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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.
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...
I had an interesting conversation with George last night—it would admittedly be difficult to have any other kind of conversation with George—during which we touched on the meaning of “action” in a Greenpeace context, particularly as it applies to this expedition.
Both inside and outside the organization, the traditional view of Greenpeace action is of non-violent confrontation: driving inflatables between whales and harpoons, for example, or sailing a ship to a nuclear test site.
But taking action can take many different forms, and be no less effective for doing so. The canyons leg of this expedition is a classic example: working almost round the clock every day for three weeks, the crew of the Esperanza and the scientists who joined them on board were able to provide exactly the kind of documentation needed to provide a legal case for banning bottom trawling in the Pribilof and Zhemchug Canyons.
That would be a huge accomplishment, and a pretty impressive achievement for three weeks’ work. Of course, there’s more involved than the documentation itself: gathering the evidence is the first part, and working to ensure the implementation and enforcement of conservation measures will at best take many months more yet.
Much the same applies to the community outreach legs. Here, too, we’re taking action: not just by providing an opportunity for the people of the Bering Sea region to explain their way of life, and express their concerns and fears, to the rest of the world; but also by demonstrating to those communities that we share similar concerns—about overfishing, global warming, and environmental change—and, hopefully, by countering the negative impressions that some Alaska Native communities, particularly those here in the Pribilof Islands, harbor about Greenpeace.
The results of our work won’t become evident in days, weeks, or even months. These visits won’t yield banner headlines. They won’t provide action footage to run in rotation on cable news channels. What they can do is lay the groundwork for something more tangible and longer-lasting, an effective means of not only ending over-fishing in, and protecting the wildlife and ecosystems of, the Bering Sea region but also ensuring the sustainable continuation of the subsistence way of life of the people who live here.
We are presently anchored just off St. George Island—which, like the good ship Esperanza, is enveloped in fog. After the warm, bright, and calm conditions of Saturday, the swells began to rise overnight: not that much, but enough to briefly rouse at least one person from his slumber, and to remind him he’s happy to be on such a comfortable and capable ocean-going ship, as opposed to some of the other vessels with which he’s braved some of the more remote regions of the world in the past.
“This is more like the Bering Sea I know,” said Pete, the captain, as he arrived in the wheelhouse this morning to be greeted by gray sea and sky.
“I wonder,” added Diek, the second mate as twenty knots of blustery Bering Sea howled outside, “how, with all this wind, there can still be so much fog?”
The wind has now died down, but the fog remains, lifting occasionally as the sun occasionally wins the battle and burns off one patch, only for more to roll in off the sea. There has been no repetition of yesterday’s incredible scenes, when we encountered thick clouds of shearwaters and at least fifty feeding humpback whales; but on our journey to St. George we were accompanied by a good number of fin whales, one of which surfaced tantalizingly close off our port bow, before disappearing anew into the mist and sea.
George is ashore now, on the island where he was born, making initial contact prior to a meeting with the tribal council, and a broader community gathering, tomorrow. For many of us, the next two weeks provide entry to a world we do not know and have never seen. For George, it is a journey home.
You are nursing a cup of coffee in the mess, the last breakfaster, late at 8:15, when First Mate Hettie tells you to get your ass up to the bridge for whale watch. You'll be on watch from 8:30 to noon with your cabin mate Kelly, a marine biologist who is documenting whale sounds, and Willem who coordinates, well, just about everything around here. You grab a hat and jacket and water and laptop and binoculars and camera and haul your rear end to your post. Hettie says, "We expect to see whales very shortly once we're out of the harbour", and then the Espy hauls anchor and sails out of Dutch in a sea so smooth you can barely feel the ship moving.
You don't see much...only snow-capped mountains, their sides green with vegetation, a mossy spring green you don't see where you come from, not on the sides of cliffs. And a layer of cloud that rolls over the edge of this landscape like a puffy white duvet...no, like a soft-serve icecream cone...oh God, the clichés get worse and worse as you try and try again to come with the right words in your tiny mind, to describe these clouds. Forget words. Here come the birds. Shearwaters, flying low across the bow, crossing the whole horizon from west to east, on and on and on in a remarkably steady stream that puts you into some kind of trance. At some point you cross to the starboard side of the deck without knowing how you got there and find yourself standing with Willem and Kieran...a writer and documentary filmmaker...in silence for what seems like an hour, just looking at the birds, and the ocean, and the sky... The boat begins to rock from bow to stern, not violently, just a little and you find you are doing Tai Chi without even trying, torso swaying like a wave, feet rooted to the deck. The seamless motion of the small black birds streaming across the bottom of the sky so close to you, without interuption, soundlessly, deepens the silence somehow and a great peace descends, around you, around all of you, and you think you will stand there like that forever, perfectly happy. And then Diek, the Second Mate, shouts: "Twelve o'clock," in Dutch-tinged English. Actually, he doesn't shout, he is too cool to shout, only calmly announces it, as if he's saying: "Let's have a cup of tea", and the binocs go up and you're all scanning like mad for blow, for surfacing, for breaching, but you don't see anything. Then Kelly sees something at two o'clock, and you find yourself both running to starboard. A fin! You give a little shriek, which doesn't sound cool at all. And then you see, ahead, a low dark cloud that stretches across the horizon, and coming closer you see that it is made of birds, all birds, and the fin of a humpback whale pops through the surface of the water.
