When I heard that Perry Island’s shoreline had been smothered in Exxon’s crude oil, it was as if a family member had passed away. That was 20 years ago. Since 1985, nearly half my life, I have been teaching kayaking in the Sound, observing its natural history, admiring its beauty and studying its ecology.
I find solace in the routine of returning to its landscape and abundant natural life. The familiar smells of the spruce-lined shores, the ubiquitous sea otters and seeing “Bent Fin,” the social male of the resident AB pod of orcas, cemented my love of the place.
Kayaking there is like revisiting a dear friend and catching up on what has changed, what has stayed the same. In March of 1989, the Exxon Valdez spilled around 11 million gallons of oil into the Sound and polluted a little over a thousand miles of shoreline. I wondered if the Sound could ever recover. http://www.eoearth.org/article/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill
The hardest news of all to hear was that Day Care Cove had been hit. I had been there many times and loved its granite shores and the abundance of sea otters, harbor seals and pups that gave the Cove its name. All of us who knew the Sound wanted to do something, anything.
Kelly Weaverling, one of the original kayak guides in the Sound, organized a program on Perry to watch the cleanup conducted by Exxon’s contractors. It seemed like a good idea, so that May my friend Dori and I paddled the 45 miles from Whittier to help Kelly. When we arrived at Day Care, we found the Cove’s once emerald water and shore covered in a black layer of oily goo. It created a stench that smelled like the exhaust coming from an old truck burning motor oil.
The fumes overpowered all of our senses, and gave us instant headaches. Death, even if made evident only by the absence of life, was omnipresent. The once plentiful sea otters and harbor seals, the pigeon guillemots and murrelets were gone. Above the tide line, Perry Island was seemingly the same beautiful place we had known for years: the soaring peaks, the beautiful old growth forest and the plunging waterfalls. But its white granite shores were now black. Like an empty, burned-out house, it was no longer a home.
We landed on a small beach, avoiding the oil as best we could. Like Klister ski wax, it stuck to our boots, spread to our pants and into our hair. The activity of the cleanup was everywhere. The cleanup crews created trails and camps, and left trash strewn across the landscape. We spent a restless night camping next to the Cove, and in the morning we were plagued with headaches and nausea.
Sickened by the sight and smells, the next day we fled from Perry in spite of a late spring storm moving in over the water. Typical of storms in the Sound, it started slowly, with winds shifting from the south to southeast. After leaving the Cove’s protection, we paddled around the south end of Perry and across Perry Passage on the way back to Whittier.
Normally I do not make this four-mile crossing when a southeasterly is blowing—the 20-plus-mile fetch can build waves to 10 feet or more. However, the storm was a mild one and escaping the toxins on Perry seemed more important than the known risks of kayaking through familiar yet stormy waters. We made the crossing safely, and as we paddled back to Whittier I wondered if the Sound would heal.
Despite my heartrending experience in May, I was drawn back to the Sound as if to an old friend in need. That summer I returned to Perry Island, teaching kayaking to a group from the National Outdoor Leadership School. We hiked across the island to see Day Care Cove. Proving that beauty is relative, my students thought the cove was amazing. One student commented, “Beats the Chicago boat harbor!”
I was impressed that the oil was apparently all but gone from the beach after multiple cleanings. Yet oily sheens on the water, the kind you’d see if someone had spilled several gallons of gasoline, were evidence that some of the millions of gallons of oil that covered the Sound just a few months before was still present. Day Care Cove had regained its beauty, but to me, without its wildlife, it was just an empty shell.
I returned almost every year for the next 10 years. Each trip had a familiar routine: camping at Meares Point, looking for the return of intertidal life and sea lions, and anxiously paddling into Day Care wondering if the otters had returned. Initially, the shore and sea were bare and devoid of life. After the first year, barnacles began to appear as small white specks looking like dandruff on the grey-colored slate rocks.
Rockweed—a brown algae—covered the Sound’s intertidal zones. A couple of years after the spill, seastars and sea urchins appeared. Year after year, the shore slowly came back to life. Eventually sea lions returned and the occasional otter and harbor seal popped up in the Cove. Even the damage to the land done by the cleanup crews—the trash, trails and camps—was gradually being swallowed up by the Sound’s temperate rainforest.
