NOTES FROM [what was] A FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD: Galapagos

The white stuff on the heads of marine iguanas is from spitting out salt.

It was December, the beginning of the warm season and at the cusp of the wet and really hot.  The water temperature was already 82 degrees.  (Don’t come here in February!)  Following on a couple of days in Quito we were on a 15-passenger ship that visited probably half (I lost count) of the 18 islands that make up the archipelago. Like everyone else before us, we were drawn there because of the unique wildlife of the Galapagos.  Darwin’s 1835 visit had put the place on the map for most of us.  We saw pelicans, boobies, sea lions, iguanas, penguins, tortoises and sea turtles practically within hours of our arrival, and crabs with the delightful name, sallylightfoot.  Snorkeling and panga rides later on added sharks, rays, many varieties of fish, more sea lions.

What interested me as much, maybe even more than the wildlife, was the cataclysmic geology and the human history minus Darwin.

A suggestion in rock and tuff of the cataclysmic shaping of the land.  Our ship peeks around the corner center right.

The land breaks apart

The new lava is only a thin layer

Puerto Villamil, one of the smaller towns

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

Errant winds brought the first human visitors to these volcanic islands.  Until the early 1500’s the fish and birds and reptiles had the place all to themselves.  Those were probably the Golden Years.  Except for the fluctuations of climate, occasional volcanic lava flows that burnt unsuspecting iguanas to a crisp or singed sea lions swept into hot water, life pretty much went on as it always had. Today 26,000 people live in the Galapagos.

A typical beach, with pelicans, sea turtle nests in the dunes

An old caldera in the highlands of Santa Cruz island

PLUNDER

It was publicity that put the islands on the map, literally.  Ships may have been blown off course for accidental visits in the early 1500’s or even before, but none left word of their impressions until 1535 when a ship aiming for Peru and carrying a notable, the Bishop of Panama, drifted to the islands, desperately short of water.  Water was then, as now, a rare commodity on the islands (the highlands are moist, but because the soil is so permeable hardly any of it remains on the surface) and after exploration of several islands water was eventually found.  The significance of his visit was the letter he sent to King Charles of Spain in which he described the islands.  (“Giant tortoises,” he wrote, “with shells shaped like riding saddles”––galapagos in Spanish.)  With that, the islands had been officially discovered.  It wasn’t long before there was a world map including “Insular de los Galapagos.” 

And it didn’t take long for commercial interests to find their way to the islands, especially Floreana because it was known to have water.  By the 1700’s the Galapagos had become a base for pirates.  (As the local name Buccaneer Cove reminds us.)  By the late 1700’s and well into the 1800’s pirates were largely replaced by whalers.  Herman Melville visited.  A cabin boy from the Nantucket whaler Essex, source material for Moby Dick, set fire to Floreana Island in 1819 in the dry season just for fun. It burned for days, if not weeks.  The first known permanent human resident on the Galapagos was an Irish sailor who was deposited onto Floreana Island by his whaling shipmates. Becoming virtually feral, he managed to survive for three years by growing vegetables and trading with visiting whalers before finally stealing an open boat and navigating the 500-plus miles to the mainland.   

In this pre-environmentally inclined world it was all there for the taking:  iguanas, birds, sea turtles, tortoises.  No creature offered resistance.  One of the amazing characteristics of giant tortoises is not only that they live incredibly long,* but that they can survive for many months without either food or water, inadvertently providing the ideal food storage material for ships sailing on what were often year-long voyages: Stack them in the hold and use as needed.  The tortoise population, once over 250,000, never recovered.  Making things worse, whalers introduced goats, letting them loose on several of the islands, the idea being to recover them as needed, another blow to the environment and tortoises in particular.  There are still goats on some islands.**

A gallery of a few non-human inhabitants:

Sea turtle, many of which we saw busy mating

An endemic (only in the Galapagos) flightless cormorant

Galapagos pelican

Young sea lions playing around in the shallows

A pair of sea lions taking up all the bench space at Puerto Ayala

Iguanas piling up to warm themselves in the sun.  Different islands have differently colored iguanas.

A so-far-unidentified starfish

Seven frigate birds flew overhead above the bow of our ship for hours.

