Moby-Duck (14 page)

In the summer of 2006, the group's first summer in action, GoAK and a hundred or so volunteers—some traveling by kayak, some by bush plane, some by fishing boat—bivouacked along the Knight Island archipelago at the entrance to Prince William Sound. When the volunteers went home, Raynor, Pallister, and a team of several remediation contractors—friends and family of GoAK's founders—kept going. In all, they managed to clean some 350 miles of shoreline, picking up enough trash to fill forty-six Dumpsters, an accomplishment that earned GoAK the 2006 Outstanding Litter Prevention Award from Alaskans for Litter Prevention and Recycling (ALPAR)—which is, it should be said, not an environmental group, as its name misleadingly suggests, but a charitable organization whose board, in Pallister's own words, represents “the who's who of big business in Alaska.”

Neither, I was surprised to learn, does Pallister consider GoAK to be an “environmental group.” To me, he confided that he is “a greenie through and through,” but publicly he calls GoAK “a conservation group.” Why? Because “in Alaska conservation plays better.” What's the difference? In Alaska people tend to think of environmentalists as treehugging, anti-hunting “animal welfare types,” he explained, whereas conservationists are avid outdoorsmen who love nature but don't make trouble.

I'd assumed that the Gulf of Alaska Keeper was part of the Waterkeeper Alliance, the network of environmental watchdogs that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. helped found. It isn't, and I'd later learn that Waterkeeper officials had objected to GoAK's use of their brand. Although he still hoped to apply for membership in the alliance, Pallister refused to change GoAK's name. Waterkeeper's objections are without legal merit, he insists. He knows. He's checked. “They've trademarked ‘riverkeeeper,' ‘soundkeeper,' ‘ baykeeper,' ” he'd tell me, “but not ‘Alaska keeper.' ”

An enthusiastic hunter, Pallister has little patience for animal-welfare types, but he idolizes Robert Kennedy Jr. as well as John Muir, to whom he believes he is distantly related. He is, in effect, a closet environmentalist. In his thirties, after a decade or so working construction to support his family, Pallister went back to school, eventually earning a JD from Lewis and Clark College, in Portland, Oregon. Later, in hopes of becoming, like Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, he acquired a certificate in enviromental and natural-science law. Later still, on a NOAA Sea Grant, he'd gone to Washington as a staffer for Alaska's Republican senator Frank Murkowski. The first day he reported to duty, Pallister told me, Murkowski assigned him the task of rifling through the Endangered Species Act for loopholes. Though disillusioning, his year in D.C. had been for him an education in the expediencies that politics in Alaska, perhaps more than elsewhere, requires.

He would make more trouble if he had the deep legal pockets to do so, he says. But in Alaska, the loser in a lawsuit pays all the legal fees, and when you take on an oil company or a multinational mining conglomerate, the legal fees can be ruinously steep. In Alaska, only the best-endowed environmental groups dare to litigate. Which is why, even though he's read Edward Abbey's
The Monkey Wrench Gang
more than once, Pallister insists in public that GoAK's work is “not political.” He couldn't afford to be political, he said. He depended on the generosity of corporate benefactors, as well as on the largesse of pro-development politicians. “We don't care if donating burnishes your image,” he told me. “At least you're doing something for the environment.”

The Gore Point cleanup project was far more ambitious—and far costlier—than any GoAK had so far undertaken. It was also their first mission paid for in part with federal funding, funding made available by the 2006 Marine Debris Research, Prevention, and Reduction Act, one of the few pieces of environmental legislation that President George W. Bush ever signed and the latest in a long line of federal actions that have, over the past quarter century, failed to turn back the rising tide of marine debris.

The act authorized $5 million of the annual federal budget to help the Coast Guard better enforce anti-littering laws and another $10 million for a new Marine Debris Program to be administered by NOAA. In addition to conducting its own research, prevention, and reduction efforts, the Marine Debris Program is charged with disbursing matching grants to “any institution of higher education, nonprofit organization, or commercial organization with expertise in a field related to marine debris.” The Alaska Republican senator Ted Stevens, a coauthor of the act and then chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, had made sure that a disproportionately large sum would be directed to his home state.

