by Casey, Susan
On May 23, 1881, the cutter Manzanita sailed to the Farallones with a U.S. marshal and twenty-one soldiers and forcibly removed every last egger from the island. Only one man protested; he’d been the caretaker there for fourteen straight years and considered it his primary residence. The others were thrilled. As one of them wrote: “We steamed away from the windy rocks, the howling caverns, the seething waves, the frightful chasms…. Joyfully we bounded over the glassy waves, that grew beautiful as the Farallones faded in the misty distance, and, having been courteously escorted to the city dock, we were bidden farewell, and left to the diversions of the hour. Thus ended the last siege of the egg pickers of ‘Frisco.’”
WITH THE EGGERS BANISHED, THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS FACED ANOTHER, equally daunting challenge: establishing a society of their own at this remote outpost. The merciless elements—wind, fog, corrosive seawater—conspired against anything man-made, and the humans on the island struggled to keep their toehold. Maintenance—and survival—was a full-time job. It hardly seemed like a place for families, but near the end of the nineteenth century, the Lighthouse Service began to encourage the keepers to bring out their wives and children. Perhaps it was simply too lonely for the men without them, or maybe, I thought, in the wake of Amos Clift, this was an attempt to keep the testosterone in check.
To accommodate family life, two identical houses—the two that stand today—were built on the marine terrace. They were duplexes, designed to hold a pair of families apiece. And so the women and children came, accepting an existence apart from the mainstream—no entertainment, no society, none of the conveniences or comforts of the city that lay only twenty-seven miles away. Their big excitement arrived every three months, weather permitting, when a supply boat called the Madrono pulled into Fisherman’s Bay to deliver mail, news, food, oil, supplies, medicine, the occasional toy.
By 1887, there were seventeen children living on Southeast Farallon. The four lighthouse families pooled what little money they had and set out to create a school. They outfitted the stone house, where the first lighthouse keepers had lived, with desks, books, and a blackboard. All that remained was to convince some young schoolteacher to ship out from happening San Francisco for less-than-competitive wages and settle into lunar isolation. The newspaper San Francisco Call pronounced the Farallones “the strangest school district in America.” Helpfully, the paper outlined a job description of sorts: “A teacher is wanted in this queer school district…. Here is a chance for anyone who can appreciate the everabiding majesty of the ocean and who covets a quiet place in which to read and reflect.” At least four teachers gave the situation a try—three women, one man—but an unfortunate pattern emerged. After their first shore leaves, the teachers all refused to return to the island, requesting that their belongings be sent back to San Francisco on the Madrono’s next trip.
For the keepers and their wives, providing an elementary-school education was the least of their worries. Where the conditions were hard for adults, they sometimes proved fatal for children. In 1890, a child died after falling into the frigid water at North Landing while being transferred to a boat. Two years later, a supply vessel capsized in the same place, nearly killing lighthouse keeper Thomas Winther’s wife and two children. And, on October 2, 1897, a six-year-old boy named Cecil Cain was washed off the landing and drowned. Cecil was just one of three Cain children who did not survive the Farallones; two brothers would succumb to diphtheria in 1901, as would a third island child. Several others barely escaped the same fate, and for weeks they lay in an improvised sick ward in the parlor of the easternmost house. While the lightkeepers blasted distress signals in the hope that a passing ship would provide medical assistance, brutal weather kept all traffic far from the islands. And when the supply ship finally arrived on its scheduled run and the diphtheria epidemic was made known to its crew, they refused to land, returning to San Francisco instead and dispatching a doctor and nurse.
The Cains’ cousins, the Beemans, suffered an even more dramatic and public tragedy. Royal Beeman, the eleven-year-old son of lighthouse keeper William Beeman, became gravely ill on Christmas Day, 1898. A southern storm was lashing the island—it simply wouldn’t let up. Days went by. Roy got worse. No ship had any hope of landing; none were expected. By December 29, with the weather still howling, the Beemans knew that if they didn’t get the boy to a hospital immediately, he was going to die.
