by Casey, Susan
“I’m reaching my breaking point,” I told Peter.
“I can see that.”
It was time to trot out the question I’d been practicing for the last twenty-four hours: Could I sleep at the lighthouse for a night? Underlying my request was a distinct sense of panic. Call it claustrophobia or chalk it up to tattered nerves—if I could just have one solid night’s sleep, one chance to pull myself together, then I could face the yacht again. I was banking, of course, on him being too kind to refuse the request. I was right; he agreed to look the other way while I snuck up there. It was decided that I would row ashore just before nightfall and then scale the backside of Lighthouse Hill with extreme stealth. The evening offered a ready-made diversion: the Oakland A’s were playing the Boston Red Sox in a crux game, and everyone would be glued to the TV in the coast guard house, hunkered down with large bowls of chips.
At dusk, the water in Fisherman’s Bay was a surly mess, and I stood on deck, watching Tubby tossing around. The jump from Just Imagine down into the rowboat was an unpleasant flier, but it had to be done. Crouching as low as possible, I dropped in, hoping that a wave wouldn’t jostle the craft aside at the last second. This was my debut at Tubby’s helm. As I reached for the oars, one of them flew from its oarlock and sailed off in the direction of Tower Point. Peter had warned me about this design flaw. One morning he’d lost both oars and been forced to lean over the side, paddling with his hands to fish them out. Retrieving the wayward oar, I rowed a jerky path to the landing. As I approached the barnacled rocks, I attempted to jump but ended up straddling instead, one foot on shore, one in the boat. At that moment a swell bowled in and knocked me down, but luckily it threw Tubby in my direction. Crawling, and dragging the rowboat, I made land.
I hadn’t set foot on solid ground in thirteen days, and it showed. My balance was off, leaving me woozy and disoriented. I looked up. The evening sky was still mostly clear, but fog swirled at the lighthouse peak, and it was moving in fast. I began to climb.
The rocks were easy to grab on to but tended to crumble, and they were slippery, not to mention well stocked with angry, pecking gulls. Careful two-stepping was required to avoid crushing any seabird burrows. The top third of the climb, I noticed, was a chute. Though I’d done a little rock climbing, enough to have learned not to freak out when clinging to the side of a wall, this wasn’t going so well. I kept swaying and losing my bearings. Below, the waves churned into North Landing. I imagined eggs tumbling, bodies flailing. The cumbersome arrangement of gear on my back—sleeping bag, DreamTime Therm-a-Rest, and knapsack—didn’t help. My center of gravity felt as though it was somewhere near the back of my neck.
I’d just begun the steepest part when my left hand slipped from its hold, causing a heart-in-mouth backward swoon before I recovered my balance. Afterward, I realized that it had been an extremely close call, so frightening that I couldn’t afford to think about it at the time. But I did shoot a look over my shoulder at the place I would have fallen, a funnel of splintered rocks that dead-ended in a seething spit of ocean.
At the top, the wind was furious. I radioed Peter to confirm that I’d made it. Leaving out the details of my near miss, I assured him I was fine, no problems. Except, I mentioned casually, it was so windy up here I might get blown off the edge. “Oh, I know how that whole deal works,” he said, with a hint of impatience. “I’ve probably spent a few years of my life up there.”
Gulls swooped by, performing aerobatic moves in the thermals. To the east, the ocean shimmered cold and metallic, untethered to Earth. To the south, the Perfect Wave was breaking beautifully, then pounding down mercilessly on the shallow rocks. Yesterday, while we drifted along Shark Alley, I had overheard Peter and Scot discussing it. They had both turned toward shore and were watching it break.
“I think you’re on your own for that one,” Scot had declared. “I ain’t going.”
“You won’t even drive me?”
“Ah, I’ll drop you off, I guess. But that means I’ll have to pick you up.” His voice had an ominous tone. They both knew what the inflection meant.
Peter was silent for a moment. “No,” he said. “If it comes to that, just leave me out there.”
I tossed my sleeping bag inside the door. Dust and grit coated everything. A loud humming filled the air; the industrial batteries that powered the lighthouse lined an entire wall. I was reminded of a low-budget horror movie—this was the soundtrack of insanity. Above the batteries, urgent-looking signs warned of mishaps involving explosions and battery acid.
