Not Exactly The End
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.
OK, not quite. The "Apocalypse Now" analogy was undercut by the accompanying background music: instead of "The End," the boat deck groaned to the sound of Foreigner. George, woken by Brent and me for no better reason than that we were bored, has taken to wandering around the lounge to the strains of "I Want to Know What Love Is."
Veterans of Greenpeace voyages will recognize the scene. We are in the dog days of the Bering Sea Tour, the work almost done, but our journey home tantalisingly far away.
We stopped in Adak to drop off a borrowed ATV and see if we could buy fuel. The first task was easy, the second was hampered by assorted logisitical complications. We waited until midnight, our original tentative departure time, at which point those of us who had fallen asleep woke up as if on cue, wandered around the ship like zombies, and seeing no apparent movement afoot, returned to our bunks.
Important tasks remain to be completed: Freddie has yet to give tattoos to Brent and Paul, Brent has yet to finsh the crew video ... And we have yet to complete our tour of Aleutian Island communities, which we will conclude in Atka.
But this morning, we were still alongside, and with a 14-hour trip ahead of us to Atka, there was little point leaving to arrive at our next destination in the middle of night. So we will stay here a while longer, but at 1800, refueled or not, we will leave for Atka, where we will spend at least a day before returning to Dutch and then going our separate ways.
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Comments (1)
tiberiu on January 11, 2008 Didn't you visit an apparel liquidator. You said something about your underwear. No clothes and just underwear: don't drink that much whisky next time.
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About Me
kieran_mulvaney
USA
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.
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