Micah's Full Interview

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Micah Ess

Cordova, Alaska

August 31, 2011

My name is Micah Ess. I live in Cordova, Alaska. I was raised in Homer, Alaska, in a fishing town, when I was younger. Our family used to run a shrimping operation before the oil spill. We all lived on a wooden boat and a floating houseboat/walk-in freezer that was stationed out at Knight Island. When we weren’t shrimping, we would all move into Homer and do our off-season in Homer and have a normal Homer life like everybody else.

I was born June 1980, so I was nine years old—eight and three-quarter years old when the oil spill happened.  Let’s see. Before the oil spill, we lived a very humble life. We still do, not much has changed. [laughs] There wasn’t a lot of money in shrimping. My stepfather, who my mother met when I was about three and a half, four years old, we almost immediately started living on the boat when he was on the boat and doing kind of his lifestyle that he had developed. He came up to Alaska when he was 18, lived in California until then, and he wanted to have an adventure and a new life and get away from the central California thing. So when we met Mike, my stepfather, we all immediately jumped on his boat and started working and doing our various things that you do in your family on a little boat and developed the fishing operation, which it is even today, in a family kind of setup, the way a lot of the families in this town did.

It was a long time ago. The thing I think that comes to my mind, the superlative characteristic of the whole thing was, there was never this, like, boom time, “I’m going to make money and then I’m going to go and do something with my money” that we’re seeing now in the fishing industry, where everybody’s like, “Well, I’ll fish for three months and then I’ll do something else or maybe I’ll go fish somewhere else.” It’s always kind of like, you have your eye on the prize now. I do it all the time. Sometimes it’s the only thing that gets me through fishing now, where there’s what feels like a gold rush of some sort, maybe a little more mellowed down, but it seems like an annual, like a perennial gold rush, where every spring it’s really vibed out in the air in the fishing towns.

Back then, it wasn’t a summer fishery, for one. We looked at the summer fishermen as kind of like the pansies who come in and they don’t know anything about the town, because unless you’ve been in a winter storm in December, you really don’t know what it’s like to be out there, yada-yada. And we did it more just because that was—I guess my parents just thought it was the awesomest thing in the world. They both—they weren’t raised in Alaska, my mom’s from Minnesota, my biological father is from Minnesota, and my stepfather is from California, and this whole Alaska thing was just what everybody did in the ’80s, they either came up and worked in the oil field or they got into the fishing industry. In Homer, even, there’s like Spit rats  and everything. So there was never this kind of high-falutin’ money kind of thing, the swagger, it feels like everybody’s a Wall Street broker in Xtra Tuffs [boots] now and the fishery’s developed. So that was the most important thing that—when I think about it, we got by on nothing from year to year, selling the shrimp that we caught to a man in Anchorage, he had a company on paper, but it was this house, he was a seafood broker, and we would go into town, drive the boat up into Whittier, and then drive into Eagle River somewhere north of Anchorage and give him our boxes of frozen spot prawns.

There was never very many boxes. There was never a whole lot of money. At the end of the season, which is think around April 1st or so, when things actually started getting nice in the Sound, we had a few months of decent weather and then we’d be done shrimping. And this is before our family got into salmon fishing completely, so we were reliant on kind of a subsistence lifestyle, and then shrimping income. And it stayed that way. We developed our business a little bit. I popped the heads off the shrimp, that was my job. I’d sit out there and grade the shrimp, the jumbos and the mediums and the smalls, and we’d take the little coon stripes and the pink prawns and put them in a different pile, and that would be what we ate for our own meals. We built a bait floater so we’d have bait to use, we wouldn’t have to go and get bait so often, we could keep our bait in salted, confined areas, and it stunk to high heaven. We kept it anchored, like, half a mile away down in Snug Harbor.

There were about five or six other families in our area of the Sound, which is huge. It’s big. We didn’t know Cordova folk a whole lot, we didn’t really come to Cordova, we were based in the western Sound. We had a float plane come in and fly me my correspondence schoolwork. I was home-schooled by my mom. They would come out every two weeks and check on me and give my mom some ideas for different projects for science and English, give her construction paper and scissors. We had boxes of that stuff laying around, and the whole inside of the house was plastered with sketches and things I had drawn. My brother was six years younger than me, so he was three years old at that time. We had our hands full with all kinds of little projects. That was kind of neat about being so far away but yet having that—the school system had a lot of money back then to throw at putting teachers on float planes. They would laugh at you if you were to suggest that nowadays. You can’t hardly get curriculum from them without having to pay a whole bunch of extra money.

