Vultures' Picnic, page 25
What about those stripes, Larry? Some kind of Native ritual scarification? “Yeah,” Larry said. “The sacred Vietnam Ritual.” He told me he got the stripes riding a helicopter when a burst of small-arms fire came close enough to sear his skin.
Larry had called it quits on the America of union-busting Presidents and their habit of stuffing the powerless into helicopters to be shot at. He had escaped to return to the Pleistocene life, isolated from the alien madness. Then, in 1989, Exxon crashed America right into his house: camera crews, oil company executives, and Vice President Dan Quayle standing on a plank of wood so his tasseled loafers wouldn’t get smeared. Not to mention an overzealous gumshoe from New York.
The leading edge of the oil moved south and it had to go somewhere. Since BP had failed to provide that rubber containment boom, something had to capture and hold the fast-swimming oil. That would be Chenega. Exxon designated Chenega’s fisheries, clam beds and rookeries as “sacrifice” zones. Of course, it wasn’t Exxon that would make the sacrifice.
The seal rookery was a death zone now. There was still a lot of salmon, in your choice of leaded or unleaded. Clams were declared deadly poisonous by the State. Chenega lived on food drops now, flown in by Exxon. Refugees in their own homes.
Father Nicholas’s church, once the tallest structure on the island, was soon topped by a mountain of cans and crates and other garbage. Larry hadn’t thought of building a dump on the island because, before the spill, he never had to take plastic wrap off his lunch.
Until March 24, 1989, you could say that Larry, in his office of forest and ocean, was God’s employee. Now, once again, Larry was fired. That left him the only job oil offered. He was back in uniform: spending his workdays zipped into a head-to-toe yellow-orange Hazmat suit, wiping Exxon’s crud off the rocks on his beaches. He was back on the clock.
Eight years after the spill, Gail and Larry invited me again to stay with them in their cabin. In the morning, I boated out with him and other islanders, to watch them pressure-blast the rancid oil still left at Sleepy Bay. To look at their spattered outfits after an hour, you’d think they’d hit a gusher.
During the investigation, I hung around Father Nicholas’s kid brother, Paul, by then seventy-something. He was Uncle Paul to everyone. His conversations had more silence than words, thinking about what he had heard, then thinking through what he would say. For a New Yorker, this was physically painful.
Paul looked out his window at the water. What are you thinking about, Uncle Paul? “I think about their bones.”
At the Old Chenega, Naked Island, junk captured by the tsunami, pots and pans and toys, would wash up on the beach. And so would the bones. Maybe they were his parents. Naked Island was also “sacrificed” and now the bones were soaked in crude oil. Chenegans complained and Exxon’s chief kindly agreed to order clean-up crews to stop picking up bone “souvenirs.”
Then the Exxon circus came to town. With camera crews at Exxon’s call, the company CEO, Lee Raymond, showed up at Chenega to show his concern for the victims of that drunk-driving reprobate Hazelwood.
Uncle Paul told me, “I feel hungry all the time. They bring me your store food. I eat it. But I still feel hungry.” He also told that to Mr. Exxon who, abracadabra, ordered a crate-load of seal meat for Chenega. It came in cans marked NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION. Zoo food.
Years later, when I met up with Chenega Corporation’s president in Anchorage, I asked him if, like other Natives, he received “subsistence” food only Natives may legally capture, such as seal meat.
Chuck gave me a look. “Seal meat? You ever smell that shit? Give me a Big Mac anytime.”
Well, de gustabis non est disputandum.
NANWALEK
“They flew in frozen pizza, satellite dishes, Hondas. Guys who were on sobriety drinking all night, beating up their wives. I mean, all that money. Man, people just went berserk.”
Sally Ash Kvasnikoff, Chief Vince’s sister, told me, “This place went wild. They gave us rags and buckets, at sixteen-something an hour to wipe off rocks, to babysit our own children.”
The village of three dozen Native families at the end of the Kenai Fjord Glacier had survived on the sea and forest since the Russians marooned them there a century earlier. Now they survived on the Exxon payroll.