They had one long-shot chance—there was a boat on the island. It wasn’t much, a fourteen-foot dory used for fishing and puttering around on the calmest days. Having seen how the water rages at the Farallones, even in fair conditions, I was astonished as I studied the old newspaper clippings to read how William Beeman, his wife, Wilhemina (Minnie), and assistant keeper Louis Engelbrecht laid Royal on a mattress in the bottom of the boat, wrapped him in oilskins, jury-rigged a sail, and set off into the storm in a desperate gamble to reach the San Francisco lightship, a floating beacon stationed at the Golden Gate’s entrance. This would mean crossing fourteen miles of open ocean, through one of the most daunting passages known to sailors, without navigational equipment or even a radio, in an overloaded rowboat, in a gale. Also along on the journey was Isabel Beeman, aged two months. She was still breast-feeding; for this reason Minnie felt she could not leave her behind.
Miraculously, eight hours after they set out, the lightship’s pilot boat rushed Royal to San Francisco. Mainlanders were captivated by the dramatic story, and Minnie Beeman became a local hero. On December 31, 1898, the San Francisco Examiner ran a front-page feature titled “She Proved That There’s No Love Like a Mother’s Love.” “There are two kinds of American women,” the story read. “The fluffy kind that frivols its way from the cradle to the grave, and the other kind, and Mrs. Beeman is one of the other kind…. She is strong and straight and active and clear-skinned, thanks to the sea air, and she has the calm eyes and earnest, sweet face that peace and quiet and contentment bring. She is the reverse of chatty, and very quietly and modestly she told the story of how with a two-months-old baby in her arms and the sick boy to watch over she put to sea in a fourteen-foot rowboat to save her boy’s life.”
Four days later, a smaller piece tucked into a corner of the Examiner delivered the sad epilogue: “Death Claims Royal Beeman: A Mother’s Love All Unavailing Against the Grim Reaper.” “The little colonel of the Farallon Islands is dead,” the paper reported. “All that medical skill could devise was done for the boy but the angel of death carried him off.” Once again, the paper emphasized the perils of the crossing. “I didn’t give much thought to the danger,” Minnie was quoted as saying. “Of course I knew it was dangerous—but we had to do it.” The way she and her husband saw it, there was never a choice: “He could die a dozen times before a vessel came to us.”
THE MILITARY ARRIVED NEXT. IN 1905, THE NAVAL RADIO HEADQUARTERS was erected near East Landing; during World War I, the Farallon signal would be among the most powerful in the Pacific. A plan was hatched, in 1916, to turn the islands into a battlement that would become the first point of defense in the event of an enemy attack on San Francisco. “Mighty Guns on Islands to Sweep the Ocean for Miles Around,” announced the Examiner. A government report enthused over the possibilities for what could be done with Southeast Farallon: “Leveled off for military purposes it would provide a serviceable area of more than a hundred acres; in other words, ample space for an aviation field and for all the needs and equipments of a modern fortress.” And this makeover needn’t be confined to land: “The indented coastline invites the construction of harbors for submarines and torpedo craft.” I imagined the scene: bazooka rocket launchers tucked behind the cormorant blind; armed personnel carriers lumbering up Lighthouse Hill. The report ended with the recommendation that the entire place be ringed with sixteen-inch guns.
Luckily, the Farallones never got leveled, paved, or armed. (They also narrowly dodged other absurd fates, such as becoming the new home of the Alcatraz prison or a gas station for passing o
il tankers.) But the military continued to keep an interest in the island. More war devices were erected: transmitters and transponders and a forest of antennae and a secret radar beacon that no one was supposed to know about. By 1942, there were more than twenty buildings on this small patch of rock, and a town of nearly one hundred people, referred to by its inhabitants as Farallon City. Life was a little easier for this crew—the supply boat now arrived every week—and they actually managed to have some fun, holding movie nights and dances and cocktail parties, even publishing an island newspaper, the Farallon Foghorn. After the war, the population, not surprisingly, thinned; when the lighthouse was finally automated, the coast guard sent the last lighthouse keeper back to the mainland.
