Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir Read online

  He looked at me with chagrin and said, “You mean there’s more than one kind of sparrow?”

  We continued touring Isabela and saw what looked like prehistoric rock paintings, but they must have been a natural phenomenon. There is no known history of indigenous people in the Galapagos and besides, who would climb all the way up there to carve curlicues in the cliff? These decorated rocks were mesmerizing, in any case, and people snapped photo after photo, despite the rain and terrible light.

  Someone saw a spotted eagle ray in the water, and we spent half an hour trying to get a good look at it. The two pangas chased and circled the poor creature and the two groups of people took photos of the others trying to take photos of the ray. It never rose completely out of the water, but we saw its “wings” flapping the surface and its form hovering just beneath. It was huge and exotic, mythical.

  All the movement and wave action lulled little Fiona to sleep and she dropped against me. I held her up with one arm and clung to Ben with the other while making sure my feet were well planted on the bottom of the boat. Fiona’s parents were in the other panga and looked over anxiously from time to time. I smiled at them; I wouldn’t let her fall into the ocean.

  The panga drivers signalled to one another and the two boats raced each other back to the Alta. By this time, Fiona was wide awake. Jorge told us to crowd up close to the bow to make us go faster. He wanted to win. Ron was sitting right at the bow and he looked quite pleased to have Laurie, Jane, Meredith, and me suddenly piled on top of him. We were laughing so hard we didn’t care who won the race, it was just so much fun to be doing something silly in the rain. Then I heard Jorge yell to Fiona that there would be hot chocolate waiting for us on the boat.

  On one of our panga rides we saw a group of Galapagos penguins sunning themselves on rocks next to some Galapagos sea lions. The Galapagos are the smallest penguins, with an average weight of less than 2.5 kilograms. They are the only penguins with no particular breeding season and have been known to breed up to three times a year. This is in adaptation to an unreliable food source — when food is abundant, they breed more often and sometimes, when food is scarce, they produce no young at all. They are at the mercy of ocean currents as well as weather patterns such as El Niño, all highly variable in the Galapagos.

  We watched them slide off the rocks headfirst, like children in a water park, and swim under water. We saw them swimming while we snorkelled. They looked like fat fish, except that they flapped their wings to move themselves through the water. At first, I found it disconcerting to see a bird swimming. One time I saw a common loon swimming at the cottage, but I’d been standing on the dock and it was underwater, distorted by the waves. This time, I was underwater too, watching these birds swim past. If I’d thought about it before I would have been blasé at the prospect of seeing a penguin swim, but in the moment I was astonished. It took my breath away.

  Another day we spent some time on Isabela Island to see the giant tortoises and the yellow land iguanas. Here we also saw some of Darwin’s finches. Not even Jorge could tell them apart without spending time comparing them to one another and to the photos in his guidebook. The differences between the fifteen varieties were pretty small, mostly to do with size and shape of beak. We didn’t bother trying to identify them, just checked “Darwin’s finch” off our lists and carried on. We also saw yellow mangrove warblers, small yellow passerines with rust-coloured faces.

  We stopped at Fernandina Island and disembarked from the pangas onto black lava rocks, which were covered in black marine iguanas and thousands of colourful Sally Lightfoot crabs. It was very hot in this place and I sensed that some of the group were restless, but still we paused to watch blue-footed boobies diving for fish off a rocky promontory. Jorge told us that they kept their mouths shut until they were under water, when they scooped up the fish. If they left their mouths open, the force of the water hitting the backs of their throats would make them explode. It reminded me of the pelicans we’d watched diving for fish in Florida, but these boobies were much more graceful, being smaller and more streamlined. They tucked their wings along their bodies and looked like racing arrows as they plunged into the sea. Five or six of them dove at once in nearly the same place, then another three hit the water soon after. It looked like choreographed manoeuvres, a boobie air show.

