A DESIRE TO PRESERVE a virtually undisturbed environment in the islands seems obsessive and unrealistic to some local villagers and farmers. Their pressing concerns are for food, a stable source of fresh water, and such things as raw building materials and supplementary income. (One encounters this basic difference in point of view, of course, with growing frequency in many countries -- around the game parks of East Africa, for example, or in the rain forests of Guatemala.) In Galápagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne's lace of stars in the moonless Galapagean sky, struggle toward accommodation with an elementary desire for material comfort. In Galápagos, however, the measure of accommodation is slightly different. Things of the mind and spirit exert more influence here because so many regard this archipelago as preeminently a terrain of the mind and spirit, a locus of biological thought and psychological rejuvenation. It represents the legacy of Charles Darwin, and the heritage of devotion to his thought.
The sheer strength alone of Darwin's insight into the development of biological life gently urges a visitor to be more than usually observant here -- to notice, say, that while the thirteen Galapagean finches are all roughly the same hue, it is possible to separate them according to marked differences in the shapes of their bills and feeding habits. The eye catches similar nuances elsewhere -- minor differences also separate eleven species of tortoise and fourteen species of scalesia tree. This close variety is tantalizing. Invariably, one begins to wonder why these related species look so much alike -- and an encounter with adaptive radiation, with what Darwin called "descent with modification," becomes inevitable.
A vague intellectual current meanders continually through Galápagos, an ever present musing one senses among a certain steady stream of visitors, if but faintly. Evolution, an elegantly simple perception, is clarified by exceedingly complex speculation; Darwin's heroic attempt to understand evolutionary change forms part of the atmospheric pressure in Galápagos. The idea that an elucidation of natural selection or genetic drift, mechanisms by which evolution might operate, could contribute to more than just a clearer understanding of the universe, that it might make humanity's place in it plainer, is never far off.
One has no need, of course, to know how natural selection might have directed their destinies to appreciate unadorned variety among Darwin's finches. The Galápagos penguin is no less startling, the turquoise eyes of the Galápagos cormorant no less riveting, for not knowing precisely how each might have evolved since it arrived. Nor is a visitor required to brood over the economic fate of farmers and villagers in Galápagos, while staring down into the wondrous blowhole of a dolphin riding the bow wave of a tour boat. But at the close of the twentieth century, not to turn to the complexities of evolution in a real place, to the metaphorical richness and utility of Darwin's thought, or to turn away from the economic aspirations of a local people, seems to risk much. Our knowledge of life is slim. The undisturbed landscapes are rapidly dwindling. And no plan has yet emerged for a kind of wealth that will satisfy all people.
AS I SAILED between the islands -- at dawn from the sea they look like heads of crows emerging from the ocean -- I dwelled on the anomalies. Subsistence hunters pursue feral cattle high on the Sierra Negra with dogs and snares, the same cattle that are pursued by packs of resident feral dogs. What meat they get they sell in Puerto Villamil for ninety cents a pound. From their mountain redoubt they watch the tour boats far below, streaming east along the coastal margin. The park's wardens work 350 days a year for $8,000, part of the time on twenty-day patrols in the arid, rugged interior, hunting down feral dogs and goats to purify the park. A young farmer, proud of his shrewdness, says he will grow a diversity of condiment crops on his small holding and so be in a strong and exclusive position to supply new restaurants which are sure to come to Puerto Ayora. I remember an afternoon sitting at the Darwin Research Station, reading formal descriptions of nearly a hundred scientific projects under way in the islands. What a concise presentation of the inexhaustible range of human inquiry, I thought, what invigorating evidence of the desire to understand.
The evening before I departed I stood on the rim of a lagoon on Isla Rabida. Flamingos rode on its dark surface like pink swans, apparently asleep. Small, curved feathers, shed from their breasts, drifted away from them over the water on a light breeze. I did not move for an hour. It was a moment of such peace, every troubled thread in a human spirit might have uncoiled and sorted itself into graceful order. Other flamingos stood in the shallows with diffident elegance in the falling light, not feeding but only staring off toward the ocean. They seemed a kind of animal I had never quite seen before.
I LEFT FOR QUITO with regrets. I had eaten the flesh of blue lobster and bacalao from Galápagos's waters and enjoyed prolonged moments of intimacy with the place; but I had not, as I had hoped, had the days to climb Volcán Alcedo, nor had I seen a shark or a violent thunderstorm. But I knew that I would be back. It was not the ethereal beauty of the flamingos, solely, or the dazzling appearance underwater of a school of blue-eyed damselfish that now pulled at me. It was the fastness of the archipelago, the fullness of its life; and the juxtaposition of violent death that signaled that more than scenery was here.
On the way to the Hotel Colón in Quito, the cabdriver spoke about Galápagos with resignation and yearning. A number of Ecuadorians think of Galápagos the way Americans once dreamed of the West -- a place where one might start life over, fresh. I told him about a young couple who had just opened a small restaurant on the hill above Puerto Ayora. I had had coffee there after a long hike. I sat by myself on the veranda, watching sunlight filter through the forest. Far in the distance I could see the pale ocean. I could hear birdsong, which sharpened an irrational feeling of allegiance, of fierce camaraderie, with the trees, the wild tortoises I had seen that afternoon, the vermilion flycatchers that had followed me.
As we threaded our way through heavy traffic and billowing diesel exhaust from the municipal buses, the driver asked what sorts of birds I had seen. I told him. The litany made him gesture at the traffic, the different makes of vehicle pinning us in, and led him to smile ruefully.
Por que quieres ir a las Galápagos? I asked. Why do you wish to go to Galápagos? For work? To buy a farm?
La paz, he said, turning to look at me, his thin, sharp face full of fervent belief. The peace.
Ah, Galápagos is not peaceful, I thought. It is full of the wild conflict that defines life. The groaning of the earth beneath fumaroles on Fermandina. Owl-dashed petrels. But what I reflected on wasn't what he meant at all. He meant a reprieve. Retreat. I thought to tell him, as I put the fare in his hand, of the flamingos at sunset on Rabida. People in Frankfurt and San Francisco, here in Quito, in Puerto Ayora, in Geneva, I wanted to assure him, are working to preserve such a retreat, a place out there in the ocean where men and women might gather themselves again. It would take wisdom and courtesy to effect a certain understanding between those who wish fewer people would come and those who want to see more. An understanding that what is beautiful and mysterious belongs to no one, is in fact a gift.
But these were my own feelings, too presuming. What came out of me, as I nodded gratitude for a desultory conversation in an unfamiliar city, was Hallar la paz, eso es sabio ... To go there to find peace, that is very wise.
About the writer
Barry Lopez, a National Book Award winner, is the author of "Arctic Dreams"; a book of essays, "Crossing Open Ground"; several story story collections and a novella-length fable, "Crow and Weasel." His work appears regularly in Harper's, the Georgia Review, Orion, the Paris Review and Manoa.
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