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22:08:12 It has been, as two reasonably famous songwriters once put it, a long and winding road, one that has lasted, on and off, for more than eighteen years now. And, theoretically, once we drop anchor in Dutch Harbor on Monday morning, it is a journey that—apart from a couple of days of post-expedition wrap-up and video editing—will come to an end.
Except that I have said as much many times before. It isn’t even the first time I’ve said it this year.
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16:46:18 I looked out of my porthole this morning and found myself channeling Martin Sheen.
"Adak. S***. I'm still in Adak."
Then I stripped down to my underwear, drank too much whisky, and cut my hand on the mirror while practicising kung fu.
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20:50:10 Of all the places I never imagined I would visit twice ...
We are about an hour away from returning to Adak. Few places have had as much an impact on everyone on board as this remote outpost, and whereas initial reaction to the apparent ghost town was disbelief and discomfort, the crew genuinely warmed to the community and the hospitality it showed us. For a few hours this evening, we will have an opportunity to experience it again.
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01:33:41 Thirty-five years, eleven months, and eighteen days later, we finally made it.
On September 15, 1971, a crew of twelve set out from Vancouver Island in an eighty-foot halibut seiner called the Phyllis Cormack on a daring, even foolhardy, mission: to steam to the Aleutian island of Amchitka and protest, or even prevent, the detonation of an underground nuclear test. When the plan was first hatched, the group that organized the mission went by the name of the Don't Make a Wave Comittee. By the time the Cormack set out to sea, they were calling themselves Greenpeace.
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17:46:44 So this is what the edge of the world feels like.
Adak is the most westerly town in the United States. It is 1,300 miles southwest of Anchorage and 350 miles west of Dutch Harbor, the final redoubt before the Aleutians devolve into a broken necklace of isolated volcanic pearls.
And it is empty. Or so, at least, it seems.
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Not that I’m trying to imply anything here, but when I look back on my relationship with Greenpeace, I’m always reminded of Michael Corleone’s anguished cry in The Godfather, Part III: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” By my reckoning, this voyage on the Esperanza is my fifth stint with Greenpeace. I first joined, as a whaling campaigner for Greenpeace International, in 1989, after two years as founding director of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. During that time, I was expedition leader or campaigner on five voyages, all on ships which have long since departed the organization: documenting French drift net fleets in the North Atlantic on board the Sirius in 1991; chasing Norwegian whalers on the Solo in 1992; and, on three occasions, leading anti-whaling voyages to the Antarctic on board the MV Greenpeace. I left in 1995 to become a freelance journalist, and it was while writing for the Discovery Channel and New Scientist, among others, that I accepted an invitation to join the Arctic Sunrise on a global warming tour of Alaska and the Russian Arctic in 1998—an experience that prompted me to move almost immediately to Anchorage, where I lived for seven years. I returned briefly in 2001-2, to lead another Antarctic whaling campaign, and then, in 2005, I moved back to Washington, DC from Alaska to become Senior Communications Adviser for Greenpeace USA. I left that post in May, and yet, here I am again: back in Alaska, on yet another Greenpeace vessel. What can I say? It’s addictive. For me, it’s a return home of sorts: an opportunity to once more experience Alaska, albeit an entirely different part of the state than I have ever before been to. The highlight, for me, is the opportunity to visit Amchitka, the place where, for Greenpeace, it all began, and to pay homage to the organization’s 35 year history of bearing witness to environmental threats. September 2007 (1)
August 2007 (12)
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