Looking Back

CHARLES DARWIN:  It is a hideous-looking creature of a dirty black color, stupid and sluggish in its movements. The usual length of a full grown one is about a yard, but there are some even four feet long. ... When in water this lizard swims with perfect ease and quickness, by a serpentine movement of its body and flattened tail, , the legs being motionless and closely collapsed on its sides. A seaman on board sank one with a heavy weight attached to it, thinking thus to kill it directly, but when, an hour afterwards, he drew up the line, it was quite active.

The nature of this lizard's food, as well as the structure of its tail and feet, and the fact of its having been seen voluntarily swimming out to sea, absolutely prove its aquatic habits, yet there is in this one strange anomaly, namely, that when frightened it will not enter the water.. Hence, it is easy to drive these lizards down to any little point overhanging the sea, where they will sooner allow a person to catch hold of their tails than jump into the water. They do not seem to have any notion of biting, but when much frightened they squirt a drop of fluid from each nostril. I threw one several times as far as I could into a deep pool left by the retiring tide; but it invariably returned in a direct line to the spot where I stood. It swam near the bottom with a very graceful and rapid movement, and occasionally aided itself over the uneven ground with its feet. As soon as it arrived near the edge, but still being under water, it tried to conceal itself in the tufts of seaweed or entered some crevice. I several times caught this same loizard by driving it down to a point, and though possessed of such perfect powers of diving and swimming, nothing would induce it to enter the water; and as often as I threw it in, it returned in the manner above described.

Flightless Cormorant

WILLIAM BLAKE: "Without contraries is no progression."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  What misplaced vanity causes the flightless cormorants of Galapagos to lift their pitiful wings and strut against the wind on the blackness of these crooked lava shores? There are monsters in paradise. 

Galapagos was created sterile. It remains arid and scrubby. Everything that lives here came once by sea or air, and those that remained found themselves freed of old enemies and in need of new talents. Paradise transformed them. The cormorants stand this way because once, far away, on a distant shore their ancestors did the same to dry their wings for flight. Thus these cormorants, though not quite fish, have learned to live by swimming and are matchless in water, but not quite fowl, they prepare for flights they will never take, their muscles redesigned for underwater gymnastics.

Courting Brown Pelicans

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  There are no docks in paradise. That's how they try to keep it pure, and when anyone goes ashore it is aboard small, inflatable pongas. Our first such landing was, I believe on Fernandina, newest and most westward island of the archipelago. Fernandina last erupted in 2009. It sits directly above the hot spot.

I wasn't prepared for the joyous greeting we received as we landed. It was like passing through crowds of well-wishers in costume at Mardi Gras. As we stepped across rocks to where stone steps climbed to a bluff above the sea, a booby was perched beside the steps, and we gasped. Three steps up and we were eye-to-eye.  Almost by habit I checked for my ID, and the booby might as well have been checking them, as each of us had to stop and pose for and snap a photograph before proceeding to the top of the bluff. 

Overhead, boobies and frigate birds cruised for mates from among the many birds who were building nests around us near the shore. Pelicans fished and sometimes carried food back to their young, and along the trails baby boobies were being groomed or scolded by their parents, or they played or pecked for our attention while parents watched.  The trail across the island was filled with the commotion of courting and mating and raising new families, and as we walked, birds looked into our eyes in calm wonder.  In mid-May Paradise is alive with the feracious celebrations of scales, feathers and fur. Even hermit crabs were out searching for larger dwellings, and we were privileged to be included in the ancient and annual pageant inebriations that had long ago adjourned on other shores.

Like all tourists, we thrilled, thinking we were part of the parade; the parade was for us.  Later I saw the next cycle of tourists pouring expectantly onto the tarmac from the plane that would soon carry me away. I understood then our place in this fearless bliss. I thought about that never-ending line of us, and I was glad the world had limited access here to small groups arriving via ponga.  I understood why new limits had just been imposed, capping the number of landings allowed at each site, and, as I fastened my seatbelt for take-off, I understood why paradise can never be reclaimed.

