by Carl Safina
And now we’re tangled in one prop. Line this heavy, wound tight, can cause serious damage to the propeller-shaft seal. It has to come off before we can attempt the long run home. While trying to free that line by reversing the propeller, another line that was inadvertently left dangling in the water also gets stuck in the props.
Now we have two lines to cut away from the propeller shafts. That means swimming. The prospect of going overboard with these hungry, agitated sharks seems somehow less than enticing.
Wolfe confirms from the bridge, “There’s several big sharks under the boat right now.” I climb to the bridge and look down into water so dark it looks blue-black. I can see their lemony-looking shapes slinking along. I count the shapes of seven very large sharks. Not only are they large, but over the last few hours they have gotten accustomed to the idea that this boat provides them with opportunities to eat something easy every little while. They like our boat. For them our boat is a good thing, perhaps the best thing that’s happened in a long time.
Dave says, “Does anybody want to go swimming to get the line out of the props?”
“I’ll go,” I say.
He says, “I won’t let you.”
I tell him don’t be ridiculous—I’m kidding.
He says these sharks are so ferocious—
I say I realize that. And though today is a good day to die, who knows?—tomorrow might be better. I’m curious about that. This scene reminds me of a Gary Larson “Far Side” cartoon showing a terrified guy in a boat, surrounded by sharks who are saying, “Look, why don’t you just give yourself up? Otherwise this could turn into a frenzy, and nobody wants that.” It seemed funny at the time.
Dave manages to pull one line free. But the other is badly stuck.
A cloud appears overhead from nowhere, as though conjured by our gloomy mood. Nothing dampens the mood of the patiently patrolling sharks. Dave goes into the cabin and reappears with a mask and snorkel. He says, “I’m just going to poke over and have a look.” He says to Mike, “Please hang on to my legs.”
I have visions of Mike suddenly pulling back and coming up with just Dave’s legs.
Dave leans out the transom door on his belly. He’s not vet committed to going swimming, but now his torso disappears while Mike holds his ankles. He comes back up to the surface and he says, “It’s not bad at all. The line is just around the cotter pin to the nut, and I can see the lure. I can cut it off.” He pokes back under with a knife. But then he comes back and says, “It’s not as simple as I thought. There’s actually a lot wound on.” He says, “I need to cut the wire from the lure and then the line. But there are sharks down below.”
Somehow that last bit of information takes none of us by surprise.
Nancy whispers to me, “This is nerve-racking.”
We limp ahead about two-thirds of a mile, hoping we can leave the sharks behind. I’m skeptical, because we can’t go very fast. The sharks have had a very profitable morning following us around. Dave goes over with Mike holding his ankles again. He cuts the lure free and comes back to the surface. But then he says, “It’s a scuba job. There’s a lot of line wound in. I don’t mind doing it, but we need to get off the seamount first because of the sharks.”
Wolfe puts the boat in gear. But it makes a bad sound. He’s afraid of damage. As captain, he’s responsible; plus we’re all the way out here alone. So he simply comes down off the bridge, puts a mask on, grabs a knife, and slips over. Mike yells, “Oh, a shark! Bring him back in.” Dave takes a pole and taps him on the back. Wolfe scrambles to safety. In a chastened and thoughtful turn of mind, Wolfe says, “Let’s just drive off the seamount with one motor. Let’s get away from all these sharks.”
Good idea. We drive off slowly on one engine.
The atmosphere on deck is part bravado (not mine), part professional responsibility to the boat and the equipment, and part the time pressure of needing to get Dave back to make his airplane flight later.
Now Wolfe is setting up a scuba tank. He goes over.
Mike says, “In addition to the sharks, there’s the problem of working right under those propellers with the boat rocking back and forth. A larger wave could land the boat and propellers right on your head, or cut you deep and give you a big problem.”
Just being in the water here is bad enough, but bleeding!
