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Anjuli's Full Interview

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Anjuli Grantham

Baranov Museum

Kodiak, Alaska

November 7^th, 2011

My name is Anjuli Grantham. I was born in Kodiak, Alaska. I live in Kodiak today. As far as my memories of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, I was seven, I believe, when it happened, and I mean, I knew that something big had occurred and it was an oil spill, but mostly—my mom wouldn’t let me go to the beach at all. She wouldn’t let me go down and see the oil. She thought it would be too upsetting for me. I remember I really wanted to go down there and help with the cleanup, and I remember the other parents were letting their kids, my friends were able to go down there, but my mom didn’t want us children to have to go down there and to experience it. I think she thought it would be probably painful for us. And so I remember driving around Kodiak in the car with my family and trying to look out the window to see if I could see anything, but I was too short to see, really, down at the beaches.

I mean, I remember when it was all happening, but it was just kind of confusing. All of it was kind of confusing to think, like, barrels of oils—I didn’t understand the idea of barrels of oil either, because in my head I was like, “Why aren’t the barrels floating in the ocean? Where are the barrels?” I just didn’t understand the idea that it was liquid volume, the barrels. And then I was just kind of confused about the idea that oil was a black tar, a black substance. I was confused about that, too, because in my mind it would be like this rainbow-colored slick. It was just kind of confusing the way that—you know, just a basic understanding of petroleum and the whole industry. It was confusing. I don’t really recall exactly—I don’t remember first hearing about it. I remember—I mean, when it was happening, for sure, and how everyone was very upset. There was the outrage associated with it and all the pictures in the newspaper and everything.

I definitely recall the spill. I remember looking at pictures in the newspaper and so kind of like, I don’t have a recollection at all of the oil or the beaches or the contamination, I more have, like, this kind of like media idea of it, because I experienced so much of it through the newspaper and through watching the news, even though it was happening right outside. Yeah, so much of it was media-filtered, because my mom wouldn’t let me go to the beaches. But I remember the iconic scene on the news, obviously some cameraman was in the helicopter going over the Exxon Valdez and seeing the fishing boats with the booms, and I remember the Kodiak Daily Mirror, the newspaper, looking at that and seeing pictures of, like, my family friends down at the beach with the oil. And then of course I remember tragic oil-covered pelicans and eagles and sea otters from the news. And then I just remember booms everywhere. There were always booms in the water, and afterwards there were booms on the beaches and in people’s yards. So really, it just—and then I think of jars of oil. It was huge, definitely. I remember it was the main topic of conversation for a long time.

And then I also remember the kind of like, almost like the stuff associated with the oil spill. I don’t remember the oil because I didn’t see it, aside from jars that people had in their house. But I remember the booms, the oil booms were everywhere, and they were in the water for a long time after the cleanup had mostly been complete. And it must have been the next summer, like, the summer following the Valdez oil spill, or the summer after that, the summer of ’89, ’90, my family were out fishing, ‘cause my dad was a commercial salmonfisherman. My family would spend every summer out at a setnet site beach, seining on the west side of Kodiak, Uganik Bay. And we were traveling by skiff to go visit another setnet family, and we’d seen booms, pieces of booms floating around sometimes, but a couple of times that summer, the booms would be partially submerged and would get caught in our motor for our skiff, and so one time we were cruisin’ along, like, really fast, and the next thing you know, we’d just come to a complete stop. And we look and the skiff had been caught in the boom. So I have a lot of memories that summer of cursing parents and fishermen as they got knives out to cut the boom away from the outboard motor, and I just remember being jarred, almost falling out of the boat because we went from traveling pretty fast to being completely stopped from the leftover—it’s almost like pollution from the pollution, the booms.

I recall thinking—I remember I was on the beach and came across, like, some weird-looking stuff and I was thinking that maybe it was oil and I ran up to get my mom to show her what it was, and it ended up that it was paint because they were just painting up the way. So OK, not oil. I remember that I was like, “Look, it’s oil!” and everybody was upset by the possibility of there still being oil around there, but it was just me thinking that—it was paint in the end. But I remember being kind of vigilant about looking out for it and everything. I think it had to have been that same summer, ’89, when we were out there.

