ALASKANS NOT ALONE IN ANGER OVER OIL SPILL
SPILL STILL IS A LIVE ISSUE OUTSIDE

By LARRY CAMPBELL
Daily News Reporter

ANCHORAGE- Susanne Thomas has never been west of the Mississippi River, but she thinks Alaska must be something like Maine. At least that's what the pictures on television look like frothy waves crashing into rocky cliffs, tall trees, lots of wildlife, solitude.

"It looks gorgeous," Thomas said. "At least, that's what the tourist ads show. I want to see it someday."

Thomas, a university regent, is one of the regulars in the afterwork crowd at Manuel's Tavern, a neighborhood bar and restaurant in downtown Atlanta and a haven for bankers, athletes, construction workers, politicians and journalists.

She sipped a Miller Lite Draft Monday and had to raise her voice to be heard by a caller on the phone from Anchorage. She talked about the oil spill in Prince William Sound and how it disgusted her.

"I hear that the cleanup's been bungled," Thomas said over the crowd. "It's a shame. Evidently, it's never going to be the same.

"I'm sort of an East Coast person, just up and down the East Coast. But I've always wanted to do, like, the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Still do. You still have clean areas up there, right?"

A month has passed now, and people are still talking about the oil spill all over the United States. They are angry at the despoiling of the land, angry at empty oil company promises, angry that it could also happen somewhere else, angry at rising gasoline prices and just plain angry.

They feel like Alaskans have felt since March 24, when more than 10 million gallons of North Slope crude was dumped into the Sound when the tanker Exxon Valdez veered from the shipping lane and ran aground.

The thick, black, smothering, toxic crude spread like mucus through the islands on the Sound's west side. Then it oozed into the Gulf of Alaska, slipping through the fingers of men with machines who had promised before all this happened that they could clean it up.

Alaskans know they are incensed. People Outside feel the same way still. Even lots of them who have never even been here feel something is lost.

"I'm an avid fisherman, and I've got this friend who's a fisherman, too, and he's been there," said Lee Frinsko, a policeman in Saco, Maine. "Boy, I'd like to get there someday."

Saco is a small town on the southern coast of Maine, about halfway between industrial Portland and President George Bush's retreat at Kennebunkport. Monday, Frinsko was at the York County Pistol Range, where he works part time. He and his friends are all fishermen and sportsmen, and the northern part of their state is still a popular oasis for them, lots of woods and streams and quiet. But it's not like what they imagine Alaska to be.

"You know, I've always had the impression that Alaska's still a part of the Last Frontier pretty much undeveloped, still unspoiled.

"I'm extremely upset (about the spill). It's like they could've done more to contain it, but they didn't."

Bill Arthur, northwest representative for the Sierra Club in Seattle, said there are lots of people who think like Frinsko and Thomas.

"Even if you've never been there, you've seen a documentary or something," Arthur said. "And there are two words that connote Alaska vast and wild.

"Then you see TV and see the oil and you know that man did that. It's just not as wild when you know that."

Radio people who make their livings talking with folks across the country say the mass of anger and frustration has saturated their audiences. The nation hasn't vented this long and hard since a congressional pay raise was brought up earlier this year, they say.

"More than anything else, the feeling in general is, "Who the hell does Exxon think it is?' " said Debbie Alpert, producer of the Tom Snyder Show, a syndicated callin radio talk show in Los Angeles. "And there's something else, I think. People just seem tired of everything going wrong no fruit, no red meat, fish parasites, and a big government that's doing nothing about it.

"And, usually, these things are short, they blow over. But this issue has lasted with folks for weeks. They're still calling in."

And people are writing letters thousands of them, to newspapers, and radio personalities across the country like Mike Siegel in Seattle. He's called on his audience to boycott Exxon. Gary Null, talk show host in New York City, has asked the same of his audience.

People are also cutting up their Exxon credit cards. Thomas Regmier is general manager of the R.C. Fitz Co., a small printing company in Indian Orchard, Mass. Earlier this month, Regmier hacked the cards his small company uses for gasoline.

"I was sitting at work one day, signing the new charge card and saw Exxon's name. I thought we should do something about this," Regmier said. "I got out the scissors and chopped it up.

"We talk about it every morning at work; what we saw on TV the night before. Alaska is important to us. Not that Massachusetts is an eyesore. But I don't drive by Mount McKinley in the morning, either."

Some are persecuting Exxon service station dealers, even though it isn't their fault. For the past month, Ron Sylvester has been doing a lot of explaining in front of his Exxon station in Sacramento, Calif. Lots of the people he is explaining to are old customers and friends, back from when he used to be a Texaco dealer at the same spot, before Exxon and Texaco traded some of their properties two years ago.

"One lady stopped one day and said she was going to boycott Exxon, and I told her she'd be boycotting me," Sylvester said. "People just don't understand."

So far, only Stephen Hugo Rice, 45, a University of Washington student from Seattle, has been charged with shooting at a service station. He was arrested last week and confessed to blowing the windows out of a Seattle station twice.

Rice is currently in a state mental hospital, being evaluated.

"I don't think anyone's championing this guy's actions down here," said King County Deputy Prosecutor Jonathan Love. "But, well, I'm not buying gas at Exxon anymore."

People around the country also want to find something to do themselves, as if keeping busy will help ease their frustration. Some from Seattle to New York are slapping bumper stickers on their cars. Others are attending rallies, memorial services and benefit concerts.

The story has certainly played big in Peoria, Ill., where folks are collecting towels for the Valdez bird and otter rescue centers. They've sent 1,200 pounds so far, and they are sending more.

"Everyone feels that you pitch in and help," said Lynn Sommer, in Peoria. She and her husband have been to Alaska to visit their son and daughterinlaw, Joedy and Lori Wake. Sommer caught a salmon last year and fell in love with the place.

"We're a long ways away, and can't do much. But we want to do something," she said. "Maybe it's because it's the wilderness and so untouched. And I'm a puffin admirer."

And just last weekend, 10 Los Angeles residents landed on the doorstep of the local Sierra Club chapter. The 10 had won an L.A. radio station callin contest for expensepaid treks to the oil spill front lines. Some are engineers, one is an architect. Others are veterinary technicians, attorneys, secretaries.

They are here to volunteer their talents to the cleanup process and report back to the station for daily, onair reports, said Roger Johnson, an environmental engineer from San Dimas and one of the L.A. 10.

"You know, you mention Alaska down south, and people get images of sled dogs and that this is still a pristine wilderness," Johnson said. "There's a mystique. And the spill spoils it for them."

Certainly there are people for whom higher gas prices are reason enough to be irked. The vague rage against Big Oil and environmental irresponsibility in general enrages some people, too.

But John McPhee, writer and Princeton University scholar, likes to remember the feelings of people like the L.A. 10, the towel collectors from Peoria, the regulars at Manuel's Tavern in Atlanta, Frinsko's sportsmen buddies in Maine.

McPhee's 1976 best seller, "Coming Into the Country," is, for many, the definitive accounting of Alaska's land and people, and the beauty and the harshness of both. He said this week that he's glad people are angry.

"I'm not surprised at the level of dismay and concern," he said. "You know, the haunting echo in my mind is that this was one of the first subjects discussed when the pipeline was being proposed, that this was going to happen someday.

"Alaska is a very different place from the Lower 48. And Prince William Sound is one of the most beautiful places on earth. If I could speak for the people of the Lower 48, I'd say that what they think about Alaska is really true."

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