Grounded, Galápagos Style

Los Gemelos Crater, Galápagos
photo by Josephine Teoudoussia

The flimsy, decaying wood railing makes me mad. It gives not even a tiny illusion of safety. It doesn’t go around the whole crater. It barely makes half the length of the lookout area. It’s like a kid playing with her set of farm toys—the plastic horse, cow, chicken, and several pieces of fence that can click together to make a barn yard—but her set only has one fence piece, so she has to cram it down to make it stand among the worn carpet strands.

One step backwards while posing for a photo and you’d fall over the railing and into the abyss. I stand on the path a good ten feet from the edge, unable to take a step closer. Yet I really want to see. My mind is drawn like a magnet, overwhelmed with a need to understand what I am looking at, to be able to categorize this image as something knowable. But my body will not move.

Without moving, I can see that from the rim of the crater all around, the sides are extreme slashes straight down, as if an angry giant thrust a 1500-foot-wide cookie cutter into the flat earth. My daughter and niece (whose constant laughter and fearless plunge into every experience on this trip has me remembering my younger years of risk-taking and giddy abandonment to the present moment) stand with their backs to the railing taking selfies. Backs to the vast sinkhole. Backs to nothing but a few inches of ground and then empty air. Air and dropping, falling, letting go of Earth.

I feel a familiar, terrifying shift in the earth below my feet. All the past months of meditation and getting grounded vanish. I have the urge to throw myself to the ground and hold on for dear life, to stop the land under me from breaking off and drifting away. 

“I do not like this place,” I say to no one in particular as I will my feet to take a step. My toes ache in my shoes, curled in a mighty bird claw grip. I wave my daughter over, hold her sleeve, and take a few solid shuffles toward the edge.

photo by Josephine Teoudoussia

Though I wish to be on my knees or belly and maybe even tethered to a tree, I stay upright and inch forward. As I get closer, I see that the bottomless pit must actually have a bottom for it is full of lush greenery. But I can’t figure out the perspective. I purposefully look up and out to the horizon, searching for an anchor before looking down again into the optical illusion pit. Am I looking down hundreds of feet onto the tops of behemoth trees? Am I looking at some bushes in an oversized pool? Or am I looking at a bowl of broccoli?

photo by Josephine Teoudoussia

   

Los Gemelos on Santa Cruz Island in the Galápagos are twin pit craters formed when the ground above an underground void collapsed. The underground void was created when subterranean volcanic magma chambers emptied out, causing the chamber roofs to collapse. There’s a pit crater in Hawaii called the Devil’s Throat. There are pit craters on Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Moon. “A newly formed pit crater has steep overhanging sides and is shaped inside like an inverted cone, growing wider closer to the bottom. Over time the overhangs fall into the pit and the crater fills with talus from the collapsing sides and roof. A middle-aged pit crater is cylindrical, but its rim will continue to collapse …”*

Here is proof: The ground collapses.

Our four days in the Galápagos are divided into two land days and two ocean days. After the land day with the visit to the twin sinkholes that left me undone, I am ready for an ocean day. I wake up and pull back the curtain to fast-moving clouds, mist, and fog. The view across the valley and out to ocean has been swallowed whole. Moisture presses in close. A sense of unease spreads as my eyes search for the horizon line, the ground, the road—anything straight and solid.

We take a bus through a cloud. I never see beyond the dripping wet windows. We board an inflatable motorboat, sit teetering on the hard balloon sides, hands gripping the wet nylon ropes. We smash up and down on waves, outracing the fog at last. Saltwater and the first glints of sunlight slash our eyes, leaving us semi-blind and once again disoriented. The boat stops, we all stand, and everything tilts right and then left in slow motion. Our legs wobble, we reach for each other, we conjure thigh muscles to balance, and then work off our life vests.

The captain’s arm reaches across a three-foot gap between the yacht and me on the motorboat. I hold my breath, plant a foot on the slippery end of the boat, grab the arm, muster any ancient grace the universe has to offer, and before I can think about how badly this can go, I step from one unstable surface to another. Throughout the day, I do this seven more times as we get off and on to snorkel, hike to a volcano top, and swim with penguins, manta rays, sharks, and turtles.

On the last snorkel in the late afternoon, after hours at sea, hours away from land, I realize I am still clutching for stable ground. My body is still rigid, on alert, and fighting the buoyancy and perpetual motion of the ocean.

Yet being under water wearing a wetsuit, flippers, mask, and snorkel gives me the freedom to explore and see what I couldn’t see looking down into the crater—an underworld. It’s enchanting—everything dappled and twinkling, undulating and waving, plunging and swarming. I am encircled by wonderous fish that are long and pointy like Dachshunds, flat and thin like pancakes, jagged and fist-size like rocks, striped, luminescent, and covered in dots. One fish has a line of illuminated white dots perfectly spaced on each side that evoke an airstrip landing in a pitch-black night. I am compelled to follow it.

