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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.
We are moored off Amchitka Island, as far west...and interestingly, on the map, also as far east...as a boat can go. How ironic it is that visitors here were once greeted by a sign "This is a wildlife refuge and no weapons are allowed", words rendered absurd when the U.S. government set off their biggest underground nuclear test ever here, blasting the earth, sea and animals to smithereens.
When the 1971 blast, code-named Cannikin, ripped through this island, puffins were found with their legs driven through their chests. Sea lions miles from shore had their eyes blown out of their sockets. And the sea otters this refuge was set up to protect? Against reason, I am hoping to see even one.
But as we shuttle in zodiacs from the ship to a precarious stretch of jagged rocks some distance from the shore, as close as we can manage to get without the thick kelp rendering our propellers unworkable, there is not a single otter nibbling on the kelp beds they used to come here for.
The difficulty of our landing, which takes my mind momentarily off the otters, seems appropriate. The first Greenpeace boat, an eighty-foot halibut trawler jerry-rigged to hang together, braved thirty foot high waves and the hazards of the capricious Aleutian fall weather to try to make it here. A cushy landing for us would seem far too easy.
We climb out of the zodiacs and start to gingerly leap and crawl from kelp-layered stone to stone, sometimes wiggling on our bellies over barnacled slabs of rock, managing by some miracle to avoid slipping and falling into the drink except for one crew member who trips on a mass of seaweed and slices his leg open.
We have more than the usual reasons for not wanting to fall into this particular part of the ocean. After Cannikin was exploded, iodine 131 and Krypton 85 started leaking into the sea. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission denied that the shot cavities leaked, but in 1996 Greenpeace scientists found radionuclides --such as the plutonium byproduct americium 241-- in White Alice Creek, a rapidly-moving stream that flows into the Bering Sea. It took six more years for the Department of Energy to declassify documents showing that it was known as early as two days after the blast that radioactive isotopes were leaching into groundwater and the ocean. No wonder an unintentional swim here is something we’re particularly anxious to avoid.
Ashore, we wander up and down a beach covered in black sand and driftwood. Kieran asks me how I’m feeling. I think about that. On the one hand, I’m very glad this isn’t a nuclear test zone anymore. On the other, I’m extremely angry. How dare any government think it has the right, or any rationale whatsoever, to harbour nuclear weapons? And against all reason I keep looking for a sea otter. The A.E.C. estimated that "only" 20 to 240 of these animals would be endangered by the blasts. Post-test assessments estimated 700 to 2,000 died.
We set off for Lake Cannikin, the thirty-acre water-filled crater that the A.E.C. failed to anticipate would be created when the bomb exploded and a sizable portion of Amchitka Island imploded.
First we have to climb the near-vertical cliff that surrounds the beach. We start up, lifting legs waist high through vegetation as the muskeg sinks and bounces under our feet. I expect to see insects, small mammals, but there is not so much as a mosquito. It’s beyond eerie. Has what happened here so outraged the environment that not a single living creature will return?
We spy a concrete hut, enter and slowly back out when we notice what looks at first like large cans of soda but on closer inspection turns out to be unexploded ordnance.
We troop on, through a fierce wind. Someone trips over a wire, almost goes down. Muttered expletives about this island are heard and I want to defend it. It’s not Amchitka’s fault for God’s sake, it’s the fault of massive unrestrained power-mongering egoism by President Richard Nixon whose personal approval was required to set the bomb off, after massive protest by not only other countries like Canada and Japan which stood at risk of earthquakes and tidal waves from the blasts, but a sizable portion of the U.S. government. Nixon, and arrogant personalities like then head of the A.E. C. James Schlesinger, who announced that it would take at least a thousand years for radiation to dribble into the Bering Sea. Egoism and arrogance. As I think of it, traipsing through the muskeg, I get more and more outraged. God damn it! And then I think, if there is a God, he or she or it does indeed appear to have damned it. No living creatures anywhere. The very air feels weird. We stop, waiting while Brent shoots some background shots, and I crouch down in the grass and look hard at the variety of plants here…because there is that, there are mosses and lichens and…what is that? A fly? A wasp? No, a black spider. Some of the crew crowd around, joking macabrely: bite me.
When we reach Ground Zero, we find the muskeg fractured with patches of bare, barren earth, like the balding heads of cancer patients. Nothing has grown here for thirty-six years. Words like "abomination" and "blasphemy" spring to mind. What kind of hell on earth have we come to? Again I get the feeling I had on the boat, of sheer dread, and I wish we could turn around and hightail it out of here, but we have a mission to accomplish.
Below us lies a huge brackish body of water that we think, we hope is Lake Cannikin. By GPS we’re at least very close. By now its spitting rain, the wind is fierce, my socks are wet and like some of my mates I’m almost shaking with cold. As we tie flags from countries all over the world onto bamboo poles, Kieran quietly suggests I read a small sign made out of driftwood that Diek has planted beside the lake. Bending down I see the carved words "Phyllis Cormack 1971" and below that "Esperanza 2007" and I bow my head as tears spill out. With these simple, poetic words, Diek has completed our journey. He has brought the crew of that first Greenpeace boat here, to this island they tried so hard to reach. Their faces flash through my mind, especially the four who have died: journalists Bob Hunter, Ben Metcalfe, Bob Cummings; and Captain John Cormack. And, kneeling here beside this sign at this abominable lake in the crater that the bomb carved out, I turn and look at the Esperanza crew holding up flags from all over the globe: Russians Slava and Victor (who once worked on nuclear submarines); Helena and Brent from Australia; Freddy from Argentina; our Dutch crew Ruurd and Diek; Rao from India; Tom from Belgium. Others from Canada, England, the U.S., and more countries. We’re here, standing for peace, in this dreadful valley. And I know we, and all of Greenpeace, will stand for it and for the environment and all the creatures of the land and sea and air for as long as we exist.
I must thank a few sources: Dean W. Kohlhoff’s book "Amchitka and the Bomb"; Jeffrey St. Clair’s article "Report on the Environment" in "Fishy Business II", 2002; and Bob Hunter’s "The Greenpeace to Amchitka".
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.
We may take advantage of our presence here to refuel, if that proves possible. Otherwise, the principal rationale for returning is to give back something we borrowed.
We had little idea what we would find in terms of terrain on Amchitka, so George secured the loan of an ATV from someone in town. It sat proudly lashed to the heli deck on our journey west--the previous leg boasted fancy submarines, we had a Polaris four-wheeler--until we left our anchorage off the coast of Amchitka and tied up alongside at the island's (surprisingly well-maintained) dock in beautiful, sheltered Constantine Harbor.
From the dock, the gravel road that the military had carved into the spine of Amchitka sloped gently into the distance, and several of the crew unhesitatingly used our temporary transport to drive up it and explore the island in much greater comfort than had been the case the day before. I stayed behind, as there was filming to be done, but I wandered around the vicinity of the dock, looking at the tell-tale signs that this silent, abdandoned spot had once been a hive of activity: dirt tracks now almost overgrown, drainage pipes emptying into the water; piles of trash and abandoned, rusting equipment.
Perhaps it was gallows humor, but after a while, we defined everything on Amchitka with the same pejorative adjective. There were no spiders, only radioactive spiders; no flowers, only radioactive ones. Want to reach the bluff that overlooks the harbor? Head up the radioactive road until you reach the radioactive fork.
We were joking, sort of, but it was rarely comfortable. Amchitka was beautiful and rugged and peaceful, but the demons were everywhere. The knowledge of what had happened there was inescapable; it invaded us, possessed us, bore deep inside us. I had wanted desperately to be here, as if it were my destiny, to the extent that the morning of our arrival I was almost physically sick with nerves and anticipation. But there was something about the spirit of the place that made me want to leave almost immediately.
"I hate this [expletive] island," I kept muttering. "I hate this [expletive] island."
And yet, it is now a part of me to a degree I never dared imagine.
It is not the island's fault, what happened here. Amchitka did not ask for the violence that was visited upon it. Amchitka is the victim, not the perpetrator. Amchitka needs to be healed, not shunned.
We stood, a few of us, overlooking the ship and the harbor. We said a few words, gave thanks, expressed the hope that perhaps, in some small way, our presence there, by closing the circle started by the crew of the Phyllis Cormack thirty-six years ago, might somehow represent a process of cleansing. It is time for life to return to this place of death.
In honor of the sentiment we pronounced the bluff to be Esperanza Hill--not as a claim of ownership, but as a declaration of hope, for Amchitka and for the Bering Sea.
We returned to the ship and prepared to leave. But first we had to wait for Hettie and Mannes, who had stayed on board the day before while we had scrambled to the test site, and who now had taken the twenty-mile round trip up the road to the vicinity of the Cannikin test to see for themselves. They made it back to the Espy at almost exactly the time they had promised, but then they set my heart racing.
"We think you went to the wrong spot," they said.
They described what they had found to the side of the road: the site of the Long Shot test, definitely, and, farther north, evidence, they thought, of Cannikin. Of the latter, I was certain they were wrong: apart from anything else, our GPS had shown us to be almost exactly at the coordinates of the test. But, it was ALMOST exactly, not exactly: enough for us, after tramping across hostile terrain, to declare victory, but now I felt a nagging discomfort. There should have been a commemorative plate in the ground, believe it or not, but we didn't find it. I wished now that we had looked with greater vigor for definitive proof; I feared that perhaps we had not seen Cannikin Lake at all, that in fact what we had sought had been just over the next ridge.
