Honeymoon
So the best thing about the Galapagos islands is swimming with baby sea lions. You were going to ask at some point, so there-that’s it, I’ve told you. The best part is having them swim up to your snorkeling mask, twitching their whiskers, having them bring you a piece of kelp the way a puppy would bring you a Frisbee or a stick it wants you to throw, turning around to find that they are playfully biting your flippers. It is hard, when writing a paragraph about baby sea lions, to not use the adjective “playful” seventeen times in a sentence. You chase them playfully and they playfully loop underneath you, slicing through the water like missiles or bullets, playfully circling your awkwardly wet-suited body, playful and curious and eager for the chance to explore (playfully) something that is not another baby sea lion. And they climb clumsily onto the land and look at you, their head tilted. And you see how incredibly small they are and you are touched that something so foreign and innocent is interested in knowing or befriending you. You are in a rocky cove a thousand miles off the mainland in water that is as blue as the Windex bottle that is back home under your kitchen sink. There are jagged grey rocks protruding like the masts of ships and sea turtles circling endlessly, like men lost and unwilling to ask for directions. Hundreds of fish swim back and forth, going about their business and black tip sharks glide past, not caring about you at all even though you see them and immediately think, “Shark!” and freeze and start shaking and begin thinking about all of the ways you could die out here, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Bizarrely designed sea urchins litter the floor and you are floating amongst all of it, confused, realizing how fully you do not belong here, when a three month-old sea lion nuzzles up to your mask, so desperate to play that you forget about the sharks and the cold and the enormity of the ocean and begin chasing it as if you are delirious first graders at recess.
Your honeymoon is when things start. You are with a person you love very dearly-someone you may have met at a party or online or through friends, but who you liked enough to take home to your family and say, “Thank you all very much for raising me to adulthood, but I am going to go off and live the rest of my life with this person I just met a few months ago in a bar on 2nd Avenue.” And your family goes, “Sure, that’s fine,” as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do, which by the way, it is. And you plan a wedding with cake and flowers and you hire a photographer who promises not to let your face get shiny and a DJ who swears that she will not play the electric slide or the chicken dance. And the wedding happens over the course of a few hours and everyone goes, “Wow, that was wonderful, we had a great time!” And then they go home and immediately go back to their normal lives and you look directly into the face of the person you have married and go, “Ok, so what now?”
The beginning of a relationship is plagued by questions like, “Why didn’t he call me?” and “Is she bipolar or is it normal for women to act like this?” and “Should I say I love you or wait for him to say it?” And the second part of the relationship is when you realize you will spend the rest of your life with this person, whether or not either of you has verbalized this. And once you have verbalized this; once you have said this out loud to them, you begin planning some sort of wedding. And once the wedding is over, that’s it. You look at the person you have decided to spend your life with and think, “Ok, so now we’re in this together.” Your getting married does not change anything about the nature of life or the concept of time, or the universe in general-the minute you are born you begin to die, but now, at least, you have company.
When most people think “romantic setting” they do not call to mind a volcanic plain covered in lizards, where a ten year-old in a life jacket repeatedly asks you to play cards. But that is their own problem, highlighting their inability to think outside the box. While the term “honeymoon” brings to mind images of twin beach chairs and poolside martini delivery service and private romantic bungalows with king-size beds, ours was spent in the matchbox-sized cabin of a boat that, when moving, recreated the feeling of trying to sleep while inside a clothes dryer. While we had intermittent periods in which we could lovingly gaze into each other’s eyes, we could also gaze into the eyes of an NYU Psychology professor and his boyfriend of ten years, an Asian family of five from Redondo Beach, two Ukranian physicists, two German biologists, and an Ecuadorian naturalist guide named, fittingly, Darwin.
The Galapagos islands are on a volcanic conveyor belt in the Pacific ocean, over a thousand miles off the coast of Ecuador. The islands are created by volcanic activity and spend millions of years traveling southeast. They inch slowly away from their point of creation, as if on an assembly line, becoming green and lush and developing diversified life forms-plants and bees and finches-bazillions of finches-will someone in design please put the finishing touches on the finches?-before reaching the end point and disappearing back into the ocean, being swallowed, I assume, by some sort of underwater trench. I felt bad for the elderly islands, so close to death, to being sucked under the water and destroyed in the bowels of the earth until I realized that the same thing will more or less happen to me some day, and I was forced to take my mind off my own demise by eating seventeen of the imitation Werther’s Original-like candies that sat untouched in the dining room.