  WE WERE OFF TO Bartholomew Island to watch the sunrise. It was a climb of about half an hour to the top of the island, which is small and rocky. Just about anyone who has looked through photos of the Galapagos would recognize this place, with its rock tower jutting up from the ocean and its perfectly circular bay. A couple of large cruise ships had anchored there. They looked huge next to the Alta and we were glad all those people weren’t joining us on our sunrise trek.

  We saw no birds on Bartholomew. There were no trees, and nothing for animals of any kind to eat except for a few scrubby bushes here and there. It was amazing to us how different these islands were from one another. We had breakfast back on board the boat and set off on a fairly long trip to re-fuel on another island, Baltra.

  Hours later we disembarked on a lovely beach, the first one we’d seen where tourists were allowed to hang out. All the other beaches we’d been to had been protected for the sake of the wildlife. We carried water and juice and beer with us. We wore our swimsuits and brought along a Frisbee and soccer ball. The women sat with bottles of beer at the water’s edge, all in a line, and David snapped a photo. We laughed and then posed for him, smiling and hamming it up like beach babes. We were having fun. A game of catch started up in the water with the soccer ball and quickly turned into a team sport complete with goaltenders and a scoreboard.

  Ben and I wandered away from this competitive activity and found a couple of birds. Yeats joined us for a while and told us what they were: lava gulls, laughing gulls, and sanderlings. Then he joined the game while Ben and I took a quiet moment to ourselves farther down the beach. It was lovely and peaceful. The water was warm. We were in the tropics.

  Ben said, “We could do this. We could take a Caribbean holiday one time.”

  It was a miracle! Maybe he was developing a travel bug at last.

  We wandered back to watch the game, but by then most people had stopped playing. Apparently the ball had a small hole in it, so every time it landed in the ocean, it took on a bit more water, until finally it was too heavy for most people to throw. Yeats, Thomas, and Jorge were the only three left at the end and they played a game of Monkey in the Middle while everyone else had something to drink.

  The Alta was full of fuel and ready for the long journey around the island of Santa Cruz and into Puerto Ayora. Back on board, most of us showered and got dressed for dinner. Laurie and I were teased for wearing linen trousers with long, loose tops because most of the others were in shorts and T-shirts. My sister and I were a bit too chic.

  The grown-ups went up to the top deck for sundowners and the sunset. Fernando brought us popcorn and we lolled about happily after a day of exercise and fun. The sun set promptly at six o’clock, after which we went down into the lounge to hear about the next day’s itinerary. The wind had picked up during sunset, and now the waves were starting to rock the boat uncomfortably. I went downstairs to take a Gravol and lie on the bed for a minute.

  Then we hit the reef.

  The boat made a horrible grinding noise and then pitched to starboard. I sat up. The noise was right underneath me, so I had a pretty good idea right away that we’d hit something.

  The boat stopped but made the noise again, several times. That was apparently when the skipper tried to back up, off the reef, to no avail. The boat lurched again, this time to port, and I got off the bed and hurried upstairs.

  Everyone was on their feet in the lounge. Jorge was shouting for one person per cabin to go downstairs and fetch the life jackets and their passports. I looked across the room at Yeats who mouthed, “It’s okay.” I guess I looked worried. I was worried. I wanted Yeats and Ben right beside me, but ther
e was no chance of that.

  I turned around and went back down the staircase, since I was closest. People followed me — Tom, I think, and Stephen and Andy. I went back into our cabin and grabbed my little knapsack. I opened the top drawer of the bedside table and took out the passports, the envelope of cash, and my reading glasses, and stuffed them into the pack. If I’d opened the next drawer down, I would have taken my journal, too, the loss of which I’ve rued ever since. And if I’d stopped for ten seconds to rifle through what I’d grabbed, I’d have realized I had only Ben and Yeats’s passports, not my own.

  The whole time, the boat was pitching back and forth, the wind was howling, and the waves were crashing against both the boat and the reef. Back upstairs I tossed a life jacket to Ben, who was still on the other side of the room. I didn’t see Yeats — he’d gone down with Thomas to fetch their life jackets along with those of the little girls. I put mine on and tried to figure out what we were all to do.

