The summer of our discontent

 A friend sent me this article that I wrote and was published in small literary magazine 

Before: Happy boat captain

called Anna's House. I had forgotten about it, written more than 30 years ago shortly after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. I found it difficult to read, having to relive for a little while that awful summer that changed my life in so many ways. Because of some personal embarrassment I feel over at least one incident in it, I hesitated putting it here, but I decided to, mostly because I want people to know how far the ramifications of an oil spill go into the lives of people involved. The effects of that spill still linger in Prince William Sound and not just in the minds of residents. Keep in mind this was written probably a month or so after the first summer of the spill so some verb tenses might sound funny. Also this comes from magazine pages made into PDFs and then transferred to Word and then to Blogger and there are some crazy formattings I couldn't get rid of. Please bear with me.

Years ago, before I began driving  tourist boats for a living, I was Alaska correspondent for Sports Illustrated. The people there never could get the time difference straight and often  in New York at 9 a.m. they would phone me. Of  course when my phone rang, it was 5 a.m. in Anchorage. Training dies hard. 

Last spring my friend Barbara and I moved into a little house trailer in Valdez. Four days later, March 24, when the ringing phone awakened me at about 5:20 a.m., I wondered what Sports Illustrated wanted and how they'd found me. The caller, the owner of the boat I had been operating for six years, told me an oil tanker had hit Bligh Reef and he needed my boat to haul crews to the site. As dumb from sleep as I was, the journalism instinct proved strong and I called Howard Weaver, the editor of the Anchorage Daily News and told him what I  knew.
I  drove to the harbor and navigated the ice on the docks to the boat, which was still in winter layup. We had only just  begun the spring preparations for the tourist season. In less than two hours we had most of the systems functioning  and the engines warmed and could have departed. Instead  we  stood by waiting for orders.  Calls  on the marine radio told some of the story. The tanker had hit the rocks sometime around midnight. Salvage equipment didn't even begin moving until 11a.m. and didn't arrive until  around 2p.m.

Most of us on the boat  had chosen to work in Prince William Sound because of its  wildness,  its adventure, its beauty. Now an oil tanker was filling the sound with crude, and all we could do was sit at the dock waiting, frustrated at our inability to do anything  when so much should be done. It wasn't until about 4p.m. that we got the call,ran across Port Valdez to the  Alyeska  pipeline terminal  and picked   up  a  crew  and learned    one of the reasons for the delay.

The pipeline operators did      have equipment to clean up spills but were unable to load  it  on their barge. And there was another problem. Valdez averages 24 to 32 feet of snowfall every year. Most of that equipment was on shore, covered by a winter's worth of snow.

We departed the terminal sometime after 6 p.m. and arrived at Bligh Reef after dark, guided by the deck lights of the ship on the rocks, and what seemed like hundreds of lights from small boats. Darkness hid the oil in the water from us, but the odor was unmistakable a mile from the ship. 
[ An insert: On the trip down to the ship the owner was sitting out on the bow. About a mile or so from it a killer whale surfaced to breathe right in front of the bow. I turned on the autopilot and stepped out and asked the owner if he had seen that. He said yes and he hoped it wouldn't get into the oil. I thought that too but I had a history with the sound's whales and something else occurred to me. "What makes you think he wasn't trying to tell us the same thing?" I asked.] 
When we reached the ship, I maneuvered the boat against the side of a tug and our crew left to begin work. A tired oil-coated crew boarded for the return trip toValdez.

From that first morning until the middle of October, the work never stopped. I worked 12 hours a day, sometimes 20, seven days a week, with few respites and no relaxation. For the first 18 days we hauled crew changes to the leading edge of the cleanup. The boat, 60 feet long and licensed for 45 passengers, was ideal. Each day we followed the oil a little farther southwest. The last trip was 80 miles.

Each day the enormity of the disaster grew. We learned about oil and spills; new terms entered our lexicon: "boom" and "skimmer" and "mud boat. "We learned how to measure the thickness of the oil on the water: Oil came through the sea water intakes to the boat's toilets a foot below the waterline, but didn't come through the intakes for the main engines three feet down, meaning the oil was somewhere between a foot and three feet thick, at least in the first few days,

A t first the oil was a brownish sludge on the surface of the water with just the hint of rainbow in it. As it spread farther and thinned,  the rainbows became more obvious. After the first three days, most of the aromatics in the oil had evaporated and the odors were less pronounced. We learned about skimmers and the booms that contain and absorb oil. On the first of the longer trips through the spreading slick,  I  drove through 35 miles of oil. The white hull of the boat turned brown; we covered all the seats with plastic to protect them from oil on the workers' clothing, and put up signs, "Please don't flush the toilets while we're in the oil," to protect the working parts of the electric pumps.