In the winter of 2007, Pallister applied for one of the grants. By then GoAK certainly had acquired the requisite expertise. Despite all that the group had accomplished in its first summer, Pallister was unsatisfied. It wasn't enough to clean beaches near coastal communities. Alaska has 33,000 miles of coastline, most of which is wild and remote. “GoAK's goal,” his successful grant application explained, “is to remove the plastic MD”—the plastic marine debris—“from as much of the Prince William Sound and Gulf of Alaska shoreline as possible.”

The shoreline Pallister thought about most, the one that had become for him a kind of Everest, was the outer coast of Montague Island, a hundred-mile-long femur-shaped bar of mountainous land that stretches across the entrance to Prince William Sound. “There are forty miles of beaches that are covered in plastic” but no place to safely anchor a boat, he told me in his home office. “We'll have to put people on that shoreline by airplane, and land them on the beach, and then support them by airplane.”

For now the costs and logistics of such a “massive undertaking” were more than GoAK could handle. Before attacking Montague, Pallister had determined, he and his crew needed to practice on a remote, heavily fouled beach where airplanes weren't necessary; where it would be safe for even a small supply vessel like the
Opus
to anchor. On the east side of Gore Point was a tranquil lagoon and a sheltered pebble beach, the perfect spot for a base camp from which it would be a short walk across the isthmus to the debris-strewn windward shore. The Gore Point cleanup would be a sort of pilot project, an experiment in logistics that, if successful, Pallister hoped to repeat on a larger scale. What would it take, he wanted to know, to clean up one wild beach?

I had my own questions that I hoped to answer at Gore Point. To beachcombers, that midden heap of flotsam had made Gore Point a happy hunting ground, one of the best places in Alaska to find exotic oddities. To Pallister it had turned a wilderness park into an accidental dump. To me it sounded like a kind of wonder, akin to the Mammoth Caves or Stonehenge or the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, except that the Gore Point midden heap was the collaborative work of both nature and man, an unforeseen marvel that the ocean had wrought with the raw material we'd provided it. It also sounded like an unsolved environmental mystery—unsolved and possibly unsolvable. Who, if anyone, could be held accountable for all that plastic trash? What did it really forebode—for us, for the sea?

 

 

Another trough of anxious calm. Another concussive wave. Yet to fly from the dash are Pallister's wristwatch, a ziplock bag of venison jerky he made himself from a blacktail deer he shot himself, a bag of trail mix purchased yesterday morning in the Anchorage branch of Costco, and a spiral notebook serving as captain's log. As if playing the nautical equivalent of Whac-a-Mole, I manage to keep these items in place. In the spiral notebook are the entries Pallister made the last time he attempted to take the
Opus
out. The notebook is open to a page inscribed with the following cautionary reminder: “BEAR COVE / Keep close to large rock on port side. / Do not go between shoaling rocks and port side.” Accompanying this message is an alarmingly cartoonish hand-drawn map of Bear Cove and its large rock. That last voyage ended badly but not, though it might have, disastrously: Way out on Prince William Sound, the ancient, rebuilt, 120-horsepower four-stroke Volvo inboard/ outboard overheated and stalled. A fishing boat came to Pallister's rescue, towing the
Opus
back to safe harbor.

Ready to come to our rescue today is the
Patriot
, a charter fishing boat two or three times the size of the
Opus,
captained by Cliff Chambers, who may well weigh twice as much as Chris Pallister. A sweet, mustachioed bon vivant, when we met up at Seward Harbor this morning, Chambers had encased his prodigious gut in a T-shirt conveying the message that at Hog Heaven could be enjoyed three things: BIKES, BABES, AND BIG FISH. He enjoys all three, but about the babes he appears to have discriminating tastes. As an in-kind donation to GoAK, Chambers agreed to ferry volunteers to and from Gore Point, free of charge, so long as Pallister buys the fuel; the volunteers he's ferrying today—a mother and grown daughter from Alaska's North Slope who answered Pallister's televised call for volunteers less out of do-gooderism than out of a desire for a cheap vacation in the famously beautiful Kenai Fjords—are in Chambers's estimation the inferior variety of babe.

