JANUARY 15, 2000
The woman is choosy about her soft drinks. She and her tour group, all Americans, just arrived in Jack’s lobby a few minutes ago after a midmorning hike to the Station. They’re hot, tired, and thirsty. Jack’s more than willing to oblige, asking them each what they’d like in the way of a beverage.
“Ginger ale,” says the woman, as she sighs deeply and drops her fanny pack on a chair by the window. She gives Jack no more than a glance as she unzips the bag and searches for something. As far as she knows—as far as she cares—this man in his flip-flops and T-shirt and shorts is part of the help at this hotel, just another employee. Which bothers Jack not in the least.
“We don’t have ginger ale,” he says pleasantly enough, moving toward the bar to fetch the others their drinks.
“Mm,” says the woman, still not looking up. “Have you got Seven-Up?”
“No Seven-Up,” says Jack, lifting a handful of cold bottles from the cooler. “We’ve got Sprite.”
The woman stops, lifts her head, and with exquisite deliberation turns and gazes at Jack.
“Sprite,” she says flatly, as if he’s just tossed her a foul-smelling bone. She purses her lips, turns her eyes back to her bag, gives her hair a quick flip, and repeats the word. “Sprite.”
Jack doesn’t need this grief, not this morning. Nuñez and the surfers checked out an hour or so ago, and indeed, the ex-president’s nephew skipped on part of the bill. “There’s an old Ecuadorian saying,” Jack said with a shrug after the surfers had left: “It’s the same shit; they just change the flies.”
Maybe, after all these years, Jack’s finally had enough of the flies. Maybe it’s his dad’s illness—the old man’s mortality shoving itself in Jack’s face so close he can smell it. Whatever it is, the way Jack feels right now, he’d sell this hotel in a minute if a buyer just happened along.
“If someone walked in with a suitcase full of cash and a couple of tickets out of here,” he says, setting up a sewing machine on a lobby table after the tour group has finished their drinks and moved on, “I’d be gone. Not immediately, not forever, but I’d be gone.”
He fetches some swatches of neon-bright fabric from a room in the back. The scuba boat he owns with his dive shop partner, Mathias, needs some new flags, so Jack’s doing what’s always been done with such needs around here: He’s making them himself. The hum of the sewing machine blends with the sound of the surf floating in through the lobby’s screen door.
“Two million,” says Jack. That’s what he figures the place ought to go for. If someone laid that kind of cash on the table, he’d take it. Then at last he’d be able to settle up with his wife, Patricia, finalize their divorce and move ahead and get married to Romy. He’d love to tie up the loose ends with Romy and Audrey. It would clean things up as well for his daughter, Noell, whom Patricia took with her to California when she and Jack split back in 1992. Noell was two at the time. She’s ten now. Jack can’t wait to see her next month when he stops in L.A. on the way to pick up his father in Thailand.
California remains a touchstone for Jack, even after all this time. It’s where he grew up, of course. It’s where his mother still lives. It’s where Patricia and he met, before he first came to the Galápagos. And it’s where he looked up Patricia two decades later, after she wrote him a letter that arrived out of nowhere. They got married shortly thereafter, in 1987, and she came down to the islands with Jack to help run the hotel. Two years after that, Noell was born. Nearly three years later, Patricia had had enough—of the Galápagos, of the hotel, of the marriage—and went home.
Then came Romy. It’s easy to look at the three of them—Jack, Romy, and Audrey—and mistake Jack for Audrey’s grandfather. Happens all the time. Jack doesn’t care. In fact, he kind of delights in the surprise on a hotel guest’s face when they discover that Audrey is Jack’s daughter and that the striking Peruvian beauty beside Jack is his wife.
Actually, Romy’s only part Peruvian, on her mother’s side. The other parts—Italian and Austrian—come from her father, whose family fled northern Italy during World War II and wound up in Lima, where Romy was born in the summer of 1962. Five years after that—the same year Jack first came to the Galápagos—Romy’s dad, Armando Antonio Alfredo Hartmann, took his family to South Bend, Indiana, where he spent the next five years at Notre Dame earning his Ph.D. in chemistry. Then he moved his family back to Peru. That explains Romy’s fluent English and dead-on American accent.
Romy arrived in Puerto Ayora in early 1986, after a short stint in Germany as a perfumer and a couple of years as a museum guide in Guayaquil. The Galápagos trip was a lark, with a friend who’d gotten a wild hair to visit the islands. For Romy, it was love at first sight—“no traffic, dirt streets, everyone barefoot”—and she wound up staying. She did “the hippie thing,” as she calls it, for a couple of years, painting T-shirts and making sand-cast candles to sell to the tourists. Then she went to work at Jack’s hotel. She and Jack were “just friends,” she says, until Patricia moved out. “Then,” she says, “we became more than just friends. I realized I loved him.” They moved in together that year. Audrey was born three years later, in 1995.
Now Audrey’s four, and Romy’s getting a bit edgy about the future, about how life—Audrey’s life—will develop if they stay on this island. Audrey’s close to school-age now—in fact, that’s where she is at the moment, at a little preschool up in the village, where Romy will fetch her in a half hour or so.
Right now Romy’s enjoying the downtime, relaxing on a lobby sofa with a hot cup of coffee before returning to being a mom. Her thick dark hair’s up in a bun. Her strong, shapely figure is draped in a loose T-shirt and shorts. She’s got paint on her hands from a still life she’s working on back at the house, a big painting she hopes to have framed and ready to hang by next week. The portrait of Darwin on the wall, the one with the window frame, is Romy’s. If all she had to do was paint and pass her days here on this island for the rest of her life, she’d be perfectly happy. That’s part of the reason she’s stayed for the past fourteen years. This island life, she admits, can be hypnotic, seductive, easy to settle into without even knowing you’ve done it.
But now there’s Audrey to worry about. It would be nice, for starters, says Romy, if she and Jack could get married, which is something Jack’s wanted from the beginning. “I don’t really care much, myself,” Romy says. “I’m not crazy about marriage. But I would do it for Audrey’s sake because of social reasons.”
Beyond the issue of marriage, the question of raising Audrey in such an insular place is beginning to press on both Romy and Jack. “If we keep her here,” Romy says, taking a sip from her cup, “it’s like we’re keeping her in a bubble. She needs a better education than what she’s going to get here.”
She takes another sip. “Shit, man,” she says, setting the cup down and turning to look out the window at the glimmering bay, “she needs to know there’s a world out there, even if it’s falling apart.”