You shout, despite your determination not to, and then another surfaces, and your whole body tingles. And then...Oh God! a tail. Kelly wants to find Killer Whales, not Humpbacks, and does not share your excitement...at least, not until she sees a different blow, higher and thinner then the shorter, fatter blows of the Humpbacks and even she gets quite a grin on. Is it a Fin Whale? She's never seen one of those before, and now, Hey! HEY!, you see it too, a HUGE dark fin slashing into the air. And then a Humpback jumps into the air and crash, thumps back into the sea, sending a cloud of spray up, and Diek gets on the PA and says casually, "Whale paradise", and Raymond, the cook, gets to the bow first, in his trademark white T-shirt and blue and white checked cook's pants, and it crosses your mind that lunch may be late today, and that no-one will care one tiny bit about LUNCH...and Penney with her blonde spiral curls zips onto the bow and so does oh, just about everybody, 20-odd of the 25 on board. And then a shoal...is that what it's called? Kelly's the whale expert, not you...of whales surface on starboard, and everyone runs over there, and you hear a gasp from the stern, and you all run down there, and you think it's good the boat is so large, as otherwise it might tip over, and you're swarming from one end of the boat to the other, one mass of beings, like the Shearwaters streaming across the bow. Kelly says to Cap'n Pete, you might want to slow down, and a whale surfaces so close you see the barnacles on it's tail, and sunlight hits the underside of the tail and the white underside glows gold-tinged and pale orange as a streak of sunlight flashes over it.
The whales are making a sound something between a growl and a fart, and you hear Penney and Clive, the ship's doctor, talking about how lovely it was to see that first blow, awhile back, with that rainbow in it, the sun striking it just so, and you say, "Really? A rainbow?" and they nod solemnly. You're remembering how Bob Hunter, now passed away, always seemed to see rainbows when something special was about to happen on a ship, and how you were a bit skeptical about that, and what an idiot you are, and you look up at the rainbow painted on the portside funnel, and above that, on the roof of the heli-hanger, is George Pletnikoff, his tall heft silhouetted against a phenomenally blue sky, and you feel an embarrassing, terrible warm mushy feeling, like you might just hug everybody. But at the same time you don't want to hug anyone and if someone hugged you right here, right now, you'd probably punch them, and besides, fortunately there is no time for hugging, just as there has been no time to take a sip of water or use the W.C. or do anything for three hours now, because of the damn whales and their damn beauty! Not to mention the Tufted Puffins with their orange beaks, the Glaucous-winged gulls, and you are so cold your fingers can hardly hold the binocs and just when you firmly decide to stop, to go inside, here comes ANOTHER great mass of birds up ahead, and the whales are blowing and surfacing and growling and farting and blasting into the air and you wonder if besides coming here for the fish, if maybe they know. Maybe they know by now, the whales. Maybe word has gotten around. Maybe when they see that rainbow on the ship they know it stands for love, and maybe, just maybe, they have come to say hello, our friends.
Over lunch...finally the whales have disappeared...for the moment, anyway...Clive talks about how a whale, shot dead in the Arctic by some whalers, had a spearhead embedded in its neck, and archeologists dated the spearhead back 130 years, and how a longevity of 130 years has brought all previous estimates into question. And you look at all the whales painted all over the ship, in the corridors and on drawer handles in the Wet Room and in the metal shop and even on the walls of the W.C. and you wonder if these paintings have somehow called the whales, like an incantation, a prayer, and you think you will dream tonight of being a whale in the Bering Sea, travelling through the green blue ocean with your whale mates, growling and farting and calling and loving and eating and all the things whales do.
The shearwaters came first, a steady parade of seabirds skimming the surface of the sea, flying across the water in a seemingly interminable procession. Then, far ahead, close to the horizon, there was a whale blow, then another. Shortly afterward, another.
We grew closer, and the number of whale blows kept growing. Five, six, seven, eight in a row, all stretched out ahead of us, and then humpback whale dorsal fins, and then an occasional tail as a whale dove deep beneath the waves.
We slowed to a crawl and then to a stop as the scene began to play out around us. We had come across a Bering Sea feeding frenzy: dark clouds of shearwaters—and petrels, gulls, and puffins—literally tens of thousands of them, churning up the surface of the water as they feasted on whatever lay just below. There was a constant low-revel rumble as they beat their wings, their feet paddling furiously against the water’s surface, as they landed and took off.
And in their midst were the humpbacks. How many of them, it was hard to tell: fifty, surely, and maybe many more. They surrounded us now, one surfacing and blowing just off the starboard bow, others off the stern. One breached directly in front of us, launching itself out of the water and back again with a giant splash; another breached off to starboard, and another.
It was a sight to behold, a truly remarkable experience, and a privilege to have stumbled across it and to have been able to witness it. It was the beauty and bounty of the Bering laid out in front of us. If ever we needed a reminder of why we are here, and why protecting this region is so important, this morning provided it.
For a couple of days, I just stared from shore. The Esperanza sat at anchor, close enough almost to touch, but I wasn’t ready to board just yet. I had other things to do before I took a ride out to what would be my home for the next two weeks or so.
Sam and I saw each other just about every day for most of the seven years I lived in Anchorage, but we hadn’t laid eyes on each other since I reluctantly left Alaska about eighteen months ago. But now, there she was, waiting for me at Dutch Harbor airport, and I can’t even tell you how overjoyed I was to see her. It isn’t every day you find your closest friend working on an island in the Bering Sea, after all. But there she was, and for a couple of days, there was much catching up to do. There were long nights at the Unisea Bar, and long days spent recovering while staring at the television and DVD marathons of "Rescue Me."
But eventually, Sam had to go back to work, and I had a ship to join. I stood at the Small Boat Harbor as Hettie steered the inflatable over to pick me up; a short ride later, and I was up the pilot ladder and in my new home.
I have friends here, too: those I have sailed with before, like Clive and Marc; those I know from land, like George and Kate; those I’ve only spoken with on the phone, but feel I know already, like Barbara. And then there are those I don’t know at all yet, but whom, when these two weeks are over, I’ll regard, as I do so many of those I’ve had the opportunity to sail with over the years, as friends for life.
And now we are underway, steaming slowly away from Unalaska and out into the Bering Sea. The ship is settling into its slow, gentle, hypnotic movement, as Dutch Harbor (and Sam) recede into the distance, and new places, new experiences—and new friendships—lie ahead.