The best thing about the Galapagos is the swimming with baby sea lions, but there are about a thousand million things all competing for second place. On our first day we take a short hike in which a yellow land iguana walks up to our group-walks right up to our shoes-and what you think first is, “It’s a fake iguana. Nothing in the wild would walk right up to us. It seems like an animatronic land iguana engineered by the people at Disney and it is going to say, “Hello!” and start talking to us about its lifespan and eating habits and hypothesize about how its species might have ended up in the Galapagos.” But it is a real iguana and it is, for whatever reason, curious. This is the only iguana on the trip that will do this. The rest of them will lie, indifferent, sunning themselves as you walk past, often with their legs splayed as if they had been dropped from a helicopter.
The iguanas are prehistorically beautiful and freakish. We see land iguanas and marine iguanas and one day after snorkeling we notice that a tortoise the size of a roll top desk is slowly wandering through our belongings on the beach, gazing at a pair of New Balance Sneakers that are sitting on the sand behind a pile of towels. Those are what you think of when you think of the Galapagos islands-the tortoises. They were hunted nearly to extinction by explorers in every century except the present one, which is not difficult to understand, given that their speed is only slightly slower than that of a nursing home resident walking waist deep through molasses. The turtle eyes the sneakers-perhaps imagining some updated version of the Tortoise and the Hare in which he has several corporate sponsors, his shell littered with Nike swooshes and Gatorade logos-and walks off into the brush. The NYU professor begins madly snapping pictures of its rear end as it wanders into the grass. That is something all of us do. We take rapid fire pictures of anything and everything. “There’s a flightless cormorant! A shark! There’s another shark! Penguins! Baby Marine iguanas!” The animals not being afraid, there is no real need for a zoom lens, as you can squat inches from anything living on the island and it will stare blankly at you for upward of thirty minutes while you snap two hundred pictures of it from various angles.
As much as you love the excursions you learn to love the boat that has temporarily become your home. This is not your real home-the post-honeymoon home to which you will return with 3 CDs full of photographs and restlessness and the vague desire to get a puppy. But for now, during your honeymoon, this is your home and your family. You are a newly married couple and if people ask, “Do you have kids?” you violently shake your head no, but if they ask, “Do you have two Ukranian Physicists, two German biologists, and an Asian family of five from Redondo Beach?” you smile with pride and say, “Yes. Yes we do.” You talk for hours with the Psychology professor from NYU and his boyfriend, the only people who live close enough that you might have kept in touch after returning from the trip, except that they are (go figure) moving to Abu Dhabi seven days after arriving back in New York. You play cards with the family from Redondo Beach as their youngest daughter (who is five) regales you with tales of things her mother has said she is allowed to do, using the word “actually” twice in every sentence and tugging at your pants when she feels you have stopped listening. She is tiny-just tall enough to reach the lightswitches, and has bangs cut straight across her forehead and is always laughing and smiling and running around the deck and talking in long, surprisingly complex sentences, occasionally using the words “endemic” and “ecosystem.” Her sisters are ten and fifteen. The eldest is in the midst of being a teenager, lovable but despondent and hopeful for attention, and the ten year-old is trapped in the inbetween. She is too old to be blissfully innocent-strangers do not talk to her without reserve in supermarkets anymore-but she is not old enough to know why her older sister is frustrated and upset. She is trapped in limbo between the joy of believing in Santa and the agony of hating your mother and her stupid goddamn haircut and why the hell can’t I stay out till ten thirty if everybody else is staying out till ten thirty? And there is always Darwin who stands at the head of the table, shyly answering questions, quietly explaining how they are trying to save the Galapagos ecosystem. He is always thoughtful and serious except that one time, when I am snorkeling far from the shore I come up to rest for a moment and see him alone on the beach, running back and forth, doing Scott Hamilton-style backflips.
The third day on one of the islands we are playing with baby sea lions. They walk after you manically on the beach as if you had dropped your wallet and they are desperately trying to return it to you. They are fat and happy and, there’s that word again, playful, except for one which is thin and tired and Darwin tells us that if the mother of any of the babies is killed, the baby will also die. He looks at the sea lion solemnly. Its head is cradled in the sand and it is curled, lying anxiously on its side, its ribs showing through its skin. This is one of the last days this particular sea lion will be alive, and the five year-old has particular trouble with this, as do I, as we do not normally live in a world in which it is ok for adorable baby animals to die. We tentatively leave the beach to resume the rest of our vacation but the three girls fall silent and even the Ukranians and the Germans peer over their shoulder at the baby sea lion, as if to say I’m sorry or pay their last respects. A few days later we come to an island where there is the carcass of a baby sea lion curled on the beach and it is sad, but not as sad as seeing a live one approach various mothers, needling them for attention the way the five year-old on our boat comes up to me, hoping that I will run around the deck with her. It is hard to watch the constant rejections from various sea lion mothers, one dismissal after another until the baby resigns itself to lying curled in the sand, waiting, possibly forever.
