The Evolution of Jane

by Cathleen Schine

  At that time of the morning, the crew were all rushing politely by on their way to raise or lower some huge noisy greasy chain. I thought them wonderfully discreet, for they did not even blink at Gloria, who wore a long, decidedly unethnic nightie, unless you consider New England Puritans an ethnic group. On her arm she carried the PBS tote bag in which she kept her umbrella, tissues, sunscreen, water bottle, the biography of Darwin, a bird guide, and a few Baggies. Around her neck hung binoculars, two cameras, her sunglasses, and a hat.

  She started talking about DNA, but as that didn't seem to have any bearing on Martha, and not much on why a husky is not the same species as a wolf but is the same species as a Pekingese—one of my favorite puzzles—I didn't listen too attentively, and eventually it was time to go back to our cabin and get dressed.

  Getting ready in the morning was an homage to all that wonderful shopping I had done at home—preparing, donning, arranging everything in the appropriate manner. There was a sensuous, ample significance to each item. Dressing was a whole field trip in itself.

  After breakfast, there was a little while before we began shoving off in the pangas. I decided to put it to good use by walking round and round the deck, in circles, thinking. Darwin had walked in circles when he thought. Every morning, Darwin would walk along a circular sandy path on a neighbor's property. With each lap, he kicked a pebble onto the track so he would know how many circuits he'd done. I had no pebbles to kick, but I liked the little laps and the idea that it would help me think.

  I meant to think about volcanoes, but I didn't know enough about volcanoes to ponder them for very long. So I thought about Martha and species some more. By lap five I got dizzy, and I changed direction, going counterclockwise. That reminded me: Now that I was below the equator, did the shower drain in a counterclockwise funnel? I had forgotten to look. We would go back and forth across the equator during the trip. The Galapagos lie within two degrees of either side. At what point does the funnel of water change? At what point does an individual change to become a member of a new species rather than its parents' species? At what point does anything change? At what point did Martha stop being my best friend? And what exactly was she now? My former best friend? My perfect guide? The object of an obsessive interest born of resentment and hurt? A cold, impersonal distant relative I detested? A vague memory from another era, a fossil stuck in a stripe of sediment?

  There. I had thought. Just like Darwin.

  Then I got into the panga and made sure I sat next to Martha.

  She was engrossed in a conversation with Mr. Tommaso about tectonic plates. The earth's crust is like the shell of a hard-boiled egg that has been cracked against the counter, she said, but not peeled. Each piece of the cracked shell of the earth egg is called a tectonic plate. The plates shift around, causing all kinds of crumpling and crushing and piling and stretching. Beneath the ocean floor, there are bubbling pools of hot, liquid rock pushing up through the crust of the earth. The Galapagos were formed when a tectonic plate and a hot spot of spitting magma met beneath the sea. The plate slid across the hot spot; boiling magma from the earth's core bubbled up to the surface. It burst through the crust, through the tectonic plate, a volcanic eruption beneath the waves of the Pacific. The magma cooled and piled up, then it happened again, and again, and gradually a huge mountain poked its head up from beneath the sea. Then the plate moved along, like a conveyor belt, taking the volcanic island with it, dragging a nice fresh expanse of eggshell behind it. The hot spot would again bubble up, creating a new island, and so a chain of islands was born, all riding to South America on the back of a tectonic plate, like monkeys clinging to their mother, the older ones those farthest east, the newest ones, only one million years old, pushing their bald heads up in the west.

  "West to east? It's moving toward South America?" said Mr. Tommaso.

  "It knows what it's doing," said Mrs. Tommaso.

  "What it?" said Gloria.

  "That's the eternal question!" Mrs. Cornwall said with a big smile.

  "No wonder the South American governments are so unstable," said Mr. Tommaso. "Islands bumping into their continent every time they turn around."

  "You mustn't blame rocks for the follies of our species," Mrs. Tommaso said in her mild, disapproving voice.

  "Blame the stars," said Gloria.

  Dot Cornwall began humming.

  There was a moment during which no one said anything. We watched the island of Bartholome get closer, a squat gray cone.

  "An ash cone," Jack said.

  "Ashes to ashes," Mrs. Cornwall said cheerfully.

  Dust to dust, we all thought.

  "The dustbin of natural history," Gloria said instead.

