(see Part 1 below)
Meaning
Going to the Galapagos made me realize that I didn’t really understand what it was that Adrian found so satisfying in those trips he took with Bruce, the biologist and adventurer who was fighting his own mortality. Bruce was convinced he would die young as his father had, and was packing it all in at breakneck pace.
While I was studying literary theory and creative writing at Florida State University, Adrian was taking courses in physics, calculus, biology and physical anthropology. He talked about biological necessity, evolutionary purpose, or—since he had been psychoanalyzed for forty years—a reaction or conformance to one’s parents.
For Adrian, meaning meant reproduction. Immortality was passing on one’s genes. This enabled him to move backwards to his parents and other progenitors; sideways to gorillas, whales and blue boobies; forward to his children and grandchildren.
But I had lost faith in that kind of meaning. I looked for it sideways, along the edge, through indirect paths. Art had displaced meaning for me.
Adventure
It is more and more difficult to have an adventure today because someone has already lived through the experience and interpreted it for you. Over-interpreted it for you.
My idea of an adventure has always been to start my life over. Move. Change jobs. Start a business. Escape some horrible tangled mess I’d made of the previous new start.
Life has always been my adventure, so I have trouble understanding how you can do it in a two-week package. How can it be an adventure when you know you’re going to come back at the end of it to the same thing you were doing before? The same person you were before?
Value
Experiences on our Galapagos trip were judged in a strict hierarchy. Most of the animals and birds in the Galapagos are amazingly available for very close-up viewing. Touching the animal was a bonus, but having it come up and touch you voluntarily was even better.
Exotic was valued higher than common. Any creature resembling those back home—like the crane and mocking bird---were worth less than ones we didn’t have, like the boobies and penguins.
Catching an animal in the middle of an activity had its own set of hierarchies: Sleeping and shitting were low. Flying, nest building, walking, swimming, and eating were high. But the most cherished were closer to life and death—mating, killing, being killed, or being born.
Seeing
As an abstract painter, I tend to see the world in patterns, colors, shapes, and contrasts. Seeing a giant tortoise or blue-footed booby in its natural habitat isn’t all that different for me from seeing one in a zoo.
I was in Nassau a month before the Galapagos trip in June of 1991. My daughter, Blixy, had won a free vacation at Divi Resorts and since her husband couldn’t go, she invited me.
It was a luxury vacation with no pretense of being a naturalist adventure like the Galapagos trip. But looking for a change from lying around the pool and playing tennis, we went one day to the Adastra Gardens and Zoo, which boasted the world’s only marching flamingoes.
After the huge group of birds marched around a circled enclosure to the commands of their keeper, those of us who wished to were allowed to step inside and have our pictures taken with the flamingoes. I dutifully stood on one leg and smiled while Blixy snapped the shot.
There were pink flamingoes on several of the Galapagos Islands, yet I couldn’t help but be disappointed when I saw them. They were few and scattered far apart—even with my zoom lens I couldn’t get a real close-up—and they weren’t so pink as the ones in Nassau.
I told myself this was different, that I was looking at flamingoes in their natural habitat now, whereas in Nassau it had been a zoo. But in Nassau I was standing in the middle of a mass of flamingoes. It was an amazing visual experience.
I knew the Nassau zoo was a hokey thing for tourists, and not very successful at the time. Tourism was down since the Persian Gulf War and the recession. I was talking about that to a woman selling fruit on a corner while we waited for the expanding and contracting bus to take us back to Divi.
That bus was actually my favorite natural event. The middle aisle was made up of seats that could fold or unfold as needed. When more people got on, they would unfold these seats from the back first, filling up the middle aisle. If someone in the back needed to get out, the people in these seats would stand up, fold up their seat, and let the person out. Then everyone would move back one seat, opening up more space in the center aisle again.
When Blixy and I got on the bus at the zoo, it was packed and I could barely close the door against my back while standing on the bottom step. When the first people wanted to get off, eight of us piled out to give them room.
The bus rearranged itself. We filed back in and found our places. But the driver still wouldn’t go.
“How many people in the back seat?” he shouted.
“Three and a little boy,” someone answered.
“You paying for that little boy?”
Because the mother had not paid for a seat, he made her put the boy on her lap and everyone moved back a seat, rearranging themselves until eventually another seat became available at the front of the bus.
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The expanding and contracting bus felt natural to me, especially when I yelled at the driver as he passed our stop and asked him for change back because, after riding all week, I knew what the correct fare was supposed to be.
Riding that bus was a great adventure.
