Nobody moves toward the rock Pete’s posing on. It looks cold up there with the wind blowing and the water spraying.
Erik says, “This guy drinks way too much coffee.”
“Too much sumpin’,” says Pritchett, pinching his fingers together like he’s smoking.
Erik shakes his head. “Sure glad I’m missing a meet for this crap.”
Ho-Jun and Ho-Bong nod in agreement. Ho-Bong says, “We’re missing baseball. And our coach takes it out of our butts.”
Dawn looks at Pritchett. “What team are you on, big guy?”
“I’m on my own team, small-town white girl,” says Pritchett.
“Sorry,” says Dawn, going pink in her ghostly cheeks.
Pete yells above us. “Don’t leave me hanging!”
I bolt for the rocks with Ho-Bong and Ho-Jun right behind me. All this peer bonding is making me crazy. My tennis shoes slip beneath me on the salty film that covers the rocks. I taste the salt in my mouth from the wind. I get to the top of the rock first, and Pete grabs my arm to help me stand up.
Instantly I feel Erik watching Pete hold my arm. I right myself and stand a few steps back from Pete. I don’t even think about it. I just do it. “What’s up here?” I say.
Pete drags his arm across the horizon like he’s invented the sparkling gray panorama just for us. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the Little Galápagos.”
“The what?” says Ho-Bong.
“The Little Galápagos. That’s this little island’s nickname.” Ahead of us is a small patch of earth covered in huge boulders that jut up from the lake’s shallow surface. The mound of gray rocks is about a mile away. Around it the lake water sparkles like a cheap bike in the March sunshine. “Do you know what’s out there, campers?” Pete looks goofily happy.
“A pile o’ rock,” says Erik.
“No. You have to look at what’s on the pile of rock. Use your binoculars.”
I put up my borrowed binoculars to see the birds dotting the island. “Aren’t they just gulls?”
“Not them. The black ones.”
I cup my hand over the lens and look again. “Are they ... double-crested cormorants?”
“Ding, ding, ding!” Pete grabs my hand and throws it up over my head. “We have a winner.”
I drop my hand so fast I nearly drop the binoculars.
The other students crowd close to see what we’re looking at. Pete yells over the wind. “They came early. What are the odds? That hasn’t happened in years.” He spins and drops down through the rocks, then runs for the van, I guess to get gear. Erik stands nearby, intermittently watching Pete and glaring at me.
Pritchett stands behind me and whispers, “And we have a winner.”
Pete races back with his tripod and spotting scope and is set up in a split second.
“You can all look through this. I am calling my buddies at Audubon as soon as we get home. I mean, I guess this isn’t exactly a good sign. It’s kind of a bad sign if birds are coming in this early. Suggests that global warming has thrown off their schedule. But maybe it’s just a freak thing. You know, an irruption. Maybe ... Maybe we should just watch them. There aren’t many of them yet. I might not have even looked if it wasn’t for Myra.”
When it’s my turn, I look through the glass scope. My eyes aren’t used to the lens and it’s hard for me to steady myself in the wind. Salt water stings my face and mouth. I can’t make out more than black lines, and then the whole lovely bird comes into focus. One bird fills the circle of the scope. It’s long, dark, and curved. Like a black S with a yellow hook on its face.
The gulls and cormorants shriek. Over the ridge of the first set of rocks I see nests made of bleached grasses and sticks. They’re everywhere. So is white bird crud. Heaps of it. Boulders poke out in angry angles, rocks in the pocket of the lake. I adjust the lens for detail. Feathers and spare bones litter the ground everywhere. I see a few intact skeletons decaying on rocks. It makes the place feel haunted.
“Why do people call it Little Galápagos?” I ask. “Just because both places have cormorants?”
“That island may not look like much, but it actually has a huge significance. Birds come through here by the hundreds and nest on the island. It’s too small to sustain life, but it’s a perfect place to be from. Unlike the cormorants in the Galápagos, who have lost the ability to migrate, these cormorants travel huge distances. Without this safe nesting site they’d be in huge trouble. Their numbers have already vastly decreased.”
I look through Pete’s scope at the nests of bleached grass everywhere. Some look old and abandoned, while others are already occupied by the slender black birds.
I say, “It’s weird to me that these cormorants fly from Belize to Canada, but the birds in the Galápagos don’t even leave their island.”
“When you’re six hundred miles out to sea, it’s a much longer trip in between rest stops. The birds that tried it either didn’t make it or didn’t come back. The birds that stayed found what sustained them and evolved into their niche.”
I’m embarrassed to be talking so much. Not my MO. But I can’t help asking one more question. “Why are they here? So early?”
“Maybe they’re just horny,” says Pete.
I look away so he won’t see my face. Everyone laughs, but Pete changes into his normal professor voice. “I mean, they are here to breed, but I don’t know why they’re early. Maybe the weather has them baffled. We could paddle out to them if I had my kayak today.”
Dawn says, “Doesn’t that bother the birds when they’re nesting?”
“Great point,” says Pete. “The birds come here to breed and the last thing they need is human interference. But with these cormorants, if you keep a reasonable distance, they couldn’t care less about you. In that way they are a bit like their cousins in the Galápagos.”
“The birds on the Galápagos really don’t run off when you walk up to them?” says Pritchett.
Pete says, “Nope. Europeans killed birds and other wildlife by the shipload when they first came to the islands, but the birds still didn’t develop a fear of humans.”
“So in a way, the animals haven’t evolved,” says Erik.
