March 17, 2009

• Almost Twenty Years Ago

  It was a Friday morning, shortly after 5 AM.  The third of my five alarm clocks had gone off, the one that was too far from the bed for me to hit the snooze button or off switch.  I had to get up, because when the next alarm went off, I’d need to get Doug, who was in 3rd grade then, out of bed so he would have time to dress and eat before the school bus came.  The final, fifth, alarm clock would sound to tell us it was time to suit up and head out the door to the bus stop.

  Even before I lit the propane light in the kitchen (we were off the grid back then), I turned on the old car radio that was hooked up to my 12 volt electrical system.  I caught just the tail end of a little piece of breaking news:  “…hard aground on Bligh Reef.”  I didn’t know where Bligh Reef was, but a chill ran through me, leaving behind a feeling of oppressive dread.

  Half an hour or so later, KSKA repeated that story, such as it was.  There were no details at the time, just that initial report that the supertanker Exxon Valdez had run aground in Prince William Sound.  There was no mention, at first, of an oil spill.  I cried, anyway, without any conscious knowledge of why I was weeping.  Later, at Sheep Creek Lodge for the neighborhood women’s session with Jane Fonda, I saw a few seconds of video of the ship, tilted, leaning on that rock in the gray light of dawn.

  Through the day, back at home, I listened for more news.  Not much came at first, and then it seemed like that was the only news there was.  As our world started thawing out, people from the neigborhood started going to Valdez to work on the cleanup.  It was the first (and only) economic boom Alaska had since the construction of the pipeline from Prudhoe to Valdez, and many of those people had been out of work for years.

  Eventually, most of the cleanup workers came home.  One who didn’t return was my beloved Shanda, daughter of Mardy, my life’s longest best friend, who ended up outliving her daughter by only a year or so.  Shanda herself had been an even closer friend to me than her mother was.  Her death, on a boat in Valdez harbor, was from drug overdose.  We will never know whether it occurred because the disaster killed off her will to live, or whether the cleanup just provided too much, in money and drugs, for her to handle all at once.  Dealers and hookers and gamblers and grifters had flocked to Valdez along with those who were hired for the cleanup.

  Everyone who returned from the coastal cleanup crews had horror stories and emotional scars.  I was reminded of one of those stories this morning, listening to Talk of Alaska on APRN.  A woman called in and spoke with difficulty, her voice breaking over the lump in her throat, of an enduring memory, of sea otters crying.  My neighbor Chuck came back and told stories of his job in the hold of a tanker ship that was sucking up the oil from the booms offshore.  His job was to clear out obstructions in the big hose that pumped the oily seawater into the tanker’s hold.  Suited from head to foot in rubber gear, he’d have to reach into the mouth of the thing and pull loose whatever was stopping the flow.  Most often, what would clog up the pipes was a dead otter.

  The spill and cleanup have never stopped being “news” here, as trials and lawsuits went on and on.  Recently, the final checks for reparations went out from Exxon, after the initial award of damages had been cut so severely to keep from bankrupting Exxon, that each recipient’s share was so insignificant as to be insulting.  There was a small public outcry this year for the Iditarod Trail Committee to return a donation from Exxon in protest, but I say let them keep it.  They can find better use for the money than Exxon would, I’m sure.

  I had intended to blog about the oil spill next week.  I don’t know if I will.  You will probably hear more about it than you want to, when the national media pick up on the anniversary, March 24th.

  

  • 4:03 pm
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