The only place to sleep that wasn’t out of the question in terms of active vermin and extreme creepiness was right in the doorway, wedged in beside the bank of acid-spewing batteries. The passageway was just wide enough for the deluxe Therm-a-Rest. The alternative, moving farther back into the structure, would mean sleeping in the old lighthouse tower itself, with its abandoned spiral staircase and its trapped, suffocating air. At least near the door, I could bolt if I had to. I stepped outside, into a small sheltered spot. Edging around the side, both hands clamped on the railing, I looked down through backside fog that was pooling at North Landing. The curtain had fallen; Just Imagine was no longer visible. This was dirtier weather, closing in. I wondered how much longer I could stick it out.
I stood in the doorway, wrapped in my sleeping bag, as the light drained away and the indigo-black night came up, and the harsh beauty of the landscape was replaced by the terrible beauty of the elements. The lights from the houses shone with warmth. A dozen people sat down there, eating dinner and talking baseball; they had no idea they were being watched. Later, Scot and Peter would be drinking Jack Daniel’s and poring over shark video. Up here: the Farallon equivalent of the lunatic in the attic. All I needed was a white dress.
A three-quarter moon rose, with Mars like a bodyguard beside it, glowing red. Gull feathers tumbled by in the gale. The sea and the sky had melted into each other, and now they were just nuanced tones of infinity, dual voids. Overhead, the lighthouse beacon rotated. It was hard not to imagine that I was standing at the very end of the world; that there was nothing but water, and after that, more water, and that all the land was gone.
Chapter 10
The forecasts went from small craft advisories to gale force winds during that day. Hazardous seas. Wind. Cold. Rain.
—FARALLON PATROL LOG, “NIGHTMARE!”—THE CORMORANT, SPRING 1983
OCTOBER 7–9, 2003
Peter knocked on the lighthouse door at 7:30 a.m. I was asleep, but barely. The floor was bulletproof cement covered with planked wood, hard enough to bounce pennies, and the DreamTime Therm-a-Rest had failed to deliver on its promise of decadent comfort. The wind was not quiet up here, nor was the buzzing phalanx of batteries. All night, mice had played tag on top of my sleeping bag, and I could tell by the way my head was itching that I had bird lice. Opening the door, I stepped into total, disorienting fog. Everything outside a six-foot radius had dissolved into a ghostly ether. Peter stood there holding a container of orange juice and a banana. “You can go back to sleep if you want,” he said, looking somewhat alarmed by my appearance. I ran my hand through my hair to make sure nothing was nesting in it. “Sharkwatch is canceled until the fog lifts.”
There was an advantage to being socked in. As long as the view from below was obscured, I could slink down the front-side trail rather than having to descend the cliff out back. And I was not anxious to repeat this route, especially after having had time to consider yesterday’s slip. I squinted into the mist. It would be better to hightail it back to the boat now, under cover of fog.
Peter and I agreed that, in thirty minutes, I would steal down the path and meet him at North Landing. He’d then make a roundtrip in Tubby, depositing me on Just Imagine and returning to the island. Later this morning, he and Scot would row back out. We had to move the sailboat today. If the fog lifted, the helicopters would be arriving, and by the time they got here Fisherman’s Bay needed to be obstacle-free.
/> I made my way down the zigzag trail. Although I was scurrying through zero visibility in a half crouch, running low and, I imagined, with cat-burglar finesse, the going was easier this time. For one thing, I’d jettisoned the DreamTime, stashed it in the cobwebby recesses of the old tower. Approaching the midway notch in Lighthouse Hill, where I could drop over to a manageable part of the backside, I skidded on some rocks and stumbled, ripping the knee out of my pants.
Somehow, I thought, picking myself up and wiping away the dirt and blood, this lighthouse foray hadn’t been the respite I’d hoped for. I was still dizzy with fatigue, and rubber-legged on land, and now I was going back to the spiteful yacht.
The fog persisted. At noon, Tubby poked a hole through the murk, and I tied her to the side as Scot and Peter climbed aboard the yacht. I was anxious to put Fisherman’s Bay in the rearview mirror, but the logistics were daunting: disconnecting the linguine of ropes, pulling up the cantankerous anchor chain, and then actually having to drive the beast. While Scot searched for the windlass to bring up the anchor, Peter drove the whaler to the buoy and untied the ropes. Surprisingly, none of this took much time, and suddenly we were at sea, with Scot standing confidently at the wheel and the yacht acting momentarily subdued, as Tubby and the whaler surfed along behind us.
