JANUARY 5, 2000
It’s been only four days since Jason and his friends left for their surf trip, but the sucre has plunged in that time from 20,000 per U.S. dollar to 25,000. The experts in Quito are talking of hyperinflation, an economy spun out of control. The government is tottering on the brink of collapse. There is talk among Mahuad and his staff of scrapping the sucre entirely, dumping those near-worthless coins and deflated bills and adopting instead the same dollars the United States uses. An old Ecuadorian proverb—“To cure rabies, kill the dog”—has been quoted to justify the plan. But not all dogs die quietly.
Even as Mahuad’s advisors debate this so-called “dollarization,” they can hear shouts and chants rising up from the street outside the presidential palace in Quito, where thousands of demonstrators—students, laborers, Indians—have been massing for days now. The smell of the tear gas fired each afternoon to disperse the mobs still lingers the next morning as the crowds reappear to face the helmeted troops yet again.
This is the world Jason and his friends had tried to escape, if only for a few days. But there is no getting away from it, not even here, on this island, in the middle of the ocean. When he shows up at the store this Tuesday morning, Jason finds Christy there, and José-Luis too, but the front door is locked, and a sign says CERRADO—“Closed.”
Christy’s upstairs in the small attic office, counting tall stacks of twenties and fifties and hundred-dollar U.S. bills. Some of that money is hers and José’s, but most belongs to friends, who trust Christy to take care of their cash and send it on to an account she keeps in Miami. It’s been years since she had to do this, to act as a private bank—there was no bank in town when she last brokered money like this—but the sky is falling right now, and so she’s at it again.
As for the store being closed, the sucre is sinking so fast that the price tags on the shop’s products mean nothing. Beyond that, the suppliers on the mainland have been shut down for days, so the store’s shelves are half empty. It’s a good time to take inventory, which Jason now begins and will continue to do for the next several days.
No one’s taking inventory up at the Quatro y Media. No one there seems to care about news from the mainland. No matter which way the wind blows, the Quatro y Media is open for business at five each afternoon. Its women are ready and waiting at the bar or along the bench by the dance floor, where the disco ball glitters and the wall-to-wall mirror shines, or out on the concrete front porch, which looks down on a sloping landscape of opuntia cactus and bleak brush-covered fields, four and a half kilometers north of Puerto Ayora in the middle of nowhere.
“Four and a Half.” That’s what the townspeople call this place, though its proprietor, Mary Rodriguez, wrinkles her nose at that name. The actual name of her business, she insists, is Amazonas. That’s what she’s got printed on the cards she hands out to the people who ask, though few of her customers have reason to ask. They’ve been coming here for years, most of them. And for the newcomers, well, it’s easy enough to find the way. Just flag down a taxi, or if it’s a weekend, look for the bus with the colored lights strung on its roof. Mary’s got a deal with the vehicle’s owners, and every Friday and Saturday night they drape those lights on the bus, like it’s Christmas, and it winds through the town, stopping at the outdoor restaurants and bars, picking up anyone who wants to climb aboard and carrying them for free up to Mary’s place. The bus brings them back, too, as long as they’re finished by, say, three A.M. That’s when the driver goes home. If the customers aren’t done by then, they can pay for a taxi, or—and many do this—they can just walk back to town, the stars showing the way as they stumble downhill toward the ocean.
There are those who are upset that such a business is here. On the mainland, okay, but not here on these islands. Most of the tourists have no idea this place even exists, but the townspeople know, and there are those who all but spit upon Mary and her girls when they come down to the village to shop or have some lunch at a café on the water. The priest on the radio has a field day with Mary, as if she gives a damn. She’s seen so many priests come and go over the years she can hardly remember their faces. As for the town’s women, who huddle and whisper when Mary comes into view: Well, let’s see now, how many of their husbands and boyfriends were up at her place just last weekend?
No, Mary doesn’t give a damn what any of them think. She makes a good living, depends on no one to support her, and does nothing illegal—well, okay, maybe she’s spent a night here and there in the jail. But that’s politics more than anything else, Mary explains. Morality? She just laughs. The same men who have put her behind bars are customers at her club. She doesn’t hold it against them. It comes with the territory.
Mary understood this when she first opened this business in the spring of 1992. It kind of surprised her husband, to come home from a trip to Spain and discover his wife had taken their house on the farm up near Bellavista and moved three young women into it, who charged by the hour for the pleasure of their company. This, in the same bedrooms where Mary and he and their two children had once slept. But Mary’s husband adjusted, and though they soon divorced, the two remain friends and partners. The property the place sits on is half his, though he has nothing to do with the business itself.
It was tough getting started, Mary will tell you, her thick, little legs crossed as she leans back in a chair by the door of her “cabaret,” as she calls it. A nest of orange hair tumbles down from her head, and it quivers when she laughs, which is often. She wasn’t open three days, she recalls, when the police came and shut her place down. “These islands,” the mayor and his lot told her, “are for the plants and the animals.” Mary remembers their words exactly. This thing she was doing, they said, this is not “the morality of the Galápagos.”
Mary lights up a Belmont and blows the smoke out between thin, hard-set lips. “The morality of the Galápagos.” She smiles, repeating the phrase. The same men who told her these words collected bribes every day for the decisions they made. They were businessmen, right? Fine. This was a business as well, she told them, pure and simple. Her friends, she admits, did not quite agree. Actually, she says, they were neighbors, not friends. Would friends have so swiftly shunned her? “Who needs them?” she says, taking another drag from her cigarette.
Her children, however, now that was a problem. Her daughter was ten when Mary started this place, her son only six, and their classmates at school made fun of them both. The priest mentioned her children by name on the radio, as he railed against Mary, and that was simply too much. She didn’t care what the priest said about her, but to do this to her children was going too far.
