by Casey, Susan
And at what point would the hunting stop? When all the sharks were gone? There certainly wasn’t an endless supply. Nature doesn’t dole out apex predators at the same rate that it provides us with, say, pigeons. White sharks, like tigers and lions, reproduce slowly, giving birth to live young. Their gestation period has not been precisely determined, but it’s thought to be close to eighteen months and result in only a handful of pups. In recent months, great white sharks have earned a spot on the World Wildlife Federation’s “Most Wanted Species” list—the ten animals most likely to go extinct, “based on threats of unsustainable trade and consumer demand.”
So in March 1993, PRBO, the Center for Marine Conservation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Defenders of Wildlife, Earth Island Institute, Surfrider, and at least a dozen other environmental groups in California proposed a bill to protect the state’s great white sharks. They had an unexpected advocate: Mike McHenry had decided that it wasn’t right to kill these animals. “After a while, I started feeling sorry for them,” he said, recalling the old days. “They’re big and they’re intimidating I guess, but you could wipe ’em out in two days if you wanted to.” At the bill’s hearing, he stood up on behalf of the fishermen and supported the motion. “We don’t need to kill any more of them.”
It wasn’t an entirely selfless stance. Fishermen were beginning to wake up to the fact that the ocean wasn’t infinite after all. Much of their livelihood was simply gone, wiped out by bad management. For certain species like Atlantic cod and sturgeon, the destruction was so quick and so thorough that it was almost as though the industries had put their heads together to figure out how best to annihilate the planet’s marine life. And monkeying around with the balance of nature is the ultimate fool’s game: Strip away the top of the food chain and the bottom is likely to sprawl, with opportunistic animals (fish-devouring sea lions, for example) dominating and breeding unchecked, worms, viruses, parasites, and their ilk having a high old time. Oceans without sharks would be pest-filled affairs, and that’s only the most obvious side effect. Given the paltry state of knowledge about the aquatic environment, no one really has a clue what would happen if the ecosystem were to be upended in such a drastic way. One thing’s for sure: It’s not likely to be good for the catch.
After provisions were made for continuing attempts to exhibit great whites (to appease aquariums), Bill 522 passed unanimously, and was made permanent in 1999. White sharks could no longer be killed in California. Not deliberately, anyway.
THE FINAL MORNING OF THE 2001 SHARK SEASON CAME UP SURLY AND gray. And I was leaving. Both things depressed me. I had that sinking party’s-over feeling and a gut hollowness that seemed a little bit like heartbreak. I’d completed my reporting; Scot and Peter had answered all of my questions, and then some. I’d met Ron. At this point, an article would practically write itself, and yet it all felt incomplete. Basically, I’d been handed a ticket to a private showing of the secrets nature guarded most possessively—you don’t just walk out on that, on the shark visitations and the Green Flash and the probability that something even grander will reveal itself tomorrow. I felt seduced by all the animals I hadn’t seen yet. The island wasn’t a place that allowed for the detached, casual, drop-in guest: I wanted to stay here, and in a bad way. Of course I knew this was impossible, but it felt equally impossible to turn around and go back to a sharkless urban life. And that was what I dreaded, really, returning to the ordinary.
While we were watching a meteor shower the night before, Peter had warned me about the difficulty of what he called “reentry,” adding that it often took him weeks to get used to being back in the civilized world. The first time he had come off the island, after eight weeks, he had been a zombie, completely unable to deal with even the basics of mainland life, things like traffic, or returning a phone call, or maneuvering through a crowded store.
After breakfast, everyone ran off to do various chores and I sat in the kitchen by myself, soaking up the warm, communal vibe of the house. It seemed wrong to stay indoors though, so I clipped a radio to my jacket, went outside, and roamed the marine terrace looking for seal stones—rocks that had arrived at the Farallones in the bellies of fur seals. I’d noticed several of these stones, known as gastroliths, displayed in the living room. There were only a handful of fur seals on the island now, so the stones were scarce, but occasionally you could still find them. The seal stones stood out from the island’s flaky granite; they were round and smooth, like they’d been through a polisher, and they had a dense quality, as though a much larger rock had been condensed into a pebble. No one knew exactly why the seals ate stones, but maybe, some thought, it was for ballast. Or to help digestion. Or to stave off hunger. Or, as Brown had written in the journal, “maybe they’re just weird.” Sometimes a single seal would ingest ten pounds of rocks.
