It was March 1989 and a hiking buddy and I were sitting on a mountain in Kodiak, Alaska, looking across the valley at a bear who had just come out of hibernation and was happily digging up roots, eating and rebooting his digestive system. We gazed into our binoculars and talked about a tanker that had just gone aground in Prince William Sound. To me, it seemed far away, and I felt as safe as French Jews talking about what was happening to the Jews in Germany in the 1930s. It all seemed like someone else’s problem that would not affect my island and fishing community. Alaska has 33,000 miles of coastline: the ocean is deep and huge, but the tides are strong, and the menace was headed our way. Shuyak Island was the first landfall to see the black sludge boiling in the foam of the waves lapping on the shore.
My family moved to Kodiak Island in 1975. My husband practiced small town law, and I had been his secretary for years, but I also was a stringer for the local newspaper, The Kodiak Daily Mirror. A full-time job opened as the fisheries/business reporter and I took on the challenge. And it was a challenge. The law office overlooked the harbor, so I’d see vessels come and go with the fishing seasons, but I really wasn’t part of the fishing community. My brother-in-law had a boat and my kids would fish halibut openers and salmon in the summer or work on a tender, but I had a huge learning curve to write about such a big and diverse industry. And, at times, a divisive industry with gear groups battling over issues and other squabbles that brewed even within certain groups.
I made my fair share of mistakes—like using tons rather than metric tons for herring. I’d sit with a group of fishermen at the local diner every morning for coffee before I went to work. They would tease me that I worked for the Daily Mistake as I usually had an entry or two in the corrections section of the paper, but I was learning. I had a weekly column called Harbor Lights, and I liked to include tidbits and gossip from the coffee table to lighten up the serious and sometimes dangerous business of fishing.
The Exxon summer, as I later came to call it, was my major educational experience. I caught a ride on a friend’s boat to get to Shuyak. My newspaper didn’t have a big budget, but if I could figure out my own transportation, they were all in favor of my chasing a story. I got rides in spotter planes for herring and salmon and almost threw up on more than one occasion, bending and dipping the small plane in the pursuit of fish. I had to do my own photography. It was a skill I had to learn, and it was the days of film and you didn’t know until the prints came out of the newspaper’s dark room if you had anything worthwhile to go with your story. I got a good shot of a local fisherwoman, who had a cabin on Shuyak, holding a dead oiled bird. Front page material.
Soon Kodiak was awash with media as well as spilled oil. Every major news agency had someone there. I went to a meeting at Fisherman’s Hall with my little slim reporter’s notebook in my hand. I stood like the wallflower at the high school dance as people with TV cameras, microphones, and aggressive journalistic skills unknown to me all jockeyed for positions. This feeding frenzy went on for weeks. Soon, the national coverage was mostly any new information with the same footage of lovely scenery and the occasional same oiled sea otter. Then Tiananmen Square happened in June and our little drama in Alaska was no longer newsworthy. The local papers, public radio, and television stations in Alaska were left to keep the public record of what efforts went forward from then on.
There were lots of public meetings, protests, and things to cover in town, as well as getting out to remote bays to cover the actual cleanup. Fishermen were frustrated because they couldn’t fish. Any oiled product would be a disaster to the industry in future years. They remembered when some faulty canned salmon killed some folks in England and how the entire industry suffered. But they were all dressed up and ready for the salmon season and had nowhere to go. There were spillionaires, as we later called them, that were created that summer because they quickly switched gears and got contracts from Exxon and helped with the clean-up rather than hoping it would all go away quickly, and the season wouldn’t be lost.
I covered as many of these meetings as I could. The townsfolk were holding Exxon’s feet to the fire. They had said the town would be made whole, and that is what folks were expecting. There were some payments made with promises of more to come. Local hotels, restaurants, and small businesses were making a killing. If I had quit my job and just rented out all the spare rooms in my house, I would have made a lot of house payments that summer. One middle-aged woman I knew who a waitress got a good job at the State Office of Environmental Conservation that summer and kept it until she retired, I am sure. She never would have had that opportunity without the Exxon summer.
There were lots of environmental activists in our community and they were appalled at what had happened and the somewhat ramshackle response to cleanup—especially at the beginning. I tried to write impartial stories because I thought being fair to both sides was the purpose of journalism, but Exxon wasn’t being helpful. We had a series of guys from the South in charge who were clueless about the state they were in. I remember being on one vessel and hearing one fellow questioning the captain about how long it was going to take to get somewhere. But, he said, it is only an inch on the chart. One would think that someone from a state as big as Texas would understand vastness when he was experiencing it.
I would cover a meeting, write the story, and fax it to Exxon to see if they wished to respond or refute anything and give them my deadline. No comment. We had just gotten a fax machine at the paper. It was the old kind with rolls of paper like the Dead Sea Scrolls. A pain in the neck, but my saving grace that summer. I wanted to write unbiased articles, but if Exxon was content with fairly one-sided ones, so be it.
My oldest son came home from his freshman year of college and had planned to fish that summer. Instead, he got a job that involved being taken to various beaches and collecting dead and oiled birds. He did lots of walking and made more per hour than he ever had before in his life. Another former high school mate was also home from college and working as a waitress in a hotel dining room. She had planned to work at a cannery in one of the villages. Again, the hotel was super busy, and the tips were good and she could go home every night and not sleep in a bunk house. But there were others who had huge investments in their boats who were missing the salmon season and wondering how far in the future and what other species were going to be affected in the uncertainty surrounding the whole clean up effort.
