The
island headquarters is only a short walk. It is just a few hundred
yards to the mission-style buildings, which now house the visitor
center and ranger lodgings. Lunch is very peaceful on the bluff
tops. Not too far away are the remains of Chumash middens, remnants
of their lunch and dinner spots for thousands of years. I can
see why they would have chosen such a spot. The grasses are dry
but a very mellow yellow, the ice plant filled with red flowers,
the coreopsis "forests"-or Dr. Seuss trees-as 
Victor calls them are lush looking,
with green tops and clusters of yellow daisy-like flowers. We
are high enough to have excellent views out over the ocean and
it is truly beautiful.
In the not-too-far distance a cargo container ship passes quietly by, headed for Los Angeles, and in the mist I can see the oil derricks here and there, a reminder of how much the health and safety of the channel is dependent on man, and how careful we are to make sure things out here last far more than just our lifetimes.
Along the way Victor have begun to share
bits and pieces of the island history and its plants and animals
with us. He uses words like isolation and adaptation and interrelationship,
and out here they 
seem
to have a very real and direct meaning. He tells us, for instance,
about how the kelp, the otter and sea urchins interact. He first
talks about food webs and how the kelp provides food for the
sea urchin and in turn the urchin for the otter, describing in
vivid words what happens when any one of them are disturbed.
Some of the kids do not listen but most do, fascinated by the
urchin and how it "walks" on its spiny legs across
the palm of his hand.
I am beginning to learn, too, about the
difference between the native and non-native plants, which are
here today. 
Forget the ice plant;
the same for the wild oats, which cover the island: neither was
here when the Chumash inhabited these islands. My dreamy image
of what a Chumash might have seen begins to change too, as I
try to imagine what it would have looked like here five hundred
years ago, before the arrival of Cabrillo and a time when many
of the Indians inhabited the Channel Islands. Things are not
always as they appear. I wonder what these kids might be thinking
now, and what of those Chumash who sat here many centuries ago?