Tales of a Female Nomad (14 page)

The only way to see the animals in their environment is to visit them on
their
islands, islands where people are permitted only if they are touring on an Ecuadorian-registered boat with a government-certified guide. Islands where people are permitted only during the day. Islands that have paths where humans are permitted to walk. The Galápagos are well protected.

I make plans for Jan and me to take a two-week luxury tour, one that usually costs two hundred dollars per person per day. We are filling in the empty bunks and paying fifty dollars a day. I’m excited. I know Jan is going to love it.

Then, four days before she arrives, our luxury boat breaks down and the cruise is cancelled. So much for making reservations in advance.

It’s time to test the pick-up-tour method. A pick-up tour is what the more adventurous and longer term travelers do. Instead of booking a boat in advance through a travel agent, they just book airfare to the islands. No one meets them. Instead, they settle into one of the mediocre hotels and wander the plaza looking for others like them who want to put together a group for a tour. I’m going to wait for Jan’s arrival so we can find our pick-up group together.

I have to admit that being able to say to my kids “Come visit me in the Galápagos” makes me feel great (Mitch can’t get away). I like being able to introduce Jan to new worlds while enriching our relationship.

The day after her arrival, Jan and I go off to the square. We talk to everyone we see. By afternoon, we’ve found our passengers: two women from Sweden, an Englishman, an Israeli couple, an American couple just finished with their Peace Corp duty in Peru, and the two of us. It’s a good group. I’m the only one over thirty.

Together, the nine of us talk to various captains who are hanging around the dock. Finally, we book a seaworthy but slightly battered fishing boat that’s been turned into a cruise boat. Then I talk to a friend who is an official guide and she agrees to come with us. We leave the next day. The cost per person is twenty-five dollars a day.

The first day out, Jan dives off the boat and loses both of her contact lenses. The whole point of being in the Galápagos, of course, is to observe the animals, and Jan can barely see. Her glasses are back in Santa Cruz.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been called upon to sacrifice for my daughter; she’s been independent since the age of eighteen, and stubborn about accepting help from adults since the age of fourteen. But this is serious. There’s only one thing a mother can do.

It’s not quite like giving her a kidney, but it’s the best I can do in the circumstances. I have two lenses in my eyes and an extra one in my bag. I gallantly give her the extra lens . . . and the one in my right eye.
Voilà!
She can see again, albeit imperfectly since our prescriptions are not the same. I am only a little bit dizzy with one lens. And the blur disappears for both of us after two days. Somehow we are both able to adjust to our manufactured disabilities.

I have had two luxury trips before this one, both on the
Tigris,
a sleek sailing yacht. All the passengers on those trips were Americans who could afford $150 a day. And while the tours were great, on each tour there were at least two out of the six people who were unpleasant to be with. Some of my most vivid memories are of people not talking to people, others nonstop complaining, and one couple squabbling for two weeks.

This time we’re on a beat-up converted fishing boat; there are no romantic sails fluttering in the wind, and no hints of luxury. The group is mostly European; all except me are young; and not one of them could have afforded $150 a day. But the dynamics are sensational. We sing songs in four different languages and play charades in sign language, desperately trying to come up with universal clichés and proverbs. No one complains about anything or criticizes a fellow passenger.

Our food is mostly fish caught by the crew while we are visiting the islands, and cooked to perfection, simple and moist. One day, the crew goes off and shoots a wild goat for our dinner. Twice, at night, they dive and catch lobsters. And we snack more than once on sea urchins, fresh from the bottom of the sea. Papaya, potatoes,
plátanos,
pasta, and other assorted non-
p
dishes are turned into great dinners.

Maybe it’s being with Jan, maybe it’s the contagious exuberance of the young passengers, but this trip is pure joy. There is a part of me that can’t help but compare it to the hotel vs. backpacker syndrome. Do people who are spending more money have more brakes on their ability to have fun, are they more self-conscious, more demanding, more judgmental?