But it took two weeks before the party started. Nanwalek heard reports of the leading edge of the oil slick approaching and Exxon didn’t do squat, despite the village’s pleading. Sally’s uncle Mack Kvasnikoff was chaining logs across the salmon-spawning rivers. His boots filled with gravel and tore away the skin.
It was Nanwalek’s turn for a visit from the Exxon circus with the cash and the promises. Exxon even agreed to fly Mack to a hospital in Anchorage—but not until he signed a waiver promising he wouldn’t sue Exxon. (BP took good notes about that waiver game, which BP would use in the Gulf of Mexico.) Mack’s foot was amputated.
Then, after a couple of months, the industry’s clean-up circus folded its tent. They left Nanwalek with dead salmon, a bankrupt cannery, and their food, Badarki snails and razor clams, designated off-limits for the next decade. Chief Kvasnikoff lost his fishing boat; five of the island’s eight commercial boats were repossessed.
I didn’t get there until 1991, two years after the spill. Some of the guys were sitting inside, watching an endlessly repeating Elvis in Blue Hawaii.
The Exxon clean-up left some of the villagers with a drug habit—and ten cases of HIV/AIDS, which took one child. For Sally, that was it. “I felt like my skin was peeling off. After the oil, I thought, This is it. We’re over, Sugestun, we’re gone unless something happens.”
Something did happen. Sugestun, “Real People,” is their tribe’s traditional name. And in that Sugestun language—which only the women knew and passed on—Sally and the other women led an uprising against her brother, Chief Vince, and voted him out.
That’s when the Cultural Revolution began: No alcohol, no junk food (Vince’s little commissary was closed), and even the halibut in the smoke houses would be dried by electric fans, not smoke and molasses. (For me, that was a step too far.) When Uncle Mack flew home from a doctor visit, as soon as the four-seater landed on the beach, they threw his behind in jail for bringing in a six-pack. Not everyone supported the Revolution. Sally’s Sugestun name, Aqniaqnaq, means “Leading Star,” but not everyone thought she should lead. (The women tagged me with a Sugestun name meaning Calendar Boy; they’d say it and giggle.) Anyway, guns were oiled and loaded, and Leading Star found it prudent to stay away from the Christmas Masking Ceremony. I stayed close to neutral territory, playing the drum set in the dance hall.
Nanwalek rocked. Their band was famous all over the Sound. Their big hit was “World Upside Down.” It began, Chief Vince said, when a guitar washed up on the beach, and by morning, he was playing “You Ain’t Nuthin’ But a Hound Dog.” (Chenegan Don Kompkoff verified that you could learn any instrument in a day by turning your clothes inside out, hinting that a dark Raven-like spirit would help.)
Back in Chenega, Uncle Paul’s silences grew longer as he watched the villagers go off the rails. I went along with him and his wife, Minnie, up a slope to the edge of a snow line, where we picked gallons of blueberries. He looked over at the little village a hundred miles from nowhere and said, “I think I have to find someplace else to live. It’s just too crowded.”
He was silent again. Then he added, “My home is now a strange place.”
TATITLEK VILLAGE, BLIGH ISLAND
Gary Kompkoff, Chief and President of Tatitlek’s village council, said he’d meet me at the airfield, the island’s softball diamond. The Natives had cleared some rocks so I could land. Gary told me to look for his red truck. That was easy: It was the only vehicle on the entire island.
This was just after his warning to me about the village going crazy with the oil and oil money, and years before his daughter’s murder.
Gary didn’t say hello. He didn’t say anything. That was OK: The Chugach tend not to speak unless they have to. Even then, they may not speak. Gary directed me with a nod into the truck cab and threw my bags on the pickup’s back bed, next to a huge compressor motor.
He drove across the infield down to the end of the village’s one road, about two hundred yards, killed the engine, and nodded for me to get out. The entire journey took ninety seconds. He parked next to the village cemetery in front of a trailer, where I could cook and sleep while I worked in the village. I got out of the cab into icy quiet, only the sound of his front tire hissing. I thanked Gary for the ride and added, “I think you got yourself a flat.”
