Everything you’ve read about the Galapagos is true. It is an innocent Eden where the animals do not flee. Herds of iguanas cluster on black lava beaches, next to cormorants that don’t fly and penguins that do fly, only underwater.  Among the tour groups the words "Evolution" and "Darwin" are whispered like incantations of sacred text, the revealed Truth evident in the life all around us. Every island has its own Mockingbird, each island a slew of finches of varying beaks, the aftermath of adaptive radiation and natural selection now woven into DNA.
There may be two Frigatebirds, there may be two hundred, but their cut-out black silhouette, a sharp-edged, gothic "W" against the sky, accompanies a ship wherever she travels through the islands. In the water sea lions cavort, whales exhale and dolphins ride the bow wave at night, leaving bioluminescent streamers. The landscape is sere and sharp, hard crust of lava softened by a green belt of mangrove. Cactus grow like trees, the acacias have inch long spines--everything growing has hard edges.
	These photographs and stories come from a week in early January, 2003, with my wife, Robin, her mother Elly, and Nick, our nephew. We were aboard the M.S. Polaris on a tour by Lindblad Expeditions.