by Casey, Susan
RON ELLIOTT DIDN’T ALWAYS HAVE THE FARALLONES TO HIMSELF. Though the waters here are as cold and dark as a haunted basement, forbidding enough even without the sharks, in the days before people knew better there were numerous divers who worked them—for abalone, for urchins, and even for sport. On Sunday, January 14, 1962, to cite just one incident, more than a hundred divers arrived at Southeast Farallon Island to participate in a spearfishing competition.
At about 10:30 in the morning, a spearfisherman named Floyd Pair had just surfaced, about one hundred yards from shore, when something hit him from below. Confused, he looked down and saw a fourteen-foot shark with his right leg in its mouth, shaking its head to shear off a hunk of thigh. Pair whacked the shark repeatedly with his spear gun as he yelled for help, and it swam off—toward the other divers. Even after all the spearfishers were safely back on board, and the emergency helicopter had been summoned, the shark remained at the surface, circling. Floyd Pair lived, but he had incurred “serious fang-like lacerations” that missed his femoral artery by less than a centimeter.
Later that same year the Mighty Skin Divers Club of San Francisco anchored at Middle Farallon, a nubbin of rock set off by itself about three miles north of Southeast Farallon. It was November 11, the height of shark season, although no one knew that at the time. The new sport of scuba was becoming popular and the divers were excited to photograph the psychedelically colored rockfish and octopi that lived on the marine shelf next to the islet, maybe spear a few of them while they were at it. The thirty club members were guided by Leroy French and Al Giddings, two extremely experienced divers.
At the end of the first dive Giddings was standing on deck, counting heads to make sure everyone had returned to the boat. There was one diver missing, though—French. At that moment Giddings turned and saw a large shark, at least sixteen feet long, thrashing on the surface. Leroy French was in its mouth. The shark lifted its enormous tail, slammed it down, and, as the scuba club watched in horror, dragged French underwater. Giddings heroically jumped from the boat and swam to the spot where his colleague had gone under. Seconds later French’s life jacket inflated and he popped to the surface, screaming and clawing at the water. With the help of another diver named Donald Joslin, Giddings managed to get him back to the boat. French was then airlifted to the Harbor Emergency Hospital in San Francisco, where 480 stitches were required to close his wounds. The shark had bitten him three times, taking chunks out of his forearm, calf, and buttocks. Seven years later, by cruel coincidence, Donald Joslin would also be attacked by a great white shark while diving for abalone off Tomales Point, the apex of the Red Triangle. And he too would live, after hours of surgery and hundreds of stitches.
And so it went through the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties as more and more people discovered the hard way that the Farallon Islands were not an ideal diving locale. Scuba clubs went elsewhere. Spearfishermen followed. The abalone and urchin divers, however, remained for a time. The waters around Southeast Farallon were too rich to ignore, and these men were not easily intimidated. Yet the sharks began to make increasingly frequent appearances as the seal population revived over the decades, and there were several near-fatal attacks and many close calls and as a result everyone carried a 9mm pistol when diving at the Farallones, a specially modified Glock that could fire underwater. Some divers even wore elaborate jungle gym–like cages on their backs in the manner of turtles. But the cages only made it harder to move quickly and almost impossible to climb back onto the boat, and the guns were better in theory than in practice. One by one, the divers lost their nerve.
Soon it was only Ron. At first Peter and Scot thought he was on some kind of suicide mission. They noticed that when selecting his dive sites, Ron had an uncanny knack for anchoring at the scene of the latest shark attack. They worried that any day they would be picking up Ron’s body. But the years went by and he kept showing up to dive, often calling on the radio at day’s end with valuable observations about shark behavior that only someone who was down there with them would ever see. The three men became friends.
Today the GW was anchored off Shubrick Point in front of a dramatic cathedral of a sea cave called Great Murre Cave. The cave’s opening was a two-hundred-foot-high vertical slash, cleaved into the island like a lethal wound. This was Sisterhood Country. We tied alongside. Ron stood on deck in his wetsuit, its thick industrial neoprene giving off the dual auras of hard work and tired seal. He was a trim guy, in his early fifties, with an efficient brushcut and eyes that, while kind, definitely didn’t miss much. We greeted him, Peter introduced me, and the talk turned immediately to sharks. Scot mentioned the drive-bys we’d had near Saddle Rock.