Gary didn’t say anything and he didn’t look at the tire. Instead, he jumped onto the back of the truck, fired up the compressor, uncoiled a ratty air hose, jumped down, and filled up the tire. The compressor howled and quaked and it looked like it might shake right off the truck and crush him flat.
I stared at Gary and he stared at me. Then he cut the compressor and spoke. “You don’t want to talk to Bear.”
I tried to contain my inner New York. I grinned and chewed on my tongue. Then I said, “Gary, I have just traveled seven thousand miles over three days to come to this very remote island. I have to speak to an Elder. I intend to speak to Mr. Gregorieff and I would appreciate you telling me where I can find him.”
Gary said nothing. He nodded toward an old mobile home between some rusted-out boats and broken engines near an unused dock. It looked abandoned.
He waited, then added, “So, are you staying?”
I said nothing. He threw down the bags, then hauled them into the “guest” trailer and drove the truck back across the ball field. I headed off through the weeds, holding a cantaloupe.
Ed Bear Gregorieff did not have a phone. He had no idea I was coming, but at the door, he greeted me like he had been waiting for my arrival. “Cha-mai!” Aluutiq for “welcome.”
I maneuvered through the dark trailer home, with its damp, old carpeting and aluminum walls patched with duct tape. I walked through a tight maze of makeshift shelves jammed with large, dusty no-label cans, motor parts, dishes, and trophies. He’d placed the stuffed shelves to cover over the windows that faced his neighbors’ stilt bungalows up the slope.
I put the cantaloupe on Bear’s formica table. He saw me scan the cluttered shelves and old wedding photos in cheap metal frames. There were several of a bride.
“She’s passed,” he said. He popped open a couple of nonalcoholic beers.
Bear was in his seventies. It looked as if he’d let his white beard go unshaven for a week and that he’d been wearing his Joe Cool T-shirt just as long.
He didn’t know who I was or why I had come, but he could guess. A white man would only come to talk about the Exxon tanker and its oil. I opened a notebook.
“Bear, I need to know what happened when the oil hit. You know, how things changed.”
“I warned them,” he said. “I told them, ‘We’re fishermen. We’re no oilmen.’ ”
He had drifted back to the sale of Valdez. I tried to steer him back to the spill. “Ed, I need to know what happened that night.”
He said, “This is what happened:“There was a man once. A Native man. A fisherman, you know, a ‘net seiner.’ A subsistence man. He loved this woman. Then the woman’s husband died. So then he married her. Then this Native man, he went away to the war. And when the war ended, he came back to the village and back to his home. And his son stayed up in his room. And he didn’t see his son all day, the day he came back from the war. And then it got dark and his wife made supper. And his son came out of his room and his son was all dolled up. And his son didn’t say anything; he just headed for the door. And the Native man said, ‘Where are you going? I just got home and your mother’s fixed us supper.’
“And this man’s son looked right at him and said, ‘Dad, while you were out at the war, I got a Alyeska job and I made twice as much money as you made in your entire life.’
“And he went right out the door.”
Bear looked through the filthy window at the rusted boats. He looked at the warning light turning around on the tower over the reef.
“Where’s your son now?”
“Seattle,” he said. “Pipeline engineer.”
I left the cantaloupe on the kitchen table, closed the door softly, walked up through the weeds to the guest trailer, removed my bags, still packed, and called in a seaplane on the shortwave.
Not every native finds inner peace in a life of gill netting or skinning sea lions. Exxon’s attorneys were having a good old time harpooning the idea of a “Native way of life.” To them, the claim was a joke. The company deposed Chenega’s Corporation President, Chuck Totemoff, about the last time he hunted seal. Evanoff said Chuck answered, “Oh, I don’t know . . . years ago.” Then he added, without prompting, “You know, that water IS REALLY COLD.”
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
There are many ways for a corporation to say Go fuck yourself.
Here’s one:
The Chugach of Prince William Sound pooled their money, borrowed some, and with good old American can-do spirit, set up a cannery for the salmon they caught.