It does indeed feel as if the world—at least Ecuador’s little corner of it—is imploding. The volcanoes around Quito are continuing to blow; newspapers publish eruption alerts every morning. The Colombians are making louder anti-U.S. noises. And the capital city is now under siege from the Indios, with hourly news updates barking out of radios perched in windows and on store counters throughout Puerto Ayora.
But up at the National Park headquarters, just off the road to the Station, it’s as if nothing is happening, as if the mainland is as tranquilo as the finches perched on the pads of the cactus that surround this compound of sea-green, cinder block buildings.
The front door to one of the buildings is open, the sound of a radio drifting from inside. But the radio’s not tuned to the news. It’s playing rap music—Tupac Shakur chanting and whoofing from a tiny transistor as a woman sits at a computer typing a letter. She’s Eliecer Cruz’s secretary, and the director is in, if you’d like to have a seat. He’ll be free in a couple of minutes.
Which he is. The door opens, a squad of Park lieutenants files out, and Cruz returns to a desk strewn with memos, reports, and fresh faxes. It could seem very hectic, but Cruz is unruffled. The same quiet calmness he displayed when he spoke to the mob from the steps of Judge Avellan’s building last year, the easy confidence he exudes whenever he’s in public, is here, when he’s alone in his office. His English is sketchy, so an assistant is called in to translate as Cruz explains how in the world he can be so relaxed when his job, this Park, the very nature of these entire islands might be completely transformed at any moment.
Cruz settles back in his chair and half-smiles.
“Anything is possible in situations like this,” he admits. He counts on his fingers the number of Ecuadorian presidents who have come and gone in the four years he has directed this Park. “…dos, tres, quatro.”
He smiles.
Four.
“I am always walking a tightrope,” he says. There are politicians both here on the islands and certainly on the mainland, he says, who would love nothing more than to see him removed. There are local businessmen and fishermen who would pay for the freedom to pursue their vocations unhindered by aggressive Park wardens enforcing Park laws. Each time the government changes hands, the hopes of Cruz’s detractors are kindled. And each time—so far—he has survived.
“Gatos…,” he says.
“Cats,” repeats the translator. “They have nine lives.”
Cruz nods and stands. He’s not concerned with the minute-to-minute accounts of upheaval on the mainland. He’s in continual contact with Roz Cameron’s boss, the head of the Research Station, an Englishman named Robert Bensted-Smith. And he’s in touch as well with the U.S. Embassy in Quito. But all Cruz will say about these conversations—all that needs to be said, he says as he smiles—is that “they have promised me they will ‘fight like the tiger’ for us.”
That leaves him free to focus on his job, on the problems at hand, which at the moment include a nasty little situation that’s been developing since early last year. It seems that an imaginative entrepreneur from the mainland has put together a unique Galápagos tour package and has begun advertising it on the Internet. Cruz pulls a printout of the Web page from a folder and slides it across his desk. The page is adorned with photos of seals, tortoises, and iguanas. But its title is what catches the eye:
ANDEAN OUTDOOR OUTFITTERS
Conservation Through Hunting
The description of what these tours offer is even more arresting:
See Charles Darwin’s legendary islands and hunt the extensive populations of feral game.
The price for six nights and five days, including airfare from Miami, is $4,800 per person. Two telephone numbers are provided, one a U.S. 800 number in Boca Raton, the other a number in Guayaquil. It seems that last March, the company’s first customer arrived here, an American who flew in with his wife. The couple was met by two “guides” who took them by truck, boat, and on foot for a five-day foray into the islands that exceeded the clients’ wildest expectations—at least according to an account of the trip written by the husband, an attorney from Iowa named Richard Meyer, who summed up his experience for a newsletter called The Hunting Report, published out of Miami.
The excursion, wrote Meyer, was an anniversary gift for himself and his wife, Lynn. It “allowed us to get off the beaten path and really see the Galápagos,” he explained at the start of his piece. Then he went into detail:
The experience is not really a sport hunt as such, nor is it a “drive-the-Suburban-out-to-the-pasture” prairie dog shoot.
Travel to the first shooting area I visited on Santa Cruz Island involved at least a one-hour trip by truck and another hour by open boat powered by a 50 hp outboard. We saw sea lions, sea turtles and manta rays on the boat trip. While I walked inland and shot 13 feral donkeys in 3½ hours, my wife snorkeled with her guide, who caught fresh lobsters and prepared a midday luncheon.
That was the first day. The journey went on:
I spent another day in the Galápagos trying to shoot a wild boar that we hunted with the locals’ hunting dogs. The boar was so large that the dogs were unable to turn or stop it, so I did not get a shot. A pleasantly surprising aspect of this hunt was the jolt you got seeing the 400-pound tortoises meandering along in the bushes.
Then came two eventful days on Santiago Island:
The landing on the beach here was rugged and wet. Once through the surf, we set up a traditional “Galápaganian fishing camp” consisting of a suspended tarp to shade the sun and a campfire. In the late afternoon heat, I shot 17 feral goats. The bushes and grass on the island had been stripped by them, leaving little vegetation for the land tortoises and other native fauna.
My wife and her guide snorkeled, hiked, and photographed marine iguanas, pink flamingos, sea turtles and other wildlife. That night, she and I slept in a nylon pup tent on the beach. We were awakened after midnight by a sea turtle throwing sand on our tent as she dug a nest for her eggs. The next morning, I shot 51 goats in about 3½ hours.
On our last day, we traveled two hours by open boat to the west side of Santiago. We attempted to find wild boar while my wife and her guide snorkeled for lobster. After an hour of unsuccessful searching for boars, we went back toward the beach, where I shot 24 feral donkeys in 1½ hours. We then went back to the landing site for a wedding anniversary luncheon of wine, fruit salad, and fresh lobster ceviche. After lunch, we boated back to the hotel. That evening, we were treated to a delightful anniversary dinner at a rural restaurant.
In conclusion, wrote Meyer:
A trip there organized by Escobar, even without shooting, would be far preferable to the canned offerings of the tour operators.
Indeed, says Cruz. He recites just a few of the laws broken here: hunting without permits, transporting tourists in open craft between islands without license, camping on Park land without permits, camping in a turtle nesting area, and fishing for lobster out of season without permits.
“It is blatant,” says Cruz. “Very blatant.”
He doesn’t blame the American and his wife, who Cruz assumes were unaware that what they were doing was illegal. But the man who set this all up, the owner of Andean Outdoor Outfitters, an American-born Ecuadorian named Braden Escobar, knows just what he is doing, says Cruz. And if things go as Cruz plans, the next time Escobar arrives for such an outing, he will be placed under arrest.
