Galapagos Update (2005)

Galapagos Update: Letter to my father, 2/19/05 Dear Dad, I’m delighted to respond to your questions.

Yes, I did go back to the Galapagos in December 1993/January 1994, since I very much wanted to show Blanca the place and personally to thank the people that helped to save my life. Before I went, I had the great pleasure of meeting with David and Malca Nachmoni, the parents of Guy, the man who died on Santa Cruz near where I was lost a year later. Mr. Nachmoni called me in Cambridge and told me that he’d like to come up from New Jersey, where they were visiting friends, to see me. We had a wonderful afternoon together at Giannino’s in Harvard Square. He gave me a copy of a taped interview that he’d made with Felipe Degel, the guide who headed up the searches for Guy and me. I later put the Nachmonis in touch with my dear friend Nurit, who met them in Israel. The Nachmonis commissioned Chaim Tal, an Israeli journalist, to write a biography of Guy, and Mr. Tal contacted me for an interview.

Mr. Nachmoni’s search for his son is an amazing story in itself. The family had been together in South America, after Guy completed his military service. When David and Malca returned to Israel, Guy continued traveling around South America, apparently without any fixed itinerary. But after Guy failed to show up in New Jersey, as planned, the family began to get worried. Weeks passed. Not knowing what else to do, David decided to go to South America. I’m not sure why, but he suspected that his son might have gone out to the Galapagos Islands. So he went to Quito and searched the hotels until he found where his son had left his luggage. (It’s customary for travelers to the Islands to leave heavy baggage in Quito.) So he at least knew where his son had gone. David flew out to Santa Cruz and, in a series of events described in the interview with Felipe, managed to get a search going in the center of the island. He himself spent days in the bush, until finally he had to return to Israel. The day before his flight, Guy’s remains were discovered on the beach at Tortuga Bay.

A year later, David and Malca returned to South America, where they tried to reconstruct Guy’s movements. I discovered, when I went to an Israeli hangout in La Paz, Bolivia, that Guy had been there and that David had tracked him. In the Galapagos once again, David learned what had subsequently happened to me, the details of which he elicits in the interview with Felipe.

When I got to Quito, I found the suitcase I had left in the hotel Auca, which I had not been able to recover when I flew directly home from Guayaquil.

After several days in Quito, I met Blanca, who came from Spain, and we went out to the islands. Of course we stayed in Jack Nelson’s Hotel Galapagos, and he helped me to organize a fiesta for the people in the rescue party, the kids who had helped locate me, the doctor and nurse who cared for me, Carlos Acosta, Romy, and several others. It was great. The day before we had gone to the school where the little girl, Paola Ramón Varelas, studies. She was very shy and embarrassed when I told her classmates how she had told the police where I had gone, thus substantially narrowing the area where they had to search for me. I don’t think she understood that she had saved my life.

Blanca and I also went to Santa Rosa and into the turtle reserve at El Chato, where there are now large signs warning people that they are entering a dangerous area. On the trail, we passed the memorial plaque commemorating Guy Nachmoni. Several kilometers down the trail, we passed a giant tortoise that had gotten caught in the barbed wire fence of a nearby farm. I took a picture of Blanca with the poor beast. Traveling back down towards El Chato was a pretty emotional experience; what had happened there a year ago seemed unreal.

In recent years the islands have had more than their share of problems, many stemming from the clash between the locals’ economic interests and the drive by the scientific community to preserve this unique environment. The story is well told by Michael D’Orso, in Plundering Paradise: The Hand of Man on the Galapagos Islands (2002, Harper Collins). I was surprised to encounter a reference to my adventure.

“Jack Nelson has seen it firsthand, more times than he can count. A few years back, a guest checked into the hotel, a philosophy professor from Dartmouth [sic] who was spending his summer knocking around South America. The forty-year-old man was a long-distance runner. One morning he decided to take a jaunt into the hills to a tortoise reserve up near Steve Divine’s place, just below the hamlet of Santa Rosa, a distance of about twenty kilometers. The man told no one where he was going. Two days later, his bed was still unslept in, a fact reported to Jack by one of his staff. After confirming that his guest was indeed missing—that he was not simply sleeping off a bad hangover someplace up in town, which is not rare among vacationers here—Jack phoned the U.S. Consulate’s office in Guayaquil. Search parties were sent up to the highlands and out along the coast. They found nothing that day, or the next. A week went by, and by then they were hunting for a corpse, just as they had been when an Israeli photographer, a former commando trained in desert survival, wandered into this same jungle a few years earlier. (The latter’s body was finally found six months later by some lobster divers on a small beach at the southwest edge of the island. The fishermen noticed a skull in the sand, dug away the dirt, and found an entire skeleton buried up to its neck. ‘Possibly in an attempt to keep the mosquitoes off,’ says Jack, ‘or maybe in a dying effort to conserve moisture.’ In any event, the Israeli was long dead, cooked by the sun and eaten by insects. This is what Jack and the search party expected to find when, ten days after the professor disappeared, he was discovered, curled by a rock in the highland jungle, a sliver of life still left in his dehydrated bones. ‘He looked and felt dead,’ recalls Jack, who, after the man was carried down from the mountain, nursed him to life in one of the Hotel Galapagos’ beds by feeding him teaspoons of orange juice. The man would have died, Jack is sure, if he hadn’t been a long-distance runner” (pp.116-17). You asked me to say something about what I’ve been doing since my adventure. I’m now in my third year of retirement, after almost 30 years of teaching philosophy at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. I still run, but I’m slowing down dramatically.

I go back and forth frequently between my house on West Island in Massachusetts and Spain, where my girlfriend Blanca lives and works as a schoolteacher. About a year ago, we bought a small house in a village south of Valencia, and we are in the process of restoring it.

I have been lucky in many ways, not the least of which was to have escaped death in the Galapagos. For this I have many people, including you, to thank. Love,