It’s all a little bit foggy. Kind of tough to recall the early days when everything was—I don’t know, euphoric, a little bit, the golden years, I guess, or even younger.

The chronology is still really vivid at the time. That’s when my memory gets a little more vivid, for sure. We were—at the time of the oil spill, we were also doing herring pounding, which is where you take herring and seine them up and put them into the pens and then you take a special kind of kelp that we dive and harvest down in southeast Alaska and bring it up in wetlock boxes and hang in the pen, so when the herring go to spawn, they spawn on the kelp and then that kelp is a super-delicacy, awesome. And so that’s what we were about ready to do when the oil spill happened. Shrimping was kind of pretty much done, I think it was done. I wasn’t out in the Sound. Our houseboat was kind of buttoned up for the season, and we had a few weeks to go before they opened up the season for herring pounding.

And then we got the news that the oil spill had happened, I think we got the news a little bit late, because word didn’t travel quite as fast back then, and it might have been a day or two afterwards. We didn’t really know what to expect. And I remember being a lot more angry and defensive and ready to just jump into action, and the family was like, “Oil’s not good for anything, let’s not jump into this. There’s people that are out there that are trained to do this. Let’s watch the news and see.” We knew our houseboat was out there and we had gear on the beaches that we had stored, we’d put our pots on the beaches, that way we didn’t have to haul our gear back and forth every year. We were a little bit worried, it was kind of like having a house somewhere and not knowing, if there’s a wildfire going by, what’s actually happening. We were all very anxious. It felt really similar to a September 11th kind of issue, where we didn’t want to get too far away from the phones or the TV or the radio. Every little breaking news was a big deal.

Right away we could sense that there was this runaround in the media. The media didn’t quite know how heavy to weight the consequences right away, very similar with all major disasters. They didn’t want to overstate it or understate it. They stayed blameless. And then of course Exxon or any major company that goes into a kind of—now it’s textbook, disaster capitalism has unfolded and we realize now that there’s this, “Don’t worry, we’ll make everything better,” kind of really—they hire people that are very good at doing this. It’s a business policy now. They didn’t have it super-polished back then. Exxon Valdez is kind of what polished up the corporate accident doctrine that we see today, in my opinion.   Now it’s very glossy and very easy. I think the Deepwater Horizon spill was a good example of a slick operation.  Up here in Alaska, it’s really tough to get any news. You see pictures of everything happening, but as far as, “How far did the oil spill? Let’s see a graph of the Gulf of Mexico with actual outlines of where the oil—” There was no graphics in the newspapers, it was all texts. There wasn’t a lot of pictures, not a lot of oiled animals.

Back during the oil spill, when I was nine years old, the newspapers, they weren’t in bed so much and it wasn’t this thing that was like, “OK, well, this is kind of a package deal.” They were going, “This is big news!” and they were out there, and they were trying to get footage that was going to give them really raw, good news coverage. And we saw that and we read that, and it was a really emotional times, because there was pictures of sea otters and birds that were lying on the beaches. Every day. It wasn’t just one Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, like happens nowadays, where you capture the sorrow and everything. It was like, every single day they were coming, and the next day the news was running different pictures and text and there was reporters everywhere trying to get interviews and stuff.

It was a chaotic period, because we felt so far away, and everybody in the family had a different take on it. Mine was definitely like, “Let’s do something. Let’s help. I want to scrub the beaches.” I grew up with not a lot of friends out there, but a lot of animal friends, a lot of birds, a lot of sea otters that I had names for, a lot of whales that I knew, resident pods of both porpoises and orca whales that we knew, we knew their personalities, we’d feed them herring when they came up to the boat. I was really worried about all those animals. That was the big thing for me, “Let’s get out there and do something.” My mom and my dad were like, “We’ve got to hang out here because the oil’s bad and it’s already there.” We had a wet exhaust boat at the time. We had just gotten rid of our old wooden schooner. That would have been the perfect thing. In a deep draft it would have had a dry exhaust, we could have gone everywhere and moved oil. But we switched to this Roberts fiberglass boat with a wet exhaust. You can’t drive through oil, it doesn’t cool the engine, doesn’t work right.  So we felt very helpless. That was the toughest thing for me.

Back then, there really wasn’t a lot of context, there wasn’t a lot of modern—the Internet was hardly developed, we didn’t really know—there was not a lot of communication. There was confusion. We just didn’t know an awful lot.

After the spill had progressed to the point where we knew how many gallons had been discharged, we knew what the cleanup effort was going to look like, it wasn’t a lot of—the initial chaos kind of burned out. We didn’t go back into the Prince William Sound until after the initial oil spill remnants had been cleaned up.