I mean, it was good to go out to Uganik that summer and to see that nothing had changed, beyond the random pieces of boom that would wash ashore, the kind of oil spill detritus, essentially. Beyond that, it was still the same place. It didn’t seem like there was less wildlife. The beach was the same. It was still home. I couldn’t see—from after the cleanup, there was no fundamental difference to my beaches in Kodiak. It was the same place after the oil spill as before, physically. I’m sure there was a lot of damage to the ecosystem, but on the surface, to me it was the same. There was no drastic change. So that’s reassuring. If there had been permanent damage to these places, that would have been seriously damaging to my young psyche, I’m sure. But going out to Uganik the next summer and seeing that it was still there and appeared healthy, that was reassuring, for sure.

I’m not sure if it really changed my day-to-day life. It’s hard to say. I mean, it was definitely—I feel like it affected—it really affected my parents and their friends a lot, and especially the kind of like haunting sensation of the settlement. It was like, a lot of people, especially the fishermen, who were more down-and-out anyways, they were really betting on it as a cash cow. And I think for a lot of people it was almost disempowering to have this possibility of maybe getting this money. It just was like a mirage that these older fishermen were looking and waiting for and holding out for.

I know that my dad, he got out of fishing soon after that, and he was always, like, hoping and waiting for Exxon’s settlement. Unfortunately, he died before it all came out, but it was almost like that for me was the biggest effect personally for my family, this kind of in-the-future idea of making it big with the settlement. It was kind of strange.

It was kind of like, the event was really huge, but it was more like the waiting for retribution was the thing that was more significant, in my memory, because it was always like this expectant payday that was going to be coming. It seemed like so many people were always holding their breath for the day when the money would come because of the spill and the economic effects of the lost fishing seasons and everything. It’s almost like the kind of like—I don’t know, kind of strange in a way. People, at least the fishermen that my family knew, a lot of them were just really looking forward to it as if it was going to be almost like a panacea. It was like, the Exxon Valdez checks are going to come. It’s going to be like this cure-all, we’re all going to be rolling in cash.

And that lasted so long, it was just years of anticipation and expectations for this money to finally come, and then by the time that it really started to make its way through the court system, my family had moved from Alaska and was living in Washington at that point, and it came out that Exxon wasn’t really going to be held accountable for a lot of additional payments to fisherman for damages. I remember my family, of course, was really upset. When we heard it over the radio, I was with my family and we were at a gas station, and my sister, who was pretty young, she was like, “That’s almost like us blowing up the gas station and giving them some paper towels and saying that that’s all that we really need to do to help with the cleanup.” Which was a totally appropriate analogy, considering, you know, gas stations! It was really upsetting for all of us to think that this big payday wasn’t going to happen in the way we had expected it to.

Also, another thing that is a continued effect for me and my family is that we have boycotted Exxon since then. Of course there was no Exxon in Kodiak at that point, but having lived all over the country and the world since then, I refuse to go to Exxon to fill my tank. And I continue to boycott it. So really, they’ve lost thousands of revenue from my family.

Those are the most distinct things that I can remember, really just the anticipation of waiting for the settlement and the disappointment related to that and continued effects of avoiding Exxon as much as possible.

Like I said, I do not support Exxon, I continue to boycott Exxon, as does all of my family, and they all live in places that actually have Exxon possibilities for pumping gas. In that way, it’s affected my consumption choices in what could be seen as a drastic way. But beyond that, it’s like more just this kind of weird—I don’t know, like, it doesn’t affect me on a day-to-day basis at all, really. However, it was almost like this kind of echo throughout my entire childhood, just this idea of, “One day when we get the settlement check, everything’s going to be better” type of thing. And it didn’t happen in that way. So it was kind of like—I don’t know, in a way it was like a get-rich-quick scheme, I think, in the mind of my dad, at least, like, “Hey, this thing didn’t work for me, but maybe this lawsuit will.” That was the biggest effect for me, that repercussion of the anticipation of the settlement that didn’t pan out the way that my family was expecting it to.

