Micah's Full Interview - 7

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Category: Micah's Full Interview

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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.