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Published: April 25th 2016
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Six thousand Western Gulls squawked across the heat baked crust of cliffs that was Anacapa. The day-trippers were leaving the island as we labored with our tent amid the relentless heat without a single shade tree. The island was less than a one hour boat ride from the Ventura coast, yet California seemed hazy and distant, a blurry line of something vague, somewhere we had been in the distant past.
Anacapa was a small sliver of land, actually a set of four islets and a dozen smaller rocks on the way to the main islands. Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa stole the show, each easily fifty times the size of small Anacapa and boasting ranges of diminutive mountains, friendly island foxes, miles upon miles of hiking and long sandy beaches.
But Anacapa was the gateway, the beacon and sentinel of the coastal channel. A fatal ship wreck in 1850 had led to the erection of a lighthouse and the tenements of a small Coast Guard outpost. The settlement was so close to the shore yet divided by massive cliffs and a waterless existence forcing nearly all of the subsistence to be a delivered difficulty. It would prove to be
the last light beacon built by the US Lighthouse Service.
The Pacific was mostly calm as we left Oxnard harbor, leftover swells from the prior day’s winds knocked the
Island Packers boat to and fro, if only gently. A single dolphin came alongside, enjoying the eddying wake as his relatives created bait balls in the distance where crowds of gulls and cormorants flocked and dove.
We bobbed at the port, a wall of metal and concrete smashed against a cliff in a cul-de-sac of crags that felt more at home in
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as port of call for Nemo’s
Nautilus. The boat rose and fell as the crew assisted the thirty or so visitors up a rusted ladder and onto the dock. Another 150 steps up a zig-zag of ladders and walkways put one at the top of the cliffs. Bill, the island Ranger gave a speech to the crowd, about the rules of the island, a manner mild peppered and with a few jokes.
The few miles of trails that existed were easily conquered. It was a strange place; the entire island viewable from almost anywhere, an endless series of vantage points. The
rest of the islandets were a handful of equal sized parts and rocks that spun like a spine twisting eastward, inaccessible due to the never ending cliffs. The water below at the base of the stone walls was something of a transplant from the tropics; crystalline and clear all the way to the seafloor.
The island emptied of the majority of its inhabitants just as the wind was kicking up, the crescendo building as the sun set. The white tips raged offshore.
Zach had brought a steak, bone-in and all as he cooked it on the lid of a pot that Garrett and I had boiled water for our now sad looking freeze-dried camper’s fare. The steak was beyond excellent, as far as meat prepared on an isolated island was concerned. But as the wind threatened to tear our tent away from the ground and send it flying into oblivion, a gull took advantage of our absence and snatched the remains of the steak-bone between its beak. Three of his companions jumped him, vying for the stolen goods, every bird for themselves, another two dozen joined in, all pandemonium began to break loose. It was a feeding frenzy
of seagulls, pulling each other down as beaks snatched tails, the bone flying from one bird to another. I was starting to think that we were on the wrong side of a certain Hitchcock film turned real, until in a move of desperation one bird grabbed the steak-bone and swallowed it in one fell swoop. We gasped and laughed as the mob of white, frantic wings abated. That gull was set to receive a surprise, having swallowed a seven inch bone of substantial girth. Death or the most painful of gastrointestinal consequences were in his future.
We stood at Inspiration Point, the far east end of the island, looking at the rest of the islets as the sun pushed beyond the horizon. The sky blazed red as three dozen gulls sat on drifts of wind above us, changing altitude but staying in place, seemingly enjoying the free ride that the invisible currents were producing. One by one they turned right and hooked onto a breeze that was pushing in the opposite direction and flew towards the setting sun. It was the only of the eight channel islands to have a non-Spanish name, a derivative of the Chumash language (the
local native people) translated roughly as
mirage island. Being the only humans present as far as we could see added to the other-worldly feel, it seemed we were part of a mirage, something distant and forgotten.
The wind howled as we stared at the sky and finished a bottle of Irish whiskey. We laid on the picnic tables while attempting and mostly failing to identify the distant constellations. If not for the bright pale moon, it would have been the perfect view; unobstructed in every direction, a complete night sky panorama from where we laid.
The wind shook the tent through the night. The gulls continued to mate and make noise, as a pair sounded as if they were on top of our tent. Zach, in another surprise move had packed a dozen eggs and scrambled them in the morning on the pot-lid, heated over a single butane lighter. The opportunistic and cannibalistic gulls sat, watching and waiting.
Bill Faulkner, our ranger, came by again the in the morning. It was his last week of work, he was retiring.
No, he said,
I didn’t write the Sound the Fury, he chuckled, he just had been given the
same name as the writer who had helped draw the antebellum South and former Confederacy into modern recognition. It was only a coincidence. He told us about working on the northern edge of Alaska; the Inuit communities and drastic changes in sunlight and weather as the seasons changed. I asked if he knew of a Starbucks on the island for we had all forgotten coffee. Ten minutes later we were standing in his bunkhouse as he was boiling water for instant coffee, a god-send. Our conversation veered. He seemed amused but didn’t completely reject the idea of cloning Columbian Mammoths and reintroducing their pygmy cousins to the islands.
We re-circled the island paths, spotting several nests with large black and grey speckled eggs that blended into the shrubs and weeds. The mother-birds backed away but yelled at us to be on our way. The gulls gathered on Anacapa, all three thousand breeding pairs (the largest colony of Western Gulls in existence) to breed and nest since it was devoid of any natural predators. The rest of the islands held foxes and skunks that regularly munched on their eggs. An invasive colony of Golden Eagles that had since been dispatched
had hunted the birds in the past, pushing them westward to Anacapa .
We were set to leave. Zach napped upright, leaning against a bench at the base of a massive crane that stood one hundred and fifty one steps above the landing area. We jumped from the ramparts the day before, splashing into the freezing cove. The water rolled across our paths, the visibility was poor compared to the rest of the island’s inaccessible beaches. Overhead the cove was all fifty foot tall cliff-faces, cragged and holed as gulls and cormorants darted overhead.
Island Packers arrived, the boat engines pushed it against the vertical dock as we climbed down and onto the bow. The afternoon was warm and the waters calm as the boat cut its way back to Oxnard, leaving the strange little castle of cliffs and birds to its quiet and lonesome existence. In all certainty, it was a mirage island.
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