A FRIEND IS SICK
ADMIRERS OF PRINCE WILLIAM SOUND RECALL LIFE BEFORE THE OIL SPILLED

By DEBRA MCKINNEY
Daily News reporter

ANCHORAGE- I've tried to write about friends who died, as if casting memories in print might hold the emptiness back a little longer. But I could never get beyond a few sleepless nights of worry over where to begin. So I'd let it go, write sympathy cards and decide what kinds of trees to plant in their honor once the ground thawed in spring.

I feel the same way about Prince William Sound, although this is a friend I refuse to bury. The Sound isn't dead, but it's very, very sick. My heart is sick, too.

For those who have never spent much time on the Sound, it would be like coming home to find your house ransacked and obscenities spray painted all over the walls. Or having someone you love lapse into a coma, and not knowing if he'll ever be the same again. Or having your church burn to the ground.

I've always wanted to spend a whole summer in the Sound, to watch seals and otters raise their pups, and visit the secret beach where orcas come to rub their bellies. I wanted to spend time in Derickson Bay, described by a friend as "Yosemite being born." Its glaciercarved granite walls, the El Capitans of the Sound, rise from below the ice to meet the clouds. Twice I've tried to get there. Twice weather chased me away.

I decided I'd go to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge instead this summer. There might be oil drilling up there someday, and I want to see the refuge before it's too late. Prince William Sound, I figured, would always be there.

Parts of the Sound are still pristine. Cold, strong winds blowing off glaciers in Blackstone Bay and the fiords of Port Wells may be able to push away wandering fingers of oil should they come calling. Meanwhile, oil is reaching into the mouth of one of my most cherished places, Port Nellie Juan.

My friend Louisa Rand introduced me to that corner of the Sound. She spent her first summer in Alaska there, working on a shrimp boat. She tells of a brilliant day of feasting on the bounty of the ocean seafood caught that day and a loaf of bread she baked in the galley oven. The sky was the most elegant shade of blue. Life was all around.

"We were in heaven," she recalled recently. "I really could have died out there and it wouldn't have mattered."

Kayaking with Louisa through Culross Passage to Port Nellie Juan was slow going. She had to take it all in every bird, every ripple in the ocean, every movement in the trees. Have you ever seen such water, she asked. So pure.

Beyond the Sound, oil is starting to leave an industrial ring around Kenai Fjords National Park. On a kayak trip there, in Aialik Bay, we counted black bears on two hands and saw so many seals and pups hauled out on ice floes we couldn't begin to count them.

At one point, we stopped paddling and drifted silently among the floes until the bow of our kayak tapped one. On it, a seal was sound asleep. It opened its eyes, focused and blinked. Then our presence registered. With a "Holy Smokes!" look in its eyes, it squealed, slid off the ice and dove.

Later, we were startled ourselves by a powerful, ominous snort coming from behind. We spun around and stared into the eyes of three Steller sea lions. We weren't much good for eating, mating or picking a fight, they must have decided. Another snort and they were gone.

I've never known a place as rich as the Sound. I'm left with many more memories: Poking along wild beaches looking for sunbleached bones, feathers, shells and other treasures from the sea. Watching sea otters eat. Staring into a tidal pool as communities of invertebrates went about their subtle business. I must admit, I can't think of much I'd rather do.

Scientists have said the oil will become embedded in gravel beaches and slowly dispense toxins for years to come. They also say that in time the Sound will recover. But I don't believe it will ever be the same, at least not in my lifetime. Along with the countless birds, otters and other casualties of the spill, a part of me has died.

The following people have spent large portions of their lives in Prince William Sound. In the three weeks following the largest oil spill in U.S. history, they took time to remember the way it was.

NEIL JOHANNSEN

"The only thing that's going to heal Prince William Sound and the souls of Alaskans is time," said Neil Johannsen, state parks director and author of a guidebook to the Sound. "It just tears me up. I feel like a person I've been close to has died."

Johannsen began exploring the Sound in 1973 aboard the 30foot sloop Nellie Juan. He'd spend up to a month at a time sailing from cove to cove, dropping shrimp pots, fishing for salmon and flounder and never seeing another human for days on end.

His most cherished experiences include the sounds he heard one night in Jackpot Bay when it was too dark to see. First, he heard a whale blow while he was sailing through the entrance of the bay. When he dropped his anchor, he could hear salmon splashing in a stream near shore. When he struck a match to light a lantern, the flash startled a bear prowling on the beach, and it crashed through the woods in a panic. Johannsen considers this night a statement of the richness of Prince William Sound.

Johannsen met Prince William Sound resident George Flemming in the summer of 1974. A storm had settled in, pinning him on Knight Island, where Flemming was tending a turnofthecentury herring saltery. A halibut boat was tied up there, too, and the fishermen hauled ashore slabs of fresh fish. The group feasted and passed around a whiskey bottle while one of the fishermen played Bach on an old piano by lantern light.

"We just had a rousing time that night," Johannsen said.

Flemming grew up on the Sound. He was born in 1905 in a log cabin on an island named for his father at the northern end of Prince of Wales Passage. His father was a whaler, his mother a Chugach Eskimo. The family ran a fox farm on Flemming Island.

Johannsen recalls standing on the deck of the Nellie Juan in the rain, pulling sails out of a bag, going on and on about how fast the world was changing. Flemming listened politely, then mentioned he hadn't been to town since 1930.

Johannsen was floored. Are you serious? He started telling him about how much Anchorage had grown. He talked about the freeways, the highrises, the way everybody's in such a big hurry. "You just wouldn't believe," he said.

