I snorkeled for the first time in the Galapagos, It made me cry.

I started to tear up when I saw a starfish. I told myself, don’t cry inside your mask, but that feeling of awe and overwhelm isn’t something you can fight. It isn’t something you should fight. I was surprised to feel it in response to something so small, the movement of a starfish on the sea floor, 600 miles from mainland Ecuador in the waters of the Galapagos.

Until this week, I had never been snorkeling. I always thought I would be afraid.

But on this day, they offered a chance for beginners to start on the red sand beach of Rábida Island. They called it “practice” and there’s nothing to be afraid of if you are just practicing.

https://youtu.be/SfvYVBuzRDs

I zipped up my wetsuit. The water is cooled by the nutrient-rich Humboldt Current, flowing up from Antarctica, which makes it a perfect habitat for whales, sharks, all manner of colorful fish, sea turtles, sea lions and a kind of small penguin only found here.

I sprayed some baby shampoo on the inside of my goggles so it wouldn’t fog up and placed the snorkel in my mouth. I sat in the water for a moment getting used to the feeling of breathing out of my mouth and feeling a mask over my nose. I wondered how I would react underwater, if I would panic among the fish and long for the shore.

I put on my flippers and laid on my belly in the shallow water as if I was learning to swim.?

But my body remembered immediately that I can swim. I love to swim. At first, the ground was red sand. Then, it dropped off into a red lava shelf. Sunlight filtered through the water like stage lighting and the fish seemed to glow. Purple. Yellow. Blue. They fed on algae on the rocks and I watched their fins move like wings and realized that I’d gone my whole life without understanding the way fish move underwater.

Why didn’t anyone tell me that you can swim with fish and that the underwater world is bright and vibrant? Wait. So many people have told me, but I imagined it was not a place for me.

I put my hands by my legs and moved forward with my flippers. I was not in a rush to get anywhere, only here to take in every movement and every undulation of the underwater landscape. Blue king angelfish, yellowtail surgeonfish,

.

I moved away from the shelf and on the sandy floor, I saw the starfish, stretching its long legs. I flashed to all the dried, dead starfish of childhood. This one was alive. As it came into focus, I saw others. Dozens, in slightly different colors and variations. And that’s what made my face flush, my pupils dilate, my need to fight back tears. It was the recognition of life, the familiar in the unfamiliar, that made my spirit sing out and made me wish for the moment to never end.

A manta ray folded itself by, its long tail and spotted body disappearing into the murk of the deeper water. A small sea lion danced by and circled back, puppy eyes and long whiskers.

I felt saltwater in my snorkel and broke the surface to clear it and see where I was. A pelican sat on the shore, watching me. A marine iguana sunned itself below trees of prickly pear cactus.

Just around the corner was the open ocean. We were among islands, but they are just dots in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, straddling the equator, the protruding belly of the earth. I moved my flippers to stay in place and felt my body as far away from anywhere, as remote as I’d ever been.?

I’d come on this pilgrimage to the famous Galapagos to see birds and fish and beings that only exist here. This place has been preserved and conserved, with tiny pathways carved out for us to explore but the rest set aside as an untouched laboratory for us to truly understand nature.?

Back on land on Fernandina Island, it was almost impossible to know where to focus my attention. We stood on a lava flow, black folds of lava that still seemed to have motion in them though it had hardened.?

Should I look at the marine iguana, just as black as the lava? Their molting scales blended in with the ground. I walked carefully, because more than once I realized there was a blinking iguana right there, almost underfoot.?

The air smelled like them, the humid, sweet, choking smell of guano and salt air.?

They don’t move as you walk by. It’s the main feature of the wildlife here, what naturalists call ecological na?veté. They stay close. They are unafraid. They are even curious. As a rule, we stay six feet away from them. We don’t touch them. But we drink them in.?

I looked closely at the thick eyelids and long fingers of the iguanas. I notice the rounded snout and the horns on their spine.?

There are a few places like this on earth where you get a chance to look closely at animals in the wild, like the grizzly bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park, the elephants in Kenya and the mountain gorillas in Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC. These places, these conservations efforts, are gifts. And they are fleeting. You aren’t allowed to stay. You are given a window of time to look closely, to notice the movement and the shape and the behavior. Then try to remember every detail.

Charles Darwin, the most famous visitor to the Galapagos, was only here a very short time. His well-documented five-year trip on the Beagle, took him all over the world and to the Galapagos only five weeks of that trip. When he got home, he never left England again. He spent the rest of his life remembering and revisiting in his mind what he had seen here, a lifelong mastication of his notes, drawings and specimens from standing right where I was standing.

Naturalist Gilda Gonzalez pointed to two flightless cormorants sitting close to a tidal pool.

“You will only see these flightless cormorants here. They don’t exist anywhere else in the world and you are only here two days,” she said. ?

The cormorants spread their wings to dry. Their wings were small and almost naked, thin feathers hanging down like strips of cloth on a clothesline. Their webbed feet, strong legs and long necks make them perfect underwater fishermen, but they live on land. They are the shape of a bird but survival long ago sold away their place in the sky.?

The black ground was made more dramatic next to the blue green Pacific Ocean. On one side of the flow, the waves broke and rolled into a perfect crashing barrel that sprayed and foamed as it landed on the rocks.?

The noise of it hung in the background, but our eyes were drawn away from the drama toward a small, protected lagoon, full of playing sea lion pups and massive swimming turtles. The sun reflected off the shining fur of the sea lions and one large male pulled his body out of the water and started barking out the boundaries of his territory.?

A bleached whale backbone glowed in the distance behind us, white against black lava.

The essential book “Galapagos: A Natural History” by John Kricher and Kevin Loughlin offers this view of where I was standing: “When you walk on any of the islands, know that the volcanic material beneath your feet arose from the depths of the sea, escaping as molten magma, cooling and solidifying when it hit the cold, deep Pacific Ocean water, and gradually but inexorably building to reach the surface in a majestic process of geological creation that probably began sometime around 15 million years ago.”?

The process continues with islands eroding and disappearing below the surface and new ones rising up, like the beach in Urbina Bay on Isabella Island that uprose from the ocean in the 1950s and has since covered its new, naked land with trees and lumbering turtles and yellow flowers that fill the air with a musky frankincense-like perfume.?

Want to go??

I’m in the Galapagos a few more days, traveling with Lindblad Expeditions. Post and Courier Travel partnered with them to offer a trip next year to the Galapagos in September. If you’ve always wanted to go, this is the company to use because of their long interest in conservation of the islands through funding, education and environmental stewardship.?

Here’s a link to learn more:

https://www.postandcourier.com/travel/galapagos/exploring-galapagos-one-week-sailing-the-islands/article_cd946128-7a1c-11ef-a701-83a71efe19a4.html