Ron Spatz vividly remembers Marybeth Holleman's reaction when the Exxon Valdez oil tanker hit Bligh Reef 15 years ago this month, spilling 11 million gallons of crude into Prince William Sound.
"She was emotionally devastated," says Spatz, a professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage. "She right away -- right away -- felt it was a mission to write about what this meant. It wasn't like, 'I want to.' It was, 'I must; I must do something about this.' "
Fifteen years later, through the birth of her son, a divorce, a remarriage and what she sees as the slow, imperfect healing of the part of Alaska she loved most, Holleman, 46, has fulfilled that mission. Her book, "The Heart of the Sound: An Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost," was published this month.
The book is "like one long love poem," writer Janisse Ray said in a blurb for the book. "... a story about a place that breaks your heart and breaks it again."
INCREASINGLY AMAZED
The love story began almost from Holleman's first glimpse of Alaska. Living in North Carolina, she and her husband Andy faced a decision nearly 20 years ago. They owned 10 acres there -- property so revered by her family they referred to it simply as "the land" -- but felt an urge to explore. Andy wanted to go south to Mexico's Baja Peninsula; Marybeth hankered for Alaska. After a summer working in Denali National Park, both were hooked and returned for good.
The first summer back, Andy got a job at a golf course, and the couple lived near the grounds in their camper. Marybeth became more smitten by the wildness she found here, so different from her home.
"I was just increasingly amazed by everything," she says. "Maybe I thought I would grow tired and leave, but it just hasn't happened."
Instead, her affection deepened, especially as she spent more time in and around Prince William Sound.
" 'Whale!' I shouted to the space in front of me where Andy should have been," Holleman writes in her book about an early kayaking trip she took with her husband. " 'Killer whales!' I shouted as another surfaced a few yards away, enough to see black and white and fin. 'Andy, killer whales!' My voice was high-pitched, my breath came in gulps, my heart beat like a caged bird trying to escape."
"When I came to Alaska, I thought, 'OK, I've found it,' " Holleman remembers of those times. "Everything is as it should be. We haven't messed it up yet."
But only 33 pages into her book, the tone changes from awe to one of shattered disbelief. "Struck," is the title of Holleman's first chapter about the Exxon Valdez.
"I gathered the energy to rise from my chair and slip out underneath the crossfire," she writes of hearing about the spill while at work. "I headed for the bathroom, seeking solitude and a place to weep. ... So it was real. It had happened. An oil tanker had struck Bligh Reef. Ripped the hull. Spilled oil. Was spilling oil. Even now, this moment, oil spreading, animals dying. And this moment, too. Now. And now."
Holleman went home sick and stayed there a week. She prayed, paced the house, finally wrote a National Public Radio commentary. That essay was the beginning of the book.
VIBRATING IN HER
"Most people, like you or I, were really upset about it and followed it closely," Holleman's friend Tara Wreyford remembers of the spill. "Marybeth was devastated. She's really one with that environment. That's her space. She took it far harder than anybody I knew, and she's never put it down."
Eventually, Holleman joined animal rescue efforts, chasing an oiled murre down a beach to try to save it, being what she calls a "witness" to the damage done.
"Marybeth knew the internal geography (of the Sound) as well as she knew the blood that runs through her," Wreyford says. And with that intimate knowledge, Holleman's awareness of what had been lost was nearly unbearable.
Desperately searching for ways to help, Holleman and her friend Naomi Klouda went to work in a facility cleaning oil-soaked sea otters. Klouda remembers that the animals were placed on a grate over an oil drum that had been cut in half, then scrubbed with liquid soap. She describes the experience as bizarre.
"I went with her to be her support," Klouda says, adding that she doesn't believe in interfering with animals in that way. But she felt Holleman needed her.
"She was in tears. She was crying over the spill."
Holleman's teacher Spatz remembers something else about that time: conversations with Holleman that indicated a quickening -- a convergence of talent, will and mission.
"It was vibrating in her and you could feel the pain and the passion of needing to do something," Spatz says. "At that moment she was going to have to take a journey, and she did it. It's inspiring."
"There was never anything she proposed that was easy. That's just Marybeth," Spatz adds. "This is a person who took what happened in Prince William Sound personally."
The book took shape slowly but with one mission always in mind.
"I decided I wanted it to be about one real person's relationship to one real place and how that changes with events," Holleman says. "I wanted to give voice to the Sound."
NEVER AGAIN
But as time passed after the spill, and Holleman struggled with her continuing grief over the damage done to the Sound and how best to write about it, something else was happening too. His name was Rick Steiner.
Shortly before the spill, Holleman interviewed Steiner over the phone for a story she was writing on orcas. She remembers thinking she wanted to meet him: "He seems very nice," she thought. "And he's very quotable."
One day she walked into a gathering about the spill and heard a voice. From the question, she had a hunch the man speaking was Steiner. They were great friends from the beginning.
