by Casey, Susan
This obscurity is understandable. The boat ride from the mainland is a riot of turbulence and nausea that can last more than six hours—and that’s on a day when a captain is willing to attempt the voyage. Even coast guard crews balk at the crossing, admitting that they try to take a helicopter when possible. No one lives year-round at the Farallones. Peter, Scot, and a revolving handful of colleagues bunk in the only habitable building, a 120-year-old, no-nonsense house on Southeast Farallon that looks like it could stand up to anything. And it has: The place gets regular lashings of the meanest weather the Pacific can dish out. Thirty-knot winds, blanketing fog, and fifteen-foot seas are standard.
Even if a visitor is hearty enough or curious enough to make the trip to the Farallones, upon arrival he cannot set foot aground—it is a tightly supervised National Wildlife Refuge, within a National Marine Sanctuary, and the only people allowed there by federal law are the biologists who monitor the wildlife. In any case, there’s nowhere to land a boat. The islands are perimetered by sheer cliffs and treacherous hidden rocks that create abrupt surf breaks. A quarter million seabirds spend the year painting these rocks, and the stench of ammonia will knock a person back on his heels. Noisemaking is prohibited, planes may not fly directly overhead, and all boats are required to remain at least three hundred feet offshore. And you sure as hell don’t want to go in for a dip. When all the impediments are taken into account, there is really only one reason to visit the Farallon Islands: because it is the spookiest, wildest place on Earth.
I BECAME HAUNTED BY THE FARALLONES IN 1998, WHEN I HAPPENED TO see a BBC documentary about Scot and Peter’s work. Television tends to make even magnificent things seem puny, but this program managed to convey how enormous the sharks were, how toylike the men’s research boat was by comparison, the extraterrestrial nature of the place. When the show came on I was lying on my living room floor, bleary with mononucleosis, and I wondered if I might be hallucinating.
On-screen, the islands jutted from the Pacific like the fangs of a sea monster badly in need of dental work. The water was a fathomless black; fog crept through savage rock archways. But the islands’ most surreal feature lay beneath the surface. When the blond man identified as “Scot Anderson, biologist” leaned over the edge of their eleven-foot boat and lowered an underwater video camera, it was only seconds before a great white shark appeared in the frame. And then another, and then another. There was no chum in the water, no bait. The sharks were just there, swimming around, stacked like planes over O’Hare. Is this some kind of hoax? I wondered. A camera montage? This cannot be real. How on earth could great white sharks the size of cube vans be hanging out in a pack within the San Francisco delivery radius for a pizza? And who were the two crazies sitting in the middle of it all in a rowboat?
Great white sharks elicit a kind of universal awe—and not just because of their ability to snack on us. Grizzly bears can devour people with equal proficiency, and while they certainly command a healthy respect, it’s nothing like our primal response to seeing that black flag shearing the water. Ask the Discovery Channel; its annual Shark Week is a ratings bonanza that has drawn as much as a 100 percent increase in viewers, and the network invariably schedules it during the sweeps.
Even to the most dedicated control freak, white sharks represent the terrible, powerful unknown. They live in a different element than we do, they’re not cute, they’re not at all cuddly, and on some level they seem like the closest thing we’ve got to living dinosaurs. Their otherness is what both compels us and scares the pants off us. That, and their several sets of teeth. It’s a complicated relationship. The biologist Edward O. Wilson summed it up beautifully when he wrote, “In a deeply tribal way, we love our monsters.”
Most prefer to love the monster from a distance, or perhaps only in photographs, rather than marching right up to pet its fur or examine its claws (or stroke its fin, as Scot did on the BBC program when a shark passed alongside him). Survival usually trumps curiosity and that’s good because those are the people we can count on to stick around and continue the race, passing their sage judgment down to their children. Then there are the others. Like me.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve had the feeling that the most exciting things in life were locked away somewhere, like Fabergé eggs or hundred-year-old Scotch. And that the only way to get to them was by relentless searching. You weren’t going to stumble across a lost civilization on your way to catch the commuter bus, for instance, or find a goblin shark lying in the seafood section of Safeway. Seeing the moon on TV, visiting the wildest creatures in cages, nose-pressing museum cases to admire a souvenir of history—all this added up to an unacceptable trade-off. And yet pretty much everyone I knew had already made it.
And in truth I had too. But at the age of thirty-four, ten years into a successful career in the magazine world, there was still more restlessness and curiosity in me than I knew how to handle, and I wouldn’t say that I ever felt content. Bodies of water caused the most distraction. They drew me in deep, like a hypnotist’s coin, and I could never look at one without wondering what was under its skin. The green-black Canadian lakes where I spent my summers, the gin-clear Caribbean, the fathomless Pacific, the shallow, antiseptic glint of a swimming pool: I wanted them all the same.