For a few sweet moments, I let go. The white dotted fish slips gracefully through sunbeams and bubbles. I will follow this fish anywhere. My body unclenches just a little. It’s quiet and peaceful.

Quiet? Oh shit. Where is my group? I flex my flippers to come to a sudden halt and bend my torso to reverse. I’ve flipped around and started paddling too quickly, creating a tornado of bubbles that I can’t see through. I’ve lost my orientation and for a split second I’m not sure which direction the surface is. I want to take a deep breath but I’m under water and my body has not registered the idea of breathing through a snorkel. I’m on the verge of panic when the white dotted fish passes by, this time with three white-dotted-fish friends. I pop my head out of the water and see that I am only about ten feet from other splashing people.

Back on the yacht, my body is pleasantly exhausted from the sun, sea, and hours of movement that were peppered with moments of fear. I’ve struggled out of my wetsuit for the last time, taken a shower that involved trying to stay upright while getting slammed back and forth in a slippery stall as the yacht made its way over tumultuous waves.

We have two hours back to Santa Cruz Island. I stretch out on one of the deck lounge chairs and cover myself with a whisper soft blanket. I stare up into the endless pure blue sky. I am hypnotized by a black dot that slowly grows bigger as it comes straight down like a spaceship. Just as it gets close enough to decipher as a frigate bird, I see two more dots descending in transparent shafts. Soon there are twelve frigates hovering above the deck. The boat is racing south and when I look forward to the bow, I feel the speed. But when I look up, I see the frigates are not only effortlessly floating like balloons on invisible strings, but they are all facing east. It is discombobulating.

I keep my gaze fixed on the sky full of floating frigates. My eyelids are half-mast, growing heavy as the rocking boat and muffling winds lull me. My body wants to let go but my brain is fighting to stay alert and figure out the message of the frigate birds. They embody movement and stillness at the same time. They seem unattached and free yet invisibly tethered and controlled. That’s it. They are grounded aloft. It’s an oxymoron full of possibility. I wonder … could I replace my disorientation with being grounded aloft?

The older I get, the more I fight feelings of disorientation, unstable ground, imbalance, disconnect, floating, teetering, falling, … But when I was young, I sought these feeling out—being thrown into a pool, skiing, climbing trees, roller coasters, jumpy houses, swings, water slides, trampolines, spinning, dancing, riding a bike downhill, getting drunk, getting high, …

From the time I learned to walk until my teen years, like most kids, I was curious about the thrilling sensation of flight, spinning, being high up, upside down, off the ground. But I also had complete trust. Trust that the equipment would not break, that someone would catch me, that I would be fine even if I fell. And then later as a teenager, I understood more about the dangers of taking risks, and that trust is often flimsy at best. But that just made it all the more compelling, because like most teens, I thought I was invincible.

My twenties were lived in a kaleidoscope twisted with gusto. The free-falling teen years splintered into a fragmented life in Chicago of art school, being a bell hop in an old hotel on the Gold Coast, and trailing graffiti artists and rappers. That life spun into college in Montana, befriending and living with two Native American men, dating a cowboy, cleaning cabins in Glacier National Park, and being a sous chef in a hip alley restaurant. That life exploded into teaching English in Cameroon and in return being taught life.

When I came home from Cameroon, a strange feeling would overcome me—like I was in an elevator coming down to the ground floor, my body settling into the landing, and then out of nowhere, an aftershock, a slight surge back up that throws off equilibrium. It was the first time I felt disorientation that I did not like. I fought it. This unstable feeling was not fun like it was when I was younger. It felt unsafe and out of control.

Could it be that maturity squelches trust in the universe? The more we learn about our surroundings, the more we fear? The more our surroundings get under our skin, the more our trust in ourselves is undone? Until what used to be fun and free like jumping off a high dive becomes reckless and terrifying and then eventually just walking down a crowded street brings such anxiety in the form of disorientation that we are paralyzed into believing the only answer is getting grounded?

I spent my thirties and forties trying to mature—get a stable job, start a family, get a house—stop all that crazy spinning in the kaleidoscope and get serious. Get grounded.

As I drifted at sea under the frigates, I realized that the Galápagos Islands were the exact opposite of groundedness and stability. Their creation was one of violent volcanic eruptions, ocean currents churning with massive power, fierce colliding winds, and creatures that came only by floating or flying.

Miracles of change, motion, and movement abound here.

