Moby-Duck (20 page)

By dinnertime all that remained on that forest floor were a few sprinklings of Styrofoam—“bear messes,” Ted Raynor called them. “You can see the huge rake marks they make with their claws,” he told me. “They find something with any sort of smell at all, they just rip into it, they just”—he pretended to be a bear—“
raaar!
The Styrofoam messes we find it's always bears.
Raaar!
”

Our day's hard labor done, we climbed, some of us less nimbly than others, over the slippery, shifting bone-white logs of the driftwood berm, built a fire on the windward beach, and gathered around it to celebrate. A case of Milwaukee's Best and another of Molson emerged from the secret stash. Out on the water the salmon were jumping. Pallister's three sons fetched fishing rods and stood at the edge of the surf, casting and reeling in, until one of them snared a dolly, not as tasty as a silver, but it, too, was good enough.

They gutted it, wrapped it in foil, and baked it among the cinders “barbarian style,” and when it was done, they passed the foil package around, and we plucked out steaming morsels of the pink flesh with our fingers, and when there was none left we cooked hot dogs on sharpened alder branches, and Ted Raynor gave a speech about making Mother Nature happy. We'd restored this awesome place to the way Mother Nature had intended it, he said. Although I found his pantheism sentimental and suspect, the mood of beery triumph was infectious. Far, far away, in the lower forty-eight, green consumers were shopping for carbon offsets and energy-efficient lightbulbs. Meanwhile, this merry band of rugged eco-mercenaries or conservationists or remediation contractors or whatever the hell they were had ridden out into the wilderness to do battle against pollution, and the impact of their actions could be reckoned in tons.

We stayed late, tossing the empties into the fire, where the labels sizzled away and the aluminum whitened. Night didn't fall, but the windward shore faced east, and as the sun sank below the mountains behind us, the ocean took on the dull gray sheen of a pencil rubbing, and a weird sort of shadowy darkness gathered in the cloudy sky, a darkness like that of night scenes in old movies. As it gathered, the mood began to turn.

The boys were passing around slices of watermelon. “None for me,” Raynor said. “It would make me feel . . . ”—he leaned in a little, smirking in anticipation of the funny crack he was about to make, his face flushing an even brighter red from beer and firelight, and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “It would make me feel . . . darker. You know what I mean?”

“No, I don't,” Erik Pallister said, but he did know. We all did. The silence grew long and awkward.

“You don't?” Raynor asked with what seemed genuine if drunken bewilderment.
Doesn't everyone know,
he seemed to be thinking,
who likes to eat watermelon?

“No,” Erik persisted, righteously. “Missed that one.”

Raynor retreated a little from our sociable circle, toward the edge of the firelight, the edge of the darkness, into the safety of his solitude, and gazed out across the leaden Pacific. Beside him on the pebbles, nose resting on her paws, Bryn had curled up on somebody's sweatshirt, possibly mine. “Sometimes I think I'd like to head out to that horizon until I ran out of fuel,” Raynor said now to no one in particular. “And then just pull the plug and have a life-changing experience, if you know what I mean.” Once again, we knew what he meant. “A real life-changing experience, pull the plug. There'd be something beautiful about that, you know? To die in isolation.”

I said something then that, after I'd said it, sounded more cruel than I'd intended. “That's kind of why Ishmael in
Moby-Dick
went to sea,” I told Raynor. “So he wouldn't shoot himself in the head.”

“I understand that,” Raynor said. He polished off his fourth or maybe it was his fifth beer. Then he tossed the crumpled can into the embers. We'd overstayed the campfire's welcome. Boozy triumph had soured into boozy estrangement. We were no longer merry comrades-in-arms, but a band of shitfaced
isolatoes
.

Preoccupied by the airlift, and by his wife's desertion, in no mood to celebrate, especially when alcohol was involved, Chris Pallister had retired early, gloomily, to the
Johnita II
. The broken water maker wasn't the only technical difficulty afflicting the yacht. There was also, among other things, a broken showerhead: when you turned it on, the showerhead and hose would pop from the plastic stall and fizz around like a demented snake.