It is not that we don’t know about death. We come across the enormous skeleton of a Minke whale, the bones bleached white, and the five year old strikes a Vanna White pose in front of it, “Ta Da!!” gesturing to it as if it were something you could win. “This 2005 premium condition Minke whale skeleton, valued at 25,000 dollars!”
We know that things will die and we know that new things will be born. We visit an island heavily populated by blue-footed boobies and see, within the first five minutes of arriving, a mating dance, an expectant couple, the male switching and taking his turn on the nest, and a third pair with a hatchling in the process of crawling from the egg. It is like watching a living textbook-this is how baby birds are made. We look back and see the male booby still lifting his feet and extending his legs, hoping that the female will find this irresistibly attractive and want to “come up for a cup of coffee.” The psychology professor takes hundreds of pictures and promises to give me copies of them, as I have forgotten my camera on that particular excursion. His boyfriend takes photos of Jonathan and I standing by the cliff, the horizon stretched out behind us and says, “These pictures are really sweet.” And I ask, “Sweet like, endearing? Or sweet like, “that’s a sweet car,” and he laughs and says, “Sweet like endearing.” I kiss Jonathan on the top of his arm, in the place where people sometimes have vaccination scars.
We walk through the rest of the island talking with the psychology professor and his boyfriend, with whom we have a great deal in common. That part was unexpected. You arrive at the boat and look at the people you will be spending your time with and wonder what on earth you will talk about with a Ukranian couple in their early fifties who were physicists working during the cold war since you are a waitress at a French restaurant near the World Trade Center. But you remember, suddenly, that people do not happen upon the Galapagos the way you happen upon the world’s biggest ball of yarn while driving cross country-to come here is a deliberate move and anyone who is here wanted to come here very much. We hike together and return to the boat, all of us poring over pictures of fish we think we have identified. We crowd around Darwin and ask about the mating habits of different species and why turtle eggs will be female if the temperature is above or below a certain point and we look at each other and go, “Aha, that’s why!” and we are all genuinely excited. I realize at one point that I am able to identify all four types of Galapagos mangroves and am dismayed that this knowledge will in no way help me become a better waitress, comedian or SAT tutor. But we all know them. Black, white, red and button mangrove. The psychology professor points over the side of the boat and yells, “Puffer fish!” and all of us scramble to see them. His boyfriend stands at the front of the boat looking for whales and I stand with him and he and I several times scream out, “Whale! No…wait. Not a whale. Wave. It was a wave. Sorry. I’m an idiot.” And we finally do see a whale-its endlessly arched back topped with a diminutive dorsal fin-“Whale! Really a whale this time!”-and the German couple pull out a zoom lens for their camera the size of a roll of cookie dough. Everyone is giddy. We are like an excited first grade class.
So the best part is swimming with baby sea lions and the scariest part, aside from maybe the sharks, is leaving and realizing that you have your whole life ahead of you and that you are not entirely sure what you are doing with it yet. We spend the last night on the deck looking at a pelican perched on the boat, while the Ukranian and German couples try to locate the southern cross amongst the stars. We exchange e-mail addresses and the girls beg me to recite the Animaniacs song that lists all the presidents of the United States, but I refuse because I have already done it once that day-I explain to them that the other adults will kill me because having to hear that song more than once is annoying. The fifteen year-old says that she will try to facebook us and the Germans nod politely and smile at everyone and the Ukranians give a long, enthusiastic speech about how wonderful of a time they have had and how happy they are and how this has been maybe the most amazing trip of their lives. Darwin thanks us and says sheepishly that he will miss us, that we have been one of his favorite groups. And the next day at the airport we huge everyone goodbye-the Ukranians grabbing us up in enormous bear hugs and grinning and all of the girls saying goodbye and then last of all we are forced to leave the Psychology professor and his boyfriend who were our favorites, and as we hug them the phrase, “I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow,” runs through my head, and the psychology professor hangs his head and says, “I hate saying goodbyes. I’ve always been bad at goodbyes.”