The land is in a perpetual state of evolution. The sixteen islands represent every stage of change, from the youngest in the west which are dry and blackened like a fire just doused to the middle-aged islands in crater shapes covered in green to the oldest in the east, eroded down to just a half crescent rim or simply flattened as they disappear. The Galápagos Islands are drifting across the surface of Earth at the rate of about three centimeters a year. Over their three-million-year existence, they have drifted almost 60 miles.

Under the Islands, a gigantic column of molten lava descends 1800 miles down, connecting to the center of earth, an umbilical cord lit hot yellow and floating in a dark endless womb full of life-giving fluid. Volcanoes burst from that lava column and create ground that does not rest stable but rather grows to peaks through repeated explosions and then sinks under its own weight of ash and lava and then shrinks and eventually disappears. All of this happens over a few million years but the change over those years is constant.

The life-giving fluid that makes up the ocean around the Galápagos is the result of faraway elements brought through three cold water currents converging on the Islands. Rain washes nutrients from forest soils, down streams, into rivers, and into the ocean from New Guinea 8000 miles away, Peru, and the Panama Basin.

The Galápagos Islands may be tethered to Earth’s core deep below the ocean, but above water, the Islands are perpetually battered by two competing winds—the southeast trade winds from South America and the northeast from the Caribbean and Central America.

Since the Galápagos Islands are volcanoes erupted from a 60-mile-wide hot spot far from the mainland, they have no indigenous plants or animals. The first living things came floating on those powerful ocean currents or flying on those strong winds.

From South and Central America, six hundred miles away, rafts of vegetation carried the first iguanas, spiders spun fine threads of web that attached to the wind and carried them like miniscule hot air balloons, and seeds tucked in flying birds and floating debris made the journey.

The most prolific seed was a relative of the dandelion called scalesia. Scalesia seeds that landed on infertile dry lava rock used a “conjuring trick”** to germinate. With a bit of rainwater, it can grow without soil. Parts of the plant die and shed. The dead parts decompose and become soil that provides nutrients for the living part to thrive on. Scalesia covers the middle-aged islands like Santa Cruz. It evolved from ground covering to tall trees—forests that cover miles and miles.

Creatures like iguanas, penguins, tortoises, and birds transform their bodies to adapt to changes in the land and weather. With no significant predators, animals here can spend all their time mating, eating, and raising young and as a result they evolve at hyper speeds—in an “evolutionary blink of an eye.”**

Blue footed boobies dive down into the ocean at bullet speed from 25 meters high. At speeds of 65 miles per hour or more, hitting the water at such force could kill many birds, but boobies have special air sacs that cushion the impact.

photo by Josephine Teoudoussia

Frigate birds never touch the ocean. Its saltwater would kill them. Instead they fly behind a blue-footed booby who has just caught a fish, attack the booby’s back end, shaking the fish out of its mouth, and with incredible flying stealth, the frigate bird darts under the booby and snags the falling fish midair.

The Galápagos Islands play in my mind’s eye as a time lapse video: explosions from earth’s core, ocean currents and titanic winds snatch up plants and creatures from hundreds of miles away into their powerful pull, and weather slams, slaps, shapes the land. Pause the video and you see a medley of birds, a stew of sea creatures, hot spots, sink holes, lava tunnels, pit craters, spitting iguanas from mainland rainforests that now swim, penguins from Antarctica that float like ducks, sea lions from California, birds with blue feet, birds with red balloon chests, and scalesia creeping high and low.

The Galápagos pandemonium sent me over the edge at first. It triggered feelings of disorientation that I had been fighting for years. I tried stabilizing myself by pressing my bare feet to the ground, by setting my sight to the horizon, by hugging trees anchored to Earth. But then I saw the fragility of the ground by the crater pits, how easily the horizon vanishes in fog, mist, ocean waves, and how a sturdy tree that is deeply rooted into the earth is just one of a billion tiny things rooted to planet Earth. But being rooted means nothing in a pursuit to be grounded because planet Earth is spinning, rotating on its axis at tremendous speed. To make one complete rotation in 24 hours, a point near the equator of Earth, where I was in the Galápagos, must move at close to 1000 miles per hour. We are all in motion all the time. The best we can hope for is being grounded aloft.

So while the boat speeds south through all these moving elements, I face east and still myself like the frigate birds. I let go and let it all rush around me. I let the tilting of Earth, the rocking and lapping of the ocean, and the whipping and whispering of the wind take me. I somersault, float, and finally sink into the motion like a baby who trusts the world will keep her safe and never let her fall off.

*Okubo, Chris, and Stephen Martel. "Pit crater formation on Kilauea volcano, Hawaii." Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research. 86.1-4 (1998):1-18. Print.; Geological Field Guide: Kilauea Volcano. revised edition. Claremont, CA: Hawai'i Natural History Association, 2002. 97. Print

** David Attenborough in Steven Hsu’s natural history documentary, Galápagos