolutionary, ecologic, and geologic processes which shape all life on Earth. It’s not just where we have come from that these scientists are studying, but where we are going.
This was what fascinated Gayle Davis when she first visited the Galápagos two dozen years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer, after earning her zoology degree from the University of Wisconsin. She was a Chicago girl, born and bred, but like so many long-timers at the Station today, she fell in love with this place at a time and under circumstances that made it easy to leave behind the world she knew. Rules and restrictions were almost nonexistent back then, largely because there was no need for them. Few people were living and working on these islands, and conditions were so difficult for those few who were that there were no problems with overcrowding. Life for the scientists during the first couple of decades at the Station was much the same as it was for the people living in the village. If you could deal with the spartan conditions, the lack of amenities, the harshness of the setting and climate, and the near-absolute separation from the rest of mankind, well then, you were welcome to stay.
Now, there are rules at the Station just as there are rules—or the semblance of such—down in the town. Just getting on the list to secure a stint of study at the Station today—getting the green light, for example, to come down for three or four months to monitor the reproduction of sea lions on the island of Marchena—is a formidable task. Finding a way to navigate the sticky web of immigration restrictions in order to actually stay and live on these islands is almost impossible, for a scientist or anyone else.
Gayle Davis lives here. And she worries about the same issues that are on everyone’s mind at the Station right now: the political unrest on the continent (where Davis is due to travel in just a few days to a clinic in Quito for an operation on one of her eyes), the collapse of the Ecuadorian economy, and the ongoing struggle between the Park Service and the local poachers. The pepiñeros continue to be a problem, and now some local lobstermen, unhappy with the Special Law’s restrictions on shellfish, are starting to make threats against local authorities—the same kind of threats that led to the Station takeover four years ago.
Davis’ eyes still narrow with outrage at that memory. When those jacked-up fishermen burst out of the brush with their machetes and Molotov cocktails, no one was more upset than she. Like her colleagues, she fled when the mob first arrived, but she could not stay away, not with her library in danger. Within a day, she and a small group of friends—scientists and students—sneaked back into the compound. “Just to make sure everything was all right,” she says. “And in my case, to check my e-mail.”
E-mail has changed everything about life on these islands, says Davis. It used to take days, sometimes weeks, to get news from the outside world. Now it arrives electronically in seconds, when the server’s not down. Some of that news, frankly, is hard to believe. In a way it confirms Davis’ choice so long ago to leave behind a culture that seemed to be going in some wrong, even crazy, directions. Like the decision—when was it, just four months ago?—by the Kansas Board of Education not to teach evolution in that state’s public schools. Davis could hardly believe that one when she read it on the Web. None of the people at the Station could believe it. It flies in the face of all that they know, all they are doing. They can tell themselves, Okay, that’s Kansas, but even right here, in the very crucible where the theory of evolution was inspired and continues to be explored every day, there are now Mormons walking the streets in their white shirts and ties, knocking on doors to rescue the unsaved. There are Jehovah’s Witnesses doing the same. There is a Pentecostal church back up in the village, the Asamblea de Dios, where the congregation gathers three nights a week to garble in tongues and writhe on the floor and pray that the beast that their minister warned about, waiting to rise from the sea and swallow them whole, will stay away at least one more month.
Gayle is leaving for lunch now, but Godfrey’s just up the road, she says, doing some work with some finches.
And so he is, right downtown on Darwin Avenue, just across from the Media Luna Café. Come this evening, he’s quite likely to be out there on its porch sipping a pilsner.
Now, however, he’s on task, standing motionless beside a head-high stone wall, staring up at a cactus plant a few feet away. He’s wearing sandals, shorts, and a T-shirt—standard dress for a Galápagos day. His thick, sun-bronzed arms are crossed on his chest. A well-worn ballcap is pressed down on a head of wild hair. And those eyes—those Rasputin-like eyes—are fixed on that cactus.
A tripod-mounted video camera standing beside him is fixed on it, too. Over the camera is draped a neatly folded dish towel to shade the device from the sun. But the heat appears to mean nothing to Merlen, who shows no expression as he stands and stares. The minutes go past. Then hours. Nothing appears to be happening.
The tourists stop and look at this odd man. Then they glance up at the cactus; then they look back at the man and wonder what the hell’s going on. Some even approach him and ask.