As our shark flotilla rounded Shubrick Point, a ship named White Holly came into view. The 133-foot vessel had been hired by the Fish and Wildlife Service to lug away the debris; the helicopters would winch their loads down onto its deck. White Holly resembled a miniature container ship, squat and strong as a sumo wrestler. Its ropes were slung around the East Landing buoy. The best anchorage for Just Imagine was right beside it, on Hurst Shoal, a reef that lay halfway between the buoy and Saddle Rock, 150 yards from shore. I liked this: The houses were visible from here, and I was pleased by the idea of being next to the bigger boat (although in truth it was just another object that the yacht could potentially slam into). Somehow the presence of other people, especially those with nautical expertise, was reassuring.
Scot anchored the sailboat effortlessly, providing sharp contrast to the circus atmosphere that had surrounded our original mooring, although he was disconcerted to find that Just Imagine’s anchor chain was unmarked, forcing a blind guess as to how much of its length had been paid out; you could be right at the end of your tether and not know it. This was peculiar, and sort of unsafe, and likely the reason the anchor had almost slipped off as Tom had deployed it. But Scot knew the water here better than anyone, with the possible exception of Ron, and he’d carefully estimated the depth and monitored the chain as it slid to the ocean floor.
Securing a boat was never easy, Scot noted, adding that mariners often described anchoring as the “test of a relationship.” Typically, the process was a contentious matter involving widely divergent opinions about where and how. No one was arguing about it right now, though. This was a far better arrangement. Just Imagine was no longer double-tied, leaving its back end free to move with the currents and the wind. And even though at first glance the new parking spot appeared more exposed, with the wind coming from the northwest, we were actually in a lee created by the island itself. Instantly I could feel the difference, and the sailboat behaved more like a sailboat and less like an angry, lassoed animal.
Avoiding the places on deck that smelled like dead cattle, the three of us sat waiting to see if the helicopters would show up. The marine layer of fog was melting away, though the lighthouse was still engulfed. Among the contractor crew, there was a high level of motivation to wrap up this project and get the hell out of here. The weather wasn’t making the Farallones any new friends, and some of them had been bunking in the coast guard house for ten days, which was about nine days longer than they preferred.
“The problem in Fisherman’s Bay was that the sailboat wasn’t just pitching, it was surging,” Scot said. “And you know that’s gonna be—” He stopped midsentence. “What’s that shark doing?” I turned. The animal was about thirty yards west of us, with both its dorsal and tail fins on the surface. Its entire back arched out of the water, as though it was trying to tug something up from below. “I don’t see a seal,” Peter said, focusing his binoculars. Scot dispatched Seal Baby; the shark skirmished with its mystery prey again and then dove, returning briefly to take a pass at the decoy before bolting nervously.
“Tubby will definitely get visited in this spot,” Peter predicted.
“I think you’re right,” Scot said, noting that rowing back from here was out of the question. We were anchored in a high-traffic area, a sort of shark thoroughfare between the seals piled in the East Landing gulches and the seals perched on Saddle Rock. It was a stretch of ocean that had hosted some fairly dramatic events.
I thought of a story that Peter had told me earlier, an almost unbelievable tale of negligence involving a charter boat named the New Holiday II. One fall afternoon it had emerged out of nowhere, pulled up to East Landing, and disgorged twenty plump, seal-shaped tourists, who’d jumped into the water and begun to snorkel. Peter had been at the lighthouse that day and remembers gaping in disbelief through the scope, feeling faint, screaming into the radio: “New Holiday II!! New Holiday II!! Get out of the water!! REPEAT: GET. OUT. OF. THE. WATER!” He considered calling for a medevac helicopter, as one was sure to be needed. To this day he doesn’t know if the captain heard his transmission, broadcasting blind across the emergency frequency, or—more likely—whether one of the tourists saw one of the sharks. But as Peter watched helplessly from the light, the snorkelers scrambled onto the boat in a panic and the New Holiday II shot off, never to be seen again. On this exact spot, Swissy, the rehabilitated sea lion, hadn’t been quite so lucky, nor had many of Scot’s surfboards.
