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Mike's Full Interview

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Mike Mickelson

Cordova Breakwater

Cordova, Alaska

August 26, 2011

My name is Mike Mickelson. I actually grew up ten miles out of Cordova by boat.  My family had a birding and natural history lodge, which they had been operating for my most of my life, I guess.

Well I was five when the Oil Spill happened, and so I was in kindergarten.  I knew that something bad happened.  I wasn’t really conscious of exactly what it was. I knew that oil was spilled, but I didn’t really realize how it was going to affect things and how it was going to change the life of everybody in Cordova.

Well, as a kid you know, I think what I really remember were all these zodiacs coming in that were all covered in oil and all these boats coming that were covered in oil from working on the clean-up effort.  The year after the spill we went out into the [Prince William] Sound, and I remember seeing the high tide mark that had oil in it.  But how it really affected Cordova wasn’t just the physical changes to the environment, it was kind of the social changes that happened.  A lot of people got depressed, you know, it was a lot of men especially.  There was just a bad scene and nobody would ever talk about it.  It was just sort of taboo to talk about the Oil Spill, and, I mean, it still is, for that matter.

I think because I was a kid, I just sort of missed it. There’s lots of positive things that happen here, like my mom had me playing music and started this band and I was touring around the country when I was in high school, to some degree.  But that was just I guess a way to divert the attention off the greater issue, which was this major natural disaster and habitat healing. 

Looking back on it now I can definitely see a lot more of the effects than I could as a kid, because I just thought that was normal. The way that people were behaving, and the amount of drinking that was going on.  I remember that my parents wouldn’t let me ride my bicycle around after 7:30 because they said there were drunks out driving around.  There was just so much more drinking that was happening then because you people made all this money cleaning up the spill, there was just this huge issue where it was like, well, “I’ve always been able to support my family and now I can’t because fishing’s terrible.” So I think that definitely had a major sociological effect. 

I think one of the biggest problems that happened in coping with it is that no one really talked about it, no one dealt with it.  I think the big thing about growing up in Cordova during that time was that people were so negative about what was happening and it was all Exxon’s fault. I’m not saying that it wasn’t, but I think there is hope.  But, as a young person, I wasn’t really encouraged to think that there would be a brighter future or to think that Exxon ever would pay off or that there would ever be any sort of closure.

I think the other part of recovering from it too was that because the lawsuit wasn’t settled, that was a really big issue and people were just so frustrated that it hadn’t settled, and especially that the amount got dropped so much.  There were so many people here that died and never got their checks.  People had been kind of counting on it as a form of retirement.  It really had nothing to do with the amount of income that they would have had had the Oil Spill not happened. It was just such a low portion before the numbers were cut down.  I just think it really spawned a lot of anger.  I’d just kind of like to go back to that wasn’t really addressed, those feelings and those emotions that people had weren’t addressed.  I think that’s another way that the oil companies could have done a better job of oil spill clean up, is not just dealing with the physical aspect of it as dealing with the emotional aspect of a man-made spill that you can obviously pinpoint on one entity.  So I think for the Gulf Oil Spill, that’s a major thing. The entity that spilled the oil actually dealing with the problem immediately, you know, so that there’s not this lingering court case trying to figure out when things are finally going to be settled and when we can move past it.

I mean, even now it’s hard to look back at it and try to remove myself from it because it was such a big change here. You know, my mom said she got over it when her mom died but she never got over the Oil Spill.  When people talk about the Oil Spill, my blood pressure rises and I wasn’t even really conscious of what was happening and that was a long time ago.  So, I think for things that would have been helpful, I guess was to just deal with it.  It’s almost like having someone or some family of people you know die, and there was just no conflict resolution.  And so, I guess probably counseling would have been a great idea for the whole town.  It does take a long time.  We’re by no means 100% recovered from the Oil Spill. 