Blue-Footed Booby

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Imagine a world in which when we walk by, the birds don't fly to a bush further off and hide in the branches, the field mice and chipmonks don't scamper beneath rocks and fish don't shy away as we near the water.  Imagine a world where other animals, innocent of fear, merely pause at our approach and look back in innocent wonder at the odd new creatures with the clicking boxes visiting among them, strangers in paradise.

CHARLES DARWIN: "I will conclude my description of the natural history of these islands by giving an account of the extreme tameness of the birds. This disposition is common to all terrestrial species; namely to the mocking thrushes, the finches, wrens, tyrant flycatchers, the dove, and common buzzard. All of them are often approached sufficiently near to be killed with a switch, and sometimes, as I myself tried, with a cap or hat. A gun is here almost superfluous; for with the muzzle I pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree. One day whilst lying down, a mockingthrush alighted on the edge of a pitcher made of a shell of a tortoise, which I held in my hand, and began very quietly to sip the water. It allowed me to lift it from the ground whilst seated on the vessel. I often tried, and very nearly succeeded, in catching these birds by their legs. Formerly, the birds appear to have been even tamer than at present. Cowley (in the year 1684) says that the 'turtledoves were so tame that they would often alight on our hats and arms, so as that we could take them alive, they not fearing man until such time as some of our company did fire at them, whereby they were rendered more shy.' ...It is surprising that they have not become wilder, for these islands in the last hundred and fifty years have been frequented by buccaneers and whalers; and the sailors, wandering through the wood in search of tortoises, always take cruel delight in knocking down the little birds.  These birds, although still more persecuted, do not readily become wild. In Charles Island, which had been colonized about six years, I saw a boy sitting by a well with a switch in his hand, with which he killed the little doves and finches as they came to drink. He had already procured a little heap of them for his dinner, and he said that he had constantly been in the habit of waiting by this well for the same purpose. It would seem that the birds of this archipeligo, not having as yet learnt that man is a more dangerous animal than the tortoise or the Amblyrhynchus [local iguana], disregard him, in the same manner as in England shy birds such as magpies disregard the cows and horses grazing in our fields." 

Sea Lions on the Shore

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Fearless in Galapagos

Fear, like the sound of the wind,

may go unnoticed 

until branches scrape 

and canyons howl;

or most preciously 

when it is suddenly still. 

Imagine that fearless silence,

spacious as the horizon,

where the song behind the wind

rings clear, 

fills immensity -

Welcome to paradise.

Striated Herons, White Sand, and Waves

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Along the Edge

Although the idea of Galapagos 

has no human footprints, 

we've been scrambling here

since the time of Pizarro.

The clumsy wreckage of our presence 

still vies with efforts to preserve and restore.

Beside the slow, even breathing of the sea, 

weed-white shells and fish as bright as the rippling moon;

small herons check our credentials, 

lose interest, continue pecking

among grains of white sand,

along the edge of paradise.

The Idea of Galapagos

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  If you have thought about Galapagos at all, it is likely that before it was a place, it was an idea. As I have read and thought about it for a little while, the idea has become more distinct and multifaceted. First came the name and its reference to sentient creatures, the tortoises who some think may live as much as 500 or 1000 years. That is long enough for all of Mayan, Aztec, and Inca civilizations to have come and passed. That is one scale on which I measure my Galapagos.

Despite strong evidence to the contrary, my Galapagos is a pristine archipelago set far apart from continental traffic and trends. It is a place where volcanic islands are still rising from the ocean, floor, borne on a bulging hotspot in the earth's crust which each island will ride back into the sea in an arc of time. Each island from oldest to youngest, children of the sea, is distinct though a recognizable member of a family. My archipelago explodes with diversity and abundance, free of threats from outside.