"...are we there yet?" How many of we parents and grandparents have heard those wonderful and so touching questions when driving? Oh, I know it can be so annoying, especially when stuck in rush hour traffic, or when we are a bit late, but to those of us who are seperated for any length of time from our families, they are words more and more cherished.
So, for me, back on the Esperanza after a brief recharge and wonderful break with my family (we went dipnetting for salmon on the Kenai river, rested in hot springs pool east of Fairbanks, saw the bottom half of Mt. McKinley up close, and basked in being thankful for being married for 34 years now) it is, well, good to be back to my other love in life, the Bering Sea. And so, I ask "...are we there yet?" But, asked not until I saw, heard, looked, listened and wowed the results of our dives into the abyss next to my home on the Pribs. Oh my gosh, what amazing, and at the same time, saddening wonders! Amazing that my doorstep to my life, my childhood, my dreams are and were the Canyons! Saddening, because, someone came, or in our case, lots of someones, came and trashed my threshold to security, peace and a gift which He eventually allowed me to open and peek in. I peeked. I teared up. I smiled. I oh my goshed, and probably for now, will continue to oh my gosh. Our dive team went literelly down and beyond expectations. So much so that I walked the beaches of Dutch Harbor, beaches far from this industralized mess of killing for food, and finally learned, inner knowledge, that the marine cultural heritage zones are happening. We are doing it. A dream, seeminly impossible at its birth in my head, being made real by Greenpeace and our wonderfully dedicated group of people, and being done correctly.
So now, we are getting ready to listen to my question: "...are we there yet?" I am going home. I am coming back to my birthland, birth homes, both the Pribs. Coming back to smell, taste and see my playground, which now is in grave danger of becoming a tomb to dreams, to memories, to wonders. I am going home. And I am nervous, filled with butterflies, wondering if what I am doing is the right thing. And, you know what? Through those nervous, butterfly feelings? Through them, I know it is right. Without the help of all of you, having a chance to keep clean our home, our heritage, none of this would have been possible. I often ask: "Why is Greenpeace doing this, to help my people, our people, why?" And I learned; because its the right thing to do. In all humanity, from time beginning to now, it is the right thing to do.
We will once again, visit, talk, listen and learn. We will discuss where we are going to finalize our marine cultural heritage zone plans, what reports, studies, laws, and all that such, that will ensure parts of this bloodline of Mother Earth is not trampled upon, destroyed and mocked by anyone.
So, the answer to my question: "...are we there yet?" has been given. Yes, we are. We have a few more hurdles to overcome, this first being the most difficult, this research. We have some hurdles, and I know, you are going to help Mother Earth. It is the right thing. And me? I am going to know, yes, when we come together against seemingly insurmountable odds and put our collective hearts and minds into it, we are a force to be reconded with.
As we come closer to the midpoint of our two weeks left in our tour, I will try to put into words our final goals, the directions we need to yet go. However, just being at this point in the Bering Sea, working and growing, gives us all a sense that yes, we are doing the right thing in protecting this planet we call Mother.....Earth.
Until next time
George
Greenpeace is known for rocking the boat, but we also have boats that ROCK, and I don't mean just the way the Espy is rocking us right now, gently like babies in a cradle. This ship has five zodiacs on board, a sauna, a heli-pad, and...most important of all...an espresso machine in the lounge, the engine that truly powers this vessel according to certain wags. All this, and I keep flashing back to the Phyllis Cormack, Greenpeace's first boat, that set sail from Vancouver in 1971 for Amchitka Island where the U.S. government was preparing to explode an atomic bomb hundreds of times bigger than the one that leveled Hiroshima.
There wasn't enough room to swing a cat on board let alone ribbon dance, like bosun Penney was doing up on deck the other night. She blushed when she saw Captain Pete and I watching her, stopped, and picked up the cigarette she'd been smoking intermittently. She is slender and tall and pure muscle, like most of the crew. Then there are the rest of us, slouched over our laptops, barely fit to hoist a coffee cup. Another thing not on board in 1971...laptops. Greenpeace has come a long way, baby.
When a friend who lived in Alaska back in the day heard I was going to Amchitka she said: "I thought it was just called "Amka" now...because that last nuke test in '71 blew the "chit" out of it." Yeah. Five megaton nuclear bombs will do that to a wildlife preserve. According to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, who couldn't give a "chit" about sea otters, let alone the wisdom of exploding atomic bombs underground in the most volatile earthquake zone in the world, no damage was done and no radiation escaped. But when Greenpeace scientists visited Amchitka in 1996 they found radioactive isotopes such as Tritium and Krypton in groundwater and fish. A spokesman for Arctic-Alaska couldn't understand it. "We've never found any radioactive fish," he said. Later he admitted his company had never tested fish for radioactivity...and had no plans to start. The Phyllis Cormack became the touchstone for a worldwide outrage that erupted against the blast, and although it didn't stop it, afterwards the U.S. government announced it would cancel the rest of the series of tests planned. Seven blasts were originally announced. Only three were ever carried out. So, sometimes the ire of concerned citizens, intelligently directed, can go up against the biggest military industrial complex in the world and win. And there's nothing like rocking the boat with boats that rock! More memories...stories...and tales of life on the Espy soon.
We are back in Dutch Harbor now and enjoying the first sunshine since we left here three weeks ago. As I look north out of the harbor, I can see the almost ever present fog bank waiting for us. The last three weeks we used two one person submarines and an ROV (Remotely Operated vehicle) to explore two canyons around the Pribilof Islands. It was tiring work for the ship drivers. Maintaining communication with the submarines meant staying directly (plus or minus 100 meters) over them. Staying on top of the ROV is sort of a given, as it is attached to the ship with a 1000 to 250 meter fiber optic cable.
