Читать книгу The Lightkeepers - Abby Geni - Страница 14

6

WE ARE DEEP into Shark Season. I came to the islands in late summer, and my arrival coincided with a vast influx of white sharks. (The great, I have learned, is only used by ignorant nonbiologists.) On my travels, I have encountered dreadful creatures before—leeches with a penchant for armpits, crocodiles masquerading as logs, irate lions. For nearly five months, I once lived in the rainforest; I slept in a hut and bathed with a bucket. The rules of my visits were strict: no littering, no hiking except on the designated trails, and, whatever the provocation, no destruction of any living thing. This included venomous tarantulas and foot-long centipedes. I loved that place as a photographic object, but by the end I was dying for a cup of real coffee, a change of clothes, and the feel of a stiff breeze on my skin. I found that, of all things, I missed the look of straight lines. There were none in that eruption of greenery.

But the white sharks have a lethal charm all their own.

Galen and Forest are our shark specialists. In the past month, I have learned a bit more about these two, but my initial impression of them has not changed all that much. Galen is white-haired, venerable, and never in a particularly good mood. He still strikes me as being an elderly god of the sea—possibly omnipotent, probably omniscient. He knows everything that happens here. He watches the tides. He organizes repairs on the cabin, the boats. He can recite the history of the Farallon Islands with the scholarly air of a college professor. He has a thousand animal facts at his fingertips. Though his raison d’être is the sharks, I have seen him sitting on the porch beside Lucy, helping her to dissect the wing of a dead cormorant like a trained veterinarian. He can read the coming weather at a glance.

Forest, on the other hand, is an enigma. A dark-haired, cold-blooded naiad. Galen’s right hand. Forest eats, sleeps, and breathes work. I have yet to hold a conversation with him that has not centered on something to do with biology: the anatomy of harbor seals, the local varieties of comb jellies, or the weather patterns as related to bird migrations. The one time I dared to ask him where he’d grown up, he shot me a withering look, like a Victorian butler reprimanding an impertinent housemaid. Like the others here, he seems to have no past, or a distinct unwillingness to discuss it. Once, long ago, I read that all nuns who joined a convent were forbidden from speaking about their lives before. The Farallon Islands seem to be a religious order in their own right, with a similar vow of silence.

Galen and Forest catalog and track the population of white sharks. Throughout the autumn, the two men rise at four-thirty in the morning to start the watch. During every hour of daylight, one of them is in position in the lighthouse, keeping an eye out for blood on the water. Against every basic human instinct, they hurry toward a feeding frenzy. They board one of the boats and head out to sea, armed with video cameras, tagging equipment, and the “dummy,” a surfboard painted like a seal to lure the sharks in closer. The two of them live to make contact with these creatures. Galen and Forest are lunatics, to put it frankly. Galen has mentioned that he dreams about the white sharks every single night. Forest sketches a shark’s silhouette—lean, rough, and spiked with fins—on any nearby surface. He does this unconsciously, doodling on the table, on a book I once left open on the couch.

At this time of year, there can be two or three kills a day. The sharks eat the seals and sea lions. There is enough prey here to sustain a massive host of predators. The birds will mark the spot like an X on a map. Watching from the lighthouse, Forest or Galen will spy a collection of gulls diving over a patch of sea. The cry will go up. Boots are thrown on—coats flung over shirts—a thunder of feet on the stairs. Forest uses a child’s scooter with streamers on the handlebars to make his downhill run from the lighthouse that much faster. One of these days he will break his neck.

There is no pier on the Farallon Islands. The tides have seen to that. Any attempts at building a dock have invariably been washed away. There is a powerful undertow. There are riptides that come and go without warning or rhythm. There are reefs and shoals. The islands are home to two small boats, both of which must be lowered into the sea by crane. They are too large to ride in the Billy Pugh, of course. Instead, they must be hooked directly to the steel cable itself.

The first is a rowboat (called the Lunchbox, I am sad to say, since its crew tends to feel like a tasty snack when moored next to a white shark). Then there is the Janus, a seventeen-foot Boston Whaler. This is a sturdier thing, with benches and a deckhouse, as well as a railing that, to my untrained eye, appears to be for decorative purposes only. The Janus is equipped with a motor, which makes this boat the preferred method of transport. Both boats spend their free time resting on a mattress of rubber tires at East Landing, a thirty-foot cliff. I have seen them being lowered into the water, swinging merrily on the end of the chain, plummeting into black waves larger than themselves.

I have not yet been brave enough to venture out on Shark Watch. I have stayed safely on land. It is unnerving to think that those monsters are always out there, patrolling the dark surf. Waiting. For the most part, the white sharks remain hidden, tucked inside a wave, buried in the deep currents. Once or twice, however, I have glimpsed a dorsal fin cresting the water, as menacing as the periscope of an enemy submarine.

MY LOVE AFFAIR with the islands has continued. At times I feel drugged, wandering the shoreline with a stupid grin on my face, camera aloft. Each snapshot seems like a benediction. We may never know what another person is thinking—never truly get into anyone else’s head—but photography brings us as close as anything can. When the members of an audience at an art gallery look at a picture, they can step for a moment inside the mind of the artist. Like telepathy. Like time travel. At some future date, when people gaze at my photographs of the islands, they will see what I saw. They will stand where I stood, on this granite, surrounded by this ocean. Perhaps they will even feel some of the elation I have experienced here.