I wanted to go back to be sure. I wanted to go back so that, if I had been wrong, I could now find the correct site. I wanted to go back to explore the rest of the island, to bear witness to the results of the other tests, as if in doing so I would be able to confront their demons and rid myself of them. And I realized that, although one circle had closed, another one had opened.
I thought I would find closure. In fact, I found a beginning. Now I am the one who must return to Amchitka.
Oh my gosh. Of all the things I have seen, experienced and witnessed, never before have I seen such awefulness. I saw Amchitka. I saw the future. I saw death shrouded in attempted beauty. I saw the big one. Amchitka.
I was born here, as you know. I grew up here. I learned here. I was nurtured in honesty and in truth by my environment, Mom and Dad. I trusted without doubt in goodness. Men; people, I was told, are fundamentally good. Given a choice they will always do the right thing. Not. I witnessed that first hand. Amchitka.
We are surrounded in the sounds of life, water, silence and beauty. When hungry, we eat. When thirsty, we drink. When tired, we rest. When alone, we seek our loved ones. But, here, in Amchitka, none of those things are possible. You cannot hardly hear life, much less see it. One cannot drink water, although there. (At dinner at home with my family, I often drink a nice clear cold glass of water and ask: "I wonder who invented water?" To which my family always responds: "No one." I continue: "Then where did it come from?" And they respond. "God."
And in Amchitka one is alone. Alone in life, thoughts, dreams, hopes. For how could one feel and think otherwise? Amchitka.
The big one is not the bomb. For sure, the bomb is, was and forever will be big. The big one is not the Island, for Islands of various sizes we shall always have. The big one is not the place or even humanity or mankind gone awry. The big one is Amchitka the total lie!
Oh we say, our government says. It is a National Wildlife Refuge. Look at thoses words. National. Belongs to the Nation of peace and pursuit of whatever. Wildlife. For the purposes of or the use by wild life! And Refuge. A place to get away, solice, rest, protection. And in my humble opinion, Amchitka is none of those. It is not a Refuge. There is nothing there taking reguge from anything. We created a wildlife refuge and even the animals don't want to go there. Not even a self respecting jellyfish to be found. We tried to fool them and instead are fooling ourselves. They know. Amchitka.
Interestingly, we saw and experienced. Then we planted a cross. For peace and thanksgiving. Giving back to the Creator something which we wanted to give back. But, we gave back the place most destroyed and dirtied. We gave back to the Creator a gift we received and trashed. We gave back, of all places, Amchitka. And? Somehow I believe He recieved it from us. He loved that we made a decision to give something back, even though it is forever trashed! And I know the only thing alive and living in Amchitka is a cross. Amchitka.
The big one is, shrouded in beauty but covered in death. Pretend Wildlife Refuge. And how can we pray life back? Once destroyed, how can we will life's return? We may very well have seen the future of the entire Bering Sea, our home, our blood, unless we act and act decisively. Once this place is destroyed, the National Wildlife Gift, we may not ever get it back. George's Banks comes to mind. And a lot of other places. We came out of death and back into life in the Bering Sea. And we are never going to be the same people. Amchitka.
And so, it is a lie. We would like to cover it up and say others in the past did this, we wouldn't. But is that really true? Could we, watching changes happen at a snails pace in the Bering Sea, suddenly wake up and be in Amchitka. Amchitka. That place is a lie, a place on the planet we call Mother Earth.
Until Next Time
George
As some of you may know, Kieran has written a great blog about Amchitka and our time there. For me it is taking a little longer to process. Hence, although we left the island this morning and are on our way back to Adak, you'll be hearing from me over several blogs about our time on this nuclear test zone. Starting now.
For any other stop I’ve been content to wander out of my cabin after the usual 7:30 wake-up call but for Amchitka I ask Hettie, who is on watch, to wake me at first sight of the island, even if it happens to be in the middle of the night. This is not likely, as we’re due to arrive at the staid old hour of nine am, but just to be sure.
Several of us are on the bridge a good hour ahead of time, tensely waiting for a first glimpse of this site that has so much historic resonance for Greenpeace. No-one from the early days of the organization, when we had a single campaign, a single focus, to stop a nuclear test on Amchitka Island, has ever made it here in a Greenpeace boat. Thirty-six years after watching the Phyllis Cormack sail out of Vancouver for Amchitka, I’ll be the first of that initial group who will arrive here on a Greenpeace ship. And what a ship. Instead of an eighty-foot halibut fishing boat, we’re pulling up in a massive boat with five zodiacs and a heli-pad on board.
I step outside, pull my collar up around my neck. I’m wearing a button on my jacket, a yellow button with a green peace symbol and one word, "Amchitka. We used to sell this button for twenty-five cents in 1970 and ’71 to try to raise the $18,000 we needed to charter the Phyllis Cormack. It preceded the green and yellow button we sold next which said "Greenpeace", a word Bill Darnell came up with at a meeting one night.
It is absolutely surreal to be standing on the deck of the Espy, nearing what was in 1971 the only refuge for sea otters in the world, a refuge that we all tried so hard to save from a series of nuclear tests. An island halfway between Russia and the USA. An island so remote few human beings besides Aleuts and members of the U.S. military, have ever been here. A destination now completely void of any human presence whatsoever.
I feel suddenly as if my father and mother, Irving and Dorothy Stowe, who helped start Greenpeace, are here with me, holding my hands. I feel as if my Greenpeace aunts and uncles, Marie and Jim Bohlen, Bob and Zoe Hunter, and so many others who used to meet in our living room, are here too I flash on my brother Bob too, who was largely resposible for 10,000 highschool students walking out of class to protest the atomic blasts here. I’m going to touch the soil of Amchitka Island for him, for them.
Although, truth be told, I’m going to touch it as little as possible. Despite assurances by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission that any radiation was contained, Greenpeace scientists found radioactive isotopes in groundwater and fish here in 1996. Everyone on this boat is nervous about landing on these shores.
Diek, who seems to have second sight, spots it first. "There." He points to a jutting shape like a looming sandcastle in the dark fog. A bright white light rims the horizon, like curious icing on a wedding cake. Too bright. I’ve never seen light like this and nor has Diek in his thirteen years on the sea. I can’t help thinking that it looks like nothing so much as a thick dusting of nuclear fallout. Suddenly the cold I haven’t felt all morning, even though I’m only in a thin coat, gets to me, and I step inside.
After we drop anchor the crew gathers to discuss what we’re going to do on the island, and then Pete sends an exploratory party out in a zodiac to penetrate the fog and figure out where we can come ashore. The kelp beds are thick around here, which is what used to attract the sea otters, and our zodiacs could get kelp tangled in their propellers.
I hide in the mess. How desparately I’ve wanted to see Amchitka, and now I feel nothing but dread. What are we doing, coming to the site of the biggest underground nuclear test in U.S. history? How much radiation is there on the island? Why don’t we just turn around and get the hell out of here? I’m ashamed of my cowardice, although I know I’m not the only one are having these thoughts. I know that workers at the test site have died from unusually high levels of radiation-related diseases but I rationalize that the exposure we’ll have, in a day or two here, will be minimal. On the other hand, I’m fifty years old, not young like our videographer Brent who muttered darkly "I want to have children," in a meeting several nights ago.
NEXT: We touch that soil...those rocks...and march through muskeg to the eerie site of thirty-acre large Lake Cannikin, created by the nuke blast.
We are here at Amchitka, and I can’t write about it. It is all too fresh and overwhelming. Fortunately, Kieran has done a wonderful blog about our experience here, which you may want to check out. Later I will try to set something coherent down.
Meanwhile, on a MUCH lighter note, in my last blog I promised to talk about what my Mom, Chuck Berry, Pink Floyd and Bono all have in common. So here goes. (Warning…Bono story included. I know many other Greenpeacers have Bono stories…bring ‘em on!)
It all comes down to food. Good cooking and good music are inextricably entwined in this story, and on board the Espy. Raymond, the ship’s cook -- whose combined Dutch, Indonesian, Chinese and Italian heritage have resulted in black wavy hair, brown skin, and a love of a great variety of cuisine -- is de facto DJ of the deck where many of our cabins reside. His music blares out into the halls as Samantha – 23 year old assistant-cook/kitchen goddess who sports a ponytail and an uncannily calm, elegant bearing – chops and dices while Raymond sautes and boils. Our dinners are accompanied by Sinatra, Swing, Classic Rock, and you may find yourself heaping your plate with a vegetable medley or fried chicken while getting down to the sounds of Mr. Chuck Berry. Swabbing the deck…the type of chore we all…almost all…do between 8 and 9 in the morning…goes faster to Pink Floyd, unless you are in a melancholy mood, in which case just let your tears mingle with the soapy water in your bucket.
Meanwhile, back home, my mother is cooking. I know this even though I haven’t talked to her for the two weeks I’ve been on the Espy. How? Because besides founding Greenpeace with a few other souls my mother is known by friends, family and the many visitors she is always inviting to dinner for her gourmet meals, and when not in the kitchen is to be found shopping at Granville Island Market for the freshest produce in Vancouver or rifling through one ot the hundreds of cookbooks on her shelves. Picture her now, five feet on a tall day and wearing a white chef’s hat bigger than her head, pounding dough to the sound of Pavoratti, serenading the entire block around her house through the giant speakers my father always insisted our house contain.