Galapagos gulls at a nest, courting. We saw the male making forays to pick up small twigs to present to his mate. 

A Great Blue Heron.  Wait!  Could that be the one that migrated from our pond in September?

An iconic Galapagos resident, a domed tortoise seen in a sanctuary in the highlands of Santa Cruz.

***

A British whaler set up a mail barrel on Floreana Island in the 1700's.  That there was a need for an exchange of mail says much about the numbers of visiting ships in that day.  Anchoring ships were easily spotted from the hills behind what is now called Post Office Bay.  The barrel––replaced of course many times since the 1700’s––is today a drop-off for tourist postcards intended to be hand-delivered in the same spirit.

Adding some mail to the post office box at Post Office Bay, and taking several to deliver.

The nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was no kinder to the Galapagos.  Prisoners were sent there in the style of France's Devils Island.  Immigration from the mainland brought with it more building, overfishing, and introduced species like rats, cats (we saw one feral cat), and dogs.  Current invasives include fire ants, fruit flies, and a kind of wasp. 

Other miscellaneous insults to the islands included the US Navy using a few of them as a base to protect the Panama Canal during WWI.  Around that time Ecuador, pressed for cash, tried to sell the islands.  (Our guide said the current president had expressed a similar idea, only this time the potential buyer was China to which country Ecuador is indebted.)  During WWII the US Air Force used at least one lava cone for bombing practice.  Known as Pinnacle Rock, much of it still stands. 

Pinnacle Rock is the pointed peak at far right.  Snorkeled around it, from beach on one side to the beach on the other side.

BROKEN DREAMS


Publicity, beginning with the Bishop of Panama’s letter to the King of Spain, has rarely done the Galapagos any favors.  In the early 1900’s an article appeared in a Norwegian newspaper about the fishing potential in the islands.  Over 1,000 Norwegians soon showed up in the Galapagos to make their fortunes in the fishing industry.  By the end of their first year almost all of them had returned to Norway.  Stories about other potential money-making projects drew unsavory characters.  Some attempted to grow sugar cane and exploit lichen, others to mine guano and sulfur.  For one reason or another, all of these schemes ended in failure, even murder. 

All endemic flowers in the Galapagos are yellow.

We heard the following story (and watched a documentary on board ship about it.  It happened on Floreana): 

In 1929 an article appeared in a German newspaper about the Galapagos, this “paradise” at the far side of the world.  It attracted a couple that longed for an “Eden” where they could live apart from the rest of the civilized world, and, interestingly, apart from their respective spouses.  They were a strange pair:  Ritter, a doctor with the philosophy of Nietzsche on his mind, and Dora Strauch, his lover and devotee.  Newspaper stories back in Germany of their settlement on the island of Floreana attracted the attention of yet another family––the Wittmers, husband, pregnant wife, and teenage son––who also felt a desire to return to nature.  So two years later they too made their way to Floreana.  Alas, they did not make good neighbors, as the initial pair had not planned on having neighbors at all.  There were severe tensions right from the start.  All too soon a truly weird addition joined Into this emotional mix:  an Austrian “baroness” (self identified as such, but possibly a dancer in a previous life) arrived accompanied by three men, one an Ecuadorian laborer, two or perhaps all three of them her lovers.  Often brandishing a whip and a pistol she began to play a role as the self-proclaimed queen of Floreana, and announced plans for a luxury hotel for wealthy visitors.  This new addition to the population brought shock waves to the two already uneasy settlements.  

A view of Floreana.  Not the most welcoming place, but it has some water, a lava tube, and now a town of about 100 or so.