“Quite a lot, actually,” he answers, his voice Britishly polite, his eyes still transfixed on the plant.
The tourists look back at the cactus for a second or two; then they shrug and move on. If they stayed a bit longer, a flit of movement would appear in a tree to the right of where Merlen now stands. A tiny black finch, the size of a canary, has darted in from the distance and now sits on a branch. Another flit and the finch is closer, its tiny head twitching from side to side as it hops down the tree toward the cactus.
“The longer you watch, the more you see,” says Merlen. And it’s true. There’s a small hole in the cactus trunk, an opening the size of a softball. Look through the camera, and in the darkness of that hole small bits of twigs and slight shadowy movements can be seen. Look back at the finch, and in its beak is yet another twig. With one final dart, the bird is inside the hole, tending the nest for its babies.
The point of this study, explains Merlen, is to see just how closely a creature like this can coexist with the thrum of humanity: the pedestrians and traffic rushing past within a few feet of the nest, the restaurants and shops just across the avenue, the smells and sounds of a small city filling the air. To Merlen, the clamor is mere background, as it is to that finch. He and the bird are each focused on one thing at the moment, the nest.
“There you are,” he whispers to himself as the finch hops into the hole. “There you are.”
The tourists don’t realize it, but this same man took most of the wildlife photographs featured in the Park Service calendars for sale in the souvenir shops down by the wharf. The pen-and-ink drawings of Darwin finches displayed as posters up at the Research Station are Merlen’s as well. His watercolors have been exhibited by the National Audubon Society in Washington, D.C.
But the art’s just a hobby for Merlen. It’s science he lives for. Over the past fifteen years he’s published more than two dozen papers on a broad array of biologic esoterica, from the scavenging behavior of the waved albatross to the calibration of stable oxygen isotope signatures in coral. He’s also written two field guides to the waters of the Galápagos, one on fish and the other on marine mammals.
Even the writing, however, pales next to Merlen’s passion for the fieldwork itself. He and Gayle share a house in the village, but one gets the sense that Merlen is most at home on the water, preferably alone.
The water, in fact, is where he is bound the next afternoon, as he unties a small dinghy at the Park Service dock, at a small, sleepy cove just west of the Research Station. The cove is surrounded by mangroves, which, from here into town, have been invaded during the past year by a white, scaly insect that’s killing the trees at a devastating rate.
The parasite, known as “cottony cushion scale,” showed up in southern California’s orange groves in the early part of this century and nearly destroyed them. Now it is here in the Galápagos, attaching itself to the mangroves, sucking the trees’ sap and coating their branches with a sweet, sticky secretion. The goo both smothers the trees and attracts a black, sooty mold, which blocks out the sun. The effect in the end, as one scientist puts it, is that the trees are both “vampirized and mummified.”
Very visibly, the mangroves are dying, their leaves turning black as their branches turn white. The situation has become so severe that the Station, for the first time in its history, is considering introducing its own nonindigenous life-form to the islands to combat this invader. The creatures they’re thinking of sound benign—ladybugs, or “ladybird beetles,” as the scientists call them. The bugs have been effective elsewhere, eating the same parasites that are now killing the Galápagos mangroves.
This might indeed be the only way that these trees can be saved, agrees Merlen, but it’s still unsettling. Once you start fiddling with the chain of nature, he says, even the best intentions can turn on themselves. Look what happened with the mongooses in Hawaii and Fiji and the Caribbean Islands. Well-meaning scientists brought those animals in to eat the rats that had invaded the cane fields, but the mongooses wound up devouring other creatures as well, including sea turtle hatchlings, whose populations have since dramatically declined. Like the hosts of a party where a guest has turned ugly, these places have found that the mongooses are much harder to get rid of than they were to let in.
Of course, none of this would have been necessary in Puerto Ayora if these parasites had been kept out in the first place. But who knows how they got here. It’s hard enough controlling the goats and pigs and dogs and rats that have been let loose in the Galápagos over the decades. Although people knowingly bring in the larger creatures that now swarm over some of these islands, tinier but just as deadly organisms hitchhike in on uninspected produce, inside unchecked packages, on the soles of unclean shoes or the surface of unclean clothing, and most dangerously, in the ballast water of commercial and cruise ships.