Initially, there were lots of similarities to a military enterprise. Boom for cleanup arrived and was supposed to be sent to a certain area, but someone else would commandeer it and it would vanish to another location. I took advantage of the chaos and made friends with helicopter pilots and got free rides to Bays and a vessel with a helicopter pad. I enjoyed being a hitchhiker or stowaway on a flight that Exxon was paying for. This endless summer was exceedingly hot, and I had to wear the bright jumpsuits on the flights. My theory was that if there was a mishap, the bright outfits made it easier for them to locate the bodies. I must have sweated off ten pounds that summer.
I remember one flight to Puale Bay that was aborted because of bad weather. The pilot had been flying in California prior to coming to Alaska and was asking me for directions like we were driving to Burger King. He was wise enough to turn around when he saw the bay in the distance looking like Brigadoon in the mist. On another trip in a small fast boat that was under contract, the local captain and I were getting pretty beaten up trying to get to the Kitoi Hatchery. He decided to turn around and later told me he thought we might have gotten swamped when making the turn if a big wave hit us. He was very experienced and that had caused him concern. I had been blissfully unaware, just disappointed that I wasn’t getting to where I wanted to go as they were doing some fishing in the protected area of the hatchery. I eventually got there and got a great shot of literally thousands of fish in a barrel, so to speak.
Another part of my education was actually seeing people fish commercially. The seiners had skiff men extent the net from the vessel to surround the schools of fish in a “purse.” It was a nautical ballet with the skiff dancing across the water net, unfurling and capturing salmon.
I also finally got to Puale Bay. The night before I was going, I was out dancing with some fishermen friends then I stopped by the newspaper in the middle of the night to finish my columns and other articles so they would have some of my material in the can to print while I was on the grounds. The old mud boat had a helo pad, so the pilot dropped down just long enough for me to get down and stay close to the ground to avoid the still spinning blades. The vessel usually tendered in the summer, but this year it was jammed full of people who were dispatched daily to clean beaches. There was someone from Exxon, a Veco employee—they were the contractors who oversaw most of the cleanup, and an archaeologist to make sure sensitive historical sites weren’t interfered with.
The captain was a good family friend, and he’d made a “cabin” for me away from everyone else. It was basically a corner of the engine room and hotter than the blazes, with no window, but it was home for a few days. Puale was one of the many bays I saw that summer. These geographical opportunities really paid off in years to come because I had seen the places I was writing about.
That summer my husband was gone a long time because he was taking an old friend to Africa. The man had hunted there in his younger years and wanted to return as an old man to just see the place again and visit people he’d met. I was also invited because since I was a kid, I had wanted to see Africa. My ticket went unused because I knew I was having the experience of a lifetime and was a part of something significant. I wanted to keep covering the spill and the cleanup.
I never had any animosity towards the oil industry. I had come to Alaska pre-pipeline and saw the benefits that selling our resources had given the state. To me, the spill was like having a big dog who one day poops on the carpet. Having the dog was something you wanted, and the accident was something that happened and now it is time to clean the mess up—not beat the dog or take him to the shelter. But I could see why folks whose livelihood was jeopardized would feel differently. The same with those with a sense of responsibility towards the environment. I was someone who valued nature and the beauty of Alaska, and I couldn’t help but share their dismay at what I was seeing.
As the summer was drawing to an end, Exxon finally got one person in charge who was there for a while and things tightened up. No more free rides for me. No more boom and other supplies disappearing. He was a company man but seemed more in tune with the community because he was there for more than a week or two. He taught martial arts classes to kids. My thought was he wanted to be part of the town—or he just missed his kids and life in Texas.
Anger and frustration may have led to a few divorces after the Exxon summer. I have no statistics on that, but there was a bumper crop of babies. Fishermen were usually gone most of the summer, but they weren’t this year.
Exxon probably decided that winter storms would continue the clean up, and it was time for them to pack up and leave. Equipment was sold for pennies on the dollar or just left behind. It was like the last days of Saigon. And a familiar quiet returned to the town.
The following summer was an amazing salmon season. The town was quiet when the boats were out and quieter in the fall. Many decided a winter in Mexico was their reward for surviving the Exxon summer and having record catches the following year. Other communities in Alaska didn’t fare as well, nor did other species.
Years of litigation followed. Exxon continued to have profits. Spills are a cost of doing business, but they weren’t inclined to settle any time soon. Suing a major corporation is like suing the government or the Catholic Church. They have all the time and resources in the world. Waiting for money from a lawsuit is like waiting to inherit. It may not even happen in your lifetime and if you spend your life festering and being angry about it, you don’t have much of a life.
Settlements from Exxon and money from the Federal Government and the State led to some benefits to the community: acquisition of land for public access and use for hiking, a museum focusing on Native culture, fish technology research that benefited fishermen and processors, and the Bear Trust come to mind.
Were Alaska’s coastal communities and its citizens made whole? Were the waters as pristine as they were before? There were winners and losers. The sea and the land healed probably better than some of the communities and people, especially those who live subsistence lifestyles.
Our family finances and livelihood were about the same before and after the oil spill: we were among the lucky people. There definitely were victors and victims, but even those who prospered would have preferred it if the event never happened and it was just one more fishing season in Alaska. As a journalist, I felt I was there as a witness, not a judge, in this David vs. Goliath encounter in Alaska.