It suddenly seemed like the most important thing in the world to find a seal stone, a piece of this place I could take back with me. I walked with my eyes fixed on the ground, and the wind scoured my skin with tiny pieces of grit. Every so often a gull would come barreling over, flapping its wings and screeching in fury. At the shoreline I looked down into the finger gulleys, where dozens of elephant seals loafed in lumpen gatherings. When I came closer, they hissed like cats.
In two weeks the winter crew was arriving. Winter was the most tempestuous and solitary season at the Farallones, devoted to monitoring elephant seal breeding and surviving wave after wave of vicious weather. Shark attacks would continue sporadically for the next six weeks, but by January they’d gradually taper off. Attacks in winter or spring or the early summer months were not unheard of, but they were uncommon. Most of the sharks simply disappeared; once December rolled around they blew out of here like socialites fleeing to St. Barts. Although no one had any idea where the sharks went.
At least not yet, they didn’t. During the past two seasons, using long harpoonlike poles, Peter and Scot had tagged a dozen sharks, mostly Rat Packers, with a sophisticated new type of satellite transmitter that collected information about their travels. At a preset interval, anywhere from two weeks to nine months, the tag would release from its position just below the shark’s dorsal fin and beam a torrent of data to the Argos satellite system. The information would then be used to plot the longitudes and latitudes of the animal’s route, the depths at which it was swimming, its daily schedule. The tags were a technological marvel that promised to shed light on some of the knottier white shark mysteries, and there was a push to get more of them in the water. But each tag, essentially a miniature computer, cost $3,500. And given that the Shark Project ran on a shoestring budget of about ten thousand dollars per season, personally subsidized by Peter and Scot, cost was an issue. One of Peter’s off-season tasks was to recruit sponsors for next year’s tags. Raising this kind of money would require a new, more ambitious strategy. Lining up a few more kids to adopt Cuttail wasn’t going to do it.
Peter detested fund-raising, all its cocktail-party schmoozing and time spent away from the field, but the tagging effort was important. Knowing where the sharks roamed was key to protecting them, especially if they were cruising around in the open ocean, that vast and lawless no-man’s-land of international waters where factory-fishing fleets the size of small cities trawled with giant nets and dragged longlines studded with millions upon millions of hooks. These operations were ruthlessly efficient strip miners; a decade-long study by Dalhousie University found that 90 percent of the global sea’s large, predatory fish had been wiped out in the last fifty years. As if that wasn’t bad enough, sharks had taken an extra hit from the odious and illegal practice of “finning,” whereby their fins were sliced off and their still-live bodies dumped back overboard. The dried shark fins joined the rhino horns (sawed off and ground up as so-called aphrodisiacs), tiger penises (ditto), elk antlers (yet again), and bear gall bladder bile (worth more per ounce than cocaine) in Asian markets, where they are prized as the thickening ingredient in shark fin soup.
I walked back to the house and said goodbye to Brown, who was fishing a golden-crowned sparrow out of a mist net so that it could be banded, and Nat, who was headed up to the lighthouse to relieve Scot. As Peter and I hauled our gear onto the front steps, I noticed that the Patriot had returned and was idling in Mirounga Bay. It was quite close to shore, and I could make out two people in hooded wetsuits being helped into the cage by a deckhand. A man wearing a fire engine–red parka and a baseball cap, I supposed it was Groth, stood at the captain’s console on the upper deck next to another well-swaddled figure who was holding a beer. The Patriot dropped anchor on the spot where, two days ago, all the sharks had surrounded us.
