ONE COLD SUMMER morning in 1985, a lone young woman came walking through the fog. The imprints of her hiking boots were the only tracks in the smooth, damp sand. Uncommonly tall and slim, her hips narrow as a boy’s, she was dressed in khaki pants that were just a little bit too short. She had a bag slung over her shoulder and wore a wind-breaker to keep out the moist air, her long brown hair held back from her face with a bandana. She carried a notebook tucked under her arm, and in her slender hands she held a high-frequency radio signal receiver. Her name was Sarah Allen, and she was there to count the harbor seals.
Though she was likely the only person present on more than ten miles of empty shoreline, the soft beeps coming from her receiver told her that she wasn’t exactly alone. The fog was so thick that she couldn’t see more than ten yards ahead of her. It’s like pea soup out here, she thought. Still, she knew they were there, even if she couldn’t see them; like benevolent ghosts lost in the ether, not far from her, rolling their plump bodies in the surf or stretched languorously on the shore. The seals. Her seals. She’d been observing them in some capacity for nine years now, ever since she was a teenage undergraduate at UC Berkeley studying with Starker Leopold. She was a research associate now for the Point Reyes Bird Observatory where she also worked as an administrative assistant, filing reports and fielding calls from volunteers. She discovered the organization one day while out in the field, when she happened upon their headquarters by chance and went in to ask for a glass of water. Despite the name, the group looked after more than just birds. Marine mammals were Sarah’s main interest, and she was learning to observe them under the tutelage of marine biologist David Ainley. Sarah didn’t have her PhD or even her master’s yet, but was studying towards them at UC Berkeley.
Her colleagues at the observatory described her as serious and exceedingly earnest; as someone who liked to laugh, but for whom levity did not always come easily. At times she seemed to vibrate with the kind of focused intensity only seen in those deeply in love with what they do. Burr Heneman, PRBO’s executive director during most of the time that she worked there, later described her as the kind of person who “wouldn’t lie even if you put a gun to her head.” He would not be alone in expressing that opinion.
As far as workplaces went, Sarah could have done worse than the rugged coastline of the Point Reyes National Seashore. Along the great arch of Drakes Bay, from the lighthouse to its rocky easternmost tip, it is never exactly the same beach. In winter the sand is sucked away from under the high sandstone cliffs and into the water, revealing dramatic rock formations that lie hidden from the summer tourists. When the winter tide is very low and very strong, you can sometimes see what remains of a shipwreck from the 1800s, the doomed Sarah Louise. Or maybe it’s the Samoa. Or maybe something else. Though I made multiple inquiries, the park staff was never completely sure. Somewhere, unseen under the sand, is a lost Spanish galleon called the San Agustín, its buried cabin still purportedly packed with silver. It wrecked on a night in November, when the rocks jut higher; a good time for tide pools but a bad time for ships.
Sarah followed the signals on her receiver towards the densest congregation of seals. Although they do head out into the open ocean, the seals need havens, like an estuary, to mate and raise their young. Without it, the pups are more vulnerable to predators, and can drown in the stronger, deeper water.
Despite the peninsula’s gentle beauty, the rocks and currents here can be deadly. In the decades after the Gold Rush, these waters were busy with schooners headed to the San Francisco markets, heavily laden with fish and casks of butter. And between their first voyages and the day that train transport replaced them, more than a few of these ships went down. In terms of commercial vessels, you won’t see much more than salmon trollers in Drakes Bay now, but even those wreck from time to time. This stretch of beach sees about one wreck per year. Within hours of running aground the hull is usually breached, and in less than a day the sucking sand will have swallowed up half of the vessel, while the surf splinters the rest into mulch. Even close to shore, the ocean is more violent than you’d think.
The beach where Sarah went to count her seals—on Drakes Beach and farther down, near the Limantour estuary—is a good beach for walking. On some days the sand is strewn with seaweed thick with swarming kelp flies, masses of dark brown and purplish tangles eight, ten, fifteen, even forty feet long. They have been ripped from the glooming offshore kelp forests during passing storms. Sometimes the sand will be smooth and firm, or rippled steeply down to the waves like a glassy staircase. Great heaps of foam will gather here, greenish and sickly. Other times a sudden abundance of perfect white sand dollars will be tossed up by the waves, scattered everywhere like an overturned treasure. Some days the sand will be dotted with living ladybugs blown out from the fields, and other times with skittering white feathers that slip out of your grasp as you reach down to try and collect them. The sand is alternately dark and flecked golden and metallic, or light and powdery. Or else a slick of seawater lies over it, especially late in the day when the tide is in, making a mirror for the pale sky. Walking over it on a clear evening, the ground beneath your feet is reflected light blue with swirls of orange and pink, like oil on a puddle. Most afternoons, the light dry sand blows over the dark wet sand like smoke.
