by Donovan Hohn
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.
THE CRYING INDIAN
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.
I mentioned to him what Pallister had told me in his defense: how he’d like to expand GoAK’s focus but didn’t have the deep legal pockets to do so; how he planned to apply for Waterkeeper certification; how volunteers were expensive to insure and less efficient than his three sons. Shavelson conceded that it was hard for environmental groups to litigate against polluters in pro-development Alaska. But he felt that GoAK was only making the problem worse, draining public resources that might be put to better use and in the meantime giving polluters the opportunity to remediate their polluted reputations. In his opinion, the Gore Point cleanup was essentially a boondoggle verging on eco-graft. Beach cleanups could teach the general public to be “good stewards” of the environment, so long as you worked with local communities and enlisted lots of volunteers, which is something that the Cook Inletkeeper tried to do, but cleanups alone did little to solve the problem once and for all. To do that, you had to stop it at its source.
The evidence on this point seems to be unambiguously on Shavelson’s side. Year after year, equipped with garbage bags and good intentions, hundreds of thousands of volunteers participate in the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup (ICC), and year after year, the tonnage of debris is greater than before. Seba Sheavly, a marine biologist who ran the ICC until 2005, will happily admit that the Ocean Conservancy’s cleanup “has never been about curing the problem of marine debris.” It has always been, she told me when I called her at her offices in Virginia, “a public awareness campaign.” Sheavly is now a private consultant who lends her expertise on marine debris to such estimable clients as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the UN Environment Programme. She’s also worked for the American Chemistry Council, whose public relations department eagerly gave me her phone number. Sheavly considers the 2006 Marine Debris Act “the best chance we’ve had in years to make real progress.” Other environmentalists I spoke to regard the act as merely the latest in a long line of toothless legislative actions that have failed. “If you look at how much plastic is out there,” says Shavelson’s boss, Steve Fleischli, president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, current federal policy seems, “well, rather comical.” In the opinion of both Sheavly and the ACC, marine debris is mainly a local littering problem, and the primary value of coastal cleanups lies in the lesson they teach volunteers—“that what they’re picking up comes from them.”
As I’d learned from Pallister, and seen for myself at Gore Point, only a fraction of the debris washing onto Alaska’s outer coast comes from local litterbugs. On much of Alaska’s 33,000-mile-long shoreline, in fact, there are no local litterbugs. On most Alaskan shores, as on those of the Northwestern Hawaiian Archipelago, or Spitsbergen Island in the Arctic, there are no people at all. But there is plastic. I for one wasn’t sure what edifying lessons to draw from all the flotsam and jetsam I’d helped bag. I hadn’t thrown those water bottles into the ocean, or lost those derelict fishing nets, or sent containers of toys and shoes tumbling overboard.
“I’ve never known a six-pack ring to take itself off of a stack of cans, go out the back door, get out of someone’s kitchen, and look for a bird to strangle,” says Sheavly. “It’s about pollution, but people are the source of it, in terms of their actions and how they function.” No one doubts that people are the source of all the plastic in the ocean. The question is, which people? The answer is more complicated than Sheavly’s six-packring scenario suggests.
According to Steve Fleischli, “some of the pollution originates at the beach. Most does not.” Data from the International Coastal Cleanup at first seems to contradict Fleischli’s analysis. Measured by number rather than weight or volume, 81 percent of the “debris items” that ICC volunteers collected in 2006 came from two somewhat vaguely described sources, “smoking related activities” and “shoreline and recreational activities.” But the ICC collects most of its data on recreational beaches. Travel away from the sun-worshipping throngs and the results begin to change.
In 20
01, the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project sampled forty-three randomly selected beaches in the L.A. area and found that “debris density on the remote rocky shoreline was greater than on high-use sandy beaches for most debris items.” There was a fairly simple explanation for the discrepancy: municipalities periodically cleaned up “high-use sandy beaches” with beach-sweeping machines. The study’s data set reads like the inventory of a really big convenience store: straws, 84,990; cigarette lighters, 5,810; toys, 2,159. But the single most abundant item—nurdles—had nothing to do with recreation, or smoking, or litterbugs refusing to give a hoot. Plastics manufacturers ship many kinds of virgin resin to extruders and molders in the form of little pellets. These are nurdles. If you’re curious about what nurdles look like, disembowel a Beanie Baby. The toys are stuffed with them. Even when compared by weight, on beaches in the L.A. area, nurdles were fourteen times more abundant than cigarette butts, the fourth most common item found.
Although quoted in the press far less often than Moore or Ebbesmeyer, the man who deserves the most credit for discovering and mapping the so-called Garbage Patch is an oceanographer named Robert Day. In the mideighties, Day and a team of other scientists began trawling for plastic in the North Pacific, inventing the sampling and sorting methods that Charlie Moore would later adopt. Those surveys showed that most varieties of plastic pollution turn up in unlikely places, including the Gulf of Alaska. The largest concentrations were found north of Hawaii, in the Subtropical Convergence Zone, which Day, like most other scientists, has never taken to calling the Garbage Patch.