The problem with running the boat with this heavy line around the shaft is that the monofilament will melt and bind up the shaft itself and cut through a rubber bearing, leading to leakage. Wolfe reports that some of the monofilament is already melted and sucked up into the bearing. That’s the bad news. The good: apparently we succeeded in getting away from the sharks.
A school of tuna comes up about a quarter mile away—white explosions under birds against blue water. I’m glad we’re not too near them.
Wolfe tries again and comes up and says, “I got it all.”
Soon, we’re on our way home—all of us, intact.
WE, THE WILDLIFE, and everyone else here have been enjoying the benefits of a former military base retooled for peace. A lot of research is now getting done—and a lot of people are appreciating the place—because logistics allow personnel, equipment, vacationers, and volunteers to get here safely and efficiently. And that’s mostly because of one man. And virtually no one ever meets him.
Meet Mark Thompson, Midway’s wizard behind the curtain. A clean-cut, right-stuff-looking, stiff-lipped kind of guy, Mark was born on the early end of the baby boom and raised in Georgia. He comes across as having a tough, taut personality. Perhaps the stiffness comes from an auto-racing accident that left most of his bones broken about a year ago. “When you go from two hundred miles an hour to zero in the distance from here to there along this porch, the effect is severe. It wasn’t my accident ; I just got collected in somebody else’s mess. So—”
We’re sitting on the porch of his Glipper House Restaurant, talking, overlooking what strikes me as perhaps the most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen. He has thick dark hair, chiseled angular features. He’s wearing a white polo shirt and wraparound sunglasses. Even in the most casual conversations, Mark’s cadence and voice seem resolute and determined. “The only thing I ever won in my life,” he is saying, “was the draft lottery, in 1969. I had number one. That’s right.” He spent the next three years as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam—about which he seems decidedly reluctant to say anything further.
But his interest in military aviation continued after the war. For amusement, Mark got heavily into skydiving. For work, he entered an unusual corner of the aviation business: operating specialized aircraft that provide an unusual service to governments of the United States, NATO, Canada, and Japan. “They hire us to be the bad guys,” he says. The idea is to help teach tactics to fighter pilots. “For example, one thing we do is electronically degrade their radar, and they have to counter us. We practice electronic countermeasures against warships. We’ve towed ninety percent of the targets for the U.S. Navy’s live-fire and gunnery. We’ve got four airplanes over Europe right now doing electronic countermeasures for NATO.”
That business brought Thompson to Midway a couple of times a year for about fifteen years. “Then, one day a few years ago, I landed here and the guy fueling the planes said, ‘This will probably be the last time you’ll ever land here; they’re going to BRAC us out.’ BRAC means base realignment activities. Means close the base. They were going to take a bunch of bulldozers, dig a big hole in the middle of the island, and push everything in. I just couldn’t believe it. Then I learned that the Fish and Wildlife Service wanted to keep a presence here, but financially, they didn’t see how they could. So we worked out a deal.” And here’s the deal: the government would take care of the wildlife; Mark’s company—the Midway Phoenix Corporation—would run the infrastructure, fuel airplanes, and bring up to one hundred tourist visitors at a time, plus students.
A year later, Mark came out here with the guys that were closing the base. Mark pointed out
the buildings he didn’t want them to tear down. “That’s what’s left. They were blowing a lot of stuff up. We had a lot of storage tanks with unknown gases in them. There were about eighty underground fuel tanks, with contaminated soil all around them. They had to clean all that out. They actually steam-cleaned the soil to get the fuel up to the surface, where they could suck it out. And there were old bombs and stuff. They blew all of those underwater. When they’d find one in the lagoon they’d mark it and send a guy down and he’d blow it. Some of them, they didn’t know if they had mustard gas. They’d spent decades in the water. We had trucks pumping grout into pipelines underground for a year; if you don’t fill them, fuel vapors inside are an explosive hazard. They still find pipelines underground on occasion. Last year they found one still full of aviation fuel. They thought it was a water line—and all of a sudden the guy who was cutting it got a flash. So—”
Over a thousand structures came down. “That big open area had dozens and dozens of officer housing units. We saved the navy ten or fifteen million dollars in demolition costs. But the federal government owns everything, even this restaurant that I built. I don’t have a lease, just a cooperative agreement. And operating is expensive all the way out here. If the sportfishing operation needs a seventy-dollar boat part, it costs fifty dollars more just to get it here. They spent seven thousand dollars just this month, just for boat parts. We never throw anything away; eventually it gets cannibalized. We have an unbelievable Filipino machinist who can fabricate just about anything we need.”