You may be wondering where Bono fits in to all this. At this point in the story I must introduce my brother-in-law Ed Montague, a lawyer and a very persistent fellow who happens to be a huge U2 fan. When he heard the band was coming to Vancouver a few years ago he said, "Hey, Bono is a big Greenpeace supporter, I bet he’d love to meet a founder of Greenpeace, why don’t you invite him to dinner at your Mom’s?
Right. Like Bono would happen by for a bite and a brew at the home of total strangers. I ignored the insane request for awhile but Ed (like all lawyers) is so stubborn that I finally wrote the Great Man just to get Ed off my back. The response? Dinner was out of the question. Surprise! However, Bono would like to meet my Mom, if he had time. I had to give Ed credit at this point. Credit, and a big hug, and then dance around the room for a minute.
Three o’clock on the day U2 was to open in Vancouver, Ed got a call: my Mom and entourage (Ed, myself, and our spouses) were to be backstage at 7 pm. Passes would be waiting. Needless to say, we were a tad excited.
When we entered the green room…having first been escorted through at least three security details…we bopped around like idiots wondering whether to partake first of the chilled wine, beer, or snacks, and taking dumb photos. My mother sat serenely on the couch, holding the history of the beginning of Greenpeace that Rex Wyler penned, and one of the original Greenpeace buttons, presents she thought Bono might like. As forty minutes ticked by, then forty-five, then fifty, our spirits fell. We weren’t going to meet the Man after all. Of course it was silly to think he’d actually show up...as if he wasn’t busy enough.
And then, just when all hope was lost, in he strode, clad in black and those trademark green shades (that his eyes are very visible through). "Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy," he sighed, putting his arm around her. "You ruined my life."
It was Greenpeace, he confided, that first inspired him to activism. He asked if she had any earplugs and everybody laughed until he pulled out a pair. It was hard to imagine how, minutes before walking onto the stage, a rock star could be so focused on the comfort of a petite 84 year old woman, how he could be so entirely present, or how he could submit so graciously to posing for a photo.
During the concert he dedicated a song "Original of the Species", to Dorothy, and the next day U2 posted Ed’s photo of Bono and Doro on their website with a link to Greenpeace.
As we walked down the stairs to the floor after the concert everyone stood back, making way for the elderly lady with the smooth white hair. Dorothy, they called, reaching out to grasp her hand. Thank you.
My mother smiled back, and only on the way to the car, having passed all the crowds, did she pull out her nitro inhaler and take a couple of puffs. I don’t remember what, if anything, any of us ate that night, but if Bono ever does come to dinner, you can bet my Mom will have something good on the table. Meanwhile, on the Espy, it’s dinnertime. Until tomorrow then…
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.
The Cormack didn't make it to Amchitka. President Nixon delayed the test, the crew put into the Aleutian port of Akutan to figure out next steps, and the US Coastguard arrested them on a technicality. But the mission was a success: although the explosion, dubbed Cannikin, went ahead, it would be the last on the island: a further four tests were scheduled but canceled in the face of the enormous protests that found a voice in the Greenpeace voyage.
And yet, ever since, a circle has remained broken, a path unfinished. Almost thirty-six years have passed, the island has become a wildlife sanctuary, and a kind of calm has returned in this most remote of realms, and yet, no Greenpeace ship had completed the Phyllis Cormack's journey and reached the shores of Amchitka.
Until today.
To the last, Amchitka seemed determined to keep its secrets. We arrived as night was reluctantly yielding its grip, and even when daylight barged its way through, Amchitka lay shrouded in thick, seemingly impenetrable fog. An initial boat ride in search of a suitable landing beach provided little of great promise, but at least one option, and after lunch we headed ashore.
The island is ringed by thick kelp beds--the reason it was once lush habitat for sea otters, all now gone, whose violent deaths as a result of the blasts angered Irving Stowe and motivated him to protest the explosions, a move that gave rise to the Don't Make a Wave Committee and thence Greenpeace. There was no doubt that the kelp could do serious harm to the propellor of the African Queen, our large inflatable, so we employed a shuttle service: from Esperanza to African Queen to the smaller Novuraina, which threaded its way uncertainly through the shallows, before we began an undignified clamber across kelp-coated rocks and finally made it ashore.
We had made it. We were on Amchitka. But the object of our attention lay a couple of miles away yet, over the intimidating-looking hillside that sloped down toward us. Undaunted, we picked and clambered and hauled our way to the top of the island, and there, of all things, stood a concrete hut at the end of a gravel road. It had been, presumably, a form of sentry post.
We stepped inside. On the floor there sat what appeared to unexploded shells. We stepped back outside.
We wandered along the road, but according to our charts and calculations, we needed to head inland a short distance. And so we marched across spongy mosses that sprang back up as our footprints left, along thick tundra that enveloped our feet as if trying to suck us into the ground, and tall grasses that hid holes into which at least some of us sometimes stumbled and fell.
Then we rose over a ridge and there, ahead of us, was what we had come to see: Cannikin Lake, created when the force of the blast caused the land to collapse, forming a crater which filled with water from nearby White Alice Creek.
It looked, frankly, disconcertingly peaceful and calm, the water gently breaking against the lush grassy coast, But its placidity is deceiving: samples have shown that the lake, the creek, and the mosses and lichens contain radioactive elements, which are still seeping into the groundwater from the blast chamber a mile below the surface.
At ground zero itself, close to the lake, the reality was more evident. Here, in stark contrast to the lush environment on the way in, the ground was all but lifeless, the remnants of scorched lichens clinging to bare earth. And there was something else, something I hadn't truly realized until talking later with Raymond back on the Esperanza. This is an island that has felt but a handful of human footprints for more than thirty years, that is an undisturbed wiildlife reserve. But there is virtually no life here. Oh, there are some seabirds, some songbirds, moths and spiders and flies here and there. But compared to the other Aleutian islands we have visited, it is lush but desolate. The place just feels wrong. It feels violated. It feels ... dead.
The crew had made it clear they had no intention of allowing us solely to come and monitor and document the site without making at least a symbolic statement, and so we stood, facing the lake, with the ship's flags tied to poles and waving bravely in the strong wind, a testament to how Greenpeace has grown globally in scope in the decades since its founding, and how, on behalf of the nations of the world, we were reclaiming this patch of inhumanity and calling for peace.
Then the flags came down, and everyone stomped back over the hill, leaving Brent, Clive, myself--and Barbara. Barbara Stowe, 14 years old at the time of the Cormack's sailing, our connection to the founding era, had sold pins and buttons on street corners for 25 cents a pop to raise money for the Cormack's voyage. And now, representing all of those who had devoted so much time, energy, and emotion into making that seminal event happen, she was here, with us, bearing witness firsthand to the place her late father had sworn to protect.
We filmed some interviews, and then again we did battle with the terrain, forcing weary limbs through unforgiving ground, and then precariously down the slopes we had earlier climbed, before once more running the gauntlet of rocks and hitching a ride back to the welcoming Esperanza.
On the beach, some of the crew had arranged driftwood to spell "Bering Witness" in honor of the campaign, a quiet message visible only from the cliff tops.
And at the test site, too, a memorial now stands: a small piece of driftwood, which Diek retrieved from the shore and tied to a short post. In the wood, he carved a simple message: Phyllis Cormack 1971, Esperanza 2007. And now it stands on the shore of Cannikin Lake, a solitary sentinel, bearing witness on our behalf to a silence broken only by the blowing of the wind, the calls of the seabirds, and the gentle lapping of the waves.
Saturday August 25 Feeling melancholy this evening -- although whether from missing home or the sheer challenge of this trip and the desolate beauty of Alaska I don’t know-- I put my ipod on, troop up to the foredeck and dance around in front of the webcam as arranged for seven pm with my extended family.
I don’t know if they see me, but as I’m dancing, feeling sad and trying to look happy, I notice a small fat sparrow on the deck. I kneel down and it goes still and then we both start moving together down the deck, me walking, it hopping. It hops near the open door of a room where some ropes and other gear is hanging and, worried, it might hop inside and get trapped, I make big gestures to scare it away from there. Then I run to the sick bay.
Clive, our doctor and the most fervent birder on board, rushes out in his trademark leather boots, green pants and flannel shirt and as we step back on deck we discover the wee visitor sheltering under the boat cradle that holds one of our five zodiacs. I notice yellow feathers on it’s back and think oh, maybe it’s not a sparrow but it is, Clive says, it’s called "Savannah sparrow". It doesn’t look hurt or sick and the thinks it will be just fine.
After he goes inside I decide to dance around on the heli-deck at the stern of the boat, hoping a good long session may cure my blues. There’s no-one around and I let my body sway like seaweed with the rhythmn of the boat. Soon I’m tripping around this great big empty space, dancing in the middle of the Bering Sea to Van Morrison, the Beach Boys, Jann Arden and other sweet and melancholy singers.
At one point I look up and there, above the stern, are five birds, at least two of which have a larger wing-span than any bird I’d ever seen before today. Just hours ago George and I saw one of these dark birds, it's wings curved like a subtle scythe, from the bridge, and identified it…with Clive’s help…as likely an immature short-tailed Albatross. of which there happen to be only five hundred in the world.
"Clive!" I rush to the sick bay again, pound on the door. "Clive! Albatrosses, AlbaTROSSES!" (emphasis on the plural, we both know how rare it is to see even ONE) and he comes flying out, but by the time we race back to the helideck the birds are gone.
I wonder if maybe they saw me, dancing with my arms outstretched like wings, and flew over to see what this strange bird was doing.