Sarah was headed to the mouth of Drakes Estero, where the seals like to congregate. They rest and play and raise their pups there, hauling out on sandbars near where the estuary gives itself over to the Pacific Ocean in a twice daily back and forth of tides. Here the green-capped cliffs slope downwards on either side to reveal a wide expanse of open sand, vaguely lunar and desolate. Still it feels protected. On much of the beach there is a near-constant soft rolling of sea air that meets and envelops; air that has not touched land for thousands of miles.
Gingerly the Western Gulls, their wings outstretched, lift first one rosy foot and then the other from the wet sand, floating gently upward. If you raised your arms out and above you, leaning into that rush of air, it wouldn’t feel so very far from possible that you might be lifted in this way, too.
But despite the different kinds of days Sarah had spent on this beach, and there were many, today was a foggy one. The fog is common, especially in the summer, but not constant. Crouching, reaching, soft as mists or wet as rainclouds; ever-present at times, or rolling in suddenly like an ethereal invasion; unobtrusive, a simple graying of an otherwise sunny day, or else so thick as to take on a kind of mystical sentience. Fog, the watcher. Fog, the concealer and keeper of secrets. In fog like this the pale cliffs seem higher, disappearing as they do into the cloud cover.
The seals were emitting radio signals, from transmitters adhered to them by Sarah and a team of colleagues and specially subcontracted experts at the beginning of the summer. In June, she, David Ainley, and fellow researcher Lyman Fancher had captured twenty seals from inside the estuary. They used a long net set over a popular haul-out site, and in this way snagged fifty animals unharmed. They selected twenty, released the rest, and went about affixing radio transmitters to the bodies of the chosen ones. They dotted each animal’s back or heads with a splotch of quick-drying epoxy and affixed the disk-like transmitter package. The packs were small, a mere one by one-and-a-half inches, with a thirteen-inch flexible wire antenna. It was no easy feat, and required the help and cooperation of the National Seashore, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the California Department of Fish and Game, Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, and a number of scientists. These included another of Sarah’s mentors, Harriet Huber, and a biologist from UC Davis called Roberto Anima; he was studying eelgrass and pollutants in the estero. Now, though, they could finally get real answers about where the seals went, and when. Did they venture out into the Pacific and become more pelagic? Did they stick closer to home? Were they crossing into areas where they would be vulnerable to the gill net fishermen and other hazards? Sarah wanted to know. And, if she could manage it, she wanted to help them. They tracked the seals by hiking or driving along the coast with a yagi antenna to pick up the seals’ VHF radio signals. When the seals traveled farther, they’d fly out over the bay and the ocean in a small plane. Sometimes when Sarah and the other researchers would hike out to haul-out sites like Drakes Estero, they would stay there, observing, for twenty-four hours. The stated purpose of research such as this was to inform future management decisions of the park and, when necessary, influence environmental legislation.
The Observatory (now called Point Blue Conservation Science) was formed in 1965, when the details of the Point Reyes National Seashore were still being hashed out. The question of what wilderness meant and how it should be preserved was a notion in flux. For a time in the 1960s, the plan was to dam the neighboring Estero de Limantour to make a freshwater swimming hole with stocked trout to fish for, a snack bar and rental boats. Scientists and local birdwatchers, including PRBO, begged for the area to be preserved in its natural state instead. They proposed a “National Research Area,” the plan for which would later become the official wilderness designation it enjoys today. A national park might be able to dam up an estuary, with a snack bar and rental boats in it, but a wilderness area could not; a wilderness area was supposed to remain untouched.
The Observatory started small but grew quickly, bolstered by the burgeoning environmental movement. They were not purely an academic institution, nor strictly a research organization, but a more freewheeling combination of the two. Their goal was to raise awareness of environmental issues, mostly through the kind of long-term research projects that can be difficult to execute in more traditional venues. And, to help guide the growing body of environmental legislation. There was the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973, to name a few. A kind of momentum was underway in the country, to protect more and learn from past mistakes. To protect better.
However, when scientists took part in lobbying efforts, their work would often come under scrutiny and be accused of bias. Fair or not, these accusations dissuaded many scientists from acting as advocates when it came to public controversies. Still, one group that managed to finesse that tricky landscape and emerge victorious was the Point Reyes Bird Observatory itself, in its fight to prevent the slaughter of marine mammals and seabirds through an unregulated gill net fishing industry off the coast of California. In his 1989 article in Conservation Biology (“Scientists as Advocates: The Point Reyes Bird Observatory and Gill Netting in Central California”) James E. Salzman wrote that, when coupled with supportive legislation, the Observatory had shown that focused advocacy—“the presentation of relevant data and insistence that it be interpreted accurately and acted upon”—was an effective method of achieving environmental protection policies that were biologically sound.
