The Orange People

On Saturday, Juan Carlos Guzman and I were biking in the fog-covered highlands, about 8 km north of the provincial capital, Puerto Baquerizo. His Haro aluminum and my Airborne titanium frames took us from the lustrous bay, filled with fishing boats, through the grimy barrios, and up a steep hill, past goats and cattle, past the overgrown cemetery and into the “garua” or misty rain. We left the asphalt and veered down the trail leading to a novel and critical experiment in environmental control. Our bike tires skidded on the crushed volcanic cinders, a crumbly kind of bubbly rock that is the color or iron oxide.

We fish-tailed to a stop at a varnished sign announcing a Darwin Foundation experiment to control invasive plant species, especially the accursed blackberry. Due to its massive number of seeds (often dropped by birds), blackberries blanket every one of the islands. This is a disaster for endemic plants, most of which are snuffed out by the aggressive "mora." And, if the endemic plants die, then the famous and exotic animals (finches, too) that depend on their seeds will die. Even though I love blackberry pie and cobbler more than anything else, I can see that here, at least, mora is something akin to evil incarnate.

Herbicide is the only large-scale way to control mora, although the only effective, long term way to permanently eradicate the berry is for humans to pull up every plant and burn all of them. That is difficult, since we are talking about billions of plants that live among scraggly bushes with large thorns. Other than herbicide and digging out the roots, the only other antidote may well be coffee plantations. Coffee trees shade the shorter bushes, thereby making sun-craving blackberries unable to thrive. So, oddly enough, Conservation International, an NGO here that is usually identified with goals like the preservation of endemic species, is helping to increase the number of non-native coffee plants in hopes of stopping mora. The head of CI, Fernando Ortiz, is quoted in yesterday's NYT article about “two-legged” threats to the islands and possible answers, including the coffee tree planting programs.

Coffee plantations will succeed, perhaps, since Galapagos coffee is, indeed, excellent. Still, the magnitude of plantation makes this solution impractical for most farmers, and such projects will hardly dampen the spread of mora. That is why the CDF is experimenting with types of herbicide, in the hope that a minimal application can be made more effective. The CDF land, donated by a local tour organizer, has dozens of squares, each with mora that has been treated by some kind of weed killer. The land seems spent, quite unfertile, but that is the point, it seems.

While admiring the agricultural plots, we saw a roundish woman and teenage boy emerge from the forest. Both were dressed in smudged T-shirts and muddy boots. The woman, who turned out to be the boy's aunt, carried a long machete and the boy toted a sack of giant oranges. They told us that they made their living by harvesting oranges throughout the highlands. This seemed illegal, by my hometown standards, so I tried to think of a non-judgmental question. I finally asked if the private land owners liked their oranges and she responded by saying that most are absentee landowners and never harvest anything. Private lands without fences are everyone’s domain, as long as the visitors only take fruit.

Her day’s wandering had another purpose: she was upset because her prized pig had escaped into the wild. We offered our condolences and then she offered us four large oranges. I fumbled at the skin, unable to open it at all. She reached for her machete. She grabbed another orange and nimbly cut away the skin. (I tried to suppress any worries about what else the machete might have been doing prior to cutting my orange.) Patient and meticulous, as if she were shaving a tender cheek in a barber shop, she peeled away. The shavings dropped on the cinders, and she handed me an Ecuadorian-style orange. The local custom is to squeeze the white husk and then suck out the juice out of the top, as if it were a water bottle. The juice was amazingly sweet.

As has become our custom, Juan Carlos asked about songs, poems and dances from her provincial home, meaning the province which she left to come to the Galapagos. She said that her husband was from Loja and used to sing many songs. A few years ago, however, he stopped singing. She explained, saying that her husband had joined a pentecostal church and that, aside from a ban on drinking and smoking, traditional songs and dances are forbidden. Earnestly, she explained that her husband had learned that songs of the world were often evil.

In every other L. American country I have visited, most of the evangelical songs are actually Baptist hymns from the southern USA. I was miffed that her family had dropped the ancestral customs, especially the culture that is carried via song. Still, I guess her husband has reaped much good from the church, especially in his refusal to drink. Alcohol is truly a curse for many men in my village, so perhaps this teetotaler now has what many lack: sobriety.