Ciao, Elisa! Also: La Playita

Week 3
Why is the post so late? Well, the past three days have been incredibly busy. Throw in internet problems and technical difficulties (the reason there are no pictures), and it's been a struggle getting this up. I will put up pictures when I can.

Ciao!

Last week we said goodbye to Elisa, who had to return to her homeland of Italy. Although I only met her three weeks ago, you bond fast in a place like this. On my very first night at Equilibrio Azul we went patrolling together, and I discovered what a sweet and incredibly friendly person she is. I honestly cannot think of a single bad thing to say about Elisa. Between almost dying on La Playita (story to follow, I promise) to diving off the top of Ricky's boat, I feel like I got to know her pretty well in the short time we were together, and it's a shame I didn't get the chance to know her better. I hope that someday we'll cross paths again—es un mundo pequeño, after all. In the mean time, we'll all miss her.

And now (drumroll, please)... La Playita!

La Playita, looking north

La Playita is a stunning beach about 5 minutes south of Puerto Lopez. Because it is an important sea turtle nesting site it is off-limits to the public, but employees and volunteers from Equilibrio Azul patrol it every night, watching for nesting females. When we find one, we measure her, tag her, take a DNA sample from her, and mark the location of her nest. This may sound invasive, but as the turtle lays her eggs she enters a kind of trance and becomes oblivious to everything around her, including annoying humans with sharp bits of metal. I'm not certain they even know we're there.

Driving

My first night at La Playita was my first night at Equilibrio Azul, and my second night in Puerto Lopez. I've already told you how hectic my arrive in town was, and how the ride to La Playita was the moment that convinced me this whole crazy trip was a Good Idea. My introduction to La Playita cemented my resolve, but in many ways my first impressions of the beach were false ones. I spent the night walking barefoot in the sand, wide-eyed and awestruck, like one who stands in the presence of God. And who's to say I didn't? But if La Playita is Divine, she is of the old school, a capricious Olympain who bestows favors with one hand and hands down arbitrary and cruel punishments with the other: the awful Yahweh of Moses, not Jesus' benevolent Lord.

Melodramatic much? Well, maybe. But Nature is the original drama queen, and when the stars are glimmering between the clouds and the waves are crashing before you in the darkness and the trees murmur at your back... it is not very hard to forget civilization and remember that you, too, are Nature. This is not always pleasant, but it always powerful.

Keep out!

In the Willamette Valley, people are everywhere. City gives way to suburbs which gives way to small farms and patchy forest—all dotted with houses and crossed with roads, all lit up with lights and loud with human-noise—until, finally, you leave civilization behind somewhere in the foothills of one mountain range or another. In Ecuador, we left the lights behind at the edge of town: beyond was only darkness cut by the headlights of the occasional car. The pickup dropped us off at the side of the road, where a sign set back into the forest told us the beach was off-limits. We shouldered our gear and hiked right past it.

Our boots thumped loudly on the packed dirt of the trail. Branches and dry leaves pressed and scratched from either side; moths and gnats mobbed our headlamps. I wanted to look around and take in the scenery, but the darkness, the glare of the light, and complicated up and downs of the path forced me watch my feet constantly. The heat was intense; the humidity, oppressive. After the first hill I was panting and sweating and cursing the Nutella I'd had with breakfast. (Okay, I'll be honest: the Nutella I had for breakfast. There was a banana, too, but that was mostly an afterthought.)

On the path to La Playita

The path led us over ups and downs and twists and turns before leveling out and turning abruptly from dirt to sand. The forest backed away, giving ground to beach grass, then vanished completely. We came out onto the beach just as the full moon rose over the hills. I toed off my shows and walked barefoot over the sand. The sand at La Playita is perfect for walking: soft and cool and always slightly damp. La Playita sand is to your feet what silk sheets are to the rest of you.

Camp at La Playita

At the far southern end of the beach we set up our tents in sand little clearing in the forest. There was a lot of rapid talk in Spanish about how we would divide up the watches, some of which I understood, most of which I didn't. It was decided that since I was the only one without any turtle experience someone should do my watch with me. In retrospect this was completely unnecessary, since I could no more have missed a turtle track than I could have missed Godzilla, regardless of how little experience I had—they look like they were left by a small tank. Unnecessary or no, Drew and I wound up pulling a double shift.

I'm not sure if I can describe that night without lapsing into clichéd descriptions that sound like they came out of a bad romance novel—something like, “the moon hung like a glowing coin in the clear night sky, painting the crashing waves with quicksilver and bathing the sand in pearly light. A thousand stars twinkled overhead like diamonds spilled by a careless god. The rhythmic pounding of the surf echoed the....”

I think you see where I'm going there.

