The Devil's Teeth
By Susan Casey, Henry Holt and Company, 2005

Try to make up a more forbidding locale than California’s Farallones Islands. Just try. I dare you. No matter what you come up with, it will not hold a candle to the real thing. Referred to affectionately as The Devil’s Teeth, these “islands” are really just big, pointy hunks of rock that stick up out of the Pacific a mere 27 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge. The islands are often shrouded in fog and pounded by gigantic waves, battered by high winds and bathed in uncomfortably cold air. Except for one modest flat spot on one of the islands, none of the Farallones so much as provides a comfortable place for humans to sit. Nowhere on any of the islands is there a safe place to land a boat. Oh, and let’s not forget to mention that the waters around the islands boast one of the world’s largest infestations of some of the biggest, hungriest Great White sharks on the planet.

The Farallones don’t seem like a nice place to visit, but, predictably, there’s a whole class of people who would go to extraordinary lengths to be able to hang out on these chunks of inhospitable rock. Susan Casey is one of those people. An editor with Time and Sports Illustrated Women magazine, she became intrigued when she saw a BBC documentary about a shark research project being conducted on Southeast Farallon. She decided that she wanted to write about the project, and she set about trying to get permission to do so.

The problem is that the Farallones are government property, and they are fiercely guarded. The reason, it seems, is that the islands are a wildlife sanctuary, one which would be threatened by an undisciplined influx of tourists. Consequently, the government bureaucracy holding the keys to the islands is extremely stingy in allowing anyone to set foot on the Farallones. Researchers are only allowed to operate within strict parameters and time limits, and one-day visitor passes for outsiders are very difficult to obtain. The government would very much like the public to forget that the Farallones exist.

But Casey was determined - she really wanted to get close to some big sharks - and she managed to obtain a permit to visit the islands. She met some of the conductors of the shark research project, including the ultra-dedicated Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson. The shark project, it turns out, is a nearly unofficial offshoot of the more official ornithological research project on the islands, which are home to astounding numbers of migrating sea birds. Since the authorities will allow basically no one to visit the island, ornithologists like Pyle have been forced to diversify, turning their scientific eyes to the other unique zoological opportunities offered by the Farallones. These bird scientists have spent their time gathering data on everything from rare bats and invertebrates to the giant sharks so that other scientists, who will never get a chance to see the animals firsthand, can learn something about the animals that interest them.

Into this tense scientific and meteorological climate comes Casey, with her journalistic eye. Unfortunately, on her first trip, she doesn’t get a good look at any sharks, so she is forced to try to worm her way back onto the islands, unofficially if necessary, and this is where her book gets really good.

Casey delves into the history of the islands, examining the early days of sea bird-egg profiteers and intrepid lighthouse tenders, and the eventual closing of the islands to the public. She looks at the conflict between the shark researchers and the commercial operators who put tourists into shark cages and drop them into the frigid water near the islands; although Casey’s sympathies certainly lie with the scientists, the haphazard and underfunded nature of the shark project makes it unclear why it is so much more valuable than the public awareness made possible by the commercial tourism operations.

Casey also wades through the tangential but fascinating territory of the bird research projects and the delightfully creepy ghostly legends surrounding the islands. She also uncovers a little known bit of trivia - that the waters around the Farallones have been a dumping ground for nuclear waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the deep-water grave of at least one ship made extremely toxic during atomic bomb tests - that perhaps explains why the off-limits Farallones seem more like a secret military-industrial city in the old Soviet Union than a typical wildlife refuge.

What makes Casey’s book such a page-turner, however, is the way that she involves herself in the story. Throwing aside journalistic objectivity in favor of her obsession with the islands and the sharks, she becomes a full-fledged character in the saga, in the manner of Susan Orlean or Jon Krakauer, and her book benefits from her enthusiastic, intimate and totally sincere account of events. She becomes such a major player in the story, in fact, that her presence and actions drive the plot and eventually threaten the very existence of the shark project that had fueled her obsession in the first place. She never intended it to be that way, and the unexpected paths that her narrative travels are what makes The Devil’s Teeth much more enjoyable than an objective journalistic project could ever have been.

Copyright 2005 Ad Media Inc.