There was a strong smell in the air still that lasted for a long time. The aerosols inside the oil lasted, they’d lain on the water for a long time. When we first came back, we were driving down through the Sound, which, if you look on a map, it’s just waterway after waterway. It takes eight hours of driving to get down from where we were to the port, through passageways and passageways, it’s not this big open ocean, it’s just these tight little areas. We have a map right here. It’s a long ways. That was one of those things where we were just looking around and it was just quiet. It was really, really quiet. No birds, I mean, like, no birds. Not even woodland birds. Everything was just quiet. And there were a lot of people in rain gear on the beaches, a lot of research vessels that were unfamiliar to us. A lot of human activity. And I guess probably a lot of sound, a lot of diesel engines.  But it was different.

It was a very calm, crystal-clear day, and we didn’t really see the oil. The oil turns into tar clumps after a while. The rocky beaches kind of looked the same. It was tough to see. It wasn’t like ooze was dripping off of everything. That’s a misnomer. It turns into kind of a rock-candy-looking substance. When it sticks to rocks, it looks like part of the rock, until you come up close to it. So we were going, “It doesn’t look that bad.” We heard the magnitude, 11 million gallons or whatever, and we were going, “This is going to be something where we’re going to see the ooze on everything.” But everything was just quiet. And there were strange people, scientists, everywhere. Absolutely every beach. Archeologists, anthropologists. They discovered all the ruins and all the artifacts in the Sound that had never been found before. Every beach in the Sound had been picked clean of oil lanterns and baidarki kayaks and utilities that were used in the—thousands of years old, just lying on the beach that we used to find every once in a while and look at and collect. So it was just a whole different scene.

We were going down there to grab the barge. We didn’t know at the time what had happened. We were just going to grab it and check it out, because we knew that the oil spill had come and socked—the place that we had anchored for the last four years, or three years that we had anchored our houseboat was pretty much a sock for the oil. The oil passed right down and caught all the different bays, and that bay is shaped like a sock. So it got hit pretty hard.

We found our houseboat had been used by the oil cleanup contracting company, VECO. They had thrown soiled booms and garbage bags of contaminated oil-absorbent material all over the boat and it had just been trashed. We sold it for a song to some guy who just took it and leveled it and turned it into a platform for something else. It was a little bit heartbreaking, because that was kind of like, “Well, that’s done.” They closed down all the ground fishing and the shrimping and that was kind of over. And salmon escaped, narrowly, biologically. The fishery didn’t escape damage, but thankfully, the salmon were out in the ocean when the oil spill happened, so we switched to salmon afterwards, to keep the lifestyle.  We became the fishermen that we once looked at like, “Oh, the impermanent seasonal yuppie crowd comes in with their little sport boats and their huge horsepower engines and they roar around for a few months and leave and the residents of the town come out afterwards.”

I don’t remember the barge at all. Maybe it was dark when we got there and maybe we didn’t stay long. I don’t remember what it looked like. I rely on my parents telling the story over the years, and they said it was trashed and that they didn’t want it or that it was unusable. I didn’t know if they maybe opened the living quarters and freezer up and pushed bags and bags—there was a lot of material just laying all over. It looked more like a mound of brown bags than it did the actual dock and house. We had a little boom that was used to trolley things back and forth between the boat and the dock. My parents said it was just this thing that was heaped into a pile 20 feet tall. Oil booms draped all around it.

I don’t know what we did. That really doesn’t stick out in my mind. At that point, when we were out there, I don’t even think we hooked up to it and towed it anywhere. I think we assessed the situation and turned around and went back home. We kind of went, “There’s nothing we can do.” I think we put it up for sale and somebody else went and grabbed it, we said, “Here’s where it is. Take it.” I think VECO came by and pulled all that stuff off after we’d seen it, so it was—when we had gotten down there, it was three or four months afterwards, the situation was still dynamic. I’m not exactly sure.

The other thing, too, that I was in touch with, because I was at a very impressionable age, that still stays with me is the abundance of life. I already said this once. That was a really big deal for me. That was something that—it’s the difference between—I don’t know if I could tell you know whether there’s more or less otters and terns and murres and mallards and all the other organisms, the big ones, not the scientific small ones, the nematodes and different little bugs, but the big ones that a nine-year-old would like. They’re all gone, the furry ones, the river otters. And we had lived in that little bay for long enough that we knew them. We knew how many families of river otter there were. We knew if a sea otter was passing through. We watched a lot. My mom was really into that whole scene. We weren’t doing, like, the Alaska redneck life, we were doing kind of the Alaska hippie life. There’s a big difference. They’re kind of the same now, I’ve noticed.