It’s one thing, says Cruz, for the Park Service to struggle with the complex problem of getting rid of the chivos—the goats—as well as the wild pigs and other introduced species disrupting these islands. He recognizes that the locals were hunting these goats and pigs long before the Park even existed. He is a local himself, born on Floreana thirty-four years ago. He respects the needs of his fellow Galápagueños, he says, both the fishermen and the people who live in the hills. For the former, a licensing system and limited fishing seasons have been created. The latter are allowed to hunt wild game in similarly controlled circumstances.
But outsiders like Escobar, says Cruz, are no better than the mainland industrial fishing fleets who pillage the Galápagos waters with no regard for the future of the animals that live in those waters nor for the Galápagueños who depend on those animals for their very existence.
It’s a high-wire act, Cruz admits, controlling the outside invaders while appeasing the people who live here—especially the fishermen. This has become possibly the most critical part of his job: keeping the people who live on these islands happy while educating them about why they must help manage and protect the rich resources that surround them. It’s not easy, he admits, to teach people to take the long view in a culture like Ecuador’s, a country that has become so conditioned—and understandably so—to living for today rather than preparing for tomorrow.
With the fishermen, it’s an admittedly complex problem to deal with, says Cruz, especially with all the recent arrivals from the mainland who have no feel or affection for these islands. But the issue of hunting is much simpler. While thousands of Galápagans’ lives depend upon fishing, he says, very few, if any, are as dependent on hunting. Bagging goats and wild boars is a supplemental activity at best for the farmers and cattlemen who live in the highlands. As for the claim made by people like Escobar that they are performing a public service by helping the Park get rid of these unwanted animals; well, says Cruz, that claim is as absurd as it is insincere.
To begin with, he explains, there are tens of thousands of wild goats on these islands—250,000 to be somewhat precise, nearly half that number on Isabela alone. With the kind of hit-and-miss excursions run by freelancers like Escobar, their “customers” wind up shooting maybe a few dozen goats at best, and in a completely random fashion. What use, Cruz asks, is that?
This is a science, he says, getting rid of animals like this. It must be systematic. It requires planning and preparation, which Cruz’s people, working with advisors from the Research Station, have been applying for quite a few years now. Cruz is proud to point out, as are the people at the Station, that the feral goat and pig populations on several islands—Española, Plazas, Santa Fé, Rábida—have been completely eradicated during the past two decades, thanks in large part to Park wardens like a man named David Sáles, who just returned from a fifteen-day pig hunt on Santiago.
Men like Sáles are called matar-chanchos—“pig stickers”—and they are proud of the title. Sáles has been part of a pig-hunting team for four years now, since he joined the Park Service at age twenty-six. He was born and grew up here in the highlands of Santa Cruz, where his family still raises cattle today. He’s a good-humored man with an easy smile that spreads widely beneath his Zapata-like moustache. And he is in tremendous physical condition, which is easy to understand once his job—“one of the most dangerous jobs in the Park,” he points out—is explained.
The chanchos— the wild pigs, which ravage sea turtle, tortoise, and iguana nesting grounds—are hunted separately from and, critically, prior to the goats, says Sáles. This, he explains, is because the goats ravenously feed on the bushes and grasses that grow thick in the highlands. “If we killed the goats first,” he says, shrugging his shoulders with the obvious logic of what he is saying, “the vegetation would grow up so densely we would never find the pigs.”
Pigs first, then goats. That’s the drill, explains Sáles, whose work routine has its own precise rhythm: fifteen days out on an island, four days back home, then back out again for another fifteen-day hunt. The pig hunters are put ashore on a targeted site in twelve-man teams, he explains. Each man is equipped with a hand-held Global Positioning System locator, a VHF radio, a gun (Sáles’ own weapon of choice is a bolt-action. 22 rifle) and a dog. “You never get close to a pig without a dog,” explains Sáles. “A pig will tear you to pieces.”
He pulls from a backpack the jawbone of a young boar he killed on a hunt not long ago. The jagged, tooth-studded bone is more than twelve inches long. A pair of sharp, three-inch tusks juts from its chin. “That was a young one,” says Sáles, “about two hundred and fifty pounds.” Full-grown boars can weigh as much as a hundred pounds more, he says, with tusks that extend nearly a foot. Sáles says he has seen dogs disemboweled by such tusks. One of his own dogs was eviscerated by a pig not long ago. Now he’s got a new one, a mongrel half-boxer he calls Bambi, trained to kill, as are all matar-chancho dogs.
The wild pigs do not need to be trained to kill; they are born with that instinct. It is a mesmerizing sight, says Sáles—chilling but hypnotic—to see that instinct unleashed. Sáles describes watching a colleague’s dog maul a pig it had caught. Believing the pig was dead, the dog relaxed and backed off. In a blink of an eye, the pig suddenly rose up and took the dog down by its throat. “Tore it wide open,” says Sáles. The pig then charged the dog’s owner, who shot it point-blank. Again, they thought that was it. “The pig kept coming,” says Sáles. “He had to club it with the stock of his rifle. He finally killed it, but the rifle was bent beyond repair.”
Despite such risks—or, Sáles admits, because of them—he simply loves hunting pigs. Before the Park Service paid him to do it, he did it for fun, going into the woods from the time he was a boy, on weekends and with friends after their farm work was finished. “The chasing,” he says, “you’ve got to run like hell, sometimes for hours, keeping up with the dogs. And then comes the actual shooting. For a hunter,” he says with a satisfied smile, “this is the ultimate sport.”
The Park Service teams, each man fanned out from fifty to two hundred yards apart, cover ten to twelve miles a day through terrain as rugged as any found on the planet. They cross fields of wicked ’a’a lava, which is why each man is issued two pairs of American-made, Caterpillar-brand construction boots for each outing. They run through savannah fields dense with brambly mora vines and low-growing pega-pega plants that clutch at their trousers and grab at their boots. They crash through six-foot-high thickets of plants they call una de gato—“ cat’s claws”—whose inch-long, curved spines can slice through the heaviest gloves. They wear thick, long-sleeved shirts and Park-issued pants, which makes the furnacelike heat that much worse. They must button their shirt collars to keep out the fire ants—another introduced species that has infested the Galápagos’ forests—but the insects are still able to find their way in. “They are the worst thing,” says Sáles. “The bites burn from the inside. Your skin actually becomes hot to the touch.”
The teams sleep each night in pitched tents, with water for drinking but no such luxury as washing. “No shower for fifteen days,” says Sáles, smiling and holding his nose with his fingers. “The dogs start confusing our scent with the pigs’.” There are few feelings so glorious, he says, as the last day of a hunt when the hunters descend to their pickup point and dive into the ocean as they wait for their boat.