My fascination with water led to an athletic career as a swimmer that has lasted for twenty-five years. For up to six hours a day I stared at the bottom of every possible kind of pool, did millions of laps and countless flipturns, and I still couldn’t get enough water. The only thing more satisfying than being in the pool was swimming in a lake or a river or the ocean, where I might possibly see fish. Even the lowliest trash fish, a crappie or a perch or a rock bass, worked a kind of spell on me, an irrational mix of captivation and terror. While other people were looking up into space, wondering about black holes and distant galaxies, I was staring down into some expanse of water, hoping for a glimpse of fin.
Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth, and it’s estimated that no one has ever laid eyes on 95 percent of the life-forms that live there; only a piddling fraction of this aquatic real estate has been explored. Breakthroughs in deep exploration have made it possible to venture farther into the abyss, and in recent years jaw-dropping images of formerly unknown creatures have come back from below—beings that stretch the imagination such as the fangtooth fish and the vampire squid and the gulper eel. Scientists have only just discovered hot vents on the ocean floors—boiling, mineral-saturated water that spews up from the Earth’s crust into the sea through chimneylike formations. (These chimneys might be the very source of life, that’s all.) Through the use of new technologies like side-scan sonar, astonishing treasures have been found: Six hundred shipwrecks, some from prebiblical times, are lying in one small swath of ocean off Portugal. At least three sunken Egyptian cities thought to be more than two thousand years old have recently been discovered kicking around on the bottom near Alexandria’s harbor. When underwater archaeologists began to explore them, they happened upon Napoleon’s sunken fleet.
In other words, even in places where the topside is familiar, there are whole new universes and ancient buried worlds swirling around down there, like rooms you didn’t know about in your house. I found this thrillingly spooky. For years, I’d had a recurring dream—actually, it hovered on the edge of nightmare territory—in which I floated at night, surrounded by large, unearthly fish. I could never see them clearly, but I knew the water was alive with them, all these hidden creatures, sweeping and circling. When I saw the Farallones on the screen that first time, the memory of these phantoms vaulted out of semiretirement and into my consciousness. This was some weird water. What was going on beneath the surface?
FINDING OUT MORE PROVED DIFFICULT. THE BBC PIECE ABOUT THE Farallon sharks was the only one that existed. What articles I could turn up tended to be wonky treatises on seal populations and seabird migration, or terse newspaper stories that raised more questions than they answered. The Los Angeles Ti
mes called the Farallones “the most forbidding piece of real estate in America, if not the world,” but didn’t elaborate. A New York Times headline from 1858 reported that a fisherman had been “seized by an octopus” at the islands, yet provided no details.
I came across random facts that intrigued: A female skeleton had been found in a sea cave, and to this day her identity remains a mystery…a century ago on Southeast Farallon Island there was a town that even had its own school…a new kind of jellyfish had been discovered there; it had arms instead of tentacles. And the sharks, always the sharks. Commercial divers refused to work anywhere near the place. Government divers were not permitted to enter the surrounding waters for insurance reasons. Great white sharks had even foiled a world-record attempt to water-ski from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Farallones. “That was the stupidest thing I ever did,” admitted the skier, who spent hours plowing through bone-jarring fifteen-foot swells, only to have his boat spring a leak when he neared the islands. Swimming beneath the hull to check for damage, he suddenly realized he was not alone: “All I could see was a swarm of sharks.” The man leaped back into the boat, whereupon he and his crew hightailed it back to San Francisco, bailing as fast as they could.
Being at the Farallones, it seemed, was like hanging around Mount Olympus as the gods glided by for another round at the buffet. And in this foreboding spot, humans were neither wanted nor needed. The usual rules of civilization did not apply. Here was a place where nothing was fake and nothing was for sale, where cars and credit cards, cell phones and expensive high-heeled shoes got you nowhere, where animals thrived while people died in any number of unlikely ways. This lost outpost, it seemed to me, was more than an unexpected scrap of America, more than a window into an interesting marine world. It was a glimpse into another realm.
As I watched the two men on TV, surrounded by sharks in their little boat, I realized that somewhere between San Francisco and the Farallon Islands, there was a border crossing. On one side of the divide was the world of blacktop and happy hour, and on the other was an uninhabitable place where four-hundred-million-year-old predators still roamed. I wanted to cross that line while it still existed, before civilization reached out and blurred it, then tamed it, then erased it completely. But how? The place was off limits, forbidden in every way. And aside from that, I had no idea how I would get there. But the Farallones had stirred something in the deepest folds of my imagination, and I knew that one way or another I was going. I had to. How often do you have the chance to step inside your own dream?
Book One
* * *
The Island
* * *
Chapter 1
The islands are government property, devoted to the lighthouse service, and to visit them requires a special permit from the Lighthouse Inspector in charge of the department. This permit is not easy to obtain.