And I silently say goodbye to the islands and to Darwin and to all the animals that I stepped over or walked past. I walk onto the plane with Jonathan, who I do not have to say goodbye to. He is the person who I met online who I took home to my family and said, “Thanks so much for raising me and everything, but I met this person on the internet and I’m thinking about living with him for the rest of my life.” I hold onto his hand. I will have to say goodbye to Jonathan someday, eventually, but hopefully not for a long time-four or five decades at least, if I am lucky. Eventually he and I will go the way of the motherless baby sea lions or the Minke whale, but there is a lot that happens between now and then, so there is no point dwelling on it.
We sit side by side on the plane, Jonathan and I, smiling at each other. The only souvenirs, aside from the photos we have taken, are two green T-shirts that say, “Parque Nacional Galapagos.” Jonathan asks the woman if they are pre-shrunk and she assures us that yes, they are. We head home, delirious, from our honeymoon. And nineteen thousand people ask us what our favorite part of the trip was. And both of us immediately reply, “Swimming with baby sea lions.” Which is true. The swimming with baby sea lions was the best part because first off, baby sea lions are adorable and have huge awkward flippers and enormous eyes. But also because they are mammals and, aside from the Ukranian Physicists and adorable five year-olds from Redondo Beach, they are the things in the Galapagos to whom I am most closely related. You cannot identify with a shark or an albatross, but it is easy to project your own feelings onto the sea lions-that they are happy, sad, thoughtful, lonely or curious.
We arrive home. Jonathan wears his Galapagos shirt the next week and a man on the subway enthusiastically strikes up a conversation with him. It is exciting, talking to other people who have been there. Who will say, “Yes! I know! Red, White, Black and Button mangroves!” And Jonathan washes his shirt and go figure, it shrinks, and he is notably upset. And I decide to surprise him by finding the shirt online and ordering him a new one, except that of course that shirt does not exist anywhere on the internet. There are shirts that have enormous sting rays and neon scribbles on them that say, “Galapagos!” and ones that say, “I heart boobies,” that are accented by a pair of blue feet, but we do not want those. I find a site for a non-profit-the Galapagos Conservatory-that sells some shirts that look similar to his and because I do not know what else to do, I write them a letter.
Hello,
I have what feels like an incredibly vapid, stupid question regarding the items you sell online through your site, so forgive me in advance for asking it. Do you ever sell the Galapagos Parque Nacional T-shirts with the Tortoise and the Hammerhead shark logo on them? We just got back from the Galapagos and bought only one souvenir to remember the trip...a size Medium sea green parque nacional t-shirt. And though the woman said the shirt was pre-shrunk, no sooner did we wash it than it shrunk so drastically that my husband can't wear it without looking like a thirteen year-old transvestite prostitute.
And it's just a stupid shirt, but we were sort of heartbroken. I can’t totally explain why. I figured I would be able to find it easily online and surprise him with a new one but I can't find it anywhere. This site seemed to have things similar to it so I figured I'd ask if it's something you once sold or may sell in the future. Please let me know-- if I can somehow purchase one through the site I'd happily donate some additional money to the cause.
Thank you and sorry for the stupid question. I just don't know who else to ask.
Sincerely,
Raquel D'Apice
And I sent the letter into the void, only to receive a reply two days later from someone saying, “I was touched by your letter, particularly by your description of your husband in his shrunken T-shirt. I will be visiting the Galapagos later this month for a meeting. Send me a picture of the shirt and I will try to pick you up a new one when I am down there.”
And I was somewhat floored but sent a photo attached to my next e-mail, and three weeks later we received a package from someone who I later learned is the president of the Galapagos Conservatory, with the T-shirt in a larger size and a note saying, “The next time I’m in Jersey City you can buy me a beer.”
The best thing about the Galapagos-you can say it by heart with me at this point, can’t you? The baby sea lions. I know. I repeat myself. But the second best thing is also the feeling of community. The camaraderie between other people who have been there and who care about it and who love it, even though their normal life has almost nothing to do with sea turtles or mangroves or flightless cormorants. Even though they sit in offices or on subways or in traffic, they have the memory of floating in the middle of the ocean, miles from anything, realizing that whatever it was they were worrying about is probably not that important in the grand scheme of things.
Jonathan and I wake up in our own bed. One wall of our bedroom is painted brown and our comforter is blue, like the ocean. Not windex blue, like the shallow snorkeling water, but blue the color the ocean is painted on a map or a globe. This is the bedroom we will wake up in for at least the next couple of years, which is fine. Jonathan will get up and go to work and I will get up and go to work and we will both do some things each day, occasionally in each other’s company, and will go back to the bedroom and go to sleep. Most of the time nothing exciting will happen, which is why it is important to marry someone you really like. Because most of your life will be boring, so at least it will be boring with someone you love and care about who will laugh with you about how boring it is. I think of the line from the movie, Hook, that goes, "So...your adventures are over," and wonder if that has become true for us. Our adventures are over. For the first few weeks after the honeymoon we will squeal the phrase, “Baby sea lions!” at each other, but after a while we realize that that part of our life is officially finished and that it is time to move on.