  "Quite enough ashes in this place," the Widow Cornwall said, clutching her backpack tighter.

  The panga bumped against a concrete step. Above rose the cone of ash on its journey from the ocean floor, up into the dry glare of the equatorial sun, east toward Ecuador, then down to the bottom of the ocean again, sliding on its plate down into a huge trench, then slipping beneath the big continental plate of South America. We had intercepted it. Bartholome Island. Land surface: 1.2 square kilometers.

  As we jumped off the panga onto the concrete steps, we had to be careful not to land on a large, sprawling sea lion. It's undignified to spot a sea lion and immediately begin cooing, as if it were one's brand-new grandchild. But that is what we all did. The sea lion ignored us. It had seen so many cooing tourists. Thank God you are not allowed to touch me, it thought, or you would pinch my cheeks and hug me too tight and say you could just eat me up, I was so cute. We stepped over the sleek mammalian bulk, we gazed adoringly into its enormous dark eyes, we walked up the concrete steps, doting ecograndparents.

  The group moved as one behind our leader. Not the arbitrary group we had been when we first boarded the Huxley, but this other entity—the comrades. How quickly it had happened. We reached the top of the stairs and stood at the foot of the ash cone. The doting stopped. The volcanic dust was magnificent, a gentle barren slope, but it was not cute.

  "What does Mrs. Cornwall carry in that backpack, I wonder?" Jeremy Toll said softly. "Could it be"—he gave me a sly smile—"Mr. Cornwall?"

  Ashes to ashes, Mrs. Cornwall had said. Quite enough ashes on this island. Maybe they really had brought the former Mr. Cornwall to the Galapagos, not just in spirit but in fact, the gray dust of his mortal remains in a Ziploc bag.

  "Mrs. Cornwall," Jeremy was saying in a gallant voice. "My dear lady, may I help you with your bag?"

  Mrs. Cornwall looked at him as if he were insane.

  "I'm quite fit, you know, Jeremy. And why are you calling me Mrs. Cornwall? I don't call you Mr. Toll, though you've got at least ten years on me. Honestly! I'm not infirm. I'm quite fit."

  "Ah," said Jeremy. "Then perhaps you would like to carry my bag."

  Jeannie, who was wearing short shorts and didn't look too bad in them for an old bat, told Jeremy she would love to carry his bag, but he declined. Martha led us up a long, long wooden staircase that the parks department had constructed not so much to aid hikers as to protect the island from erosion caused by hikers. Few things grew on the ash heap: some phallic sprays called lava cactus, each covered with prickly fuzz and tipped with mustard yellow; and a regular scattering of small silver stems, creeping along the dust.

  "Jack!" Martha called, beckoning with her finger, then pointing at the weedy growth.

  "Vesuvium?" he said.

  "Sesuvium," she said with some satisfaction, both at how close he'd come and at how wrong he'd been. "Those tiny white flowers are the only flowers on the island. Have you noticed that all the flowers, such as they are, on every island we've visited, are white or yellow? They show up better at night, when moths come out, when most of the pollination is done."

  "I have white roses on my terrace," Jeremy Toll said. "My decorator suggested it. For entertaining at night."

  "How Darwinian of him," Martha said.


  We climbed to the top of the mountain of ashes. We saw tubes created by lava flowing down the slope toward the sea, its outer crust cooling in the air while beneath it ran on, inside its own tunnel. We saw smaller cones, places where gas had escaped from the main funnel and had bubbled up, leaving spatters, like a messy cook. These were called parasitic, since they lived off the main flow. The great frigate birds flying above us were called kleptoparasitic, because they not only lived off other animals, they stole food from them, crashing into the poor old boobies, causing them to vomit their catch, and then catching it themselves as it fell through the air. We stood atop parasitic cones beneath kleptoparasitic birds.

  "Do you think I'm kleptoparasitic?" I asked Martha. I knew this question was tiresome and self-involved. And yet I could not stop myself.

  "Do you steal other people's vomit?" she said. "And eat it?"

  "Well, only metaphorically," I said.

  "That will do," Jeremy said. He said it with some severity.

  "Yeah," said Dot. "That's so disgusting."

  "Just cover your ears and hum," Gloria said.

  "I was just asking," I said.

  "I was just answering," Martha said.