Esperanza is quite maneuverable. We have thrusters (sideway propellers) in the bow and stern, and twin screws on the main engines. When we were working the subs or ROV, it was our habit to turn off the port main engine. We did this because we were using the port side for launchings, and the ROV cable point. So with the port propeller turned off, it was easier to keep the fiber optic cable to the ROV out of the propeller. That’s something that can spoil your whole day.
Meals are a big part of our day on the ship. It’s about the only time almost all the crew is gathered together. Raymond (Netherlands) and Samantha (New York City) turned out terrific lunches and dinners. Breakfast, except on Sunday, is: get it yourself. The cooks have to do some careful planning to keep the ten vegetarians, ten people who (like myself) eat fish as well as veggies, and the 12 meat eaters happy.
That the Esperanza has been a very happy ship the last few months is in no small part thanks to our cooks. On this point, I have to recommend Linda Greenlaw's excellent book, The Hungry Ocean. I always used tofigure that if the crew was happy, they would like the food. Linda, a sword fishing captain from the East Coast, figured if the food was good, then the crew would be happy. I now subscribe to her theory. And for those who would like a realistic view of what it’s like to be a fisherman, you should read her book.
I used to fish more than I do now, which is not much at all. But I used to spend time with my friend Mark Williams in Key West. Mark was a serious fisherman, and it was always and interesting experience to goout and try to see the ocean through his eyes. Whether it was spear fishing, catching lobster with tickle sticks and nets or rod and reel, I always learned.
But Mark is not fishing anymore. Pollution and run off has killed all the coral reef around Key West. And once the small fish lost a place to live and grow, the bigger fish stopped coming around. You can go a longways out to the west to find healthy coral, but Mark does not want to make the long trips anymore. And that's a pity.
This is one of the reasons we did the research on Zhemchug and Pribilof Canyons this summer. Our research should give the scientists a better understanding of the place the deep sea corals have in the lives of the commercial catch. The Bering Sea is a wonderful resource. And we can not allow our selves to kill it off.
Greetings from Unalaska/Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutian Islands. We have finished our (first!) submarine expedition to explore two of the world's largest underwater canyons. The crew is tired but happy, and so am I. The weather cooperated, and we were able to do 25 sub dives and 8 successful ROV dives, giving us well over 50 hours on the bottom. From the techical and logistics side, the expedition was a huge success. But what did we find, and what does it mean?
Above all, these are patchy environments, with rocky areas scattered throughout what otherwise tends to be fairly silty. While it was clear from the amount of holes, mounds, and tubes that there was a lot going on below the sediment throughout the canyons, the larger creatures tended to be associated with hard substrate. This often came in the form of drop stones, rocks that fell from melting or shifting ice bergs, which provided a base for corals, sponges, hydroids, anemones, bryozoans, and other important habitat-forming invertebrates. These areas were almost always home to fish and crab.
We found about ten species of corals and an even greater diversity of sponges, including at least one that is likely to be a new species. We collected dozens of specimens, several of which may be new species as well. This is not surprising, given how little is known about these canyons. Even this expedition has just barely scratched the surface when it comes to truly understanding the canyons.
Some of what we found was beautiful and exotic. It was a real treat to watch a giant octopus walk across the seafloor, to see tiny snail fish larva hatch from the eggs that had been deposited in a sponge, and to visit places never before seen by human eyes.
And some things were not so beautiful. We all knew, intellectually, that much of the Bering Sea has been heavily trawled. Still, I don't think any of us were prepared for how widespread the damage is in these deep, remote areas. We saw trawler tracks on most of our dives, and sometimes it seemed as if the tracks were everywhere. On one of my dives, I passed through a large area where nearly ever coral I saw was broken or knocked over.
Now it is time for us to take this information to the scientists and policy makers at NOAA Fisheries and the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. Based on our findings here, it is clear that continuing to allow trawl gear to impact the seafloor in the canyons is not an option. In order to protect the corals and sponges that provide habitat for fish and crab, and in order to protect the yet to be discovered deep sea life found in the depths of these canyons, we need to act now.
Of course, it's not going to be that simple. While some fishermen are clearly committed to science-based solutions to ensure that critical habitats are protected and fisheries are managed sustainably, others will fight us tooth and nail. We have truth on our side, though, and truth when backed up by determination, we've got for sure, will win in the end.
Thank you for coming along with me for this wondrous expedition. George is back on board now to continue our work with native communities, so keep in touch for more updates from him.
For the oceans,
John H
In addition to the exiting undersea research and exploration taking place in the Pribilof and Zhemchug Canyons, we are doing bird surveys for biologists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This involves making observations of the endangered short-tailed albatross, (Phoebastria albatrus) recording the exact location of the sightings as well as differentiating between adults, subadults and juveniles.
Adult short-tailed albatross are large with a wingspan of 211 cm (83 inches), mostly white with golden wash on the head. They have a massive pink bill with a pale bluish tip. Younger birds are brownish in colour and become progressively whiter as they mature. Fortunately for us their colouration makes them quite distinctive and does not lead to confusion with other species.
The total world population of this species is only about 2500 individuals. Long–line fishing continues to exact a terrible toll on these birds as well as other albatross species when they go after the baited lines, become hooked and drown. Short-tailed albatross only breed on islands off southern Japan. In 2004 an unusual discovery was made that amazed scientists: a large flock of these birds, numbering 150 to 300, was found in the Bering Sea near the Zhemchug Canyon. This observation has demonstrated the need for more observation of their feeding biology whilst far away from their breeding grounds.
Our first sighting of this rare albatross was made on 4 August amongst a flock of other birds surrounding the ship. This led to a flurry of excitement and numerous photographs were taken as we all shared in the delight of finally seeing this magnificent bird. Subsequently we have seen about 15 individuals and will continue our observations till the end of the campaign.