We were so busy and so tired those first days, I didn't fully appreciate the dimensions of the disaster. It wasn't until about a week and a half into the spill that I had a chance to reflect. We were in the harbor standing by, a watchword in spill work. I stretched out in the wheelhouse with a newspaper. I'd caught headlines on the run, but I never  had a chance to read a report on the spill all the way through. When I did, the immensity of what had happened came over me in a swell. I laid there in the wheelhouse fighting tears for half an hour. So many people must have done the same when they grasped the amount of destruction to this last sanctuary of wilderness by an economic system that cannot leave things alone.

For those first eighteen days I ran the boat on the word of the callout by Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, the pipeline operating company. We had no contract and no idea how much we'd be paid. We'd worked with them over the years and didn't worry about it. I think most Alaskans would have volunteered just to get that oil out of the water and save what we could. By the eighteenth day, Exxon had begun administering the project and we signed a contract with them that ended the same day, for some reason. The boat,· the crew and I were out of it. I had been free in talking with reporters, and I wondered if Exxon were holding it against us.

We began cleaning the boat and preparing it for the tourist season, and I began to see the changes in attitude around town. Exxon planned to clean the spill by throwing money at it and a lot of people in Valdez were cashing in. Boat owners getting five times their normal charter rates were complaining. My boss, who normally chartered that boat for $1,500 a day, turned down an offer of $4,000 a day.

I have to admit here that I was not immune. I could see in front of me maybe a $100,000 summer— $20,000 was a good year normally.

Eventually the owner landed an acceptable contract with the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. We all preferred working for the state, even though the money ultimately came from the oil company.

But it wasn't to last. We left Valdez the second of May. On the11th, crossing a rocky area near Green Island in the southern part of the sound, I hit a submerged rock and all but sank the boat. A tugboat kept it afloat for eight hours until the tide went out. We did what patching we could and then when it floated free on the returning tide, the tug towed it to shallow water.

I was the captain of a boat under tow, watching water slowly rising in the bilges, and ripping out what equipment I could to toss into a skiff running next to me in order to save what was salvageable in case the boat sank under me. Ahead on the deck of the tug right next to the tow line lay an axe to cut that tow if the boat began sinking and tried to pull the tug down with it.

The three-mile voyage was long and slow. When we did reach the beach the boat settled on the bottom with just the cabin showing at high water. For a weekwe repaired the holes enough to tow the boat 70 miles back toValdez. Iworked in the rain, slogging in water-filled boots through the clay muck of the beach. I knew the $100,000 summer was gone along with my confidence and my reputation as a boat driver. The disaster of the oil spill dimmed somewhat.

After the boat returned to Valdez and was safely hoisted onto land, I spent a weekend home reliving the accident. I wanted to stay away from the boat until the notoriety wore off and curious spectators went on to other pursuits. Meantime the owner searched the West Coast for another boat.

After a week I   began salvaging equipment and cleaning out the muck. My heart wasn't in a project that only reemphasized the mistake I had made. I was standing amid the wreckage of boat and psyche when our landlord, a friend of many years, climbed up the ladder and entered the cabin. I really thought she had come to offer sympathy. She was a boat person herself. Instead she told me she was going to sell the house trailer she was renting us.

Real estate prices had never been this high before. The spill had tripled the town's population; no rental units were available. Homeowners were renting out rooms; some reportedly rented their homes for $11,000 a month. One friend moved his son into a small travel trailer in the back yard so he could rent the boy's room. Since we didn't have to move immediately, we tabled the disaster, figuring something had to turn up for us.

My boss located another boat and I went to Seattle to help drive it north. I felt I'd bottomed out. The long boat trip eased my mind and helped my confidence. We made the trip in five days, running day and night through the Inside Passage and across the Gulf ofAlaska.

My return was anything but triumphant. Someone else was going to operate the boat. It seemed the family in the family operation I'd been working for over the previous eight years didn't want to promote me after sinking their boat. They did offer me a lesser job but I turned it down, mostly because that job would have taken me out of oil spill work.