With the baroness’ encouragement, the journalists who arrived with each passing ship elaborated on her already fanciful stories that ended up featured in the tabloid newspapers of the time.  Yachters made efforts to stop at Floreana to see the place for themselves.  But no hotel or other facilities were being built at all.  No one else came to stay, only to gawk.  The complicated relationships of the three separate parties on the island began to grow increasingly uneasy, while simultaneously becoming intertwined.  There were arguments, acts of extreme hostility, yet at the same time there was socializing, filming of one another and posing for photos.  Lorenz, one of the baroness' lovers, began to align himself with the Wittmer family, informing them that he had become a slave in the baroness' household.  The Ecuadorian, meanwhile, had long since disappeared.  (Are you following this?)  One day Lorenz announced to the Wittmers that the baroness and her other lover had announced they were leaving for Tahiti on a passing ship.  No one had seen a ship, passing or otherwise.  The baroness and her lover were simply gone––disappeared.  Curiously, a scream had been heard the previous night, yet no one admitted to knowing anything.  In the baroness’ absence all her possessions remained, and the Wittmers soon appropriated many of them.  No bodies were ever found.  While all this was going on the Ritter-Strauch relationship had been deteriorating.  Unexpectedly––suddenly––Dr. Ritter was dead.  The cause was suspect:  Ritter, a vegetarian, had been poisoned by, of all things, contaminated chicken.  It had been prepared by Dora.  At this point Lorenz left the island in a hurry, having persuaded a captain to take him to the mainland on his small boat, unwilling to wait for a larger vessel.  Lorenz was never heard from again.  Several years later his and the captain’s desiccated bodies were found on a beach on the most remote of the Galapagos islands.  Dora Strauch eventually returned to Germany.  Descendants of the Wittmer family run a guest house on Floreana.  No one now alive knows for certain who murdered whom.

 

A young Darwin (as opposed to the old Darwin of other island statues) looks out at the harbor in San Cristobal;

 *When Darwin left the Galapagos in 1835 he took with him three young (aged 5 or so) tortoises.  Two of them died.  The third tortoise ended up in a zoo in Australia, cared for by none other than Steve Erwin, the late zany TV zoologist.  Named Harriette, the tortoise died in 2006 at age 176.

**There was a major goat culling in the 1990’s but not all goats have been killed. Goat meat is less popular than it was, removing some motivation for further culling.

WHAT TO DO IN NOVEMBER

What is there to say about November?  It’s all about waiting.  It’s about absence.  

The very last yellow leaf that held on for dear life, even in the strongest wind, is gone.  Disappeared.  It seems to have happened when I wasn’t looking.  The geese aren’t flying overhead any more.  No ducks are visiting the pond.  Hummingbirds are a distant memory; I think they checked the calendar one day and took off even before there were signs that summer was planning to turn into fall.  I can only wonder what became of the muskrat family that holed up by the pond or the weasels that lived under the patio.  The hawks and turkey vultures disappeared too, after days of graceful swooping across the fields, fields they have now abandoned to the crows.  Squirrels and chipmunks are all I’ve seen of mammals lately.  Not even deer.  It’s rifle season for deer as of November 1^st and they’re not likely to make themselves known.  Yet––and of course there’s an “and yet”––it is still beautiful, especially on clear sunny day that last only until 4:30 in the afternoon when the light turns yellow.

Late afternoon light on the fireplace wall

 NOT November on the Robert Frost Trail:  October fondly remembered

It has in fact been more sunny than dark from September until now.  Our solar panels have generated more kilowatt hours from January to December than they did last year.   (We got the panels halfway through June of 2013.)  One way to measure this by comparing the solar credits we have from Green Mountain Power compared with last year: over $1,700 as of November 1^st , $200 more than last year.  This was not profit as we pay (leasing) for the panels.  So far they have provided 39,000 kilowatt hours since June 2013 and offset 30 tons of carbon emissions.  What is amazing about solar power here in Vermont is how much of it there is throughout the state.  I’m impressed at what Vermont is doing in the direction of carbon neutrality.  Solar companies are putting up arrays with great enthusiasm.  So much so that array siting has become an aesthetic issue.  There is a backlash against very large arrays, say, five acres or more.  I happen like the way our three panels look.  They tend to disappear into the background from most angles and they are far from the road.  However, this isn’t the case everywhere.  In some locations they are unshielded and smack against a road.  In other places large arrays it’s a question of the acreage they cover.  It’s also just the fact that they cover:  panels create ground shade where there would otherwise be sunlight, removing yet another potential area from bobolink territory; these are birds who will not nest in or near shaded areas, and like so many ground-nesting species, they are vulnerable not only to natural predators, but cats and, notably, mowing equipment.  It’s is why in many fields late season haying is their only ticket to survival. 

An ugly solar array in Middlebury at Vermont Sun Fitness Center; across the street is the Cabot Creamery.

