THE FARALLON INVERSION

Ten-year-old Dan Evans crouched beneath the expansive wing of a retired B-25 bomber, scrubbing an oily smudge from the hangar floor. The bulk of the right engine and three-bladed propeller loomed above him.

Then he heard it.

A low, menacing rumble–the unmistakable growl of a 290-horsepower engine–set the air vibrating. Dan froze, rag in hand, as a silver 1958 Corvette Stingray tore into view, engine roaring as it shot across the tarmac like a fighter plane on a strafing run.With a screeching, brake-assisted drift, the car spun a 180, sunlight glinting off its polished hood, and slid to a sudden stop.

Killing the engine, the 33-year-old driver swung his lanky frame out of the car, planting one foot on the passenger seat, and stepping over the convertible’s door onto the Rep-Air apron.

He cut a fine figure as he strode into the hangar: tall, athletic, with a thick shock of wavy blond hair that contrasted with piercing blue eyes. He wore a brown leather A-2 flight jacket, collar turned up. The cuffs of his crisply pressed chocolate-brown cargo pants disappeared into Russet service shoes; their tan laces tied perfectly in double-knots.

He looked every inch the WWII fighter pilot he was. His confident, outgoing nature, striking good looks, and devil-may-care grin had turned the heads of many a French girl in Mourmelon-le-Grand, where he flew a P-47 Thunderbolt for the 406th Fighter Group.Riddling German bombers with .50-

caliber machine guns, he’d sent more than one Luftwaffe pilot to an early grave.

It was RJ. Dan watched in awe, his hero worship as clear as day.

“How the hell are you, Walt?” RJ grinned, sauntering up to Dan’s father.Walt knelt by the Cessna 172's right tire, spun the wheel to test the recently packed bearings, then released the jack and lowered it.

He stood, facing RJ, wiping his hands with a shop rag. “Taking the Stearman up today?” He nodded in the direction of the PT-17 biplane sitting chocked next to the B-25 where Dan was working.

RJ walked to the WWII Army Air Corp trainer, and ran an admiring hand down its shiny yellow fuselage.

“Thought I’d take her for a spin,” RJ said. “She gassed up?”

“Topped off with a full 46 gallons of 130 octane.”

“Hey, Danny,” RJ called, gesturing the boy over. He reached a hand inside his flight jacket and pulled out a stick of hard candy striped like the red and white spirals of a barbershop pole.

Dan hurried over and stood next to his father, accepting the candy stick RJ handed him with a grin.

“So how ‘bout I take Danny Boy up with me today?”

Dan’s father glanced at his son, then back at RJ. His raised eyebrows conveyed an unspoken stipulation.

“No acrobatics,” RJ promised, crossing his heart with the forefinger of his right hand. “Just a short-haul sight-seeing trip, that’s all.”

Standing to the side of the two men, Dan noticed RJ had his left hand behind his back, fingers crossed.

“To where, to see what?” Dan’s father asked.

“The Farallons,” RJ replied.

“What’s a Farallon?” Dan asked.

RJ flashed him a smile.

“"Lohss fah-rah-yoh-ness"” he replied, affecting a Spanish accent. “Some islands named by some Spanish friar in the 1600s. Means ‘the cliffs’. Five nautical miles of steep peaks jutting up from the Pacific. Ships piled up on them so often sailors nicknamed them the Devil’s Teeth.” *

He laid a strong hand on Dan’s shoulder. “Lots to see out there. Pinnipeds and sea birds every-

where.” He caught Dan’s blank look. “Pinnipeds…you know, elephant seals, sea lions, even a few fur seals.”

Dan’s father looked at his fidgeting son, whose eyes, bright with excitement, pleaded with his father. They were riveted on his. “You can take the kid up if he wants to go.”

*There were 14 shipwrecks on the Farallons in the 1800s, 12 in the 1900s up to 1958.

Dan sprinted to the Stearman, yanked the chocks from the tires, then helped his father and RJ roll it out of the hangar onto the apron just beyond the Corvette.

RJ patted the side of the Stearman. “I trained in one of these babies at Randolph Airfield in Texas before going overseas in World War II,” RJ explained, then added with a grin, “I put in for Avenger Field up in Sweetwater, but got turned down.”

Dan’s father added with a knowing grin, “Avenger was used exclusively to train the Women’s Air Service pilots.”

Dan looked wide-eyed at RJ who just grinned and shrugged.

