Wide-eyed in Galápagos
An award-winning writer explores the mind-stretching wonders and gut-wrenching terrors of an extraordinary land.
By Barry Lopez
Jan. 30, 2006 | Fog, melancholy as a rain-soaked dog, drifts through the highlands, beading my hair with moisture. On the path ahead a vermilion flycatcher, burning scarlet against the muted greens of the cloud forest, bursts up in flight. He flies to a space just over my head and flutters there furiously, an acrobatic stall, a tiny, wild commotion that hounds me down the muddy trail, until I pass beyond the small arena of his life. Soon another comes and leaves; and afterward another, tiny escorts on a narrow trail descending the forest.
I had not expected this, exactly. The day before, down below at the airstrip, I'd looked out over a seared lava plain at the thin, desultory cover of leafless brush and thought, In this slashing light there will be no peace. How odd now, this damp, cool stillness. Balsa and scalesia trees, festooned with liverworts and mosses, give on to stretches of grassland where tortoises graze. Blue-winged teal glide the surface of an overcast pond. The migrant fog opens on a flight of doves scribing a rise in the land, and then, like walls sliding, it seals them off.
Beneath this canopy of trees, my eyes free of the shrill burden of equatorial light, my cheeks cool as the underside of field stone -- I had not thought a day like this would come in Galápagos. I had thought, foolishly, only of the heat-dunned equator, of a remote, dragon-lair archipelago in the Pacific. I had been warned off any such refreshing scenes as these by what I had read. Since 1535 chroniclers have made it a point to mark these islands down as inhospitable, deserted stone blisters in a broad ocean, harboring no wealth of any sort. A French entrepreneur, M. de Beauchesne-Gouin, dismissed them tersely (and typically) in 1700: "la chose du monde la plus affreuse," the most horrible place on Earth. Melville, evoking images of holocaust and despair in "The Encantadas," viewed the Galapagean landscape as the aftermath of a penal colony. A visiting scientist wrote in 1924 that Isla Santa Cruz, where I now wandered, "made Purgatory look like the Elysian Fields."
Obviously, I reflected, feeling the heft of the mist against the back of my hands and the brightness of birdsong around me, our summaries were about to differ. And it was not solely because these writers had never ventured far inland, away from the bleak coasts. Singularly bent to other tasks -- commercial exploitation, embroidering on darkness in a literary narrative, compiling names in the sometimes inimical catalogs of science -- they had rendered the islands poorly for a visitor intent, as I was, on its anomalies, which by their irreducible contrariness reveal, finally, a real landscape.
GALÁPAGOS, an archipelago of thirteen large and six smaller islands and some forty exposed rocks and islets, occupies a portion of the eastern Pacific half the size of Maine. It lies on the equator, but oddly; the Humboldt Current, flowing up from the Antarctic Ocean, has brought penguins to live here amid tropical fish, but its coolness inhibits the growth of coral; and the fresh water streams and sandy beaches of, say, equatorial Curaçao or Martinique are not to be found here. The Galápagos are black shield volcanoes, broadly round massifs that rise symmetrically to collapsed summits, called calderas. Their lightly vegetated slopes incline like dark slabs of grit to cactus-strewn plains of lava. The plains, a lay of rubble like a storm-ripped ocean frozen at midnight, run to precipitous coasts of gray basalt, where one finds, occasionally, a soothing strip of coastal mangrove. Reptiles and birds, the primitive scaled and feathered alone, abound here; no deerlike, no foxlike, no harelike animal abides.
The tendency to dwell on the barrenness of the lowlands, and on the seeming reptilian witlessness of the tortoise, as many early observers did, or to diminish the landscape cavalierly as an "inglorious panorama" -- an ornithologist's words -- of Cretaceous beasts, was an inevitability, perhaps; but the notion founders on more than just the cloud forests of Santa Cruz. Pampas below many of the islands' calderas roll like English downs serenely to the horizon. Ingenious woodpecker finches pry beetle grubs from their woody chambers with cactus spines. The dawn voice of the dove is as plaintive here as in the streets of Cairo or Sao Paulo. Galápagos, the visitor soon becomes aware, has a kind of tenderness about it; its stern vulcanism, the Age of Dragons that persists here, eventually comes to seem benign rather than aberrant. The nobility that may occasionally mark a scarred human face gleams here. Biologists call Galápagos "exceptional" and "truly extraordinary" among the world's archipelagoes. They pay homage to its heritage by referring to it as "the Mount Sinai of island biogeography." But these insular landscapes give more than just scientific or historical pause. With flamingos stretched out in lugubrious flight over its fur seal grottoes, flows of magma orange as a New Mexican sunset percolating from its active volcanoes, towering ferns nodding in the wind like trees from the Carboniferous, and with its lanky packs of bat-eared, feral dogs some two hundred generations removed from human contact, Galápagos proves unruly to the imagination.
A departing visitor typically recalls being astonished here by the indifference of animals to human superiority. Sea lions continue to doze on the beach as you approach, even as you come to stand within inches of their noses. Their eyes open with no more alarm at your presence than were you parent to their dozing child. Mockingbirds snatch at your hair and worry your shoelaces -- you are to them but some odd amalgamation of nesting materials. While this "tameness" is not to be forgotten, and while it is an innocence that profoundly comforts the traveler, Galápagos imparts more important lessons, perhaps, about the chaos of life. A blue-footed booby chick, embraceable in its white down, stands squarely before an ocean breeze, wrestling comically with its new wings, like someone trying to fold a road map in a high wind. An emaciated sea lion pup, rudely shunned by the other adults, waits with resolute cheer for a mother who clearly will never return from the sea. You extend your fingers here to the damp, soft rims of orchids, blooming white on the flanks of dark volcanoes.
Next page: The giant tortoise