Micah's Full Interview - 4

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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.