I snorkeled for the first time in the Galapagos. It made me cry.

I started to tear up when I saw a starfish.

I told myself, don’t cry inside your mask, but that feeling of awe and overwhelm isn’t something you can fight. It isn’t something you should fight.

I was surprised to feel it in response to something so small, the movement of a starfish on the sea floor, 600 miles from mainland Ecuador in the waters of the Galapagos.

Until this week, I had never been snorkeling. I always thought I would be afraid.

But on this day, beginners were offered the chance to snorkel the red sand beach of Rabida Island. They called it “practice,” and there’s nothing to be afraid of if you are just practicing.

I zipped up my wetsuit. The water is cooled by the nutrient-rich Humboldt Current, flowing up from Antarctica, which makes it a perfect habitat for whales, sharks, all manner of colorful fish, sea turtles, sea lions and a kind of small penguin only found here.

I sprayed some baby shampoo on the inside of my goggles so they wouldn’t fog up and placed the snorkel in my mouth. I sat in the water for a moment, getting used to the feeling of breathing out of my mouth and housing a mask over my nose. I wondered how I would react underwater, if I would panic among the fish and long for the shore.

I put on my flippers and laid on my belly in the shallow water, as if I was learning to swim.

But my body remembered immediately that I can swim. I love to swim. At first, the ground was red sand. Then it dropped off into a red lava shelf. Sunlight filtered through the water like stage lighting, and the fish seemed to glow. Purple. Yellow. Blue. They fed on algae on the rocks, and I watched their fins move like wings and realized that I’d gone my whole life without understanding the way fish move underwater.

Why didn’t anyone tell me that you can swim with fish and that the underwater world is bright and vibrant? Wait. So many people have told me, but I imagined it was not a place for me.

I put my hands by my legs and moved forward with my flippers. I was not in a rush to get anywhere, only here to take in every movement and every undulation of the underwater landscape. Blue king angelfish, yellowtail surgeonfish, bluechin parrotfish.

When I moved away from the shelf and on the sandy floor, I saw the starfish, stretching its long legs. I flashed to all the dried, dead starfish of childhood. This one was alive. As it came into focus, I saw others. Dozens, in slightly different colors and variations. And that’s what made my face flush, my pupils dilate, my need to fight back tears. It was the recognition of life, the familiar in the unfamiliar, that made my spirit sing out.

A manta ray folded itself by, its long tail and spotted body disappearing into the murk of the deeper water. A small sea lion danced by and circled back, puppy eyes and long whiskers.

I felt saltwater in my snorkel and broke the surface to clear it and scope where I was. A pelican sat on the shore, watching me. A marine iguana sunned itself below trees of prickly pear cactus.

Just around the corner was the open ocean. We were among islands, but they are just dots in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, straddling the equator, the protruding belly of the earth. I moved my flippers to stay in place and felt my body as far away from anywhere, as remote as I’d ever been.

I’d come on this pilgrimage to the famous Galapagos to see birds and fish and beings that only exist here. This place has been preserved and conserved, with tiny pathways carved out for us to explore but the rest set aside as an untouched laboratory for us to truly understand nature.

Ecological naïveté

Back on land on Fernandina Island, we stood on a lava flow, black folds that still seemed to have motion in them though the liquid had hardened.

Just as black as the lava, molting scales blended in with the ground, were marine iguanas. I walked carefully because more than once I realized there was a blinking iguana right there, almost underfoot.

The air smelled like them — the humid, sweet, choking smell of guano that whitewashed the rocks.

They don’t move as you walk by. It’s the main feature of the wildlife here, what naturalists call ecological naïveté. They stay close. They are unafraid. They are even curious. As a rule, we stay six feet away from them. We don’t touch them. But we drink them in.

I looked closely at the thick eyelids and long fingers of the iguanas. I notice the rounded snouts and the horns on their spines.

There are a few places like this on Earth where you get a chance to look closely at animals in the wild, like the grizzly bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park, the elephants in Kenya and the mountain gorillas in Uganda. These places, these conservation efforts, are gifts.

And they are fleeting. You aren’t allowed to stay. You are given a window of time to look closely, to notice the movement and the shape and the behavior. Then try to remember every detail.

Charles Darwin, the most famous visitor to the Galapagos, was only here a very short time. His well-documented five-year trip on the Beagle took him all over the world and to the Galapagos for only five weeks. When he got home, he never left England again. He spent the rest of his life remembering and revisiting in his mind what he had seen here, a lifelong mastication of his notes, drawings and specimens from standing right where I was standing.

Naturalist Gilda Gonzalez pointed to two flightless cormorants sitting close to a tidal pool.

“You will only see these flightless cormorants here. They don’t exist anywhere else in the world, and you are only here two days,” she said.

The cormorants spread their wings to dry. Their wings are small and almost naked, thin feathers hanging down like strips of cloth on a clothesline. Their webbed feet, strong legs and long necks make them perfect underwater fishermen, but they live on land. They are the shape of a bird, but survival long ago sold their place in the sky.