Back then, she put a lot of importance into paying close attention. She’s Native American on her side of the family, and she was raised on a reservation. Part of her coming to Alaska was wanting to get back into a little more natural relationship with the earth, because that was destroyed completely in the Plains Indians on the reservations by the disassociation of the culture that happens when they’re put on reservations and into boarding schools. She wanted to get back into that. She’d teach me some of the Native language, we’d go in the woods and do some stuff that a seven-year-old boy my age—I was into it. That was a tough thing, coming back and going, “This is all over. This is all done.” Not only are the animals not there, the feeling’s not there, and I knew I wasn’t going to be there any more. I knew that my life had changed. I knew that I had public school to look forward to and a house in Homer, and I was going, “Oh, my goodness, I’ve got to catch up now. I’m in third grade.”

So that was that.

I wanted to rewind life. Just like when everybody experiences, I believe, their first tragedy, they go, “Wait, is there any possible way we can take this all back? I promise I’ll do whatever it takes.” And I wanted to stay—I don’t know. I think I would have if I had the mind that I have today, wanted to have stayed. “Let’s get out some Joy soap and a sponge and go to town and try to fix this.” That was kind of my attitude, I believe. I’m not sure. Maybe I had met a really cool friend that summer in town. Sometimes nine-year-olds can be impossibly shallow, and all I wanted to do was go play Nintendo, because it was like, “Wow, have you seen this new thing? It’s awesome. I don’t want to do this home-school thing. Check this out!” So I’m not sure what the reality is at this point. It could have been something—I could have not wanted to, I could have wanted to. I believe that I would have—I had been primed up for months and months and months after knowing the oil spill was out there, and wanting to know what happened to my buddy, Otto, the otter, he was a special one, he was kind of my pet, we kind of raised him. I really wanted to know what happened to him. It’s like not knowing what happened to your dog if you hear your house is on fire. That was a big one for me. And all the others. I wanted to hang out, for sure.

Going back to town was nice, too. I liked it because I had a bike in town. There’s nowhere to bike out there. And I liked biking, a nine-year-old on a bike. I’m not sure.

I think I had to do that. Now, when I look back, I’m really glad that I went to public school and that—I became socially awkward quite a bit. I was kind of a wild child, feral. It took a while for me to catch up. But I’m glad that happened then. I think the whole—what’s the movie, the book, when a kid’s raised by his grandfather in the woods? If it lasts too long, if you get to be 13, 14 years old, you’re really playing catch-up. There are certain parts of your life you can’t get back, the social side of your life, which is very important. We’re social creatures. I know people who are still recovering and they’re adults, because they lived their whole childhood in the woods.

So I’m glad that that kind of yanked me out of that land where it was my mom and my dad, my brother and me, and then this jolly, natur-y, hippie-ish, very universal everything-from-the-same-life-path, brothers and sisters, instead of, “We kill this one and we eat this one and we don’t kill this one because they’re not good to eat,” kind of a thing that’s a little bit more mainstream now. There’s a lot of respect and a lot of—that was the change that I saw. I went, “OK, this is over,” and I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to adapt for a long time after that. For five or six years, I just dug my heels in. I didn’t do very good at school because of it. And I kind of just didn’t know—it wasn’t a natural disaster, it was something that I felt was negligence and poor judgment and pull-the-wool-over-your-eyes kind of corporate, “Hey, everything’s going to be cool. Hey, we need this, Alaska needs this, it’s economy, it’s money.” And I’m in the fishing industry, and I have to be careful with double standards, because the fishing industry relies on petroleum products, heavily, heavily, from the nets to the oil to the gas to the way that we transport our product down to market.

And I have to be considerate and fair when I judge oil companies. But even regardless, I still think that there’s a lot of lying and deceit and you take the money. There’s lot of people who are specialists in that whole thing. So that’s what happened after the oil spill with me personally. It was just going, “Wow, things are going to change.”

That was a tough thing. “OK, this is done.” I said that already. It was this chapter in my life. I started to look at my life in chapters, as a philosophical tool since then, because it’s helped me to go, “OK, nothing lasts forever.” It was a good learning experience, a sobering one. It was good.