“Can’t blame a guy for trying,” he laughed. He lifted Dan up by his armpits and stood him on the Stearman’s lower left wing, close to the fuselage. “Climb in the front seat, kid. Don’t touch any of the controls. I’ll fly her from the rear one.”

RJ double-strapped Dan into his seat, handed him a set of WWII vintage Polaroid flying goggles, and helped him connect the rubber Gosport Tube to them so he could hear the pilot’s voice. The instrument panel’s altimeter, air speed indicator, and fuel gauge were all familiar to Dan; he’d grown up around aviation and had flown several times with his father.

RJ stepped down the wing to the rear cockpit, grasped the edge of the fuselage with one hand and vaulted in.

I can’t believe I’m flying with a WWII ace! He watched the ailerons near the lower wingtips flip up and down, and felt the rudder and elevator on the Stearman’s tail section thunk back and forth as RJ tested his stick and pedals.

“We’ll be cruising at about 96 knots kiddo,” RJ called out, “Be over the

Farallons in about 30 minutes.”

Getting the pilot’s thumbs up, Dan’s father hand-propped the propeller twice to drain any oil that might have pooled in the Stearman’s seven-cylinder, 220-horsepower radial piston engine.

“Contact!” RJ yelled. Dan’s father retreated a safe distance. With the electric ignition engaged,

the engine coughed, the prop spun sluggishly twice, then the engine coughed again, caught, and roared into life.

* * *

Dan had crossed the Bay Bridge as a passenger in his parents’ Pontiac, but had never seen it from the air. The traffic below looked like Matchbox die-cast toy cars.The arrow on the altimeter in front of Dan pointed to 2,000 feet as they passed over the bay, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and heading due west out to sea.

The jagged tips of the Farallon cliffs began to appear on the

horizon. Twenty minutes later he understood why sailors called

them the Devil’s Teeth. The only sign of human habitation

among the ominous granitic spikes was the Southeast Farallon Island lighthouse. Other than that solitary stone-and-brick tower, the islands appeared deserted and forbidding.

“Islands of the Dead, the Miwok and Ohlone tribes call them,” RJ’s voice came through the tube. “They believed the spirits of their dead haunted them. Didn’t stop 19th-century sealers from killing thousands for meat and fur.President Roosevelt made them a Reserve to stop the slaughter.”

The Stearman had been slowly descending while RJ talked. When the arrow on Dan’s altimeter pointed at 1,000 feet, RJ spoke again.

“The FAA doesn’t want us going lower and disturbing the wildlife, but hell, we want a better look.”

Dan watched the altimeter arrow continue dropping.500 feet! RJ had gone silent, and as the Devil’s Teeth loomed ominously closer, Dan had a frightening thought. Has RJ passed out?!

He grabbed the end of the Gosport Tube and jammed it to his lips. “RJ! RJ!”No answer.

Then he remembered; the pilot couldn’t hear him. The tube was strictly a one-way comm device.

Suddenly the control stick between his knees shifted as RJ banked the Stearman’s left wings down left, as the pilot continued his slow descending, counterclockwise circuit around the big island.

“See ‘em?” RJ yelled excitedly through the tube.Dan twisted in his seat enough to see the pilot’s left arm pointing down at the frothing white shoals around the island’s rocky shoreline.

It was teeming with a menagerie of nesting seabirds, interspersed among lazily sunning elephant seals and sea lions who lay languorously fanning themselves with pectoral flippers.

Dan didn’t know all the names of the birds, but he recognized the ungainly brown pelicans, the diving cormorants, the black and white puffins surfacing just offshore with small fish in their orange beaks, paddling frantically away from the stocky gulls swooping in to steal their catch.

He breathed a sigh of relief as the Stearman leveled off, but his relief was short-lived. He glanced again at the altimeter…200 feet! Next the airspeed indicator. 83 knots! He began to sweat, semi-fogging his goggles. We’re going to stall and drop right out of the sky!

When he looked down at South Farallon he sucked in a breath and held it; they were flying lower than the glass windows at the top of the lighthouse! He looked back at the shoals and recoiled backward so hard his head slammed against the fuselage.

A great white shark seeming as large as a submarine exploded into the air, its rows of serrated white razor-sharp teeth snapping shut on a hapless, low-flying pelican. In a split second, predator and prey plunged under the salt water surface.He shuddered at the sheer violence of the attack.

“Whoo hoo!” RJ whooped through the tube as the Stearman banked steeply left.

