Moby-Duck (17 page)

A few dozen yards from shore, in the shadowy shallows of the lagoon, floats Pallister's big boat, the
Johnita II
, a fifty-foot Murray Chris-Craft twin-engine yacht. It is in this gray-green world an incongruously harlequin sight, at once shabby and luxurious, white fiberglass radiant above the dark water, colorful laundry fluttering from chrome rails. Atop the uppermost deck rises a structure resembling a treehouse, an unpainted wooden scaffolding enclosed with plastic tarps. Pallister pulls the
Opus
alongside the yacht, cuts the engine, balances himself on the port gunwale, springs at exactly the right moment onto the
Johnita II's
swim deck, and lashes the two boats together. When he's finished, the
Opus
looks like the yacht's sidecar. I crawl from little boat to big boat on hands and knees, voice recorder and digital camera hanging by lanyards from my neck.

The
Johnita II
was clearly intended to be a pleasure craft, not a floating bunkhouse. It has three decks, four cabins, two lounges furnished with armchairs and sofas, a mess the size of a breakfast nook, a wellappointed galley well-stocked with Pepsi, a neglected wet bar, a washer, a dryer, and, praise be, two heads, one of which I retreat to posthaste.

Several owners ago, the yacht allegedly belonged to Ed McMahon of
The Tonight Show
—an allegation that I have not been able to confirm, though the early-eighties decor (burnt-orange curtains, faux-wood paneling) lends some credence to the claim. “He and Johnny Carson had parties on this boat,” Doug Leiser, GoAK's crew manager, tells me when I emerge from the head. For the past two weeks, Leiser has been cohabiting the
Johnita II
with his and Pallister's sons, employed for the better part of the summer as GoAK's professional remediation contractors, earning $200 a day apiece—a not inconsiderable sum that Pallister, a bit defensively, insists is fair. “These are all rugged guys,” he told me, rugged and hardworking and far more efficient than volunteers; volunteers are good for “community outreach”—nonprofit-speak for “public relations”—but are unpredictable, not to mention expensive to insure. Furthermore, his paid crew would be out here in the wilderness for a month or more, longer than most volunteers can stand, effectively on the job 24/7, with no shore leave for R & R, at least not shore leave of the sort they'd like.

“The boys,” as everyone at Gore Point calls GoAK's five remediation contractors, are all approximately college age, give or take a year, so it's no surprise that after two weeks their close quarters have come to resemble a frat house. There are dirty dishes in the galley,
Playboys
on a couch
,
fragrant sports sandals piled among rubber boots beneath a coatrack heavy with wet-weather gear. There is even, we will later discover, a secret stash of beer that Pallister's sons have hidden from their teetotaling father.

I notice a tattered copy of
Tortilla Flats
beside a rumpled sleeping bag. It belongs to Keiler Pallister, the eldest and tallest of the boys. Of Steinbeck's novel Keiler will later remark, “They sure drink a lot of wine in that book!” From Steinbeck he'll move on to Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea,
of which Erik Pallister, the next eldest, will remark, “That the one about the marlin? The whole book's about that?”

Pallister's youngest son, nineteen-year-old Ryan, is the one I find most sympathetic, in part because he reminds me of my more likable students (he wants to know everything I have to tell him about the chemistry and history of plastic), and in part because Pallister is far harder on Ryan than he is on Keiler and Erik. When I mention my son Bruno's fear of sea bathing, Doug Leiser says, “You just got to make him do it.”

“And if he doesn't want to,” Ryan says sardonically, “pressure him.”

 

 

These days the
Johnita II
belongs mainly to John Cowdery, a Republican state senator in the Alaskan legislature. Cowdery, per Pallister, isn't much of a “boat guy.” During the winter of 2001, while the
Johnita II
was tied up at the docks in Whittier, so much snowmelt gushed from a leaky drainage hose into the hull that the yacht sank to its upper decks. “I guess that pickled it pretty good,” says Leiser.

Once a salvage team managed to float it to the surface, Cowdery had the yacht towed around the Kenai Peninsula to Anchorage. Pallister bought a 49 percent share in the wreck for a song and then spent the next five years making it shipshape. He put in new water tanks, rewired the electrical system, replaced the rotten carpeting, built that weird wooden treehouse thing above the exposed upper deck, and cleaned oily bilgewater from the furniture, gray streaks of which remain. He finished his restoration, most of it, last fall. This is the yacht's first summer in action.