  In spite of a vagrant, sentimental impulse to revive our ancient patterns of argument, I decided not to resume with Martha the subject of my possible kleptoparasitism.

  "Good," Gloria said. "Anthropomorphism can go only so far." She patted my back in the encouraging way teachers sometimes do. "And even metaphor has its limits."

  Our schedule assumed the inevitable, unchangeable, reassuring birth-to-grave reality of our small town life: we slept as the boat sailed; we woke up on the shores of a new island at 6:30 when Pablo walked by our cabin ringing a bell; we pointed to fish in the freezing water and lizards on the burning ground. We watched sea lion cows nursing their young. Blue-footed boobies whistled at us, masked boobies posed for us, their beaks to the sky. Red-footed boobies watched us from bare white-barked trees. Yellow land iguanas smiled up at our cameras.

  "They're so beautiful," Martha would say, gazing at a crusty iguana.

  That is why you're a good guide, I thought. You are essentially curious; your enthusiasm is undaunted.

  Into this dusty, blissful nature hike that went on day after day, an occasional pang of guilt intruded: I had insulted Martha somehow. Then the pang of guilt was followed by disgust: no, I hadn't; how had I? Then the Galapagos reappeared. Tiny orange-throated lava lizards did tiny push-ups on the lava tuff. Diminutive Galapagos penguins pecked at our goggles. Sea lions, always more sea lions, splashed and dove and invited us, like excited children, to play.

  "All the animals are so friendly," Mrs. Cornwall said. "No wonder poor William loved it here."

  By this time, I had shed completely whatever initial reservations I'd had about my companions. Who would I sit next to at breakfast? Anyone! With whom would I snorkel, sharing an intimate look, a brief visual exchange, our heads rising from the waves of the Pacific as moray eels slid by us, our eyes clouded by our masks? With anyone! One black-rubber-clad body beneath the steely water was as good as another. Tug on a slippery latex arm, point to the blood-red starfish. Whose arm is it? Anybody's.

  "I'm not used to being in a group," I told Gloria. "It's almost liberating. Do you think every group is like this? Should I start going on tour buses to Provence?"

  "We are congenial, aren't we?"

  "Unless the atmosphere radiates from Martha."

  "Perhaps you should try a tour bus, dear," Gloria said. "Do you good."

  We had sailed that day into a bay surrounded by a huge circle of guano-stained cliffs. We landed at a narrow crack in the cliffs that twisted steeply up the side, a nearly vertical corridor of black boulders referred to as Prince Philip's Steps. The prince had visited this very sight some years back, in anticipation of which these indentations had been banged into the rocks and named in his honor. At the top of the jagged slabs, a level expanse greeted us. The silver palo santo trees were heavy with nesting red-footed boobies, long-beaked white fluff peeping out beneath them. The red of their feet, wrapped around the scorched branches, the blue of their bills, bright as a baseball cap, struck me suddenly as both beautiful and doomed. Surely there was no place for such extravagance in the real world. But this was the real world, wasn't it?

  We walked through bare trees, their silver branches rattling with our passage, flashes of red and blue and white appearing on every side. I took pictures of everything, roll after roll, red feet, blue beaks, fluff, masks, and the large nests of the frigate birds, their long hooked beaks hanging over the twiggy edge, their babies tucked carefully beneath them. I watched the boobies as they pointed their beaks to the sky, knocked them against another's beak, picked up feathers and sticks and passed them back and forth, beak to beak. They were courting.

  I have a clear, sharp memory of a particularly icy snorkel that afternoon, a beautiful journey of weightless, numb astonishment above pallid sea cucumbers and colorful fish and a magnificently flat ghostly hammerhead shark sliding beneath me in the dark. Dot and Jeremy were partners. They were friends now, too. They had formed a bond, drawn together by a mutual recognition of their shared understanding of and affection for those lesser beings who surrounded them.

  "Quite right, too," Jeremy would say when Dot muttered some preadolescent slur.

  Cindy was my partner. I had not spent too much time with Cindy on the boat, but I did find her to be a compelling underwater companion. She was an expert swimmer, she dove down with her camera and its strobe flash to absurd depths, she seemed to smell out the biggest, reddest starfish, the longest, whitest-tipped shark, the most dazzling school of angelfish. And she never wore a wet suit! This last fact I found the most wonderful, and I realized I followed her in the water not so much to see the fish she inevitably found, but to watch her not get cold. I followed her until my head hurt from the frigid water, then lifted my face from the shadowy depths to see Sally Lightfoot crabs and snoozing fur seals on the black cliffs above me.