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—”

We didn’t fish that whole year. It was actually an elective process the fishermen did. We didn’t want to tax the resource too much. So we didn’t fish that year, and my dad had bought into gill-netting and herring-pounding in ’87 and ’88 respectively, so we had those permits and we were capable of doing non-shrimping-related fisheries at the time of the oil spill. But we didn’t in 1989. The next year, we basically went back in and started gill-netting. We gill-netted from the year after the oil spill right on to—we never missed a year until today. So we were back at it. I just remember being a young kid and instead of snapping heads off shrimp I was pitching fish in a hold.  After a while I went—because we tried to patch things together, and we went, “Maybe if they open up shrimping again, maybe we should keep our shrimp gear. Maybe we should keep the houseboat in case it ever opens up again and we can have our life back. Maybe it won’t last 20 years. Maybe in five years we’ll be able to do this fishery again.” And after five years, “No, we should just sell this stuff. It’s getting rusty on dry land. Somebody else should be able to use it, take it down southeast where they still could shrimp.” And then we went, “OK, salmon, that’s what we’ve got to do now.” So we switched to salmon.

I don’t know if scientifically they’ve got a lot of numbers on biomass from back before the spill. I know there’s biologists that were there. But it feels like even today, there’s just—with the exception of sea otters, there are so many now, it feels like there’s less of the birds, the cormorants. There were cormorants everywhere back in the day, and those birds got hit really hard. They don’t tolerate oil. They don’t do good in traumatic situations. So it felt like there was just, like, a lot of birds, not just sea gulls and stuff, which, there are tons of them, just a lot of different of the birds that you kind of—like oyster catchers and little finchie birds that you’d see everywhere. Maybe that was me, maybe that was the lifestyle, maybe I was seeing things. It’s one of those things where if you change the lifestyle, you stop seeing things the same. So I’m not sure.

But I wasn’t really—I don’t think at the time I was like—I wasn’t myself really looking at things that way. I don’t remember because I didn’t formulate my memory in a way where I would now. I keep track of things, there’s a little more of an adult perspective, where you go, “This is this way and this is this way,” and you can kind of understand where the ebb and flow of life is when something like that happens, where the nutrients go. If the oil goes to the bottom, the bottom fish are going to go. The seasonal fish are going to be fine. So those are just really basic things that I didn’t really understand then.

So when I came back, I was like, “Sweet, we’re back!” And the trees were still green, and the water was clear, and I thought, “That wasn’t so bad.” But the birds, it was the birds. The whales were there. It was the birds. That was tough. It wasn’t tough, but that was a change I noticed. It might have been—it was a symbolic change, for sure. It was probably not a very biologically relevant thing, but for me that was kind of what struck me when we were gill-netting. For sure.

I didn’t really know if I wanted to [be a fisherman] or not. I wanted to be a scientist. I kind of have an obsession-style curiosity about things, where I’ll pick it up and I’ll learn everything there is to know about it and I’ll want to be that thing, you know, where you’re growing up, and then I’ll be like, “Eh! I’ll start with paleontology. Oh, love dinosaurs.” And then it’s like, “Well, geology is pretty cool, too.” So it was rocks and rocks and rocks. I still love fossils and rocks. I’m a big rock fan. That’s what I wanted to do. I really wasn’t thinking, like, fishing. I was looking at my dad and going, and I still do, I guess—my dad came up here with no family to help him out, “Hey, do you need an extra couple thousand? Here, just buy my boat,” like I did with my dad. It’s so easy when you have a generational family sitting there, “Just use my gill-net.” “Hey, Grandpa, can I use your boat? Can I borrow your permit for a little while?”

He came up here when he was 18 years old and didn’t know anything about boating. He had a wooden boat that leaked on him and had a crappy engine and he was like, “OK, I’ll buy a boat,” and he went out and figured it out, no friends. It wasn’t like he was in somewhere like Homer where he could just go to a decent mechanic. You could go to Whittier if you had any problems, and then you could hitchhike to Anchorage or down to Homer and bring a part back with you and sit there in Whittier while it’s raining and try to figure out how the water pump goes on to an old Perkins engine or something. That was adventure for him. I did then and I guess I do now always felt like that was his story. And I’m in fishing now because fishing got really good.

School didn’t really pan out for me the way I wanted it to. I really still am just a sponge for knowledge. The classroom thing, I think I’m still a little bit feral, the classroom thing is tough, for me to do that. Otherwise I probably would have been a scientist, and I probably still could do that at any point. But that was kind of my attitude then and now, that I really admired my dad because he took the initiative to do that big step up to Alaska. Now I’m here, and I’m kind of still looking for my step, and I want it to have elements of surprise and ignorance. I don’t want to know how to do everything perfectly. That’s kind of how I feel about fishing. I know how to tie every knot. I know where all the key sets are in the Sound because I’ve been watching guys make these same sets and make money. I’m doing this because the lifestyle’s great. I guess I’m not talking about the lifestyle, because I think the lifestyle’s wonderful. But I’m still looking for my adventure. This is pretty good. We have a pretty good life. We have a really good life, and I’m really happy. But still, fishing isn’t going to be the last thing I do. I’m not going to just do it and my kids—I’m not hoping that my kids and my grandkids do fishing. That’s not it. I want to do something that I have to learn from the very ground up.

