Alaska

Trying a little tenderness.

Drawing by Chip Wass for a piece I wrote in the Village Voice about Northern Exposure (1990-95)

The residents of of Cicely, Alaska, the magical setting of Northern Exposure (1990-95), have a tendency to cooperate. Richard and I have been traveling there at night, an episode or two at a sitting, and a peace falls over us. These days, you have to go where you have to go. Is some of the show dated? Yes. The focus is on the male characters, but one of the innovations here is to wonder about the many things it means to be a man and even if it means anything. It appears not to mean anything you could define. Ask Chris (John Corbett), the town philosopher and 24-hour radio DJ/voiceover. He will tell you what I am telling you.

In Cicely, the residents cooperate because other people are all they have in their town of 850. Ed is served scrambled eggs that taste like shrimp and instead of sending them back, he asks for cocktail sauce. During the ice melt, Holling is dying to pick a fight—“I need to cause some pain. I need to hurt somebody.” Responds a customer at his café, “I’d like to oblige you but I have a $500 deductible on my health insurance.”

Gossip is culture. When Elaine, Joel’s fiancé back in Manhattan, dumps him, Marilyn reads the letter and soon everyone consoles Joel about his smashed plans. When Chris loses his voice and Maggie agrees to sleep with him so he can recover it, dozens gather outside her house for the event. Boundaries aren’t visible. Ed (Darren E. Burrows) doesn’t knock before entering a door. You could see the whole show as a movie filmed by Ed, a kid, besotted by the movies, who is half Alaska Native and half white and doesn’t know who his parents are.

Darren E. Burrows as Ed Chigliak on Northern Exposure.

No one here lives in a nuclear family, but the sentimentality of communal togetherness is repeatedly pierced. The longed-for family of one’s choosing is fleeting—people are fickle, and they die. Has there been a show more attuned to death? Soapy decides to end his life in his cabin after life alone on a mountain becomes unmanageable. Maurice’s brother dies. An unknown man quietly shuffles off his mortal coil in Joel’s office, waiting to see the doctor, and the town lends him an emotional funeral, sending him off on the lighted pyre. Maggie’s fifth lover Rick pegs it on a collision course with a falling satellite, and coffin has to accommodate the fusion of human and steam-punk machine parts.

Life is dangerous and unpredictable, Chris tells Ed as they contemplate the vast Pacific Northwest sky. In alphabet city, where Joel used to live, risk glints up in a crack vial on the sidewalk. In Cicely, it comes in a swirl of weather that in the flick of an eyelash can hurl a bush plane into a glacier. Chris says at Rick’s funeral, “It’s solitude in death that’s our common bond in life.”

The Big Spill

Covering the the crash of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker on March 24, 1989.

Transporting a seal pup that had been oiled from Anchorage to Homer in a bush plane in June 1989. The pup was named Phillip by the volunteers who tended him. I was one of them.

On March 24, 1989, the largest oil spill in the history of North America occurred when the Exxon Valdez discharged 11 million gallons of North Slope crude into Prince William Sound, one of the richest wildlife habitats in the world. The faces of otters covered with oil flashed on TV. I called environmental groups to volunteer to help them and was discouraged because the areas hit weren’t equipped with accommodations. A month later, the magazine New York Woman commissioned me to go there and write about my experience. I spent a month traveling the 1000 mile length of the spill in a rental car, staying with people who hooked me up with other people in the way life can go in a disaster.

The piece I wrote is long. Perhaps in other posts, I will share more of it. Let me know your thoughts. The initial kill I reported in 1989 came to half a million seabirds and 5,000 otters—about half the number in Prince William Sound. The number of dead wolves, moose, deer, and bear, which feed on oiled kelp, was difficult to gauge because these animals mainly died in the woods and couldn’t be counted. Half the bald-eagle population, equalling 2,000 birds, quickly died. Native Alaskan villagers, who for centuries had subsisted off the seafood and wildlife they gathered and hunted, were cut off from the food supply.

Here are two narratives from my travels.

Seward

The Seward Bird center is situated at a boat landing outside of town. It's Director, Jay Holcomb—38, balding, a turquoise stud in one ear—is an associate director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, a nonprofit organization located in Berkeley, California. Murres, puffins, auklets, kittiwakes, scoters and a dozen more species of wild birds rest in covered pens all around the barnlike space. Healthier animals swim outdoors in net-covered pools. The average stay of a bird is 72 hours. Then it’s released. There is a risk of re-oiling, but the stress of long captivity is more damaging to them. Fifty-nine birds arrive in boxes, their feathers coated with sticky paraffin. The team goes to work: weighing, tube feeding, and setting the birds in pens.

Ron Van Vlack teaches me to hold birds while they are washed. Van Vlack, 25, an electrician from Vancouver, is a long time volunteer. He says that the new scar slicing his right nostril is the work of a cormorant he was handling, adding that the beaks of puffins—beautiful orange, black, and yellow birds—are installed with with six penetrating fish hooks.