We have also seen the 2 other types of albatross found in this area, namely the black-footed albatross and the Laysan albatross. These large birds are quite easy to identify especially when they are more than twice the size of the commonest seabird seen around the Esperanza, namely the northern fulmar. Every time we stop to do underwater diving operations we are surrounded by hundreds of these fulmars, resplendent in their variable plumage colouration. Two species of gull, the aptly named black-legged kittiwake and the red-legged kittiwake have also accompanied us most of the time, often sitting on the ship’s rail when not soaring gracefully by.
Hopefully the work done both above and below the sea will add to the scientific data base and lead to conservation of these critical habitats.
Clive Strauss
Medic on board and avid birder.
s in charge of our short-tailed albatross monitoring project.
Alaska Natives and Marine Cultural Heritage Zones
Alaska’s First Peoples are facing many challenges. Resources, both for economic and subsistence needs, are reaching critical mass. More and more people want a similar lifestyle we have cherished for thousands of years in our homeland. Businesses, charter boats, commercial fishers and others dependent upon those ventures are demanding rights to resources. Families are struggling to find enough fish to not only feed themselves, but to also make ends meet economically. Sadly, both the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea are forced into a system not ever experienced by their calm. Global competition, climate changes and food competitions are damaging what we all consider "ecosystems in beauty." For our people, this must mean we take a very close look at our needs. This must mean we become critical of how these finite resources are being divided by foreign powers, economic powers, challenging our traditional knowledge and ways. This means we must assert our beliefs and inalienable rights to what has proven to be our lifeline for generations: we must demand marine cultural heritage zones!
Much has been written and discussed, debated and analyzed, regarding the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 and the subsequent amendments. And as of this date, August 7, 2007, much more is being questioned. Amongst the issues being debated is the historic use and dependence upon ocean resources. These resources; salmon, pollock, halibut, sable fish, crab and many species of rock and flat fish are being divided up between foreign multi-national corporations and their counterparts in the United States. No recognition of any rights, other than a small amount of resources to Community Development Quota (CDQ) Organizations in villages of the Bering Sea, is being considered. These organizations are not for profit companies primarily forced to use any income on "fishery related" activities. Some organizations are creatively incorporating for-profits to continue building empires with very little given to the village needs. Yet, given the limitations of the Bering Sea/Gulf of Alaska (BSGA) ecosystem, concern for the livelihood and sustainability of subsistence resources for the villages is being ignored. Taking a few sections related to the intent of Congress during the passage of ANCSA, "…efforts to address serious health and welfare problems…" have yet to be met, especially when the foods upon which the people depend for survival is quickly vanishing as competition for the fishing industry continues to challenge the health of the BSGA ecosystems and habitat.
If we look closely at the materials written, both pro and con, on the ANCSA, we will see that much has been done to fulfill the intent of Congress and the then agreed upon settlement with Alaska Native Peoples, and that much has yet to be done. Given that Congress directed the people in Alaska’s villages to select only certain lands, lands which had very little economic value since most of the lands that had natural resources had already been selected or owned by someone else, and lands based upon "cultural and traditional values." For most of the villages located on the BSGA, other than a few who had timber rights due to their selections, land was of very little value. As my friend and noted anthropologist Dr. Rick Knecht said: ",,,land for your people was only a place to build a home and sleep. The rest of the time, your people spent out on the ocean, hunting and gathering." And so, land, although to many very important, for our people and in the region of Alaska we chose to live, it had very little or no cultural, social or economic value.
Pub. L. 100-241, Sec. 2, Feb. 3, 1988, 101 Stat. 1788, provided that: ''The Congress finds and declares that –
''(1) the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (this chapter) was enacted in 1971 to achieve a fair and just settlement of all aboriginal land and hunting and fishing claims by Natives and Native groups of Alaska with maximum participation by Natives in decisions affecting their rights and property; (emph: added).
''(2) the settlement enabled Natives to participate in the subsequent expansion of Alaska's economy, encouraged efforts to address serious health and welfare problems in Native villages, and sparked a resurgence of interest in the cultural heritage of the Native peoples of Alaska;
p>The land conveyed under ANCSA was 44 million acres, which was a little more than 10 percent of the entire state. It sounds like a tremendous amount of land, especially when compared to treaties the United States made earlier with American Indians. When viewed as what was granted to the people who had a valid claim to the entire state, however, the settlement seems relatively small.
Of the 44 million acres, 22 million acres of surface estate went to village corporations on a formula based on population – not per capita. This land was generally located around the village itself and consisted of prime subsistence areas. (emph. added).
A final note: The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act is a very complex document that has inspired people over the last three decades to write thousands of pages about it. The act has been praised, and it has been roundly criticized. But what’s really important to keep in mind when discussing ANCSA is that it is a document that was developed for a group of human beings who had a very real claim to their ancestral home in Alaska. Their connection to the land is a spiritual one that transcends complex regulatory schemes. And yet for many, their tie to the land today is a law passed by Congress on December 18, 1971.
By: Alexandra J. McClanahan, CIRI Historian
As one can see readily, and as some have touted the value of land, for many Alaska’s first peoples, land is and was important. However, because of the restrictions placed upon what lands were available for selections under the ANCSA, the final result of the landmark legislation handed down by the US Congress may have created more problems than it was supposed to solve for Alaska’s first peoples. After all, the reason for the ANCSA was so the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline could be built. So in the end, Congress passed the ANCSA for the oil industry! And now I am afraid, the same is being done for the multinational, huge multibillion dollar fishing industry with nary a concern for the coastal peoples of Alaska, with our fishery resources.
