Just another animal in the Galapagos
After two weeks in the Galapagos we’re back on the mainland. Back to the world of highways and supermarkets, too much rubbish and too little clean water. The archipelago, famously the source of inspiration for Darwin’s theory of evolution, is trembling with animal life on a scale that puts me in my place as a Homo sapien. The finches in all their variety. Giant tortoises. Marine iguanas and penguins. Creatures great and small that voyaged via unthinkable modes — floating masses of vegetation shrugged off the mainland and set adrift? An avian digression, felicitously rewarded?
More than it is a picture of Utopia — someplace separate and exceptional — the Galapagos Islands act as a beam of light through a prism: once refracted the rainbow spectrum is staggeringly visible.
For some, this place engenders a large sense of order. For me, it’s a bewildered sense of the super-natural.
Perhaps if I were a young scientist circumventing the globe in search or in question of the principles set before me, things would be different. But I’m not — I accept what I see. I am not here to turn over stones or formulate hypotheses. I take it as it comes: let the images and information wash over me like a gentle tide in a windless bay — some of it I absorb, some of it slides back into the infinite ocean of all there is to know.
Nevertheless, this is what I remember:
It’s our second to last day on Isla Isabella and the morning is overcast. A silver-gray mirror of sky and sea that hardly conjures ‘the tropics’. This is our second week in the Galapagos and our third and final island. It may seem antithetical but we are traveling here on a slim budget and this early morning visit to a free and accessible snorkelling spot is an example of our attempt at budget travel in the archipelago.
Here at Concha Perla, insulated from the ocean by a natural barrier of volcanic rock, is a perfect pool for snorkelling. Beyond it is yet another larger pool, but at low tide inadvisable for the sea urchins and rock growth you’d be forced to trample to reach it. We have the first pool to ourselves at this hour. I squeak on my wetsuit, shimmying and hopping into the nearly fifteen-year-old garment leftover from my early attempts at surfing. Nevertheless, I’m grateful to have it as the water is a chilly 20 degrees Celsius. I ease into the pool and swim to the other side past the shallows with the orange and black starfish to where parallel rocks create a channel and fish are cocooned during tides this low.
At first it’s the parrot fish that attract me. I’ve only ever seen one or two together — never schools of hundreds. I follow their unanimous, desultory flow, swimming back and forth with no discernible sense of why or where. Their sheen is a sultry silver-blue less punching than the blues of the parrot fish of the Indian Ocean; their crested gills are an inexplicable orange.
There are other fish I cannot name. One small, silver and yellow striped with a bit of black — reminiscent of moorish idols but lacking the streamer. One narrow three-inch-long with every color of an electric rainbow. A boxy puffed-out fish I’m not certain is either a box or a puffer fish. There is one blackish-purple with three indigo spots on its side. Such a particular beauty and purpose, though the latter I’m not sure serves anything but the former.
As I investigate the edges of the pool, where tangled roots of the mangroves anchor down, I see, coming straight for me — focused and unwavering — the black head and fore-bulk of a marine iguana. I wait, steadying myself on a rock with my finger. He swishes by with his incredibly adaptable equipment: streaming his ribbon tail, hands and feet suspended. No acknowledgement of me. Simply a slight acceleration when I attempt to trail his wake.
On the opposite end, while I have been stalking the iguana, a seal pup has honed in on a couple of snorkelers, only a few minutes wet. He is weaving around them, surging and abruptly back-flipping, spinning and accelerating with one powerful flap. I swim over and feel the water rush past. His round mammal eye meets mine. He turns on his back, belly at the surface, snout in-line with my own. He dives beneath me, behind me in what aimless pursuit I can only assume to be play. Creative movement like I’ve never seen let alone been some sort of instrument in, if only an object to circumvent. It is speed and grace, decisive action and originality, flamboyance and improvisation. I am not just witness but ungainly dance partner. Wonderstruck, happy. Hysterical and giggly. I want to say I surrender. But words are useless here in this vital, physical place. This perfect element for understanding I am a creature — just one rather unexceptional one — in a world so explosive, so beyond comprehension that I can only hope to dive in once in awhile. Feel my skin prickle or my breath quicken or my eyes, stung by radiance.