“Yeah, just saw one myself,” Ron said. He spoke slowly, with a California drawl. I asked him how many times he’d seen sharks while diving in the Farallones. He thought for a minute, scratched the side of his neck. “Well, I don’t really count, but, ahhhh, at least…three, four hundred.”
Over time I would come to understand Ron’s attitude toward the sharks. Emotion didn’t enter into it. In his mind they were simply doing their job, same as him. And if, to do his job, Ron occasionally had to get away from the sharks by hiding under rocks, fending them off with his urchin basket, or staring them down—well, that was just another day at the office.
Only the week before, in fact, he had jumped into the water at Shubrick Point and practically landed on one of the Sisters. She swam away and then turned, mouth wide open, and barreled toward him with unmistakable intent. “She tried to give me a little love bite,” Ron said. “I shoved my urchin basket in her nose and then she flipped around and attacked the basket, shook it over my head, bent my arm, you know, sent me sailing.” In the scuffle, Ron’s wetsuit hood was ripped from his head, his mask jammed down around his neck, his nose bloodied. Then the shark turned and thwhacked him with its tail. “I thought she broke my face,” he said. “She kept circling me, following me around. She wasn’t one of those ones you could bluff out.”
The sharks knew exactly what they were looking at when they ran into him down below, of this Ron was certain. Often, a shark would make several passes, from different directions, trying to figure out the craftiest means of approach. Ron could sense their presence, however, even when they were behind him. And sneaking up from the rear was their specialty.
There were the stinging jellyfish and sea anemones to contend with as well, and the sea lions that cruised in marauding gangs, occasionally pausing to sink their teeth into the back of his neck. But Ron didn’t mind the danger involved in diving here. In fact, he preferred it—the diciness meant that everyone else stayed away. He’d started out diving for urchins in Southern California in the seventies, and when he and his wife, Carol, moved north to Point Reyes, he looked out at the Farallones, only a two-hour boat ride away, and realized that urchin-wise, it was the place to go. He had to dive there. And the first time he did, in 1989, he encountered a seventeen-foot shark.
As he carefully coiled his air hose, I asked how Carol felt about his job site. “She’s okay with it,” he said, and then paused. “Wellll, maybe she’s getting a little tired of it. But she knows that if something happens, I’d rather have it happen out here than, you know, in a car.”
It was dusk; it was time to leave. We had been on the water for five hours. The light had slowly thickened and the ocean looked as black as tar. As we pushed off from the GW, I turned to Scot and Peter, the question clear on my face. How could anyone possibly do this for a living? “Ron’s all about competence,” Peter said. Scot agreed, and marveled at Ron’s fearlessness. “People cry on the evening news if they see a dorsal fin in the surf,” he said. “And here’s a guy who’s around them all day long and doesn’t want to tell anyone.”
It was hard to imagine that all the competence in the world could keep a diver safe in a place where a floating surfboard can draw a great white shark to the surface within minutes, sometimes even seconds. How long could Ron’s mix of skill, s
angfroid, and luck possibly hold out? Launching into the water here with no backup seemed like Russian roulette with reverse odds. Now I understood Peter’s and Scot’s awe. It was tinged with fear. No one wanted to witness the day when things went wrong.
As we drove back to East Landing, I pointed at everything—gulls, shadows on the water, nothing in particular—thinking it was a shark. “You’ve got sharks on the brain,” Scot said. “That happens. You just can’t be close to a creature like this and not be affected. How big they are, how they glide around you.” He cast a glance at the darkening ocean. “You see their eyes, and you know they’re looking at you.”
