Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
still teaching. 1 made may way across the gardens and walkways of the Cal
Tech campus to the lecture hall in question. I came to the appointed door,
entered, and saw a sea of humanity, perhaps 300 people. It was also clear that
those packing the lectute hall were not students; they were too well dressed,
too old. I found a seat and focused on the speaker: a somewhat diminutive
man from a distance, a rather high speaking voice—and the most extraordi-
nary subject. Kirschvink was telling his audience that there is a
sixth
human
sense in addition to the well-known five. All of us, he said, have an innate
sense of direction, produced hy small crystals of magnetite found within vir-
tually every brain cell, a discovery made largely by Kirschvink himself. This
was my introduction to my new scientific partner.
I had been invited to join a very famous field trip. Every year since the
early 1980s, Kirschvink has taken several loads of students (and the occa-
sional lucky outsider such as myself) to Baja California to study the local
geology. I had heard about this trip from various colleagues for several years
and hy sheer good fortune had managed to get myself invited, not knowing
at the time that our road to Baja would eventually take us back to Vancou-
ver Island.
We assembled the next morning to load the vans, bought huge amounts
of groceries, and set out. The Cal Tech Baja trips entail endless driving.
Three hours from Pasadena to the border at Tijuana, then another two or so
to Ensenada, and then south on Highway 1. An hour south of Ensenada we
turned west into the hills on a track that could only euphemistically be
called a road, over rugged countryside and washboards, the entire van now
filled with dust.
We finally arrived, in early evening, at our camp site. Tents were pitched
in the dark under starry skies, but a howling wind from the neatby sea
drove us into sleeping bags early. Morning, however, brought epiphany.
Emerging from my REI special 1 found that our tents sat atop a rugged sea-
coast cliff, near a tall white lighthouse. A dirt track led down to the sea,
where green shale made up low coastal cliffs stretching to the horizon. 1 de-
scended to the beach and its rocky cliffs, crossing the intertidal rocks gloam-
ing under a retreating tide. I watched pelicans wheel overhead. I noted the