Ballast water—the seawater used to balance the buoyancy of large ships—has become an increasingly alarming front line of battle in the global war against invasive species. When a good-sized ship empties its load, be it cargo or passengers, it fills the lower part of its hull with hundreds of tons of seawater to maintain the boat’s hydrodynamics. That water is typically filthy, the kind of oily, scum-ridden liquid that laps at the docks of urban ports from Stockholm to Hong Kong. In the hull of a ship, this water becomes an aqueous soup of bacteria, microbes, and larvae, carried hundreds or even thousands of miles from its source, then dumped out in a foreign harbor as the boat takes on cargo or people.
The implications are obvious. As Puerto Ayora continues to grow, the harbor of Academy Bay becomes busier each day with a steady stream of such ships. Several are anchored out there right now, as Merlen’s skiff swings away from the Park Service cove and slices across the mouth of the bay, pointing west toward the “other side.”
The sky is dark. An afternoon downpour—an aguacera—is moving in from the highlands. Merlen pulls a worn canvas cap from his pack and yanks it down on his head.
Off to the right sits a small fishing trawler, empty, anchored, its steel hull flaking with rust and neglect. It’s been sitting there for almost two months now, ever since it was seized by the Park Service in November off Wolf Island, where it was illegally fishing, with longlines, no less. Like the Magdalena, which still sits in that downtown lagoon, this boat, the Mary Cody, is owned and operated by the barons of Manta. Like the Magdalena, it’s now awaiting legal action, which has been complicated by the fact that the island right now has no judge.
What makes the Mary Cody different and even more destructive than the Magdalena is the nature of the fishing it pursues. The Magdalena went strictly for sea cucumbers, which is harmful enough because of those creatures’ critical role in the nutrient dynamics of the waters in which they live. Marine biologists often compare sea cucumbers with earthworms because, like earthworms in farm soil, sea cucumbers aerate and enrich the sea bottom, where they lie by the millions, sucking up muck through their systems then spewing the nutrients out into the water. The abundant sea life in that water, from small fish to whales, depends on those nutrients as the base of their food chain. Removing the sea cucumbers is, as some scientists put it, like sterilizing your farm. No one yet knows the extent of the damage done to the food chain in the Galápagos where pepinos have been pillaged.
While that damage goes largely unseen, the havoc wreaked by longline fishing boats like the Mary Cody is much more visible. And horrific. The sight of a dolphin or tiger shark impaled on an industrial fishing hook is not pretty. Longliners hang thousands of such hooks from steel-cable fishing lines in deep ocean waters, lines that stretch out as far as seventy miles. The lines are laden with nets and hooks of all sizes, snagging anything that goes for their bait or swims in their way. The wastage, or “bycatch,” of such lines is said to be about thirty-five percent; in other words, as many as one third of the creatures caught on these lines are thrown back dead in the ocean. The Mary Cody was fishing for tuna the day she was seized, but her bycatch included sea lions, sea turtles, and sharks.
Such boats are barred from the Galápagos Marine Reserve by the Special Law, but that hasn’t kept them away. Their owners know how laughably limited the Park Service resources are. The way the fisheries in Manta look at it, losing a Mary Cody here and there is a small price to pay for the many more boats that are able to enter these waters, fill their holds, and leave without being detected.
This is the kind of thing Eliecer Cruz and his park wardens are up against. It’s helped to have Godfrey Merlen lending a hand. For years, Merlen’s alerted them to local poachers he’s come across out among the islands as he’s doing his fieldwork. When the Park Service got use of a light plane not too long ago to patrol the archipelago from the air, they asked Merlen to fly along as a spotter, which he happily did. There have been times when he’s taken matters into his own work-worn hands, boarding an illegal boat that he’s happened upon, cutting the nets, and, if possible, releasing the catches. He’s faced a machete or two, he says, but such “incidents,” as he calls them, have not yet gone beyond threats.
If they did, that wouldn’t stop Merlen. There comes a point, he will tell you, where talking to people and hoping they’ll change is not enough. He’s attended more meetings than he can remember—with the Park Service staff, with political groups, with the fishermen themselves—and all that those meetings amount to in most cases are mere words, for which Merlen has a low tolerance.
“Talking and talking in circles when you know people are camped at that very moment on a beach over in Fernandina—that can become infuriating,” he says. “I find it deeply disturbing when people make a mockery of the innocence of these islands. Sometimes you’ve just got to do something.”