By the time Sarah was monitoring her harbor seals via radio signal, the Observatory was going strong. In 1975, the annual budget was around $50,000. By the mid-1980s, it had grown to $860,000, and represented a well-respected voice in policy debates.
The gill net controversy gained momentum in the early 1980s. Dorothy Hunt, a PRBO volunteer living near Monterey, usually counted dead birds while walking along the beach near her home, as part of the Observatory’s Beached Bird Project. Sometimes there were no dead birds, and other times as many as five or six—which was a lot. Then one foggy July morning in 1982, she went out for her routine walk and counted 108. Their bodies were tangled up with the flotsam of seaweed, meaning they’d not died on shore, but in the water. Another volunteer, Frances Bidstrup, counted 185 dead birds on one of her walks that same month. According to PRBO director Burr Heneman, more than 1,500 dead birds were counted in a single day. As Salzman wrote: “Gill net fishing had come to Monterey Bay.”
The gill nets, brightly colored and innocent seeming, were effective at killing seabirds for the same reason they were good at catching fish. They are very hard to see underwater. The spaces in the mesh netting are big enough for a fish or a bird of the right size to poke a head through, but that’s it. When they try to back out, they become stuck. The fish are then hauled flapping onto the fishing boats while the birds, thrown back into the water, have already been drowned. The nets proved effective at entangling and drowning marine mammals like harbor seals too. Media reports at the time said that the gill netting industry had ballooned following an influx of Vietnamese immigrants after the Vietnam War, and noted that many of the gill net boats were manned by refugees from South Vietnam. However, Sarah says this isn’t really a fair assessment, since most of the people in charge of the boats were not Vietnamese, and the refugees were likely just taking what work was available to them.
When initial discussions for a legislative solution began, PRBO was able to use data from its Beached Bird Project to show that 90 percent of the spike in bird mortality could be attributed to the gill nets. Plus, the fishermen were moving north. In early June of 1982, two gill netting boats set their nets off Stinson Beach, just south of the Point Reyes National Seashore. The very next day, volunteers counted two hundred dead seabirds, two dead seals, and a dead baby harbor porpoise in the Point Reyes area. While the mammals’ deaths could not be conclusively attributed to the gill nets, it seemed like more than a coincidence and the effect was galvanizing.
The Observatory staff sprang into action. Burr traveled to Sacramento to persuade then–State Senator Henry J. Mello to expand the proposed legislative ban on gill nets to include Bay Area waters. He helped draft a bill that would give the California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG) broad authority over the types of equipment used, if that equipment was shown to be extensively injurious to marine life. But the bill was killed by lobbying efforts from the southern California seafood industry. The Observatory scientists, advocates and volunteers did not give up, and by the late 1980s, comprehensive legislation was in place. By working to shift the gill net fishermen into equally profitable fisheries with alternate, less harmful methods, the CDFG was able to impose wider restrictions to guard the seabirds and marine mammals that the PRBO had made it its mission to protect. Much of that was down to Burr.
In Sarah’s line of work, it was often hard not to get at least a little attached to the subjects. The observatory scientists, researchers and volunteers also studied elephant seals, and had charted the animals’ return to the Farallon Islands and surrounding waters since the beginning of the 1970s. On January 20, 1972, the first elephant seal female in a hundred years gave birth on Southeast Farallon Island, marking a return to their former habitat. They’d been driven to local extinction by sealers who hunted them for meat and high-quality oil used for making paint, lamps, soap, candles and mechanical lubricant. The observatory staff tagged the returning seals and their pups with numbers at first—Cow Four, Cow Five, and so on. Some also had distinctive markings or scars to help personalize them. These animals migrated far and wide, heading all the way into Russian waters before returning home to Northern California. Many had survived shark attacks, and were battle-scarred. Eventually, as the observatory crew became more familiar with the individual seals, they gave them nicknames: Scarface, Redeye, Power, Tarbelly.
