Galápagos Rococo

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Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book called Galápagos. The Galápagos sea lion is closely related to the California sea lion. I imagine their ancestors somehow finding their way to those islands off Ecuador. In Vonnegut’s book, humans evolve into seal-like creatures. But who’s to say that California sea lions aren’t already fully aware of their surroundings?

I looked like Gollum. The kid’s head is mine and is wired biologically to the tide pools.

I had pet tortoises as a kid. It started when I was seven. I had my first tortoise for about a day. My sister built him a home—a strange maze made from two-by-fours—but he climbed out during the night. In the morning, I found his shattered body in the busy street. It was devastating.

Then we got a couple of other tortoises. My cousin had one, and we had another. I kept ours in the backyard, but it would escape. A neighbour would tell me they had found it, and I would bring it home. Then it would escape again. I think it finally escaped permanently.

My aunt and my maternal grandmother ended up with the other tortoise, which lived with them for another thirty years, into the ’90s. Every winter, it would hibernate in a box of kitty litter, digging itself in and sleeping. When it woke up, it returned to the backyard, grazing on the grass and sheltering under a wooden box all summer until the next fall.

In grade school, I would daydream of nuclear war as the cure for all my problems. Gollum wasn’t just a physical appearance; it was my thwarted soul at eight.

I was always fascinated by nuclear weapons. Some people could turn that awareness off, but for me it was always on: the awareness of impending doom. I took it a step further, imagining that if all of Western civilization were wiped out, I could survive. That was where my do-it-yourself instinct came in.

My other daydream was of Europe before 1492 being conquered by the Aztecs. But today, I imagine something else: What if civilization had arisen in the Galápagos?

I think about people tens of thousands of years ago, building rafts and crossing stretches of water from one land to another. The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians made sea crossings to reach the ancient landmass that included Australia and New Guinea.

I remember reading about ancient images of great boats in northern Europe, crowded with people, and megalithic structures arranged in the shape of ships. I’ve also wondered about the Red Paint People of North America and whether similarities between red-ochre burials on opposite sides of the Atlantic might suggest ancient connections. Those similarities alone don’t establish a crossing, but they set my imagination travelling.

In my daydream, boats were going everywhere. What if some unknown Magellan, 25000 years ago, had taken a raft around the world and ended up, of all places, in the Galápagos? What if voyagers from different South American cultures had reached the islands and found people already living there?

And what if those islanders had developed a civilization of their own? They had a classical age, a Renaissance, and even a Baroque period, when they built elaborate temples just to keep all the giant tortoises happy.