  Someone called out, “Into the Zodiacs! We’re getting in the Zodiacs! Everyone on the back deck!”

  I stepped out the starboard door onto the narrow walkway that went from bow to stern. We lurched violently to starboard, then to port. There were people all around but in that moment, the only person I saw was Monica, one of the crew members. In the same instant that I noticed she wasn’t wearing a life jacket, I saw, beyond her, huge waves rolling in towards the boat. The waves were illuminated in the ship’s lights, faint and ghostly against the black sky.

  I groaned aloud and said, “Oh. My. God.” I was frozen.

  Monica put a hand on my arm and said, “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  That one second of fear stretched for an eternity, turned me inside out, unbuckled me from my life. Then Tom was pushing past me with seven-year-old Fiona in front and Barb right behind. His uncharacteristic aggression snapped me back into myself. I followed them, but that one split second was lodged inside me now. It was an instant that I would flash back to again and again in the weeks to come.

  People were shouting instructions and one another’s names and it was all action. We had to time our individual exits from the boat perfectly. We had to let go of the starboard railing and slide down the sea-drenched deck, one at a time, to the other side, where two crew members hoisted us onto the railing and helped us time our jump into the Zodiacs.

  Carlos, who was driving one of the Zodiacs, timed it so that the waves and the tipping boat were aligned and we all made the jump safely. We were grabbed by someone and made to sit down anywhere there was room, preferably on the bottom of the boat to keep from falling out.

  Jorge, who was driving the second Zodiac, motored in to collect the remaining passengers and crew. Ben was among them, and I watched as he slipped on the deck and crashed into the railing. I was relieved when he jumped successfully into the waiting panga. Jorge collected Andy and Ron, too, and brought them over to our boat. As Ben, Andy, and Ron scrambled into our Zodiac, Ron’s biggest worry was that his shorts were falling off (which they were). This supplied the two little girls with hours of amusement over the next few days. All of us except Stephen and most of the crew were now in one little rubber boat.

  Ben told me later that after I’d left the lounge to go outside, the boat had made a particularly bad pitch (my scary wave) and Meredith ended up on the floor, clinging to the table. She couldn’t get up because every time she tried, the boat pitched again and the table slid. Ben tried to help her up but fell and became stuck, both arms stretched in opposite directions. (When he fell, he broke his baby toe, but he didn’t say anything about it until hours later, when we were alone in our hotel room and he was telling me all of this.) Meredith was on the edge of panic, and it was all Ben could do to try to calm her down while extricating himself from the furniture.

  Yeats would tell me about it later, too. As soon as he walked into the lounge, he said, he saw Ben and Meredith sitting on the floor, unable to get up. So Yeats stepped over to Ben, stuck out his hand, and said, “Come on, Dad, it’s time to get out of here.” That must have been the only time that Yeats had ever called Ben “Dad.” Yeats hauled Ben up, who then hauled Meredith up and then they left the lounge for the boats.

  We needed to keep the panga away from the reef, which could puncture the boat’s rubber hull, but the waves kept pushing us back. I was sitting near the stern, facing forwards. We were all crammed in together — fifteen of us plus Carlos — in an eight-person boat. Some people had to sit up on the rounded sides and brace themselves every time a wave came.

  Then the motor conked out. Tom and Andy grabbed paddles and started paddling furiously to keep us off the reef. Carlos tried to restart the engine but it flooded. People were shouting instructions. Someone scrambled to the back of the boat to lend a hand. We’d all flooded outboard motors in Muskoka and got them going again, but never under such stressful circumstances. Still, it helped that all of us had spent our lives in and around boats. We had a second sense about boats and water and no one panicked.

  I wasn’t ready, though, for the sight of the final wave. It was as though the wind had been building up and up and up until finally it created what it had been striving toward the whole time. This wave must have been fifteen feet high. It was a wall of water coming right for us, and the Alta beyond. I saw it coming, but didn’t say a word. There was no time.