“What is your desire for the island?” I ask.
“To break even. Period.”
“But you can break even by sitting home and—”
He interrupts, saying, “Trust me, I could do a lot better than break even by sitting at home and not getting involved in all this.” He adds, “I lost an”—he searches for the right word—“an inordinate amount of money on this island. I’m beginning to wear thin. The only reason we did what we did out here was to prevent such a waste. I mean, how would Fish and Wildlife get somebody up here to count seals? And if they did get somebody here in a pup tent, what if they got appendicitis?”
I say, “So your motivation was basically—”
He interrupts me again. “Altruistic? No. My motivation is this: I believe this island will one day be strategically important to the United States. The government doesn’t think far enough out into the future to realize this stuff.”
“Meaning?”
“Okay. First. The U.S. has fishing rights around this island for two hundred miles in every direction. Right now the Coast Guard is responsible for preventing people from illegally fishing out here. Fifty-mile longlines. Drift nets. All that stuff. If you didn’t have this place to refuel, you’d have a C-130 come up from Honolulu, look around for about an hour, then have to turn around and go back for gas. Operating from here, they can stay up for ten hours, patrolling a vast ocean area. One day, America’s fish is going to become a big deal, because they’re fishing the oceans dry.
“That’s one strategic thing. Second: we’ve been talking to a fiber-optics company who wants to bring a fiber cable from Seattle to Japan, and they want to go through here to clean the static off the fiber-optic lines. Again, that’s fairly important.”
Mark shifts in his seat and continues, “Also: there are about a dozen people alive today—just since the navy left—that wouldn’t be alive if there was no refueling station, no working airport. Picture this: You’re on a boat out here. You’re twelve hundred miles from Honolulu and twenty-seven hundred miles from Japan. You get injured. What are you going to do if Midway isn’t here? You can turn your boat around and go back to Hono; that’ll take about five days. If you keep going you’ll hit Japan—in around twelve days. We get about a dozen calls a year from some ship with a crew member who’s gotten hurt, gotten appendicitis, gotten all screwed up somehow. We send out a boat with our doctor. They pick the crew member up. Bring him here. Doctor stabilizes him. Several times we’ve done that, to people who would otherwise have died. O.K.?” He lifts his sunglasses to give me a look that helps his point sink in. He settles back, continuing, “Right now, there’s fourteen commercial flights a day between Tokyo and Hawaii. The airlines are changing to twin-engine airplanes, because they’re more economical. One day, a twin-engine plane crossing the Pacific will lose an engine. Well—there’s not another airport for twelve hundred miles. This is it. You can go north to the Aleutians, southeast to Hawaii. There’s nothing between. The entire North Pacific is devoid.” He narrows his eyes and adds, “I assure you, one day an airplane crossing the Pacific will experience an in-flight emergency. With hundreds of people on board. That will happen. And let me tell you: they’ll be glad Midway is here to receive them, at this runway.”
I say, “All those reasons do sound altruistic, actually.”
He says, “I was never out to make money on this island. I assure you, I can make money a lot easier doing what I do, operating airplanes.”
I ask, “Do you have a particular fondness for this place?”