The black ground was dramatic next to the blue-green Pacific Ocean. On one side of the flow, the waves broke and rolled into a perfect crashing barrel that sprayed and foamed against the rocks.

The noise of it hung in the background, but our eyes were drawn away from the drama toward a small, protected lagoon, full of playful sea lion pups and massive swimming turtles. The sun reflected off the shining fur of the sea lions, and one large male pulled his body out of the water and started barking out the boundaries of his territory.

A bleached whale backbone glowed in the distance behind us, white against black lava.

The essential book “Galapagos: A Natural History” by John Kricher and Kevin Loughlin offers this view of where I was standing: “When you walk on any of the islands, know that the volcanic material beneath your feet arose from the depths of the sea, escaping as molten magma, cooling and solidifying when it hit the cold, deep Pacific Ocean water, and gradually but inexorably building to reach the surface in a majestic process of geological creation that probably began sometime around 15 million years ago.”

The process continues with islands eroding and disappearing below the surface and new ones rising up, like the beach in Urbina Bay on Isabella Island that surfaced from the ocean in the 1950s and has since covered its new, naked land with trees and lumbering turtles and yellow flowers that fill the air with a musky frankincense-like perfume.

It is a beautiful and inhospitable place.

Herman Melville described the parched lava landscape as one of the most desolate places on Earth.

He wrote: “Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky. ‘Have mercy upon me,’ the wailing spirit of the Encantadas seems to cry, ‘and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.’ ”

Despite his repulsion by the barrenness, Melville was inspired by his visit to the Galapagos on a whaling ship. He wrote the novella “Los Encantadas,” published in 1854, that described the place in close detail. He used the name “Enchanted Isles” that whalers and pirates used for the islands in those days.

And he pulled from the account of the Essex, a whaling ship that sunk after it was rammed by a whale west of the Galapagos, to write his famous “Moby Dick.”

Melville’s story “Los Encantadas” is worth reading for its vivid, almost hallucinatory, descriptions of the islands and its famous tortoises, those slow-motion creatures with their long necks and long lives.

The seamen of Melville’s time had a superstition, that “wicked sea officers” were transformed at death into tortoises, “thenceforth dwelling upon these hot aridities, sole solitary lords of Asphaltum. … There is something strangely self-condemned in the appearance of these creatures,” he wrote.

Protecting the islands

The barren lava becomes a kind of canvas for some people who imagine themselves living in the quiet remoteness of it.

A naturalist told a story early in our trip about a man who retired from a life as a military officer and showed up in the Galapagos with a plan to disappear. He paid locals to deliver food to him once a week. Otherwise, he lived naked and alone with only one pair of pants to put on when he accepted the weekly deliveries. According to the story, he lived well into his 90s that way.

I could never verify if this story was true, but I thought of that man often and what he symbolized, even if he was just an idea and not a real person. He reminded me of the Colombian philosophy professor who retired and moved to the mountains of Lebanon to live as a hermit. The human compulsion to dream of being alone after hardship or a lengthy career, to escape social pressures and the stress of daily life — the dream of an island in the middle of the ocean.

In reality, it’s nearly impossible to move to the Galapagos Islands. The only way to become a permanent resident of the Galapagos is to be born to a permanent resident or marry someone from there. People traveling on a tourist visa can stay up to 90 days.

Avoiding overpopulation is key to conservation of the place, which is not as easy as it seems.

I tried to edit it out of my memory, but it was still there. I was snorkeling in the Galapagos and had just seen a starfish so beautiful that it made me cry.

I was lost in the wonder of the underwater world. My eyes followed a fish across the sea floor and there, pulsating like a jellyfish, was the wrapper from a single slice of cheese.

Here, as far away as you can be, where lava has pushed its way out of the earth to form islands and life has found a way to thrive in this barren, rocky place, the world’s trash washes to shore.

Out here, in this laboratory, in this experiment to see what happens when humans don’t interfere, it’s hard to ignore the shadow we still cast.

Each night on the National Geographic Endeavor II, naturalists give a talk to travelers about oceanography or geology. It deepened our love for the place, as we slowly came to understand it.

One night, we watched plankton collected that afternoon from the sea through a microscope. The meeting of warm and cold currents make this a perfect nursery for plankton to live. Tiny little creatures of all shapes and sizes — creatures in constant motion, feeling their way with antennae, one that looks like a clear, miniature lobster. Yes, I learned, plankton have eyes.

They are the foundation of the food chain, feeding the humpback whales that throw themselves out of the water in the early morning as the sun comes up between Isabela and Fernandina.

Just as we had fallen in love with all of it, a naturalist showed us plastic. He clicked through slide after slide of research. We buy 1 million plastic water bottles a minute. Marine life is choking on our plastics, drinking in the microscopic remnants of our clothes and water bottles and bags. And then we eat the fish.

