Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
many such layers, I needed to know not only where on the island the fossils
came from hut also from what sedimentary level they had been collected.
Without knowing this, I was duplicating the faulty way European geologists
first tried to use fossils to tell time in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth Century. For a fossil to be of use, one must know its position in strata
relative to other fossils: Is it from a higher or lower stratum or from a stratum
of the same level? The genius of the first geologists, in the late 1700s, was
their recognition that higher meant younger, lower meant older, and fossils
found at the same level were about the same age. These observations became
the first law of the new science of stratigraphy and were codified into the law
of superposition of fossils.
I had to place the Sucia Island fossils that had been donated in the con-
text of the stratal bedded layers found on Sucia itself. There was only one so-
lution. I convinced several other graduate students who were studying pale-
ontology at my University—and my academic advisor—that a winter trip to
Sucia Island was a wonderful idea, a lark, a challenge, an adventure, a scien-
tific necessity (the story changed to fit the person whose arm was being
twisted).
Blackened highways led from Seattle in the rain, the short day soon
giving way to night. We spent the first night in a small cottage on Orcas Is-
land, facing Sucia. Arising and breaking fast in predawn cold and dark, we
set out for Sucia with a borrowed boat and a dubious outboard engine on a
steel gray dawn, leaving the coast of Orcas Island behind in the mist; soon it
was lost to view. I was a summer inhabitant of these islands, and the reality
of winter here was a shock. Gone were the lazy clouds and azure sky. Gone
was the placid green sea. We set out in a wild winter ocean of froth and
charging herds of whitened waves, an overloaded boat filled with foolish sci-
entific zealots in search of fossils on a faraway island, cloaked in the invinci-
bility of youth. Halfway across the two-mile stretch of open sea, the motor
quit and we literally rowed for our lives, barely keeping the boat from
swamping in the frigid waters. I could see that my professor was livid at hav-
ing been talked into coming on such a journey in winter, and it was only the
prevailing south wind that blew us to Sucia and safety.