Barbara, in the meantime, had her own frustrations. She had joined the volunteer effort to clean sea otters, but was told eventually there was no place for volunteers. She sobbed that she had moved to Alaska to get away from the avaricious crowds of the Lower 48 and now the spill had brought them here. Valdez doesn't have a traffic light. There just isn't enough traffic. This summer sometimes it took as long as ten minutes to cross an intersection. She published a satiric newspaper about the spill, then worked on the tour boats for the people who had dumped me.

For the first  time in 20 years I didn't have a job or any prospects. I'd never really had to look for work. I was recruited out of college; I always seemed to have another job waiting around the corner. I'd never written a resume. Once the initial panic had settled, I went looking for work and within two days I was driving a crew boat for Veco Inc., the main subcontractor for Exxon in the cleanup — no future, but it would get us through the summer. The world  had tipped somehow and we had to claw to hold on.

One evening before I left for work I started laughing and explained to Barbara, "Barb, it's 8 o'clock in the evening and nothing bad has happened to us yet." She laughed, too. At 8:30 the phone rang. It was the landlord telling us the house was being sold and we'd have to get out.

The next morning I inconsiderately left with the crew boat for the rest of the summer, dumping the housing problem onto Barbara. But through some fortune, the boat broke down three times in the first week and the third time I couldn't fix it. After a week of waiting for the part I needed, I gave up and jumped on a crew boat heading for Valdez.

When I arrived, Barbara was gone. The whole mess had become too much for her and she'd gone to stay with a friend in Anchorage. I called her and promised I wouldn't leave until the housing situation was settled. That's what I told my new employer the next morning when I took the broken part into the office. They hired a new skipper.

Barb returned the next day and we attacked the housing problem, but the situation was dismal. We finally came down to a choice between the19-foot travel trailer our friend's son had been occupying, or a room at another friend's house. When we called our friend to tell her we had decided to rent from her, she told us she was being evicted and asked us if we knew of a place where she could stay. (She left Valdez in disgust at the end of the summer.)

At this point our thinking was muddled; we just weren't looking at all the angles. It took one sentence from Barbara's father to turn us around. He said, "You just spent all that money for a car and you can't spend even less to buy a house trailer?" Within two days we located an affordable trailer sold by a long-time Valdez resident who was fed up with the chaos and was getting out.
We went to the bank I had been using for more than 15 years for a loan. The manager said the loan was small enough he could grant it on his word. Then he smiled and said, "no." That was a shock. We were driving trying to figure out what to do when we passed the other bank in town and Barbara suggested we try there. I had never been inside the door. But, we gave it a try and this banker heard our case and then asked, "do you need the money today or can you wait until Monday?" I could have kissed her.

One problem solved, but I was still jobless. In a couple of days, however, I began driving a little 28-foot pleasure boat shuttling people between Valdez and cleanup sites out in the the sound.
My daughter, Ariel, who usually spent summers with me on the boat, came to Valdez. Her visit underlined the effect of the spill on us. I saw her only a couple of times during the summer.

Early in the summer, after a miscue in semantic differential, Barbara and I decided to get married before she returned to teach school in the fall. So, amid all the other hectic activity we planned a wedding. Actually Barbara planned it; I was gone12 hours a day, seven days a week driving a boat.

I almost missed the ceremony. I had found someone to relieve me on the boat, but two days before the wedding the boat was called out for a four-day trip. My substitute couldn't go for that long and we scoured the docks for someone else. Five minutes before departure,we recruited  another skipper who could take my place. Get me to the church on time.

We were married in a simple civil ceremony August18. Barbara's family and what few friends weren't working on the oil spill joined us. We postponed our honeymoon and I went back to work and kept at it until the middle of October. As the days dragged on I declined slowly. I am used to working a hundred days straight in the summer, but not 200. Every waking minute was consumed by the spill and even the simplest of tasks outside work turned monumental. For the first time in my life I forgot to pay bills. When Exxon called in the boat contracts, putting us all out of work, many of us cheered.

With all that happened to us personally, I lost track of what the spill had done to Prince William Sound. I had seen all the work sites out in the sound, all the attempts at cleaning, all the inefficiency of effort, the lack of coordination, the politics, and most  of  all, the inability to pick up the oil. Exxon claims to have picked up about 20 percent of the oil spilled by the tanker. The company claims another 20 percent evaporated. (Historically the best oil recovery from an oil spill is around 11 percent.) I know I've walked on beaches they treated and dug holes a foot down that filled with oil. Oil clinging to rocks in places can't be scraped off with a knife, and even on the last few days before shutdown, inspectors were finding beaches still fouled with what came to be called mousse, the brownish coagulated slime of aged crude.