Dan yanked the adjustable seat lever and dropped hard. He jammed both elbows into the fuselage, wedging himself in.Chin resting on the curved trim of the cockpit, he couldn’t take his eyes off the drama unfolding below.

A dozen or more of the apex marine predators fearsomely prowled the island shallows, with shark after shark clamping vise-like jaws on pinniped and seabird alike in a feeding frenzy that tinged the water with crimson.

Dan double-checked his seat belt straps and tried to scrunch even lower.Then he remembered learning about the Red Triangle in school. Two vertices, one from Big Sur on the south, the other from

Bodega Bay on the north, converged on the Farallon Islands, completing the triangle. He’d read that 38% of all U.S. shark attacks occurred just 200 feet below him!

Suddenly the nose of the Stearman pitched up slightly, both wings on Dan’s left suddenly tilted to a precise 90 degrees, standing them on a knife edge, slamming him painfully into the side of the cockpit, his seatbelts digging in to both shoulders.

A second 90-degree left pivot made him wish he’d peed before they’d taken off. Shoulder straps were all that kept gravity from pitching him out of the plane and turning him into shark chum. RJ kept flying around the island at 200 feet—upside down!

If I fall out and get eaten by sharks my dad’s going to kill me!

His terror was tangible; blood rushed to his head, his heart pounded, he seemed to float in his seatbelt straps, vertigo set his head spinning, and his breath came in sharp, rapid gasps. The jagged peaks below seemed poised to rip him out of the sky like the maw of a great white. The reddish tinge in the coastal froth was spreading.

He suddenly remembered. RJ’s left hand behind his back, fingers crossed! Oh man, wait’ll my dad finds out…

Suddenly the biplane’s radial engine coughed once…twice…then a third time, and Dan’s heart leaped into his mouth as the Stearman’s airspeed hiccupped.

“Hang tight kid!” RJ’s unflappable voice snaked through the tube. The Stearman stood on its two right wing tips, then executed the final 90-degrees snap rotation of a four-point roll. Right side up again!

“Hey, kiddo, you beaded up, digging it, or both?” came through the tube.

Dan lifted his goggles slightly to let the sweat-caused fog dissipate.He wiped the salty moisture from his face with his free hand. There was a knot in the pit of his stomach, his shoulders burned from the chafing of the seatbelt straps, and his mouth tasted of stomach acid. The last thing he wanted RJ to know was he’d been so scared he’d almost wet his pants. He raised both hands high, giving the pilot two thumbs up.

“Attaboy! Perfect four-point at Cherub 2!” RJ yelled back. The Stearman came around east, accelerating in a tight 180. “Let’s firewall this crate and get this blue water hop headed home!”

Dan’s airspeed indicator climbed quickly to 108 knots. He leaned limply against his seat back. Although they’d been in the air for only an hour and a half, it felt much longer. Dan breathed a relieved sigh as the Golden Gate loomed up in the near distance, followed by the Bay Bridge, the packed buildings of the East Bay, then Oakland Airport’s North Field 15/33 runway dead ahead.

RJ jockeyed the ailerons and rudder to compensate for a bit of crosswind, then made a smooth touchdown. He taxied up to the Rep-Air apron, cut the ignition. The propeller slowed to a stop, the engine coughed once, banging out a final plume of black carbon exhaust, then went quiet.

RJ climbed out and up the wing, reaching down to disconnect the Gosport Tube and unbuckle Dan’s restraining straps. Uncramping himself out of his seat, Dan stepped out of the cockpit one leg at a time. Standing on the wing, swallowing down the urge to throw up, his first steps on rubbery legs were wobbly. Mortified, he had to move down the wing, hand over hand on the fuselage, to stay steady.

RJ hopped to the ground, turned, and gestured for him to jump. He caught Dan under the armpits and lowered him to the tarmac. Dan leaned against the plane’s fuselage, waiting to regain his balance.

“What’s Cherub 2?” Dan asked out of the blue.

The pilot quickly tapped his lips twice with a forefinger.

“Not so loud, kid, your old man’s coming.”

Dan’s father was walking through the open hangar doors toward them, just out of earshot.

“Two hundred feet,” RJ explained sotto voce.He put a steadying arm around Dan’s shoulders and led him toward the ’58 Corvette.

“Buy you lunch, pal, if you don’t tell your old man about our Farallon aerobatics.”

Dan brightened. “At Frank’s deli in San Leandro?” he bargained hopefully. “With a big slice of fresh strawberry cream pie for dessert?”

“You’re on,” RJ grinned.