by Casey, Susan
Another time, a twenty-foot runabout showed up with no one aboard; originally it had been manned by a family of five from Sacramento, out for a day of fishing. Not one of them was ever found, though for days the biologists were instructed to walk the island perimeter, searching for bodies.
Incidents like these were most frequent during the fall, when conditions looked promising on the mainland and recreational boaters thought nothing of lighting out to the Farallones to catch a few salmon. On a clear day in San Francisco, the islands could even be seen from shore—how hard could it be to motor out there and back? People had no idea what they were in for, and they tended to lack things like compasses and flares and extra water and radios. When the weather snapped its fingers, they found themselves in dire situations.
And you could write an entire book about the commercial vessels that had met these rocks, oceangoing clippers and schooners and freighters. During the pre-LORAN, pre-GPS, pre-EPIRB days there were a dozen major shipwrecks at the Farallones, starting in 1858 when the Lucas, a full-rigged ship carrying two hundred people, slammed into Saddle Rock at 2 a.m., and twenty-three passengers died in the icy water of Mirounga Bay, less than fifty yards from shore. From that point on, that scene played itself out every few years with a variety of victims: Noonday, Morning Light, Annie Sise, Champlain, Franconia, Bremen, American Boy, Louis, The Bardstown Victory. Ship after ship crashed into the islands, and the main culprit was always the same: weather.
Even now, the ships lay down there like so many cautionary tales. Ron Elliott had told me that he often found large hunks of them embedded in the ocean floor; one time he swam up to an anchor that was nine feet tall. He’d come across old sextants and binnacles, brass chains and bronze bowpieces, masts and hulls, all of them splintered and crumpled and cloaked in sediment. The waters around Southeast Farallon were one of the most notorious boneyards in North America.
Today the water was flat all the way out, and Kingfish made it to the Farallones in less than four hours. As the islands came into view I felt a surge of happiness. There were the familiar spires and towers, thrusting out of the black water. Something was different, though. The last time I’d been on Southeast Farallon, the island was brown. Now, it was sort of…white. And then, as we got closer, I heard it—an otherworldly echoing din of wailing, screeching, mad cackling. Tiny bird heads popped up from behind rocks; sleek, aerodynamic bodies lined every surface; stray feathers fluttered in the air. It was as though the island itself was heckling us. And then there was the smell: an ammonia-fueled cloud that settled, tentlike, over the boat. The Badgers, who had been visibly excited about going ashore, suddenly looked uncertain.
Biologist Pete Waryzbok came out to meet us. He had been on the island for more than four months at this point, and he sported a russet-colored beard that would’ve made Grizzly Adams jealous. He was driving the Dinner Plate. This was the first time I’d actually seen it in the water—it was shockingly small. The only thing that set it apart from something a kid might point to in the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog was its thick coating of gull guano. But this was the only boat the bird biologists had—the shark boat belonged to Peter, and it was at the island only during shark season.
This time, instead of being winched up in the boat, we were hoisted on a contraption known as the “Billy Pugh” (pronounced Billy Poo). No one had any idea if someone named Billy Pugh had created this device, or whether there was a salty anecdote behind the name, or whether the gadget’s inventor just had too many martinis one night and thought, What the hell. The Pugh was shaped like an enormous badminton birdie with a heavy metal disk at the bottom. (I knew it was heavy because it fell on my leg the first time I tried to climb onto it.) The disk was encircled by rope netting that was gathered at the top and attached to the crane. Two by two, we clambered from the Dinner Plate onto the Pugh, looped our arms through the netting, and clung as we were winched up and swung ashore.
Manning the crane controls was another scientist named Russ Bradley. He was in his late twenties, tall and fit, with curly blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses, handsome even in a full-length slicker streaked from top to bottom with gull shit. In fact, as my ears adjusted to the bird noise and I looked around, I noticed that every last object was extravagantly splattered.