"Neil," Flemming said. "I've never been to Anchorage. I was talking about Cordova."

Flemming died about five years ago. His ashes are scattered on the island where he grew up. When oil started moving in that direction, Johannsen's heart began to break.

"He loved that place so much . . . and now it's oiled."

"I can't shake the grief I feel over Prince William Sound," Johannsen said. "I have to let it in in small pieces. I can't let it in my heart all at once. I don't think I could function."

Woods become parking lots, game trails become freeways, farms become subdivisions. As Johannsen sees it, change that happens slowly is called progress. When it happens quickly, it's called a disaster. But the result is the same: wildlife killed, habitat ruined.

He said he hopes the oil spill will strengthen environmental ethics.

"If it doesn't do that, then I'm afraid the oil spill has been a double tragedy."

R.J. KOPCHAKFisherman R.J. Kopchak has paid his dues. He arrived in Cordova in 1974 with nothing, camping out that first season in a boat in dry dock. After years of crewing for others, he finally bought his own gill netting permit. Last year, he and his wife, Barclay, finished building a stunning Victorianstyle house that overlooks the boat harbor.

This was going to be the summer everything went smoothly, Kopchak says. He had a good season last year. The house was finished. He'd have some time to work on his boat.

After fishing Prince William Sound for 16 years, you'd think it would be difficult to pinpoint the best memory. For Kopchak, it wasn't the biggest haul; it was the year his first child was born.

He took time off from fishing to help deliver his baby. His daughter, Sager, was only two weeks old when he bundled her up and took her fishing with him in Coghill District in College Fiord, in the northern part of the Sound. She slept on the driver's seat in a canned salmon box while Kopchak and his wife shared the day bunk.

One of his second child's first words was "whale." The family had finished up at Coghill and had taken a trip across the Sound to the San Juan hatchery. On the way back home, during a leisurely drive past Knight Island, the Kopchaks came upon a pod of 18 to 20 orcas. They spent half the day watching the whales rising out of the water and splashing back down again. Whenever a whale would blow, Zachariah would yell, "Whale!"

This is why Kopchak chose to be a fisherman. He wanted work that he could do with his family.

"All of my kids fished before they could walk," he said. Zachariah learned to crawl on the deck of the boat. The third child, Obadiah, learned to crawl on Knight Island just last year.

"I flew over that beach," Kopchak said. "It's black with tar now. It is a dead zone in that portion of the Sound."

Their fourth child is due in October. Kopchak said he's sorry this one won't be able to know the Sound as it used to be.

"Now our whole lifestyle has changed," he said. "Just from being from the Sound, fish are tainted fish, in many people's eyes. There's not an untouched family here. It's a loss of innocence."

And Cordova has become a different town.

"All we want to be here is plain, simple fishing people. We have been invaded."

Still, life goes on. The Copper River Flats should open for salmon fishing as usual, Kopchak said. "The Copper River reds are in beautiful shape . . . (the flats) are a long way from where this happened.

"This has changed me as a person . . . it just brought home how incredibly fragile everything is.

"But I will come out the other end, and Cordova in general will come out the other end as better and stronger people. But I wish I could have just skipped it, OK?"

KELLEY WEAVERLING|

SUSAN OGLEKelley Weaverling arrived in Prince William Sound 13 years ago by floatplane, after wandering the world in search of a place to stay. The problem was, he missed the mountains when he was on the sea, and missed the sea when he was in the mountains. He didn't realize he could have it both ways.

As the plane flew off, Weaverling assembled his collapsible kayak on the shore of Port Nellie Juan's Derickson Bay. He looked around.

Mountains rose to the sky and glaciers calved into the sea. Sea otters and seals peeked at him from the water's surface and from atop ice floes. A pod of orcas swam by, including one with a crooked dorsal fin that he named Bent Fin and has seen every year since.

"I realized, this is it. I'm home. This is paradise. I'm going to spend the rest of my life in Prince William Sound."

Weaverling and his wife, Susan Ogle, spent five summers in the Sound guiding with Bear Brothers kayak tours, and another five summers exploring the Sound on their own, working now and then as natural history consultants for the National Outdoor Leadership School.

Two years ago they decided they wanted to live on the Sound yearround. They moved from Anchorage to Cordova and bought a bookstore and a house within walking distance of the shore.

Among their most prized possessions is knowledge of a beach frequented by killer whales. They discovered it by accident, while camped on a steep beach covered with smooth pebbles. They were startled late one night by the eerie sound of whales spouting. They peeked out of their tent and saw seven orcas, Bent Fin among them, headed their way. And they didn't stop.

The whales swam up onto the beach until they were half out of the water. Then they began to rub, inching along sideways, scratching first their bellies, then their sides. They kept this up for 15 minutes, then wiggled back into the water and swam away.

Weaverling and Ogle have no idea what's happened to Bent Fin or the rest of the resident orcas they feel they know. They're not sure they want to.

"I have a journal filled with 10 years of special moments," Ogle said. "I thought it would make a great book, but it didn't have an ending. I thought maybe the ending would be moving to Cordova and living happily ever after. Now, unfortunately, the ending is very apparent."

Since the accident, Ogle has been working as the spill response coordinator for Cordova. Weaverling is working with the wildlife rescue people in Valdez and has organized a fleet of Cordova fishermen to pick up oiled animals and birds.

He also has been trying to set up a sea otter rescue center in Cordova. But on Monday, U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials informed him that without a special permit, picking up sea otters was a violation of the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act.

"I was so low, you could have run over me with a snake," Weaverling said. "I just crawled off."

He's back now, rescuing what he can: birds only. He wears a black arm band, a symbol of mourning.

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