“That’s right. Darwin’s finches, so well known for being modern examples of evolution, haven’t weeded out the birds without fear, and yet they’ve survived. Not all the animals have survived this deficit, though. The vermilion flycatchers are just about gone, for example. But overall, fear doesn’t seem to be steering the evolutionary ship on the Galápagos. In fact, it kind of helps to be cute and stupid because people want to save you.”
“They’re vulnerable as a defense mechanism?” Dawn asks.
“Doesn’t play too well for humans,” says Pritchett.
Erik cuts in. “I don’t know. Some people know how to work it.”
I’m so busy thinking about flycatchers it takes me a second to realize who Erik is talking about. I cough to keep from suffocating.
“You okay, Myra?” says Pete.
“Just thirsty,” I say.
Pete pulls out his flask and hands it to me. His flask. In front of everyone.
I hold up my hand. “I’m good.”
We all pile into the van again. Pete says, “Next time I bring you out here I’ll bring my kayak and we’ll all take turns. This is early for these cormorants. Damn early.”
My phone rings. “When are you coming home?” says a whiny voice.
“Carson?”
“It’s Andrew.”
Andrew only has a list of about three things that make him sound like he’s Carson. “What’s going on?”
“Me and Brett need rides. Dad took Mel and Mom to Mel’s baby class. He was supposed to be home an hour ago.”
“I’m at Antelope Island. On a field trip.”
“My team will forfeit if I don’t show.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t have a way to pick you up right now.”
“Thanks for nothing.” He hangs up.
Everyone looks at me.
Pete says, “That’s probably enough for one day.”
The twins sit by each other tallying up their lists. I don’t care about my bird list. I can’t believe Erik thinks I’m working Pete. Of course, why else would Pete talk to me or be interested in what I have to say?
Five minutes later my phone rings again. Even in the noisy van everyone can hear it ring. I answer it. Andrew says, “How long till you get here?”
“An hour.”
“The coach will kick me off the team.”
I say, “I’ll tell him it’s my fault.”
The click of the phone tells me he thinks it is.
Ho-Bong and Ho-Jun look up from their bird lists but don’t say anything in English or Korean.
Dawn sits up front with Pete this time, which is fine by me. She yawns and rubs her hands in front of the heater. “So what’s it like in the Galápagos? Rainy and hot all the time?”
I perch forward in my seat.
“It doesn’t actually rain all that much. Mostly it mists, depending on the island and time of year. It does get hot. Sweaty hot.”
“It looks so green. Is it like heaven?” she says.
He shakes his head. “When Europeans first discovered the Galápagos, they actually thought they had discovered hell. They said the land was useless. And in fairness to the Spanish, most of the islands are barren lava heaps. Only one of the islands has enough water year-round to support human life, and it’s pretty inconvenient to get to the mainland. The first real settlement was a prison, but it was too hard to make crops grow and keep people from killing each other.”
Dawn looks perturbed. “If it’s such a horrible place, why does everyone want to go there?”
Pete drives for a few miles without responding. He has that look my dad gets when you talk about engines. “Millions of years of isolation created a place so unique that even stupid humans were smart enough to stop before we totally wrecked it. Once we did that, it kind of became this pristine jewel of evolution.”
“The jewels of Isabela,” I say.
Pritchett leans forward now too. “Lots of places have their own stuff, though, right? Lemurs and Komodo dragons and crap like that. I mean, the world’s full of stuff you can only find in one place.”
“The world is full of many things, Pritchett, but not rareness. And the Galápagos Islands have almost a hundred and forty land and sea species and over a hundred and eighty plants that you can’t find anywhere else. Per inch they’re bursting with rareness.”
Pritchett says, “That’s like saying that if I had a wart on my face that was different from anyone else’s wart that I’d like warts.”
“But what if no one had ever had a wart anything like yours and never will again?”
“Still a wart,” says Pritchett.
I notice that Pete is driving faster. “There is other amazing stuff about the Galápagos besides the stats for endemic species. You know that girl in the picture? She’s from there. When she was pint-size, she entertained herself by riding the backs of sea turtles. Where else are you going to do that?”
Pritchett says, “I bet you can’t do it there now, either.”
Pete weaves along the causeway and then merges recklessly into regular traffic. “You can sit on the beach and listen to the marine iguanas snort water through their noses like little pipe organs and then follow them into the water and hear them scrape the algae off the rocks with their teeth. On one island the iguanas turn red around Christmastime and then fade out in the summer. No one knows why. There are six volcanoes on Isabela, and they go off all the time. And on Española, the oldest island, they have the only waved albatross rookery in the world. The gray chicks wander around with their parents until they get old enough, and then they drag themselves to the edge of a big cliff with a blowhole and throw themselves off, only to return home years later to mate. The whole island is crawling with red- and blue-footed boobies, frigate birds, and even Galápagos hawks. Paradise. Latitude zero.”
I look up at the traffic light. “Red light,” I say.
Pete hits the brakes and we all lurch forward just as he comes to the intersection. A minivan blows past us. “Wow,” he says. “Thanks, Myra.”
“Dude. Learn how to drive,” says Erik. His is tone is light, but when I turn to look at him I see he’s clenched up like a well-tanned fist. He doesn’t handle surprises very well.
“Seriously,” says Dawn, shaking her head at Pete. I don’t think Dawn’s a real fear fan either.
“Totally sorry. Don’t get me going about the Galápagos,” says Pete, laughing. “Once you’ve been there, every place else is just every place else.”
When I get home I sit in the driveway. I put my head down and close my eyes. Unlike the other morning I see something besides my house and family now. I see Pete’s islands. Latitude zero. I see turquoise water. I whisper to myself, “I’m going.”
22
Flush:
When you scare up a bird so it’ll give away its position.