Earlier today, I found myself at North Landing, where a dozen California sea lions were lolling in the light. They maneuvered around like canine mermaids. Their bodies seemed split in two; the upper half was alert and upright—pert little ears, sharp eyes, and a snout bristling with whiskers—whereas the back half was weighted down with fat and fins, slithering across the flagstones. They toasted themselves like marshmallows, plunging into the frothy shallows to cool off.

Soon I realized that one of the creatures was injured. It did not romp and play with the others, diving and hunting fish. Instead it lay on the shore, one flipper cradled against its chest. Through my telephoto lens, I could see a deep, fresh wound. The flipper had nearly been severed from the torso. The gash was new enough that it had not yet begun to scab. Instinctively I put a hand to my rib cage, where my own flesh had been cut open a few weeks before. Probably the animal had survived a run-in with a white shark. This was surprisingly common. What the sea lions lacked in mass, they made up for in gymnastic agility. I could imagine the shark lunging forward as the sea lion pirouetted and somersaulted away. But it was clearly in bad shape now. It was weak and dazed-looking.

I knew, however, that there was nothing I could do. There would be no point in going to fetch Mick or Galen. The biologists were on the islands to observe and document. Nothing more. Noninterference was the core of their belief system. They would never intervene in the life—or death—of one of their charges. I had received a stern lecture on this very subject from Galen a few days back. An injured animal was a specimen to be studied. Its demise was an event to be recorded for posterity. The food chain was paramount. Sympathy and affection were beside the point.

I turned away. Bending down, I took a few close-ups of shark teeth. The grounds are speckled with them; they dot the landscape like flowers in a prairie. Delicate reminders of danger. People used to believe shark teeth fell from the sky during lunar eclipses. Honestly, I am not sure myself how they travel so far inland.

After a while, I moved off to get a few candid snapshots of my human companions. They had proven to be as camera-shy as the animals. I had learned to be crafty. Crouching behind a boulder, telephoto lens in place, I saw Lucy sitting cross-legged on the shore, engaging in a debate with a puffin. She could imitate most birds’ cries well enough to cause confusion in their little minds. This one clearly thought she was another puffin encroaching on its turf. Presently another shape intruded into the frame. I adjusted the focus and saw red hair, a too-big windbreaker—Charlene.

I have not mentioned Charlene yet, since I haven’t been sure what to say. To begin with, she is young, even younger than Andrew and Lucy. Charlene is still in college. A mop of unruly red hair. Pale skin strewn with constellations of freckles. She is an intern, not a biologist. (For the record, Charlene is the only intern who has ever lasted more than a fortnight on the islands. She has been here three months already.) Her identity is effaced by her subordinate position, by the eagerness she displays whenever she is asked to help with the simplest task, from hosing down the Janus to itemizing the contents of the cupboards to making coffee. I have yet to get any sense of her personality.

Now, through my lens, I watched both women get to work. They were too far away for me to catch any of their conversation. It appeared that Lucy was teaching Charlene how to tag the birds. Lucy is a master at this tricky process: capturing a feathery body, holding it firmly but gently in both hands so it cannot peck her or injure itself, and attaching the orange band. Charlene was obviously nervous, her brow furrowed with concentration. Lucy spoke soothingly, patiently, as Charlene fumbled and frowned, letting bird after bird slip through her grasp. Suddenly, both women burst into laughter. I got it on film: Charlene’s head thrown back, her hair a crimson halo, and Lucy doubled over, clutching her stomach. Their mirth scared the remaining birds into flight. The flock swirled upward, a waterfall of wings.

I found myself distracted. The problem of Lucy has occupied my mind lately. I cannot figure it out. She is the belle of the Farallon Islands, the darling of the group. I have seen her giving Charlene a neck rub or offering to do the dishes when it’s Forest’s turn because he looks tired. I have observed her sitting on the couch with Galen and delighting over a ludicrous error they have stumbled upon in a reference book—the kind of thing that would only be discernible to a pair of biologists. Lucy laughs easily and loudly. She is open, cheerful, kind.

But not with me. It has taken me a while to catch on to the reality of the situation. To be frank, I was fooled at the start by her appearance. Plump and pink, she looks like the sort of woman who ought to be wearing an apron or kneeling in a garden, her hands deep in the earth. In her interactions with me, however, she has been odd from the beginning. Every so often, she will throw out a backhanded comment. (“Wow! That shirt is interesting.” “You must have great teeth, mouse girl. I can hear you chewing all over the cabin.”) Lucy will snicker when I trip on a loose floorboard or drop my spoon at the table. Withering looks. Covert eye rolls. I cannot read the riddle.

My roommates and I have the dynamic of a family, minus any semblance of warmth. We share a home. We see one another all day, every day. I must do my best with them, whether or not we get along. There is no privacy. If Mick is constipated, if Charlene has her period, if Andrew is feeling lustful, everyone knows about it. We each have our own roles. Galen: the stoic parent, ruling through benign neglect. Forest: the brainy son, forever at his books. Me: the shy stepchild, still finding her place in the pecking order. Within this group, Lucy might be the mean sister whose behavior is not obvious to her elders—who deals out punishment in pinches and slaps and then looks up innocently, saying, “Who, me?” She presents one face, hiding another, a double identity I am just beginning to perceive.