Salmon, there’s a lot of salmon fisherman, and I am one now, and they’ll probably hate me when I say it, but it’s a—it’s just different. It’s fast boats, a lot of noise, it’s surface fishing. There’s something about it. It’s just different. It’s awesome, too. It’s definitely awesome, I get a rise out of it. But I was in a spot where everything was real slow. There was nobody out there competing for the shrimp. They’re all down at the bottom of the ocean just waiting for you to find them, and there wasn’t like, “Oh, well, it’s going to be closed in 14 hours and there’s 250 other people trying to get out.” If it’s looking bad, we’d just make some pancakes and sleep in today and go out and pick the shrimp off tomorrow. No big deal. That was kind of cool. That change between having this mellow lifestyle thing to this super-fast, high-powered, turbo-charged lifestyle is something that I—it wasn’t necessarily that after the oil spill, it’s turned into that now, because it’s kind of a cultural change in gill-netting that’s going on. It’s like gill-netting plus NASCAR that’s happening now. Which happens when you inject money into an economy like ours. People don’t know what to do. They’ve got bigger, faster, more stuff.

 

Accidents come and go, and now that I’m older, I’ve seen a lot of things that go—I see disasters hit the world in different areas and different magnitudes, and you go, “Wow, this could be big. We might never recover from this.” You hear all these words from different people saying the same thing. And what’s amazed me is that environments and people do recover, more than I gave them credit for, more than I thought that they would. I thought the Sound would be permanently and visually scarred for the rest of my life. That was kind of—nobody really knew what was going to happen up here, and nobody was willing to say one way or another. So my imagination was one of oil dripping from trees and birds with twisted beaks like you see around McDonald’s dumpsters, all kinds of funky stuff. And it’s definitely there. It’s all over underneath the gravel, it’s there.

But I am just blown away by the ecosystem’s ability to manage those kinds of disasters. Oil comes from the earth. It’s absorbed back into it. The ocean is an amazing solvent. It’s pretty amazing. It doesn’t just disappear in the time frame we’d like it to, but I guess now that I’m older, I’m seeing this as something that happens sometimes all over the world, whether it’s man-made or natural. It’s helped me to be OK with when these things happen in other places, because it does happen. And yes, there are people that are at fault and there are tactics that are criminal that powerful companies use to escape liability. But that doesn’t make me as angry anymore, because I know that the earth is this moving organism that really takes care of its own. It was kind of neat for me to see.

I’m not sure. I’m not sure what could really make that—it’s I guess uncertainty at first and fear that you don’t know the magnitude or the duration of what’s going to happen, and then—I think the best thing for all people is a sense of community in a time of crisis. And that’s what I think was lacking in my life. That would have made things a lot better. It was—it’s been something that—it stays with you until you get that resolved, the questions, the dialogue, just having conversations about it. Just like with anything that happens, whether you go to a war-torn country, a natural disaster, a volcano, an earthquake, an oil spill or whatever. Having that sense of community, a true one, where it’s like the village style, where everybody’s kind of everybody’s parent. If your mom and dad won’t smack you around when you need it, your neighbors are going to do it. They’re going to treat you like their own kid, and everybody takes care of everybody else. That would have been a wonderful resource for our family. We did fine without it, but for families that are going to going through these kinds of crises from here on out, which is going to be inevitable, that’s one thing that I could just straight-out say is a very key general tool. It’s been said by lots of professionals, but I’d definitely say it again.

Never underestimate the power of the ecosystem, especially the aquatic ecosystem, to adapt. Adaptability is a wonderful thing that happens, a survival mechanism, and it happens within ourselves when something like this happens. It happens in all animals. It happens even in the inanimate side of life. There’s something really great about the way everything’s made that—and I’m talking more about things that I’ve learned in life. I’ve seen the oil spill, and that’s the model, but you don’t have the context, and then life gives you the context. I’ve seen the oil spill happen in my eyes in many different scenarios, that metaphor. Every time I’m baffled by how things get better. As long as you’re willing to get better yourself and allow for that and not to dwell, then it’s amazing how fast life can just keep going on. There’s an amazing focus in the animals and the plants and the rocks and trees and the water. That focus is something I don’t think can be destroyed. It has that same—there’s a common goal for everything, just to keep going, keep moving. That won’t be stopped. That’s an amazing thing that is tough to learn, especially in the modern lifestyle, where technology breaks, a lot of it’s even designed to break. There’s a little bit of contempt that I have for the modern lifestyle that’s probably come out in this interview because of that impermanence of design that’s molded into everything we do now, where a lot of things don’t last very long. I’ve learned to have a pretty deep appreciation for the natural world because it’s just indestructible. If it looks like it’s destroyed, it’s only your perspective that’s changing. It’s just an opinion. The material is there.