SCOT WAS SCHEDULED TO COOK DINNER, AND WHEN WE GOT BACK TO the house he disappeared into the kitchen. Peter went outside with Brown and Nat to do something bird related, and I sprawled on the living room couch with the kind of deep fatigue that comes from gunning your adrenaline glands all day. The room was cluttered, strikingly decorated in a critter motif. There were many skulls. One particularly large skull, don’t ask me what kind, was wearing a jaunty gold crown. There were shark books and shark teeth and shark photographs and a box of Motorola radios in various states of disrepair. There were stuffed birds and weather gauges and whale bones and an old guitar. Next to the window, an old Mexican blanket covered the back of an armchair that had seen better days. A marine radio sat on a wooden desk, spitting out weather reports and bursts of static. Above the radio, displayed like artwork, hung the remnants of an inflatable Zodiac that was bitten and partially sunk by a shark named the Cadillac. Hanging in a place of honor, the scrap of rubber displayed a set of tooth marks that could only have been made by a two-foot-wide set of jaws.
I was drifting off when Peter opened the front door and shouted, “Come out here—you have to see the Green Flash!” I wasn’t sure what the Green Flash was, but I got up anyway. The entire human population of the Farallones, all five of us, gathered on the front steps. The sun was going down. It hung heavy on the horizon, like a drop of water about to fall, then vanished in the next instant. And in that millisecond, there it was—a small, crescent-shaped emerald that flared up like demented lightning. Blink, and you’d miss ten of them. Later I learned that the Green Flash is so seldom glimpsed it’s often considered a myth or a hoax, even though it’s a readily explainable illusion (if you happen to have a degree in optical physics, that is, and can readily explain principles like refraction and dispersion). To provide even the dimmest hope of a sighting, a checklist of conditions must be met at the instant of sunset or sunrise: a perfectly flat horizon, clear air at a precise temperature relative to the water, and a long span of sky with nothing impeding the view, not even a single cloud.
Everyone applauded the Green Flash before heading back inside to escape the sudden chill wind. Dinner was an improvisational masterpiece Scot had whisked together from the dwindling supply of canned tomatoes and half-finished boxes of spaghetti, and the kitchen took on a celebratory air. I had finally seen the sharks. (Also, Kabul had just fallen, with the Taliban sent scurrying, though no one on Southeast Farallon Island was aware of that quite yet. War, terrorism—those were the concerns of another planet.) Scot made it clear that our afternoon sightings were nothing compared to a full-on attack, but I was still flying from the experience and wouldn’t have traded it.
“Shall we?” Peter asked, reaching into the bookshelf behind the kitchen table for two thick binders. These were the island journals in which, from 1968 on, every last thing that happened at the Farallones had been carefully documented—from the bloodiest shark attack down to a previously unseen species of fly. At year’s end these logs would be taken ashore and bound into hardcovers. Then they’d be returned to the house, where they would remain. And at some future date, when someone needed to know whether a rare brown shrike really did touch down on September 20, 1984, or what the barometer read on New Year’s Eve, 1973, or on which days, exactly, a Sister named Whiteslash had killed five seals during the 2000 shark season, they would be able to find out. The journal was recorded every night after dinner, and it was the closest thing the islands had to a native religion.
Nat, Brown, and Scot all pulled yellow field notebooks out of their pockets. Peter ran through the birds first. “Loons and grebes? Swallows, nuthatches, creepers, and wrens? Pipits, waxwings, shrikes, starlings? Vireos and warblers?” Birds went on for some time. And then: “Whales? Dolphins? Mice? Bats? Butterflies? Sharks?”
“Well we have the one sighting in the morning,” Scot said. “And then several up to the boat this afternoon. Including Cuttail. All in Mirounga Bay.” Peter wrote this down and added a few notes of his own. His journal entries, I had noticed, were longer, more poetic, and more carefully written than anybody else’s. Reading the logs I was aware of a wide range of styles and disparity in quality. Some people would write, “Krill event, east side.” Peter, meanwhile, would write something like “Red highway of krill in eight-foot seas lured humpbacks to the island, and we watched them breaching under a rising moon.”
THAT NIGHT THE WATER DREAM RETURNED, BUT THIS TIME THE IMAGE was clearer. I recognized the sharks gliding by: Stumpy, Cuttail, and the unknown Sister with her monstrous tail. For once, though, the dream didn’t strike me as strange. Out here shark dreams were so common and so vivid there was a section in the logbook devoted to recounting them; Scot had confessed that he still had them every night. In my dream it was dark, and I was alone, drifting in a small boat. Once again I looked down as shadowy creatures swam beneath me, just barely visible by moonlight. And all night, majestic and terrible fish cruised through the Jane Fonda Bedroom in otherworldly silence.