Her children were affected, Mary admits, nodding her head. They begged her to please leave this job, leave this profession. But Mary said no, she would not. Instead she sent them both to the mainland, where her son is now finishing school and her daughter is married.
The townspeople think this is easy work. Mary smiles. They have no idea how hard it can be running a business like this. She had no idea, not when she started. Those three girls she began with arrived from the mainland by word of mouth. They heard someone was trying to get this thing going out in the Galápagos, and they came on their own. When the police shut the place down, Mary moved the girls down into town, where she and her husband owned a small pharmacy. The girls worked the front counter, and there were rooms in the back. Business was so good the girls sent word to Guayaquil, and two friends came out to join them. For a while no one asked why five women were needed to fill prescriptions at such a small farmacia.
The police finally caught on, throwing Mary and her chicas in jail. Twenty-four hours for the girls, Mary says with a smile, eight days for her. When she was released, it was business as usual, only now her girls simply worked on the streets: in the park, down by the wharf, in front of the priest’s chapel itself. Eventually, Mary flew to the mainland, where a friend up in Quito arranged a meeting with a government minister. When Mary returned from that trip, she had a permit in hand. On the continent, she explains, this kind of business is not only an accepted thing, it is actually required in some communities, where laws have been written stipulating that for every so many hundreds of people, a bordello must be provided; the same as a hospital, or a library, or any other public service. Or so Mary says.
In any event, when she returned from that 1993 trip to Quito, Mary’s business was legal, and it’s been so ever since. She’s got a staff of ten women now, rotated each month from the continent, where some live respectable lives, Mary explains, with only their close friends and families having any idea what they do when they visit the Galápagos.
A young woman named Miriam takes a seat beside Mary and says that it’s true, that her life is like that. She and her husband own a home in Guayaquil, Miriam says, where nobody knows what she does for a living. Mary buys her a plane ticket—four million sucres round trip—and takes it out of her pay, which is par for the course. At the end of the month, Miriam says, she still clears ten million sucres (about four hundred dollars), which is three times what she would make on the mainland for the same work.
Miriam says she is twenty-five, that she was born to a poor farming family in the east Ecuadorian region they call the Oriente. She says she was sold as an infant to a rich husband and wife who wanted a daughter. The family threw her out on the street, she says, when a daughter of their own was born. Miriam was forced to have sex to survive. She became pregnant and gave birth to a severely deformed baby boy, which she gave up for adoption because she could not afford his medical care. There’s no telling how much of Miriam’s story is true, but the tears washing down her face when she’s finished are real.
As Miriam sits beside Mary, half-dressed women come and go down the hall, getting ready for work. The barman is stocking the cooler with cases of beer as a mutt curls beside him asleep. Outside, the sun bakes the gray gravel parking lot, which by nightfall will be crowded with pickups and taxis, as the deejay spins Prince and Kiss on the sound system and the disco ball twirls, and the girls work the crowd, luring the shy ones away from their friends.
Mary’s rates are fair, say the men who come here routinely. For 90,000 sucres you get fifteen minutes, which is cheaper, they say, than the rates on the mainland. If you want—and if Mary’s business is slow—you can have a woman all night for only 260,000 sucres…just over ten dollars. You can’t keep her here, though. Mary doesn’t allow it. If you buy a woman for the night, you’ve got to take her away and bring her back in the morning. Some guys do it right, say the regulars. They take the girl down into town, treat her to dinner, maybe go to a disco, then rent a hotel room. The whole nine yards. Others, well, they simply hire a taxi and tell the driver to take them someplace and park. Then there are those who don’t even bother with that. They just take the girls out into the fields around Mary’s property and spend the night there.
To Mary it’s all the same, it’s all business. The question of health has come up in the past several years, but Mary claims her girls are all clean, that not one case of AIDS has come out of the Quatro y Media. The fact is, it’s hard to tell how many cases of AIDS there have been on the islands at all. Max Parédes, who’s in charge of the hospital in Puerto Ayora, which is really no more than a clinic, stated not long ago that you could count on one hand the number of AIDS cases they’ve had in the Galápagos. But there are plenty more locals than that who will tell you of a friend or a relative who has contracted the virus. Most of them had to move to the mainland to find adequate care. That’s where some of them are still living and where some have died. Maybe that’s why Max Parédes’ numbers don’t quite add up.
Who knows if Paredes is counting the guide from San Cristobal, the one everybody called George—just “George.” He had HIV, only he didn’t tell anyone, and he slept with a good number of women, as some tour guides do. That’s one of the perks of the job, the guides will tell you. “The pussy, man,” they say, tossing back drinks at the Galápason, pursing their lips and shaking their heads. “It’s amazing.”
It makes perfect sense, they explain. Here are these tourist women in this exotic place, far away from their jobs, their homes, their friends, their identities. They can do anything they like here. No one back home will know about it. And what a lot of the tourist women like, the male guides will tell you, is a fling with a Latin man. As for the guides themselves, quite a few are more than happy to oblige.
George was one such guide. The word is, he wound up infecting several women, including his wife, who was pregnant at the time. Their baby was born healthy, but at least two of the women George slept with were not so lucky. They contracted the virus, as did an untold number of men George’s wife subsequently had sex with (she was no more faithful than George). Between them, the couple had quite a few islanders, as one puts it, “shit scared.” Because of George and his wife, the village’s schools began teaching about AIDS, and free testing was offered, and it still is today.
One of José-Luis’s nephews died of the disease back in 1994. The best the family could figure was that he contracted the virus from a blood transfusion, during an operation he’d had six years earlier. But there’s no way to be sure. When the young man got sick, his family went down to the hospital to check on his records and found that the hospital had been sold to new owners, who burned all the previous records.