You can dig down on the beaches and see the oil right underneath the surface 20 years later, but there is—it’s been a long time—animals that deal with it. The cancer rates might be higher and different genetic diseases might be prevalent, and these are the bad things, but the life is happening and the time frame is, we’re not in geological time yet. That’s how you have to measure things like volcanoes and earthquakes and millions of barrels of oil covering the earth, in the flash of an eye in geological time. I’m a firm believer that things will be redissolved and reintegrated and tolerances will be built up in immune systems in some of the species down the line. A lot of benefits come from changes, and a lot of changes that are the most beneficial can’t happen in any way but traumatically. If it’s a gradual change, it might not have the same effect and it might not be as beneficial for life. So that’s kind of I guess the upside of all this, to really embrace the—the chaos of life whenever it happens.

To the folks that are down in the Gulf states, I wish I knew more about the details and the different life stories that are down there. But I imagine that as a general guideline for just—for recovery physically and mentally, just going, “What am I going to do?” whether it’s the dad who’s looking at the—he’s going to have to be maybe catching different fish that he doesn’t like to catch that doesn’t produce as much money for the family, maybe take a winter job, and the stresses and all the different aspects of the family between the adults and the children and all on down. It’s just really important, when you’re facing something like a natural disaster, that you’re emotionally and economically tied into, taking it upon yourself to kind of embrace that and to test your resolve and to test your capability to remain adaptive and consider it like an adventure and a challenge.

I think those tools would benefit everybody in life. But I think you don’t learn those until after you’ve been whacked by something fairly substantial, whether it’s an oil spill, it could be a death in the family, anything that’s permanent, that results in permanent change. The first time is a doozy, and the second time, I think, is—I think I have tools now that I’d be able to look at change and trauma and environmental and social stress in a lot of different ways now because I think back and I reference the way that the oil spill panned out in our scenario, which is long and drawn-out and confusing and it’s become kind of a tool that I use that I feel has benefited my life, which is pretty amazing, to be able to come to a point to say that. I think that’s kind of the key for survival, to take it upon yourself to rise to the occasion and say, “What can I do?” Because there’s possibilities and there’s fresh things. If things always stay the same, you can’t—you go, “OK, this is comfortable, this is what I’m going to do for the next 30 years. I’m just going to be a shrimper, and my kids are going to do this and this and this,” but then all of a sudden that’s taken away, and it can be like, you can have the rug pulled out from your feet.

But then you go, “Wait a minute, maybe this is what I needed. Let’s try getting into this.” Go back to school, get into agricultural, get into school for fisheries management or soil research. There’s things that I’ve been fortunate enough after the fact to see, after a long time. It’s probably been 20 years, a long enough time. The people I feel the most sorry for are the people 30, 40 years old, and it happened at that point in their life where it’s not like you have your whole life ahead of you to make all these changes. I was lucky. I got kind of a kick in the pants when I was young, and my story was yet to be told. It’s not like it’s over when you’re 30 or 40, but gosh, I can imagine feeling a little more tied in and committed. That generation has a very serious opinion about the oil spill compared to me, which is a little more whimsical metaphoric relationship, because I was so young. It was something I could bounce back from a little bit better, I think.

 

I don’t know. I could talk a lot about the whole thing. It was pretty amazing. It was amazing because it felt like—it was kind of like a Little House on the Prairie kind of thing, where the memories feel like a good book, just the memories feel like a good book. That was—I guess it’s important to maybe live your life like that, so no matter what you’re doing, your memories will be like a good book. Because that’s really what you’ve got when you look back.

I love talking about it. I think we’ve covered a lot. I ramble so much, I’m sorry, you probably had things you wanted to ask me and were waiting for me to finish up. I do that all the time. I start out on a thought, and then it just keeps going in my mind, so it keeps going in my mouth, and I don’t know when to shut up.