Because each island owes its origin to different volcanic events over a vast stretch of time, each island is a unique habitat. Famously, Darwin observed species here and found species of finches that were endemic, not only to the archipelago as a whole, but to specific islands within it, with differences reflecting each island's habitat. Thus Galapagos became the land that confirmed species mutability, challenging the notion that creation was over, accomplished, complete. My Galapagos is a place where the world is continually being made new, a place where we are only visitors to a finite world looking for an escape to eternity.

Quito from the Mountaintop

Rizbuth:  "The universe is apparently a self-creating entity. We were engineered by the environment of which we are part, preceded only by an impulse to be, the source and trajectory of which remain unrevealed, at best, conjectural."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Of Wheels and Weaves

Wheels spin 

like time itself 

shuttling tourists,

the Teleferico  -

built to showcase 

a local culture 

a country,

a genius,

to worldwide markets, 

turning cables,

spinning Inca, 

Colonial, 

Modern 

into global fabric 

still evolving 

on shifting techtonics,

as we plunge back to Quito

with whatever we have learned.

Cabled from the Mountaintop

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Back in the terminal the wheels were still at their cadences beginning with a whoosh as the doors close - eleven seconds whirring followed by pulses, throbs, double-thump, whoosh and silence as I imagined parallel sets of tourists issuing from the gondolas, one side coming, the other going, and cadences, gondolas every thirty seconds, the wheels forever turning. 

In reality, only a few other visitors were there when we were there, and most of the gondolas went through empty. Even so, it was hard not to pause each time the cadence reached the double-thump, whoosh, and at the silence look for the invisible families streaming up and down the mountain in even-cadenced rhapsody. I had a few moments to take it all in before we joined the line and rode the cable back from the volcanic frontier, where continents collide along the ring of fire, to the wheels and deals of Quito.

Frontier

 

FEDERICO FELLINI:  "What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one.... It's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one - which is really the realm of the artist."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:   There are many truths at the tops of mountains, and the first is that the top is always further off and higher up than it seemed along the way. We never got there and turned back toward the city. Another truth for me is that the thrill, the rush, the ecstasy comes as much from the remoteness of the mountaintop as from its elevation.  We were beside a major city. We had arrived in a gondola made to carry bicycles at a terminal where vacant store fronts begged for tenants!  

We had, however, crossed a significant edge the moment we stepped beyond the terminal and we thrilled looking over it. It was certainly an edge, even a, "frontier," to a notoriously rugged and lonely stretch of roadless, volcanic, Andean highlands; a frontier if one accepts that terrestrial frontiers are now all encircled by roads and photographed from space and available on your Google desktop. No need to stand on a mountaintop to feel the earth shifting beneath our feet, however good it felt to actually go there and feel it push up on the soles of our shoes. Perhaps the real frontiers today are all in time.

Pichincha Volcano High

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

The True Pichincha

Of course the cable had an end, 

but the mountain went on, 

the top, not top at all,

a plain of raw thatch,

empty spaces, 

distant outcrops,

under the cloud garden ,

and approaching storm; 

beneath its pall, 

they tell me, 

the true Pichincha.

Quito from Stanchion #13

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Like Cuzco, Quito is set in a broad Andean plain. It is surrounded by high mountains. It was to get on the top of one of these that we were dangling from a wire in a plastic bubble that swung gently as it rose.  We looked back as people disappeared, then the forms of buildings disappeared, then the city was reduced to bright texture, the fabric of a culture consuming the plain. How long was the wire? -the end still not in sight  -perhaps infinite at both ends!  What new wisdom to gain from one more trip to the mountaintop?

Portrait of Quito from the Plaza of the Chapel of Man

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  When we arrived in Quito neither Jane nor I had heard of Oswaldo Guayasamin. I took it as a sign of my ignorance, but I'm learning it is an ignorance widely shared in the English-speaking world. I don't know why. His paintings are visceral and feel authentic, emanating like music from the Quechua culture in which he grew up. They seem natural companions to works by Picasso and Diego Rivera and others.  