Christy thinks it was in 1994 when José-Luis’s nephew died. No, she’s sure of it, because the young guy was determined to stay alive long enough to watch the World Cup that year. And he did.
Then he died. Which, for some reason, makes Christy think of that basketball player. You know, she says, the big, red-headed guy, vegetarian, tall, tall, tall, really into the Grateful Dead, had a career in the NBA…what’s his name? Yeah, Bill Walton, that’s the one. There was that time he showed up in Puerto Ayora with some friends—his brother and a couple of other guys, all Americans—and they wound up in a game against some of the village fellows, Pepé Villa and his buddies, on the outdoor court up at the school. A huge crowd gathered and watched, and it was hilarious. None of the Ecuadorians was over 5'4'', but they had a blast. And when they were done, Walton gave Pepé his jersey as a gift, right there on the court. Pepé put the thing on, and it hung all the way down past his knees, like a dress.
Now how, Christy wonders, did she get off on Bill Walton? Oh yeah, the World Cup. Soccer. Sports. That’s it. After that basketball game, Jack had Walton and his friends over to the hotel, fixed them all up with some food, which they really enjoyed. Walton and Jack had that Grateful Dead thing in common, what with Jack’s old San Francisco days and Walton’s well-known friendship with the band, so you might have thought they’d hit it off right away. But Walton kept to himself, didn’t say much, and that was okay with Jack. He’s never been one to to be dazzled by influence or fame, and he’s certainly never sought it out.
Plenty of powerful people, the rich and the famous, have checked into Jack’s hotel over the years, but by the time they get here, all the trappings they might wear in the world—wealth, status, celebrity—are dropped like unneeded clothing. Indeed, there is a kind of social nakedness on these islands, a bareness to the way in which people connect. The demographics of one’s life—your job, family, even the country you come from—these things hardly matter here. What counts is the kind of person you are at the moment, right here, right now. If a chord of friendship is struck, this is how it is played, human-to-human in completely present-tense terms. That’s how it happens with Jack and the hundreds of people who pass through his hotel each year. That’s how it went when, a few years after Bill Walton’s visit, Bill Kreutzmann, the Dead’s longtime drummer, stayed at the hotel. He and Jack connected in a way that simply didn’t happen with Walton, and they talked late into the evening about, well, about everything.
Jack’s up at the hotel on this bright Tuesday morning, out in the open-air shed behind the laundry, rigging up one of the pieces of art he likes to cobble together from the wood, rocks, and bones he’s collected over the years. This is a big one: heavy chunks of sun-bleached coral bound with thick copper tubing. The assemblage is dangling from the shed’s wooden rafters while Jack goes at it with a glue gun and pliers. When it’s finished, he plans to mount it in the lobby, which is like no hotel lobby his guests have seen anywhere else.
The lobby’s cement floors are laid with reed mats. The chairs are pegged-wood and leather, built by a carpenters’ cooperative on the mainland, in Cuenca. The co-op was started by a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer back in the mid-1960s. Jack’s dad took a trip there in 1969 to pick up that furniture, and the stuff’s still in the lobby today.
On the walls are hung paintings and collages created by Jack, and by Romy and Christy as well. The pieces are not quite what you’d find in a Holiday Inn. One is a pastel of a football-sized cockroach. Another is an acrylic, a bright Day-Glo image of Christ on the cross. A portrait of Darwin (the face of the bearded old man he became back in England decades after his trip to the Galápagos, not the clean-shaven, young ex-divinity student he was when he sailed through these islands) glares from behind a latched window frame. From the rafters hang a pelican skeleton and the bleached bones of whales suspended by wires, bones Jack has scavenged from beaches all over the islands. They are here now, reassembled, as if the creatures have come back to life.
Beneath the hovering bones is the bar, which is fashioned from the corks of hundreds of long-emptied bottles of liquor and wine and from old life preservers as well. No bartender is in sight, and none ever will be, not as long as Jack Nelson runs this place. His system is the same as it was when his father first set out a couple of fifths of whiskey and gin almost forty years ago. Pour your own. Jot your tab on a pad by the sink. The total becomes part of your bill, which begins at $60 a night for your room ($100 for two people), plus your meals (which are marked on a chalkboard), plus the bar bill, which you keep for yourself. Such a system of honor might not work at an Econo Lodge back in the States, but here, somehow it seems perfectly natural.
The shed in which Jack is working is dusty and hot. An owl chortles up in the cobwebbed rafters. Tiny gray geckos skitter across the rough concrete floor. Forrest and Jack built this shed in the summer of 1969. The table saw against the back wall, dust-coated and flaking with rust, was built by José-Luis for Forrest forty years ago, out of red mangrove shipped from the mainland, from the province of Esmeraldas. Red mangrove is almost extinct in Esmeraldas today, logged out like so much of the timber in Ecuador. But the saw is still standing, and though it looks like a ruined antique, it still works, as does the weathered block-and-tackle rig holding Jack’s sculpture aloft.
His dad built that rig with pulleys that came off his sailboat, the Nellie Brush, the sloop that first brought Forrest down to these islands in the 1950s. Jack’s father’s hands are all over this place, though Forrest himself is no longer around. He took off to Thailand back in 1986 with a friend from Miami, a fellow named Ken Calfee. Forrest said the islands had just changed too damned much. Too much bureaucracy, too many hangers-on, too much noise. There was a time when Forrest had known exactly what he wanted Jack to do with his corpse when he died.