“Have you met these girls?” he asked Pallister as we were preparing to embark. “They're kind of a step down from Isabelle. They're nice”—“nice” here implying all that they were not.

Isabelle, I learned, was a vacationing French babe who'd recently spent a couple of weeks as the
Patriot
's solitary deckhand, and although Chambers's transactions with her were strictly professional, those two weeks seem to have been among the best in his career as a charter-boat captain. What left the biggest impression wasn't the beauty of Isabelle, though that left an impression, nor her exotic Frenchiness. What left the biggest impression was the cooking, about which Chambers also exhibits discriminating tastes. Isabelle cooked him omelettes and crepes he remembers still. His current deckhand, a blond ponytailed dude of so few words one wonders whether he might be mute, is also a step down from Isabelle, Chambers discreetly informed us, when said deckhand was doing something out of earshot involving ropes.

Not so discreetly, upon first catching sight of the
Opus
tied up at the docks of Seward Harbor, Chambers informed us that he esteemed it to be of the inferior variety of boat. “Holy shit!” he exclaimed, addressing me, within earshot of Pallister. “You're going to ride on that? Did you go to church last Sunday?”

Unfortunately, although its discriminating captain and its nice inferior babes and its mute ponytailed deckhand are willing to come to our rescue, the
Patriot's
traveling speed is five miles per hour slower than the fifteen sustained by the
Opus
, and Cliff Chambers is several knots more prudent than Chris Pallister. For hours, we've been on our own.

Back in the 1980s, you may recall, the specter of fouled beaches was one of America's most frequently recurring collective nightmares. The Jersey Shore was awash in IV bags and used syringes. New York's garbage barge haunted the world, trailing windblown flotsam in its wake. On the approach to Kennedy Airport, the protagonist of
Paradise
, a late Donald Barthelme novel, looked out his airplane window and saw “a hundred miles of garbage in the water, from the air white floating scruff.”

Then, like the ozone hole, all that floating scruff seemed to go away. Perhaps we tire of new variations on the apocalypse the same way we tire of celebrities and pop songs. Perhaps all those syringes and six-pack rings, no longer delivering a jolt of guilt or dread, were carried off by an ebb tide of forgetfulness. By the end of the 1980s, we had newer, scarier nightmares to fear. Who could be bothered about seabirds garroted by six-pack rings when Alaska's shores were awash in Exxon's crude? Who could be bothered about turtles tangled in derelict fishing nets when the ice caps were melting and the terrorists were coming?

Or perhaps—even a well-informed landlubber might be forgiven for thinking—this particular ecological nightmare, like the nightmarish ozone hole, really had been laid to rest. In the mid-1980s New York's sanitation department began deploying vessels called TrashCats to hoover up scruff from the waterways around the Fresh Kills landfill. Elsewhere mechanical beach sweepers did the same for the sand. In 1987, the federal government ratified Marpol Annex V, an international treaty that made it illegal in the territorial waters of the signatory countries to throw nonbiodegradable trash—that is, plastic—overboard from ships. Later that same year (the same year, it so happens, that members of the United Nations signed the Montreal Protocol, the treaty that banned ozone-destroying chemicals outright), the garbage barge returned to New York after four months at sea and had its cargo incinerated. The good news for the ocean kept coming: In 1988, Congress passed the Ocean Dumping Reform Act, which forbade cities to decant their untreated sewage into coastal waters. In 1989, the Ocean Conservancy held its first annual International Coastal Cleanup, which has since grown into the largest such event in the world.