He’s in deep water now, midway across the mouth of the bay, the throttle wide open as a white spume of seawater sprays from the stern of his launch.
Abruptly, he cuts the engine to idle. The sounds of the breakers on the ocean reefs to the south are carried in with the afternoon breeze. The clouds have grown thick. The bay water is dark but still clear. To the right, from the harbor, a small fin appears, slicing the surface as it slides toward the skiff.
It closes to ten yards, then sinks. Then another appears, off to its right. This fin, too, is bound straight for the boat and also disappears just off the bow.
Merlen leans over the side, peering into the water as a massive shadow glides directly beneath. The shadow is almost as wide as his dinghy is long, with tiny twin horns jutting from its head, a long whiplike tail in the back, and to the sides, a broad sweeping pair of black, batlike wings. Merlen knew what this creature was when that first “fin” appeared: a large manta ray, about eight feet across.
“Ah, he’s a good one,” Merlen says, moving to the boat’s other side as the diablo del mar (“sea devil”) moves away. In the distance its pectoral wing tips again split the surface as it turns back toward Merlen.
“Curious, are we?” he says, as if the thing understands him.
The ray slides under the dinghy once more, then heads off toward the sea. Merlen guns the engine and in minutes he’s rounding a jetty of cactus and stones—Angermeyer Point, gateway to the “other side.” Here he turns toward a large, quiet cove, Bud’s Bay, where a lone boat is anchored. The boat, a gray, fiberglass-hulled work vessel, is Merlen’s.
“Mm, looks like the birds have been busy,” he says, pulling himself up onto a nonskid deck spattered with guano. “I don’t begrudge them that,” he says, knotting the skiff’s rope to a railing.
The water is green here. So are the mangroves. The rain clouds have veered east, and the sun has appeared. The roar of the surf out past the point can hardly be heard in the cove’s tree-sheltered stillness. Merlen ignores the splash of a booby dive-bombing nearby, but he raises his head at the screech of a heron somewhere in the mangroves. Another screech and he’s into the wheelhouse, from which he emerges in seconds, gripping a pair of binoculars.
“Ah, there it is,” he says, training the glasses on the thick, shoreline foliage. “They’ve got a nest going there, haven’t they?”
A yellow-and-blue tarp is stretched over the stern of the deck. Merlen sets down his field glasses, takes off his cap, and moves into the shade. A pelican glides past, skimming the cove’s glassy surface.
This is the Ratty, a forty-two-foot line-fishing boat built in Norway in the late 1970s. Merlen bought it nine years ago, after the Ecuadorian fishery that owned it went bankrupt. He rigged a mast to the wheelhouse—“I wanted to use the wind a bit”—and has taken it since into just about every nook of these islands. He’s done seismograph studies, charted seawater temperatures, and taped the deepwater sounds of fur seals feeding at night. But the boat’s primary purpose is finding and following whales.
“That’s what this is,” Merlen says, stroking his beard as he studies the clouds to the east. “A whale hunter.”
The hunting he’s focused on lately is a survey of the more than 1,500 sperm whales known to exist in these waters. The study was begun in 1985 by a professor of marine biology in Halifax, Canada. That was six years before Merlen bought this boat. Now he and the professor are partners in a project that may, like much of the fieldwork Merlen conducts, last the rest of his life, or at least as long as the funding doesn’t run out.
The subject of money is a sore spot for Merlen. It’s no revelation that money is at the root of the problems that have come to plague the Galápagos: the poaching, the development, the influx of immigrants. But the fact that money has also become the determining factor in how those problems might be solved is more than just bothersome to him. It makes him feel ill.
“My first impression of the Galápagos,” he says, pulling his knees to his chest as he leans back against a hard metal hatch, “was of an incredibly low-key place. I didn’t have any money, and nobody else had any money. And that was fine. It was all the more striking for that, because it was so beautifully…”
He hangs on the silence, gazing out at the cove. Then he looks down at the deck. “Remote,” he finishes.
It was in 1970 that Merlen first came here, as a crewman on a sailboat called the Golden Cachelot, one of the earliest vessels to tour the islands. He was twenty-five then, with an agriculture degree from his native England, a degree for which he’d developed a strong distaste.
“I was very disillusioned with a lot that was going on in that industry, just pouring a lot of chemicals on the soil. So I decided to have a look at the ocean and see what was happening there.”