“Wrap me in some chicken wire,” he’d once said, sitting out behind the hotel, looking over the bay. “Attach some stones, take me out deep, and dump me.” But that was before Forrest decided to leave, and now he’s living in a place called Chiang Mai, up in the north part of Thailand, with his buddy Ken. That’s where Forrest Nelson now wants to be buried, in Southeast Asia, not the Galápagos.
Actually, Jack’s kind of worried about his dad at the moment. The old man’s eighty-four; his knees are just about shot. There’s been talk of a wheelchair, and not long ago he had to spend some time in an oxygen tent.
“He hates it,” Jack says, dabbing glue on the coral. “It really pisses him off.” The fact is, Forrest needs someone to care for him now, and that’s too much to ask of Ken Calfee. So Jack’s thinking about flying to Chiang Mai and bringing his father back home to the islands.
It would be a hell of a journey, no question. And there’s no way Forrest would even agree. In terms of the bullshit that drove him away, the Galápagos is far worse now than it was when he took off fourteen years ago. Overpopulation, pollution, crime, corruption: Puerto Ayora now stinks with the very problems the old-timers who first moved to these islands were trying to escape. And some of the people who are supposed to be solving these problems stink even worse.
Look at the mayor. It’s nice that the main streets in town have been paved since he was elected to office. But back up in the village, where the poor people live, the roads are still dirt, rocks, and dust. Why is it, some of them ask, that the pathway from town to the beach at Tortuga, a splendid mile-and-a-half walk through an Eden-like forest, was paved over just last year? Ask almost anyone in town, and they’ll tell you that pathway was prettier and far more appropriate in its natural condition. The tourists seemed to enjoy it the way that it was, and those tens of thousands of cobblestones that were laid down to pave it surely could have been put to far better use up in the village.
Beyond the issue of where all these cobblestones ought to be laid, a more troubling question, say some of the locals, is why the town is spending so much money on street-paving at all, when so many people here are without electricity, decent medical care, a sound education for their children, or even fresh water. Puerto Ayora’s desalinization plant, the only one on the islands, was a huge breakthrough when it was built in the late 1980s. But that water gets to only a small number of customers, with the vast majority of households still depending, as they always have, on roof-mounted tubs and rainfall, or on water trucked down from the hills (for which they pay by the barrel).
Could the fact that the mayor’s brother-in-law owns the company that manufactures the cobblestones have anything to do with street-paving becoming such a priority?
When the mayor showed up with his wife not long ago at the Panga Discoteca and found his mistress dancing with the port captain, he dragged the woman out in the street and began beating her until he was finally stopped by some men who began beating him (hey, the mayor had brought his wife with him, they said, so he had no business attacking his mistress like that). Was it just a coincidence that immediately after, the paving of a certain roadway was suddenly halted, the roadway that ran past the mayor’s mistress’ house?
Or how about Fanny Uribe, one of the Galápagos’ two representatives to the Ecuadorian Congress in Quito? Her face is on T-shirts worn by men, women, and children all over Puerto Ayora, shirts Fanny passed out like candy when she was running for office. People say it doesn’t take much to get elected in Ecuador, and they seem to be right. That’s how Bucaram became president, going through the poor sections of Ecuador’s cities and into the countryside, passing out free bags of rice—something the people could hold in their hands, something they could eat. Bucaram knew. The people have heard so many promises from so many politicians for so many years that words mean next to nothing to them. They want something tangible, and they want it now. And who can blame them? Such thinking, of course, completely forfeits the future, which is one reason, say many, why Ecuador seems to get nowhere, why such concepts as long-term planning, long-term anything, are foreign to so many of its people. Again, who can blame them? A bird in the hand is a persuasive gift when those birds in the bush never seem to appear.
No one seemed to care much when it was discovered that the flat roof of Fanny Uribe’s home in town was covered with pepinos, laid out to dry in the sun. A congresswoman dealing pepinos! Jack Nelson’s friend, Mathias Espinosa—the two run the Hotel Galápagos’ dive shop together—rounded up a group of protesters and a video camera and marched over to Fanny’s house to shoot footage. Those cucumbers wound up on national television once the mainland stations got hold of it. But Fanny didn’t budge. Her only response was to spit at her accusers: “Usted esta denigrando mi personalidad!” (“You are denigrating my personality!”) and that was that. Case closed. Fanny Uribe still sits in Congress today.
Sure, it’s funny, says Jack. It’s hilarious in a sick, tragic way, especially if you don’t live here. But for the people who do, he says, these absurdities are real. People are left suffering, these islands are left exposed and endangered, and it’s getting worse all the time.
“Facade,” Jack says, peering through spectacles at the bead of glue he’s just laid on some coral. “So much of what you see in this town is facade.
“Take the restaurants,” he says. “From the street they look fine, with drinking glasses and tablecloths and silverware. But take a look in the back, in the kitchen. Some of them don’t even have running water. Some have no plumbing.
“And those boats,” he continues, nodding toward the harbor. “They’re each required by law to have a first-aid box. The law specifically states that the box must be mounted on a wall, painted white with a red cross outside. What’s inside makes no difference. There might be nothing in there but a bottle of rum, three cockroaches, and a Band-Aid. But if it’s white and it’s got that red cross, it passes inspection.
“On the other hand, if you have a box filled with tourniquets, splints, antibiotics, an airway tube, a manual of operation, every conceivable kind of medical supply, and that box is stained cedar and varnished on the outside—no white paint, no red cross—you don’t pass. That,” he says, biting his lip as he bends a section of copper, “is what I mean by facade.”