I think that was good. Snug Harbor is right there. [Points to map]. That’s where we had the houseboat. We bought it on this side of the island. Way up there is where we’d drive down here to. We bought it there, and it took forever to tow it. We had to go all the way around. We finally ended up here. This little bay here is a blow hole. We had, like, the crappiest winter of my life there one year. We couldn’t get it all the way to here because a storm blew in, and once we got the anchors down there, we said, “Well, let’s just spend the winter here and see how it is.” Terrible. We shrimped all through here. And before I got to be old enough to do this with my mom and my brother, my dad had shrimped all over the Sound at that point, and he found this little spot there.

We had just gone back to Snug Harbor this summer for the first time since I was 10 or 11 years old, just after the oil spill. It was interesting to go back to that spot and go, “Wow, that beach is a lot longer than I remember it. It’s a half mile long. I just remember it being the beach.” The mountains were just incredible. I just remember them being the mountains. I’d take a kite and hook it onto our jigging pole and put as much line on it, like a hell of a jigging rod, and the wind is always going there, whether it’s coming off the mountain or in from the Gulf. I’d release the line and send the kite up as high as it could go until it’s at the last few ratchets and you could barely see the kite, it was way up and sloped way out from the weight of the line. I’d wonder if it was as high as the mountains were there, because it was so high, just thousands of feet up there. It was kind of cool.

Or the echo. My mom played a trick on me, a lot of tricks, and you forget to tell a kid that you’re only joking. I’d yell, “Hello!” The mountains are very big on that island, they produce an echo from a long ways away. I’d hear, “Hello!” “There’s a kid over there!” She’d go, “Yeah, that’s the kid in the next bay.” And it’s just one of those things, I always thought there was this kid yelling back at me, so I’d go, “Hey, how’s it going?” “Hey, how’s it going?” Little things like that. [laughs] It’s pretty funny. I’m going, “OK, there’s not a kid over in the next bay, what’s going on?” It was fun. There’s all kinds of little stuff. When I went back there, it was definitely—when we’d drive out of the bay in the morning, we’d go pick the shrimp box every morning, it was right there in the sunrise, no sense getting up before the sun and risking hitting a log in the dark, and so we’d get the boat fired up at sunrise. It was probably because I didn’t want to wake up any earlier, too. I’m sure that nowadays you would probably get up well before sunrise, just to make better time. We’d be met by a pod of porpoises, the same pod, there was 10 or 15 of them, and they were waiting. They would circle out at Discovery Point, they’d wait for the boat, and they’d come flying at the boat. They’d be doing that little lazy thing that they do when they’re sleeping, not using energy. We’d see them there. And they’d hear the boat and they were just all of a sudden—they’d just start charging at us, come right for us. They’d disappear under the boat and pop up on the bow and they’d ride out and spend hours on our bow wave. It was cool. They’d roll on their sides and look up with their eyes. They never took any herring out of—well, maybe they took a chunk of herring out of my mom’s hand directly once. We were always trying to feed them, but they were like, “Drop it first. I’m not taking it, just drop it.” So we’d play with them, and then we’d drop it then they went, bam! and they’d hit it really fast. You could drag your hand in the water and they would come up and touch your hand with their head, right by their blowhole, they’d put their head up and be kicking ferociously, because Mike’s going seven and a half knots in the boat, and they’re pumping their tails, and they’d see you and creep up next to the boat, you’d put the hand down, they’d put their little bell-shaped head and let you touch them. Pretty special.

That was a unique life. I really got lucky with that one. There’s a lot of people that have a lot of unique lives. I’m really grateful. There’s a lot of things I don’t even think I can remember, because I was out there when I was four or five years old. Who knows what was happening then? I can only really remember when I was eight, nine, and ten, and then all through my teenage years when I spent on the gill-netter and the crazy, wild, terrible things I had to experience growing up on a boat when I was older, they’re all very vivid, but before the oil spill, when I was young and things were magical, that “Oh, my gosh, wow!” stage of life, that was a really cool thing to do. And if I ever have kids, it’ll be really important for me to, during that same time period where the human development, the social skills, reading and writing, are all coming into play, definitely value that sense of family adventure, a family on an adventure. It’s very important. Friends and family really close together. We still function really tight. It’s a good feeling. I think that’s a good remedy for some of the disassociated families that happen today, that communication doesn’t happen between family, kids run off when they’re 13, 14 years old and hate their parents. Things happen to all families. But I think that I am definitely—I have so many good memories of that system that I feel like that would be something I’d like to try for sure, and I’d like to advocate as well, definitely. Between that and the therapy and the wonderful feelings of letting yourself just do the wild thing in the woods, I think that’s pretty good medicine, a lasting trend that I want to keep.

Maybe I’ll be a farmer and the kids can help me out. I hear farmers need lots of kids, too.