As the afternoon wore on, the fog remained parked over the island, and it was shortly confirmed that the helicopter operation had been postponed until tomorrow. We cracked open a round of Red Seal ale, and I was about to launch into my usual list of questions, aimed mainly at trying to get Scot and Peter to reminisce about encounters with the Sisterhood, when we noticed that over on White Holly, a shark cage was being lowered into the water.
A bikini-clad woman and a guy holding a cumbersome camera were wedged inside it, looking decidedly unsteady. Neither person was wearing a wetsuit as they plunged into the fifty-five-degree water. We watched the cage being rocked on its side by the swells and careening against the ship’s hull. “Well, they won’t be in there very long,” I observed.
“What the…?” Peter radioed to ask what they were doing. A whiskey-voiced woman replied with the explanation that they were shooting “promotional” photographs. Sure enough, the cage was hauled back onto the boat in less than a minute, and its occupants staggered back onto White Holly’s deck, looking shaken.
Later, in the logbook, Peter noted that this event reminded him of “Miss Universe’s visit in 1984.” On that occasion, he had been assigned to accompany the reigning beauty queen on a tour of the island that was supposed to have been capped off by a brief dunking in a shark cage for the cameras. The weather, however, had been uncooperative, and Miss Universe had remained on land. Her loss: Peter had intended to drive the Dinner Plate across Hurst Shoal, where we were anchored right now, and she might have encountered an exceptionally friendly Sister named Whiteslash.
Eighteen-foot Whiteslash, described by Peter as “gentle and maternal,” was an accommodating shark, eager to investigate the whaler, which she had learned to associate with food. The lesson—and it took only one—happened in 1996 as Scot and Peter floated next to a freshly killed seal, waiting for its claimant to return. Thirty minutes passed, and then Whiteslash arrived, all four thousand pounds of her, tucking into the food while the researchers filmed. When the feeding was winding down and the guys turned to leave, the shark dropped the last scraps of her meal and followed them. Peter and Scot were astonished; this was something new. They could only guess that she hadn’t made the kill herself but had been lucky enough to
stumble across it in the presence of the whaler. And from that point on, when the research boat passed through her territory, Whiteslash would often materialize, swimming up to the stern hopefully, in anticipation of another seal. Her clockwork appearances and laid-back personality made her the perfect ambassador for the Shark Project, and on various occasions Peter drove visiting dignitaries out to see her. Whiteslash, he recalled, was enormous, wide as a bus, and liked to hang off the back of the boat, “smiling.”
NEXT MORNING THE SUN WAS UP, AS WAS THE WIND, AND THE national guard Chinooks swept in like the Valkyries. Peter and Scot were onshore, and I had positioned myself at Just Imagine’s stern to watch the whole spectacle. As planned, shark work had been temporarily suspended, and so, of course, in true defiant shark fashion there had already been an attack today, with a big splashy breach, less than fifty yards from White Holly’s bow. I’d just climbed on deck with my coffee when it happened, and had seen the white flash of the shark’s belly as it leapt and then heard the whiskey-voiced woman barking across the public address system: “It’s showtime! Everyone to your stations. Shark attack off starboard!” A crowd of people leaned over White Holly’s rail, shouting and pointing in the direction of the attack, while a blood slick crept toward the island and the thick mammalian oil smell leaked into the air, fanned by helicopter rotors. Despite the effort it had made to catch its meal, and all the spectators waiting to watch it dine, the shark never returned, and the neglected carcass floated out to sea.
The radio trilled. It was Peter, relaying a request from White Holly’s photographer, who hoped to position himself on Just Imagine so he could snap yet more promotional pictures of his ship in action. “Sure, whatever,” I said, and then watched as a Dinner Plate–size contraption shuttled in my direction. There were two men on board: a wiry guy who looked to be in his seventies and introduced himself as Crazy Louie, and Karl, a twenty-something redhead with a soul patch, overloaded with several bulky camera cases. They had both seen the shark breach and were anxious to get out of their small boat, and they flung themselves aboard Just Imagine, firing questions. “If there’s one attack, does that mean there will be another?” Karl asked, his voice tight with adrenaline. “Now that I’ve seen one shark, I need to see more. Will you ask those biologists if they need a photographer?”