We gathered on the landing while everyone got pughed up. Russ warned that the gulls had a tendency to dive-bomb from above. Hats, therefore, were advisable. And any item of clothing one might ever want to wear again should be taken off or covered up. Or, better yet, left at home. “Part of the gull’s defense strategy is to give you an idea of how much they don’t want you here,” Russ said. “And they have a lot to give.” He indicated the drippings running down his jacket.
Something off to the side caught my eye. Three feet away on a flat rock ledge, a dead sea lion lay in a crumpled heap. It was oddly deflated-looking, and its head twisted backward at an unnatural angle. Russ, following my gaze, explained that there were more sea lions than usual at the islands and that some of them were starving. He stated this as a simple fact, in a businesslike voice.
I suppose I had always known that the Farallones was all about living and dying. But during seabird season, the killing, as I would witness, proceeded at a pace that would startle Darwin. It was never more than a few inches away from you, death. And the gulls were master assassins. The entire world population of western gulls totals fifty thousand birds, and from the months of April to August, twenty-five thousand of them congregated here, packed onto this sixty-five-acre island. They pillaged the murres as they always had, plus the cormorants and the auklets and any other bird that came around, and they killed their own too, with cannibal gusto. The adults—always agitated, always screaming—stood side by side with their chicks, which started out in life as spotted fuzzballs the size of a shotglass but within six weeks would grow as large as their parents. The young gulls were identified by their brown color, spotted markings, and odd bit of down. But their time-lapse photography growth spurt was disturbing and mutant-like, as if you had delivered a baby one day, and a week later it was wearing your clothes.
While Pete stayed at the East Landing buoy with Kingfish, Russ gave a quick tour of the island. It was already clear that Tony, Margaret, John, and Pelle couldn’t wait to hit the road. We were halfway up to the lighthouse, being harassed from above and slipping around on dead bird carcasses when Tony turned to me, his beret knocked askew and splotched with white. Struggling to be heard over the shrieking, he yelled: “You’re staying for how long?”
IN ADDITION TO RUSS AND PETE, THERE WERE THREE INTERNS ON THE island: Jen, Meghan, and Melinda. The women were all in their early twenties and all beautiful; despite their lovely appearances, all looked right at home in their work outfits of hard hats and encrusted coveralls, with flea collars fastened around their ankles to keep the bird vermin from crawling up their legs. They had been out here for more than three months, and today’s grocery delivery was a welcome event. Feisty seas had dashed several recent landing attempts, and food supplies had run low. Fruit was long gone; all that remained of the vegetables were a few spongy zucchini; milk and cheese were finished; eggs, gone. Last night Melinda had tried to make a quiche and quickly given up. This morning’s breakfast had consisted of dry cereal.
Kingfish had also brought their mail and a few recent newspapers, and after they had unpacked the groceries they sat in the kitchen, lost in their reading. The group seemed tightly familial. It was an interesting mix, an experiment in unlikely utopia that appeared to have taken. Pete and Russ, like Peter and Scot, knew how to handle this unruly island, and they were seasoned scientists as well. Russ had tracked birds in places even more remote than the Farallones, studying albatross in the far western Hawaiian islands and hacking his way north through British Columbia in search of endangered murrelets. He’d crawled into damp tents and slept on moldy pillows and gone hungry in the field enough to have developed a thorough appreciation for the basics—at least there was a hou
se here. And most of the time, there was plenty of food. When Russ spoke, the words tumbled out in a stream of enthusiasm punctuated with heartfelt inflections—awestruck whispering, yelps of mock outrage, intense emphasis placed on a single word—and every description required a string of superlatives: “It’s just an unbelievably beautiful bird. I was incredibly fortunate to see it. Their wingspan is sick.”
Tall, rugged, red-haired Pete was a New Yorker. Like most of his kind he was tough, terse, and skeptical on the surface and then, after he got to know you, he’d suddenly flash a shy smile and reveal his warmth and his wicked sense of humor. Pete was twenty-eight years old and had come to realize that cities weren’t his thing; recently he’d experienced a serious bout of claustrophobia when he came off the island. At the end of seabird season, he was heading for Alaska.