In 1969, nature finally had its turn. The islands were collectively designated a National Wildlife Refuge, and the Point Reyes Bird Observatory was contracted by the government to repair the damage. Where to start? There was so much to tackle. By the sixties, only six thousand murres nested on the islands (down from a half million), and other seabird populations had taken similar drubbings. Fur seals were a distant memory, the global elephant seal population had been reduced to about twenty animals, Steller’s sea lions were gone entirely, harbor seals glimpsed only rarely. No doubt the sharks were there, prowling the waters, but without seals they wouldn’t have stayed around for long. (You don’t get to be four hundred million years old by failing to adapt.)
As for the environment itself, past ignorance was augmented by present stupidity, and the place was limping. Oil tankers made a practice of pumping their ballast tanks near the islands, killing seabirds by the thousands. Four times, military planes opened fire on Middle Farallon with rockets, presumably for target practice. Gill nets killed indiscriminately, strangling seabirds and snaring every animal in their paths. Fishermen deployed explosives to catch fish, and boats journeyed out to shoot up the wildlife along the shoreline with high-powered rifles.
What little infrastructure still existed on Southeast Farallon was outmoded, corroded, and neglected. Garbage lay everywhere; cats and rabbits terrorized the birds; heaps of rusty refrigerators and washing machines and assorted pipes blocked the East Landing. The place, to put it plainly, was a wreck. But if any group was up to the task, it was PRBO. Undaunted, they sent out waves of all-star biologists, led by David Ainley. Slowly, the island was reclaimed by the wild. Buildings were dismantled, concrete areas were torn up and replaced by nesting terrain for auklets and petrels. Whole stretches of land became completely off limits to burrow-crushing, flock-spooking humans. Eventually, the only remaining signs of civilization were the two houses, the crane at East Landing, some water tanks, a couple of small buildings used for storage, and a crumbling stone foundation near the North Landing, known as the old eggers’ house. And, of course, the lighthouse tower itself.
Elephant seals, fur seals, harbor seals, and Steller’s sea lions began to reappear on the shores, first as individuals and then, over the years, in colonies. Murres, cormorants, guillemots, petrels, auklets, puffins, shearwaters, fulmars, grebes, scoters, pelicans, terns, loons, and even the odd albatross—they all trickled back. As the twenty-first century began, there were one hundred thousand murres in residence. The gulls, to no one’s surprise, made a particularly strong comeback.
THE STATION HOUSE WAS A FRIENDLY LOOKING RESTAURANT WITH A western feel, painted dusty red, with a funky, hand-lettered sign. I pulled into a parking spot out front, alongside two silky hunting dogs in the back of a pickup truck. It was 6:00 p.m. and already dark. As I stepped out of the rental car, I took a deep breath—the air had that cool, tangy ocean smell. The street was deserted. Toby’s Feed Barn was shut down tight next door, as was the Point Reyes Whale of a Deli on the corner, and there wasn’t a soul walking around. Glancing in the windows of the Station House, I discovered why: What appeared to be the entire town was crowded into the dining room. As I opened the door a wall of noise hit me, and a waitress swept by with a dozen Anchor Steam beers balanced precariously on a tray. A single table was available in the corner of the bar, and I grabbed it.
Peter showed up in his Toyota truck minutes later, followed almost immediately by Scot in his VW van. Fourteen months had passed since we’d seen each other, but little had changed in their appearances: Peter had a few new flecks of gray in his hair, and Scot had shaved his beard, but the net effect was still of two outdoorsmen, inadvertently hip in their perfectly distressed clothing, with a laid-back confidence that turned people’s heads.
As the waitress handed us our menus, I asked them about a story I’d just read in the local paper but hadn’t quite believed. This past October, apparently, a well-meaning boatload of people who’d nursed a pair of injured sea lions back to health, naming them Swissy and eDog in the process, had decided that the Farallones would be the perfect place to release them. They’d motored out from San Francisco and pulled up to the East Landing buoy. After weeks of rehabilitation and care, the sea lions were petted one last time and lovingly decanted into their new home. They swam around playfully while their rescuers snapped pictures for, oh, thirty seconds.