The results of this work can be seen, says Sáles, each time he goes out for a hunt. “When I first worked for the Park,” he says, “all we found in the tortoise-breeding areas were broken eggs, where the pigs had eaten them. Now the nests are intact and baby tortoises are growing up there.”
His first year out, says Sáles, his team killed more than four hundred pigs on Santiago alone. The next year, they killed half that number. Last year, the figure was eighty. This year, so far, they have found only one or two pigs on each outing. But their job is not finished, Sáles emphasizes, until the last pig is gone. “One female left pregnant with babies,” he says, “and it begins all over again.”
Still ahead (once Sáles and his team have completed their job) are the 80,000 or so goats that now roam Santiago. At the moment, however, the focus of the Park Service’s goat-hunting efforts is the island of Isabela, where an assault on the scale of the invasion of Normandy is soon to be launched. Eliecer Cruz, like his counterparts at the Station, is careful about talking too much about this one. It’s politically touchy, the image of helicopter gunships carrying crews of sharpshooters with automatic weapons spraying death on herds of wild goats. Cruz would prefer that his brother, Felipé, talk about this, which Felipé is more than happy to do.
Felipé Cruz’s office is in a building beyond Eliecer’s, back at the rear of the Park Service compound. On this early afternoon, Felipé’s outside having a smoke. Behind him are two large, horned skulls mounted to the bars of a window. “Ah, yes,” he says, glancing up at the trophies, “the last two goats—big ones—from Pinta.”
These were the last two of 38,000 killed on that island in the mid-1970s. That’s the kind of clean work that makes Felipé smile. Dealing with nonindigenous species is his specialty. It’s what he studied in college in the United States, in Hawaii, and in Colorado, where he went on a Fulbright Scholarship to learn, as he puts it, “how to efficiently kill varmints.”
Felipé actually began his education pursuing an undergraduate ornithology degree in the early 1980s from the University of Connecticut. As a boy, he loved watching the dark-rumped petrels skim the waves that washed up on the beaches of his home island, Floreana. As a young man, he saw those same birds nearly wiped out by rats, cats, pigs, dogs, and donkeys that had infested that island and others. Midway through his college career, he had an epiphany, which led to the Fulbright.
“I decided that, shit, as just a scientist studying this stuff, I wasn’t going to get anything actually done. I realized, hey, in order to save my birds, I’m going to have to learn to destroy these animals.”
Felipé is the seventh of his parents’ twelve children, eight years older than his brother Eliecer. “Lucky seven,” he says with a grin, flicking an ash and taking a seat on a bare picnic table. The landscape around him is overgrown desert, thick brush and cactus stretching off toward the north where the highlands are framed against a bright, turquoise sky. He wears a Park Service ball cap, a white T-shirt and shorts, and thick, hand-sewn sandals on his tough, calloused feet. He’s lean, sinewy, perpetually restless. He hates meetings, of which he’s attended two already today. He’d much rather be here, with his men and their weapons, or out in the field.
He stubs out his cigarette and moves into his office, where a wall-sized relief map of Isla Isabela looms over his desk. The map is a prism of colors: forest-green volcanic craters and cones ringed by orange and yellow mountainside slopes, edged by coastlines of pink, and, surrounding it all, a deep-cobalt-blue sea. Beyond the map stands a bookcase of binders with handwritten titles: “Chivos Santiago”; “Chanchos Santiago”; and, most conspicuously, “Isabela Sur: Animales Introducidos.”
The sanitary term for Felipé’s specialty is “eradication.” His title at the moment is Technical Director of the Isabela Project, whose goal, he explains, again using sanitized biospeak, is the “ecological restoration” of the northern half of that island. Boil it down, his job is to kill all the goats.
If there is one place in the Galápagos that illustrates the nightmare of introduced species, it is Isabela. By far the largest of the archipelago’s thirteen main islands—eighty miles long from north to south, fifty miles wide at its thickest—Isabela is home to the Galápagos’ largest population of giant tortoises. The animals feed and nest on the slopes of the island’s spectacular volcanoes—Wolf, Darwin, Alcedo. Eighteen years ago, in the summer of 1982, when the first comprehensive study was made of the wild goats on Isabela, only ten of the animals, apparently left by fishermen, could be found on the island. Today there are more than 100,000.
“Goats are born for one thing,” Felipé says flatly. “To reproduce.” That reproduction, he explains, is explosively exponential. A wild female goat reaches sexual maturity when she’s seven months old. The typical nanny gives birth to two kids at a time. She does this, on average, three or four times a year for the length of her life. “Do the numbers yourself,” says Felipé. “They multiply fast.”
The havoc these animals wreak as they devour the landscape is difficult to describe with mere words, says Felipé. This is why he carries a set of slides when he speaks to visiting tour groups or scientists. The photographs, taken by Tui de Roy, show specific locations on the rim and slopes of Volcán Alcedo, the island’s largest volcano and a prime tortoise feeding ground. The first set of photos, taken in the mid-1980s, shows lush verdant foliage, Amazonian in its richness. The second, taken just ten years later in the same locations, shows a landscape of death, utter defoliation, barren, eroded dirt slopes with hardly a bush or a tree to be seen. “Like in Vietnam,” says Cruz, “after they used Agent Orange.”
It was the shock of such devastation that prompted the Darwin Foundation, through both the Station and the National Park, to launch an unprecedented counterattack on these animals. With funding from a group called the Global Environmental Facilities—a branch of the World Bank—funneled through an arm of the United Nations called the U.N. Development Project, the pieces are now almost in place for the most expansive and expensive governmental assault on wild animals in the history of man.
It will last for two years, with another year of follow-up study. It will use two helicopters brought in from either New Zealand or Australia—the bid is still out—with flight crews and sharpshooters supported by ground teams of Galápagos Park Rangers. It will cost $6 million. And in charge of it all is Felipé, who now steps outside into the midafternoon heat, lights another cigarette, and crosses a small dirt courtyard that leads to a bunkerlike building and a locked metal door. He pulls out a key with the pride of a parent showing off a new baby.
Inside is an arsenal worthy of Patton.
Eight AR-15.223-caliber semiautomatic rifles, each in its own cushioned carrying case—“a military-caliber, assault-type weapon,” says Felipé, lifting one of the gleaming, unfired long-guns from its container. “Very efficient.”
Eight Benelli twelve-gauge shotguns with “box-shot” ammunition—“just one big piece of lead,” he says, pulling one of the shells from its carton and flipping it into the air, “rather than many small pellets.”