“It’s peaceful,” he says without a hint of sentimentality. “It’s a challenge to take an island and make it pay for itself. Here’s what I mean: we burn seven hundred and fifty thousand gallons of fuel a year to make the lights go on.” He pauses for emphasis. “I buy every gallon. I have it shipped here. I have it stored here. And I have mechanics maintaining the generators, maintaining the diesels, storing and transferring the fuel. And that’s just the electricity. That doesn’t cover the roads. That doesn’t cover the water system. I mean, this is a small city out here. When you turn on the TV—it works! That’s the power system and the television system. When the navy was running the island they had one phone line. Now we have a phone system. You can pick up your cellular phone or go to your room and call home. I bought that satellite antenna. I bought the cellular system. I bought every bit of that junk. I bought it in Jacksonville, Florida. Had it hauled to Seattle. Loaded on a boat. Brought it all out. Had it all installed. Made it all functional. When I write a check, it comes exactly from that little personal checkbook just like you have. I’ve written seven figures’ worth on this place. So again, my only desire for this island is to have it break even. If I make any money here, I’ll put it into improvements here.”
I ask Mark if he feels appreciated.
He thinks, then says deliberately, “Some people have a solution for every problem and some people have a problem for everv solution. Some people have tunnel vision. One person will be overly concerned with the Laysan gooney birds. The other person will be overly concerned with the Black-footed goonies. Another person will be concerned only with Monk Seals. They just kinda don’t see the big picture. And the big picture for the wildlife—in my opinion—is that unless we could keep bringing these volunteers out here, within about a year this island would have been overtaken with this introduced plant, Verbesina, and the gooney-bird population would have been significantly reduced, and the burrow-nesting seabirds would have been dramatically reduced, because they really can’t land or take off in that stuff.
“Also: I believe the American public has the right to see some of this wildlife up close. Fact is, everybody is pretty respectful to the wildlife here. As long as you control the interaction between people and wildlife, I think the sixty-five-year-old woman from Kansas who’s been paying taxes for the last forty-five years has the right to come and see those three frigatebirds flying in formation up there.” He points overhead. “Or see that gooney feeding its chick. Or that seal over there on the beach. As long as they don’t hurt it, as long as they’re not interfering. Plus: a million and a half people a year go to Pearl Harbor, which was our greatest naval defeat; but this was our greatest naval victory and hardly anybody knows about it. In 1903 the final round-the-world cable link was made at Midway. I mean, this place is steeped in history.
“So, I think that there’s a benefit to people and wildlife to have the island well maintained.
I think you have to simply ask, ‘What would the island be like if we had not done what we did?’ People can come out here to study and appreciate the wildlife, in this setting. I mean, look at this absolutely gorgeous beach and this lagoon. How many places in the world can you go to where you can leave your wallet on your dresser, not worry about anything when you walk the streets in the dark, and see wildlife like this?”
I still disagree with Mark; it sounds altruistic to me.
WHAT ELSE HAS CHANGED for the better? Rats.
One of the main reasons seabirds use remote islands in high densities is that in all the ages since the islands formed they’ve lacked predatory mammals. Consequently, oceanic seabirds have few predator-avoidance skills. Most can’t even recognize a land mammal as a potential predator—leaving them vulnerable. Rats introduced from ships to oceanic islands are tremendously destructive to ground-nesting seabirds. Rats get into nesting burrows, eat eggs and chicks, and sometimes attack adults.
Rats invaded Midway on military vessels during World War II and did tremendous damage to the birds. In 1891, Laysan Rails had been moved to Midway to prevent their extinction. It worked. On Midway the rails thrived. One observer wrote in 1907, “They must have found the conditions very suitable … for they are certainly very abundant now.” The exiles outlived their native kin on Laysan Island, who went extinct due to the ravages of the rabbits. Alexander Wetmore wrote in 1923 that on Midway the rails “are alert, self-reliant little fellows … . They came frequently to feed with the chickens.” In 1945, two years after they arrived here, a rat ate the last Laysan Rail on Earth.
Rats gnawed away 99 percent of Midway’s Bonin Petrel population—reducing it from 500,000 to 5,000 in thirty-five years. They totally destroyed the atoll’s Bulwer’s Petrels. They even threatened to wipe out some native plants, like the lovely Beach Naupaka.
