The Sharks of the Galápagos

The funny thing about getting off the airplane on the Galápagos Islands, is that it looks like you accidentally landed on Mars, not one of the most pristine marine ecosystems in the world. Everything is painted with orange and dust, and even the cacti look somewhat confused as to how they ended up here.

The only real sign of life as you walk across the tarmac, leaving the airport behind you, is the faint smell of the ocean, rich with life and promise and adventure. The perennial sweat of a backpacker traces down my lower back through my cotton shirt. School-age children from upper-middle class families swarm everywhere, as plentiful as the audacious plump finches that watch for the crumbs falling of the tourists plates back at the airport. Do the children know the magnitude of what they’re about to experience I ask myself? Will it change the trajectory of their life towards conservation and environmentalism? Or will it just be another adventure for them, time passed and mostly forgotten. Will they accidentally drink enough ocean water kool-aid that they will fall under the curse of understanding too much, yet seeing so little beneath the blue? As I sat on the packed boat, bobbing across the straight I forgot to ask myself the same question.

When you’re backpacking it’s the people you meet along the way that change you. Our conversations are forever etched in my heart, although I no longer remember their names or the woven sound of their accents melded into their rich voices. At the time I didn’t know that it was not the people I’d meet in the Galápagos, that would change my life, but the sharks.

Agnes, a ruddy Australian I was traveling with at the time, and I waited on the pier for our guide Juan to pick us up. How he knew where we were, who we were, or that he needed to pick us up on this exact abandoned pier was beyond me. Agnes and I were joined by Matts, a European from some Nordic country who had also somehow ended up on a forgotten pier with disappearing shade, flanking the Pacific Ocean under the blistering midday Ecuadorian sun.

Like some children’s television show, written by a screenwriter with a substance abuse problem, the animals started to visit us while we waited for our boat. Pelicans waddled up, geckos croaked at us in Spanish laughter, and the Sea Lions barked at each other, yelling at the others to come see the gringos that were scared of the beautiful golden octopus sun and her tentacles that encased the islands in the afternoon light.

The emerald bay glittered like a gemstone in the finger of the universe. In this moment I remember thinking my life is rich and I have been blessed in ways I will not understand until I’m much older. And in the bay bobbed several abandoned ships, reclaimed by the birds and the barnacles, and on a much greater scale, the ocean herself. Finally, out of the maternal waters appeared Juan. He wasn’t driving the boat but was standing on the small deck in his ray bans like some cool hero who had seen hundreds of faces like ours, but still mustered the enthusiasm to show us his world. However, Juan had a weakness in the name of his immediate infatuation with Agnes. Nobody could blame him though; her orange curly hair matched the island and blew in the wind like underwater seagrass. Everything was beautiful and sacred here.

I hated to interrupt the spell that had been cast upon Juan as he fired off questions at Agnes as though his feigned curiosity would make her fall in love with him, but I simply had to know. “Juan – what happened to these boats?” I asked, glancing across the bay where the abandoned boats bobbed faithfully on, forever chained to their anchors. A dark shadow furrowed his brow, and the gaiety of the day was gone. “These boats come to these waters they know nothing about, to destroy a world they do not know. They come to San Cristobal to catch sharks for shark-fin soup. Sometimes they will just lure the sharks in with bait they throw into the water and cut their fins off while they’re feeding.” He lowered his voice as he looked past the bay and into the deep rolling expanse of the ocean, “shark fin soup is a delicacy in China… they don’t care about the sharks. They come here for the fins. These boats belong to the poachers that we caught killing the sharks. Hundreds of sharks have lost their lives, and all the poachers lost was their shit boats.” In my mind, I thought of the beautiful sharks, no longer able to swim without their fins, sinking to the bottom of the ocean like torpedoes falling from the sky, their great bodies disappearing into the beyond. Their bones cast like human’s dice across the floor of the sea, a game they had been cheated at. And I asked myself, how could we say the sharks are the monsters?

And that night the tourists feasted in the restaurants that line the ocean streets. And they drank imported beer and their laughter sounded like the suburbs. It made its way down the winding streets and freshly set cobblestone. Past the honeymooners and rats scurrying down the alleyways, and the children playing soccer by the streetlights. The sunset was red that night, and tourists politely jostled each other for a chance to stand on the dock and take a picture with the sunset, the ocean teaming with life below. But to me, the sunset looked like shark’s blood, streaked across the horizon.

