Greenpeace

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.

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.

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.

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.

When official announcement was made of the first planned nuclear test on Amchitka Island, the response of then-Alaska Governor William J. Egan was to declare that, “I am pleased that we have been selected as the hosts, so to speak, for this test, and I’m sure I speak for my fellow Alaskans.” He stated that 140 previous tests in Nevada had “proven that there is no danger from radioactivity being released in the test area.”

In fact, 56 of those 140 Nevada tests had leaked radioactivity. And so did that first Amchitka test, dubbed Long Shot, which was detonated on October 29, 1965.

In the process of helping give a tour of the ship the other day to four youngsters from St. Paul--who, it turned out, had been on board a couple times earlier in the day, and whose interest seemed focused only on the snack area they had previously discovered in the mess room--I passed Penny, the bosun, cleaning paint brushes out on the poop deck.

"And here," I said to nobody in particular (because the children, aware that Penny was neither a snack food nor rich in trans fats, had little interest in her), "is an actual crew member doing actual work."

Last night at around 2300--shortly after a community meeting that was occasionally fractious, but overall highly positive and supportive, and in which one elder in particular spoke with forcefulness and anger about the need to shut down factory fishing--we left St. Paul Island. Today, we have been sailing south from the Pribilofs to return to the Aleutians. Around midnight tonight, we are scheduled to arrive at Nikolski, following which we will conclude our community visits with stops at, in turn, Atka and Adak.

The sea has been flat calm, and while the sky has, of course, been gray, it has at least been clear, with not even a hint of the fog that has followed us everywhere like a morose yet overly-obedient dog. As a result, the day has provided an opportunity to catch up on outstanding tasks, and to prepare for what lies ahed.

Looked at up close, fur seals seem really improbable animals. Underwater it is a different story: slick and streamlined, they arc gracefully through the element for which Nature intended them. But on a rocky beach on St. Paul Island, those same flippers which propel them effortlessly beneath the waves look like an afterthought, a sick joke on the part of a disinterested creator: “Well, I have these things left over, and I have to use them on something, so I may as well stick them on these seals.”

I have a slim book with me, by Sumner MacLeish, a Bostonian by birth who for several years in the 1990s lived on St. Paul, where we are now docking. She married an Aleut in a ceremony officiated by none other than our very own George Pletnikoff, who was at the time a pastor with the Russian Orthodox Church. The book, about life in the Pribilofs, is titled "Seven Words for Wind," which she explains in the opening paragraph: "Aleuts have at least seven words for wind, many of which refer to strength. Day after day, night after night, sometimes for weeks on end, the wind pushes across hundreds of miles of open water, across this small plate of land in the Bering Sea."

I had an interesting conversation with George last night—it would admittedly be difficult to have any other kind of conversation with George—during which we touched on the meaning of “action” in a Greenpeace context, particularly as it applies to this expedition.

Both inside and outside the organization, the traditional view of Greenpeace action is of non-violent confrontation: driving inflatables between whales and harpoons, for example, or sailing a ship to a nuclear test site.

The shearwaters came first, a steady parade of seabirds skimming the surface of the sea, flying across the water in a seemingly interminable procession. Then, far ahead, close to the horizon, there was a whale blow, then another. Shortly afterward, another.

We grew closer, and the number of whale blows kept growing. Five, six, seven, eight in a row, all stretched out ahead of us, and then humpback whale dorsal fins, and then an occasional tail as a whale dove deep beneath the waves.

For a couple of days, I just stared from shore. The Esperanza sat at anchor, close enough almost to touch, but I wasn’t ready to board just yet. I had other things to do before I took a ride out to what would be my home for the next two weeks or so.

Sam and I saw each other just about every day for most of the seven years I lived in Anchorage, but we hadn’t laid eyes on each other since I reluctantly left Alaska about eighteen months ago. But now, there she was, waiting for me at Dutch Harbor airport, and I can’t even tell you how overjoyed I was to see her. It isn’t every day you find your closest friend working on an island in the Bering Sea, after all. But there she was, and for a couple of days, there was much catching up to do. There were long nights at the Unisea Bar, and long days spent recovering while staring at the television and DVD marathons of "Rescue Me."