He began as a volunteer at the Station, and over the ensuing decades, through tireless fieldwork, established himself as a bona fide marine scientist. Today he is known as one of the leading authorities on the biota of the Galápagos, albeit one without an academic degree.
“I’ve sort of taken my own route in things,” he says, cracking the smallest of smiles. “I’ve found it can be just as effective, maybe more so, to come around from the rear and make your way up that way.”
The career he’s established is truly a labor of love. And like deeply felt love of any kind, there is pain that comes with it. The cascading events of the past decade or so distress Merlen in the same way that they disturb others who have watched the Galápagos they once knew turn inside out.
“Introduced organisms, increasing population, demands for resources, demands for tourism: Everybody’s making demands on these islands in one way or another, and the pace of those demands has been exponential, catastrophically so.”
A thump from above interrupts his thought. He jumps up to find a gull perched on the tarp. “No, it’s all right,” he coos, as if soothing a lover, “it’s all right. You don’t have to go.” And it doesn’t. The bird sits and listens as Merlen continues.
“Ideology or philosophy alone is no longer enough,” he says. “What happens here in the Galápagos is determined now by who has more money. We can’t simply say, ‘This is an extraordinary thing we have here, and why can’t we just be altruistic enough to leave it alone?’ No, we have to fight over it, and the weapon becomes money. We’ve wound up with huge sums of money being spent on both sides to determine the fate of these islands. And it all, in the end, costs the planet.
“That’s something people tend to forget, that money does not come from nowhere. It comes from one resource or another. The more that we spend, the more those resources, somewhere, are used up.”
He stops. He’s self-conscious now, aware that his words might sound a little…self-righteous. He looks at his sneakers and at his ship. He scratches his beard.
“One has to be careful not to be two-faced about all this. I mean, I make my demands on the resources of the Earth, like anyone else. Maybe not as much, but I have a camera. I have a boat.”
He pauses again, hunting for just the right words. “It’s all about balance,” he finally says. “I think we need to try, always, not to be too demanding. And when we do make demands, I think we must match them with an equal amount of care and responsibility.”
That’s it, the equation he’s looking for.
“This isn’t just true for the Galápagos and pepinos, or for Ecuador and what’s going on there. It’s true for any place, with any natural resource, anywhere in the world. If you want to get your hands on a resource, you ought to be responsible for looking after it and not squandering it. At the moment, at least, the attitude here in the islands is if I don’t take it, the next boat will. And they’re right.”
And Merlen doesn’t entirely blame them. He writes more than just scientific papers. Sometimes he writes opinion columns for the popular press, for newspapers back on the mainland, or for the Research Station’s newsletter, the Noticias de Galápagos, which is mailed worldwide to members of the Charles Darwin Foundation. In one of those columns, Merlen boils the pepino trade down to its essence:
If I had been born in the Guasmo of Guayaquil, into the abject poverty that occurs there, into a world of harsh survival, into a world without trinkets and fancy toys such as television, Betamax, and gaudy clothes, I would jump with glee to be offered ten thousand sucres a day to pick animals from the sea floor, to be able to join the wealthy elite, gaining the power to buy my own baubles and vodka and Nike shoes.
That column was written six years ago, when the “Pepino War” first began. Those ten thousand sucres a day now sound quaintly archaic compared with the $200 or more a day earned by the pepiñeros licensed to hunt during the most recent, two-month “season” okayed by the government. The “season” was an experiment, an attempt to appease local fishermen by allowing limited fishing of the pepinos. The result was a travesty of disastrous proportions. What was intended to be a controlled compromise turned into a feeding frenzy. Before they could begin diving, each fisherman had to secure a cédula de colono (a permit) from the government. The idea was to limit the fishing to islanders. The result was that more than 20,000 permits were issued—more than the official population of the islands. Nearly $4 million worth of pepinos were hauled out of the waters during those two months.
“And those,” Merlen notes, “were just the legal sales.”
There are pepiñeros in Puerto Ayora, and in Puerto Baquerizo as well, but their numbers are miniscule compared with the population of poachers in Puerto Villamil, on the southernmost tip of the western island of Isabela. Galápagans call Villamil “Tierra de Nadie” (“No-Man’s-Land”) because of its almost complete absence of authority. While Puerto Ayora and Baquerizo present the facade of regulations and rules, in Villamil anything goes.