Ask Jason and José-Luis up at their hardware store and they say the same thing. They see it firsthand, selling the supplies these boat owners use to make their repairs. Some of those boats out in that harbor are held together by nothing but tape. A navy inspector arrives, they paint over the tape. If they own two boats but just one fire extinguisher, they don’t buy another extinguisher; they just move the one they have from one boat to the other whenever the inspector arrives. The inspectors wised up to this not long ago and began asking to see receipts for the individual extinguishers. No problem. The boat owners promptly came into the store asking for receipts; not extinguishers, but receipts. If Jason or the guys working the counter beside him refused to sell the boat owners the false stubs, that was no problem. There are other hardware stores in town.
One of Jack’s hotel staff, a young Ecuadorian man, appears with a quick, hurried question. Jack responds in smooth, fluid Spanish, not taking his eyes off his work. His manner is unhurried, controlled. There is nothing animated in the way that he speaks, showing few traces of emotion other than the occasional sign of bemusement. Jack’s face is rock-jawed and craggy, but still he looks young, younger than he should after the fifty-two years he has lived. His coppery hair, which once trailed down his back, is now graying and cropped short. The beard he wore in his twenties and thirties is gone. So, too, are the ropy muscles of his youth, though he’s still lean and strong enough to tend to the carpentry, plumbing, and masonry work required each day to maintain a hotel in a place where materials and labor are often impossible to find.
This shed itself is a testament to resourcefulness and ingenuity, the ability to recycle and reinvent odd scraps of wood, plastic, and metal that would be tossed on a trash heap in more “developed” environments. Metal springs, PVC piping, loose planks of wood, pieces of rubber—Jack’s got this stuff piled all over his property. Nothing is thrown away here. Everything eventually finds a purpose, which is fitting in a place like the Galápagos, where the concept of purpose—of use, of need—is at the root of the process of natural selection, of evolution, of survival.
The worn, mildewy books lining a shelf in Jack’s office just off the lobby are bibles of the hands-on kind of knowledge it takes to have lived here all these years. One is a hardcover titled The Way Things Work. Its do-it-yourself chapters range from instructions on building a steam boiler to wiring a radio receiver to fixing a sewing machine and finally to a section titled “Why Does a Ship Float?”
Beside that book sits a heavy tome titled Henley’s Twentieth Century Formulas, Recipes and Processes. This one was published in 1927. Jack’s dad picked it up in a used bookstore before making his first trip to the islands in the ’50s. Its subtitle reads Ten Thousand Selected Household Workshop and Scientific Formulas, Trade Secrets, Chemical Recipes, Processes and Money Saving Ideas. Among these are an ingredient list for homemade glue, instructions for treating hemlock poisoning, a recipe for imitation roquefort cheese, and an entry titled “To Protect Papered Walls from Vermin.”
Finally, fittingly, there is a crumbling 1968 first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, which Jack acquired when he first joined his father. The pages are sprinkled with Jack’s hand-scribbled notes written decades ago: references to weaving, paper fasteners, wart cures.
Jack himself will be the first to tell you he’s a jack-of-all-trades, master of…well, maybe a few. Just like his dad. They’ve always been able to take care of themselves, do whatever needs doing, which is what this hotel is all about. It may not have the luster of, say, the Red Mangrove Inn, Polo and Monica Navarro’s place, which sits right next door in all of its splendor. Its mosquelike architecture, bright pink paint job, blue-cushioned deck furniture, four-person hot tub, and open-air bar with its hop-to-it bartender, all overlooking the bay. But then there are those who wonder whether a place like that belongs in the Galápagos. It’s so…Club Med. That’s the image a lot of the locals, the ones disgusted by all this development, use to describe the Red Mangrove. But you won’t hear Jack Nelson say it. He’s far too circumspect to go bad-mouthing his competition. But it’s clear by the way he runs his place that the world of the Red Mangrove is a universe away.
As far as Jack is concerned, true traveling—and he’s done his fair share of it, from Tahiti to the Arctic—is about stepping outside your comfort zone, leaving behind the world that you know, the life you control, and putting yourself in a different environment, where the fundamental requirement is that you go with the flow. This is what too many travelers Jack has seen over the years—mostly Americans and Europeans—don’t know how to do. They just can’t bring themselves to give up that viselike grip on their lives as they know them. They come here, to the end of the world, and they want to know where the ice machine is, if their room has a phone, and why the showers don’t get hot right away.
The problem, as Jack sees it, is that these people are simply unable to adapt! Ironic, isn’t it? He smiles. They come to this near-holy place, where every rock and every creature resonates with the passage of eons, where the very air vibrates with the ageless magnitude of life on this planet, and all they can think about is their six o’clock dinner reservation down at the Garrapata and whether the limes with their gin-and-tonics are fresh.
As far as Jack can figure it—and God knows he’s given this plenty of thought—these people are rarely required to adapt in the environment that breeds them. If something breaks down, they call someone to fix it. Something goes wrong, and there’s someone who will come make it right: a repairman, a doctor, a lawyer. The culture that’s developed in America and societies like it, says Jack, breeds dependency, liability, blame. He hates to say it, but the safer you make a society, the softer the people become.
And more helpless as well. Make a place idiot-proof, he says with a shrug, and you wind up with a large number of idiots. Who, he adds, wind up in over their heads when they travel abroad. He’s seen it so many times over the years: tourists who run into trouble, say, in Peru or Indonesia, and the first thing they do is call their embassy to come bail them out. It doesn’t occur to them that the point of journeying into these places, the essence of true traveling, is to put yourself out there on your own, with no safety net, nobody to sue if you happen to step into an open manhole on a side street in Istanbul.
The same goes for the Galápagos tourists who sometimes forget that those animals they mingle with on these islands and beaches, for all of their innocence, are still animals. If your guide says beware of that sea lion bull raising up on his hindquarters to protect his harem, it’s best that you listen. You’ve got to be on your toes to travel this way, says Jack. And when you stop and think about it, what’s wrong with that? he asks. Being there, really being there—isn’t that what a journey of any sort should be all about?
