Free About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez

service manage? And how many people can simultaneously be present at a single location in the park before a visitor’s sense of the magical remoteness of Galápagos is lost?
    P OINTS OF LEGAL DISEMBARKATION in the park—seabird colonies, cactus forests, saltwater lagoons—are limited, currently to fifty-four; the tour I joined, therefore, took us to the very same spots other visitors see. Occasionally we did encounter another group, but what we saw or heard at nearly every site was so uncommon, so invigorating, that the intrusion of others rarely detracted. We snorkeled amid schools of brilliant sergeant majorsand yellow-tailed surgeonfish at a place called Devil’s Crown, off Isla Floreana. At tide pools on the coast of Santiago, octopuses stared at us askance, and small fish called blennies wriggled past, walking peg-leg on their fin tips from pool to pool over the rock. At Isla Española we stepped respectfully around blue-footed boobies nesting obdurately in the trail. At Punta Cormorant we watched a regatta of ghost crabs scurry off up the beach, a high-stepping whirr, two hundred or more of them, as if before a stiff breeze.
    The genius of the management plan in Galápagos—its success in preserving a feeling of wilderness warrants the word—rests on three principles. The park, first, exercises a high degree of control over where visitors go, with whom they go, and what they do. No one may travel in the park without a licensed guide and guides can—and sometimes do—send visitors too cavalier about the environment back to the boat; trails are marked and bounds have been established at each visitor site; and touching or feeding the animals, wandering off on one’s own, or pocketing so much as a broken seashell are all prohibited. Second, because the boat itself incorporates the services of a hotel, a restaurant, and a souvenir shop, there is no onshore development aside from the villages. Last, the park works concertedly with the Charles Darwin Research Station, a nonprofit, international scientific program, to manage the islands and monitor their well-being.
    As a result of these precautions, few sites appear overused. Occasionally you even have the illusion, because the animals don’t flee at your approach, of being among the first to visit.
    Galápagos gently, gradually, overpowers. As our small yacht made its long passage between islands at night (to put us at a new island at dawn), I would lie awake trying to remember some moment of the day just past. The very process of calling upon the details of color and sound was a reminder of how provocative the landscape is, to both the senses and the intellect. The sensual images I recalled in vivid bursts: the yellow-white incandescence of an iguana’s head; a thick perfume, like the odor of frankincense, suspended through a grove of bursera trees. At the sheerheadland on South Plaza, I watched swallow-tailed gulls rappel a violent draft of air, stall, quivering in the wind, then float slowly backward in the stream of it to land light as a sigh on their cliff nests. One afternoon while we drifted on a turquoise lagoon, Pacific green turtles rose continually to the calm surface to glance at us, the stillness broken only by water tinkling from their carapaces. They drew surprised, audible breath and sank. Behind them a long hillside of leafless palo santo trees shot up, a cinder wall of Chinese calligraphy leaning into an azure sky.
    The most enduring image in Galápagos for me, however, was filled with terror rather than beauty. I stood an hour in a storm petrel colony, under heavy gray skies on the east coast of Tower Island. Galápagos and Madeiran petrels, adroit seabirds about the size of a robin but with thin, delicate legs, nested here in cracks and hollows on a flat expanse of barren lava. They were hunted down, even as I watched, by intense, compact lethal predators—short-eared owls. Wind had scattered the torn fragments of bone and feather like rubbish