“That’s the way it’s always been over there,” Merlen says. “People do what they want. It used to just be a slow, lazy, peaceful, little town. Now it’s like the Wild West.”
Villamil was a penal colony until 1959, the same year the Park was created. Its dusty streets are still unpaved today. There are a few small hotels, but their rooms typically sit empty. The Research Station runs a bare-bones outpost operation there, with a staff of ten who are typically out doing fieldwork. Villamil is so far away from the hub of the islands (sixty ocean miles west of Puerto Ayora) that none but the most adventuresome of travelers go there. There is no tourist “attraction” to see, except for, perhaps, the Muro de las Lágrimas— the “Wall of Tears”—a monument to pointless brutality standing deep in the bush, four miles from the village. It is nothing but a wall of rough volcanic stones, piled fifty feet high, some twenty feet wide at its base and a hundred or so yards in length. It was built by those prisoners, back in the 1940s and ’50s, who were force-marched each day into the island’s interior and made to pile lava boulders and rocks atop one another. The reason, according to one written account, was “to subdue the criminal instincts of the prisoners as well as their depraved passions.”
Officially, no more than a thousand or so people live in Villamil today. Almost all are involved, in one way or another, with pepinos. The place is just too far away for the Park Service to effectively police, and so the poachers operate openly, unabashedly. There is a café in town called the Barra Pepino. The skiffs tied to the village’s wharf each carry a gasoline-powered compressor and long, coiled lengths of bright-blue rubber tubing. The compressors run air through the tubes to the divers’ regulators, which the divers hold in their mouths as they crawl on the ocean floor stuffing their sacks with pepinos. Safety concerns, training, even the most elementary precautions, are ignored, and with predictable results. Last year more than fifty divers from Villamil wound up in Ecuador’s only decompression chamber, on the mainland in Guayaquil. Six died. And no one has counted the number of this village’s men who lie nearly unconscious in the shade of the town’s sun-beaten buildings or who lurch through its streets, their brains addled by the bends and by the oil and gasoline fumes sucked through those dive hoses.
It’s from Villamil that most of the islands’ illicit fishermen embark to the outermost beaches of Isabela and Fernandina, where they build their camps and cook their pepinos. While the pepiñeros of Puerto Ayora have been known to rent the entire Quatro y Media for an evening, thus closing the place to the public, the Villamilans have no such luxury within reach. So they import their women, bringing out speedboats of prostitutes to their fishing camps, where the women are paid in pepinos, which they eagerly accept.
“A hundred pepinos a go,” says Merlen, who not long ago encountered a boat called the Michelle off a Fernandina beach known as Punta Mangle. Merlen asked the Ecuadorians onboard if this wasn’t the boat people have heard so much about, the one known to carry prostitutes out to the pepiñeros.
“No, señor,” answered one of the men. “They are cocineras.”
Cooks.
“Cooks, indeed,” Merlen laughed.
He was able to help break up a camp that day, but there are so many more camps. And lately the pepiñeros have been turning to lobsters, shark fins, sea urchins, and anything else for which there might be a market. In that battle of money which Merlen bemoans, the cash flowing into the hands of the fishermen—from the pepiñeros of Villamil to the trawlers based out of Manta—is a deluge compared with the relative trickle of funds coming in to the Park Service and the Station and the organizations and agencies around the world devoted to saving these islands and the islanders from themselves.
Even this high-minded purpose is a sticking point for Merlen. “It’s easy for most of us—the scientists and the people who care about the Galápagos and who are trying to get the people to do certain things to protect it—it’s easy for us to prescribe solutions because we can afford to do so. If we were in these people’s shoes, it wouldn’t seem quite so simple.”
This is where Merlen turns back to philosophy, which, in the end, is the one place he finds hope. The sun is now setting, the sky to the west turning purple and pink as he unties the skiff’s rope from the railing.
“Someone once said that we live by love, by hope, and by example,” he says, “and the greatest of these is hope. I think that might be true not just for man, but for animals as well.”
He turns his head toward the shore, where the heron’s nest sits. Beyond it, barely visible through the foliage, sits a sad, weather-beaten old home.
“Life isn’t necessarily easy for any of us,” he says, “man or animal.”
With that he starts the skiff’s engine and points it toward home.