I have no idea what I am doing. My adventures are not over but whatever new ones I face will be completely unfamiliar to me and I will be wholly unprepared for them, even with thirty years worth of life and experiences behind me. I turn to Jonathan who is sitting at his desk sending an e-mail and ask, “So, what now?”
He does not know either. But he turns to me, with confidence in his uncertainty, and sucks in his breath.
"Well," he says, “let’s think about getting a puppy.”
Your honeymoon is when things start. You are with a person you love very dearly-someone you may have met at a party or online or through friends, but who you liked enough to take home to your family and say, “Thank you all very much for raising me to adulthood, but I am going to go off and live the rest of my life with this person I just met a few months ago in a bar on 2nd Avenue.” And your family goes, “Sure, that’s fine,” as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do, which by the way, it is. And you plan a wedding with cake and flowers and you hire a photographer who promises not to let your face get shiny and a DJ who swears that she will not play the electric slide or the chicken dance. And the wedding happens over the course of a few hours and everyone goes, “Wow, that was wonderful, we had a great time!” And then they go home and immediately go back to their normal lives and you look directly into the face of the person you have married and go, “Ok, so what now?”
The beginning of a relationship is plagued by questions like, “Why didn’t he call me?” and “Is she bipolar or is it normal for women to act like this?” and “Should I say I love you or wait for him to say it?” And the second part of the relationship is when you realize you will spend the rest of your life with this person, whether or not either of you has verbalized this. And once you have verbalized this; once you have said this out loud to them, you begin planning some sort of wedding. And once the wedding is over, that’s it. You look at the person you have decided to spend your life with and think, “Ok, so now we’re in this together.” Your getting married does not change anything about the nature of life or the concept of time, or the universe in general-the minute you are born you begin to die, but now, at least, you have company.
When most people think “romantic setting” they do not call to mind a volcanic plain covered in lizards, where a ten year-old in a life jacket repeatedly asks you to play cards. But that is their own problem, highlighting their inability to think outside the box. While the term “honeymoon” brings to mind images of twin beach chairs and poolside martini delivery service and private romantic bungalows with king-size beds, ours was spent in the matchbox-sized cabin of a boat that, when moving, recreated the feeling of trying to sleep while inside a clothes dryer. While we had intermittent periods in which we could lovingly gaze into each other’s eyes, we could also gaze into the eyes of an NYU Psychology professor and his boyfriend of ten years, an Asian family of five from Redondo Beach, two Ukranian physicists, two German biologists, and an Ecuadorian naturalist guide named, fittingly, Darwin.
The Galapagos islands are on a volcanic conveyor belt in the Pacific ocean, over a thousand miles off the coast of Ecuador. The islands are created by volcanic activity and spend millions of years traveling southeast. They inch slowly away from their point of creation, as if on an assembly line, becoming green and lush and developing diversified life forms-plants and bees and finches-bazillions of finches-will someone in design please put the finishing touches on the finches?-before reaching the end point and disappearing back into the ocean, being swallowed, I assume, by some sort of underwater trench. I felt bad for the elderly islands, so close to death, to being sucked under the water and destroyed in the bowels of the earth until I realized that the same thing will more or less happen to me some day, and I was forced to take my mind off my own demise by eating seventeen of the imitation Werther’s Original-like candies that sat untouched in the dining room.
The best thing about the Galapagos is the swimming with baby sea lions, but there are about a thousand million things all competing for second place. On our first day we take a short hike in which a yellow land iguana walks up to our group-walks right up to our shoes-and what you think first is, “It’s a fake iguana. Nothing in the wild would walk right up to us. It seems like an animatronic land iguana engineered by the people at Disney and it is going to say, “Hello!” and start talking to us about its lifespan and eating habits and hypothesize about how its species might have ended up in the Galapagos.” But it is a real iguana and it is, for whatever reason, curious. This is the only iguana on the trip that will do this. The rest of them will lie, indifferent, sunning themselves as you walk past, often with their legs splayed as if they had been dropped from a helicopter.