When Jack thinks of what it was like just to get to the Galápagos in the old days, well, the tourists who complain about the bad food on those TAME flights—and the food is pretty bad, he admits—have no idea how good they’ve got it. One of Jack’s first boat trips out from the mainland, at the turn of the ’70s, was on a recycled and refitted World War II American landing craft that was renamed El Presidente by the Ecuadorian entrepreneur who’d bought it. The thing was powered by eight diesel engines, four for each of the boat’s two bent propeller shafts. Every three months or so, El Presidente would leave Guayaquil for the islands so overloaded with people and freight that it actually sagged at both ends and bowed up in the middle—a condition seen in tired, overloaded hulls called “hogging.” It was hard to find qualified men willing to captain such a decrepit wreck. The boat’s skipper for Jack’s trip was a young Ecuadorian naval lieutenant who was dragooned for the job. The kid had done something wrong, and his punishment was to navigate this floating disaster out to the Galápagos.
The trip took five days, recalls Jack, and what he remembers most vividly is that those eight engines never worked all at once. You could hear the mechanics banging away night and day, pulling pieces off one to repair another and then that one would break down, and so on. At one point, all eight engines quit, and El Presidente sat dead in the Pacific for five hours, an experience Jack recalls as being not entirely unpleasant. It being March, the sea between Guayaquil and the islands was calm and flat, the sky cloudless and blue. Surrounding the ship were vast shoals of blue crabs, thousands of them sliding past just beneath the sea’s smooth glassy surface. Every so often a slight ripple would appear—the fin of a sea turtle swimming lazily past the becalmed barge.
There were 140 passengers squeezed onto that boat. They slept in the hold, on the deck, on the cargo, on each other. But as bad as that was, the return trip to the continent was worse. Jack took that trip once, on a different ship, and he’d sooner swim the whole way than ever do it again. The humans were mixed in with large herds of livestock—cattle and goats sold by Galápagan farmers and bound for the mainland. The animals stood shoulder to shoulder from the bow to the deckhouse, more than one hundred cows tied to the rails, and more than four hundred goats rioting in the hold.
Jack was lucky enough on that trip to have a cabin. Unfortunately, he had several roommates. One was a British scientist named Ian Thornton, who later wrote one of the first guidebooks to the Galápagos. Thornton was delightful company, but Jack’s other two cabinmates were a mainland Ecuadorian couple coming back from a honeymoon on the islands. With them were some of their wedding gifts, including two baby goats, which did nothing, as Jack puts it, but “shit, piss, and bleat” from the moment the ship lifted anchor. Jack soon evicted the kids—the goats, not the couple—and when the honeymooners tried bringing the animals back in the cabin, he threatened to fling the things overboard.
As bad as it was in that stinking cabin, it was worse up on deck, where the cattle were constantly seasick, as cattle on ships often are. When cattle get nauseous, Jack explains, they produce unending strings of slick, viscous drool, which hang from their snouts to the deck. Think of the worst seasickness you’ve ever experienced, then imagine what it must be like for a creature with five stomachs. By the time that ship reached Guayaquil, recalls Jack, its deck was coated with a thick, slippery layer of slime.
It’s not just the tourists who have no idea what it was like back in those days. Most of today’s locals weren’t here at the time. But they do understand, most of them, the harsh realities of these islands. And they respect those realities. They know that behind the spectacular allure of this breathtaking place are dangers, both natural and man-made. This is something else about traveling, says Jack, this matter of respect. A true traveler approaches a foreign place with humility, with the acknowledgment that he is in someone else’s land, on someone else’s turf, playing by someone else’s rules. He displays this humility by being open and aware, by listening rather than speaking, by receiving rather than delivering, and by accepting and responding rather than controlling and demanding. Nowhere is such humility more necessary than in a place where Mother Nature is in charge. She can be a seductive temptress, easily underestimated and brutally cruel when taken too lightly. There are few places on Earth where this is more true than in the Galápagos.
Jack Nelson has seen it firsthand, more times than he can count. A few years back, a guest checked into the hotel, a philosophy professor from Dartmouth who was spending his summer knocking around South America. The forty-year-old man was a long-distance runner. One morning he decided to take a jaunt into the hills to a tortoise reserve up near Steve Divine’s place, just below the hamlet of Santa Rosa, a distance of about twenty kilometers.
The man told no one where he was going. Two days later, his bed was still unslept in, a fact reported to Jack by one of his staff. After confirming that his guest was indeed missing—that he was not simply sleeping off a bad hangover someplace up in town, which is not rare among vacationers here—Jack phoned the U.S. Consulate’s office in Guayaquil. Search parties were sent up to the highlands and out along the coast. They found nothing that day, or the next. A week went by, and by then they knew they were hunting for a corpse, just as they had been when an Israeli photographer, a former commando trained in desert survival, wandered into this same jungle a few years earlier. (The latter’s body was finally found six months later by some lobster divers on a small beach at the southwest edge of the island. The fishermen noticed a skull in the sand, dug away the dirt, and found an entire skeleton buried up to its neck. “Possibly in an attempt to keep mosquitoes off,” says Jack, “or maybe in a dying effort to conserve moisture.” In any event, the Israeli was long dead, cooked by the sun and eaten by insects.)
This was what Jack and the search party expected to find when, ten days after the professor disappeared, he was discovered, curled by a rock in the highland jungle, a sliver of life still left in his dehydrated bones.
“He looked and felt dead,” recalls Jack, who, after the man was carried down from the mountain, nursed him to life in one of the Hotel Galápagos’ beds by feeding him teaspoons of orange juice. The man would have died, Jack is sure, if he hadn’t been a long-distance runner.