The gift of the Albatrosses has lifted my spirits, but sadness surges back as Green Day starts singing Time of Your Life. "Another turning point a fork stuck in the road…time grabs you by the wrist directs you where to go…" I try to keep dancing, find myself stumbling forward instead, right to the edge of the deck, grabbing the net that surrounds the heli-pad, tears welling up in my eyes. "So make the best of this test and don’t ask why…its not a question but a lesson learned in time"…All the emotion I’ve been holding back in the past ten days of this emotional journey starts to tumble out of me in salty splashes. "Its something unpredictable but in the end there’s right… I hope you had the time of your life".
It’s been a long time since I’ve cried. The Savannah Sparrow, the albatrosses, the sheer privilege of having all this space to myself, the peace and quiet and the water dancing us about at every moment floods me with awe. My mind flashes through thoughts of the life I’ve left behind, the life I’m coming back to in ten days, no job, no routine, everything familiar overturned and a space opening up for something new to grow, all this rife with possibility but the chance of failure too…"It’s something unpredictable but in the end there’s right…I hope you had the time of your life".
No question, Green Day. We're sailing to a desolate and lovely wildlife refuge blasted by three nuclear bomb tests, tests that provoked the founding of Greenpeace and its first action. And as we sail I think of the sea otters washed up dead on the shores of Amchitka Island in the late sixties and early seventies, their eardrums split by the atomic blasts, and I wonder if there are any otters left, and whether we’ll see them, feasting and frolicking in the kelp beds that are said to be so thick around Amchitka Island.
And I think of my man at home, and all the people on the boat, and the people we’ve met, and the beauty of the green mountains rising out of the rolling quilted fog, and I sink onto the top step of the staircase leading down to the main deck and cry as hard as I ever have in my whole life..
So take the photographs and still frames in your mind…for what it’s worth it was worth all the while", and I give thanks for the trip of my life. NEXT: On a different note, what about my mother (a founder of Greenpeace) who I promised, in my bio, to tell you about? What about Chuck Berry and Pink Floyd? See what my mother, Chuck Berry, Pink Floyd and Bono all have in common.
Saturday August 25 Feeling melancholy this evening -- although whether from missing home or the sheer challenge of this trip and the desolate beauty of Alaska I don’t know-- I put my ipod on, troop up to the foredeck and dance around in front of the webcam as arranged for seven pm with my extended family.
I don’t know if they see me, but as I’m dancing, feeling sad and trying to look happy, I notice a small fat sparrow on the deck. I kneel down and it goes still and then we both start moving together down the deck, me walking, it hopping. It hops near the open door of a room where some ropes and other gear is hanging and, worried, it might hop inside and get trapped, I make big gestures to scare it away from there. Then I run to the sick bay.
Clive, our doctor and the most fervent birder on board, rushes out in his trademark leather boots, green pants and flannel shirt and as we step back on deck we discover the wee visitor sheltering under the boat cradle that holds one of our five zodiacs. I hadn't noticed the yellow feathers on it’s back before and think oh, maybe it’s not a sparrow but it is, Clive says, it’s called "Savannah sparrow". It doesn’t look hurt or sick and he thinks it will be just fine.
After he goes inside I decide to dance around on the heli-deck at the stern of the boat, hoping a long sweaty session may cure my blues. There’s no-one around and I let my body sway like seaweed with the rhythmn of the boat. Soon I’m tripping all over this great big empty space, dancing in the middle of the Bering Sea to Van Morrison, the Beach Boys, Jann Arden and other sweet and melancholy singers.
At one point I happen to look up in the sky and there, above the stern, are five birds, at least two of which have a larger wing-span than any bird I’d ever seen before today. Just hours ago George and I saw one of these dark birds, its wings curved like a subtle scythe, from the bridge, and identified it…with Clive’s help…as likely an immature short-tailed Albatross. Of which there happen to be only five hundred in the world.
"Clive!" I run back to the sick bay, pound on the door. "Clive! Albatrosses, AlbaTROSSES!" (we both know how rare it is to see even ONE) and he comes flying out, but by the time we race back to the helideck the birds are gone.
I wonder if maybe they saw me, dancing with my arms outstretched like wings, and flew over to see what this strange bird was doing.
The gift of the Albatrosses has lifted my spirits, but sadness surges back as Green Day starts singing Time of Your Life. "Another turning point a fork stuck in the road…time grabs you by the wrist directs you where to go…" I try to keep dancing, find myself stumbling forward instead, right to the edge of the deck, grabbing the net that surrounds the heli-pad, tears welling up in my eyes. "So make the best of this test and don’t ask why…its not a question but a lesson learned in time"…All the emotion I’ve been holding back in the past ten days of this emotional journey starts to tumble out of me in salty splashes. "Its something unpredictable but in the end there’s right… I hope you had the time of your life".
It’s been a long time since I’ve cried. The Savannah Sparrow, the albatrosses, the sheer privilege of having all this space to myself, the peace and quiet and the water dancing us about at every moment all overwhelms me. My mind flashes through thoughts of the life I’ve left behind, the life I’m coming back to in ten days, no job, no routine, everything familiar overturned and a space opening up for something new to grow, all this rife with possibility but the chance of failure too…"It’s something unpredictable but in the end there’s right…I hope you had the time of your life".
No question, Green Day. Here we are, sailing to a desolate and lovely wildlife refuge blasted by three nuclear bomb tests, tests that provoked the founding of Greenpeace and its first action. And as we sail I think of the sea otters washed up dead on the shores of Amchitka Island in the late sixties and early seventies, their eardrums split by the atomic blasts, and I wonder if there are any otters left, and whether we’ll see them, feasting and frolicking in the kelp beds that are said to be so thick around Amchitka Island.
And I think of my man at home, and all the people on the boat, and the people we’ve met, and the beauty of the green mountains rising out of the rolling quilted fog, and I sink onto the top step of the staircase leading down to the main deck and cry as hard as I ever have in my whole life..
So take the photographs and still frames in your mind…for what it’s worth it was worth all the while", and I give thanks for the trip of my life.
NEXT: On a different note, what about my mother (a founder of Greenpeace) who I promised, in my bio, to tell you about? What about Chuck Berry and Pink Floyd? Soon you'll hear what these seemingly disparate elements all have in common.
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.
According to the State of Alaska, there are just 146 people living here, and even that seems generous. A little over ten years ago, Adak was bustling, home to at least 6,000 US Navy personnel and civilian contractors, and boasting an infrastructure that would have been the envy of any small town, let alone one nestled in a harbor overlooked by mountains covered in lush maritime tundra and surrounded by the hostile Bering Sea.
There was a movie theater, a roller skating rink, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a ski lodge, a bowling alley. There were racquetball and tennis courts. There was a skeet range. And, of course, there was a McDonald’s.
All of this was a consequence of World War II and the Japanese invasion of Attu and Kiska, the most westerly of the Aleutians. Adak, like Amchitka to its west, became a military stronghold from which the campaign to recover the two islands could be launched; unlike on Amchitka, when the war ended, the military personnel stayed, and Adak became a Cold War submarine surveillance center that marked the American military’s western outlier.
But on March 31, 1997, the base closed. When it was open, Adak must have been an incongruous site, a slice of Americana in the Aleutians; now it is closed, it feels, frankly, unsettling.
In a way, it is because the incongruity remains. The housing that was built was entirely in the style of any suburban subdivision: identical cookie-cutter houses, painted in bright, cheery shades of (as best as my colorblind eyes can tell) blues and yellows and, oh I don’t know, let’s say reds, each with its own driveway, garage, and patch of front lawn.
Now they are empty, street upon street of them, as if the island’s entire human population had just packed up, locked the doors, and left in the space of five minutes. The houses look in pretty good shape for having been left empty for a decade; here and there, a garage window is cracked or smashed or a door buckled, but by and large the houses look almost ready for new residents. But the yards are overgrown, the foliage overwhelming the swing sets, the basketball hoops rusting and fading, mosses taking over the sidewalks.
And so it is with much of the rest of the town. The shopping mall: abandoned. The McDonald’s: abandoned. The skating rink, the swimming pool, the movie theater: all empty, awaiting customers that are no longer around.
But then you turn a corner and, suddenly, one particular cul-de-sac of houses, otherwise identical to the others, boasts pickup trucks in the driveways and recently-mown front yards dotted here and there with daisies. A young child waves hello and his father looks up from washing his car and nods in greeting as if it were the most normal thing in the world to see a stranger walking through his otherwise seemingly deserted town.
For Adak, initial appearances notwithstanding, is not deserted. Indeed, there is a serious effort underway to maintain and rebuild the community. There is expected to be at least a temporary influx of people—perhaps, according to rumors, as many as 400—and an associated boost to the economy with the arrival of a cleanup crew next year, equipped with a mandate to do address the ordnance and other remnants of the military’s rapid departure. (There are signs across the island, for example, prohibiting the digging of holes more than two feet deep; and the high school displays cheery cartoon posters warning children not to touch unexploded bombs). There is fishing here, too, with Pacific cod particularly important, and a processing plant on shore. Times here are tough, but in the western Aleutians, so far at least, the situation is far less grim than in some of the communities farther east. Even so, there is an acute awareness of the importance of protecting the marine ecosystem, and there was an attentive and involved gathering at a community meeting in which George explained the concept of Cultural Marine Heritage Zones.