The iguanas are prehistorically beautiful and freakish. We see land iguanas and marine iguanas and one day after snorkeling we notice that a tortoise the size of a roll top desk is slowly wandering through our belongings on the beach, gazing at a pair of New Balance Sneakers that are sitting on the sand behind a pile of towels. Those are what you think of when you think of the Galapagos islands-the tortoises. They were hunted nearly to extinction by explorers in every century except the present one, which is not difficult to understand, given that their speed is only slightly slower than that of a nursing home resident walking waist deep through molasses. The turtle eyes the sneakers-perhaps imagining some updated version of the Tortoise and the Hare in which he has several corporate sponsors, his shell littered with Nike swooshes and Gatorade logos-and walks off into the brush. The NYU professor begins madly snapping pictures of its rear end as it wanders into the grass. That is something all of us do. We take rapid fire pictures of anything and everything. “There’s a flightless cormorant! A shark! There’s another shark! Penguins! Baby Marine iguanas!” The animals not being afraid, there is no real need for a zoom lens, as you can squat inches from anything living on the island and it will stare blankly at you for upward of thirty minutes while you snap two hundred pictures of it from various angles.
As much as you love the excursions you learn to love the boat that has temporarily become your home. This is not your real home-the post-honeymoon home to which you will return with 3 CDs full of photographs and restlessness and the vague desire to get a puppy. But for now, during your honeymoon, this is your home and your family. You are a newly married couple and if people ask, “Do you have kids?” you violently shake your head no, but if they ask, “Do you have two Ukranian Physicists, two German biologists, and an Asian family of five from Redondo Beach?” you smile with pride and say, “Yes. Yes we do.” You talk for hours with the Psychology professor from NYU and his boyfriend, the only people who live close enough that you might have kept in touch after returning from the trip, except that they are (go figure) moving to Abu Dhabi seven days after arriving back in New York. You play cards with the family from Redondo Beach as their youngest daughter (who is five) regales you with tales of things her mother has said she is allowed to do, using the word “actually” twice in every sentence and tugging at your pants when she feels you have stopped listening. She is tiny-just tall enough to reach the lightswitches, and has bangs cut straight across her forehead and is always laughing and smiling and running around the deck and talking in long, surprisingly complex sentences, occasionally using the words “endemic” and “ecosystem.” Her sisters are ten and fifteen. The eldest is in the midst of being a teenager, lovable but despondent and hopeful for attention, and the ten year-old is trapped in the inbetween. She is too old to be blissfully innocent-strangers do not talk to her without reserve in supermarkets anymore-but she is not old enough to know why her older sister is frustrated and upset. She is trapped in limbo between the joy of believing in Santa and the agony of hating your mother and her stupid goddamn haircut and why the hell can’t I stay out till ten thirty if everybody else is staying out till ten thirty? And there is always Darwin who stands at the head of the table, shyly answering questions, quietly explaining how they are trying to save the Galapagos ecosystem. He is always thoughtful and serious except that one time, when I am snorkeling far from the shore I come up to rest for a moment and see him alone on the beach, running back and forth, doing Scott Hamilton-style backflips.
The third day on one of the islands we are playing with baby sea lions. They walk after you manically on the beach as if you had dropped your wallet and they are desperately trying to return it to you. They are fat and happy and, there’s that word again, playful, except for one which is thin and tired and Darwin tells us that if the mother of any of the babies is killed, the baby will also die. He looks at the sea lion solemnly. Its head is cradled in the sand and it is curled, lying anxiously on its side, its ribs showing through its skin. This is one of the last days this particular sea lion will be alive, and the five year-old has particular trouble with this, as do I, as we do not normally live in a world in which it is ok for adorable baby animals to die. We tentatively leave the beach to resume the rest of our vacation but the three girls fall silent and even the Ukranians and the Germans peer over their shoulder at the baby sea lion, as if to say I’m sorry or pay their last respects. A few days later we come to an island where there is the carcass of a baby sea lion curled on the beach and it is sad, but not as sad as seeing a live one approach various mothers, needling them for attention the way the five year-old on our boat comes up to me, hoping that I will run around the deck with her. It is hard to watch the constant rejections from various sea lion mothers, one dismissal after another until the baby resigns itself to lying curled in the sand, waiting, possibly forever.
It is not that we don’t know about death. We come across the enormous skeleton of a Minke whale, the bones bleached white, and the five year old strikes a Vanna White pose in front of it, “Ta Da!!” gesturing to it as if it were something you could win. “This 2005 premium condition Minke whale skeleton, valued at 25,000 dollars!”
