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Micah's Full Interview - 5

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Category: Micah's Full Interview

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This whole process is something that I haven’t done since the depositions back in the day. It takes a little bit for me to remember exactly, and to use adult words to describe things that really weren’t well-put-together emotions back then. I would say pretty much you’re a schizophrenic when you’re nine years old, at least I was, when it comes to being very—most nine-year-olds that I know that aren’t completely brain-dead from media and TV, they go through bouts of being the perfect nine-year-old style, like, “Oh, this is awesome,” and then all of a sudden they’ll look at you and say something so profound, and the brain is just developing in that way. The verbal mastery is coming around now. So that was an interesting time for me, because I was doing the pre-teen thinking thing, trying to get away from the parents a little more, really thinking, reading books, getting your own ideas from different sources that aren’t coming from the family. But at the same time, you just want to climb trees. There’s nothing better than—like, my mom would read big books, the Narnia books, the Tolkien books, and she was really adamant about reading to me every night and doing that thing.

So there were the child things that were probably embarrassing to me that I wouldn’t let anybody know, “My mom still reads to me,” but there were the other things where I was turning into who I am today at that point. Change is definitely the key word for the whole thing for everybody. And I think the Cordova youth have a very similar yet different story as far as that snapshot in time than I do. I can’t even say people like me, because I really didn’t have a community to fall on. There was a family on Naked Island and another family on—I can’t remember. I remember the pilot would come in and say, “I just landed, and this family, they’ve got a nine-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son,” and I’d go, “Wow, what do they do?” “Their dad fishes or something,” and I’m like, “That’s crazy,” and do my thing.

The Cordova thing is just—from what I hear, the impact was social for Cordova. The church groups talked about it. Down at the docks they talked about it. There was a lot of talk. The oil representatives and the biographers and the TV news crews came in and people sat around in the coffee shops and talked about it. And they did in Homer, but we really—our life in Homer was kind of this little—it wasn’t in Homer, it was in Anchor Point, it was a log house at the end of Anchor River Road. We kind of did the same thing there that we did in the Sound, but I didn’t love it like I loved the Sound. The Sound’s a magical spot. Even back when Homer had trees, it wasn’t as magical. Well, yeah, it was, but not to me.

So it changed things. I don’t know.

I’m probably only mature enough just lately to really come to terms with how—I guess how— [pause] I guess it’s like —it’s an emotional time when your environment changes for the bad. Categorically oil is bad. There’s different changes that happen to people. We saw the spruce bark beetle in Homer, and people really had to change in Homer. It really was profound. If you think of it in abstract terms, it’s like, well, it happens, and how can people be that emotionally attached to something like old-growth forest when new plants come up in their place and then this metamorphosis happens? It was tough for me because there was just no one to really—there was no, like— [pause] there’s no finale. There’s no, like, “OK, this is done and now we’re doing this.”

Even the lawsuit that happened afterwards, when we were all going, “OK, our lifestyles are kind of done. How can you attach a dollar sign to a natural disaster changing your life?” I didn’t feel like I deserved anything. It was like, money is the last thing you want to think about. It wasn’t anywhere on our agenda when we were living out there. We weren’t out there for the money. We didn’t get any settlement because we weren’t making money, and that’s what the settlement was based off of, and nobody ended up getting any real serious money like you get if you have the right lawyers and you burn your tongue at McDonald’s. But there was kind of just this, like—it was lonely, because I really wasn’t part of the same community. It wasn’t like I could just go down to the local Tesoro and spark up a conversation with somebody. I could have, probably, in Homer, because it’s a fishing community, too, and there were huge amounts of devastation within the families in Cordova, but we weren’t part of that niche. We weren’t really a Cordova niche or a Homer niche, we were kind of just doing our own thing. Aside from my mother and my dad and my brother, there was really not a lot of people that went, “Yeah, man, don’t you remember going down through McPherson Passage and seeing all those transient whales that were coming through and they blew their air differently, they’d chase the boat differently?” Little things that weren’t there now. There was this reminiscing that our family still does, but not being able to share that perspective and being able to hear—

Everybody has a different story with the spill, but it’s nice to hear other people who have similar stories where you can go, “Yeah, that’s kind of what happened to me.” Kind of like, I don’t know, like a therapy group, almost. Which sounds kind of corny, but that was kind of a tough—that has—that was a big component to my emotional suffering from that, feeling like a little bit alone, because our lifestyle was alone. When you’re out there and you get taken without any warning, it is a wonderful lesson in looking for the good and seeing what’s next, going, “OK, well, this is—”