“It became an exciting event, similar to greeting an old friend, when a known cow returned to the colony each year,” wrote Observatory scientist Steven D. Emslie in 1988. Steve, now a marine biology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, is a tall man with a friendly face and warm smile. He has since devoted his career to the study of seabirds, but was roped into monitoring the elephant seals for PRBO in the 1980s. At the time, the project’s longest-lived Farallon-born seal, a female, started life as “Pink 49” but later came to be called Abbey. She was a favorite of Steve and his colleague, Bill Sydeman, and was feisty and strong-willed. She didn’t like letting the researchers near her. She bred sporadically and, some years, didn’t come home to Point Reyes or the Farallones at all. An elephant seal cow usually lives for between thirteen and twenty-two years, and having fewer babies likely extended Abbey’s life. Biologist Harriet Huber, a mentor of Sarah Allen’s, wrote about Abbey’s behavior as well. But the seals tended to lose their tags over time, and Abbey was without any distinguishing scars to separate her from her peers. By the mid-1980s, her colony had grown substantially, with hundreds of elephant seal cows pupping there each year. Without her tag, it would be impossible to find her.
One winter, when Abbey was thirteen, Steve was standing on the beach, watching the first pregnant cows arriving for the breeding season from their long, pelagic vacations, when he noticed something.
“In the rocks well above the beach, something on the ground caught my eye,” he would write. The team sometimes recovered the tags of various seals at the haul-out sites, usually because the tag had simply fallen off somehow, perhaps in the course of a fight or amorous encounter. It was with mixed emotions that Steve saw the tag was pink, with “49” written on it. After thirteen years, they now had no way of knowing what Abbey was up to.
“We’ll never know what happened, but in a way I was glad to have found the tag,” Emslie wrote in 1988. “Now, instead of having her simply vanish from our records, presumed dead, I can look over the crowded pack of animals on Shell Beach each year and think that perhaps Abbey is still there.” Though long gone now, the mystery of her end would dull the edges of their good-bye.
The work of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory researchers was also trying and dangerous at times. Most of the crew, Sarah and Steve included, spent months out of the year on research vessels at sea, or living in spartan conditions on the rocky Farallones themselves. They were a youthful, happy, shaggy-looking bunch, sporting an abundance of long haircuts, beards and moustaches. They wore down vests and bandanas and plaid flannel. The archival group photos, showing people seated together at headquarters or clustered around spotting scopes on the shore, are a study in retro biologist chic. In one group photo, printed in a newsletter, Sarah is seen grinning happily with somebody’s floppy-eared puppy in her lap. In all of the photos there is a sense of camaraderie. If you’re going to be spending a month in a tiny windswept shack with someone, it’s a big plus if you get along.
Besides, as Steve Emslie would tell you matter-of-factly, the Farallones were haunted. This was especially true of the old lighthouse keeper’s cottage where the researchers stayed. That was how the stories went, anyway. According to Steve, it was haunted by the ghost of a woman from the nineteenth century.
“Back in the old sealing days, the sealers stayed out there and they . . . had a woman with them,” he later explained to me, euphemistically, over the phone. “They didn’t treat her very well, and she died.”
The ghost did not like men, which, considering her history, seemed reasonable. There was one room in the old house in particular that gave researchers the creeps. When male biologists stayed there, they’d sometimes report waking up with the strange sensation of something heavy sitting on their chest, unable to move or breathe properly. One night in the middle of the night, when everyone was in their beds, Steve swore he heard the front door of the old house creak open, and the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Still, the season for watching elephant seals was in the wintertime, when the whistling cold winds and cries of seabirds could easily stand in for the voices and movements of spirits.
The winter of 1983 was particularly bad. Record storms on the mainland and uncommonly rough seas left the Farallon researchers stranded without supplies. The door to the pumphouse blew off. Their radio antenna toppled in the wind. One of the elephant seal blinds washed into the ocean, the lighthouse railing collapsed, and the fascia of the researchers’ house fell off. Maybe the ghost of the sealers’ woman had finally had it with that old place. A rubber raft capsized, dumping a biologist into shark-infested waters. She survived, though the craft’s outboard motor didn’t. There were blackouts, loss of telephone service, and thwarted rescue attempts. Eventually, though they never completely ran out of food, the researchers did resort to eating ten pounds of frozen squid originally brought to feed to the seabirds.
Nevertheless, it was exhilarating. Writing about the experience, Harriet marveled at the strength and beauty of the raging ocean, seen at such close range. Burr had been a journalist before turning to ecological work, and managed to convince old colleagues to send the Channel 7 news helicopter out to the island on Christmas Day to bring supplies. Harriet later wrote that she enjoyed these winter storms on the island, with the ground under them stable amidst the chaos of the angry sea.