Ocean
As the global economy and the resources which are dependent to keep the economy thriving dwindle; and as the competition for these resources reach their "peak," the same is going to be said about the oceans. However, in the case of Alaska’s first peoples, it is true for the coastal peoples, the ocean was, has and always been the source of life! It is from the ocean that the cultures grew, families survived and our foods came. In Native American folklore, and traditional understandings, the ocean is the bloodline of Mother Earth. Without the oceans, Mother Earth cannot survive, will not survive. This is why there is the need to establish marine cultural heritage zones in order that the ocean can be protected and the resources coastal peoples depend are cared for. I am not sure, but when I read in the first paragraph above, "…fishing claims by Natives and Native groups of Alaska…" may only be referring to salmon and not the other species of fish coastal peoples depend upon.
From all the information we are able to put together about the management of BSGA commercial fisheries by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC), the subsequent closures of three of the four pollock fishery areas of Shelikof Strait, Bogoslov and Aleutian Islands; massive millions of metric tons of bycatch, a good argument can be made concerning the "wanton waste" issues, which is against all laws, man-made and otherwise; and total mismanagement of both the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, we cannot wait any longer for some future date to make our argument for protections of our foods. We cannot rest on possible scientific corrections and solutions to ensure our continued survival. We must not become complacent into thinking that solutions for our challenges can come from somewhere, someone; because to repeat history that has taken away our sovereignty, is fatal to our people. We must realize that land, without water, is dead. We must make the argument that most, if not all, of the waters in the Gulf of Alaska/Bering Sea must be a marine cultural heritage zone. Ecosystems are interconnected, interrelated. Without this part, another part of the ecosystem will fail. If we are to survive, we must demand that it is truly the oceans that are the bloodline of our Mother Earth. She must survive.
Ahoy -
Yesterday, the weather caught up with us. We tried waiting it out, but in the end we weren't able to get in any dives. Today was a bit better, and we did a couple great ROV dives along the southeastern edge of Zhemchug Canyon. We encountered a large field of sea whip corals at the first site, 3 to 5 feet tall, along with numerous fish hiding among them. It was all too easy to imagine the impact dragging huge nets through this rich area could have on corals and fish alike.
On the second dive, the ROV descended right next to a boulder covered with large bubblegum corals and anemones.
We will use the video and data we collected today and on our other dives in the Bering Sea to demand that these areas be closed to destructive fishing practices. According to the reauthorized Magnuson Stevens Act, the federal fisheries law, policy makers are required to report on the distribution of corals in their jurisdiction and what steps are being taken to protect them. We have found corals on most of our dives in these canyons, but so far there is nothing to stop bottom trawlers or so-called mid-water trawlers that regularly impact the sea floor from destroying these long-lived and delicate species.
The importance of protecting the habitat that sustains marine life is on my mind today, as I read reports confirming that the Yangtze River dolphin has gone extinct. Many of the last several thousand of these 500 pound creatures, our fellow mammals, were killed by indiscriminate fishing methods - drowned in nets or caught on long lines of unbaited hooks. And many were poisoned by the pollution leached, drained, and dumped into the Yangtze.
Preventing extinctions is not a problem with just one solution. In the oceans, however, the best tool we have to protect marine biodiversity is to protect sensitive areas from fishing. It is well established that marine reserves closed to all fishing are often the most effective type of marine protected area, but in over 98% of US waters, it's still open season.
The Bering Sea is one of the richest marine environments on earth, but even this level of abundance cannot withstand the fishing pressure it is facing today. And global warming is creating additional pressures and causing further changes that we have not begun to understand.
We will not allow magnificent creatures like the Steller sea lion and the short-tailed albatross to go the way of the Yangtze River Dolphin.
We'll need your help, though. Are you with us?
John H
Hi my name is Kenneth Lowyck, welcome onboard the Deepworker 6 and I will be your pilot for today. We will be traveling down to the bottom of the Bering Sea to a depth of 1200 ft or 365 meters. Please fasten you seatbelt; put your table in the upright position. The exits are nowhere. Sadly there will be no in flight catering service provided during this dive; the entertainment today is all around you.
Once we get the all clear from the Esperanza we start our decent, first by emptying the ballast tank and then by electrical rotors. Keeping visual on Deepworker 7 we leave the surface and start heading down together. After a few minutes the clear greenish glow around us starts making room for the darkness of the deep sea. At this point we switch on our big lights and keep heading down. We are now at 300 ft or 91 meters and are experiencing some turbulence; actually we are getting attacked by huge group of squid. Some are tiny some are about 50 cm long. They obviously feel threatened by the sub, or we interrupted their afternoon tea party, because all of them, big and small, swim quickly up to the dome and squirt ink at us. Some of the bigger ones actually try to bite and hold on to the sub.
We continue to dive deeper and after another 10 minutes or so we see on our sonar that we are approaching the sea bottom. Depth is now over a thousand feet or 305 meters. We start slowing our decent and once the bottom is visual we settle down on a clear spot. The water around us is teaming with all kinds of life forms, most of them no larger than our fingernail. There are plenty of comb jellyfish around and the amazing thing about them is that they make these florescent lights while they swim with the current. The bottom is rather flat with here and there a boulder or a rock. Moving the submarine around we see that there are corals and sponges all around, exactly what we hoped to find here. Moving the sub closer to one habitat we see that beside sponges and corals the bottom is covered with tiny starfish. Getting the camera in position we notice that the manipulator arm isn’t functioning properly, one of the joints seems to be blocked which means we can not extend the arm to its fullest. That will be a problem when we want to take some samples later. We first spend some time filming what is around us, some red rockfish come swimming by and here and there we spot a juvenile King crab. The occasional squid, now a bit less hostile, posses for the camera and we are getting some great footage from a place no one ever been down to.
e for some sampling
Opening the basket was relatively easy with the arm but taking samples will be something completely different now that we found that part of the arm isn’t working. However by maneuvering the sub to a nearly vertical position and driving the nose in to the soil (I’m sure this isn’t in the text books!), we manage to collect some great samples (it will turn out later that the coral we just collected will make the scientist on board quite ecstatic). After securing the samples in our basket, we are now getting orders through the underwater comms to start our transect, travelling at a certain speed keeping a fixed bearing. (If you look to you right you will see the lights of the other Deepworker some 100 meters away) We are now at 1200 feet or 360 meters and will start heading up on the light slope of the canyon. Along the way we are filming constantly what we see in front of us. Plenty of corals and sponges around, loads of starfish, shrimp, we see cod swimming by, some Pollock (fish), different kind of flat fish and the occasional octopus. And then we go off transect to film something in more detail. We see a Skate(ray fish) hunting and we managed to film it as it jumps on its prey(probably a crab) and starts to devourer it. We also film some remarkable starfish (totally white with a pink-reddish hood) sitting neatly upon one of the stone (Later, the scientist told me that this starfish hasn’t been classified yet and that the only picture they had of it was on the deck of a ship after it came up with the by-catch. There was no footage, until now, of it in its environment.
