Island Life

They say that no man is an island, but Lyndal Lee Laughrin comes close.

He lives and works on a 23-mile-long island off the Ventura County coast. To most people, Santa Cruz Island is a mist-shrouded mystery in the ocean, but to Laughrin, it is his home and his passion. He has been offshore for 36 years--longer than anyone else living there--and has no plans to leave.

Fifty-seven years is too young to ponder his end, but were he to be buried one day with the cattle hands and ranchers who once ran great herds across the island and now lie corralled in a small cemetery beside a red-brick chapel, that would suit Laughrin just fine.

Some folks visit a place and think they know it because they snapped a photo, ate a meal, spent the night. But Laughrin, a cowboy-turned-biologist has as intimate a relationship with rugged Santa Cruz as one could have, short of becoming a scrub jay or island fox.

His experienced eyes see nature’s ways, how native buckwheat reclaimed hills mowed by more than a century of grazing, the way wild pigs spread fennel across canyons, and the ebb and flow of creeks. This land of the sea has no greater admirer, no more devoted steward and no more eager student.

Laughrin is director of the UC Santa Cruz Island Reserve, which is part sanctuary, part laboratory. It is one of 26 such reserves in California established so researchers can study the environment without fear that bulldozers will wipe out their work.

He never planned to be on the island this long, but then again he cannot recall a time that he wanted off for good. Scientists often don’t have much truck with abstractions like providence, but looking back at his life, Laughrin may well have been destined to be here.

“It fits so well, I haven’t left yet,” Laughrin said.

The commute to Laughrin’s office is like no other, a trick of planning that would give military commanders fits. Indeed, for years the Navy was the only reliable transportation to Santa Cruz, but nowadays aircraft and charter boats provide transport, sometimes.

On a light plane buzzing over the Santa Barbara Channel, the flight is low enough to spot dolphins and sea lions dunking in the waves below, before the aircraft shakes off wind gusts and zeros in on a steep airstrip that is a mere patch in the great valley on the island’s east end. A quiet prayer, a generous bounce and the propellers throttle down upon arrival at Laughrin’s island.

Laughrin arrives in his company car, a four-wheel Ford pickup with a shattered windshield and faded red paint.

“You guys ready?” he inquires, and begins loading gear. That’s his style--direct, few words, straight to the task. His mannerisms and appearance are like nature itself: little fluff, maximum efficiency.

It is dry this time of year, and the single-lane road to Laughrin’s office is dusty. The only traffic on the 62,000-acre island is an occasional jeep ferrying work crews to one project or another. He drives beneath towering eucalyptus groves planted long ago when Ed Stanton, and later his son, Carey, ran the Santa Cruz Island Company. The Nature Conservancy acquired 90% of the island as a nature preserve in 1988. The truck rumbles past the old sheep-shearing shed and the milking barn, that, like the chapel, are remnants of the late 19th century when cowboys lived here and raised sheep and cattle.

“When they started getting a lot of sheepherders out here, I guess they needed to build a church to keep them in line,” Laughrin remarks, concentrating on the dirt road.

Laughrin wears a thin beard, neatly trimmed, that is more silver than the hair beneath his khaki bush hat. His frame is lean, built for walking, and his neck is dark as coffee and creviced from long days in the sun. When he talks, he gazes into the landscape, blue eyes fixed like apertures on distant objects.

About 1,000 researchers from all over the world come here annually, lured to the island much as Charles Darwin was drawn to the Galapagos, to marvel at the simplified but peculiarly diverse ecology. At Santa Cruz, isolation from the mainland has at one time or another produced runt-size mammoths, foxes no bigger than cats, and a forest of bishop pines, bonsai-like conifers common to California’s North Coast but left behind here after glaciers retreated.

Scientists come to study the living and the nonliving, including ants, Indian middens, golden eagles, marine mammals, rocks, nine endemic plants, most anything they can get their hands on.

The hub for all this inquiry is Laughrin’s study center in the great valley, which was formed by an earthquake fault that split the island like an ax blow. It’s a modest place, with bunkhouses and a kitchen and showers. There are fossils in the lobby, photos of jeeps stuck in ravines on the bulletin board and a copy of “Wings: Essays on Invertebrate Conservation” in the men’s room.