Peter’s radio trilled. It was Mick; he was ten minutes away. We set off down the cart path to East Landing, where we were joined by Scot on his toy bike. I lifted my pack into the whaler. Next to the boat, a life-size, human-shaped neoprene decoy named Buoyhead Bob lay jackknifed on the landing. Much of Bob’s stomach had been ripped out. The sight of him, mangled as a well-loved dog toy, was a graphic reminder of what I’d be missing. I said good-bye to Scot, and then he craned us over the edge.
Superfish hovered in front of Shubrick Point, waiting. This time I was going to have to vault up and bridge a six-foot gap between the two bucking vessels. Mick leaned over the side, ready to help me aboard. He was tall, sandy-haired, and rugged with heartthrob good looks and the buoyant personality of someone who regularly dealt with the public for money. His passengers were crowded around him.
“This is one of the shark guys!” Mick announced, pointing at Peter. “He’s out here running around after all the sharks!” Fifty curious faces peered out from under layers of Gore-Tex. This was Peter’s cue to say a few words about the Shark Project and give credence to the notion that, likely, there were great white sharks stalking around below us at this very moment. He and Scot tended to avoid situations like this, but with Mick, they made an effort. He was always ready to help them in any way, constantly ferrying out people and gear, and in general behaving with admirable cool around the sharks. And make no mistake: When the likes of Scar-head or Kyra or Mr. T put in an appearance near Superfish, they were very good for business.
As the crowd gaped, Peter reeled off a Cliff Notes version of the research, passing my gear up to Mick as he spoke. No one gets to do this, I thought, conscious of all the whale-watching eyes following our movements. And now it’s over. The boats were pitching angrily in the waves and it was time for me to make the jump. Peter hugged me like we were old friends, and then I stood on the railing of the whaler, took a deep breath, and grabbed Mick’s hand. As he yanked me up, I pushed off and, for a brief instant, hung in the air between the boats. But then I landed firmly on the Superfish and stood there for a moment, trying not to look as disoriented as I felt. The crowd examined me as if I’d just dropped in from another planet. And I suppose I had.
SUPERFISH CRUISED OFFSHORE, SPENDING A FULL THIRTY MINUTES IN Mirounga Bay so that everyone could get a good look at the jagged, arched rocks and the twisted old buildings and the shadowy mounds of seals perched along the edge. I stared hard at Saddle Rock as we motored by, trying to cast it into a permanent memory that I could summon back at will, replete with smells and sounds and images of sharks unfurling like frightening ideas in slow-motion technicolor. As Peter, Scot, and Brown moved around on shore packing up decoys and camera equipment, loading gear and garbage to be shipped off, Superfish completed a loop of the four south islands—Southeast Farallon, Sugarloaf, West End, and Saddle Rock—and set off toward the North Farallones, seven miles away, in search of whales. Leaning against the stern, I watched as Peter and Scot launched from East Landing and turned toward Bolinas in the shark boat, standing at the console, side by side.
The whale watchers were full of questions about life on the island. “Was it really boring?” “Do you get television stations there?” “What do you eat?” I didn’t feel up to answering any of them, and retreated into the cabin. Several people were bunched around a table, looking cold. One stout woman, who had obviously misunderstood some basic information about the trip, was wearing shorts, a cotton T-shirt, and flip-flops. A bearded man sat in the corner next to his frizzy-haired female companion. The pair wore matching foul-weather coveralls and had an array of Ziploc-bagged snacks spread in front of them. Clearly, this was meant to be a romantic outing because his hands worked overtime, pawing at her and tossing back fistfuls of mixed nuts. Watching him knead her thigh and inhaling the thick sweet peanut smell while the boat buffaloed through fourteen-foot swells was a sure recipe for seasickness, and the cabin slowly emptied out. Luckily I’d taken a Dramamine, my daily vitamin at the Farallones. Others weren’t so fortunate. A half-dozen people clustered along the back railing, their sheet-white faces drooping with misery. Several more were buckled over the side. But then we arrived at the northern islands, and even the sickest passenger had to lift his head in amazement.