Four dozen Ruger .223-caliber, bolt-action rifles—“for the ground crews,” he says.
He opens a closet containing hundreds of boxes of bullets. He pulls down from a shelf one of twelve velvet-soft sacks, each containing a sleek rifle scope. On wooden, warehouselike shelving that runs from one end of the room to the other are arranged dozens of pairs of gleaming black combat boots, radio chargers, portable generators, solar panels, sleeping bags, cases of insect spray, GPS monitors—all that his rangers could possibly need as they work their way over those hills and ravines, shooting every goat they see.
“This is the largest area in the world where an eradication program has ever been attempted,” says Felipé. “And I know we are going to get hell for it. That is what happened in Hawaii, where they had a tremendous problem with feral pigs. They used snare traps there, and the animal rights people were very upset.”
He steps back outside, locks the door, and lights another cigarette. “I know these animal rights people are going to try to do some hassle with us,” he says. “They want more humane ways of killing these animals? Come on! I mean, pigs are not human. Goats are not human. And the point is, they don’t belong here. Look at the damage they’re doing.”
He shakes his head. “Let’s be real, man.”
He takes a seat back on the table behind his office, gazing up at the hills, where a bank of cottony cumulus clouds have now gathered. It’s funny, he says, that someone like himself should become a target of animal lovers. No one has lived with and loves wild animals more than he.
“Being a naturalist,” he says, waving an arm at the landscape before him, “it’s in my blood.”
And in his brother’s. And in the blood of the other ten children raised by Emma and Eliecer Cruz Sr. on the island of Floreana.
Floreana. To Galápagos tour groups with nothing to go on but their guidebooks, this southern island with the lyrical name is known for two things: the beach-mounted mailbox used by David Porter’s warship, the Essex, during the War of 1812 (a replica of that box still stands on the same spot today, offering visitors a novel way to mail a postcard home), and the scandalous multiple murders that transpired there in the mid-1930s. The tale of those murders—of nude farming, sex slaves, and poisoned meat—is told eagerly to enraptured tourists by guides who embellish its edges with their own imaginations. As with many such stories massaged over time by both memory and myth, it’s hard to tell where fact blurs into fiction.
This much is known: A Berlin doctor named Friedrich Ritter, along with his lover, a woman named Dore Koerwin Strauch, left Germany in 1929, bound for the Galápagos, about which Ritter had read in a best-selling book of the time called Galápagos: World’s End. Published in 1923 by a writer named William Beebe, that book brought more attention to these islands than anything that had come before it, including Darwin’s writings. Beebe painted a portrait of a tropical paradise, albeit with a few unpleasant realities; still, more than a few readers envisioned a heaven on earth. It was Beebe’s book that lured the first Norwegians to the Galápagos in the 1920s, and it had the same effect on Dr. Ritter.
A vegetarian, nudist, disciple of Nietzsche, student of Lao Tzu, and an avid astrologer, Friedrich Ritter had decided by the late 1920s that Berlin was not for him. Nor was Germany or Europe or any place on the planet where people were living. He was sick of society and envisioned life as an Adam in his own self-made Eden. So he sought out an Eve, whom he found in a former patient, Dore Koerwin Strauch.
Strauch happened to be married at the time, as was Ritter. But their utopian vision overwhelmed such a minor inconvenience. They informed their respective mates that they were leaving for the Galápagos Islands and offered the somewhat stunned spouses an invitation to come along if they’d like. Ritter’s wife and Strauch’s husband, not surprisingly, refused, and so the doctor and his lover turned to their preparations, which, according to some accounts, included the forty-eight-year-old Ritter pulling out all his teeth and forging himself a set of stainless steel dentures. He intended this to be a permanent stay.
It turned out to be, at least for the doctor. It wasn’t easy carving a farm and a home on the slopes of a dorment volcanano in Floreana’s tangled highlands. When the couple arrived, they soon learned why this island, which had once housed a penal colony, was now uninhabited. Wild cows, bulls, and pigs—the progeny of the animals once raised by the prisoners—feasted on whatever Ritter and Strauch tried to grow. When the couple built fences, the animals tore them apart. True to his vegetarian beliefs, Ritter had brought no weapons. But he had brought cases of dynamite to blast the volcanic rocks from the fields he was planning to farm. He soon found that the explosives were handy for blasting wild animals, too.
But nothing could hold off the mosquitoes, cockroaches, and ants that infested the couple’s home. The house itself, a geodesic dome of sorts built of logs cut from the surrounding forest, looked fine, solid, positively Germanic—until the first rainy season arrived. The logs warped, green shoots began to sprout from the walls, and tree branches grew up from the floors.
Still, with time the couple settled into their Eden and began to enjoy the fruits of success: bananas, papayas, oranges, coconuts, guavas, lemons, pineapples, and plums, all of which grew abundantly in the soil Ritter was able to clear. Vegetables were plentiful, too, as was fresh water from a trickling spring. They called their rustic estate Friedo—a combination of the couple’s first names. Flush with prosperity, they began writing letters back home, which were delivered by sailors and yachtsmen who passed through the islands.
The Berlin press, which was well aware of the doctor’s scandalous departure, eagerly published the accounts, which soon drew curious visitors to the island to see the place for themselves. Among the first was an Englishman named J. F. Schimpff, who for a time lived in a cave not far from Ritter and Strauch. Schimpff wrote of his experience in a 1932 article published in a magazine called American Weekly:
Naturally I felt somewhat embarrassed at intruding on these people, and thought it best to announce myself. I did this by singing the German national anthem, in honor of the fact that Dr. Ritter is from Berlin, and his Eve, Dora Koerwin, I had heard, was the wife of a Dresden school teacher. Before I had finished the second line, two absolutely naked figures, beautifully tanned, ran out of the roundhouse, stared at me a moment with open mouths, and then darted back again.
…The doctor soon reappeared, dressed in canvas pants and a white shirt. Eve soon followed in a light blue cotton dress, under which there was nothing but Eve.
…Afterward I learned that this Adam had also paused to insert his false teeth…. I have read of savages losing their wits at the sight of a white man taking out his glass eye—well, these teeth had almost that effect on me. They were not made of porcelain, to resemble human teeth, but of glittering stainless steel.
Visitors were the last thing Ritter wanted. He treated guests rudely, but they continued to come to check out what a Time magazine reporter at the time described as “a free-love, back-to-nature colony.” Most of the visitors quickly left, turned away by the island’s brutal realities or by the brutal temper of the good doctor himself.