If you leave the Galapagos and still want to buy a single-use plastic bottle, you weren’t paying attention.

Eliminating plastics is a key piece of the ethos of National Geographic-Lindblad Expeditions.

Company founder Sven-Olof Lindblad said, “I can’t sit idly and watch humans pour plastic into the ocean and destroy marine life and ecosystems that so many people depend upon for livelihoods and sustenance. I have to act. And I’m using my business to do so. … When we asked one supplier to remove the plastic encasing each individual item they sold us, they said it wasn’t possible. We suggested we take our business elsewhere, and suddenly they found a solution.”

There’s a single-use plastic ban on Lindblad boats. Garbage bags are compostable and dissolve in water; passengers receive stainless steel bottles for filtered water when you come onboard.

It’s also part of the ethos of the towns on the Galapagos Islands. Santa Cruz Island has a ban on single-use plastics.

When the naturalists said, “I moved here because I fell in love with the Galapagos,” I was confused. How do you move to the empty Galapagos? Do you build a lean-to among the marine iguana? That is how little I understood about the islands before I went.

I was pleasantly surprised to walk the streets of Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz Island, population 12,696. It’s a busy but relaxed little town.

A man pushed his snow cone cart up a hill and against the curb so it wouldn’t roll. He turned a metal wheel to shave ice into a cup and covered it with colored syrup and then a layer of condensed milk.

People sat nearby, drinking Club beer and eating ceviche, served through the windows of small restaurants. They grabbed handfuls of popcorn and plantain chips and mixed them into the ceviche, letting the crunchy additions absorb the lime juice.

After eating, the men flagged down a white pickup taxi, ideal for throwing a bicycles, groceries and supplies in the back for the drive to the farms of the highlands.

This island is home to the Charles Darwin Research Station, whose work has helped restore endangered species like the giant tortoise.

I sat on the pier and looked out on the screensaver view of white sand and turquoise water. A breeze kept the head of a palm tree in constant motion. The bay was full of boats — ships like ours with a host of tourists, sailboats and a line of yellow water taxis.

A man emerged from one of the sailboats and tossed what was left in his coffee cup overboard. He was barefoot and wearing a loose black beanie for the bit of morning chill still in the air. He busied himself with the puttering work of tightening stanchions, checking lines and looking out to sea.

A black marine iguana sat near me, first looking out on the scene and then looking up at me. It kept moving closer with a cat curiosity. Could an iguana want affection? Or do people feed it?

A bright red crab pulled itself out of the water below onto the black lava rocks. A mural on the wall showed a child swimming underwater with turtles and fish, eyes wide taking in the beauty — and all the plastics: bottles and wrappers.

Members of our boat crew were not far away participating in a six-week program to clean beaches of litter. That day, they collected 40 pounds of plastic trash.

Seeing everything

The thing that changed in me in the Galapagos was my access to the sea and the depth it added to my view of the world.

Years ago, I was in Madagascar and was offered the chance to swim with whale sharks in Nosy Be, the best place to see them in the world. That idea was ridiculous to me at the time, and I didn’t hesitate to say no. It was October, the end of tourist season there, and I was the only person staying in the hotel on the beach. With my quick refusal, I missed the chance to swim alone in the turquoise waters near the largest fish in the sea, gentle giants feeding on the plankton.

I was in the most biodiverse place on the planet, but I only saw the land.

By the end of our trip to the Galapagos, I was no longer that person. I snorkeled every day we got a chance.

On our last day, we hiked to an outlook on San Cristobal Island. Above us, frigatebirds coasted on the wind, and their 7-foot wingspan and tail feathers made me think for a moment of pterodactyls. We stopped at the nest of a blue-footed booby, just feet away from us, built of dried grass and twigs, low in the bush so that we could look down into it. A juvenile bird still had its white downy feathers and was waiting to be fed. The brown lava was carpeted in bright red succulents.

Below us, a flock of feral goats were grazing, ancestors of goats left long ago by sailors. They’ve been eradicated on most islands because they compete destructively with the native and endemic species. But not here.

Naturalist Jason Kelley, a California native who led our hike barefoot, told us to stop and notice everything.

“Listen to the soundscape,” he said. “It’s different than any of the other islands.”

We could hear a cacophony of birds — the airy whistle of the blue-footed booby, the deep-throated ticking of the frigatebirds, the fast, high-pitched song of the yellow warbler.

He made us slow down and take in where we were. On our way back, we stopped on the windy peak, and Jason told us to sit for a moment and look down on the beach. Sea lions were pulling themselves out of the water and enjoying the sun.

We came down from our perch and followed the steep path back to the beach. I took off my shoes and put on flippers and a mask and snorkel and eased into the water until I was swimming among a big school of yellowtail surgeonfish.

What an amazing feeling to climb to the top of a hill and then sink down to the seafloor. I hovered above a large horned sea star. Birders call the bird that got them interested in birding their “spark bird.” That sea star is my spark fish, even though it’s not a fish at all.