The chemistry could so easily have gone wrong. And had in the past. Crack-ups, hookups, breakups, and even, according to Peter, four divorces could all be chalked up to the Farallon crucible. Nervous breakdowns snuck up on people after an eight-week run of bleak weather, a few missed grocery drop-offs, a piggish housemate or two, and days spent watching animals kill and eat each other. Tempers exploded, psyches unraveled. Wind, in particular, could really wreak havoc with people’s mood, as could fog. One couple who’d come out together as interns broke up when the woman fell for another biologist and moved into the bedroom across the hall. (The next boat was ten days away.) Another intern threatened lawsuits after tripping on the back steps of the house. Someone’s fist went through the wall. On a few occasions people had panicked when they realized they couldn’t leave the island at will; one of them ended up chartering a helicopter to get off. And one disgruntled visitor, no one was really sure whom, had spray-painted scarlet graffiti, a mess of streaks and whorls, across the vaulted ceiling of a sea cave.
One recent night Russ and Pete had been sitting in the coast guard house, watching Survivor. A contestant was whining. He was freshly shaved and looked chipper, but psychologically he was coming apart at the seams. “It’s been twenty-eight days,” he moaned. Russ and Pete looked at each other, ungroomed for weeks, facial hair running amok. “It’s been seventy-eight days!” Russ yelled at the screen.
Even so, the five of them were loving their time here, never mind that they had to work fourteen hours at a stretch to keep up with the birds. Simply put, they were happy. There was no whiff of the driven, anxious, upwardly-mobile-or-die young professional. They’d made a career choice that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with the fact that they’d never lost the child’s sense of amazement about nature. It was as though the “career goal” entry on their résumés read: “To stay as far away from an office cubicle as humanly possible.”
In the early evening I sat at a desk by the front window of the living room, flipping through old logbooks. It was dead calm on the water. About ten miles out, on the edge of visibility, I could see breaching humpback whales and freighters heading to Asia, toys rolling across an iron tabletop.
I was making my way through twenty-five years of shark season notations, accounts and stories of great white doings scrawled in a dozen different pens. Scot’s entries, set down in his distinctive architectural handwriting, were succinct, and often dryly funny. While some people poured out exclamation-point-studded epics that went on for pages—one enthusiastic writer had broken a shark attack down into minute-by-minute musings—Scot saved his detailed observations for the Shark Project’s reports, and his contributions to the island log read like telegrams:
“1 breach, 2 splash & thrash. Half Fin’s back.”
“Lots of decoy action. They are here and they are hungry.”
“2 attacks plus several visits. SA and PP watched an e-seal get nailed by Stumpy at East Landing. Some close-ups gotten.”
Auditing the month of August for shark action, I was encouraged by what I found; on average, there seemed to be an attack or two per week. (By October, every day brought reports of spilled blood.) Leafing from one August to the next, I came across an entry that read, “Ron Elliott was aggressively approached by a sixteen-foot female shark.” It was accompanied by a cartoon drawing of Ron fighting off a shark and yelling, “Back off Whitey! I’ve got urchins to pick!” The logbooks made for addictive reading, and when I finally tore myself away from them, hours had passed and everyone else was asleep. On this trip I was bunking with Jen in a large bedroom down the hall from Jane Fonda. This was fine with me. Two nights ago at an Inverness restaurant, Peter and Scot had informed me that the Jane Fonda bedroom was notoriously haunted. “There’s a ghost there,” Peter said matter-of-factly, after a few beers. “It’s a woman.”
“In the house?” I’m not sure why I found this surprising. If any place deserved to be infested with ghosts, it was the Farallones.
“Around the island. There was a body found in a cave.” He went on to explain that a century ago, the well-preserved skeleton of a woman had been found in Rabbit Cave, down by East Landing, close to the site of the original Russian settlement. Most people assumed she was an Aleut slave; it was their custom to entomb their dead. But others believed she was a Caucasian, a claim they insisted could be confirmed by her dental work. The truth is that no one really knows, and there is no record of her death. Her bones remain on the island, buried near the cave’s entrance.