The Farallon Islands’ bedrock is made of granite, as is that of Point Reyes, which, in a geological sense, is just the largest island in the chain. Most of California’s deep earth is a carnival swirl of color and minerals called the Franciscan Complex; red cinnabar, green jade, aqueous blueschist and manganese ores ranging from black to shocking pink. Compared to that messy mix, Point Reyes and its attendant islands are austere and pure. Though it connects to the mainland, the peninsula is something of an island itself, perched as it is on the edge of the Pacific Plate. A dab of gold and green, it is scraping against the North American continent at California’s San Andreas Fault as it travels north. According to one theory, Point Reyes has been undulant in its trek, sinking beneath the water and then breaching again, like a whale making its incremental way up the coast. The movement isn’t gradual. The plates will lock together for many years and then, when the right amount of pressure has built up, lurch forward. In the great earthquake of 1906, fences near Point Reyes were split by a span of sixteen feet and the steam engine parked at Point Reyes Station shook so violently that it toppled over. The place where the ground actually fissured and opened up was directly underneath where the National Park Service now has its Point Reyes headquarters. Because of all this, there is a popular local notion that friction is therefore in the area’s blood.
(I remember the 1989 earthquake well. I was ten years old and sitting on a swing in the yard. Because my feet weren’t on the ground, I didn’t feel the ground shake. Instead I saw all of the trees on the valley hillside swaying violently, as if in the worst wind I’d ever witnessed. Then the aftershock came, and the trees shook again. The 1906 earthquake was ten times as strong as that.)
Twenty million years ago, the Point Reyes peninsula was down by Mexico. In another fifteen or twenty million years from now, Point Reyes will have traveled all the way up to Alaska, where the Pacific Plate is being sucked under the North American one. The process is called subduction, and a whole other plate, with who knows what continents on it, was already eaten by North America many millions of years ago. Only two little corners, north and south, remain unconsumed. This was the Farallon Plate, related to the Farallon Islands only in name, and its demise is what fueled the upthrusting creation of the Rockies and the Sierras, as one plate slid under another, pushing up the landscape. Its remaining corners are called Juan de Fuca in the north and Cocos in the south, but they are both really just Farallon leftovers. When the Pacific Plate ran up against ravenous America, instead of bowing down it began to slide past, going northward, its motion creating the earthquake-heavy Ring of Fire along the borders of the Pacific. But to the north, at Alaska, the Pacific Plate is subducting. When it reaches that point, Point Reyes will then be pulled down at the Aleutian Trench, into the sea and under the earth’s mantle. There it will be melted and turned into the molten fuel for a whole new volcanic mountain range, as yet unimagined.
For now, its fiery demise still a long way off, the peninsula is home to little tremors, shudders and shakes; earthquakes we feel and many we don’t, a reminder of this place’s particular transience.
Below the surface of Sarah’s day out with the seals, another kind of tension was starting to build.
The Point Reyes National Seashore was a relatively sleepy place in the 1980s, but with an unusual mix of uses. Agricultural operations, present since before the creation of the park, continued to function alongside hikers, campers and day-trippers, as well as working researchers like Sarah, Steve, Harriet and Burr. But the surface of that peaceful coexistence was beginning to show some cracks. The estuary where the harbor seals liked to haul out was also home to an oyster farm, run by the Johnson family since 1957. Charlie Johnson had been a wheat farmer in Oklahoma, driven west by the Dust Bowl with his three young sons. His second wife, Makiko, came from Japan, and together they had revolutionized West Coast oystering by importing Japanese oystering techniques using strings and stakes. There had already been a century of challenges in California oystering. However, some locals were starting to get angry about plastic debris from the farm that had started washing up on nearby beaches. Mostly, the litter consisted of plastic coffee can lids in the hundreds, which the Johnsons bought as rejects from a processing plant in Santa Rosa, to use as part of their oyster cultivation method. The lids were used as spacers and to steady the oyster stakes in the estuary’s soft bottom, to keep them from tipping over and suffocating the oysters in the mud. The farm did try to keep the lids from dispersing, they told the press, but the lids often escaped their grasp or got stuck, and later washed out to sea with the tide. One man, a surfer who lived nearby, complained to the park that if he walked along the shore he would quickly be able to fill a shopping bag with the oyster farm’s debris. It wasn’t exactly hundreds of dead birds slain via gill nets, but nevertheless it wasn’t a very welcome sight.
Sarah encountered the litter from the oyster farm, too. While she walked along the beaches she saw the lids, but also plastic tubes and mesh bags. She picked them up whenever she could, knowing that such marine debris could be harmful to animals. When she started working out at Point Reyes, she’d been told that the farm was set to leave at some point in the future, and that the area would be converted to protected wilderness. Now, she doesn’t recall quite what she thought of that eventuality then. She was engaged in research, and not focused on policy, she told me. Since all this wouldn’t happen until 2012, when the farm’s forty-year reservation of use permit was set to expire, it still seemed like a very long way off.