—CHARLES S. GREEN, “LOS FARALLONES DE LOS FRAYLES,” THE OVERLAND MONTHLY, 1892
NOVEMBER 16, 2001
The phrase “islands in the Pacific” brings to mind images of lushness and ease; of gently rustling breezes, sunshine, relaxation, and elaborate cocktails. These Pacific islands, however, are not like that. Nothing is easy at the Farallones. Even stepping onto Southeast Farallon Island is a white-knuckle affair requiring physical agility and no fear of heights, because the landing involves being hoisted by crane from a skiff and then winched up a cliff on a metal disk the size of a manhole cover. Or leaping ashore from a bucking Zodiac and scrambling up a rock face while hauling gear, making sure to time the waves just right to avoid getting plucked off like lint and swept out to sea. All of this takes place in a constricted area that allows the boat driver no room for error. To the right, waves and eddies boil over a narrow gulch fringed with toothy rocks. At left, the ocean explodes against a granite outcropping, sending sheets of spray into the air. Above: thousands of dive-bombing seagulls. Below: a ring of great white sharks. Not exactly the perfect infrastructure for receiving company.
Living at the Farallones presents another round of challenges. Sixty-five-acre Southeast Farallon is the only island in the group that is even remotely habitable, thanks to the flat strip of marine terrace that runs along its southern edge. On this stretch of rock, two identical weather-beaten houses, originally built in the 1870s, face the ocean like sentinels. One of them has electricity and running water, the other does not. The sole source of freshwater on the island is a sickly yellow stream that only a desperate person would drink from. In the past, many have. These days, rainwater is collected on concrete catchment pads, then funneled into tanks and run through seven stages of filtration. Hot water is scarce. Food varies in availability, particularly during winter and spring when ferocious storms often prevent supply boats from arriving for weeks on end. Although by law there are never more than eight people living on Southeast Farallon at any one time, privacy’s nonexistent—everyone has at least one bunkmate and that person is likely to be a biology intern who hasn’t showered in the past eleven days. Oh, and the toilet can’t be flushed that often.
Getting an invitation to come here hadn’t been easy, either. The year before, when I’d contacted Peter Pyle, introduced myself, and proposed writing a magazine piece about the islands, he had advised me to apply to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for a media day pass. Staying overnight was completely out of the question—nobody but scientists got to do that. And he’d warned me: even day passes were rarely granted.
But Peter is naturally a friendly guy, and our conversation stretched for hours. He’d been one of the Farallones’ head biologists for some sixteen years at that point, and along with his shark credentials he was a renowned ornithologist and a one-man encyclopedia of the islands. Talking to him only made my desire to visit stronger, and he ended the call agreeing to help in any way he could. Soon after, I applied for—and received—a one-day permit to write a story for Time magazine. Unfortunately, the day I visited, November 17, 2000, turned out to be virtually the only sharkless day that season. It was worth the trip just to see the islands in their creepy beauty, and I liked Peter and Scot on sight, but the hours passed and the only wildlife I encountered were hordes of gulls and piles of seals and sea lions. My disappointment must have been obvious, because as I was leaving Peter offhandedly invited me back during the next year’s shark season. To return to the Farallones as a de facto intern.
And, of course, I accepted. Which is how, three years after catching the BBC documentary, I came to be lying on a bunk in the Jane Fonda bedroom, upstairs in the Farallones’ main residence. (The room got its name because its door was once decorated by an oil painting of Jane in her Barbarella days, wearing nothing but feathers. Someone had since come along and painted it over with a picture of a bird called the common grackle.) The Jane Fonda bedroom’s decor spoke of a dorm room gone horribly to seed. Mice scuttled in the corners, ripping and tearing at something in the closet. (Powerbars I’d left in my duffel bag, it turned out.) Thread-bare towels thumbtacked over the windows served as makeshift curtains. The mattresses looked like Rorschach tests, the paint was peeling, the plaster was cracking, and the dresser was marked “Property of the U.S. Coast Guard.”
Though it was barely daylight, just after six, I heard voices downstairs. I got up and brushed my teeth in the communal bathroom, wearing the same three layers of clothes I had slept in. At this time of the year, early morning temperatures hovered in the forties, and even inside the house the air felt clammy and damp and the linoleum floor gave off a chill. I pulled on a pair of ski socks and made my way down the steep wooden staircase. The lower floor of the house was divided into three main rooms: a living room filled with battered flea market furniture, a workroom ringed by computers of various vintages, and the kitchen, which was the house’s main gathering spot.
Scot and Peter were already done with breakfast and had probably been down in the kitchen for at least an hour. Part of Scot’s daily ritual was to arise at 3:30 and check the weather for shark potentia
l, then briefly return to bed before reawakening to brew a particular blend of Peet’s coffee that he personally imported from the mainland. In contrast to the decrepit state of the bedrooms, the kitchen was warm and homey, with cast-iron pots dangling from the wall and cheerful blue countertops and a tiered stadium of a spice rack crammed with everything from plain old salt to black malabar peppercorns. Dominating the room was a stainless steel, restaurant-grade Wolf range that was probably worth more than the entire house. Scot stood next to it, pouring a cup of coffee. Peter sat behind him in one of the mismatched chairs. He was tilting back, laughing and talking, his dark hair curling out from beneath a sun-bleached San Francisco Giants cap. He was wearing what I now recognized as his trademark outfit: bulletproof Carhartt pants, a heavy canvas workshirt worn soft with use, and a fleece vest. A tidal calendar lay open in front of him.
