Poems by Nicholas Crane Moore

The Sound of Living Water

by Nicholas Crane Moore

From Canary Spring 2023

Nicholas lives on accumulated glacial sediment at the foot of the Chugach mountains near the mouth of Furrow Creek.

I was asleep during my first trip through Prince William Sound. At the end of it, as the M/V Kennicott docked briefly at Whittier, I set foot on mainland Alaska for the first time. I would not know the significance of that step for many years, but I immediately perceived that I was entering a world very unlike the one I had come from. Though the darkness of dawn obscured their true immensity, I sensed that I was surrounded by a wall of mountains. Just beyond the light of the ferry terminal, a row of large conifers lurked in the shadows. Rain seemed to come from all directions, discouraging further investigation, so I made my way to Anchorage.

During subsequent years, return trips to the Sound would reveal an alien landscape in which the divide between land and water, so reliable in most places, nearly disappears. Nothing embodies this blurred boundary as overtly as the Sound’s tidewater glaciers, but ambiguity permeates the entire region. Roughly 2,500 miles square, the Sound contains nearly 4,000 miles of coastline—a length derived from the myriad coves, peninsulas, and barrier islands that distinguish this convoluted inlet from the vast blankness of the Pacific. Seawater invades narrow fjords, carves glaciers, swallows beaches. Tides wear away at the land with the accumulated patience of millennia, slowly expanding the reach of the sea. Spruce and hemlock cling to cliff edges, their seaward roots exposed; floating driftwood timbers foretell the loosening of their grip. Even where solid earth is available, water is omnipresent. Creeks drain the forested slopes of their share of 150 inches of annual rainfall, which pools in meadows and renders undergrowth so consistently wet that I’ve been drenched while hiking on a sunny day.

It is this proliferation of fresh and marine water that gives Prince William Sound its defining richness of aquatic and terrestrial life; and it is this water that made it vulnerable. On a spring evening more than 30 years ago, the nightmare, long-feared, finally came to pass: The Exxon Valdez, carrying 53 million gallons of North Slope crude, ran aground on Bligh Reef, spilling one fifth of its cargo. Conveyed by the current, oil drifted into the furthest corners of the Sound. The devastation was beyond measure; that oil slicks were observed nearly 500 miles from Bligh Reef gives some hint at its scope.

After the spill, observers quickly assigned blame to the responsible parties. National media tended to dwell on the most compelling character—the alcoholic captain, Joseph Hazelwood, who had bizarrely left command to a subordinate in a critical moment—and in so doing provided the public with the most simplistic, anomalous explanation of what had gone wrong. For Exxon, the important question was not blame but liability. In the legal proceedings that followed, studies assigning a price to a dead sea otter ($11,500) or puffin ($308) rendered plain our society’s inability to assess the value of life.

A basic assumption underpinning the legal wrangling was that tragedy could quite easily have been averted, so long as the ship’s crew had simply managed—as they had on every previous occasion—to avoid Bligh Reef. “The cause,” wrote the trial judge, “was pure and simple human frailty.” But framing the accident as solely the product of navigational negligence ignores the larger, more complete picture, and minimizes the number of humans whose various frailties were implicated. Any sailor can make a wrong turn, but it takes a collective set of value judgments to send bulging oil tankers through the aquatic paradise of Prince William Sound. The judge acknowledged the more complex reality when he wrote that “Exxon officials well knew that oil and fisheries could not mix with one another” and “that carrying huge volumes of crude oil through Prince William Sound was a dangerous business.” But Exxon officials were not the only people who knew this. On some level, we all did.

Even before it crept from beach to beach like the grim reaper, the oil that visited death upon the northern Pacific had traveled a long way. Prior to being loaded onto the Exxon Valdez at the ship’s namesake port, it had journeyed 800 miles through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, then in its twelfth year of operation. Flowing south from the state’s northernmost edge, this batch of unrefined crude traversed a wilderness of forest and tundra, passing over lakes and creeks just beginning to thaw. It crossed three mountain ranges and the third-largest river in the United States. It made the trip in four days.

