Keys, Jews, and Seahorses

I hate keys. I hate little things that abandon you again and again just to give you grief and piss you off, and keys, for some reason, entertain an unparalleled enmity toward me. There is not a single combination lock available on this little speck of land in the middle of nowhere. There are, however, about twenty types of padlocks requiring keys. I am now on my fourth, having cut my third off my locker today, after my third spare key decided to vacate the locker of a friend it was was housed in for safekeeping. Hence, the post is a day late. Sorry about that.

I’ve explained some things about Judaism to people before, but not ever to the extent that I have to here. I’ve never felt, in some cases, like such an alien. I’m fairly sure there’s an entire one other Jew on the island. He’s one of my dive instructors, who moved here from Israel when he married an Ecuadorian woman.

Monday I told a couple guys that my name is Hebrew, not Spanish. “Why?” “Because I’m Jewish.” “Oh, you’re from Israel? I thought you were from the states.” “I am. My mother’s family were Russian Jews (sorry if I got that wrong, mom).” “But how can you be Jewish and not be from Israel?” “There are Jewish populations all over Europe.” “Oh, they immigrated to Europe from Israel.” “No, most people immigrate from Europe to Israel, not the other way around. Israel is our homeland, but that doesn’t mean that we all come from there.” “But you cannot be Jewish if you aren’t from Israel. I see! You are Jewish because you like the religion and you changed.” “No, I’m jewish because my mother’s family is Jewish.” “But Jews do not come from Russia.” Yeah, actually, they do.

Conversations about Passover go a little something like this: “Oh, Passover’s coming up in April. Gonna miss my birthday by two days!” “What’s Passover?” “It’s a Jewish holiday. It celebrates the story of Moses.” “Who?” “Moses. Pharoah. When the Jews were freed from slavery in Egypt. Ring a bell?” “I’m Catholic. I only know the New Testament.” “Ok, whatever. Anyway, we don’t eat beans, rice, bread, pasta, or cereal.” “That’s a celebration? How is that a celebration?” “It’s also recognition, because the jews didn’t have time to let their bread rise when they left.” “But that sounds like punishment, not celebration.” Ok, whatever. Moving on.

My host parents asked me, “Do you have Jesus?” “Nope.” “Who do you have?” “Just God.” “Only God?” (At this point I’m on the receiving end of incredulous, blank stares.) “Yep.” (Mouth stays closed shut in reference to possibilities of agnosticism and atheism; no reason to imply I’m Satan’s disciple as well). “How do Jews pray? Sitting or standing. Three times a day, if you’re orthodox.” “Where do you pray?” “At home or in a synagogue.” “What’s a synagogue?” “Like a church, except for Jews.” After I tell them that some synagogues have benches, just like churches, they seem a little happier about the whole deal.

Tuesday evening the dive class met up around 6:30, headed back to the pier near the university, and jumped into the water for our night dive. Apparently the cromwell current had decided to make its presence known, because the water was freezing (relatively speaking). After flipping on flashlights, we sank down and began swimming along the rocks, passing over thousands of sea urchins through tiny crimson fish that flashed through the beams from our lights. A huge, bright turquoise and white trumpetfish hovered just above the seafloor. Bright red, orange, and blue lobsters, over a foot in length, tucked themselves between rocks lining the shore. At one point we all circled up, kneeling on the sand between urchins. One by one, we switched our lights off until we were left in pitch back, with a nearly indiscernable hint of light seeping down from above… until we started waving our hands in front of our faces like idiots. Tiny neon green lights blinked on for the space of a couple seconds in front of us, bobbing up and down currents in our hands’ wakes. I felt like a kitten chasing after a feather duster, attempting to surround myself with bioluminescent specks in the otherwise inky water. On the way back, we managed to scare a stingray into the gloom after it decided swimming straight at our lights might not be the best option. We found giant pufferfish, half a meter in length. And we found the largest hermit crab I have ever seen, spilling out of a shell over a foot across, complete with anemones growing on it.

On Wednesday afternoon, the class headed up to go camping in the highlands for a couple nights and experience the (not so) glorious flora of this tiny little speck of land in the middle of the ocean. (Sidenote: “highlands refers to almost anything not sea level; San Cristóbal’s elevation is an entire 2,400’.) Our first little jaunt took us to Jatun Sacha, an NGO working to restore endemic plants either in danger of extinction or to areas that have been overtaken by invasive species. Predictably, almost all their volunteers are foreign. They don’t really seem to have done much except plant some scalesias (an endemic genus) to attempt reforestation in a small area. No one really knew what was going on and the place was swarming with more (introduced, thank you dear Carmen and your damn bananas) mosquitoes than I had ever imagined possible. So, we took our leave and moved on to pitch tents on a soft, cushy soccer field for the night. Thursday morning we headed to El Junco to take up machetes and attack the blackberries (or, according to our professor, the “FUCKING mora”) for a little “character-building taste of what it takes to eradicate the damn things.” Except it isn’t actually eradication: they just grow back after three or four months. You can’t burn them out because fires aren’t allowed on NP property, and you can’t use herbicide because it’ll run into the lake and the berries are consumed by the all-holy endemic Darwin’s finches. So, option #3: fruitless, thankless, endless attempts at control. Friday we visited a sector of private property where the owner has preserved a tract of endemic miconia “forest” (all 2-3 m. of it). After walking through a muddy lane, down through a couple more-defined trails and through a colony of nesting cattle egrets, we reached two tiny reservoirs that provide the entirety of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno’s unpotable fresh water supply. We then found ourselves in a maze of muddy ditches worn in by cattle, winding through the shrubby miconia in a directionless attempt to find our way back to the road before driving up to eat lunch under the only wind farm in Ecuador, comprised of three white windmills on a hill in the middle of nowhere looking down over León Dormido.

Saturday we headed back to Karahua for our wreck dive. This time a few lobos decided to join us, twisting and looping around us with ease and blowing bubbles in our faces as we made our way around the wreck through the current. After finding the engine room, a couple of massive anchors and some portholes, I spotted a huge, mottled-brown and white seahorse grazing along the deck beneath the remneants of the walls rising up around us. He remained surprisingly unperturbed by the seven giant faces suddenly staring down at him through masks from a foot away, progressing lazily along the algae-covered wreckage before zooming off into a cranny under the jagged metal.

For Sunday’s dives we stayed in the bay once again just off the pier to practice underwater navigation. During the “search and recovery” portion, a contest to see who could find the bottle of tequila on the sea floor in the least amount of time turned somewhat moot when we realized that we were actually all searching for a long-empty sixpack. I did, however, finally manage to find the perfect boyancy while waiting around on the seafloor for my turn to search. I subsequently spent an hour bouncing around and floating inverted and suspended in mid-water, giddily coming to the epiphany that this was most likely the closest I will ever come to being an astronaut, before heading back to the shop to clean up gear and receive a pretty little temporary Advanced Open Water card.