by Donovan Hohn
It was almost 1 A.M. in New York. Here at the northerly latitudes of Anchorage it felt like late afternoon. Peering up through the windshield as we drove south along a six-lane boulevard, past strip malls and office parks, I watched a single floatplane fly north toward the mountainous horizon, its pontoons printing an equal sign on the bright, papery, overcast sky.
Sciatica and stenosis weren’t Pallister’s only troubles, I soon learned. Several years prior, while recovering from that traffic accident, he’d had to give up his law office and start working from home. Then, a year before I met him, he’d lost the lease on the house in which he and his wife, Jane, had raised three sons. The following winter, six months before I met him, after three decades of marriage, Jane left him for reasons he didn’t understand. Dispossessed, deserted, he was living like a castaway in a duplex condominium. He’d offered to put me up there so that we could get an early start fitting out.6
Aside from the kitchen, the only room in Pallister’s condo that seemed recently inhabited was the home office, which served as the headquarters of both GoAK and his struggling law practice. Here, the bookcases sagged with law volumes and three-ring binders. “Navigability,” the spine of one of the binders read. More law volumes were stacked in precarious towers on the floor, and drifts of papers covered almost every flat surface. Post-it notes like yellow petals circled a computer monitor on which, in screen-saver mode, a slideshow of nature photography played. Pallister had taken the photographs himself on his many hunts and hikes: mountains, tundra, sunsets, streams, more mountains, more tundra, more streams. The wall above the desk was papered in maps and charts of Alaska’s outer coast.
“Okay, so we’re here,” Pallister said, pointing out Anchorage on one of the charts. “Gore Point’s way out here.” He moved his finger to the southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula, a wing of land the size of Connecticut that extends 160 miles from the south-central coast of the Alaskan mainland into the Gulf. On the northwestern, leeward side of the Kenai Peninsula is Cook Inlet, a long shallow tidal channel. On the eastern side of the peninsula is Resurrection Bay. Between the inlet and the bay are several hundred thousand acres of wilderness, some federally protected, some protected by the State of Alaska, and on the outer coast of the state-protected wilderness, at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, is Gore Point.
“There’s this big, high peak,” Pallister said. All that connects the peak to the mainland is a narrow crescent-shaped isthmus—“a witch’s finger of land,” he called it—that gets in the way of the prevailing winds and currents. The Alaska Coastal Current, I’d learned, flows north along the Alaska Panhandle, past Kruzof Island, past the sea caves the Orbisons like to go foraging in, past Juneau. Colliding with barrier islands, the current makes a sharp left, following and hugging the coastline west until it reaches the Kenai Peninsula, where, ricocheting off Gore Point, it bears south by southwest and continues on toward the Aleutians, becoming the Alaskan Stream. “The isthmus is barely above sea level,” Pallister said. “On the west side of it the forest is pristine, but on the east side all the lower branches are stripped off. You can tell that hellacious winter storms have pounded the crap out of it.”
The windward shore of that isthmus is what’s known to beachcombers and oceanographers as “a collector beach.” According to the Anchorage Daily News, of the 10.8 million gallons of oil that spilled from the Exxon Valdez in 1989, more ended up on the windward shore of Gore Point than on any other beach in Alaska. In a single month workers there had filled six thousand plastic bags with toxic goulash—“oily sand and gravel, patties of emulsified crude, tar coated flotsam and jetsam, and the oil coated carcasses of birds and sea otters,” the Daily News reported at the time. These bags the workers loaded onto a landing craft, which carted them off to the nearest landfill, eighty nautical miles away, in Homer. The same currents and winds that brought the oil bring flotsam, both man-made and natural. Wave action and strong flood tides have built up a berm of pebbles and driftwood ten feet high. Those hellacious storms throw flotsam up over the berm and into the forest beyond, where it remains. Unlike the oil spill, the incoming flotsam never ends. Every tide brings more. Over the course of the last several decades, ever since the dawn of the plastics era, a kind of postmodern midden heap has accumulated there. When Pallister first set foot on Gore Point, the floor of that forest was “covered in every conceivable type of plastic,” he said. There was colorful debris a hundred yards back into the trees.
The single bag of trash Ebbesmeyer and I had collected during our day trip to Kruzof Island was nothing, Pallister assured me. All along Alaska’s convoluted outer coast were shores littered with debris. Most of that debris was plastic, and much of it—the Asian, Cyrillic, and Scandinavian characters printed on bottles and fishing floats suggested—was crossing the Gulf of Alaska to get there. “Go out to Kodiak Island, or Kayak Island, or Montague, those first barrier islands,” Pallister said. “They have an unbelievable amount of plastic trash.” Thomas Royer, the oceanographer I’d met aboard the Morning Mist, had done research on the windward side of those barrier islands, and he later confirmed for me Pallister’s description.
Before founding GoAK, Pallister and a charter boat operator named Ted Raynor, now GoAK’s field manager, helped organize an annual volunteer beach cleanup in Prince William Sound. Over the course of four summers, working their way east from Whittier, the volunteers managed to scour approximately seventy miles of rugged shoreline. At that rate, Pallister and Raynor calculated, it would take two hundred years to clean Prince William Sound just once. The annual cleanup began to seem like a symbolic gesture at best, at worst a Sisyphean exercise in futility. It would take far more than three days a year of volunteerism to clean up Prince William Sound. It would take months. It would take “professional remediation contractors,” as well as volunteers. It would take logistics of an almost military complexity. And it would take money. In 2005, Pallister, Raynor, and a NOAA oceanographer named John Whitney chartered GoAK as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and started soliciting donations.
According to its grandiose mission statement, GoAK’s purpose is to “protect, preserve, enhance, and restore the ecological integrity, wilderness quality, and productivity of Prince William Sound and the North Gulf Coast of Alaska.” In practice, the group has done little else besides clean up trash from beaches. In the lower forty-eight, beach cleanups like those organized by the Ocean Conservancy tend to involve schoolchildren scouring the shore for candy wrappers and cigarette butts left by recreational beachgoers. GoAK’s cleanups, by contrast, are costly expeditions into the wild. The group’s volunteers must be eighteen or older, and everyone, myself included, must sign a frightening waiver in which they agree not to hold the organization liable for such perils as “dangerous storms; hypothermia; sun or heat exposure; drowning; vehicle transportation and transfer; rocky, slippery, and dangerous shorelines; tool and trash related injuries; bears; and”—in case that list left anything out—“other unforeseen events.” Pallister, damaged as he was, seemed almost astrologically condemned to endure such events.
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.