Sarcasm aside, it was beautiful. The moon was full, and the sky was perfectly clear, the stars would have been bright as diamonds if the moon wasn't so bright it outshone them. I don't recall there being a balmy tropic breeze, though. Most of what I remember is how bright it was: more like very early morning, just as the sun is thinking about getting out of bed, than like midnight. I also remember how isolated it was. We could not see a single light anywhere—no boats in the water, no houses on the hills, no lighthouses on the points. We might have been the last people on the planet.

There were no turtles that night., but two nights later I was back at La Playita, this time with Ricardo, San Antonio, and Drew again. When we reached our campsite, we found we had company: a turtle was busy laying her eggs among the bushes not five feet from where we would sleep.

Baby turtle headed to the ocean

The turtle was deeply other: there was nothing mammalian about her, nothing familiar for me to easily anthropomorphize. She felt primitive, primeval: a creature older than myself following the drives of a species older than my own. She had returned to the beach where she was born, the beach where all her grandmothers had been born, to produce a new generations, whose daughters would in turn drag themselves up this same beach and lay their own eggs.

This was incredible, Discovery-channel stuff, and here I was getting a front row seat, even touching her. And yet I didn't feel anything special. I didn't think, “OMG turtlz!!” or anything. My thought process was more like, “Oh. Turtle.” If violent movies can desensitize you to pain and death, can nature documentaries desensitize you to wonder?

When she'd finished laying her eggs she filling in her nest and started back out to sea. She was clearly exhausted and kept stopping to rest, blowing out deep sighs of air that made her carapace heave. When she moved it was at a sprint: surprisingly fast, and clearly using all of her effort. She reached the surfline and for a while was visible as a rounded lump among the waves and foam. Then Drew called “Adios, mamasita!” and she was gone.

My next night at La Playita I almost died.

That's actually a bit of an overstatement, but it was damn scary and honestly dangerous. At the either end of the beach the water comes quite close to the cliffs, especially in the north, and there are huge rocks jutting out of the sand. Elisa, San Antonio, and I were doing our preliminary patrol before setting up camp. The tide was coming—or maybe it was going out—at was very high. I was thinking about this blog, and how I wanted to write a post all about La Playita, and how I would explain the beach is very unpredictable—how the tide will be only so high and you'll think your shoes are safe, but the next wave will come up and soak your sneakers without warning.

Just as I thought that a wave came out of nowhere. As it rose around our ankles I thought, Shit, the hem of my capris is going to get wet. But the water kept rising and I started thinking instead, Shit, were gonna die!

The wave came up to my waist and pushed me forward, almost knocking me over. I braced my feet in the sand, trying not to fall down, afraid that if I lost my footing I would be swept away. The water changed direction, sweeping back out to sea, and it almost took me with it. I stumbled and dropped to my knees, but by then the wave was gone.

La Playita, looking south

It had all happened in a few seconds, a few quick seconds full of alarmed shouts and disbelieving cries. We stumbled forward, sputtering, and then a second wave came, almost as high as the first. San Antonio had made it to the rocks and he grabbed my arms to make sure I didn't get swept away. I think Elisa was knocked over. After that we ran for it.

In retrospect it makes for a good story and a good adventure, and at the time it was certainly exhilarating, but it was very frightening, too—and of course we were soaked. I hadn't brought a change of clothes so I wound up borrowing Elisa's shorts—her own legging dried out a lot faster than my jeans—and wearing my raincoat over my bra. We hung up our wet clothes in the branches, but of course it had to rain and I think they were wetter in the morning than when we put them up.

The shelter

Rain is always a bad thing at La Playita. The trail down turns into a sea of sticky red-brown mud that clings to your shoes until you find yourself wearing a sort of mud-shoe—like a snowshoe but way less cool. This is actually something of a good thing, because the mudshoe helps keep you from slipping or sinking. I suppose this is a little like the medieval doctrine of signatures. Equilibrio Azul's tents are old an unreliable, and staying dry during the night is not guaranteed. Plus, while you crammed in a stuffy, hot, damp, smelly tent with two other people, you are always aware of the fact that if the weather would just cooperate, you could sleep outside. (This may change. Part of the reason I'm so late in posting is because today we went out to La Playita and rigged a little shelter that should keep us drier. I'm really excited about this.)

My second turtle had a radio transmitter epoxied to her back. This was a real adventure because we had stop her from returning to the ocean so we could saw it off her with a hacksaw. Needless to say, she didn't appreciate this. Turtles are really strong. You probably did know this. Epoxy is also very strong. This made for a very difficult combination, as San Antonio and I sat on her back or pushed against her shoulders and generally wrestled with her while Luis sawed at her carapace. I think it took about half an hour to get it off her.

La Playita is easily the most beautiful beach I have seen in my life. She is temperamental, true, and there are times when I dread going to see her. But there are times, like when I sit on rock, waiting between shifts, and watch the waves go in and out, that I can't think of anywhere else I would rather be.