It also doesn’t hurt the local economy when the occasional Greenpeace ship comes into port, either. For a lot of the folks on board, it’s been a long expedition that is nearing its end, and while your faithful correspondent remained on board, there was no shortage of crew making friends and letting their hair down at the local bar. During the stagger home, suddenly Adak didn’t seem like such a bad place to be.
But now we have left and are heading west. The sea is flat calm, and the Esperanza just steamed slowly through the narrow and stunningly beautiful Kagalaska Strait. We put the African Queen, one of our rigid-hulled inflatables, in the water to film our passage through the verdant green volcanic hills, and as we made our way, a minke whale appeared off the bow, swam lazily past us, and then surfaced just feet away from the inflatable, diving slowly beneath and turning sideways to watch the strange visitors as it disappeared beneath the waves.
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.
The explosion, which had a force equivalent to 80,000 tons of TNT, was detonated 2,300 feet below ground. Even so, cracks appeared in the earth, there were rockfalls along the Bering Sea coast as far as 10,000 feet northeast of ground zero, water levels dropped in nearby lakes, lichens were literally drowned by subsequent flooding, and mud geysers burst into the air.
Long Shot was just the beginning of the nuclear age in the Aleutians, and but the latest violation of the island of Amchitka.
It is not known for certain how many thousands of years Native peoples had inhabited Amchitka before the arrival of the first Russian fur traders in 1761, but a little more than a century later, they were gone: some forcibly displaced by the Russians to work at nearby Adak, some killed by previously unknown diseases, others the victims of a society fragmented, disrupted, and ultimately destroyed by Russian and American colonizers.
In 1913, President William H. Taft signed an executive order setting aside the Aleutian chain, including Amchitka, as a wildlife reservation; but the declaration left open plenty of loopholes for economic and military activity, and was of little consequence when confronted with the specter of war.
After Japanese forces bombed Dutch Harbor, and invaded the far western Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska, in 1942, the United States military moved into Amchitka in force, building a dock and a landing strip, and housing up to 16,000 military personnel. With the cessation of hostilities, Amchitka briefly was allowed to return to its status as a wildlife reservation—albeit one that was now littered with ordnance, and that had been battered and bruised by the boots of thousands of soldiers and sailors.
But then came Long Shot, and four years after Long Shot came Milrow. The plan had originally been to dub the test “Ganja,” until somebody in Washington, DC discovered the word’s more common usage, prompting the name to be changed amid fears that the press would start referring to it as a “pot shot.”
By the time the one-megaton Milrow was detonated, the political climate, stirred by the Vietnam War, had shifted. For the first time since the War of 1812, the Douglas Border crossing between British Columbia and Washington State was closed down, blocked by 2,000 protestors.
Milrow, however, was but a rehearsal, a warm-up act for the main event. Milrow’s principal purpose had been to test whether Amchitka could withstand an even larger blast, and that blast, codenamed Cannikin, was detonated on November 6, 1971. At five megatons, it was 250 times the yield of the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, and it endured a series of protests, from the legal—the test proceeded only after withstanding a Supreme Court challenge—and the dramatic, most notably attempts by two vessels from a nascent group called Greenpeace to reach the test site and protest or even prevent the explosion.
Cannikin was the largest underground nuclear test ever conducted by the United States—so large that of it comprised 14 percent of the total yield of all 730 underground nuclear tests in US history.
The blast registered a 7.0 on the Richter scale and caused a subsidence crater over a mile wide and 60 feet deep, which filled with water and became the largest lake on the island. Rockfalls, containing over 46,000 square yards of material, smothered intertidal marine life. Nearly three hundred deceased rock greenling fish were found offshore, and subsequent catches of rock sole declined substantially. The remains of over 10,000 three-spined sticklebacks and 700 Dolly Varden were found in the island’s lakes, streams, and ponds. Perhaps 1,000 sea otters were killed, their skulls fractured by the force of the blast driving their eyeballs through the bones behind their sockets. Harlequin ducks were found with their backs broken and their legs driven into their bodies by the force of the explosion.
A 1996 Greenpeace survey revealed continuing traces of plutonium-239. plutonium-240, and a plutonium by-product, americium-241, in moss and algae species, as well as americium-241 in the waters of White Alice Creek, a fast-flowing stream that exits into the Bering Sea.
After Canikin, Amchitka was not used a test site again. Today, it is uninhabited, stripped of most of the infrastructure set up to support the WWII military presence and the testing program, and rarely visited.
“It was a very interesting five years,” said an official with the Atomic Energy Commission of the Amchitka nuclear test program, “but I don’t think I would want to go through it again.”
NOTE: Much of the above information was culled from “Amchitka and the Bomb: Nuclear Testing in Alaska,” by Dean W. Kohlhoff (University of Washington Press, 2002); and “Nuclear Flashback” by Pam Miller (Greenpeace, 1996).
She has freckles, long eyelashes, a crooked smile and she's floating in the middle of the Bering Sea. There is no land in sight, no boats but ours. It is our job to rescue Overboard Annie.
How did she fall overboard? Actually, we threw her off, then circled the ship 'round to start our emergency drill. I was on the bridge talking to Captain Pete at the time, having forgotten all about the cryptic note on the blackboard this morning mentioning O.A. drill at 14:30. When I'd asked what it meant I was told it didn't involve me, as I'm only here for three weeks, unlike the rest of the crew who are mostly on for three month stints. So mid-afternoon there I was chatting blithely away to Pete when suddenly he responded to a message, moved to the control panel, pressed a red button and an alarm sounded.
People started running in.
First came Radio Operator Tom, looking surprisingly cute (Tom will not appreciate being called "cute", and as he's our resident computer genius will likely sabotage this blog later, even though "cute" is meant as a compliment --in bright yellow headphones pushed up on his forehead like some kind of cartoon bumblebee. Then Rao, 3rd Mate, with his million watt smile, which was not in evidence now. Tom and Rao rushed outside and began scanning the water.
I ran after them. "Where's Annie?" Tom shouted. The sea was uniformly blue-grey, peaked with small waves, and there was no sign of Annie's yellow head (a buoy, actually, which someone painted a face on) anywhere. Turning towards the stern we saw a few mates struggling to get a zodiac lowered from the stern. There seemed to be some problem...it wasn't moving.
Meanwhile about eight or ten other mates rushed onto the foredeck, ran to the bow and pointed out to sea, arms uniformly at shoulder height like dancers in a ballet. I felt strangely moved by them.
Rao and I followed the direction of their arms, but couldn't see Annie anywhere. "There," said Tom, his deep voice tinged with a Belgian accent, "Further out...further" until finally ahhh, WAY out there, about six-hundred feet, bobbing in the sea in an orange survivor suit stuffed with life-jackets.
I know the Bering sea is cold, but how much colder it looked suddenly. More mates rushed onto the foredeck, and we turned to the stern to see if the zodiac was down yet...no, still suspended aloft...what was taking so loooong? Finally it started down and after what seemed like ten minutes but was probably two hit the water, and Diek our poetic (you'll know why if you read his blog) Second Mate stuck his arm out too, pointing, and Marc (our Mechanic/Film buff) gunned the engine, and off they went.
How slowly they seemed to travel, like in a dream, or a nightmare. Now seagulls were pecking at Annie's head, and Diek reached for her, and she must have been awfully water-logged, because she looked so heavy and hard to hold as he hauled her in, and all of this seemed to be going in slow-motion.
Later we all assembled on the bridge, waiting in silence for the Captain to speak, and for once not a single person made a quip or joke. Captain Pete shared that if one of us fell off the boat "while looking at the moon and stars one night on deck, not that any of you would do such a thing" we'd basically be, well...He didn't need to finish. We all knew there'd be nothing but a bobbing head to see, not a bright orange and yellow shape buoyed up by life jackets.
Lying in bed that night I can't stop seeing my mates, all standing together, pointing out to sea. I keep seeing the zodiac, zooming towards Annie. I keep thinking of the Earth, and all the living beings on it, and I can't help being glad I'm here, with my mates, trying our best to keep Earth, and Annie, afloat.
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."
"Would you even know real work if you saw it, Kieran?" asked Penny, without looking up.
Ha ha. That Penny. She kids because she loves.
I think.
The truth is, there's a very real difference in the rhythm and nature of work on board for crew and "guests"--campaigners, journalists, and the occasional weird hybrid such as myself. And no matter how much us passengers do our best to contribute, whether it be by cleaning toilets, standing watches, helping cook dinner, or just trying not to set the ship on fire, it is always the case.
For those of us who are occupying ourselves with nothing mnore arduous than tapping on our computer keyboards, the period between 12 noon and 6PM can seem a particularly long and trying spell, because it is the buffer between two of the most enjoyable and important times of a ship's day: lunch and dinner. (And, with many thanks to Raymond and Sam, they are enjoyable indeed).
Today, horror of horrors, the gap between the two meals was longer than usual, because at 1300 (1PM) ship's time, we turned the clock back an hour to come into line with our steady progression westward. We are now ten hours behind the United Kingdom, but realistically should be closer to twelve, as we are almost exactly on the opposite side of the world from the Greenwich Meridian. But, such is the occasional arbitrariness of time zone allocation. At least the International Date Line has the good manners to skirt the western edge of the Aleutian Islands, slicing between them and the Russian-ownd Commander Islands--where, incidentally, Vitus Bering, after whom this sea is named, became shipwrecked and died in 1741. (The Commander Islands were also the only home to the Steller's sea cow and spectacled cormorant, both of which were driven to extinction within decades of their discovery).
