The Evolution of Jane (11 page)

A rose was a rose when it was just a prickly stalk in the ground, my mother said, trying to soothe me. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, my father inevitably added.

"But I'm not a rose," I said.

"And you don't smell sweet, either," Andrew said.

"Changing your name to Rose? That's wonderful, Barlow, dear," Aunt Anna said.

I played the violin for years, laboriously practicing, never really making much progress. Perhaps part of my problem was that as I practiced, my finger slipping a hairsbreadth to distort a G to a something unnameable, I would be thinking, How did the G get to sound right and the something unnameable so wrong? Who says so? In chemistry class or algebra or geometry, the laws of nature were scrawled on the blackboard, as clear as day. But to me, they were as arbitrary, as frivolous, as the rules of Parcheesi.

I told Gloria about my problems with this sort of thing. It was in the nature of a confession. She was, after all, a science teacher.

Gloria explained to me that I was a nominalist.

"Lamarck was a nominalist. The Enlightenment was big on nominalism. You're in very good company. You're wrong, but you're in good company."

In her best science-teacher voice, she explained that a nominalist thinks there are no real divisions of organisms into species, just an endless, gradual arc of individuals. The divisions are no more than arbitrary names given by scientists for their own convenience.

"I'm very radical, it sounds like."

"You? I should hardly think so," Gloria said.

I watched Martha climb back down the steps carrying her wet suit. Then she disappeared into her cabin. She was friendly enough to me, I thought, though no friendlier than she was to, say, Mrs. Tommaso. In a way, I understood and was even grateful. This camaraderie business was nothing to be sneered at—a kind of friendship vacation, all the comforts of home and no cooking! Still, I had occasional unworthy stabs of curiosity about Martha, of resentment and, I must admit, longing. Friendship, that freak of nature, kept limping into view.

What on earth had I done to her, anyway? I went through the possibilities again. And again. Boyfriend interference? No. We didn't even have boyfriends when I knew her. Insufficient appreciation? Hardly. An excess of appreciation, then? Martha had never minded appreciation, and she had been equally devoted to me. General obnoxiousness? An unintended insult? Did I borrow money from her and never pay her back? Nothing I came up with made any sense.

When Darwin and the crew of the
Beagle
first landed in the Galapagos, they were astonished to discover that the birds were so tame they could kill them by hitting them with a stick. I longed to whack my guilty confusion in the head with a stick and watch it fall with a satisfying thump to the ground. We saw albatrosses one day, huge white waddling birds, which may have been what gave me this particular fanciful notion.

"Martha is my albatross," I said to Gloria. Then I realized she could have no idea what I was talking about. And that I had, at that moment, no intention of telling her.

She gave me a curious look. "Maybe you're hers."

"The waved albatross!" I said quickly. "I can't believe they stay in flight for a year at a time."

"Two years," said the science teacher, instantly distracted from any thought of Martha. "They come to land every two years to mate with the same female. A quaint species."

I was confused about Martha, but I noticed that confusion in the Galapagos took on an almost global quality, a grandeur extending well beyond Martha to the creation of the universe itself. This intensity conferred on poor old puzzled uncertainty a dignity, and that dignity was in turn reflected back onto Martha. And so, as I mulled over the problem of species, I recognized that there existed between the origins of life and Martha Barlow an important link: the confusion experienced by Jane Barlow Schwartz. This link was extremely suggestive. It seemed to promise some related solution. If A = (?) and B = (?), then all one has to prove is (?). It was obvious. The mechanism that explained the transmutation of species would explain Martha's transmutation, the transmutation of friendship.

"What is a species?" I said to Gloria.

"Oh,
you know,
" Gloria answered.

But I didn't know. The world is an oozing, crawling, swimming, swinging, stampeding, strolling kind of place, reveling in the swarming diversity of its creatures. First we were one, now we are many. Now we are us, and they are spores and pigeons and caribou. How did we come to part ways?

