Micah's Full Interview - 2

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Category: Micah's Full Interview

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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.