“Thirty ecologists.”
Her smile is quick, grateful — he can always lighten the mood. “Yeah,” she says, “I think that’d be about right.”
He’s smiling now too, suspended there above the perspective line of the table like a figure in the still-life painting she’s composing behind her eyelids: the pita on the counter, the late sun breaking through to slant in through the window and inflame the stubble of his cheek, the freeway gone and vanished along with the mood of doom and gloom she’d brought with her into the front room. All is well. All is very, very well. “But I just wanted to be sure,” he says, breaking the spell, “in case you want me out front for crowd control.” He gives it a beat, reaching out to take her hand and run his thumb over her palm, to and fro, caressing her, bringing her back. “No rat lovers, though. Right? Are we agreed on that?”
On the second of December, 1853, the captain of the SS Winfield Scott, a sidewheel steamer that had left San Francisco the previous day for the two-week run to Panama, made an error in judgment. That error, whether it was the result of hubris, overzealousness or a simple mistake of long division, doomed her, and as the years spun out, doomed generations of seabirds too. She had been launched just three years earlier in New York for the run between that city and New Orleans, but in 1851 she was sold and pressed into service on the West Coast, where passenger demand had exploded after the discovery of gold in northern California. Built for heavy seas, some 225 feet long and 34½ feet abeam, with four decks and three masts, she was a formidable ship, named for Major General Winfield Scott, lion and savior of the Mexican War, a gilded bust of whom looked out over her foredeck with a fixed and tutelary gaze. On this particular trip, she carried some 465 passengers and $801,871 in gold and gold dust, as well as several tons of mail and a full crew. Where she picked up her rats, whether in New York or New Orleans or alongside the quay in San Francisco, no one could say. But they were there, just as they were present on any ship of size, then and now, and they must have found the Winfield Scott to their liking, what with its dining salon where up to a hundred people at a time could eat in comfort, with its galleys and larder, its cans of refuse waiting to be dumped over the side and all the damp sweating nooks and holes belowdecks and up into the superstructure where they could live in their own world, apart from the commensal species that provided them with all those fine and delicate morsels to eat. There might have been hundreds of them on a ship that size, might have been a thousand or more, for that matter — no one could say, and the ones that turned up in the traps set by the stewards were mute on the subject.
Captain Simon F. Blunt was a man of experience and decision. He was familiar with the waters of the channel, having been a key member of the team that had surveyed the California coast two years earlier, shortly after the territory was admitted to the union. Coming out of San Francisco the previous day, he’d encountered heavy seas and a stiff headwind, which not only put the ship off schedule but kept the majority of the passengers close to their bunks and out of the drawing room and dining salon. In order to make up time, he elected to enter the Santa Barbara Channel and take the Anacapa Passage between Santa Cruz and Anacapa, rather than steaming to the seaward of the islands, a considerably greater distance. Normally, this would have been an admirable — and expeditious — choice. Unfortunately, however, while dinner was being served that evening, fog began to set in, a frequent occurrence in the channel, resulting from the collision of the California current, which runs north to south, with the warmer waters of the southern California countercurrent, a condition that helps make the channel such a productive fishery but also disproportionately hazardous to shipping. As a result, Captain Blunt was forced to proceed by dead reckoning — in which distance is calculated according to speed in given intervals of time — rather than by taking sightings. Still, he was confident, nothing out of the routine and nothing he couldn’t handle — had handled a dozen times and more — and by ten-thirty he was certain he’d passed the islands and ordered the ship to bear to the southeast, paralleling the coast.
Half an hour later, running at her full speed of ten knots, the Winfield Scott struck an outcropping of rock off the north shore of middle Anacapa, tearing a hole in the hull and igniting an instantaneous panic amongst the passengers. People were flung from their berths, baggage cascaded across the decks, lanterns flickered, shattered, died, and the unknowable darkness of the night and the fog took hold. No one could see a thing, but everyone could feel and hear what was happening to them, the water rushing in somewhere below and the ship exhaling in a series of long ratcheting groans to make room for it. As they struggled to their feet and made their way out into the mobbed corridors, terrified of being overtaken and trapped belowdecks — water sloshing underfoot, the hands of strangers grasping and clutching at them while they staggered forward over unseen legs and boots and the sprawl of luggage, spinning, falling, rising again, and always that grim hydraulic roar to spur them — there was an immense deep grinding and a protracted shudder as the hull settled against the rock. Curses and screams echoed in the darkness. A child shrieked for its mother. Somewhere a dog was barking.
The officer of the watch, his face a pale blanched bulb hanging in the intermediate distance, sent up the alarm, and the captain, badly shaken, ordered the ship astern in an attempt to back away from the obstruction and avoid further damage. The engines strained, an evil tarry smoke fanning out over the deck till it was all but impossible to breathe, the great paddle wheel churning in the murk as if it were trying to drain the ocean bucket by bucket, everything held in suspension — the captain riveted, the officers mouthing silent prayers, the mob thundering below — until finally the ship broke loose with a long bruising sigh of splintering wood. She was free. Trembling down the length of her, lurching backward, but free and afloat. It must have been a revivifying moment for passengers and crew alike, but it was short-lived, because in the next instant the ship’s stern struck ground, shearing off the rudder and leaving her helpless. Almost immediately she began to list, everything that wasn’t secured careening down-slope toward the invisible rocks and the dim white creaming of the breakers four decks below.
Captain Blunt, at war with himself — lives at stake, his career ruined, his hands quaking and his throat gone dry — gave the order to abandon ship. By the light of the remaining lanterns he mustered his officers and crew to see to an orderly evacuation, but this was complicated by the gangs of desperate men — prospectors who’d suffered months and in some cases years of thirst, hunger, exhaustion, lack of female company and the comforts of civilization to accumulate their hoards over the backs of sweat-stinking mules — swarming the upper deck, dragging their worn swollen bottom-heavy satchels behind them and fighting for the lifeboats without a thought for anything but getting their gold to ground. At this point, the captain was forced to draw his pistol to enforce order even as the stern plunged beneath the waves and ever more passengers emerged from belowdecks in a mad scrum, slashing figures in the dark propelled by their shouting mouths and grasping hands. He fired his pistol in the air. “Remain calm!” he roared over and over again till his voice went hoarse. “Women and children first. There’s room for all. Don’t panic!”