philopatry
The little boat bobbed on the waves like a crimson bathtub toy. I’d never been to sea. In fact, apart from a handful of childhood afternoons spent building sandcastles at the Oregon coast, the ocean was a foreign landscape. Peeling a banana, I dangled my feet over the edge of the bow and watched the waves crest and subside. Salty soap bubbles in a limitless landscape. We’d been sterilized at the border and I could still smell the insecticide on my clothing as I dug through my new Patagonia duffle bag to look for my camera. Someone nudged me from behind. It was Rob Jensen, biology teacher and academic coordinator of our expedition. “Land-ho little buddy,” he said pointing into the distance.
At face value, the Galapagos are not the most stunning of islands. Dry and shrubby, the primary vegetation is an endemic species of wrinkly cactus, slightly resembling a mangled pipe organ. Much of the intrigue seems to come from the field notebooks of Charles Darwin, and the tourist idea a biological Eden erupting from the ocean to flourish in uncorrupted isolation. We’d come to work with sea turtles. Seven disheveled teenagers and one overwhelmed professor from Montana who, for one reason or another, had run away from February and were now standing knee deep in surf, unloading plastic containers of potable water from a rented fishing craft. I gazed around at the mangrove choked beach and licked the salt from my lips as I struggled to absorb the distance.
Suddenly a man burst into view, hurtling down the steep bank of the tideline. He was barefoot, shirtless and absurdly tanned; and flapped his arms animatedly while shouting out greetings in lisping Spanish. This was David (pronounced Daveed); one of our two resident instructors who would spend the next twelve days teaching us how to tag and measure nesting turtles, identify native species, and cook with a gourmet selection of rice, canned tuna, tinned fruit and canola oil. Rushing into the waves he thrust out a hand in greeting then tossed my duffel bag over his shoulder and headed off towards camp. I paused, it was late in the afternoon and the shadows were just beginning to lengthen behind the three wall tarp structure which was to serve as our kitchen, classroom, and makeshift research station for the next two weeks. It also happened to be the single source of shade on the entire island.
For two weeks we slept in tents, ate Cliff Bars and rice, rationed water, and radioed the main station on Santa Cruz each evening to let them know we were alive. During the day we learned about turtles, tides and the ecology of the islands; played frisbee on an abandoned airplane runway and complied our field data for later use by the Charles Darwin Research Center. Often, we would spot passing yachts, and sometimes an occasional cruise boat. The Parque Nacional Galapagos is reserved space. It belongs to the finch, the cactus, the marine iguana, the land tortoise, and the blue footed boobie; and the ratio of protected park zone to human use area is extremely small. Visitors pay an access fee of $100 to see alot of water. They are allowed off their boats long enough to be hustled from one end of a crowded boardwalk to another and to snap a few pictures of penguins or interesting rock formations along the way, before being hurried back to a fish lunch onboard their seaborne versions of the RV camper. I found this all mildly amusing, particularly from the vantage point of my little pocket of geologic uplift. At night we ate dinner on the beach. Rob figured out a way to filter his iPod through the shortwave radio, and our evenings were full of Eva Cassidy and the Gipsy Kings. We talked about extremes, and David and Ashley told us stories about their previous jobs while Rob chimed in with anecdotes from his time as a Peace Corps field biologist. After clearing up the dishes, we filled our thermoses with hot coffee, pulled on shoes and jackets, and set out on patrol.
The nesting sea turtle is a remarkable creature. The female is philopatric, meaning that each nesting season she returns to the same beach from which she hatched in order to lay her own eggs. After mating in these native waters, the mother turtle hauls herself on to land (no small task for a 500-1,000 pound animal designed to be a swimmer), and crawls across the wet ground until she settles on a suitable patch of sand. Then, using her hind flippers, she begins to dig a three foot hole, a process which can take hours. Once the hole is dug, the turtle begins to lay, slowly filling the nest with hundreds of ping-pong ball shaped eggs. Once finished, she re-fills the nest with sand, sculpting and smoothing the surface until the nest is hidden. Finally, she returns to the sea without so much as a backward glance. The whole process requires immeasurable patience.
Every night we watched; internalizing the techniques that would allow us to take accurate data without disrupting the difficulty of such purpose. Sea turtles come ashore in darkness, always alone, and most often during high tide. We crisscrossed the beach beneath a full spectrum Milky Way, and kept an eye out for tracks along the inky shoreline; listening for the sound of tossing sand. Once we spotted a turtle we waited at a safe distance until the egg cavity was complete. At this point the turtle enters a sort of trance; undisturbed by the punch of a marking tag through the dorsal fin, or a tape measure unrolled along her shell. One of us would lay splayed out on our stomach with a red flashlight pointed into the hole counting off each individual egg as it dropped, while the other crouched with a pencil and a waterproof notebook taking down numbers. To sit at the base of a nesting sea turtle, to feel the grooves of her shell and softly murmur words of comfort as she struggles to lay hundreds of eggs is to be part of a living breathing, creation myth. And then it would be over, and the antediluvian mother would return to the freedom of inverted space.
We measured our nights in number of turtles and our days by the predictability of equatorial time. It was a rhythm that mirrored the temperature and the tide. And before we could contextualize our own identities within the immensity of this place, it was time to re- pack for the passage back to winter. Before tossing my bag into the boat, I remember tying a piece of flagging tape to the mast of our shelter, probably some Hindi quote like, “may all the beings in the world be happy an free.” The pink strip fluttered in the wind as I watched the island grow smaller against the horizon. And then it too was gone, slipping over the edge of the world.
The rest was a marathon of transportation. A fishing boat, a bus through the Santa Cruz highlands (with a sign posted on the window reminding us that “emergency have him the lever.”), a passenger ferry, and a mini plane to the mainland. Speeding through Quito on an airport shuttle, I fell asleep with my face pressed against the glass, waking just long enough to see a young boy urinating on the steps of a cathedral. And before I knew it, I was curled up in a chair at the Seattle airport, with a Vogue magazine propped against my lap, waiting out the layover and cleaning sand from the cracks behind my ears.
Somewhere along the way we’d shed the distinction of “tourist.” It may have happened when we entered the park, with our special permits and research notebooks; the qualifier left in quarantine with our foreign microbes. It may even have happened somewhere around baggage check at the Missoula airport. Yet more likely, the dependent was cast off when we finally returned home. Not because the landscape of the Galapagos had become comfortable or familiar in any measurable sense, far from it, in fact. It was simply because we had somehow produced a place of our own out of isolation and distance.
Email me when Geography Lessons publishes stories