There plenty of other fish around which we managed to capture on film, also some snails, sea cucumbers and we also spot some adult King crab (these crabs can have a leg span up to 1.8 meters)
Prepare for take-off
We are now about three hours in the dive and are at 875 feet (266 meters), when top side calls us to start preparing for our recovery. Apparently there is bad weather heading our way. So please make sure you seatbelt is properly secured, we are now starting our ascent. We leave bottom using our thrusters and we see the seafloor disappearing beneath us. Switching of all the lights we are now floating in total darkness. Now and then you can see light flashing up from squid, jellyfish and other underwater creatures, kinda like underwater fire works. After some time the darkness disappears which means we are now reaching surface,
time to switch of the camera.
Once on the surface we notice two things, one that there is some swell which means we are bobbing around quit a bit, and two that there are dolphins (Dalls Porpoise) swimming around the sub. Quickly I turn the camera on and manage to capture them playing around the sub, coming close to the dome and then quickly swimming away. Beautiful mammals that look in coloring rather like Orca’s with their distinctive black and white markings. A few minutes later they are gone, and many more minutes after that we finally get hooked on by the ships crane and lifted on deck of the Esperanza.
I hoped you enjoyed your dive and would like to thank you for choosing Greenpeace Diving Operations. Until a next time?
- Ken
Kenneth Lowyck is the Action Unit Coordinator for Greenpeace Canada. He is one of the sub pilots on this expedition, and is leading the SCUBA components of our work in the canyons. We believe that Kenneth's dive to 1930 feet in Zhemchug Canyon made him the deepest diving Belgian on record.
I made a dive today to about 1950 feet. That’s more or less 600 meters.
On my way down, at around 200 feet, I looked up to see porpoises swimming down between the surface and my position. I’m assuming they were Dall’s porpoises because we have been seeing many of them from the deck of the Esperanza. In fact the life we see out here from the deck never ceases to amaze me. I just came down from the bridge where we were observing a pod of about ten or so fin whales off the bow, and last week we saw a pod of Orca whales overtake us near the Pribilof Islands. They were in the distance, but their dorsal fins were huge, even that far away.
The camera on the sub was working, because I was watching the feed on the monitor inside the cabin, but unfortunately a technical glitch meant that it was not recording the data, so I’m just going to have to describe the scene I saw when I first got down to the sea floor on this dive.
Swimming around the seabed were thousands upon thousands of tiny fish. We must have landed smack bang in the middle of a huge shoal of them, because they were everywhere. Although tiny, they reflected what little light there was from our lighting system and so I could see them quite clearly.
I pushed off the bottom and hovered 50 feet above the Kenneth in the second submarine and switched off all my lights to better see the fish without the glare from the reflection of my beams in the water and found it difficult to comprehend the sight before me.
I could clearly see Kenneth’s sub below me surrounded by thousands of little points of light. It was like a huge field of moving stars. All around us. I have never seen anything like this and it was a profound moment for me.
I’m gutted the camera was unable to record this image so that I could share it with everyone back on the surface. You will just have to take my word for it, although I have a hard time believing it myself.
Zhemchug Canyon, Bering Sea. We arrived here yesterday, and have had two days of diving. On the way here, we stopped in St. George and St. Paul, in the Pribilof Islands, to help out a couple fur seal biologists and to drop off Andy Malavansky, who was with us on board for a couple days. Andy heads up the Ecosystem Office on St. George, and is on the Scientific Advisory Council for the expedition. All of us appreciated getting his insights on what we've been seeing, and it was great having him on board.
It was also a great chance for the crew to get ashore for a few hours, to see one of the wonders of the world: the fur seal rookeries of the Pribilofs. Aquilina Lestenkoff was a very generous host, patiently answering all our questions and setting us up with tour guides and a viewing permit. Then it was a mad rush back to the Esperanza for the 18 hour transit to Zhemchug.
The world's largest underwater canyon, Zhemchug means "pearl" in Russian. Before this week, what little we know about the creatures that live here came from things people could see from boats or pull up in fishing gear. This expedition has barely scratched the surface, but already we are shedding light on some of Zhemchug's mysteries.
In our dives in Pribilof Canyon last week, we saw large quantities of deep sea coral, but only two or three species. In just two days in Zhemchug, we've already found nine: feathery black coral, tiny chalice-shaped stony corals, sea whips, encrusting "stolon" corals, sea fans, and descriptively named but seldom seen bubblegum, bamboo, and red tree corals.
Along with the corals, we've seen some very interesting associations. For example, snail fish seem to go with black corals. Pacific Ocean perch are frequently seen among sea whips or fans. We often find worms, brittle stars, and other tiny invertebrates of the exact same color as the coral they live on. But we're getting ahead of ourselves - it's going to take a lot more work before anyone can really claim to know what these canyons look like or what lives there, never mind how the different species interact with one another.
One thing that is clear at this point is that it is not possible to characterize these canyons in simple terms. Just when a particular area looks like a silt or sand bottom with limited structural habitat, the substrate will change abruptly for a while - and the marine life will change right along with it. The geology is complicated here, with nearly flat mud plains giving way to nearly vertical bedrock without any warning from the limited bathymetrical charts.