Pallister was anxious to finish all the repairs and return to Anchorage. He had people to call, donations to raise, an airlift to arrange. Out here in the wilderness, we were off the grid, incommunicado. The yacht's sat phone was too expensive to use except in emergencies, and then, too, for the past few days, it had been on the fritz. Every extra day his crew spent out here cost Pallister more money. He was also racing against the seasons. Fall comes early to the Kenai Peninsula's outer coast. By mid-August, the purple fireweed would finish blooming, and on the upper slopes of the Kenai Mountains the tundra would be tingeing red. The weather could turn for good. (The first time Thomas Royer, the oceanographer I met aboard the
Morning Mist,
attempted to visit the Kenai Peninsula's outer coast in winter, his research vessel encountered fifty-foot seas.) By mid-August the southeasters could start howling in off the Pacific, buffeting Gore Point's windward shore, making waves surge up into driftwood, stripping branches, hurtling plastic beavers a hundred yards back into those trees. If that happened, you could forget about your airlift. If that happened, Ted Raynor and the boys would have to lash down the heaped bags with cargo nets and pray they survived the winter.

Three days later, the morning after Pallister and I depart, an unfamiliar fishing boat appears at the mouth of the leeward lagoon. Aboard are a man and a boy, father and son. The son is twelve years old. For the last three weeks they've been boating and beachcombing along the outer coast. On their return to Homer, while waiting for a favorable tide, they decided to make one last stop at the best beachcombing spot they knew of: Gore Point. After breakfasting at anchor, they motor ashore, cross the isthmus on the familiar trail, and discover that their happy hunting ground has been replaced by a desecration—garbage bags, great cairns of them piled twenty feet high, twenty yards apart. On the perpetrators of this driftological crime the father unleashes an earful of expletives.

“An idiot named Brad Faulkner came ashore and gave us crap about cleaning beaches,” Raynor would write that night in his logbook when he retired with Bryn to the
Cape Chacon
. “I insulted him as often as possible. Then he left.”

Three days later, at the Driftwood Inn, in one of the cheapest hotel rooms in Homer, I receive a call from Chris Pallister. “Apparently some jerk stopped by Gore Point,” he says. “Brad Faulkner. Some sort of fisherman, I take it. Apparently he tore into the guys for the cleanup, for a lot of various reasons. I'm not sure what kind of bee he has in his bonnet.” Then, to his credit, Pallister adds this: “I thought you might want to talk to him.”

 

 

I'd driven to Homer in an old GMC Jimmy, owned by Doug Leiser, that Pallister had commandeered on my behalf. It hadn't been my plan to drive an old GMC Jimmy to Homer. It had been my plan to continue voyaging on my own, following the currents west, perhaps all the way to the Aleutians, returning to New York by the end of the month, in time for Bruno's second birthday. But I was improvising, surrendering to happenstance, riding the drift, and with every passing day the drift was leading me into wilder waters.

Pallister had convinced me to stick around for the Gore Point airlift. It hadn't taken much convincing. I didn't want merely to learn whether or not GoAK succeeded or failed in its rescue mission. I wanted to witness the denouement for myself. The day after we returned to Anchorage, Pallister managed to land a $50,000 grant from an outfit in Juneau called the Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation. To his great relief, panhandling from Exxon wouldn't be necessary. Now all he had to do was line up the helicopter and the amphibious barge. The airlift could take place as early as next week, he estimated, and if I stuck around, I could be there to witness it.

In the meantime, he proposed a reconnaissance mission to the outer coast of Montague Island. He'd been meaning to conduct a survey of that coast anyway, he said, and was certain the amount of “plastic crap” out there would make an even bigger impression on me than what I'd seen at Gore Point. I'd never ridden in a bush plane, the mention of which summoned from the depths of my mind the theme song of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. We'd fly out in the morning, fly back in the afternoon. That was the plan. Then the skies darkened, and the rain began to fall on Anchorage, pouring from the eaves of Pallister's condo in a curtain that played a dispiriting drumroll on the little wooden balcony.

It was stormy out at Gore Point, too. “Boy how the weather can change,” Raynor noted in his logbook on July 21, the day after Brad Faulkner paid his unwelcome visit. On July 22, Raynor wrote, “Got rocked good last night. The current kept us broadside to the waves all night. Got up at 7:45 A.M. just as the first raindrop hit.” The first of many raindrops, it turns out.