I’m the only one on the trip who is disappointed when the captain tells us that he is not planning to take us to Tower Island. I’m also the only one who knows what we’re missing. Tower has all the birds of the other islands, plus. It’s the plus that I fell in love with: hundreds of nesting frigatebirds.

A few hundred feet onto Tower Island from Darwin Bay is a flat area filled with trees and shrubs around four to eight feet high; and during the first six or so months of the year, there are spectacular great frigatebird colonies sitting on top of the vegetation. It’s the males who are spectacular, resting their heads on what look like bright red basketball-size balloons (technically called gular sacs).

Normally these balloons are the size of a turkey’s wattle, but when the male frigates want to attract a female, they blow up their balloons. When a female frigate flies overhead, the males turn their heads and wings upward, shake seductively, and cackle into the sky. The chorus of frigates sounds like a theme song from a witches’ convention.

Hearing the call, the female flies around, surveying her suiters, flapping to the chorus of the cackles. If she’s interested, she chooses one of the males and lands next to him. The rest of the birds stop cackling and go back to waiting. The “dating” pair do a short flirtation dance, waving their heads at each other, wiggling, the male shaking his balloon. Sometimes he puts his wing around her.

I have watched this ritual dozens of times on two visits to Tower, and I have never seen a female who liked what she saw. Once I watched for two hours as females flew over and males cackled and wiggled and wooed. Every time the female flew down, she flirted a bit, observed her suitor’s technique, and then flew off in search of something better. As soon as she gave up, the cackle chorus began again.

It was obvious, however, that some females had stayed long enough to make the fluffy, puffy white babies that were perched in the trees waiting for their parents to arrive with food, but I never did see a female who stayed.

On both of my visits to the Galápagos, Tower was the highlight of my trip. If there were no iguanas, no sea lions, no boobies, no finches in the Galápagos, the extraordinary frigates of Tower would be worth the trip.

I think about those frigates often. In addition to their comedic courtship, they are also spectacular fliers. I have seen frigates poking and pulling on a booby in midair until it drops the fish in its beak; then the frigate with its ten-foot wingspan and forked tail swoops down, and catches the food in midair. I often fantasize about coming back in my next life as a frigate, riding the wind, pestering boobies, getting cackled at by whole colonies of males shaking their red balloons at me.

So, when our captain explains that Tower Island is too far and too flat (too easy to miss without radar), I am disappointed. He tells us that the last times he tried to get there, the island was fogged in and he missed it completely. The group lost two days of their tour and never made it to Tower. None of us is willing to risk losing two of our ten days.

Then, one evening, three days into our journey, the captain sends for me. “You have a call.” A call? How exciting! This was before cell phones.

It’s José. He was part of the crew on my second
Tigris
trip, and he’s gone on to captain a very posh yacht. I happened to meet him in Santa Cruz a couple of days ago and I told him that my daughter and I would be touring on this boat. José tells me that he is moored just across the harbor from us. Would Jan and I like to come over for a drink? He’ll send someone to pick us up.

I have no idea what his daily rate is, but the boat is gorgeous: the wood paneling in the parlor is polished to a mirror finish, the staterooms are spacious, and the equipment is state of the art. While the passengers watch a movie on the VCR, the three of us talk and drink. José and I reminisce about his dalliance with one of the passengers on our last trip. When we leave, I ask José where he’s headed next. “We’re leaving for Tower in a couple of hours.”

His luxury craft is navigating by radar, he says, and he’d be happy to have us follow him.

I wake up our captain when I get back to our boat. He’s not too happy, but he gets on the line to José, and in a couple of hours, we’re off to Tower, following José. Most boats do the long distances at night while the passengers sleep. The islands are far apart and we’d miss too much if the traveling were done during the day. You get used to sleeping to the rumble of the motor, and when you wake up, you’re moored off another island.

Our pick-up trip is wonderful for everyone. The amazing experiences with the animals, the camaraderie, the sea. The singing and games and snorkeling. The fresh fish every day for dinner. When the trip is over, Jan and I are closer than we’ve ever been. Sharing friends and experiences, watching and enjoying each other in a new and intriguing setting, has brought our relationship to another level. We’ve become good friends.