The main lesson that I took away from it, it was really all about, when I think about it, all about responsibility and essentially people absconding responsibility. There was the fact that it actually happened that was a lack of responsibility. The cleanup and the fact that it was months later that my family was cruising along in our skiff and almost causing us to capsize because of these leftover booms that weren’t cleaned up. That’s a lack of responsibility. Not cleaning up the cleanup, you know.

And then after that, just kind of like—the down-and-out fishermen absconding responsibility to their trade in the hopes of getting some big fat check from Exxon in the future. So really, it was just kind of like—I don’t know if there was any—there’s no lesson, it’s not like they talked to you about it in class, necessarily. I mean, I’m sure we did, but it wasn’t an activity that I can really recall. But now, reflecting back on it, that seems to be the overarching thing, essentially a lack of responsibility on a lot of—on, like, multiple fronts, the big corporation side down to down-and-out fishermen hoping for big bucks from the payoff. I don’t know.

Well, I’m definitely not into get-rich-quick schemes! Nor do I have any hope that there will be any retribution whatsoever from any type of corporate lawsuit. If anything, it just made me feel disenfranchised and made me feel that the court system has no interest whatsoever in the little guys. I mean, it was just the entire thing to me reeked of classic cases of American injustice, corporation winning out over the small guy, you know? And all based on legal minutiae. It wasn’t—definitely nothing about it was empowering, especially witnessing it from when I was seven until whenever it kind of started to work its way out—I don’t even remember when the case was heard or anything.  But yeah, it wasn’t an empowering experience at all. The entire experience was disempowering.

Like I was saying, the biggest impact was definitely my parents and my parents’ friends, it’s affected them in a way that wasn’t going to affect me, so I kind of got the ripples of that. It’s so hard to say, because so many people had—it’s like, my parents’ friends, they’re all my old bachelor fishermen uncles, essentially, they—I mean, they had their heyday back in the ’70s and early ’80s. So I think that they were able to use Exxon as an excuse to—it was disempowering, and I think that it became a crutch for some people. I don’t think that really reflected on the community as a whole in my mind. I knew that that was just kind of essentially the way that my fishermen uncles operated. I think it was definitely a crutch, in a way.  So really, it seems like probably providing support for those people, the adults, and the ones that couldn’t really cope with the changes or with—I don’t know, just always waiting for the settlement check and the fact that it just turned into a bad thing. So in a way, the kids are affected, but I think the kids are affected because their parents are affected. So I think that probably providing support for those people is what’s really important.

It just kind of underscored the fact that we in general have very little idea of what’s happening in our own backyard, especially looking at industry and business. We knew that the pipeline, we know that it’s pumped into these big boats and then goes somewhere, but I’m, like, seven or eight years old, and just had such a basic understanding, really no understanding of the whole process, and still to this day I really don’t. I think in a way it also kind of highlights the need for us to be aware of our immediate surroundings, not only the ecosystems and natural processes but also the extraction that’s happening, so that we then can know and understand what’s going on.

Like with the Deepwater Horizon, they’re calling it an oil spill, but it’s more like gushing from the bottom of the ocean. It’s totally different. I think that so many people had really no idea about how all of that worked. I think it just kind of shows that in general, it would be nice to have a greater understanding about what’s happening in our local economies and our backyards related to these type of things.

I mean, I do remember kind of feeling like a sense of pride a bit for the way that the community mobilized around everything and the fact that there were so many volunteers on the beaches, and watching the news and seeing all the fishing boats carrying the booms out and everything. I remember feeling kind of proud of my community for responding so actively in the disaster. So I think that was a positive thing that came from it maybe, just knowing the way people came together and really worked together to clean up and everything. That was a positive aspect, I guess. I think I had a kind of increased sense of pride in my community and faith in our ability to come together. So that was a good thing.

Really, I think just the fact is that self-sufficiency in a way, just really relying on yourself and your community, because in the end, there’s absolutely no guarantee that justice will be served, unfortunately. So really, it’s just, you can’t hold out hope that you’re going to get what you deserve in a situation like this, because there’s a chance that you won’t. So really, I think the best thing you can do is do local work, really relying on your community and your family and friends and building the strength of your community in situations like that, instead of waiting for people on the outside or hoping that you will get what you feel that you deserve.