The Chapel of Man is a large, circular exhibition space surrounding an eternal flame and topped with a decorated cupola. It was designed by Guayasamin (trained as an architect) to hold and display his paintings.  The scale of the works and the space and the silence inside is expansive. That silence surrounds giant faces and hands that wait, hope, pray, cringe, yearn, rage, console, sometimes wail silently from all around us. It is painting on the scale of grand opera. It is soulful music.

After the gift shop we found ourselves back out on the plaza of the Chapel of Man, and this was our view over Quito, close enough to touch and big enough to get lost in.

Click here for more on Oswaldo Guayasamin.

Wired Quito

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Quito is a beautiful city choked by traffic. Our visit was brief, and much of what we saw of the cityscape came to us through car windows as we toured neighborhoods and rode between wonderful places where no photographs were permitted. In "the betweens," I snapped wildly in frustration while Diego, our driver, bumped us forward along clogged boulevards or elbowed us into honking intersections where only the fittest survived. We're grateful for his talents and thankful neither of us was behind the wheel. Diego knew shortcuts and sometimes we'd break free onto a side street, race around a corner, and we'd be winding up over the hillsides as if lifted above traffic up with the air and the clear mountain light and the city's bright colors and gleaming new apartment towers.  

Our hotel was a place of quiet amid the bustling city. A porter had to unlock stout, wood doors every time we left, and when we returned we had to buzz for the porter to let us in. On our first evening there, we found a spiral stair that led to a kind of loft-room above the third floor and offered a rooftop panorama. Other buildings had similar aeries with rooftop vistas so that even bottom feeders could grab some top air. Sitting in the aerie, we looked up at La Panecillo with its giant, white statue of La Virgin de Quito lit amid the night clouds, almost as if she were hovering just above the city.

However, this photograph was snapped out of the back window of the car as we were about to turn a corner between where we were and where we were going. It was the clothes line in the upper right that caught my eye.  To make the composition, however, most of the laundry got cropped away.

NOTE: Jane and I were especially awed and dazzled by the beauty of La Campaña de Jesús and thankful to be introduced to the work of Guayasamin whose soulful paintings touched us deeply, but this is a photo blog and no photography was permitted there.   

Past Noon, Plaza de la Indepencia, Quito

TERRENCE McKENNA:  "Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  If one knows the history, it's hard to look at monuments such as this one to, "the heroes of August 10th, 1809," in the Plaza de la Indepencia, in Quito Ecuador... hard to look at it without reflecting on the world today. (You can read about the events of August 10th here.) 

And further back in time's jungles, the events of our world and the struggles of 1809 seem linked to the day in 1539, a year after Pizarro had executed the Inca, Atahualpa, when Atahualpa's general razed Quito by setting fire to the Inca Palace, rather than surrender it to the conquistador, Almagro.  

However, the city already had a long history then. Won by Atahualpa's father Huayna Capac in his northward conquests, it had eventually become the home from which he ruled the Inca Empire, setting off wars of succession upon his death, between Atahualpa and his Cuzco-born half-brother; they were wars that left the Inca Empire divided just when it needed to be unified against the Spanish.

Tangible ruins of those times lie in the Inca foundations under the colonial buildings, but the city's name brings us further still to the struggles of the Quitua people who ruled here until conquered by Huayna Capac.  How are these spaceless Quitua halls connected to all of the other ruins through which our spirits wander?

Una Via, Peguche

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  We were in Peguche to buy a rug. What that has to do with the little man who accosted me in the square, I'm not sure. Perhaps they have no connection at all. In the Otavalo region many of the villages have taken on an identity attached to the particular craft cultivated by the native population there. We visited a village known for its leather-goods and then another for its woodworking. Although there was nothing I wanted, the beauty of the work and the vitality of the villages was inspiring. Raquel told us the villages in the area compete annually for awards to claim the title of best.

Peguche was where José Cotacachi, a weaver, had his studio. The trip had been worth it; his rugs were magical. Owning one would be a privilege.  I did my best to communicate that, and I wondered about his lack of responsiveness. I could read his demeanor as arrogant, timid or simply due to the gulf between our languages.  With Raquel's help I asked if I could photograph him at his loom, and he sat down and wove for a few minutes, but he avoided eye contact, had his attentions elsewhere; he wove the rows, it seemed, as if it was a ritual he felt obliged to submit to. Perhaps I misread the signals completely. Perhaps it was just late.