The North Farallones were a knife-edged set of spires that made the South Farallones look downright inviting. They erupted out of nowhere, five sheer rock pinnacles ranging in a tight circle, like a clawed hand. Fierce surge channels poured between them. Seals and sea lions had scaled their steep sides and they sat lodged in the gloom, barking like a Cerebus choir. Sharks had also been seen in these parts, divers menaced and attacked. Few people came here though, and it was easy to understand why. When I had asked Peter about the North Farallones, he’d described them as “wicked scary.” Even Ron admitted that the diving up here was challenging; the currents were odd and strong and the islets dropped off sharply into underwater caverns filled with eerie deepwater critters like wolf eels and ratfish and giant octopi. He didn’t care much for it, mainly because the urchins were low quality. “The southeast island is the mother structure,” he’d declared. For some reason that made me think of the movie Alien, and as Superfish approached the North Farallones, I tightened my grip on the rail.
We rounded the islands and then traveled a few miles farther west, until we were straddling the edge of the continental shelf. On one side of Superfish was a relatively easy-to-envision one-hundred-foot depth of ocean; on the other, a long and vertiginous drop of two miles. It was probably a good thing that the seasick people didn’t realize this. The wind had whipped the ocean into towering swells, and I became chilled and went into the wheelhouse to sit with Mick. Even this far out, hanging over the shelf, there were no whales to be watched. Mainly because, he confided to me, whale season had been over for two weeks. The onboard naturalist, an overenthusiastic woman who made people clap when a lone dolphin passed by, was reduced to walking around the deck holding a plastic model of a humpback.
On the trip back to San Francisco the water became even snarlier, and by the time Superfish hit the Potato Patch, a shallow spot in the channel where outgoing currents collide with incoming swells, the waves were cranky mountains. Mick had to pull the throttle way back so he didn’t bury the bow. When we finally pulled into the marina at Fort Mason, it was almost dark and nearly everyone was huddled in the cabin.
The marina was crammed and congested, filled with people in a hurry and the din of civilization: traffic humming, metallic machine noise, the constant background buzz of human voices. Ringing cell phones. Slamming doors. An endless line of cars trolled impatiently for nonexistent parking spots. Looking across four lanes of frantic road at a bustling shopping center, I wondered how a place as primitive as the Farallones could possibly survive sharing a zip code with seven million people. I
was afraid that it couldn’t.
BACK IN MANHATTAN THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS ORDINARY LIFE. September 11 was barely two months old, and the city was still in shock. A pall hung over everything, and a numbness, and it wasn’t uncommon to see people walking on the street with tears streaming down their faces. My office in Rockefeller Center was bristling with guards, soldiers carrying automatic weapons patrolled the subways, and almost every day Fifth Avenue traffic was halted for memorial services at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The city had turned inward to heal its wounds, life seemed darker and more fragile than anyone could bear, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the day when all the sharks came up to us in the whaler, like chiaroscuro visitors from another planet.
Chapter 3
I have never seen an inhabited spot which seemed so utterly desolate, so entirely separated from the world, whose people appeared to me to have such a slender hold on mankind.
—CHARLES NORDHOFF, “THE FARALLON ISLANDS,” HARPER’S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE, 1874
JANUARY 10, 2003
Point Reyes smelled like leather and eucalyptus and moss and wood and smoke when I pulled onto the main street in my rental car, looking for a diner called the Station House. I knew it wouldn’t be hard to find—there were only about a dozen buildings in the entire commercial district. This was a rugged, Northern California beach town, a place of woodstoves, balky plumbing, and artisan cheese, nestled into folds of low coastal hills and edged by a finger of ocean called Tomales Bay. Tomales Point, at its mouth, was a popular place for surfing, kayaking, and abalone diving, despite the fact that more people had been attacked by great white sharks there than anywhere else in the world. From the point, it was only twenty miles to the Farallones.