In the long run the impact of people on the sound may have been even worse than the oil. What six thousand people can do to a wilderness is unbelieveable. I'd gone into a bay where I'd spent time before the spill, a quiet place where mine was the only boat, and found a virtual city with hundreds of boats and as many as a thousand people. At one of my favorite little bays, where I'd watched for killer whales, I estimated five hundred people living on barges and boats. Maybe a hundred cleaned the beach. The rest all provided support of some kind or another.  And this whole effort was aimed at about half a mile of the thousand miles oiled.

AFTER: 12 years as an oil spill 
response consultant.

During my last boat operations, taking marine surveyors around Port Valdez to inspect barges and their loads before they headed south after the summer, I found myself working for Outsiders who had come to Valdez to exploit the spill. The people I was working with, the cargo surveyors, wanted only to get paid and get out. The Seattle woman who worked with me as crew joked about having PMS, "Point Me South." Since most of the local boats had quit, even the radio talk was restricted to Outside boats. I felt like an alien in my own country.

I wondered how many people working on the spill  saw the sound only in terms of a fast buck. One day I took some Outsiders to a couple of beautiful bays near Valdez just  to showthem what the sound really is like. To their credit, they appreciated what they saw.

I never thought I'd look forward to a cold snowy quiet day in Valdez, but when it came and I looked out over a quiet harbor, a few snow-covered boats, a wave of relief swept over me. It was over, this summer of disruption. I hope that time will wash away the memories of this year, but I'm afraid it will do little more than the winter waves will do to wash the beaches clean.


During the mayhem a friend, an accomplished poet who had shared the sound with  me a time or two, sent me this poem:

There Is No Way Back

By Patricia Monaghan

On the radio, an old friend's voice

chokes with anger and grief.

At the Stony Island intersection

I am stuck, gridlocked in place.

Stalled in traffic uselessly

weeping I listen to the news.

The light turns yellow, red

again; a sudden cry of horns.

Salmon in the tide pool, whales

beside the boat: memories flood me.

The traffic surges forward,

each car spuming its exhaust.

Now the announcer decries

the otters' oil-soaked coats.

I speed home along the freeway

surrounded by the names of animals.

I have fished the Sound, watching

slow fog fall on the blue shore.

--Someone passes me, too fast.

I brake as I approach the exit.

Anchored over the crab pots

I have watched the day moon rise.

A red sun sets now over

the Halsted Street bridge.

I want this to be easier. I want

to forget that oil fueled our boat.

I want to hate the vivid city

as a kind of expiation.

But I've burned trees as fuel.

I have boiled crabs alive.

My trapper friends kill for luxury.

Gardeners rub their hands with Vaseline.

There is no way now to be innocent,

no way for it not to be night and

each of us unprepared to pilot

through these rocky narrows.

And there is no way back.  There is no

part of the world that is not part

of the world.  There is not one of us

who was not on the bridge that night.

Comments from facebook:

Jan Williams Simone This is a heartbreaking and deeply personal story, Tim. Thank you for sharing it with us. And now? What has permanently changed? I wrote about it, too, when it happened, because I was a feature writer for a small newspaper But I could only cry for what was lost from very far away. To live through all of it - well, I can see that it was hell.

Sharon Wright I am glad you posted this, Tim. It was a solid piece of writing then and is now. We all lost somethings bigger than just our innocence. Dave & I & our family lost our annual Spring trip and income from the herring roe on kelp fishery and he was cheated out of any bit of settlement in spite of extensive documentation. To go out there now & miss the porpoises, orcas, the massive flocks of those black ducks with the orange-red feet, etc. etc. is still heartbreaking.
Karen Lachance I am determined never to forget the spill and the aftermath.
Carrie Ann Nash Thank you for sharing that. You write beautifully. The spill, the changes for all of us from the spill, that inability to return to innocence is still an open wound, at least for me. Time passes but the helplessness and fury and violation is fresh for me. And of course, the 52 year old me regrets that our pain translated into more chaos and pain for you. But, thank you for posting this piece.
Tim Jones Thank you Carrie. I have always understood.
Wendy Wiedenman The spill forced me out of housing and I lost hope, my heart in Valdez 
Joe May Hard reading, Tim. Some of it still must hurt.
Kathy Flesch Thank you for sharing the so real story. I could imagine the colours, smell of oil, turmoil, heartbreak. I remember when it happened, tv news...but your post made it so real for me...
😱