Long before this oil was processed and loaded into the pipeline at Prudhoe Bay—before it coated bald eagles and sea otters in Prince William Sound, producing images that horrified the world— it had been lying 9,000 feet underground for longer than humans can meaningfully conceive. For only a fraction of this time, humans have endeavored to extract it. Petroleum and its derivative products now undergird much of American life. Oil propels our vehicles, our industries, our products. It also spreads through water like poison. All of this—the depth of our desires, the gravity of their risks—was known in 1968, when oil was struck and celebrated at Prudhoe Bay. It was known in 1977, when the pipeline was completed. It was known the night of March 23, 1989, as the Exxon Valdez left Valdez harbor bound for Long Beach.

Oil spills, like car accidents, are inevitable. There are simply too many things that can go wrong for all of them to go exactly right, every time. It is convenient to forget this fact, but periodic events, like the recent pipeline leak off the coast of California, have a way of reminding us. The people of Prince William Sound have never forgotten.

By many metrics, the Sound has recovered. Populations of sea otters, bald eagles, and common loons now equal or exceed their pre-spill estimates. Pink salmon run in large numbers, and harbor seals are a common sight. Oil-soaked birds are only a traumatic memory. But anyone who remembers the days before the spill can tell you that things are not the same. Some species have not yet rebounded; some, like the killer whales and the once-great schools of herring, never will. Hidden under rocks, buried in gravel, broken down into small but stubborn particles, oil remains.

Exploring the Sound today, one does not see obvious evidence of the spill. More readily apparent to most visitors is the region’s resemblance to their vision of pre-European North America. Walking through the hemlocks in late summer, a multitude of blueberries and salmonberries present themselves for picking. Mushrooms the size of one’s hand grow along the trail. Enormous salmon crowd creeks narrow enough to step across, wriggling upstream. The experience evokes Eden.

This abundance of life—specifically, its edible and nutritious character—reminds me that mankind’s dependence on the land was not always as attenuated as it is for most Americans today, filtered through a long, dispiriting sequence of industrial transformations. People ate what they picked, cooked what they caught and killed. As I walk near the shore, filling my belly with wild berries, I begin to imagine, even fantasize about, living as all humans once did—intimately connected with nature, reliant on senses that modern life has dulled. I then think of the frigid winter days, the many months without berries or salmon, the avoidable challenges and discomforts of such a life. I think of the heat that warms my Anchorage home, and I think of its source: a reservoir of fossil fuel beneath Cook Inlet.

The crude oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez is no longer, at least directly, the gravest threat facing Prince William Sound—climate change has begun to disrupt its longstanding pattern of life. The entities responsible for the Exxon Valdez—those involved in the production, regulation, and transportation of fossil fuels—are again targets of public ire, this time for the consequences of a later phase in that process. Without doubt, producers of energy must adapt, quickly and dramatically, to address the crisis at hand. But it may also be time for those of us on the other end of the supply chain to ask ourselves whether we can still afford to view our consumption as having only a distant connection to the oil spills and heat waves we lament. We might ask, in other words, whether the Exxon Valdez was really just the fault of one incompetent captain. The truths to which these questions lead are likely to be painful, but we no longer have the luxury to avoid them.

Perhaps the fishermen of Cordova have shown us a way forward. In the hours and days after the Exxon Valdez hit the reef, it became apparent to the fishermen of Cordova, who make their living in the waters of the Sound, that no relief was imminent. A thick mat of oil was speeding toward the shallow bays where millions of tiny, vulnerable fry were developing into the next generation of commercial salmon, but no help was on the way. So a small fleet of fishermen, taking whatever gear they could scrape together, headed out to try and stop it. That they succeeded to a surprising degree is in some ways beside the point. Faced with nothing short of an environmental catastrophe, one that threatened their livelihood, their home, their beautiful world, the fishermen of Cordova took action. They asked not who is responsible, but what can we do. They knew they had no other choice.