Laughrin’s job is to get scientists and other guests to and from the research station and make sure they have what they need when they arrive. Some days his duties are noble, other days mundane.

He might spend one day repairing a jeep axle or fixing the plumbing. He might count how many foxes remain after eagle attacks. He once rescued tourists from a shipwreck and a brush fire in the same day. He takes people on jeep tours to acquaint them with the island environment and history. Some evenings he lectures university students who come for field trips. In the early years, he helped build the center and maintained most of it before hiring a pair of handymen.

Celebrities, from Jane Fonda to Ringo Starr to Barry Goldwater, have visited. On one trip, he drove former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to a windy ridge with an entourage of bodyguards. “Her hair was sprayed to the max, I mean it looked like a helmet,” Laughrin chuckled. “We get to the top and she says, ‘My goodness, it’s so brushy. Is this because of drought?’ So I explained to her that this was a Mediterranean climate and chaparral always looks like this.”

One time, a research partner brought an assistant, Ann Bromfield, whom Laughrin met, courted and eventually wed in 1986. They spend 80% of their days on the island in a modest tan house with a red roof but no TV or Internet. They enjoy horses, opera, astronomy and sailing to islands around the world and Mexico.

Diplomacy is a big part of Laughrin’s job. The island is vast and has many constituents, including the University of California, The Nature Conservancy, National Park Service, Navy, recreational users and fishermen. “You do a lot of learning on the job,” Laughrin said.

He took the position in 1970 after spending six years helping as a ranch hand and getting to know the late Carey Stanton. When the previous reserve manager left to make money on vineyards, Laughrin stepped in as successor.

He earned advanced degrees at UC Santa Barbara, studying island foxes and mockingbirds, but he realized the ladder to academic success required frequent publishing and no small measure of self-promotion. Turned off by that approach, Laughrin was looking for a way to stay involved with research while helping students and other scientists and keeping a comfortable distance from university politics and bureaucracy. An island separated by 25 miles of water from UC Santa Barbara seemed the perfect job.

“This isn’t publish-or-perish out here. It was the path of least resistance for me,” Laughrin said. “You like it, you keep moving in a direction and before you know it, you’re deep into it. It’s home. There aren’t many better combinations of life, work and pleasure, and they pay me to do it.”

Wild lands have always tugged at Laughrin. As a boy growing up outside Salinas, he worked with his father, a rancher, and spent long days exploring the hill country of Central California when he wasn’t branding cattle or mending fences. When the young cowboy went to college, he excelled in biology and chemistry, establishing his course as a scientist. Little of that, however, rubbed off on his own son, Jon, who spent much of his youth on the island riding horses, hunting and learning to drink whiskey with the ranch foreman.

“My son told me a long time ago, ‘Dad, there’s no money in science.’ So he went into construction.”

Does so much isolation get boring? Not for Laughrin. There are others who live on the island, but not for long periods of time.

Though he knows every canyon and cliff, beach and brook on the island, the diversity and beauty of Santa Cruz captivate him, surprise him and always surrender something more to the trained observer. Besides, when the guest log contains a constant stream of brilliant minds from top universities, the opportunities for stimulating discussion and social interaction are abundant.

A private man, Laughrin values solitude and escapes to the remotest corners of the island when repairs, paperwork, e-mails and phone calls pile up. One spot he likes is Portezuela, gate of the meadow, a panoramic ridge where sea breezes chill the skin and stir a winsome tune from crispy wild oats and tar weed. From the south, the relict pine forest tumbles like an evergreen wave down a canyon wall. And to the north, towers 2,434-foot Diablo Peak. Below, golden grasses and green smears of chaparral fall away quickly into a long valley that ends abruptly at the Pacific. Two sister islands, Santa Rosa Island and San Miguel, float on a sea of shimmers in the distance as the sun slides low on the horizon.

“This is my backyard,” said Laughrin, face into the wind, brim pulled low over his sunglasses. ‘That’s why I’ve been here so long. I don’t think it’s possible someone could make me a better offer. Would I like to be buried here? Yeah, I suppose I would. Why not? I’ve spent most of my life here.”