At first, what attracted her to him were his ideas and his passion, she says. "I loved that he was so creative and persistent in trying to help this place."
But then the friendship grew, confusing her. "I'm in love with two great guys," is how she sums up her situation at the time. "I didn't expect it to be on the level it was. It was a real surprise. It's not the kind of thing I can completely explain. I tried."
Figuring out what to do about it didn't come easily, either.
"It took me years, it really did. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. It was terrible. Either way, someone loses. Everyone loses something."
She contemplated being alone after ending her marriage with her husband, but that didn't last.
"Logic only takes you so far," she said. "And I tried to follow my heart. ... It took many years of conflict with myself. And I'm never doing it again."
Writing about the dilemma was yet another challenge. Holleman's internal loss and grief over the end of her marriage was as much a part of her life as the destruction to the Sound. But how much of that should she reveal in her book?
"It is a really difficult problem," says writer and teacher Sherry Simpson of the question nature writers face of how much of themselves to include in their writing. "You're worried you're taking the focus away from something larger than yourself. Sort of foreshortening it. You want to get beyond 'Here's my life, and here's how I feel about it.' "
Ideally, "you're more the lens than the object," Simpson says. "If it's becoming all about you, that's a memoir."
Holleman's instinct was to put less of her personal struggles in the book. Her editors wanted more.
According to editor Dawn Marano, there were places in the manuscript where Holleman's "footprint became very light.'' Marano said she encouraged Holleman to expand on areas where there was "psychic and emotional restraint,'' while still respecting the material.
"This was about a woman and a place that had gotten under her skin,'' Marano says, adding that initially Holleman seemed to be standing "too far out on the margins'' of what she was writing about. "I felt it was so important that I have some better sense of this woman.''
Holleman, who began teaching at UAA after getting her master of fine arts degree, wound up writing about it all. Her feelings about the destruction without -- from the millions of gallons of oil coating the Sound and the wildlife -- and within, as her marriage disintegrated. There was no formula for such writing.
"Marybeth wanted a roadmap, but there wasn't one," Spatz says. "She just lived through it."
EYES OPEN
Holleman and Rick married a year ago, the prayer flags from their ceremony at Kincaid Park are draped on the wooden gates at the foot of their Hillside driveway. On a wall of her home office, where multicolored glass floats line a windowsill, are photos of the Sound taken by her son James, 12, who grew up in and around its waters.
On one photo, he's written a note to his mother: "I love you more than the sky, the mountains and the sea.''
Holleman and Andy share custody of James, who moves regularly back and forth between their houses.
"She's probably got one of the best relationships with an ex-husband I've ever seen," says Wreyford.
A box of her new books has just been unpacked in Holleman's home office, and she's planning trips to promote it at book fairs in Washington and elsewhere. She seems a woman, if not at peace, at least at ease.
She's pleased many of the tankers in the Sound now are double-hulled and wishes that would've happened sooner. Ditto the presence of escorts accompanying the giant ships in and out of dangerous waters and more effective ways of cleaning up spilled oil.
"If it were to happen again -- and it will -- my sense is we'll do it better," Holleman says, adding that she would personally do things differently too. "I wouldn't chase oiled murres. But we were desperate to do something."
And, if it happened again, she would do some things the same.
"I would witness. I would at least be there. The most important thing is to be there and keep our eyes open."
Still, there's a lightness to Holleman; the look of a woman who's walked a very long way and can't quite believe she's home.
No less an authority than Annie Dillard proclaimed Holleman's book "lyrical," with "evocative prose ... (and) true transformative power."
Simpson believes Holleman's book explores the relationships we form personally and with the world. In that way, it relates to us all.
"What we grieve when we lose things," Simpson says, "that's something I think most of us can respond to, whether we love Prince William Sound or have lost someone."
Spatz says there are moments Holleman makes come alive in the book. "She's able to capture the feeling, plumb the depths of the moment and the moment shimmers."
Wreyford agrees, adding that "there's poetry in it."
"This is just her reason for being," Wreyford says. "She wants people to be aware and experience the Sound the way it was. It's definitely her crusade, and now she can put it down. Now the grief that she's felt over it has found a voice."
And what lessons has Holleman brought back from her 15-year journey?
"I learned you can love a place just as much as you love a person," Holleman says slowly. "And just as with a person, when disaster strikes, the love can go new directions and grow stronger.
"Change is inevitable. But I'm still trying to learn that one."
Daily News arts editor Susan Morgan can be reached at 257-4587 or smorgan@adn.com.
PUBLIC READING
The University of Alaska Anchorage Department of Creative Writing and Literary Arts and Alaska Quarterly Review present graduate Marybeth Holleman reading from her book, "The Heart of the Sound: An Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost," at 7 p.m. Friday in Room 110, Business Education Building. The public is invited, and admission is free.