In the late summer of 1932, a German named Heinz Wittmer and his young wife, Margaret, arrived on the island and stayed. They built a home far enough from the Ritter estate that the doctor was not too disturbed. Less than three months later, however, in the autumn of that same year, a newcomer arrived who would turn out to be more than merely disturbing to both the doctor and Strauch, as well as the Wittmers.
She called herself a baroness, though her credentials were suspect and never confirmed. A Newsweek magazine account of this woman’s arrival on Floreana—culled from reports relayed by passers-through to the islands, as most Galápagos news was at this time—reads like pulp fiction, with the hint of a titter on the part of the writer:
The most recent newcomer is not even mildly annoyed by Ritter snubbings. She is Baroness Bousequet de Wagner of Vienna. With her she brought three men known only as Philipson, Alonzo, and Arends.
As she stepped ashore, the Baroness removed all her clothing except a pair of pink silk panties, flourished a .22 caliber revolver, and proclaimed herself Empress of Floreana. Since she had the revolver and no one else wanted to be Empress, her reign is undisputed.
Ecuadorian officials, sent to investigate strange goings-on, were shocked when they first saw the Empress. They caught their breath a second time when they found the Ritters wearing nothing but hip boots to keep thorn bushes from scratching their legs. When the investigators submitted their report, Ecuadorian Government officials sadly shook their heads, carefully put the report away, and forgot about the whole matter.
The matter, however, was far from concluded. Over the course of the next year and a half, the friction among the neighbors increased. The baroness built her own highland dwelling, not far from Friedo, and gave her place a much more dramatic—and, she hoped, commercial—name: Hacienda Paraiso. Never mind that the hacienda was in fact hardly more than a hut. The baroness had plans to build a resort hotel here, to turn Floreana into “a sort of Miami,” as she put it in a quote published in Newsweek.
She never got quite that far. In November of 1934, two years after the baroness’ arrival, a news report burst from the Galápagos Islands that both shocked and captivated the world’s reading public. The remains of two bodies had been discovered on a beach of an island called Marchena, 120 miles north of Floreana. Photographs of the small, shriveled corpses, cooked by the sun and curled up like mummies on the black lava sand, were dispatched to newspapers and magazines throughout Europe and the United States. A flurry of news stories soon followed in publications ranging from the Los Angeles Times to the Times of London to the great, gray New York Times, each rife with speculations about the identities of the bodies and whispers of murders of passion on this tropical island.
Over the ensuing weeks, a string of facts began to emerge from the fog of innuendo and rumor. A long-running feud had indeed developed among the baroness and her neighbors. The woman had clashed with both Ritter and Strauch, and with the Wittmers as well. To make matters worse, the doctor and his mate were not the best of friends with their neighbors, the Wittmers.
Events had begun escalating when one of the baroness’ housemates, the man they had called Arends, was wounded in late 1933 in an unexplained shooting accident and was evacuated from the island. The following spring, in late March or April, the baroness vanished along with her housemate Philippson (whose name now had three ps in updated news reports). That July, the baroness’ third housemate, the aforementioned Alonzo—now identified as Rudolf Lorenz—turned up missing as well. Finally, that December, not long after the discovery of the bodies on the Marchena beach, Dr. Ritter fell dead from a sudden case of botulism after eating, of all things, a pot of bad chicken.
The string of strange deaths prompted wild speculations and questions that remain unanswered to this day—questions not only encouraged by guides and debated by tour groups, but also explored over the years by a slew of would-be detectives and novelists.
Among the most obvious puzzles: What happened to the baroness and Philippson? Were they lost? (This is quite possible in a place such as this.) Or were they killed in an accident? (This is just as conceivable.) Did they commit suicide? The baroness, according to both Dore Strauch and Margaret Wittmer, who were questioned by government investigators in the wake of the deaths, had grown increasingly distraught as her vision of a booming resort on this island faded with each passing month. Suicide was not out of the question.
Or were the pair murdered? If so, by whom? Lorenz emerged as the prime suspect here. He and the baroness’ other two housemates had, in Strauch’s words, been “slaves to the woman, even to the extent of sleeping together with her in one bed when commanded to do so.” After the exit of Arends, Lorenz had apparently been rejected in favor of Philippson, and in a fit of jealous rage might have murdered them both.
This would explain Lorenz’s hasty departure that July. In an agitated state, he managed to hail a passing Galápagan fisherman and persuaded the sailor to give him a lift. No one will ever know Lorenz’s ultimate destination. A heavy sea blew the small boat off course, its motor failed, and then the wind stopped, leaving Lorenz and the unfortunate fisherman at the mercy of the tides and sun. These were the two bodies found that November on the sand of Marchena.
As for the death of Dr. Ritter, the first question everyone asks is, How in the world did this avowed vegetarian wind up eating a plate of cooked chicken? It turned out, according to Strauch, that the doctor was a closet meat eater and had been for years. He had potted that fatal chicken himself and ate it with relish the day before he died.
Strauch herself was a suspect in this one. Margaret Wittmer, who had seen Strauch and the doctor squabbling many times over the years, arrived at Ritter’s bedside during the man’s final hours and witnessed, at least according to her account, Ritter cursing Strauch with his last dying breath.
Strauch’s account differs. It throws the light of suspicion on Frau Wittmer, who had had her own run-ins with the doctor several times, at least according to Strauch.
Dore Strauch left Floreana that December of 1934 and sailed home to Germany, where she wrote a book on the affair, titled Satan Comes to Eden. Margaret Wittmer wrote a book of her own, Floreana, which is still sold today in the souvenir shops in Puerto Ayora. Frau Wittmer will sign a copy for the occasional tourist lucky enough to catch the old woman at the small seaside hotel that her family still runs on the same Floreana beach that Margaret and Heinz first arrived at in 1932.
The hotel was built in the late 1940s with the best of the pine from the air base at Baltra. Some tourists today mistake the elderly woman who serves meals on the hotel’s screened-in patio for Margaret, but that’s actually her daughter, Floreanita, born here in 1937. Margaret’s upstairs in bed most of the time. She’s in her nineties and not doing well.
Floreana remains to this day little more than a remote outpost, the smallest by far of the four Galápagos Islands where people are permitted to live. Fewer than eighty souls make their home in the island’s seaside village of Puerto Velasco Ibarra. Most of them are Ecuadorians who have drifted here over the past several decades, settling into a cluster of small houses arrayed near the shore, around the Wittmers’ hotel, by the village’s simple cement wharf. Some of them fish. Some of them farm. And one of them emerges from a house near the wharf when the whine of a boat engine tells him visitors are arriving.