In Anchorage, every bush pilot Pallister contacted gave him the same bad news: the weather conditions prohibited a flight to Montague's windward coast. Tired of biding time in Pallister's lonely condo, I accepted the keys to Leiser's SUV as if they were keys to some Alcatraz or Elba of the mind. Nominally, I was going to Homer as a favor to GoAK, delivering four empty fuel drums to Cliff Chambers so that Chambers could, on his next run to Gore Point in the
Patriot
, refuel the Zodiacs and the
Johnita II
. But I had my own, ulterior motives for going.

From Michael Armstrong I'd heard that Homer was a strange place: part fishing village, part tourist trap, part hippie town, part Alaskan satellite of Seattle. According to my
Lonely Planet
guide, Homer was “a mythic realm, like a northern Shangri-La, which bestows itself upon the faithful only after a long, difficult pilgrimage to get there.” Homer was also “the arts capital of Southcentral Alaska” and home to a colony of Russian Old Believers, the Puritans of the Orthodox Church, and it boasted more “wonderful eateries than most places 10 times its size,” a dubious travel book claim. After three days roughing it at Gore Point, and another two subsisting on Subway sandwiches and Pepsi in Pallister's condo, such enticements were to my ears irresistible. I also wanted to speak to an environmental lawyer named Bob Shavelson.

Director of the Cook Inletkeeper, which unlike GoAK is indeed part of the Waterkeeper Alliance, Shavelson is Chris Pallister's great and true nemesis. Alaska is a big place geographically, but a small place socially and politically. The two men had known each other, and disliked each other, a long time. Towing the
Opus
back to Anchorage, Pallister had told me a story, his narration of which sounded suspiciously one-sided. Before founding GoAK, he'd spent five years trying to start a new Waterkeeper chapter—the Prince William Soundkeeper, it was to be called, and Pallister had expected to serve as the group's first executive director. But something went wrong. An unforeseen event occurred. Another director was chosen in his place, a woman who, Pallister alleged, had compromising ties to commercial fishing. He blamed this coup on Bob Shavelson.

The Cook Inletkeeper's headquarters are in Homer, at the end of a winding unpaved road, in a two-story building that the group shares with the local chapter of the World Wildlife Fund. The place on the sunny morning I visited seemed brand-new, stylishly decorated in an eco-contempo sort of way: dark green carpeting, natural wood trim. A big Calderesque mobile made of driftwood and sea glass spun slowly around in the lobby, above shelves of Cook Inletkeeper T-shirts made in America from organically grown cotton. I noticed on one wall, among save-the-beluga-whale posters, a sign informing me that I had entered a COKE AND PEPSI FREE ZONE.

Accompanied by his border collie, Shavelson—stocky, forty-something, dressed in a button-down, pen tucked into his breast pocket, his graying hair receding into a widow's peak—gave me a tour of the premises, which included a well-equipped laboratory where that morning a summer intern with a newly minted bachelor's degree from Evergreen College was titrating water samples to be tested for pollutants. Like Pallister, Shavelson was concerned about plastic pollution, but he considered it just one among many man-made environmental threats to Cook Inlet—ominous, certainly; grave, possibly; the gravest? Far from. The dizzying list of contaminants that could be found in this watershed belied the pristine illusions peddled in tourist brochures. There were the pharmaceuticals people were pissing into the waste stream, the depleted uranium leaching from ordnance fired during military exercises, the heavy metals from mining tailings, the pesticides carried here by breezes and currents, the oily water dumped back into Cook Inlet by a Chevron production facility at Trading Bay, the “gray water” discharged from superliners, not to mention the invasive species that stowed away on oceangoing ships.

“I've got very strong differences of opinion with Chris Pallister,” Shavelson told me after we'd adjourned to his office, where a bumper sticker on a file cabinet commanded me to BOYCOTT CONOCO & CHEVRON. Shavelson objected to GoAK because marine debris was their “sole focus,” and because people had confused the Gulf of Alaska Keeper with the Cook Inletkeeper, and because Pallister so indiscriminately accepts and promiscuously advertises donations from known polluters like Princess Cruises and BP, and because one of GoAK's directors, John Whitney, was an administrator with the federal agency, NOAA, charged with disbursing marine debris grants in a supposedly impartial way (later that summer, because of such complaints, Whitney would resign from GoAK), and because Pallister was paying some of that NOAA grant money to his own three sons. This “appearance of a conflict of interest” was “the kind of thing that can hurt organizations like mine that don't operate that way,” Shavelson said.