In the sailor’s delight morning, we met Juan and his small ragtag crew at the dock. We each had a small backpack as we set off on our weeklong sailboat voyage across the ocean. Oddly, Juan had brought Agnes a red Gatorade which he triumphantly handed to her as she boarded the tiny sailboat. As an aside, Agnes, despite her aristocratic face which seemingly guaranteed grace and poise, is an extreme over-packer and is as equally ungraceful as she is over prepared. While boarding the boat with her bag perched precariously on her hip, Agnes slipped and nearly toppled face-first into the water, where foot-long sharks and rays were swimming below. They reminded me of the five-cent candy sharks I’d eaten as a child. “Oooooops! I was almost shark bait there” Agnes drawled. “Shark-bait-uh-ha-ha” she laughed. Agnes laughed hard, but Juan laughed harder. I suspected the Finding Nemo reference was lost on him, but I respected his enthusiasm all the same.

The first night at sea, is a night I’ll never forget. The light pollution was swallowed into the black hole ocean, and all that stretched out before us were ink black waves, and a beautiful universe watching lovingly over us from above. I’d seen the milky way hundreds of times before on my ranch, far away in the green grass of Wyoming, which I’d always thought had been crystallized by the crisp mountain air, but I’d never seen the milky way like this. It appeared cut with purple and yellow amethysts, iridescent and shining in on itself. The sea was cold, and icy and terrifying. But the universe was warm and glistening, and I had trouble convincing myself that I was still alive as the 30ft boat rolled tirelessly over the waves as old as time itself. I thought of the sailors, thousands of years before me, who had watched the universe from the sea, with the same glimmering hope in their eyes, scared of what lurked below, unsure of what existed above, but floating peacefully somewhere in between.

I’ve left out the part where I became violently sea-sick and had to sleep on the deck of the boat where I drank Agnes’ red Gatorade unbeknownst to Juan. As I swallowed the last few drops I hoped to myself I hadn’t just drank a love potion, I hear that love potions don’t quell the seasickness whatsoever.

The days softly faded into each other which I appreciate is quite melodramatic, for only spending a week at sea. But they did, and I started to think of the sailboat as a spaceship taking us on a voyage from one planet to the next, so different were the islands and the animals we met along the way.

On one of the last evenings, I could tell we were getting close to something significant, as Juan’s eyes kept darting excitedly to the horizon. Agnes and I stood at the bow of the ship where the ocean’s breath whispered lustily through our long-tangled hair. On the horizon, an alien rock formation appeared oddly nestled into itself. On the left, a sharp rock stood alone, like the upturned K-9 tooth of dog. The second middle rock was the largest, like some rectangle gemstone adorning Poseidon’s crown. The third rock was smaller, attached to the gemstone rock, and paled in comparison to its two sisters. “It’s called Kicker Rock” the lusty ocean wind whispered, which was actually Juan now standing closely behind us, rather, closely behind Agnes.

Diving at dusk isn’t advisable, it’s the time when sharks normally feed. But when you’re backpacking South America with nothing to lose and everything to gain, nothing is really advisable. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. I could feel the electric energy radiating off Kicker Rock. This place was sacred, and it did not belong to humans, it was the domain of the Ocean and the children that lived within her. Birds screeched and plummeted from the sky, and turtles occasionally popped their heads out of the water, their old-man gasps audible over the waves crashing into the rocks.

Matts and I dove together, as Agnes and Juan were the obvious pair. I was never scared of the Ocean, after all, I had spent nine months in an ocean much like this, before I had ever walked on land. But that night was different because I truly appreciated the power of the Ocean and the animals that fight for survival within it. Matts was struggling to set his go-pro up properly in the fading light, and I blew all of the air out of my lungs, dropping several meters below him, past a rocky outcrop. As I looked past the outcrop, in the evening light I saw her, the flat hammer shape of her head, peering back at me, both of our eyes, very wide apart. I was a small traveler, this was her ocean, both of us knew that without a question. My heart thumped through my ears; it was all I could hear over the faint bubble of my respirator. Then with incredible speed, she soared above me, briefly blocking out the light from above. Then she was gone forever beyond the rocks. Matts missed the entire thing, and only caught her fleeting shadow on his go-pro. But I will remember the moment forever. I am older now, but it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. The majesty and power of the ocean, all embodied in one creature, the hammerhead shark.

I spent the rest of the night alone sitting on the deck, with the ocean trying to rock me gently to sleep. I thought of the fisherman, the pickpockets, and the tourists I had seen along my journey. I thought of the poachers who had killed so many sharks. I thought of their cowardice, huddled safely upon their boats, trying to cut the fins off power they did not understand. I knew one day the ocean would come for them, I knew one day they would inexorably come face to face with a shark, and not be afforded the peace she had granted me. The ocean waits and the shark is her gatekeeper.