The Exxon Valdez crack-up was not the best advertising for their canned salmon. Diners of the Lower 48 lost their appetite for “crude in a can.” Plus, there was the cost of the lawsuit—the confabs with lawyers, the experts (and the investigator from New York). Exxon folded its arms and watched the Chugach Corporation go belly-up with the salmon.
The Sound had been the world’s herring supplier; no one had more of it. A year after the spill—shaZAMM—the herring disappeared. From millions to zero.
BP looked down on the tragedy they caused and saw a cheap exit. With the Native-owned businesses up and down the coast going under, BP offered them a lifeline: the insurance fund.
BP and Exxon had a cute game going. Exxon would hold out, and the victims of the spill, looking into the chasm of bankruptcy would have no choice but to settle for peanuts from the BP consortium. BP offered the Natives, fishermen, oiled towns, and all the injured the amount already sitting in an industry insurance fund, $125 million. Even Exxon admitted that the damage would be in the billions.
My Native clients had a choice: Take it or die. It was the one-dollar deal all over again, but with a few zeros added on. A few added zeros were not enough to prevent the Chugach Alaska Corporation from sinking into bankruptcy court. (There went that investigator’s bill.)
In other words, BP didn’t pay a penny out of its own pocket.
Once BP was off the hook for free, the company’s Alaska Chief, Bob Malone, was sent to run BP operations in the Gulf of Mexico
Here was Lesson #1 for BP to take to the Gulf: If your lost oil destroys an economy, back up the truck and finish the job.
The devastation so weakened the company’s victims, they had to take anything.
And there was Lesson #2:It’s a heck of a lot cheaper to pay off the victims than to prevent oil spills.
A by-the-book oil spill response operation requires over a billion dollars in equipment for Alaska, way more in the Gulf with ten times the traffic and drilling.
We can sum up Lessons #1 and #2 as DP-DP: Don’t Prevent, Don’t Pay. BP not only got away with it, they took this lesson to the Gulf.
There’s yet another way for corporations to say Screw you. This is the one Exxon used on Uncle Paul.
All Uncle Paul wanted was a commercial fishing boat sturdy enough to carry him and his son beyond the oiled death zone. They were not very excited about their career opportunities in rock wiping. He asked me if I thought Chenega and the other Native villages could get enough funding for boats and licenses to get back into the business of being Native.
I knew not all the lawyers liked that idea (what’s 20 percent of a herring?). When he asked me to go straight to the Exxon chiefs, I said that we’d get in trouble.
Uncle Paul said, “We’re already in trouble.” So I went to San Diego to confront The Man With The Checkbook.
Chuck, as Chenega’s Corporation President, joined me on the four-seat float plane, along with Larry’s wife, Gail. She was just brilliant with the technicalities of the case, and more important, it was her life on the line.
We were on a mission to San Diego, where we could track down Otto Harrison, the General Manager of Exxon USA, hosting a symposium on oil spills. On the last leg out of Seattle, Chuck’s seat was empty. We pretended not to notice and flew on.
After three days’ wait, Harrison agreed to meet, just in time for Chuck to show up. He called from the airport, the travel budget gone and therefore no cash for a cab. We retrieved him and headed for a cheap motel next to the San Diego Freeway, where Exxon’s man had rented a conference room for our meeting.
Otto Harrison is a dead ringer for General Norman Schwartzkopf, who led U.S. troops in Gulf War I: the bearish frame, even the military buzz-cut hairdo above bulldog jowls. Harrison placed himself dead center between fifteen empty chairs on his side of the table, framed by heavy green curtains that blocked out the California sun. He faced us alone, without the usual scrimmage line of lawyers, PR operatives, and whispering consultants that other corporate chiefs typically employed as human shields in negotiations.
Otto smiled.
I handed Harrison one sheet of paper, the carefully honed list of repairs and economic aid needed to keep the five stricken villages alive. Enough for a boat for Paul and the other uncles in the Sound. Otto smiled again. He turned the paper over, facedown on the conference table, without looking at it. He smiled once more. “So, Gail, you have something to say?”