On the other side of the season’s arc, fall instead of spring, the maple syrup ritual was replaced by apple cider time.  Our apple trees produced delicious, if seriously misshapen, apples this year on two of our four trees.  Since you don’t need to have male and female apple trees for fruiting (unlike holly, for example), I can’t understand why we have two productive trees and two utterly stubbornly unproductive trees.  Ideas, anyone?  The apples produced by the Good Two trees were deep red and tart, like Empire apples. They made the tastiest applesauce I’ve ever eaten, but, alas, only after endless and tiresome peeling and trimming of their bumpy, crooked bodies.  The Bad Two made nothing whatsoever.  They didn't even try.  Our Huston family next door has several huge old apple trees, plenty of apples for making cider, and then some.  The biggest obstacle to churning out cider is the challenge of efficiently turning whole apples into small chunks for juicing in the press.  A while back the Goudey family came up with the idea of using a garbage disposal that got attached to an old sink the Hustons supplied that turned the apples into mush before they went into the press.  Running the press then became a piece of cake. 

The sink with garbage disposal arrangement for cider-making

Apple cider.  Pumpkins, pumpkin pie. A lot of what's left of November is taken up with planning for Thanksgiving.  

Nothing else to do then but wait for the snow.

WHAT THE SKY SAYS

It was the brightest of days, it was the darkest of days

A week ago––no, only days ago, it was warm, really warm.  Indian summer it would have been called, if there had been a frost later followed by warmth, but there has been no frost.  Not much rain either.  But something, some mysterious condition, lack of condition, or arcane conflation of temperature/light/moisture produced an enhanced red/crimson/orange hue in the foliage this year that critics (we rate fall colors up here, and we’re all critics) say are outstanding.  Red, in other words, is outshining yellow.

In past years this sugar maple's colors went more toward the yellow-orange spectrum

Fiery colors reach for the sky

Sunsets have been striking too.  The combination of immense lumbering clouds over the Adirondacks with gaps in between where the orange sun shoots rays in unexpected designs and then sets, suddenly now, in an entirely difference place than where it used to vanish in the summertime.

The sun will be setting to the right of Snake Mountain before long

Wood is stacked, plants moved indoors.  Local hikes, school visits––now is the time to do everything.  

On the Middlebury College Campus

Atop Buck Mountain (L to R) Audrey, Hans, Ben, Olin (in a customary eccentric pose. Stop doing that, Olin!)

View from the two-story window of the Middlebury Science Building

Our meadow, given a second mowing in late August, is ankle high and bright green again.  The owner of woodland behind our land has been logging for firewood.  I hated hearing the chainsaw, but the result so far is not unpleasant:  A new opening to the forest from the field and an easier walk once inside.  To say “inside” is precisely what it feels like.  You leave the bright light as you walk through the opening and then everything changes.  The sounds are different––birds, chipmunks, other rustlings––and the light is suddenly heavily filtered. Emerging, the sun low and shining right at you, is like coming out of a theater in mid-afternoon.  You may have to shade your eyes.  I don’t know how much more he’s going to be cutting, but the great “room” he has so far created––one bounded by a rocky ridge on one side, a steep hill on the other, meadow on the third side––is a grand space.

New entrance to the forest, the trees then just beginning to change

Speaking of that woodpile…we haven’t burned a stick of wood yet.  That will change almost immediately.  No more days like this one below.  It seems like yesterday that I reclined under the apple trees (trees that produced a decent crop of excellent, if misshapen, apples this year for the very first time!), reading in the dappled light with a soft breeze.  (The book, if you want to know:  Kate Atkinson’s “A God in Ruins.”  Very fine. Companion to her acclaimed “Life After Life.”)

I am called away from my book.  (Perhaps to take this photo?)  Skyler at left.  There'll be no more of this in the weeks to come.

One of the things people do this time of year when you’re preparing for winter is schedule stuff for winter to keep everyone occupied.   I’ve had to schedule two speakers from the Vermont Humanities Council to speak here in New Haven.  One, Rebecca Rupp, whose topic relates not to winter but spring* wrote me back:

            

“Nice to think about spring, sitting as we are on the wrong side of winter. Propane truck showed up here last week, which we always take as a Sign of Doom.  I'll see you after we're all plowed out.”