Along a shelf under a window the boys have arrayed an exhibit of castaway curiosities scavenged from Gore Point's windward shore: a thimble-size likeness of R2-D2, a hollow plastic witch riding a hollow plastic broom, a weird turtle with a hole in it like a doughnut, a bottle labeled HANDS CLEARNSER [
sic
], and—lo and behold!—Floatees: three frogs, two beavers, one turtle, one duck. Although I've already seen the Orbisons' impressive collection, seeing these, out here in the wild, at the scene of their recent discovery, feels different, as though I'm getting closer and closer to one of the X's marked on my map. As expected, the frogs are still green, the one turtle still blue, whereas the formerly maraschino beaver has faded to a milky beige, and the duck—the duck has turned the yellowy white of banana flesh.

Although Leiser and Pallister are old friends, it's clear that in the field Pallister is boss. Like a general visiting his troops, he stomps about inspecting the yacht, assessing damages, exclaiming “Holy Christ!” in response to the mess the boys have made, barking commands (“Someone had better get up here and pin down these clothes before they blow overboard!”), all the while demanding intelligence from Leiser.

GoAK's crew has worked fast, faster than expected, Leiser tells us. We are almost too late. The Gore Point midden heap is almost gone. In the past two weeks, ten workers—Leiser, the boys, field manager Ted Raynor, and three volunteers from Homer—have already filled around 1,200 garbage bags weighing, on average, fifty pounds each. In my notebook, I do the math. That's sixty thousand pounds of trash collected along a single half-mile beach. By comparison, consider this: volunteers participating in the Ocean Conservancy's 2006 International Coastal Cleanup picked up on average eight thousand pounds of trash per mile from the coast of New York State. “There's probably a day's work left out here, one good swath,” Leiser says.

Impressive as Leiser's numbers are, the success of GoAK's rescue mission remains in doubt. Pallister still doesn't know how in the hell he's going to get all that trash off that windward shore once his crew finishes bagging it. The original plan was to load the bags onto six-wheel all-terrain vehicles, drive them across the isthmus to the protected lagoon, and transfer the bags onto an amphibious barge. As during the cleanup of the
Valdez
oil spill, the barge would ferry the bags eighty nautical miles to the landfill in Homer. But archaeologists with the State Parks Department, worried that the ATVs could damage the Unegkurmiut house pits, recently told Pallister, no six-wheelers. So now how is he supposed to get those bags across the isthmus? Sweat equity? Zip lines? Helicopters?

Nor does Pallister know how he is going to cover his multiplying costs even if he works out the logistics. He still hasn't raised all the cash and in-kind donations that his $115,000 matching grant from NOAA requires, and he won't see a penny of federal money until he does. Last spring, Pallister campaigned hard to convince Alaska's state legislature to chip in. He sent letters accompanied by photographs of debris. This is state land, he reasoned, so it only makes sense that the state should help clean it up. When his appeals seemed to fall on deaf ears, he did what any citizen well educated in the ways of American politics would do: he hired a pair of lobbyists. The lobbyists began persuading pro-development representatives in Juneau that GoAK isn't “ just another environmental group”—that, in other words, the group poses no threat to anyone's profitable interests.

The lobbyists delivered, winning a $150,000 allocation for GoAK by a narrow margin. But at the last minute, Alaska's new Republican governor—the once obscure, now infamous Sarah Palin—vetoed the allocation. When he first put out his call for volunteers on the local evening news, Pallister described the “super camp” that GoAK intended to build out here. There'd be an electrified bear fence, he said. There'd be tents. There'd be food. More than a hundred Alaskans answered his call. But without that state allocation, he had to slash his budget. The super camp was downsized to an unfortified, bring-your-own-food-and-tent, dumpyour-own-shit volunteer ghetto. Instead of a hundred volunteers, he ended up with five, each of whom had enlisted for a single ten-day tour. Scrambling to come up with the matching funds his NOAA grant required, Pallister turned to corporate donors, notorious polluters among them: Princess Cruises, the Alyeska Pipeline, and British Petroleum, whose sunflower logo decorates most of GoAK's garbage bags.