Further north, in the Bering Strait, the date line passes between the twin islands of Big Diomede and Little Diomede--a division that would not have affected the related inhabitants of those two isles, only a couple of miles apart, except that during the Cold War, the Soviet Union forcibly evacuated Big Diomede, which fell on their side of the line. I remember one morning on the Arctic Sunrise in 1998, coming to the bridge and looking at the two islands on either side of us.
"See that?" said Lena, the thrd mate, pointing to Big Diomede off our port side. "That's tomorrow."
Way to mess with my head, Lena. And before I'd even had any coffee.
Today, we anchored off the small village of Nikolski, population 31, on the southwest corner of Unmak Island. And while we are on the subject of time, Nikolski has witnessed the passage of a lot of it, as this area is reckoned to be the site of the longest continuous human habitation in the world. The region has been occupied for at least 8,000 years, and Nikolski for at least 4,000 of that. There were people living here before the Pyramids were built, before the Mayan calendar was invented, before the Chinese language was first written.
We are leaving Nikolski now, to head for Adak--temporarily bypassing Atka, originally planned as our next destination, which we will now visit on our way back. After Adak, we will reach, probably on Monday, Amchitka, where for Greenpeace it all began.
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.
This afternoon saw an oft-delayed Man Overboard drill, which had initially been planned for our first day out of Dutch Harbor, but abandoned when we found ourselves surrounded by shearwaters and whales. Opinions on the fate of the inanimate crew member who took the fall into the Bering Sea (or was she pushed?) were divided, although the fact that a brace of gulls had alighted on her by the time Diek and Marc arrived to her rescue in the Novuraina was not a good sign. More seriously, the sea is a dangerous place to be, and repeated drills, even absent the pumping adrenalin engendered by the real thing, are an essential exercise in making the unthinkable routine.
The small room next to the laundry, used as the ship's gym, is once more open for membership after refurbishments, redecoration, and the addition of new equipment. Brent, my cabin mate, has already beaten me to it, slipping into his workout gear and out the door while I am typing. George, my other cabin mate, followed shortly afterward, but the cigarette in his hand suggested a different destination.
This morning, a small group of us--George, Pete, Willem, Barbara, Brent, and myself--sat down for initial discussions of plans for the final step of the expedition: the visit to Amchitka Island. Amchitka was the site of three underground nuclear explosions between 1965 and 1971; and it was in an attempt to protest and prevent the third of those that a group of activists set sail from Vancouver on September 15, 1971, on an 80-foot halibut seiner called the Phyllis Cormack. That group, originally called the Don't Make a Wave Committee, had just renamed itself Greenpeace, and that voyage toward Amchitka was the organization's first.
A combination of bad weather, a change in the date of the explosion, and the attentions of the US Coast Guard prevented the Phyllis Cormack's crew from reaching its destination. Thirty-six years later, the Esperanza will complete what the Cormack started, and become the first Greenpeace vessel to reach Amchitka and, all being well, document the test site.
None of the original crew are with us, of course, but they are on board in spirit, embodied in the welcome presence of Barbara Stowe, daughter of Greenpeace founder Irving Stowe. At the age of 14, she watched as the founding members plotted and planned in her family's living room; stood on street corners selling buttons and pins to raise money for the voyage; and--wisely, probably--resisted her father's entreaties to join the crew on that historic voyage. It is fitting that she should be with us when we reach the place that inspired her father to take the steps that resulted in Greenpeace, and it is an honor to have her with us.
Today we're on the high seas, having left St. Paul around 11 last night. We weren't expecting a great reception in St. Paul. Something happened there twenty years ago that the residents have not forgiven Greenpeace for, according to rumours going around the Espy. Details are sketchy. It's said that we had a boat visiting St. Paul, and some campaigners went to a Tribal Council meeting in town while other mates went out in a zodiac and accidentally disturbed the seals, which St. Paul Aleuts depend on for their subsistence. Some of the seals took off out to sea, and as the annual seal hunt was next day, our accident was seen as sabotage.
Rumors are rife and conflicting. It was the subsistence hunt of the Aleuts. No, it was really commercial seal hunting. At least one mate thinks it doesn't matter which it was, subsistence or commercial, that we have a duty to stop the hunting of all seals, period.
The Captain is prepared to apologize to the community at a town meeting we'll be holding in St. Paul.
At the island of St. George, which we just left, residents distrustful of Greenpeace came around to a supportive position. But a man warned me: "
on't expect the same reaction in St. Paul that you've seen here in St. George". Besides, St. George has 108 citizens. St. Paul, more like 500.
Needless to say we are a touch wary as we walk into the only bar in St. Paul and sit down for a brewski. Back in a bar in Dutch Harbour less than a week ago a man...wielding a knife, apparently...suggested to several Greenpeacers that they go drink elsewhere. They didn't, and nothing further ensued, but...
Anyway, I decide to check out the lay of the land, see if I can do some campaigning. While I order an Alaska Summer beer at the bar, a man introduces himself and we shake and I gradually get into why we're here. He isn't too crazy about Greenpeace, but he's interested in the canyon footage we're going to show at the meeting and is against bottom trawling. He says he may come to the meeting. The guy on the other side of me. (Note to husband: all these guys are dead ugly!). is a longliner who is furious about how bottom trawling is destroying the marine environment. Or maybe it’s just a line. If so, these guys are good. (Note to husband, that means I'm happy my campaigning is working). He also kite-surfs (I make a mental note to mention this to Brent, our videographer, as a kite-surfer who opposes bottom trawling might make for interesting footage) and may come to the meeting, too. It occurs to me that word has preceded us. Have people in St. George called friends in St. Paul, given them a heads up that they're on side with us?
Then a giant of a guy, he must be six-five and maybe 225 or more, stomps up and plants himself about an inch from my face. "Greenpeace is twenty years too late!" he shouts. All I hear is "twenty years" and I think, I'm going to get my lights punched out. My companions at a table by the window suddenly seem so very far away. Why, why did I ever start talking to men in a bar? (Note to husband: never again). I start to stammer something about being sorry for whatever happened twenty years ago but he waves it aside with a hand as big as a bear paw. "That doesn't matter," he growls. "I don't always like what Greenpeace does, but if it wasn't for Greenpeace, there'd be no boreal forests in the Amazon!" He is so loud, I'm sure the whole bar can hear. How great is that? And then HE starts going on about the evils of bottom trawling. Kite surfer gets into the game: "Greenpeace is here at exactly the right time!" Boy, these guys sure know how to sweet-talk a girl. I mention we're going to Amchitka, and the giant gets heated: "They set off three nuclear bombs up there. My buddy won't work there, because it's radioactive." I pull aside my jacket collar, show him the button pinned to my denim shirt. It's the one that preceded the first Greenpeace button, the yellow one with a peace sign and the word "Amchitka" in green, the one I used to sell for 25 cents to raise money to charter the first Greenpeace boat to sail to Amchitka to protest the blasts. Giant staggers back a few steps. "No way!" he shouts.
As we leave the bar I'm practically floating, and it's not (just) the Alaska Summer. Our meeting tomorrow night is going to be a piece of cake! Best of all, I'm not going to have to speak now, hopefully. After I shot my mouth off in St. George and accidentally said something right, I've been targeted to open the meeting here, and although I've prepared some remarks, I'm not exactly looking forward to it.
Back at the boat Julie, our cultural anthropologist and as you may know from a previous blog super-duper prize knitter, shares her not-so-great experience. Apparently there are some in the community who attribute the blunders of every environmental group who've messed up here, to Greenpeace. Groan. Let's hope they come to the meeting so we can set them straight.
But the next night at the meeting, the only people attending are about eighteen locals, thirteen Greenpeacers from the Espy and a German camera crew who film the whole thing. George is absolutely brilliant, of course. Several Aleuts speak, articulately and at length, and seem to be on side. I'm off the hook, only have to say a few words about "back in the day". Whatever hostility and negativity there may be in the community towards Greenpeace never materializes. The only flack we encounter is from a pre-teen, hanging with his friends outside the general store, who asks Willem where he's from. "Amsterdam," Willem replies. "You must be a pothead then!" the kid says. When Willem denies it, the kid says: "Then you're a crackhead." "Look at him," I say to the boy. "oes he look like a crackhead?" Willem continues ahead, erect and well-dressed as always in subtle blues, greens and browns. His clothes hang on him as if they've just been ironed, although I'm sure there's no iron on board. "F... you," the kid says, and I continue on.
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.”
They waddle and slither unconvincingly across the terrain, trying not to stray too close to their neighbors for fear of sparking a fight. As it is, little skirmishes seem on the verge of breaking out all the time, before the big bulls step in to restore order with an intimidating, snarling roar. The whole scene is a cacophony of chaos, seals constantly grunting, barking, and snorting, the youngest of pups suckling, slightly older ones play-fighting, and the oldest of them, six to eight weeks old, frolicking in the surf, learning to become comfortable in the water, and learning to fish.
The fur seals on the beach are breeding males, females, and pups. Once all the pups are weaned and able to look after themselves, breeding season will begin, and then the lunges and fake fighting will be pushed aside in favor of an altogether more aggressive stance: teeth will be bared and blood will be shed, and the beach, already noisy, will become louder still.
Over on the other side of the island is a “Bachelor Beach,” a haulout frequented by males too young or too old to breed. Nearby—hard to make out now, covered by wild celery and thick grasses—is the outline of the original village established by Russian settlers in the 1780s. Its proximity to the seal beach is not accidental: it was the presence of fur seals that first attracted the Russian explorer Gerasim Pribilof to these islands, and it was to hunt and harvest these seals and their fur that the Russians forcibly removed Unangan (Aleut) families from Unalaska and Atka to St. George and St. Paul.
After Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, Americans assumed control of the fur seal fishery of the Pribilofs, but they showed no more concern than had their predecessors for either the seals or the humans they were enslaving to kill those seals.
During the first half of the 20th century, the Pribilovians were regarded, not as US citizens, but as wards of the state. They were paid only in meager provisions; they were not permitted to leave the island without permission; and they were forced to work from the age of 16. Even marriages were arranged by government officials. While the worst of this indentured servitude was stamped out after World War II, the inhabitants of the Pribilofs remained, in effect, economic slaves, forced to hunt ever-growing numbers of seals to satisfy the desires and profits of peoples far away.
Fur sealing ended on St. George in 1973, and on St. Paul in 1985, amid much bitterness and controversy. The fur seal population has not recovered, but nor has that of the resident Unangans. Today, among the 108 people of St. George, unemployment is 80%.
Our guide tells us that the big fur seals we are looking at are not as big as they used to be; that in recent years the seals on the island, presumably unable to secure the nutrition they need, have been thinner than before. There are fewer of them, too; the population is in a steady decline.
The northern fur seals of the Pribilofs need to be protected. But that protection can not take the form of yet another wave of officials focusing their efforts on restricting the subsistence hunting that still remains, while the bottom trawlers which are squeezing the life out of the Bering Sea ecosystem continue on their rampage with impunity.
The Bering Sea is dying. The way to save it is to stop those who are killing it, not those who are as much a part of its ecosystem as any seal and whose future is intricately and inextricably linked to its continued survival.
The Disclaimer: Today's blog is of a more serious nature than some of my previous ones, as I take you into some very heavy meetings that include complicated issues and language I haven't had the chance to educate myself enough to talk about except in the most basic terms. I hope there are no inaccuracies, and if there are I apologize and beg your indulgence as a blog is a like a daily diary and on this ship there is scant time for intensive study in my schedule so far! For more information on this very important issue, please see George Pletnikoff's blog on the Bering Sea Voices website.
TRIBAL COUNCIL
Today we're in St. Paul, but three days ago we were still in St. George, an island so remote and underpopulated (by humans) that as we walked around part of the village, photographing the Russian Orthodox Church where George used to be parish priest, we saw no-one at all. Everything was shrouded in mist and fog, and the words "desolate" and "beauty" came to mind twinned, each perfectly applicable. I wondered what it would be like to live on this windswept island among the hundred-odd men, women and children who reside here and whose ancestors have lived off the sea for so many centuries.
The next day George took four of us to a Tribal Council meeting, and unlike the witty garrulous George who had driven us around in a mini-bus the previous afternoon, stopping to speak in both Aleut and English to friends and pointing out sights like the house he grew up in, he is completely silent. So are we. Everyone knows this mission, which he is leading, could scarcely be more difficult for an Aleut from the Priblof Islands. He is here to convince the people of St. George, whose lives depend on fishing and hunting fur seals -- practises Greenpeace has not exactly come out thumpingly in support of in the past -- that we are here to help support their traditional practises, and to ask for their help in ending the bottom-trawling that is destroying the rich marine environment of the Bering Sea.
The meeting is held in a one-story community hall/office building. We clamber out of the bus, troop in and are offered tea. Julie (a cultural anthropologist and the Espy's champion knitter), Samantha (assistant cook, a 23 year old who converys a remarkable serenity), Brent (our Aussie videographer and resident smart...er, mouth) and myself pour ourselves hot water, dunk tea bags and settle into chairs around two long tables that have been pushed together to form one. Facing us are Ted, in a T-shirt that says "I'm a multitasker, I can talk and piss you off at the same time"; Sally, in a black windbreaker, who sits with arms crossed over her chest and a tense expression; and Phil, whose eyes are unreadable behind rectangular silver glasses. Their unsmiling faces don't inspire hope. Also there is Andy, who was on the Espy for several days and avoids eye contact. I don't envy George one bit right now.
He begins by saying he was reluctant to work with Greenpeace, but over the past year he's come to the conclusion that the organization is making a real effort to protect the marine habitat. He elaborates, talking for a long time, maybe twenty minutes, about the need to establish "cultural marine heritage zones", then hands around a draft resolution. The Council scans it and questions begin. How far out would these zones be? How much support is there for this resolution from the other communities? George replies that the community will need to decide where and how those zones should be created.
Heavy footsteps are heard and Chris, Chief of the Tribal Council, strides in wearing a sweatshirt that says "The Deadliest Catch". He warily examines the resolution. He wants language about local needs in it. It needs to be specific, and this needs "to be made clear to your group". George offers, as an example, that the resolution might say certain types of fishing gear are used. He states the problem for the community as he sees it: "You people are sitting right out here in the middle of the Being Sea and have no say", and Chris explodes: "They don't care! They're just gonna come along and kick your butt."
Andy asks, "Are you open to language change in this resolution?" and George says, "The best thing would be for you people to take this resolution and totally rewrite it." It is as if the room exhales. Discussion continues, but the atmosphere lightens noticeably, and we leave the meeting with a feeling of optimism and relief, tempered for me by angst about the fact that at several points in there I shot my mouth off in support of the resolution with scant preparation and knowledge of the issues. I'm aware that in speaking from my heart I've waded into politics, which inevitably involves compromise, some results of which, who knows how far down the line, I may end up intensely uncomfortable with.
I ask Samantha and Julie for feedback and for their thoughts on the resolution. Both respond that my contributions were helpful and I am also reassured by the fact that Julie, a vegan, firmly supports the right of communities who have always fished and hunted for their food to continue to do so. Nonetheless I find myself having to walk around for a long time as everyone else visits the local store, asking myself some hard questions. The answers that I come up with satisfy me, at least for now.
That evening we hold a meeting in the community hall, which is well attended, and George introduces the film shot in the canyons where we sent a submarine down to find out what was down there. As we wait for Julie who has stepped up to the plate as volunteer techno-whiz to get the video recorder going, a young boy puts up his hand. "Is our culture dying?" he asks. It's like a punch in the stomach. "No," George replies. "No, don't you worry about that. You let us worry about it." Julie signals that the video is ready to play and it is a relief to have the lights go down. The child's question underlines the real crisis this community is going through, a crisis we have embroiled ourselves in by connecting with this village, and the weight of this responsibility seems immense and terrifying at this moment.
The video shows tracks bottom trawlers have left on the bottom of the ocean, cutting a swath that Marge, a woman sitting next to me, whispers: "looks like a road". There is bubble gum coral and scant other marine life in the area examined. Most moving are the interviews with people whose livelihood depends on fishing, notably one woman who speaks of knowing, from the food her mother insists on storing, that the time is coming when her people will starve. She weeps, unable to continue.
.As the video ends, the boy...I think it is the same one who spoke before but is now sitting in a different place, but I'm not sure, asks: "Will you help us protect our cultural heritage?" This time George, who looks like the wind has been knocked out of him, can't offer unrestrained hope. He offers tempered hope: "We'll try. We'll do our best".
Then Sally, from the Tribal Council, stands up and asks me to tell the community what I said in the meeting this morning. Which words? I wonder. What, of the several things I spontaneously said resonated? Feeling like I'm about to fail, I wobble to my feet, and what she said to me at the close of this morning's session comes back: "We love our animals, our seals. We give thanks for them." This is a person connected to her food, not a "fish and meat coward" like me, who eats flesh but does not kill it.
I dredge up words. I say how my husband quit eating fish earlier this year because the fish are dying off in the Bering Sea, and he doesn't want to be a part of that. How I still eat fish, and how my husband will sometimes bring it home and cook it for me...because he loves and cares for me. And how when people think of the environment they think of grass and trees and earth, but the environment includes all the creatures of the earth, including humans, and how Greenpeace cares for them all. I speak of Kelly, the marine biologist on board the Espy, and how she uses the term "Killer Whales" rather than "Orcas" (as some of us call them, because the word "Killer Whales" is feared as unempathetic), and how the fact that they kill other whales doesn't make her love them any the less. (As her cabin mate I can attest to the fact that Kelly is in fact utterly and completely obsessed by and devoted to Killer Whales). And how Greenpeace basically handed the Espy over to Kelly, even though she isn't a member of Greenpeace, asking her to direct us, to help her find and observe the whales. And how I hoped they'd think of Greenpeace as a boat they could drive, because we're here to help.
Afterwards, a man says something like, that until now he'd thought Greenpeace was the devil, but now he understands, and appreciates what we're doing, and a woman seconds him, and George reiterates a very important point I've forgotten in my emotion: that Greenpeace won't do everything the community wants, that we want the community's response to the resolution, and then we'll negotiate back and forth.
As the meeting closes a woman who is probably my age or younger but whose face and several missing teeth speak of a far harder existence than mine comes up to mewith tears in her eyes and hugs me and says, "Thanks so much for all you're doing for us", and I accept her thanks silently on behalf of all the work George and John and everybody has been doing on this issue for so long, because I've only been on this boat for a week, but what a privilege it is. And what a responsibility.
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."
It's easy to picture the inhabitants of these islands having to hunker down for long stretches as the wind screams off the sea and across the landscape. It is also possible to close the eyes and picture the beauty and bounty of the Pribilofs, the sun shining on the luscious tundra, flowers in full bloom, seals and whales offshore ... It's possible, but it has not, during our extremely brief sojourn here, been the experience. Nor, at least while we have been here, has the climate been defined by wind.