Our propane truck showed up last week. too.  

Just another great sunset!

DENIZEN

A good-sized snapping turtle, its long neck fully withdrawn

Look at those claws.  The beady unblinking eyes.  The hissing, rasping sound it makes.  It's what you might expect a dragon’s breath to sound like.  Its carapace is flecked with leeches.  The pond holds all this:  snapping turtles, leeches, the animals–whatever they are–that make tunnels around the rim, plus boatloads of frogs.  Right now it brings to mind an African waterhole in the dry season.  We’ve had a dry August, followed by a not-wet-enough September.  The pond water has thickened with inhabitants once spread thin, now crowded like city dwellers.  Small green frogs, probably the tadpoles of spring, sit in the open on muddy beaches that had been covered with water in mid-summer.  The clay earth, my garden, is cracked open by aridity.

Leeches and mud read:  I came from the pond

Getting back to the turtle (chelydra serpentina), this creature is far from uncommon in Vermont.  The above specimen is the second we’ve come across near the pond.  Its carapace was about fourteen inches long.  They can get to be up to about eighteen inches or so.  Snappers like slow-moving water with muddy bottoms, and that describes our habitat precisely. The first time we saw a snapping turtle near the pond it was clear in which direction it was moving so we let it continue on its way, away from the pond and down the slope to the woods, presumably to lay eggs.  It was June, the time females leave the water to lay their eggs on land.  

This time the turtle was in the driveway, ambiguously facing the house.  It’s not the season for egg laying.  So where was it headed?  Ken put on a pair of gloves, picked it up, and, very gingerly, carried it to the pond and tossed it in.  It’s likely, from the evidence I'd say extremely likely, that that’s exactly the place it left behind, and we were forcing it to repeat the trip.  But the alternative was–well, where exactly?   At least in the pond it was out of harm's way (read: ugly encounter with dog or car) and would have an opportunity to rethink the whole tedious trip.  

Low water allows frogs to make use of the pond's new beach

This is the second time Ken has picked up such a heavy snapper.  The first time we found a snapping turtle it was in the middle of Route 23, inching its way to the far side. We stopped the car and Ken got out and picked it up with bare hands–yes! and it was even larger that this one–and staggered across the road, all the time ducking its snapping jaws.  Now, only now after this second snapper-lift, we know better!  A snapper should be grabbed at the far end of its carapace, hands on either side of the tail at the rear (never by the tail itself as this could dislocate the spine that is fused to its shell), and gently pulled, rear end lifted, front claws dragging, backwards to safety.  Next time.

The newly muddy edge tells of visitors come to drink.  (It's off limits to Styler, so we know they're not dog prints.)

A dearth of rain has meant good weather for haying.  Farmer Dan Kehoe got a second cutting done.  The grasses had been so lovely I was sorry it was going to be cut.  There were several acres of clover in blossom, many kinds of wildflowers, milkweed, and a variety of grasses.  The newly raw cut meadow brought to mind the freshly shaved heads of army recruits.  Raw and bleeding.  For a week afterward when we walked in the field Skyler sniffed out and nibbled the remains of mice left among the detritus.

Farmer Dan making hay while the sun shines; the baler tosses the bales into the cart

Looking almost like a ride at the fair, this piece of equipment rakes the hay into rows

I can’t say it’s been as good for the garden as for the hay.  I like to let nature takes its course and rarely water anything besides potted plants an the vegetable garden repaid me in kind.  One eggplant plant equaled one, only one, eggplant.  It was a nice eggplant at least.  The tomatoes had a climactic week and then decided they were pretty much done for the summer.  Likewise the pepper plants.  And I don’t even want to talk about the cucumbers.  There was a summer I planted two cucumber plants and ended up with over thirty cucumbers.  (Cucumber salad, cucumber soup, pickled cucumber, etc.)  Not this time.  They are stunted and few.  Even squash–pattypan this time–a vegetable that by reputation always overproduces and overgrows, produced a single product.  I was so resentful of that plant I have yet to cook it.  I may let it rot.

Good drying weather for the wood pile

A remarkably good yield of raspberries. 

I may be glad in the darker days of fall to come that there was so much heat and sunshine in late summer.  It was, after all, a good year for raspberries.