I especially wanted to communicate how beautiful his work was as we would not be buying one of the magical rugs I so admired. Their designs were filled with visual paradoxes and creatures that quickly reminded me of M.C. Escher, though his source was native imagery. Hanging about his studio they enlarged it, opening spaces behind the walls. Each was a new adventure. Jane and I were both impressed but a bit concerned that kind of spacial ambiguity might be unsettling underfoot. 

We had chosen a beautiful, though clearly inferior, rug at a lower price to spread in our dining room. It would be the sole, lasting, tangible artifact of our travels in Ecuador and Peru, and we would treasure it for itself and for its connection to this beautiful studio. I wanted to communicate that and my admiration for the weaver's artistry and to maybe learn a bit about what moved him, but by the time Raquel was closing the deal, I knew that would be impossible. I'm not sure why.  I retreated to the plaza where there had been some photo ops, and I left Jane to see things through.

It was an ugly little square, "Plaza Cultural," they called it, dominated by a one-story church whose facade reached up in flat imitation of a belfry with an opening in which were hung two tiny bells that seemed capable of little more than tinkling. Two columns in a style best described as Las Vegas Greek surrounded what could never be called the portal, and the whole silly facade was crowned with a cross.  I really wanted to photograph some large, black ovens along one side of the square and the ancient women dressed in black who were busy there, but it seemed improper to photograph the women without speaking with them first. Jane would be out momentarily, and it was getting late. If communication was even possible, it would involve more time than we had left; tempting as it was, I would not photograph the crones at their labor.

Some young girls, barely teens, passing through the square, posed saucily, tried to get me to take their pictures. They would probably ask for money.  In any case, engaging seemed unwise. As I turned, the barefoot man waved to me. He wanted my attention. He pointed to the belfry and made the sign of the cross as he tried to speak.  He kept opening his mouth, urgently trying to tell me something, but no sounds came out. He was insistent. What did he want me to do? He kept pointing, mouthing wordlessly. I smiled and tried to make a sign that I didn't understand, couldn't comply. I wanted to understand, but in the end, I changed the topic.  Could I take his picture.  He seemed happy to pose and happy to take the coins I gave him afterward.  I'm still struck by the brightness of his eyes, and I wonder what it was he would have said and how he fits into this world in which I'm such a stranger.

¿Este Sombrero?

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Raquel, our guide led us beyond vegetables through thickets of Quechua and Spanish and flashing calculators and the important distinctions of quality and inferior Panama crafting, until we finally closed a deal, shook hands and strutted away in our dapper, Ecuadorean Panamas. 

The Panama hats for the Galapagos cruise spent the voyage in steerage. Sailors that we are, we had not counted on wind at sea, and it's still not clear if the hats survived steerage.

Among Vegetables

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  We were on a quest. We had read that, contrary to expectation, the best Panamas are made in Ecuador. Finally, we were in the best market in Ecuador, home of stylish headwear. Here, we thought, just beyond vegetables, were stalls where we would find two, suave, Ecuadorian Panamas for cruising the Galapagos.

Finger-Lickin' Good

Birdman of Otavalo No.2

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE: 

"'God save thee ancient Mariner!

From the fiends, that plague thee thus! --

Why look'st thou so?'-- With my cross-bow

I shot the Albatross."

Blue Owl?

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: What a magnificent looking creature! Alas, the presentation was in Spanish only. Does anyone know what kind of bird this is? 

Parque Condor's mission is to educate the public about the environment. As an example, they explain, "The role of vultures that feed on dead animals is to clean the ecosystem and prevent pollution. If we kill all the Andean condors, who will clean up this waste?" They root their mission in Inca values that recognize the interdependency of all parts of the natural world and on the Inca's mastery of agricultural techniques that maximized production while conserving quality soil and water.