  7

  AFTER SNORKELING, we headed for the Huxley's unlikely Jacuzzi to warm up. The hot tub, which sat on the deck outside my cabin, was really a tepid tub, and it was meant for perhaps three people. Still, when we climbed off the panga, shivering in our wet suits, the little pool of lukewarm water could not have appeared more luxurious, and stocking it with ten or eleven or twelve bodies, as many bodies as possible, struck all of us as much more amusing than it probably was. But we had turned out to be, or at least felt ourselves to be, a particularly convivial group. Other groups, when we encountered them now and then on a beach or a rocky trail, struck me as dour and pompous and alien; or, if they, too, were a jolly group, they offended me even more, polluting the islands with their tourist laughter and comments.

  "What if I put my left leg under your right leg?" Mr. Tommaso said, climbing into the tub.

  "Mine is already there," said Jeannie.

  "Well, then, over, I guess."

  That afternoon, even Martha got in. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. We were all still in our wet suits, and they billowed absurdly beneath the surface, full of air and swirling water.

  Mrs. Tommaso said, "Martha, why do those poor sea lions have so many scars? Something should be done about it."

  Martha opened her eyes and lifted her head just a little. The water bubbled around her throat. "The story of those scars is a love story," she said. "They're dueling scars. You know the big, boisterous male sea lions we see, surrounded by sleeping females? That bull has had to fight off a lot of other bulls to get where he is. He has to continue to fight off challengers, too. And the rest of the time he spends copulating with all the females, one after the other, as they come into heat, over and over again, until he's so tired and worn out that some other male can challenge him, fight him, and take his place."

  "What an exotic land this is," said Mrs. Tommaso.

  "Meanwhile, the females calve," Martha said. "That's all they do for
the rest of their lives. They copulate, have offspring and raise offspring, and have more offspring."

  "The whole thing sounds like a depraved religious cult to me," Jeremy said.

  He stood on the deck beside Dot, his new friend and kindred spirit, both of them watching us in shared, superior amusement.

  There were already seven of us in the tub, all women except for Mr. Tommaso. Then Craig and Jack approached the Jacuzzi, and Mr. Tommaso began barking at them like one of the bull sea lions.

  "I think that's disrespectful," Mrs. Tommaso said.

  "Of whom?" said Mr. Tommaso.

  "Those poor male sea lions," said Mrs. Tommaso. "They have so much responsibility."

  "Now, here's another Galapagos love story," Martha said. "It's a true story, one that is often mentioned in the guidebooks. But to get this story straight, to be able to indulge yourself in the details of it, to understand its true fascination, to delight in its lacy, farcical intrigues or wallow in its lugubrious tragedy, you would have to do a bit of research. You would have to go to the library and find diaries that are no longer in print, examine old newspapers. Or, better yet, you would have to come on a trip with me, after I had already done those things. You all have chosen the latter path and so I am able to recount to you with some degree of reliability the story of Adam and Eve on Floreana Island."

  I had been transfixed, watching Jeannie's impressive cleavage bobbing up and down in the water, but now I turned away to observe Craig and Jack as they tried to climb into the Jacuzzi. Perhaps it was the thought of them as suitor sea lions, but they both seemed suddenly so attractive. Craig was a pleasant muted monochrome sort of person—light brown hair, light brown eyes, regular features, even white teeth, a light brown tan, usually dressed in a beige T-shirt, khaki shorts. He spoke in his soft Canadian murmur. It was a beige accent. There was something comely about him, about how unassuming he was in his looks and his manner.

  Jack was quite different. He was small and handsome in an angular way, with his big face and black hair and small blue eyes, which actually seemed to flash. He didn't say much at all aside from his aggressive botanizing and geologizing and entymologizing remarks. And one did have to wonder what kind of a twenty-five-year-old man went on a trip with his mother, not to mention his incinerated father. Either a very weak or a very strong twenty-five-year-old man, I thought. He slid next to me in the hot tub, his knees bent, his arms resting on them. There was no more room in the tangle of wet-suit legs. I noticed we were wearing the same watch, a diving watch.