When her three weeks are over, I return to the library for another week of research; and then, there’s one last experience I need in order to finish the book.

I want to write about the lives of the animals . . . around the clock. I’ve observed them during the daylight hours, but I’ve never been on an island at night. It isn’t allowed . . . except for scientists. My only chance is to get permission from the National Park Service. I go see them.

“No way,” they say, closing the subject before it is even opened.

There’s got to be a way, I think, and I go talk to some of the scientists. Turns out there’s a group of four Germans—three men and a woman— who are about to go off to one of the islands for several weeks to study marine iguana hatchlings that will emerge soon from white leathery eggs that were buried three months ago. I ask if I can join them for a week. It’s no problem for them.

I’m called in to talk to the head of the National Park Service. Under the sponsorship of the German iguana team, I’m given permission to go with them to the island and to stay for a week, not a minute longer. I promise— on my life—to be off the island after seven days. I don’t know at the time, but it’s a promise that will be almost impossible to fulfill.

Felipe makes arrangements for the interisland boat to pick me up after a week. He gives me a number to call via the scientists’ shortwave radio so I can confirm the day before. My return trip is set before I leave—day, time, and place.

The bay where we debark is on the side of the island where tourists never come. The team has been here before, when the iguanas were laying the eggs. One of the scientists gives me a little tour. He shows me a deep crevasse in the rocky cliff, about fifty yards away from where we set up camp. “Here’s where we shit,” I’m told. I peer down the crack, which is an opening in the rocks about three feet long, eight inches wide, and probably thirty feet deep. The roar of the ocean echoes from the depths.

The group sets up tents, including one for me, and they take out a grill and a tank of gas. We have meat that first night and rice and salad. I wander around looking for animals to observe. I want to know what the boobies do at night, what time they wake up, what noises they make. It’s a long walk to the booby colony. Maybe it’ll be enough to write about their early morning rituals, stretching and combing their feathers, and doing whatever else they do.

Close by camp, about a hundred yards away, is a sea lion colony. I’ll definitely spend a night watching and listening and sleeping with them.

One of the scientists and I talk until we go to sleep. He’s a hang glider back home, and he offers, if I come to Germany, to take me hang gliding. I like the idea.

It’s peaceful snuggled in my sleeping bag, listening to the waves crash into the rocks and to the bull sea lion honking every five minutes to let the world know that his harem is well protected. There’s an owl nearby and her hoot pierces the waves. I sleep soundly.

By the time I get out of my tent in the morning, there is a yeast bread cooking on the fire. Breakfast is bread, melted butter, and sliced, raw garlic. I try, but raw garlic in the morning makes me vomit. That’s something I never knew until now.

The next night I take my sleeping bag and spread it on the rocks next to the sea lions. The sky is flooded with stars; the moon is dark. I have my flashlight with me. There is a mother and her baby less than three feet away from me. They don’t seem to care at all that I am sleeping with them. They don’t even mind that every fifteen minutes I scan the area with my flashlight. The bull’s honking goes on all night long. Every now and then I hear a splash as one of the females dives into the water. A few minutes later, she waddles back up.

Another day, with the sun’s earliest rays, I wander over to watch the blue-footed boobies waking up. Seabirds, the boobies dive for their food, so they have to spend a lot of time waterproofing their feathers. At all times, in all booby colonies, birds are oiling their beaks by rubbing a gland just under their tailfeathers and spreading the oil onto their body feathers. In the early morning, every bird in the colony is oiling and combing. Frigates are seabirds too, but they don’t dive. They catch flying fish in the air, surface-swimming fish with their long beaks, and from time to time they do their pirate trick of stealing from the divers; but they don’t dive because their feathers are not sufficiently oily.

The week goes quickly. Then, the day before I’m supposed to leave, I get a call on the radio. The boat that is supposed to pick me up has broken down. It can’t pick me up for at least five days. I tell the person at the other end that I promised the National Park Service I’d be off this island tomorrow. He apologizes, but there’s nothing he can do.