His name’s Walter, he’ll tell you, extending his hand as he helps tie up your boat. Walter Cruz. He looks like a native, an old-time islander with a thatch of white hair on his darkly tanned chest and a salt-and-pepper beard and wild random curls framing his round, ruddy face. But he sounds like an American, which he might as well be, after spending the past two dozen years in Miami. He just returned to Floreana last month, two days after Christmas, to resettle this house by the beach and a farm in the highlands, the place where he and his siblings grew up.
Walter knows they think he’s gone nuts, his younger brothers Felipé and Eliecer and the others. They can’t understand why Walter’s come back to this island at this stage in his life. He’s fifty-four, with a wife and two kids and a professional career in America. What in the world, they all want to know, is he doing back here?
“I know, it seems crazy,” he says, leading the way up to his house. But his children are grown, he explains. And his wife, a schoolteacher, will soon join him when she wraps up her obligations back in Miami. As for that professional career of his, well, fixing boat engines for wealthy yacht owners around Biscayne Bay might have fattened his wallet, but it did not feed his soul.
“I just couldn’t take it anymore,” he says, walking barefoot and shirtless across the dirt of his yard. “The city life, driving a car every day, running the rat race. I’m not made for that. Now this,” he says, lifting a coconut from a pile drying out at the end of his porch. “I am made for this,” he says, hacking the fruit open with a heavy machete.
A vehicle appears off in the distance, churning up dust as it descends from the highlands. It’s a four-wheel-drive Jeep with a man at the wheel: Walter’s younger brother Claudio. The three little boys chasing each other around the back of the house are Claudio’s kids. Walter has to explain this because, unlike himself, Claudio—the eighth of the Cruz children, born just after Felipé—has never moved off this island and speaks only Spanish.
The Jeep pulls up to the house, the engine shuts off, and the boys rush out to leap into the arms of their father. Whereas Walter is short, Claudio stands tall. Whereas Walter is thick, his brother is thin. Whereas Walter’s beard is speckled with gray, Claudio’s is black through and through. But they share the same wide, easy smile.
“Twice a day he goes up to the farm,” explains Walter, as Claudio and the boys head into the house. “The rest of the time he’s down here,” meaning the village with its seventy-five residents.
“Seventy-six,” Walter says, “counting me.”
There’s not much to this community, just three dirt lanes, a single small schoolhouse, the Wittmers’ hotel, and the homes, which are laid out along a mile of waterfront. There are a couple of power lines, fed by a generator in a small building down by the beach, that Claudio tends when he’s not up at the farm. “He’s the technician,” says Walter, not just for the village’s electrical system but for Floreana’s telephone system as well, which last month expanded from one phone line to eight. “Hey,” Walter laughs, “we don’t have to line up to make outgoing calls anymore. Now we can even call each other.”
Walter’s laughter is brief. Those new telephone lines are a harbinger of more changes to come. There is talk that an airstrip might soon be put in for Park Service use, which has most Floreanans quite excited. “They think it’s fantastic,” Walter says. “But I don’t like it. I’m probably the only one opposed to it.” He draws a deep breath and smiles.
“But then,” he says, “I was one of the few idiots against putting that road across Santa Cruz.” Another deep breath.
“But then,” he says, “look what has happened to the Galápagos after they built that.”
Walter and Claudio are all that’s left here of the clan that some argue is truly the first family of Floreana, perhaps even the first family of the entire Galápagos. Enough of the Wittmers, they say. They’re history. And the Angermeyers as well. Now the Cruzes, they say, there’s a family that has really made something of themselves. Look at Eliecer and Felipé and their Park Service success. And their brother Augusto—Georgina Cruz’s husband, the father of Sebas—look at that cattle farm Augusto and Georgina have got over on Santa Cruz, and their own tour boat business and the beautiful house they live in above the barranco, perched right there on the harbor, looking down at the town.
Even Walter’s is a success story of sorts, how he was one of the island’s first tour guides, helping lay out and mark the first landing sites and Park Service trails back in the ’60s and ’70s. And how he worked with the scientists up at the Station and how he finally met his wife and moved with her to Miami.
So maybe Walter knows what he’s doing, coming back here to the island this way. He certainly seems to be happy, hiking down to the water at lunchtime and grabbing a couple of lobsters with his bare hands, bringing them back to the house and sautéing the buttery meat on his small kitchen stove. It doesn’t take much to get him to drive you up to the chacra—the farm, which happens to be the old Ritter estate. The drive is a rough one, on a gravel and dirt road rutted by rain. It takes a while to get up there, which gives Walter time to tell his family’s story—or at least a small part of it.
It begins, naturally, with the patriarch, Eliecer Cruz Sr. He was born, says Walter, in the Ecuadorian province of Ibarra in 1916. After finishing school, he went to work as a typographer in Quito. “But he didn’t like sitting in an office,” says Walter, “so he went looking for adventure.”
He found it for a while in the early 1930s working a farm in the northernmost coastal province of Esmeraldas. One day, however, a wealthy landowner showed up and told Eliecer, as wealthy men often did at that time, that this land was rightfully his, not Eliecer’s.
“What could he do?” Walter asks. “There was nothing he could do. But my father had heard of the Galápagos, and so he came here.”
That was in 1935. Eliecer spent two years fishing on San Cristobal, then sailed over to Floreana to try his hand once again at working the land. It was now 1937, three years after the baroness mess had blown over. There were only three families on the island at that time: an American couple named Conway, the Wittmers, of course, and an Ecuadorian named Zavala with his wife and children. “Them,” Walter says, “and from time to time a few soldiers.”
He downshifts and slows and turns off the road onto a rugged dirt drive sprinkled with fresh horse droppings. The surrounding gullies and brush resemble Texas hill country. Ahead is a makeshift barbed wire fence, a thick stand of trees, and a small wooden gate. Walter parks the truck, climbs out, opens the gate, and steps into…paradise.
High-arching scalesia and acacia branches drape cool shadows over a well-tended path rimmed by pink and white pansies. A freshwater rill trickles through a carpet of emerald ferns and moist, spongy mosses. Splashing the greenness are bursts of roses, dahlias, and lilies. Blood-red hibiscus, pink bougainvillea, and broad, green banana leaves point the way up the slope to a small, one-story house ringed by fruit trees—papayas, mangoes, guavas, and plums. The house was built by Walter’s uncle, Eduardo, in the late 1950s, on the same soil Ritter and Strauch had cleared decades before. These flowers were theirs. They planted the fruit trees. But the only trace left of their actual hands is a small mound of vine-covered stones and a rough wooden cross up past the plum orchard, in the dark of the forest beyond the barbed-wire fence. A barely legible number is etched into one of the stones: 1934.