Injuries and deaths among visitors to these islands are more frequent than might be imagined, though Jack would rather not talk too much about it. Again, bad for business. To the outside world, through the portraits painted by the tourism industry and by those ubiquitous television documentaries, the Galápagos seem so benign, just a natural stage upon which innocent animals, birds, and fish perform for the pleasure of their human audience. But these islands can kill.
Jack himself underestimated the heat when he first came here that summer of ’67. His dad put him to work the day he arrived. They were building a dock. Jack wore a hat but no shirt. He wound up with third-degree burns on his back and his neck.
It’s not only gringos who misjudge this place terribly. In the early 1980s, a battalion of Ecuadorian marines came to the Galápagos for their final exam, as it were, in survival training. Three hundred of them, with one day’s worth of water and rations, were dropped off on the west coast of Isabela. Their challenge was to cross to the island’s east side, a distance of about fifteen miles as a bird flies, but closer to twice that for a man on foot, who must traverse steep, stone-covered hillsides and vine-clogged ravines.
These marines were tough, and they knew it. Before even beginning their trek, many of them didn’t think twice about chugging one of the two canteens of water they’d each been allotted. They knew they’d be finished long before the eight hours they’d been given to make this crossing.
They were wrong. The hills they encountered were covered with razor-sharp ’a’a lava, the worst kind there is. The photos shown of smooth, syrupy, hardened lava here and in spots like Hawaii are of pahoehoe lava. ’A’a, on the other hand, is like broken glass, fragile enough to crush underfoot and sharp enough to slice through the highest-grade combat boot—like the ones those Ecuadorian marines were wearing that day.
The thing about ’a’a, say locals, is that it gets you both ways—in the feet and the hands. Imagine climbing a mountain of broken beer bottles, they say. It offers no footing, crumbling and breaking away with each step as it slices into your shoes. When you reach for a grip, it’s like grabbing a fistful of razor blades.
Before the marines had gone two miles, their boots were shredded and useless, their hands bloody and raw. A sergeant who survived the ordeal later told Jack he could see a disaster in the making by the time the group had gone five miles. He ordered the soldiers within earshot to turn back, which they eagerly did. But the expedition had spread out so far by then that some men were separated, pushing on on their own. Three days later, ten men were rescued on the island’s eastern shore. Nine others were never found.
The sea here can be as seductively deadly as the land. The scuba diving in the waters around the Galápagos is some of the most breathtaking in the world. Six-hundred-pound sea lions. Fifteen-foot hammerheads. Manta rays the size of dining room tables. And a technicolor array of every conceivable species of fish. That’s what makes the Galápagos different from anywhere else, Jack says, but it’s not for beginners. This is big-league diving, he warns. That’s the term Jack uses, big league. What makes it so are the currents, the same unpredictably strong swirls that have played havoc with ship captains since Darwin’s day. It’s common for the most seasoned sport divers to misjudge those currents and wind up surfacing in a near-panic, far from their dive site. Dive boat pilots among these islands pride themselves on retrieving lost, disoriented clients.
But they’re not always successful. Not long ago, a Brazilian couple was diving with a group off Wolf Island, at the far northern tip of the archipelago. Their dive master instructed them to swim on the surface from their boat to a rock ledge some thirty feet away. From there they would begin their descent. But the couple couldn’t wait. Halfway to the rock, they went down.
When the rest of the group reached the ledge, they understood why the dive master was being so cautious. The rushing current was so strong it was all they could do to keep a grip on the wet rocks. They also realized, when they looked around, that the Brazilians were nowhere in sight.
Four minutes later, the husband burst to the surface. His dive computer depth gauge showed 364 feet. He was distraught, confused, drunk with nitrogen narcosis from those few minutes of breathing compressed air at that depth. It turned out that he and his wife had hardly begun their descent when they were swept into a downward-bound current. The man lost sight of his wife almost immediately. He dove deeper, hoping to find her, until he realized he was beginning to pass out.
The woman’s body was never found. As for the man, says Jack, “Other than losing his wife, he was okay.”
News like this from the Galápagos often goes unreported. There is no newspaper on the islands, no bona fide journalism of any sort. The nearest professional reporters are on the continent, and by the time they get word of events way out here, it’s often too late for more than cursory coverage at best. Natural disasters of epic proportions, on the other hand, attract swarms of international news crews: the 1995 eruption of Fernandina’s La Cumbre volcano, for example, where rivers of molten magma poured into the ocean for months on end, boiling the fish, scalding the seabirds, and superheating the shoreline rocks, upon which frightened marine iguanas scrambled only to burst into flames; and the explosion three years after that of the Cerro Azul volcano on Isabela, which prompted an airlift evacuation of a colony of some seventeen tortoises that sat in the path of an oncoming lava flow; and of course, the press come with the El Niños, with all their disruption. Descending on the islands like locusts, the reporters fill every hotel room and bar they can find, gathering the requisite press packets from the Research Station and the Park Service. They file their stories, then, once the crisis has passed, they fly out, leaving the Galápagos as it always has been: a world apart, unto itself.
Not long ago, in the summer of 1998, there were two disasters on the islands that would have made national headlines had they occurred in the States. One was the crash of an ultralight glider carrying a two-man film crew who were shooting footage for an IMAX movie about the Galápagos. The men—one an American, the other a Canadian, the very man who invented the IMAX camera—were killed when their aircraft nosedived into the slopes of Cerro Azul during a sunrise shooting. That tragedy occurred just three weeks after a tour boat carrying sixteen passengers, all members of an Elderhostel group, capsized near Santa Fé. The group had gathered on the foredeck of a boat called the Moby Dick to photograph the sunset. The sea was calm, with soft, velvety swells. But one swell rolled through, larger than the others, so slowly, smoothly, and gently that neither the passengers nor the crew realized it was happening. The boat, which had been recently renovated (an extra deck added) to create more cabin space with no regard for the vessel’s stability, turned over. Four of the passengers, all Americans, died, and it was Jack Nelson who had to relay the news to their families.
