Free The Way of Wanderlust by Don George Page B

the northernmost islands in the Galápagos chain. The others in my group had moved on to snorkel off the far tip of the island, but I stayed behind to see how it felt to be the lone soul in that singular place.  
    Well, the lone human soul anyway, since I had lots of other company. To my left, dozens of charcoal-brown juvenile red-footed boobies perched among saltbush branches; their parents whirled around the sky. Two black-and-white Nazca boobies waddled past me. Soft-needled cacti sprouted from a cleft in the rock beside me; with no animals to eat them, they’ve evolved without their protective hard spines. To my right lay a sand-crusted driftwood tree trunk borne from who knows where.  
    The ancestors of some of the wildlife around me had probably arrived on just such a trunk, clinging perilously to the surface of the storm-tossed wood or embedded snugly inside, like passengers on an accidental ark. The volcanic rock around me—pocked with air holes and studded with brown and red stones—had been tossed from the earth’s fiery crust through a hotspot that sent molten lava spewing onto the seabed in such quantity that it piled up and eventually broke the surface, forming Isla Genovesa, the other almost sixty islands in the chain, and even the hollow in which I sat.   
    Suddenly, from a thick stand of mangroves I heard a choked squawking, a male red-footed booby trying to attract a mate. Then, straight ahead, oblivious to the human playing castaway among them, three Nazca boobies screeched and squabbled in fierce beak-to-beak combat. Two were ganging up on one, and when the victim rose to confront her tormentors, I saw a light blue egg glistening beneath her. She occupied prime real estate, and the newlyweds wanted it.   
    A juvenile booby practiced landing to my left, its body wavering to and fro as it fluttered onto a branch. A male frigatebird flew overhead, flashing the red pouch that he puffs into a bright balloon at mating time. Black-and-white swallow-tailed gulls, their eyes outlined in brilliant red, fluttered onto a rocky perch.   
    At the waterline, black marine iguanas padded across black lava rocks, also dotted with red-and-white Sally Lightfoot crabs. A couple of sea lions fenced with their snouts, bellowing at each other while a whiskery pup flopped along after the bigger one, trying to nurse even while its mother barked at the intruder. Sea lion yelps and roars filled the air and the salt-scented Pacific swashed blue and white.   
    I swigged water and considered Charles Darwin. Certainly during his seminal visit to the Galápagos aboard the HMS Beagle in 1835, the father of evolutionary theory had sailed into the bay now named for him and set foot on this island. But, I thought, it was quite possible that no other human had ever sat precisely where I was. All islands are to some extent worlds apart, but few, as Darwin noted in The Voyage of the Beagle, are quite so profoundly separate as the Galápagos. “The natural history of this archipelago is very remarkable,” he wrote. “It seems to be a little world within itself; the greater number of its inhabitants, both vegetable and animal, being found nowhere else.”  
    Sitting in my little corner of that world 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, I couldn’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else. And to think that just a week before I’d been having doubts about this trip.  
    Darwin’s voyage from England took four years and was plagued by seasickness; the worst we faced on our two-day trip from San Francisco were airplane meals and in-flight movies. But I contended with one foe that Darwin didn’t: long-distance déjà vu. Long before we departed, a film of the Galápagos reeled through my mind. I had already seen countless times—complete with James Earl Jones narration—boobies, iguanas, frigatebirds, sea lions, giant tortoises, and