Walking With the Ghost of Exxon
It’s 5am on the fourth of July, and the alarm goes off. I open one eye and think surely I must have set it for the wrong time, but then I remember. Today I’m heading to Prince William Sound with Shannyn Moore and Zach Roberts. Our goal is to document the lingering effects of oil, still present in the Sound after the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in the spring of 1989.
It’s 5am on the fourth of July, and the alarm goes off. I open one eye and think surely I must have set it for the wrong time, but then I remember. Today I’m heading to Prince William Sound with Shannyn Moore and Zach Roberts. Our goal is to document the lingering effects of oil, still present in the Sound after the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in the spring of 1989.
I was not in Alaska back then. I, like the rest of the country, watched the news footage in horror at images of oil-soaked otters and birds, and people hosing off the rocky shoreline, and aerial photos of a tanker surrounded by boats and thin ribbons of ineffectual orange boom. I didn’t know that people I would some day know and love were working on the cleanup effort even as I watched the pictures on the news from thousands of miles away. I never imagined I’d live anywhere near Prince William Sound, but I felt the loss of this far away place, and I was sad and angry. I had a wild notion that I’d go to Alaska to see if there was anything I could do to help, but warnings came across the TV that oil spill responders were there in droves and people who wanted to come scrub otters were becoming a burden, and people shouldn’t go to Alaska expecting to be able to help. So I stayed on the East Coast and left it to the experts.
But I did find myself in Alaska about a year and a half later. And almost as soon as I arrived, my relationship with Prince William Sound began - sailing past Columbia Glacier amid crackling icebergs; the city of Valdez; camping in a sandstorm in Jeanie Cove on Montague Island; my first sperm whale sighting from the air; the anxious drive through the newly blasted tunnel to Whittier; hiking on the alpine flower-covered high ground of Perry Island, Bering glacier with its endless swaths of lupine; the sculpted rock formations on Kayak Island, the biggest tree I’d ever seen hidden in the forest of Little Johnstone Bay, beach combing, campfires, sailing trips, fishing… Over the years, the Sound became a very real and beautiful place, no longer a distant abstraction.
And yet, the oil spill and this place I visited in my real life remained strangely disconnected. I knew there had been a tragedy here, but it remained out of my experience, out of my sight, out of my touch, and smell. I was always a degree of separation from those who were there. And that was OK with me, because even imagining the kind of environmental disaster thad had happened in this place brought such overwhelming sadness it was simpler and less painful to leave the disconnect in place.
But with the recent events in the Gulf, where oil in the amounts of the Exxon Valdez spill pours into the Gulf of Mexico in a matter of days, and where no end is in sight, people have turned new attention to those remote shores in Alaska, looking for answers, looking for lessons and seeking some kind of crystal ball that will reveal to them the future of the Gulf.
And so this morning, Shannyn Moore, Zach Roberts and I head out to go find some answers. We arrive as the tunnel to Whittier opens to automobile traffic. The tunnel is shared alternately through the day by cars in to Whittier, then cars out, and then trains. After far too long driving in the claustrophobic dark tunnel, we pop out the other side and in to the sunlight of the city of Whittier. I say that I think the slogan for the city should be ”We’re Whittier Than You” and I make my sleepy companions laugh. Zach says that the slogan obviously isn’t true, or they would have thought of it before I did.