I realize I have a tendency toward analogy. Perhaps you think that unscientific. Again, I point to Charles Darwin, a serious scientist, a genius, a thinker who changed the world forever. He, too, had a tendency toward analogy. In the conclusion to
The Voyage of the Beagle,
Darwin wrote that because "a number of isolated facts soon become uninteresting, the habit of comparison leads to generalization. On the other hand, as the traveler stays but a short space of time in each place, his descriptions must generally consist of mere sketches, instead of detailed observation. Hence arises, as I have found to my cost, a constant tendency to fill up the wide gaps of knowledge, by inaccurate and superficial hypotheses." Or, in his case, accurate and revolutionary hypotheses.

As I stared down into the water, I understood with startling clarity the connection between my revived interest in species diversity and my friendship with Martha. First Martha and I were one, now we were two. We had been twins, then we became strangers, now we were something or other, I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Three days had passed, three exhilarating, rather odd days of endemic species and strenuous physical activity during which, when I had time to think about her at all, I had gone from sullen, leaden anger at Martha to peppier rage to the muddled tranquillity of trailing in her wake, in her knowledge and appreciation of every sapless specimen of Galapagos vegetation, every pebble of volcanic rubbish, every feather, every bob of every head of every bird or beast we encountered. So perfect, so distinct, were the adaptations to that arid, barren land, so perfect and distinct were Martha's tales of nature in all its struggles and glories, that for long stretches I quite forgot she had ever been my friend, I felt so friendly toward her.

"Species," I said to Gloria. "You must tell me. What is a species? That's the mystery of mysteries. Darwin said so."

"He was quoting from someone," Gloria said. She gave an almost inaudible little sigh, an indication of gentle forbearance that made me miss my parents for a moment. "I've always found that phrase banal," she added.

At that time of the morning, the crew were all rushing politely by on their way to raise or lower some huge noisy greasy chain. I thought them wonderfully discreet, for they did not even blink at Gloria, who wore a long, decidedly unethnic nightie, unless you consider New England Puritans an ethnic group. On her arm she carried the PBS tote bag in which she kept her umbrella, tissues, sunscreen, water bottle, the biography of Darwin, a bird guide, and a few Baggies. Around her neck hung binoculars, two cameras, her sunglasses, and a hat.

She started talking about DNA, but as that didn't seem to have any bearing on Martha, and not much on why a husky is not the same species as a wolf but is the same species as a Pekingese—one of my favorite puzzles—I didn't listen too attentively, and eventually it was time to go back to our cabin and get dressed.

Getting ready in the morning was an homage to all that wonderful shopping I had done at home—preparing, donning, arranging everything in the appropriate manner. There was a sensuous, ample significance to each item. Dressing was a whole field trip in itself.

After breakfast, there was a little while before we began shoving off in the
pangas.
I decided to put it to good use by walking round and round the deck, in circles, thinking. Darwin had walked in circles when he thought. Every morning, Darwin would walk along a circular sandy path on a neighbor's property. With each lap, he kicked a pebble onto the track so he would know how many circuits he'd done. I had no pebbles to kick, but I liked the little laps and the idea that it would help me think.

I meant to think about volcanoes, but I didn't know enough about volcanoes to ponder them for very long. So I thought about Martha and species some more. By lap five I got dizzy, and I changed direction, going counterclockwise. That reminded me: Now that I was below the equator, did the shower drain in a counterclockwise funnel? I had forgotten to look. We would go back and forth across the equator during the trip. The Galapagos lie within two degrees of either side. At what point does the funnel of water change? At what point does an individual change to become a member of a new species rather than its parents' species? At what point does anything change? At what point did Martha stop being my best friend? And what exactly was she now? My former best friend? My perfect guide? The object of an obsessive interest born of resentment and hurt? A cold, impersonal distant relative I detested? A vague memory from another era, a fossil stuck in a stripe of sediment?

There. I had thought. Just like Darwin.

Then I got into the
panga
and made sure I sat next to Martha.

