Micah's Full Interview - 3

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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.