Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Geologists were in despair until a way was found to tell the age of at least
some types of fock: through the use of fossils.
Odd things, fossils. Long known as curios, they became the most
cutting-edge scientific tools in the Europe of the Industrial Revolution, for it
was discovered that with fossils, the relative ages of geographically separated
rock bodies could be deduced. Many of us recall being fascinated by fossils as
children, but they are serious tools of paleontologists even in our day—
anachronisms still useful in this age of instrumental extravagance. Some of
us have never put them away with the other wonders of childhood.
The first time
Stephen Jay Gould has written of his paleontological epiphany when he first
encountered the American Museum's colossal
Tyrannosaurus rex
skeleton.
Mine was a more modest fossil discovery, made on a seashore that now exists
in memory alone.
In Washington state the strongest weather, like the strongest light,
comes from the south, the direction from which great winter storms arise.
Beaches, created and maintained by weather, thus take on the personality
of the directions in which they face. Southern beaches carry the largest
wrack, the finest sand, the biggest boulders. Western and eastern beaches
are calmer, yet still prone to violence. Northern beaches are the rarest and,
like the northern light and northern sea that bathe them, the most con-
stant.
A long gravel heach claims the northern shoreline of Orcas Island.
Looking north, there is only a view of largely or utterly deserted islands,
mostly Canadian. One of these is Sucia Island, which from my family's vaca-
tion cabin on the northern shore of Orcas indeed looks like a low battleship.
We children, brought up on patriotic World War II war movies, sank it in-
numerable times with imaginary torpedoes. It never moved. Easy shot.
This patticulat gravel beach was a biological paradise at low tide. Early
morning was our favorite time for childhood beach exploration, and we