In the years since there had been reports of odd, ghostlike encounters: trouble breathing was commonly cited, as were chills, whispering voices, glimpses of shadowy silhouettes moving across the cart path, footsteps and doors slamming in the night. Now, it’s one thing for a few people sitting around on heebie-jeebie island to wind themselves up thinking about ghosts. It’s another thing altogether for that group to be composed entirely of scientists, most of whom would rather eat dirt than admit to any sort of belief in the paranormal. But at the Farallones some very logical minds had been flummoxed and terrified by unexplainable encounters.
In the mid-eighties, Peter told me, a biologist was walking back to the house in the last, foggy light of day when he noticed a woman with long dark hair standing on the marine terrace in a filmy white dress. Figuring it was one of the two female biologists on the island, albeit in a fairly strange getup, he continued on his way into the house—where he immediately encountered the two women, sitting on the living room couch. He turned on his heel and ran back outside, but the woman in the white dress had vanished, though there was really no place she could have vanished to, short of jumping into the ocean. “And he was Mr. Science!” Peter recounted, snickering. “A guy who would do things like rebuild the transmitter. He said it made a believer out of him.”
On another occasion a visiting botanist was intercepted sleepwalking out the front door in the middle of the night, screaming, “NO! I’m NOT going up there!” When someone tugged on his arm and woke him, he explained that a dark-haired woman was trying to entice him to climb to the lighthouse with her.
“What about you?” I asked them. “Had any ghost action out there personally?”
They both nodded vigorously.
“Oh, I’ve had scary experiences,” Scot said. “You get the creeps. It’s the feeling of a presence around you. It usually happens when you’re alone. At night.”
For Peter, one incident in particular stood out: he awoke to loud, thudding footsteps on the stairs, followed by the front door slamming, an attic trap door in the Jane Fonda bedroom stuttering rapidly, and a chill wind that blew through the house, rattling the windows from the inside, after the door shut. At the time he was one of four people on the island, all of whom were cowering together in one bedroom, scared witless. There was no extra set of human feet that could possibly have been pounding up and down the stairs that night—they all knew it, and they all felt it. This had occurred more than a decade ago, and I could see that telling the story still gave him a chill.
“Certain rooms are scarier than others,” Scot said, fingering his glass. “That Jane Fonda room…the one you stayed in…”
“Yeah, that’s the one where most things happen,” Peter agreed. “I’ve never liked that room either.”
“I stayed there for a while. Man, I couldn’t wait to get out of that room.”
DURING BIRD SEASON, WALKING WAS RESTRICTED TO CERTAIN PATHWAYS and, even then, extra care was required to make sure no one felt the delicate crushing of fluff beneath one’s boots. There were chicks in every crevice, downy balls bunking down in the most unexpected places. They were even wedged into the front steps of the house. Territory meant everything to these animals; it was the difference between survival and death, and every square inch of it was staked.
Along with the twenty-five thousand gulls, there were one hundred thousand murres on the island right now, packed tight as bowling pins on the sea cliffs. There were also about forty thousand cassin’s auklets, twenty thousand cormorants, four thousand pigeon guillemots, and assorted other homesteaders in smaller numbers, including 120 tufted puffins. Every bird needed its own little stomping ground, and they arrived in late fall and hunkered down for months before breeding, simply to hold the spot. The smaller seabirds—the petrels and auklets in particular—had evolved strategies to gull-proof their offspring. They were nocturnal, flying only at night, hiding themselves in underground burrows during the day. (And still, the gulls managed to eat a lot of them.)
For everything on the island with two wings, the point was not simply to hatch chicks, but to successfully “fledge” them, get them flying and diving and fending for themselves. The fledging process was especially dramatic for murres. Before they ever learned how to fly, the chicks were walked to the cliff’s edge by their parents, and then they tumbled into the sea, sailing away on the currents like cotton puffs and, if they were lucky, figuring out what to do when they hit the water.