“Dr. Ritter,” says Walter. “That’s where he’s buried.”
By the time Eliecer Cruz Sr. fetched his wife, Emma, and brought her to this farm in the late 1930s and they had their first baby, Walter, in 1945, Ritter and Strauch and all the others were ghosts. That’s how Walter remembers the stories of these strange German people who once lived here. To him they were ghost stories.
But Frau Wittmer was no ghost. The photo of Hitler that hung in her living room in the late 1930s was taken down by the time Walter was born. But Mrs. Wittmer was just moving into the prime of her life, and she became Walter’s flesh-and-blood godmother. “She convinced my mother to call me Valter,” he says, grabbing a ripe plum from a low-hanging branch. “Valter, Valter, Valter. I finally said ‘I don’t like Valter. My name’s Walter.’”
Once he was born, he says, it was as if the floodgates were opened for Eliecer and Emma. The babies kept coming. And coming. And coming. “It got to a point where I said, when is this going to end?”
It ended with twelve, enough little Cruzes to keep the place going. The family raised livestock. They grew corn and cabbage and carrots and coffee. After a while they became fishermen, too, trading some cows for a boat and an engine. “A Briggs and Stratton,” says Walter. “Three-horsepower, bronze shaft, homemade prop, direct-forward drive, no neutral, no reverse. Just crank up the engine and go.”
There was no formal tourism yet, but the occasional yacht would pass through, and little Walter would run down with a sack of fresh oranges and trade them for bullets for his .22 rifle. He could speak English, which stunned more than a few of the yachtsmen, this barefooted Ecuadorian island boy chatting them up.
“My Uncle Eduardo taught me,” he says. “He learned by reading books. He had cases of books, a very literate man. I said if my uncle can learn English like this, from just reading a dictionary, so can I.”
Until he was ten Walter was homeschooled by his uncle, his mother, and sometimes Margaret Wittmer. Then he began taking classes in the small port-captain’s building down by the beach. The port captain was the only government official at the time on the island, the only one other than Eliecer Sr., who, because of his reputation throughout the Galápagos and because of the respect of his neighbors, had early on been named Floreana’s intendente—a loose blend of mayor and judge. One of his first official acts was to throw the police off the island.
“They were more trouble than anything else,” Walter says. “All they did was grow grapes and get drunk and fight. My father finally kicked them out. He said we don’t need any police here. And the government agreed.”
There are photos of Walter’s father all over this house, old, faded snapshots of a bony, barefoot, shaggy-haired man with a beard just like Robinson Crusoe’s, eyes as warm as the sun and a smile even warmer. In most of the photos he stands beside a short, portly woman, caressing her as if they are teenage lovers. Eliecer never left Emma, not even for a quick chore, says Walter, without kissing her full on the mouth. “You’ve never seen two people who loved each other so much.”
In the spring of 1956, near the end of Walter’s first year in the port captain’s “classroom,” two Ecuadorian Navy warships showed up off the island’s shoreline. The massive vessels dropped anchor, and one sent a motor launch into the village. Aboard the launch was the nation’s president, His Excellency Dr. Valasco Ibarra, whose name would soon be given to this village.
“They had us line up to greet him,” Walter recalls. “Eight kids. We sang the national anthem to him. Then he took my sister Rita out of the line and said, ‘I promise you a schoolhouse.’”
They eventually got it, though it took several years. “The materials were first shipped to San Cristobal,” says Walter. “And they stayed there for quite a long time, until my father finally traded some of our cattle to get the stuff here.”
There were other Ecuadorian presidents after Ibarra who dropped in at Floreana over the years. Celebrities stopped in as well—movie stars, sports heroes, all eager to meet these islanders, Emma and Eliecer Cruz, who became celebrities of sorts themselves. They were fun to sit with and laugh and drink a glass of Emma’s famous vino de naranja— orange wine. In 1970, she carried a jug of the wine with her, along with some jars of plum marmalade, when she went to the mainland to visit the leader of the nation’s new ruling military junta at the time, a general named Rodriguez Lara. “Everyone,” says Walter, “loved my mother’s wine.”
The year he turned nineteen, Walter’s life was changed by a visit to Floreana from some scientists from the Research Station on Santa Cruz. Among them was Dr. Robert Bowman, the American who had been one of the Station’s earliest trailblazers. Beside Bowman was a geologist from Berkeley named Alan Cox. Cox asked Walter if he’d like to work with him as a field assistant. “The next thing you know,” Walter says, “I was out on the islands drilling holes in solid lava sites for core samples. You can still see my little holes here and there.”
Walter moved to Santa Cruz later that year, 1965, and lived in the highlands with old Mrs. Hornemann on her family farm. “Mutti,” he says. “She was my second mother.” When he wasn’t out drilling with Cox, Walter earned extra cash guiding small groups up to the tortoise reserve in the Santa Cruz highlands, an all-day trip by horseback from Academy Bay.
By the late 1960s Walter had hooked up with Karl Angermeyer and began taking some of the first tour groups out onto the islands. “We decided where were the best places to take the people, then we went there,” Walter says. “A lot of the trails the tour groups use today, we made them back then.”
He worked on tour boats—the Lina, the Iguana, the Encantada—into the mid-1970s, which is when he ran into a particularly difficult pair of clients, a couple from France. “They were the first vegetarian passengers we had ever had. I can tell you, they were a pain in the ass.” The husband spent each day off taking photographs while the wife wound up hanging around Walter. “They left, and the next thing I knew, I received a letter from her, from New York. I almost didn’t answer it. This crazy passenger. And she was married.”
He answered the letter. One thing led to another. And by the following summer, the woman was back in the Galápagos, this time as a crew member aboard Walter’s boat. A year after that the two were married and she became pregnant. A year after that, in November of 1976, they moved to Miami.
“Which pretty much brings us to where we are now,” Walter says, taking a bite of the plum. He’s done with the tour. It’s starting to cloud up. By the time he’s back down by the beach, the rain’s falling in sheets.
He hustles inside the house, where Claudio’s boys are watching TV. There’s lobster left in the fridge, which Walter pulls out and broils. The boys have no interest. “They don’t like lobster, they’re sick of it,” says Walter. “They’d rather have eggs.”
Which Claudio is frying right now.
Then everyone sits. The men eat their lobster, and the boys eat their eggs.
The afternoon rain that’s moved down from the mountains sets the village palms swaying. It wets down the dust and sweeps over the rooftops of this house, of the others, and of the hotel down by the beach, where Margaret Wittmer lies sleeping.