  Our little boat rode it out. We didn’t tip. We just went up and over the other side, like in a ride at an amusement park. Everyone gasped, though, and turned to watch it hit the Alta. The wave crashed against the ship, flooding its uppermost deck and tipping it further over onto the reef. This time it stayed tipped.

  After that the ocean was calm. The wind was gone. No more storm, just like that: from one moment to the next.

  We could see lights from shore and lots of anchored yachts, but we were still a ways out there and unsure about any rescue. We still didn’t know why this had happened and whether we’d get any of our stuff off the Alta. We also couldn’t see the other panga, so we didn’t know where Jorge was with the crew, or even whether Stephen was safely off the ship. Jane was frantic and blew incessantly on the whistle attached to her life jacket.

  Once the engine was fixed we motored slowly in to shore. We were bedraggled and mystified, wet, tired, and worried. We went past yachts where people were eating their dinners. They sat at tables lit with candles, drinking wine and laughing. They had no idea that this little panga filled with stunned tourists was moving among them. Evidently, no mayday message had been sent out.

  It turned out that Jorge had deposited Stephen and some of the crew on an isthmus and then gone back to look for the other crew members. Jorge had his cell phone with him and called his friend, Julian, who ran the Hotel Solymar, telling him to pick us up at the wharf and to find us clothes and give us anything we wanted. The owners of the Alta would pay.

  Julian, his wife, and all his staff were wonderful. They picked us up and brought us back to a lovely hotel with a terrace overlooking the water. We were all at least slightly in shock and most of the adults wanted a drink.

  Andy said, “Do you have a good Scotch?”

  Julian said, “I do. Do you want that on the rocks?”

  “On the what?” Laurie said, and after a second or two, we all laughed. It was a relief to laugh. Julian laughed, too, and fetched a bottle of his best Scotch. No one had it on ice.

  They brought pizza but few of us could eat. I think the kids ate. All I’d had since lunch was some popcorn, a gin and tonic, two Gravol, and a couple of ounces of Scotch. I forced down a few bites.

  Stephen and Jorge appeared on the terrace and Jane gave a shriek.

  Eventually, we learned that the captain hadn’t been driving the boat as we approached Puerto Ayora. The second mate was driving and the captain was attending to accounts. The reef was supposed to have two lighthouses on it, but only one was working. Plus, the waves had definitely been getting bigger and bigger. All of these factors combined to cause the
accident. Once the second mate realized the boat was on the reef, he put the engine in reverse and tried to back it up, but it was too late.

  Ecuador takes Galapagos’ UNESCO designation very seriously. Visitors are not allowed to bring animals or plants or even foodstuffs that might contaminate the ecosystem. People are supposed to decontaminate their shoes after walking on one island and before they walk on another, because each island represents a different ecological microcosm. There are pages and pages of rules. But here was a boat, full of fuel, stuck on a precious, sensitive reef, causing who knows how much damage. We were all sick at heart.

  Jorge went back out to the boat late that night. He scaled it like a monkey, according to David — who went along but didn’t try to enter the Alta himself. Jorge’s goal was to retrieve Ron’s medications, which he needed for his blood pressure and his heart. The Coast Guard had ordered everyone off the boat, including the captain, who’d been planning to stay at least overnight to guard against looters. But he’d obeyed the order and the Coast Guard had posted no one on guard duty, so Jorge took a calculated risk and went into the boat on his own.

  He gave us a full report when they returned. The ship was full of water, especially the rooms on the downward side. It felt stable on the reef, but he suspected that was only because the sea was calm and there was no wind. He’d found Ron’s travel case, but not his and Barb’s passports. We’d given him a list of things to retrieve if possible, including my passport and those of Tom, Ron, Barb, and Fiona. But there was too much water, and he knew that if he stayed too long, the Coast Guard would catch him.

  But he had Ron’s medications and Jorge was now truly our hero. He had lost everything himself. His passport, all his camera gear — including videos of an underwater shoot he’d just completed in the Arctic — his computer. Everything was under water and he would have to start over again.