Swissy was on his second circumnavigation of the boat when a shark seized him, literally biting him in half. Everyone on board screamed; one woman burst into tears. There was some splashing, and the shark dove, taking Swissy’s hindquarters with it. The tiny head had bobbed for an instant and then disappeared. I needed confirmation: Was this really true? Peter nodded slowly. Scot winced. “It was awful.”
“What were they thinking?” I asked. It was like taking someone with a broken leg, carefully nursing the leg back to health, and then pushing the patient off the side of a cliff. A week afterward, back on the mainland, one of the would-be samaritans sent Peter some pictures of the sea lion’s demise. By blind luck the shutter had gone off at the exact moment of the hit, and as far as attack photos went they were the best he’d ever seen.
(Later I saw the pictures myself and it’s true, they are spectacular. A two-ton, sixteen-foot male shark named Gouge is heaving himself out of the water only a few feet away from the camera. Gouge got his name because when he first showed up at the Farallones he had three propeller wounds on his head, deep, and so pulpy they looked like raw hamburger meat. In one image, a tiny flipper can be seen hanging out of the left side of Gouge’s mouth.)
Over the roar of the restaurant, they recapped the past year for me. Scot was back at his park ranger job, tending hiking trails at the national seashore, and Peter was consumed with a new bird book he was writing, a detailed treatise on the subject of plumages and molt. The sharks were never truly out of mind, though: Seventeen scientific papers were currently on the drawing board.
The 2002 shark season had been mediocre; fifty-six attacks were observed between September and November, approximately the same number as the previous year, but down from the season high of seventy-seven in 2000. Things on the surface were buzzing, however. The Patriot had been a constant presence, with cage-diving tours all but sold out. Over the course of three months, their decoy use had topped two hundred hours. Six other boats had shown up, attempting to lure the sharks with surfboards and, in two cases, chum. The shark-tourism situation only promised to get worse, so the push was on to enforce new, more muscular restrictions including a ban on towing decoys and a 150-foot no-approach zone around feeding great whites. Predictably, the cage divers were opposed to this, and an ugly battle loomed this winter. The intensity of the conflict made everybody nervous. Peter had been spending much of his time dealing with the fallout, attending committee meetings, smoothing ruffled bureaucratic feathers, doing his best to ensure that the Shark Project didn’t become a political casualty. As he and Scot described the tense atmosphere, I noted a weariness in their voices. They were tired of this, I could see, and longed to return to the days when the island and its sharks were their only focus.
Well, what about the sharks?
“Okay, let’s see,” Scot said. “So Betty was back, and Emma. Cal Ripfin was back.
Our old buddy Bitehead was back; he’s got some new bites on his head. Spotty was back, he showed up with Cuttail, late again.” He turned to Peter. “That’s something we need to look at. As they get older do they arrive later? Could be.”
Peter nodded. “Or they learn to come in during the elephant seal peak.”
“Or maybe they’re spending more time breeding.”
I was beginning to realize that studying great white sharks was not really about the rush of seeing them. Instant gratification was beside the point. Decades passed before patterns became visible, before hunches could be proven, before the jigsaw puzzle came together, if it ever did. Science, by definition, was altruistic. You might be the one who benefited from the information you’d collected over the years, you might not. You might be dead, even. And someone else using your data might go on to win the Nobel Prize.
But there had been one major breakthrough this season: The satellite tags had begun to pay off with reams of new information. The Farallon sharks, it seemed, spent most of their lives roving the open ocean rather than sticking close to the coast, as had been supposed. And when they moved away from the islands and over the lip of the continental shelf, they began diving to depths greater than seven hundred meters. That, too, was unheard-of behavior from an animal that hunted its prey on the surface. And the sharks were booking, logging as many as sixty miles per day with purposeful efficiency. It was as though they were late for an appointment somewhere and hustling to keep it. A Rat Packer named Tipfin, tagged by Peter in October 2000 (and again in October 2001), was discovered to have cruised 2,300 miles to Hawaii in thirty-seven days. He remained near Maui for at least four months, and then turned around and returned to the Farallones in October. No one had any inkling that great white sharks were such globe-trotters. “It was like seeing owls leave the forests and head out over the open plains,” Scot said.