I slip on thick rubber gloves that extend to my shoulders and in a tub of warm water mixed with dishwashing liquid hold my first bird. It’s a murre, a diving bird that flies underwater like a penguin. The murre gets one of my fingers in its beak, and even through the glove I feel its strength. With one hand, I cover its eyes and hold its mouth shut. With the other hand, I extend a wing and Van Vlack pushes water toward it with swift pulsing motions. Next, I hold both wings out while he uses a toothbrush and a water pic to clean the bird’s head. Birds use their faces to preen, so a lot of oil accumulates there. The murre squawks and whines, saying, “I’m done. I’m done.” It thrusts its body against my hands, expressing a will to live that is thrilling to feel.

Homer

Before the spill, Nancy Hillstrand, 36, worked in a fish hatchery. Now, she’s directing the Homer Otter Facility. We form a quick friendship. Otters that are well enough to leave Seward are flown to Jackalof Bay—a 40 minute boat ride from Homer—and placed in Hillstrand’s care. In Valdez, working as a volunteer, she watched Exxon money spark ego-tripping and swaggering—“the Valdez disease,” she calls it. “That bullshit they give you about not naming the animals and not making a eye contact with them infuriates me.” During the worst of the crisis, she played tapes of ocean sounds for the animals she was tending.

Hillstrand’s face is ruddy from wind and sun. She looks girlish. We have lunch with a member of her staff, Jeanne Tolle, 30, who, as soon as she heard about the spill, hitchhiked to Alaska from her pig farm in Orlando, Florida. “Nancy won't eat anything that has eyes,” says Tolle as Hillstrand studies the menu, settling on a sandwich of cheese and sprouts. Hillstrand asks if I believe in God, and I say no. "You're an atheist,” she says as if discovering a new species. “I'll be damned, well, what made all this?” She gestures toward the mountains. I say, “Physics and luck.”

She hands out parkas and sweaters for the crossing to the floating pens. We get in her skiff, and she starts the motor, steering through choppy water. “Can you swim?” she says, smiling, as a wave splashes our faces. Green islands jut from pristine bays, each more tranquil and luxuriant than the one before it. We arrive at an A-frame house that serves as a base camp. Inside are crowds of people and piles of backpacks. A cook is chopping vegetables. On the wall is a sign-up sheet for contributions to save the rain forest in Belize.

We load into a smaller boat and quietly make our approach to the pens, where sixty-nine otters cavort. “Hello babies, how ya doin’,” says Hillstrand. Most of the staff here spent time in Valdez at the start of the spill—weeks where they heard animals screaming and dying—and they are especially pleased to be with animals that are well. The workers say they want to be otters. I mean, we’re tossing them pretty great sushi—clams, crab, sea urchin, shrimp and squid.

I feed a group of females, and one catches a crab on the fly, her arms outstretched. Another otter stockpiles food on her belly like a glutton at a buffet. Me, for example. There’s a commotion. A rogue otter from the cove attacks some of the penned-in animals and has to be chased away.

Everyone here is tired and weather beaten. Staff members are paid either $15 or $20 an hour and work twelve-hour shifts, ten days on and three days off. They prepare food for the animals, wash equipment, and check for changes in their behavior. Especially noting shivering and listing—symptoms of lung disease that is one of the the long-term effects of oil poisoning.

This place, born from the belly of a disaster, is a place people don’t want to leave. The workers have formed a fantasy they can stay here, even though they know they can’t. All day, Hillstrand has been sad and alarmed because Exxon—who is paying and using the animal rescue as a PR gambit—has told her she must cut down on staff. Should she begin a rotation system? Discharge workers who pitch in less than others? She doesn’t want to be turned into a boss.

We leave at midnight, when the sun is still lighting the sky with a voluptuous glow. We’re alone on the bay. The boat bounces like a surfboard, and mountains soar around us. Nancy asks about my life in New York, and suddenly I miss it because I haven’t until this moment. I, too, have gone the way of the spill like almost everyone I’ve met, living in the NOW it demands. She wants to know about being a writer. I tell her I sit alone thinking for hours and then hit the streets for a walk. She says it sounds like her concentration at the fish hatchery, which she interrupts by tracking animals in the woods.

Just then we come upon an enormous flock of seagulls. The light, which is golden, shines on their bellies. The wind is high. The birds don’t flap their wings. They just hang there suspended. Configurations of shadow and light go on and on, and because we don’t scare the birds, they let us accompany them.

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Gillian

Gillian Anderson from her X Files days.

Here is something to cheer you up, if you are feeling despondent for reasons you can and cannot put your finger on. Here is something I read in a typically brilliant and indecipherable piece by Patricia Lockwood in the current London Review of Books (12/5/2024). I mean you can't stop reading her although what is she ever talking about with her puff ball words that never land.

The apparent subject of this piece is watching The X Files (1993-2002) for the first time. She's all over Gillian Anderson and the time Anderson left the show because she was pregnant and the writers didn't want that in the story. So she underwent an alien abduction. Not in real life, although maybe.

Never mind any of this because I couldn't understand what Lockwood was saying, although it was entrancing. Suddenly, I came to a quote from A Passage to India, and it instantly changed my life for the better. It was like a very soothing alien abduction. Here is the quote: “People are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.”

This changed my life because I don't know anyone with whom I could honestly say there hasn’t been a misunderstanding. And if there was a misunderstanding, there is always the chance on some planet you could sit at a milk bar and laugh about it. I think it's true for everyone, but I can't speak for you.

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