Till this point, the climb has taken us along dirt paths, through lush, thick greenery. The trail begins 800 meters above sea level, Gabriel tells me, and by the time you reach the volcano, you’re 1,000 meters up. From the pack he’s carried, he takes out a lunch Abuela has made and spreads it between us. There are plastic bowls of rice and chicken, and a chocolate bar that is already soft with heat, which we share. I stretch my legs out in front of me, looking at the dust on my sneakers. “How much further?” I ask him.
He grins at me, his eyes shaded by a baseball cap. “You sound like Beatriz, when she was little.”
I try to imagine Beatriz, smart and demanding, as a little girl. “I bet she was a handful.”
Gabriel thinks for a moment. “She was just the right amount.”
I open my mouth to explain the idiom to him, but then realize his answer is already perfect. “Don’t think I didn’t notice that you avoided my question …”
“You’ll know,” he says. “Trust me.”
And, I realize, I do.
We gather up our trash and put it into Gabriel’s pack, falling into an easy rhythm as we hike to the top of the caldera. “What are the odds,” I ask, “that this is going to go all Mount St. Helens on us?”
“Slim to none,” Gabriel assures me. “There are twelve geological systems tracking its tremors, and it gives out plenty of hints before it erupts, which happens every fifteen years or so. I was here the last time. My father and I hiked in and we slept on ground that was warm, like it had heated pipes underneath. He taught me how to gauge the wind and the slope, so that we wouldn’t wind up in the path of the eruption. We took pictures, when it happened. I remember you could see the orange lava in the cracks of the earth, just a foot or so below. My shoes stuck to the rocks, because the soles had melted.”
“When was this?”
“Two thousand five. I was a teenager.”
I do the math. “So … ?this volcano is overdue to blow?”
“If it makes you feel better, the Galápagos are moving eastward on their tectonic plate, so even though the hot spot is in the same place, the lava flows mostly to the west now … ?which means the eruptions aren’t as dangerous to the people living here anymore.”
It does not make me feel better, but before I can tell him that, the caldera comes into view.
The crater stands out in stark relief to the lush green that cradles it. It’s black, six miles of it, sprawled beneath a cloud of mist. It looks desolate and barren, otherworldly. From where we hike along the precipice, I can see the ocean and the rich emerald of the highlands to the right, but also the ropy, frozen black swirls of the caldera to the left. It feels like standing on the line between life and death.
We have to climb down into the caldera, trek across it, and then hike up to the fumaroles—the active part of the volcano. As we walk across the scorched belly of the crater, with its melted eddies of charred lava, it feels like we are navigating a distant planet. I follow behind Gabriel, stepping where he steps, as if one wrong move might plummet me to the middle of the earth.
“You know,” he says over his shoulder. “You’re different from when you first came.”
I glance down at myself. I know, from looking in the mirror in the apartment bathroom, that my hair is streaked blonder from the sun. My shorts hang on my hips, likely because I’m not eating every day at Sant Ambroeus, the café in the Sotheby’s building, and because I’ve been running and hiking instead of just briskly walking to work. Gabriel has slowed, so that we are shoulder to shoulder, and he sees me doing a self-inventory. “Not like that,” he says. “In here.” He puts his hand over his heart.
He starts walking again, and I fall into pace with him. “You came here like every other tourist. Wound up supertight, with your checklist, to take a picture of a tortoise and a sea lion and a booby and put them on Instagram.”
“I didn’t have a list,” I argue.
He raises a brow. “Didn’t you?”
Maybe not literally, but sure, there were things I had wanted to do on Isabela. Touristy things, because what’s the point of crossing off something on your bucket list if—
Shit. I did have a list.
“Visitors come here saying they want to see Galápagos, but they don’t, not really. They want to see what they can already see in guidebooks or on the internet. The real Isabela is made up of stuff most people don’t care about. Like the feria, and how trading a pair of rubber wading boots can get you a meal of fresh lobster. Or how people who live here mark a path—not with a wooden sign, but with a lava rock set in the notch of a tree. Or what dinner tastes like, when you’ve grown it yourself.” He glances at me. “Tourists come with an itinerary. Locals just … ?live.”