Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
rocks' true dip. Tricks of the trade. Shrouds of rain billowed downward in this
time before Gore-Tex; the tall firs overhead seemed dismally somber, and the
summer joy of fossil collection now seemed grimmer, more fitting for adults,
no longer a childhood delight. Lunch was a water-logged peanut butter sand-
wich and a can of Coke, the sugar and caffeine a welcome lift. We worked
with stolid, grim purpose, and I sympathized with the long-ago pioneers who
had first concocted this methodology.
As the day wore on, a column of strata began to form in our notebooks,
and a checklist of fossils from various levels in that column was recorded as
well. Fossil prizes were few. Up until now I had always scoured Sucia for the
fossil prizes, eschewing all save the most pristine fossils. Now every scarp was
information, every scrap of long-dead shell a datum point if its identity could
be ascertained. The grubby fossils were chiseled out of the strata in the fine
rain, later to be labeled and wrapped. The day flew by; it was time to try to
return to Orcas Island in the small boat, a voyage I dreaded. I was surprised
at how little one could do in a day. I was surprised that it was no longer play
but work. But we had indeed collected data, and for the first time I under-
stood responsibility to record faithfully. "Good data are immortal" read a sign
on an office wall at our school. But data could be "bad"—mislabeled fossils,
poor measuring, poor recording. We had taken a small measure of Sucia's se-
crets, its long-held mysteries. And in so doing we had proudly applied exact-
ing scientific methodology.
Later that night, safely back in our cabin on Orcas Island, we shared
our notes, shared a welcome warm dinner, shared a sense of profession. The
professor watched over the apprentices with satisfaction as they drank them-
selves into stupor, another geological tradition.
Later that week I extracted from my still-soggy field notebook the mea-
sured section we had made and drew a column of the strata, arranged with
the oldest layers on the bottom, the youngest on top. Then I portrayed in
graphical fashion the positions of the ammonites earlier collected, as well as
those found on this trip. Each fossil was identified as a given species and plot-
ted on the chart, the first appearance and the last appearance of each
"taxon," or species, being noted with a bold line. Soon a series of short and