We know that things will die and we know that new things will be born. We visit an island heavily populated by blue-footed boobies and see, within the first five minutes of arriving, a mating dance, an expectant couple, the male switching and taking his turn on the nest, and a third pair with a hatchling in the process of crawling from the egg. It is like watching a living textbook-this is how baby birds are made. We look back and see the male booby still lifting his feet and extending his legs, hoping that the female will find this irresistibly attractive and want to “come up for a cup of coffee.” The psychology professor takes hundreds of pictures and promises to give me copies of them, as I have forgotten my camera on that particular excursion. His boyfriend takes photos of Jonathan and I standing by the cliff, the horizon stretched out behind us and says, “These pictures are really sweet.” And I ask, “Sweet like, endearing? Or sweet like, “that’s a sweet car,” and he laughs and says, “Sweet like endearing.” I kiss Jonathan on the top of his arm, in the place where people sometimes have vaccination scars.
We walk through the rest of the island talking with the psychology professor and his boyfriend, with whom we have a great deal in common. That part was unexpected. You arrive at the boat and look at the people you will be spending your time with and wonder what on earth you will talk about with a Ukranian couple in their early fifties who were physicists working during the cold war since you are a waitress at a French restaurant near the World Trade Center. But you remember, suddenly, that people do not happen upon the Galapagos the way you happen upon the world’s biggest ball of yarn while driving cross country-to come here is a deliberate move and anyone who is here wanted to come here very much. We hike together and return to the boat, all of us poring over pictures of fish we think we have identified. We crowd around Darwin and ask about the mating habits of different species and why turtle eggs will be female if the temperature is above or below a certain point and we look at each other and go, “Aha, that’s why!” and we are all genuinely excited. I realize at one point that I am able to identify all four types of Galapagos mangroves and am dismayed that this knowledge will in no way help me become a better waitress, comedian or SAT tutor. But we all know them. Black, white, red and button mangrove. The psychology professor points over the side of the boat and yells, “Puffer fish!” and all of us scramble to see them. His boyfriend stands at the front of the boat looking for whales and I stand with him and he and I several times scream out, “Whale! No…wait. Not a whale. Wave. It was a wave. Sorry. I’m an idiot.” And we finally do see a whale-its endlessly arched back topped with a diminutive dorsal fin-“Whale! Really a whale this time!”-and the German couple pull out a zoom lens for their camera the size of a roll of cookie dough. Everyone is giddy. We are like an excited first grade class.
So the best part is swimming with baby sea lions and the scariest part, aside from maybe the sharks, is leaving and realizing that you have your whole life ahead of you and that you are not entirely sure what you are doing with it yet. We spend the last night on the deck looking at a pelican perched on the boat, while the Ukranian and German couples try to locate the southern cross amongst the stars. We exchange e-mail addresses and the girls beg me to recite the Animaniacs song that lists all the presidents of the United States, but I refuse because I have already done it once that day-I explain to them that the other adults will kill me because having to hear that song more than once is annoying. The fifteen year-old says that she will try to facebook us and the Germans nod politely and smile at everyone and the Ukranians give a long, enthusiastic speech about how wonderful of a time they have had and how happy they are and how this has been maybe the most amazing trip of their lives. Darwin thanks us and says sheepishly that he will miss us, that we have been one of his favorite groups. And the next day at the airport we huge everyone goodbye-the Ukranians grabbing us up in enormous bear hugs and grinning and all of the girls saying goodbye and then last of all we are forced to leave the Psychology professor and his boyfriend who were our favorites, and as we hug them the phrase, “I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow,” runs through my head, and the psychology professor hangs his head and says, “I hate saying goodbyes. I’ve always been bad at goodbyes.”
And I silently say goodbye to the islands and to Darwin and to all the animals that I stepped over or walked past. I walk onto the plane with Jonathan, who I do not have to say goodbye to. He is the person who I met online who I took home to my family and said, “Thanks so much for raising me and everything, but I met this person on the internet and I’m thinking about living with him for the rest of my life.” I hold onto his hand. I will have to say goodbye to Jonathan someday, eventually, but hopefully not for a long time-four or five decades at least, if I am lucky. Eventually he and I will go the way of the motherless baby sea lions or the Minke whale, but there is a lot that happens between now and then, so there is no point dwelling on it.