Still falling more than $60,000 short of his estimated costs, with the end of the cleanup drawing near, he began entertaining the unthinkable: hitting up Exxon, an act regarded in Alaska's environmental community as tantamount to signing a contract—in North Slope crude and otter blood—with Satan. What choice did he have? A chartered helicopter would run him approximately $2,000 an hour, the amphibious barge $4,000 a day, and already he was bouncing checks.

 

 

After we've unloaded the
Opus
, Ted Raynor and the boys pull on their knee-high rubber boots and ferry us ashore, Raynor's brindled pit bull Bryn perched like a figurehead at his rubber skiff's prow. Pallister's sons are everything I preconceived their father to be. They seem to have stepped from the pages of an outdoor adventure magazine. They carry around carabiners, which they refer to as “beaners.” They wear striped knit caps and lots of polar fleece but no life jackets. During their time at Gore Point, they've grown beards. They enjoy punching each other in the arm. Earlier today, to access a beach just north of here, they freeclimbed a fifteen-foot cliff. And, I now discover, they can launch and land a Zodiac with acrobatic grace. As we approach the breaking surf, Erik, in a pair of mirrored sunglasses, cuts the outboard. As if on cue, Keiler and Ryan leap out, splashing up onto the pebble beach, hauling the Zodiac with me in it behind them.

In the long midsummer twilight, glacial pebbles clattering beneath their boots, their shadows tall as spruce trees, the boys toss around the new Nerf football that I and Pallister have brought for them, doing their best to keep it from Bryn, who popped their last football with a single chomp. Eyes on the ball, Raynor's pit bull runs barking from boy to boy to boy. “That damn dog just bit my ass!” one of them shouts.

Meanwhile, two volunteers, Bree Murphy, a researcher from the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies, and Michael Armstrong, a reporter for
Homer News
, are playing bocce ball with plastic fishing floats on a sandy course they've groomed clean of pebbles. Looming over the scene is a shipwreck. Rusted, sundered, half-sunken into the pebbles, it is in an advanced state of decay, but its name—
Ranger
—can still be read, written in white block letters on the remnants of its black bow.

Pallister and I are anxious to have a look at the cleanup site before dinner. Ted Raynor leads the way, Bryn racing on ahead, sniffing the ground for marmots and bears. Raynor is a forty-something bachelor, with close-cropped hair turning from orange to gray, but like me he still has boyish cheeks, cheeks so ruddy with sunburn and burst capillaries, he seems to be blushing even when he isn't. As we walk, he rants. He rants against “the idiot” who wrecked the
Ranger
and didn't bother to clean it up. He rants about the archaeologists and their precious “culturally modified trees”—the ones modified by Unegkurmiut. “If I take my chain saw and cut down a tree tomorrow, four thousand years from now they're going to be worshipping me because I culturally modified a tree,” he rants. “I, Ted Raynor, modified it.”

In response to this remark I think and feel complicated thoughts and feelings. When you embed as a journalist, no matter which subcultural group you embed in, it's hard to resist the tug of sympathy, which is perhaps why organizations from the U.S. armed forces to the Gulf of Alaska Keeper invite strangers like me into their midst. Strong as gravity, the tug of sympathy can pull you out of your detached point of view into the foggy atmosphere of relativism. It's kind of like the Stockholm syndrome, or what happens in
Heart of Darkness
to Mr. Kurtz. Before you know it, you're rooting for your sources even if, under other circumstances, under the influence of different sources, you might root against them.

I want GoAK to succeed. I also sympathize with the archaeologists. The Unegkurmiut didn't merely alter trees when they were hungry. These spruce forests were for them what whale oil was in Melville's time and what fossil fuels are in ours—the resource on which the entire economy, the entire material culture, depended. Spruce bark served as siding for Unegkurmiut houses and steam baths. With the pitch they patched the skin hulls of their kayaks and bidarkas, waterproofed their wooden bowls, started their fires. They chewed spruce pitch chewing gum, and applied spruce pitch bandages to their wounds. A culturally modified tree is to an Alaskan archaeologist what an oil field or strip mine or, for that matter, a collector beach would be to Raynor's hypothetical archaeologist of the future.