She was engrossed in a conversation with Mr. Tommaso about tectonic plates. The earth's crust is like the shell of a hard-boiled egg that has been cracked against the counter, she said, but not peeled. Each piece of the cracked shell of the earth egg is called a tectonic plate. The plates shift around, causing all kinds of crumpling and crushing and piling and stretching. Beneath the ocean floor, there are bubbling pools of hot, liquid rock pushing up through the crust of the earth. The Galapagos were formed when a tectonic plate and a hot spot of spitting magma met beneath the sea. The plate slid across the hot spot; boiling magma from the earth's core bubbled up to the surface. It burst through the crust, through the tectonic plate, a volcanic eruption beneath the waves of the Pacific. The magma cooled and piled up, then it happened again, and again, and gradually a huge mountain poked its head up from beneath the sea. Then the plate moved along, like a conveyor belt, taking the volcanic island with it, dragging a nice fresh expanse of eggshell behind it. The hot spot would again bubble up, creating a new island, and so a chain of islands was born, all riding to South America on the back of a tectonic plate, like monkeys clinging to their mother, the older ones those farthest east, the newest ones, only one million years old, pushing their bald heads up in the west.

"West to east? It's moving
toward
South America?" said Mr. Tommaso.

"It knows what it's doing," said Mrs. Tommaso.

"What
it?
" said Gloria.

"That's the eternal question!" Mrs. Cornwall said with a big smile.

"No wonder the South American governments are so unstable," said Mr. Tommaso. "Islands bumping into their continent every time they turn around."

"You mustn't blame rocks for the follies of our species," Mrs. Tommaso said in her mild, disapproving voice.

"Blame the stars," said Gloria.

Dot Cornwall began humming.

There was a moment during which no one said anything. We watched the island of Bartholome get closer, a squat gray cone.

"An ash cone," Jack said.

"Ashes to ashes," Mrs. Cornwall said cheerfully.

Dust to dust, we all thought.

"The dustbin of natural history," Gloria said instead.

"Quite enough ashes in this place," the Widow Cornwall said, clutching her backpack tighter.

The
panga
bumped against a concrete step. Above rose the cone of ash on its journey from the ocean floor, up into the dry glare of the equatorial sun, east toward Ecuador, then down to the bottom of the ocean again, sliding on its plate down into a huge trench, then slipping beneath the big continental plate of South America. We had intercepted it. Bartholome Island. Land surface: 1.2 square kilometers.

As we jumped off the
panga
onto the concrete steps, we had to be careful not to land on a large, sprawling sea lion. It's undignified to spot a sea lion and immediately begin cooing, as if it were one's brand-new grandchild. But that is what we all did. The sea lion ignored us. It had seen so many cooing tourists. Thank God you are not allowed to touch me, it thought, or you would pinch my cheeks and hug me too tight and say you could just eat me up, I was so cute. We stepped over the sleek mammalian bulk, we gazed adoringly into its enormous dark eyes, we walked up the concrete steps, doting ecograndparents.

The group moved as one behind our leader. Not the arbitrary group we had been when we first boarded the
Huxley,
but this other entity—the comrades. How quickly it had happened. We reached the top of the stairs and stood at the foot of the ash cone. The doting stopped. The volcanic dust was magnificent, a gentle barren slope, but it was not cute.

"What does Mrs. Cornwall carry in that backpack, I wonder?" Jeremy Toll said softly. "Could it be"—he gave me a sly smile—"Mr. Cornwall?"

Ashes to ashes, Mrs. Cornwall had said. Quite enough ashes on this island. Maybe they really had brought the former Mr. Cornwall to the Galapagos, not just in spirit but in fact, the gray dust of his mortal remains in a Ziploc bag.

"Mrs. Cornwall," Jeremy was saying in a gallant voice. "My dear lady, may I help you with your bag?"

Mrs. Cornwall looked at him as if he were insane.

"I'm quite fit, you know, Jeremy. And why are you calling me Mrs. Cornwall? I don't call you Mr. Toll, though you've got at least ten years on me. Honestly! I'm not infirm. I'm quite fit."

"Ah," said Jeremy. "Then perhaps you would like to carry my bag."

Jeannie, who was wearing short shorts and didn't look too bad in them for an old bat, told Jeremy
she
would love to carry his bag, but he declined. Martha led us up a long, long wooden staircase that the parks department had constructed not so much to aid hikers as to protect the island from erosion caused by hikers. Few things grew on the ash heap: some phallic sprays called lava cactus, each covered with prickly fuzz and tipped with mustard yellow; and a regular scattering of small silver stems, creeping along the dust.