“Stupidity, sheer stubborn stupidity,” he says of such accidents, which have happened in these waters more times than he can count, and certainly more times than have been reported beyond the borders of Ecuador. “It’s always the same story,” says Jack. “Negligence, ignorance, greed, laziness. They don’t learn anything from what’s happened before. Sometimes it seems this is a nation of amnesiacs.”
Still, he cautions, it’s a mistake to conclude, as some people do, that every boat in that harbor is unsafe, every tour operator corrupt. There are coalitions of responsible tour operators in the Galápagos whose concerns extend beyond their mere profit margins. These people realize, says Jack, that the future of their industry depends on the future of these islands. They set and maintain standards not just of safety but of the caliber of tours that they offer. They are intent upon educating their guests about the fragility of this archipelago, the threats that it faces, and what outsiders can do to help. (What they can do in most cases is join one of the many organizations created to protect the Galápagos and contribute resources—in most cases, money—to help those groups do their work.)
Too many people, says Jack, see the problems confronting these islands and assume that tourism is the culprit. It’s just not that simple, he says. As he sees it, when it comes to a place such as this, there is simply no way to keep people away. No place is a vacuum, he says. No place on this planet can remain unchanged. Not Antarctica. Not the Amazon jungle. Not the Galápagos Islands. People are going to come, Jack says, and they’re going to cause changes.
If that’s so, he continues, it’s probably best that those people come as tourists. Jack would prefer a gentler term than “rape” to refer to the history of man’s hand on such places as the Galápagos. But accepting that term, which is often used by critics of tourism here, he considers the industry—and he smiles as he says this—a “kinder, gentler form of rape.”
Far from hurting the Galápagos, tourism, Jack maintains, has actually helped. It’s brought attention as well as funding. Those sixty thousand people a year who visit these islands, he points out, become lifelong ambassadors for the Galápagos; crusaders, as it were, for the cause.
No, it’s not the tourists who are the problem, says Jack. It’s the people in the culture and industry that have grown up around that tourism. The people and businesses that have flocked to the islands in pursuit of the dollars washing off those tour boats are the agents of destruction, says Jack. Most of the tour boats in these waters are safe, he points out again. But the ones that are not…well, they’re like the proverbial bad apples, spreading their rot beyond their own skins.
Take, for example, the Galápagos Explorer. Actually, it’s the Galápagos Explorer II. The first one, alas, ran aground a couple of years ago on the reefs off Wreck Bay, with a drunken first mate at the helm. That ship was owned by a Guayaquil-based corporation called Canodros. So is the Explorer II, which was built in Italy in 1990 before it was bought by Canodros and brought to the Galápagos just last year. It’s the largest among the ninety ships currently licensed to tour the islands, and at first glance it’s first-class. Each of the Explorer’s 100 passengers enjoys an air-conditioned suite with a television, VCR, refrigerator, bar, and bath/shower. The freshwater swimming pool goes without saying, as does the carpeted dining room, where dinner, served by tuxedoed waiters on a typical evening, goes something like this:
Marinated Sea Bass with Chef’s Sauce
Broccoli Cream Soup with Quail Egg
Veal Enince with Roasted Potatoes
Salad of Belgian Endive
Peach Pie or Chocolate Mousse
The Explorer’s brochure makes much of the fact that the ship “is equipped with special systems to minimize the impact on the Archipelago. All soaps, detergents and shampoo used on board are biodegradable.” Which is fine, as far as that goes, Jack says. But what about that thick oily smoke billowing out of the ship’s stacks when she starts her engines? Does anyone care that this ship runs on bunker fuel? That’s practically raw petroleum, for those who don’t know, Jack points out. Crude oil. Sinks to the bottom like lead. Virtually impossible to clean up. Nasty shit.
A vessel running on bunker fuel shouldn’t be allowed near the Galápagos, says Jack. But there it is, anchored right out in the bay. And even more alarming than the Explorer are the tankers that transport its fuel from the mainland. Some of these ships are as battered and rusty as those landing crafts Jack rode here in the ’70s. They’re pieces of junk, if the truth be told, and they’re typically captained by men whose credentials are suspect at best. Hell, just last summer one of those ships loaded with sacks of cement ran aground while entering Puerto Villamil, over on Isabela. Its fuel tank, thank God, didn’t break open. All that was spilled that day was waste water. But it could have been a major disaster. That would have brought out the reporters.
The fact that such boats are in the ocean at all is a crime, says Jack. That they are allowed to even approach waters as pure and precious as the Galápagos’ is an abomination. But it’s not surprising. If there were such things as true journalists on the islands, they’d have a field day tracing the ownership of those junk ships. Jack (and others who keep their ears to the ground on these islands) have no doubt the trail would lead directly to Quito and Guayaquil, into government offices where the very people who ought to be regulating these vessels refuse to do so because, directly or indirectly, they own them.
And so the supply ships continue to come and go, fleets of Third World freighters and barges casting their shadows on the animals and the birds and the beaches of the Encantadas.
“They shouldn’t be here,” Jack says with a sigh, turning back to his artwork. “Any accident at all with any one of them could be an unimaginable disaster.”
He nudges the sculpture and watches it twirl. The coral and copper twist slowly in the afternoon light as a small finch flits in and alights on an old wooden barrel.
“Perfect,” Jack says softly, surveying his piece. “Perfect.”