Chapter 2
We are no longer alone.
—FARALLON ISLAND LOGBOOK, SEPTEMBER 10, 1994 (FIRST DAY OF SHARK SEASON)
NOVEMBER 17, 2001
The old tower stands at the highest spot in all the Farallones, a precipitous perch that goes by the misleadingly gentle name of Lighthouse Hill. When the Farallon light blinked on in 1855, it had a first-order Fresnel lens, an optical jewel shipped from France, and a crew of devoted operators. An indentured mule named Jack hauled its fuel—drums of sperm whale oil—up the zigzag path. (Even by mule standards this was no picnic; when Jack retired twenty years later, his fur had turned completely white.) In 1972, the eighteen-foot-high lens was replaced by a pair of automated beacons, and the last lighthouse keeper sailed off on a coast guard cutter.
These days the lighthouse is a wreck, colonized by mice, smeared with guano, and sprouting neon-green lichen. But if you’re up here to scout shark attacks, it’s nature’s luxury box. On a clear morning the observer has ten miles of visibility and can make a 360-degree sweep of the south islands: gazing west into Maintop Bay; looking straight down on Fisherman’s Bay and Sugarloaf to the north; Tower Point, Shubrick Point, East Landing, and Saddle Rock to the east; and Mirounga Bay rolled out like a carpet to the south. Seven miles off in the westerly distance, the North Farallones jut up, and three miles northwest, Middle Farallon pokes out of the ocean like a speed bump. The lighthouse tower itself, a two-story concrete cylinder with a small rectangular entranceway, provides little shelter from the inevitable howling wind, and walking around the deck requires one hand on the railing at all times.
This was the obvious place for Sharkwatch, which Scot created in 1987. During every daylight hour of shark season, someone was stationed up here—Scot, Peter, Brown, Nat, or one of the interns who completed the crew—scanning the water for attacks through a powerful scope. Right from the start, Scot had claimed the first slot: for the past fourteen years, every September, October, and November morning, whenever he was on the island, he had switchbacked his way up 348 vertical feet to man his eight o’clock shift.
When Scot was watching, no nuance on the water would go undetected. Not that a shark attack at the Farallones was typically a subtle event. Elephant seal blood is a brilliant scarlet due to its high oxygen content, and it left a big slick on the blue water that was hard to miss. The most obv
ious clue, though, appeared in the sky. The site of a kill was instantly engulfed in a Hitchcockian swirl of gulls, all fighting to scavenge a snack. Sometimes the aerial view provided even more detail: the Sisterhood’s lair lay directly below, to the east, and when one of the Big Girls ventured out in the late afternoon light, you could see it all: the blood, the seal, the outline of the shark.
Sharkwatch had a simple set of rules: If Scot spotted a slick or a bird rally on the water, he would radio Peter, chart the position of the ruckus using a surveying instrument called a theodolite, and then sprint down the hill to meet everyone at East Landing. The idea was to launch the whaler as quickly as possible and get out there to video. Later, every last detail of the encounter would be noted in a field report, including an identification of the shark and a diagram of which parts of the seal were missing.
Hurtling down Lighthouse Hill in a big hurry to go see a shark attack, however, was an easy way to die. Not only was it treacherously steep, ranging from a thirty-to a fifty-degree incline, but the ground was unstable. The path was a loose carpet of granite chips, decomposing bird corpses, and skittery stones, and your feet tended to whip out from under you as if you were roller-skating on ball bearings. Recently, Scot had acquired a girl’s banana-seat bike to speed his descent. The bike was sized for someone about three and a half feet tall, and it had a glittery pink seat, purple streamers, and knobby tires.
At the moment I was more concerned with the ascent; despite my two-hour-a-day training schedule in the pool, I’d stopped twice along the way. When I eventually joined Scot, breathless from the last pitch to the top, he had been studying the ocean for an hour. He stood in cinematic relief on the narrow concrete apron that encircled the tower, his arms crossed against the pummeling winds. Classical music wafted from a boom box. There was a dizzying amount of sky up here and the sea pressed in on all sides. At the horizon’s far edge, you could trace the curve of the earth.