We sit side by side on the plane, Jonathan and I, smiling at each other. The only souvenirs, aside from the photos we have taken, are two green T-shirts that say, “Parque Nacional Galapagos.” Jonathan asks the woman if they are pre-shrunk and she assures us that yes, they are. We head home, delirious, from our honeymoon. And nineteen thousand people ask us what our favorite part of the trip was. And both of us immediately reply, “Swimming with baby sea lions.” Which is true. The swimming with baby sea lions was the best part because first off, baby sea lions are adorable and have huge awkward flippers and enormous eyes. But also because they are mammals and, aside from the Ukranian Physicists and adorable five year-olds from Redondo Beach, they are the things in the Galapagos to whom I am most closely related. You cannot identify with a shark or an albatross, but it is easy to project your own feelings onto the sea lions-that they are happy, sad, thoughtful, lonely or curious.
We arrive home. Jonathan wears his Galapagos shirt the next week and a man on the subway enthusiastically strikes up a conversation with him. It is exciting, talking to other people who have been there. Who will say, “Yes! I know! Red, White, Black and Button mangroves!” And Jonathan washes his shirt and go figure, it shrinks, and he is notably upset. And I decide to surprise him by finding the shirt online and ordering him a new one, except that of course that shirt does not exist anywhere on the internet. There are shirts that have enormous sting rays and neon scribbles on them that say, “Galapagos!” and ones that say, “I heart boobies,” that are accented by a pair of blue feet, but we do not want those. I find a site for a non-profit-the Galapagos Conservatory-that sells some shirts that look similar to his and because I do not know what else to do, I write them a letter.
Hello,
I have what feels like an incredibly vapid, stupid question regarding the items you sell online through your site, so forgive me in advance for asking it. Do you ever sell the Galapagos Parque Nacional T-shirts with the Tortoise and the Hammerhead shark logo on them? We just got back from the Galapagos and bought only one souvenir to remember the trip...a size Medium sea green parque nacional t-shirt. And though the woman said the shirt was pre-shrunk, no sooner did we wash it than it shrunk so drastically that my husband can't wear it without looking like a thirteen year-old transvestite prostitute.
And it's just a stupid shirt, but we were sort of heartbroken. I can’t totally explain why. I figured I would be able to find it easily online and surprise him with a new one but I can't find it anywhere. This site seemed to have things similar to it so I figured I'd ask if it's something you once sold or may sell in the future. Please let me know-- if I can somehow purchase one through the site I'd happily donate some additional money to the cause.
Thank you and sorry for the stupid question. I just don't know who else to ask.
Sincerely,
Raquel D'Apice
And I sent the letter into the void, only to receive a reply two days later from someone saying, “I was touched by your letter, particularly by your description of your husband in his shrunken T-shirt. I will be visiting the Galapagos later this month for a meeting. Send me a picture of the shirt and I will try to pick you up a new one when I am down there.”
And I was somewhat floored but sent a photo attached to my next e-mail, and three weeks later we received a package from someone who I later learned is the president of the Galapagos Conservatory, with the T-shirt in a larger size and a note saying, “The next time I’m in Jersey City you can buy me a beer.”
The best thing about the Galapagos-you can say it by heart with me at this point, can’t you? The baby sea lions. I know. I repeat myself. But the second best thing is also the feeling of community. The camaraderie between other people who have been there and who care about it and who love it, even though their normal life has almost nothing to do with sea turtles or mangroves or flightless cormorants. Even though they sit in offices or on subways or in traffic, they have the memory of floating in the middle of the ocean, miles from anything, realizing that whatever it was they were worrying about is probably not that important in the grand scheme of things.
Jonathan and I wake up in our own bed. One wall of our bedroom is painted brown and our comforter is blue, like the ocean. Not windex blue, like the shallow snorkeling water, but blue the color the ocean is painted on a map or a globe. This is the bedroom we will wake up in for at least the next couple of years, which is fine. Jonathan will get up and go to work and I will get up and go to work and we will both do some things each day, occasionally in each other’s company, and will go back to the bedroom and go to sleep. Most of the time nothing exciting will happen, which is why it is important to marry someone you really like. Because most of your life will be boring, so at least it will be boring with someone you love and care about who will laugh with you about how boring it is. I think of the line from the movie, Hook, that goes, "So...your adventures are over," and wonder if that has become true for us. Our adventures are over. For the first few weeks after the honeymoon we will squeal the phrase, “Baby sea lions!” at each other, but after a while we realize that that part of our life is officially finished and that it is time to move on.
I have no idea what I am doing. My adventures are not over but whatever new ones I face will be completely unfamiliar to me and I will be wholly unprepared for them, even with thirty years worth of life and experiences behind me. I turn to Jonathan who is sitting at his desk sending an e-mail and ask, “So, what now?”
He does not know either. But he turns to me, with confidence in his uncertainty, and sucks in his breath.
"Well," he says, “let’s think about getting a puppy.”