"So George," I asked in the wheelhouse with a smile this morning. "If the Aleuts have seven words for wind, how many do you have for fog?"
"Just one," he deadpanned. "F*****g fog."
It has been everywhere, cloaking us and seemingly moving with us. It affects the mood somewhat: slowing things down, quieting them. Add the fact that, for most of the crew, these are the final two weeks of a three-month expedition, and this is a quiet, laid-back ship.
The locals take the conditions in stride. "There's no point getting mad at the weather," observes George, correctly.
"It's real nice weather lately, real nice," said a villager on St. George yesterday evening, casually lighting a cigarette as we stood around looking at nothing in particular. "Well, apart from the fog."
We had just concluded a meeting with the community, one in which George explained the expedition so far: the initial round of community visits, the submarine exploration in the canyons, the campaign against overfishing and for Marine Cultural Heritage Zones. It helps, of course, that the villagers know and trust George, except now, instead of Father George he is Greenpeace George. That is not, shall we say, exactly considered a promotion, but several community members took the time to express appreciation for the fact that they now have a greater understanding of what Greenpeace is and stands for, and that we are here to work with, and not against, them, that we want to protect the Bering Sea on which they rely but which is dying, bit by bit.
By the end, one small boy, in a line seemingly scripted for the Hallmark Channel, actually asked: "Will you help save our culture?' Honestly. George, briefly taken aback, quietly promised that "We'll do everything we can."
We are not expecting quite such a warm welcome on St. Paul. It is a larger community, and resentment remains (misdirected toward Greenpeace) over the cessation of the sealing hunt here in 1985 and the sense that we were somehow responsible. It is part also of a general and understandable distrust of outsiders, who for centuries have lectured, hectored, and enslaved the Aleut people.
All we can do is represent ourselves and the organization to the best of our ability. Nobody said it would be anything other than a long haul, after all.
We are now alongside and the engines are off. Time to go ashore. We'll see what the next two days bring.
Two days ago we arrived at St. George, an island populated by 108 people and a heck of a lot of fur seals and birds such as the Red- Leg Kittywake and Thick-Billed Murre. Imagine cliffs teeming with birds and their offspring, gulls squawking overhead and the grunts of fur seals and surf pounding the shore.
We arrived in the afternoon, after a morning where Stoweaway found the "Nausicalm" didn't. Even more ignominious, we were only in five foot swells.
After awhile, I fell into the sleep I hadn't had much of the night before. When I woke up it was afternoon and there was this sound like marbles the size of giant satelite dishes tumbling out of a closet. Holy s, had we hit something?
I staggered to the foredeck to find Ruurd, the super-blond, super-organic-food-educator, was ringing a bell. "What's that noise?" "We're dropping anchor".
Oh.
Ruurd calls to Penney, who is turning a giant winch. "Is that five yet?" "Four." Ruurd pulls the bellcord again and Penney turnes the winch and the "marbles" roll, link after link, into the ocean until Cap'n Pete, standing outside the bridge? calls "Stopping" and the sun comes out rather cooperatively and things began to look slightly less bleak.
Blessed George, whose blog you may be reading, appears at that moment , takes one look at moi and knows just what to say. "I threw up before lunch." "Thank you, George," I say, hugging him. Willem, who has captained Greenpeace boats, can't repress a slight smirk. Strangely, this is equally comforting, a relief to get even a hint of the ribbing I've expected, a kind of challenge. Ha, Stoweaway will toughen up!
Rumour goes around of a zodiac going into town shortly. But I signed up to clean the mess after breakfast, and Kelly said she'd do it instead when I was down for the count, but she had to whale watch, so Ruurd was going to, but now I've taken over from him, and..."Just go!" everyone says. I'm beginning to see how things work around here. Ta, mates!
Next comes the Cirque de Soleil aspect of life on the Espy. The swells are certainly higher than five feet now. The zodiac rises up near the wet room door, where we're waiting to climb on, then abruptly drops down, oh, looks like six or seven feet. Up and down, up and down. "You have to step very surely." Yeah, right. Or end up in the drink. But hey, we all make it okay and off we zoom.
The harbour is shrouded in fog, and circuitous, a snaky route in created by mound of boulders the residents of St. George have piled up all around the shore. A sign warns "No Rat Infested Ships", and in case you don't read English, there's a handy-dandy picture of a rat with the red "no" circle around and through it. Irresistibly, jokes about who on board this zodiac constitutes a "rat" ensue.
A small boy runs along the shore. "George!" he shouts. "George!" He trips over a rope, falls, picks himself up and keeps running towards us. George waves and the kid's face breaks into a huge grin. A smaller toddler eyes sea urchins by the dock with his mother. After we strip off our lifejackets and climb into a pickup truck with the two boys and Mum, the older one says, "Hey! I want that sea urchin for my crab trap!" and I get an intimation of the life of these islanders, who have subsisted on seal, sea urchin and other native foodstuffs for centuries.
George points out the house where he grew up, and the Russian Orthodox church where he was the island's parish priest for two years, and then we tramp through long, wet grass and wildflowers to a fur-seal viewing blind that warns visitors to assume their presence is disturbing the animals and leave immediately if they see: head-raising, increased agression, etc. If visitors don't leave after seeing these things, mothers and pups may get hurt, the sign warns. Hmn. Just like humans. The seals are brown and golden and some are fighting and one...a parent?...responds to a young one's cries with what looks like a kiss on the mouth. We'd like to stay longer but are cold and wet and happy to get back to the boat and dinner...broth and a bit of rice for Stoweaway. The boat was really swaying, seen from the shore, just how big are the swells now? "Oh, ten feet," says Cap'n Pete. Ten feet, and I'm in the mess, eating? I want to give him a high five, even more so when he says the sea should be like glass the next three days coming up.
Next time, a much more serious side of our voyage: "Is our culture ending?" A young St. George boy asks us to help save his people's way of life.
Last night after our fabulous whale watching day we gathered in the mess where Kelly, the marine biologist, gave us a talk on whale vocalization, playing us some recorded sounds. "What's that?" someone asks. "That thumping sound? That's the whales jumping on the seals," says Kelly. The room goes sober, as we imagine that scene, although the image provokes some uncontrollable laughter too, which gets worse as she explains the next sounds, a kind of garbled grunting. "Now they're eating. They're like us, they like to talk over their food, it's like a whale dinner party." Hmn. Do the Humpbacks...like the beauties we saw all morning...do that too? How incredibly ignorant I am about whale behaviour. Later, Kelly educates me: Humpbacks eat fish or Krill, a shrimplike creature. But right here, right now in the mess she is talking about Killer Whales and Tom (our resident radio operator and techno-genius) corrects her: "Orcas". There is no mistaking the disapproval in his voice. Kelly doesn't hear him. I ask her later about the discrepancy in terms. Haven't some people...by which I really mean "Greenpeace"...decided to call these types of whales "Orcas" as the term "Killer Whale" sounds perjorative, and creates a lack of empathy? "Well, they kill other whales," she says matter-of-factly.
ght the boat starts to sway in an exciting manner. If it gets any more exciting there will be cookies tossed all around our cabin. I get up, pulling on jeans and stuffing my flannel nightie into them...ahh, the fashionable Greenpeace outfits we wear!...and wander up to the bridge. I get as far as the room adjoining the bridge, with its countertops covered by machines blinking various coloured lights (don't expect too many details from a techno-idiot) from where I can see that the bridge is dark and silent. No, I mean dark. And SILENT. Who's on watch? WHERE are they/he/she? it??? I put my hand into the dark empty space that is the open doorway to the bridge...nothing, empty air. Mysterious, strange, and alarming. I put my hand further forward...further...and encounter a curtain. Ahhh! Pulling it aside, I discover more machines, blinking reasuringly, and people, how wonderful!: Rao, from South India, who is Third Mate, and Kate, our youngest crew member, 24 years old. Kate had left a note for Kelly on our cabin wall earlier, when she was starting her watch and Kelly was somewhere not to be found. It has a coloured diagram showing how to get to Kate's cabin from ours and it says: "Please, please do not hesitate to knock on my door. I'm on watch, so my schedule in not to begin work until 1 pm. BUT, I would really, really rather take stills of whales for you than I would sleep." After which she'd written "Serious), in case Kelly didn't believe it.
Kate tells me a story she's heard involving several Greenpeacers out in a zodiac who were approached by three whales (Bowheads I think, I can't ask Kate as she is out in a zodiac with Kelly right now), one male and two females, and how the male started to butt the zodiac, and the Greenpeacers found out later the behaviour indicated an ominous whale dinner party plan involving a few tasty eco-warriors. Then this morning Second Mate Diek -- for once being serious -- tells of seeing furious whale activity in waters off Hawaii, and then seeing the ocean redden with masses of blood. He thinks it was a baby Killer Whale (or Orca, if you will) being savaged. So, whales. Gentle and lovable? Certainly, at times, and after the humpbacks visitation this morning it would be hard to find anyone on board whose heart was not moved. Ferocious and deadly? That, too. Sociable, like to talk over dinner? Absolutely. Just like us. Tomorrow: Ten foot swells...Quick and Unintended Weight Loss Diet...St. George tour with our spiritual leader, including fur seals and cliffs teeming with birds; and Pink Floyd, Chuck Berry and more...