The Sound appeared to be healing, the winter storms washing the beaches clean one wave at a time. In fact, despite the tremendous human effort to clean the Sound, most scientists concluded that the Sound’s winter storms did just as good a job ridding the beaches of oil as did the cleanup crews. But for every hopeful sign I saw, I also knew that oil still lurked beneath the surface. I could easily find it by digging a foot or two into most oiled beaches. Many of the damaged species, like marbled murrelets and the AB pod of orcas, were not recovering. The Sound had changed and I doubted if it could ever fully recover.
Exxon settled its civil and criminal legal cases with the state and federal governments by creating a trust fund to be used to study damaged resources and help the Sound heal. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent studying species like sea otters, harlequin ducks and orcas, and buying easements and land to preserve habitat critical for nesting birds and salmon. Ironically, some of the money from the criminal settlement was also used to build infrastructure to encourage tourism.
According to a study done by myself and Dr. Chris Monz of Utah State University, the improved access to the Sound has been detrimental to the area in more ways than the spill. A new road to Whittier brought more powerboats, kayakers and personal watercraft. Though the oil spill affected only a portion of the Sound’s beaches and waters, the increased tourism affects most all of the Sound.
For instance, after looking for five years this past summer we found our first invasive plant species, Pineapple Weed, on a Black-Legged Kittiwake rookery near Valdez. My and Dr. Monz’s study showed that the influx of people and boats also may be having an impact on species like harlequin ducks that are struggling to rebound to their pre-spill numbers. The recreational users of the Sound, though a welcome addition to local economies, also made it feel more crowded. It seemed like the final blow to the Sound’s wilderness. With each passing year, it was harder for me to imagine the Sound ever being close to its pre-spill natural wonder that attracted me to it in the first place.
A few years ago, almost 17 years post-spill, I had all but given up on the Sound. Some species like the murrelets, harlequin ducks and some pods of orcas still had not recovered, and I was disappointed by the influx of people and boats. I planned a sort of goodbye tour.
I’d spend a few years seeing all the Sound that I could and visit my favorite places. For two years I paddled every month of the year there, even in the middle of winter. I had spent most of the past summer studying recreational impacts. I thought that after revisiting 500 miles of shore and more than 200 campsites, including Day Care Cove, I would move on to wilder places.
Yet, surprisingly, while kayaking that summer it all came back. Everywhere I went I saw a place that seemed to have recovered to what I remembered prior to the spill. I saw few people but lots of otters, sea lions and waterfowl. Each day, paddling by waterfall-draped cliffs and seeing sea otters munching on shellfish, I began to feel my old connection to the Sound returning. The empty solitude of the fjords filled with the sounds of booming, calving glaciers. Paddling the east coast of Perry Island, I noticed that sea lions covered the rocks. In Day Care Cove I saw harbor seals, sea otters and harlequin ducks.
In the years since the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, I may have changed too. A couple of decades older now, I have slowed down. I’ve lost friends to avalanches, heart attacks and cancer. I’ve also seen babies born, grow up and graduate from college. I’ve come to find beauty in nature’s resilience.
I know that oil still lurks in the beaches of Prince William Sound, slowly releasing toxic hydrocarbons. I know that the improved access continues to lower the chances of my finding solitude and quiet there. Still, for everything I’ve seen that has discouraged me, the slow pace of the kayak has allowed me to see much of the beauty and vitality that attracted me to the Sound when I first kayaked there in 1985. At some point in this past summer I realized that I would be kayaking in Prince William Sound the rest of my life.
I could have given up on the Sound, but its recovery made me hopeful. I truly cared about the place and I could not give up on it any more than I could give up on a good friend. When a friend has a difficult time, we help them through it as best we can. We can do the same for the places we care about by Leave-No-Trace camping, volunteering to clean trash from beaches, or supporting causes that preserve wilderness and wildlife habitat. I’ve done that for the Sound. It deserved no less from me.