I think the biggest thing to do when you’re trying to deal with it is just talk to people and try to maintain those relationships, because we’re our own support groups.  As they can see from us, there wasn’t any organization that came in to help us deal with it.  We had to help ourselves. 

I think one of the main ways that it affected me is Cordova before the Oil Spill I think was one of the major fishing ports in the U.S. in terms of value of catch.  Basically all through my childhood everyone said, “Don’t be a fisherman, whatever you do, don’t. That’s not a viable source of income.”  And I think what’s happened.   Because everyone was encouraging us not to go fishing, a lot of people left, whereas in reality they could have stayed here and become valuable members of the community.  And I think that’s one of the main things to think about when you do have a natural disaster like this, is that you can’t be negative all the time, and that’s what people were, after it, like, “don’t do this, don’t do that.” Whereas you have to have some aspect of hope to go onto.  And I really feel like that was lacking.

My family fished halibut commercially before it went to a limited entry quota system, but they weren’t primarily fishermen. I think growing up here, especially growing up ten miles out of town by boat, the whole gillnet fleet would go by, and I just always kind of knew that was something I wanted to do.

When you’re a little kid, you kind of have these goals and sometimes they’re not always realistic. I always liked Cordova and I think it wasn’t necessarily that anybody ever was directly saying, “don’t stay here, leave, leave, leave.” It was just that was kind of the undertone, as, you know, “fishing isn’t really a good choice for you, you need to go to college and do something where you can like make something of yourself.”  Like that wasn’t a viable way to make something of yourself.  

When I was in high school fishing here was pretty dismal.  I think the first year I went seining in 1999, was the first year that there was really kind of enough salmon coming back for seining to actually be like halfway decent.  Honestly, had I gotten into it right after high school, it was still a little rough.  It was a lot harder to get into it than it is now, because, although the entry costs are more expensive, everybody’s making money, for the most part.

And as much as we like to say it’s about lifestyle, there has to be some money involved in order to keep ourselves doing it.  And there were some up and down years there, but over the last, I don’t know, five to six years it’s really started to kind of start getting a lot better again. Now, as my ten-year class reunion rolls around, I’m looking through the people in my class and there’s a lot of us that are fishermen because things have recovered enough to where we can actually make that a viable part of our income. And with that said, there are still aspects of, of the fisheries here that are completely absent, that have happened since the Oil Spill.

I think before the Oil Spill as a fisherman you could make money year–round.  There was salmon in the summer, and halibut, and then there was crab in the winter, and then in the spring there was herring.  And since the Oil Spill, there is no longer a herring fishery and there is no longer a crab fishery.  And so, basically, if you look at someone’s income now compared to someone’s income, in 1988, it’s vastly different, just in the economic opportunities that you have.  And so I think, as young person especially, it’s really difficult to stay here because there’s just a limited amount of economic opportunity.   I have to leave, you know.  I have to go work other places so that I can afford to stay here part of the time.  That’s the solution that a lot of people have.  It’s just really hard to be here all winter just because everything’s expensive.  As much as everyone wants to stay, it’s just not always a choice that you can have. 

The generation that was ahead of us and the generations that have kind of been in high school the last few years or have just graduated, they’ve had such a different experience. Cordova’s a fishing town and it never stopped being a fishing town, it was just for a while there weren’t any young fishermen because of the Oil Spill, basically.  And so in high school, you know, we’d go fishing and come to school wearing our rubber boots and get made fun of because you just didn’t really do that.  And I think that’s really changed, now, if you look through the high school.  In the yearbook the volleyball teams got their picture taken in their Xtra Tuffs [rubber boots].  Because fishing is so good now, and so it’s really changed how people see themselves, how they feel about themselves, what the energy of the town is.

I think the thing about fishing here is it just gives you a lot of freedom and it’s really hard to find this lifestyle anywhere else.  And it enables you to stay here.  There aren’t many other ways you can actually stay in Cordova and make money, other than be a fisherperson or someone involved directly in the industry.