In fact, as I write, the ship is in a search pattern looking for three pinnacles reported to rise out of the depths to as shallow as 22 feet from the surface. The notations on the charts say it all: reported 1947, position doubtful. Like almost everything else about this expedition, it's hard to say what we'll find, or where we'll find it.
The wind's picking up and there are storms to our west, so we may not be able to dive tomorrow. The Bering Sea has been pretty kind to us so far, though, so we can't complain.
Check out the deck cam to see how the waves are looking, and you'll probably be able to guess whether we're in the subs (good weather), using the ROV (pretty good weather), SCUBA diving (decent weather AND we've found the pinnacles), catching up on sorting through our data (sketchy weather), or feeding the fish (baaaaad weather).
I'll leave you with the Weird Fish of the Day, with a suitably weird name: the blob sculpin. Stay tuned for photos!
John H
"The does not belong to despots." - Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea
Jeremy lent me his waistcoat for this trip.
Jeremy’s waistcoat is one of those sports waistcoats with lots of pockets. It’s made of mesh so that you can wear it in any weather over anything and it doesn’t affect how hot/cold you are, so it’s more a tool really, than an item of clothing. It is pretty much the perfect piece of attire to wear in the type of submarines we are using because there is not much space in there if you want to bring in any little bits and pieces with you. Having pockets you can reach easily around you makes storing things for the dive so much easier. One member of the team even uses a form of photographer’s shoulder holster system to be able to organize the equipment he takes with him.
Jeremy’s waistcoat has a small Greenpeace patch on the front, but on the back is a large patch with the legend “Forest crimes unit”. I first saw him wearing it when on my first trip to Alaska with Greenpeace. It was also on the Esperanza, and I was a deckhand on board during that trip. We were up here working on supporting the movement to protect the Tongass coastal temperate rainforest from the destructive logging practices that continue to threaten its ecosystem to this day. Jeremy taught me many things on that trip, and my respect for his passion and commitment to the forest and environmental movement swayed me to become a true believer and self confessed tree hugger. He would absolutely love this gig.
Jeremy’s waistcoat is sitting on the back of his chair at his desk in the Greenpeace office in San Francisco. I was so pressed for time on my last day packing on my way up here for this expedition that I ended up not being able to head in to pick it up. I think of it every time I get in the submarines and look for places to put my notepad, pen, spare pen, cliff bar, water bottle, GPS, little camera, spare batteries, multi-tool, photo of the beautiful and inimitable Ashby, my good luck piece of red jasper, bits of paper with lists of things to remember on them, gloves and spare rag to wipe away any condensation. I carry a small bag that it all goes in, and I stuff it into a tiny space between the joystick for the manipulator, the switches for the thrusters, compass, hydraulics, and under the O2 analyzer and cabin pressure gauges. It’s tight, but if I’m careful when I grab things from it, it works well enough.
Jeremy’s waistcoat however, would have been way easier to deal with and I shake my head, grinning, every time I think about it.
Jeremy is in my head today as his friends and family gather with him near his home to take part in a healing circle to support him on his journey battling with cancer. He opened my eyes to a side of Alaska I would not have seen without him, and I hope to return the favor with the work we are carrying out here today in the Bering Sea.
Go deep brother!
There' re back!
Nowadays the ship is packed with people; scientists, technoman and crew. After a couple of days sniffing at each other we are used to each of one of us. It is still some 70 meters living space we are sharing, so with 34 people, everyone needs some private once in a while.
The bridge is rebuild like a tower of a aircraft carrier. Many computer screens, blinking and bloinking and pinking machines asking for attention or just to be ignored. Wires covering the ceiling and walls and when the subs are on a mission, a very loud : boing ping .... boing ping... and between that boing ping a watery voice is telling the guy on the aft bridge everything is A oke.
The main job for the captain is keeping the ship exactly above the subs. He has to maneuver the 'mothership' constantly, keeping one eye at the wind, one eye at the current, one eye at the mate (handling the pitch), and one eye at the screen for the position of the subs. O yeah, he also has to keep one eye at the wheel. In the mean while he has to listen to the communication between the subs and the aft bridge.
So, the Espi it packed and rocking and rolling the Bering Sea; in surge for new life and everything there is to be seen for the first time!
Stay tuned!
am in the process of writing a longer blog, but for now am just testing the system.
we are presently near the north west end of the pribilof canyon and are steaming into position to deploy the ROV to explore the seabed down there.
all is good.
Today was a big day for the team aboard the Esperanza. After the bad weather yesterday, it was nice to get back out under the water! Michelle and I went down in the subs to start things off, and got some really nice footage. I got up close and personal with an octopus, a shrimp, and another snailfish, and Michelle spent some quality time with king crabs and juvenile rockfish. We also were very happy to see quite a few large barrel sponges, and some really interesting little caverns occupied by everything from prowfish to hermit crabs. There were enormous numbers of basket stars and brittle stars - suspension feeders taking advantage of all the plankton and detritus near the bottom.
Then we took the ROV into even deeper water, where we came across a large eel like fish that none of us could readily identify. It could be a type of eel pout, but we'll have to look into that a bit further. There were also quite a lot of long slender fish called grenadiers, as well as the ship's favorite, the short-spined thornyhead - aka "idiot."
Finally, as I type, Timo and Kenneth are in the subs again, exploring some of the shallower parts of the upper canyon wall. We haven't explored these depths yet, so everyone's excited to see what these guys will find. There are records of soft corals being pulled up in trawl nets in this area, so we're hoping to find some things we haven't come across before.
Even though we are on deck by seven in the morning and still out in the subs well past a lot of people's bedtimes, everyone's still going strong. The crew has been amazing, going way above and beyond the call of duty. It's a good team.
 John |
 Michelle |
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