4 = Wednesdas; April 5,198) i>North.Shore- News:

a

1 REMEMBER the Alaska coastline. I was lucky. I was up
there a year before the first supertanker pulled out of

Valdez in 1972.

A tremendous, lonely — now
lost — corner of the world.

By boat, while one is perfectly
aware of travelling along the
American mainland, it remains
that the peninsulas and little
clusters of islands have names like
Dolgoi, Ukolnoi, Poperechnoi,
Chernabura, Sanak and Miasik.

I can still see the icy wind-whip-
ped scallop of Pavlof Volcano in
my mind’s eye. Cape Tolstoi.
Belkofski Point. Unga Spit.
Kaslokan Point. Popof Strait. The
Shumagin Islands.

As the Russian influence wanes,
one comes across places with
names like Kitchen Anchorage,
Lefthanc Bay, Bluff Point, Seal
Cape, Sandman Reef, Saddler’s
Mistake. And Cathedral Peak and
Pyramid Peak and Monolith Peak
and Hoodoo Mountain, names
that speak to the scale of the place.

And then there was Glacier Bay,
the clouds lowering themselves like
crinolines over the rocky calves
and ankles of Mounts Hay, Wat-
son and Case. Ultimately, there
was mighty Mount Fairweather,
the glaciers emerging out of the
fogs like the translucent paws of
lime sphinxes, veined and flaked
with pearl and violet.

Across the intricate ar-
chipelagoes of ice crusts came a
sound like giant bracelets tinkling
as fragments of ice coagulated into
a crystal broth, out of which vast
castles of ice arose. And I'll never
forget the not-so-distant thunder
as cornices of glacier broke loose.

And the lushness of the wildlife
that was!

Flocks of birds rising and falling
in immense sweeps, so thick that
the sky could be obliterated for
moments as though by a giant
giant wing. Sea lions coming up to
one’s boat in packs, rolling and
flopping around. Porpoises, seuls,
jellyfish, Crested Puffins and
Terns. The birds were so numerous
that one had to yell sometimes on
deck to be heard above their cries.

Underneath the sea, legions of
Alaska King crabs still moved.
Snow crabs. Fish in such abun-
dance that it seemed they were
limitless. An illusion, we know
now.

Even though I’ve seen more than
30 countries, the Aleutian Islands
remain the most awesomely

beautiful area I have ever laid eyes
on.

There were no trees, only moss
and lichen clinging to the rocks
amid clumps of heather. Streams
came drooling down from the hills
as though whole islands were being
squeezed like sponges, clouds spill-
ing into the sea like slow-motion
avalanches.

IT was lucky indeed, a
member of maybe the last
generation to see that
particular pristine corner of
the Northern Hemisphere
before the dull-witted beast
called Industrial Man -
personified perfectly by a
drunken captain not on the
bridge - stepped in to
destroy it forever.’’

CE eee

Surf-clouds I called them, trying
to find an image to match their
splendor, but, of course, not even
coming close. A gauze of milky
seal-pup fur drifting downward in-
to a crack in the ocean, it seerned.

There was an actual physical
ecstasy to be experienced merely by
looking upon this primitive, un-
tainted world. It was as though
one had received a silent command
to remove one’s hat and get down
on one’s knees. No altar or temple
could ever approximate the spen-
dor of God’s work there.

The slopes were snaggled with
scrub willows and tundra, a mass
of vegetation. Bunchberries throb-
bed as though struggling to pull
free and fly. Cow parsnips, lupin,
horsetails, blueberries, daisies that
seemed to flame against the ex-
quisite green, a green unlike any
other hue of green in the world, I
was sure.

To remember all this is to weep.
And rage.

Spoiled by the greed and indif-
ference of Exxon, a name that has
always struck me as sounding like
some kind of horrible robot king,
a metal monster sent to Earth to
smash and poison and befoul with
gunk, the kind of name a Saturday
morning science-fiction cartoon
scriptwriter would invent.

I was lucky indeed, a member of

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te

maybe the last generation to see
that particular pristine corner of
the Northern Hemisphere before
the dull-witted beast called Indus-
trial Man — personified perfectly
by a drunken captain not on the
bridge — stepped in to destroy it
forever.

There’s hardly any point saying
again what I said at the beginning
of this year when the West Coast
of Yancouver Island was undergo-
ing its ordeal of black death. By
now, being right about what was
about to happen to the environ-
ment merely haunts and hurts,

I suppose, at this rate, by the
turn of the century, when all of the
other ecological holocausts that we
were warning about back then
have likewise come true, and hu-
manity and all the animal and
vegetable kingdoms are reduced to
a few survivors clinging to trecless,
lifeless, probably airless hunk of
radioactive rock, the last thing I’!
get to do is scratch a useless
message, saying:

GOD DAMN IT, I TOLD YOU
so!

What a lousy little bit of
pleasure that’ll be.

We should have been more radi-
cal, kids. We should have kicked

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CORRECTION NOTICE
Ad Correction for April 2, 1989

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Woolco regrets any inconve-
nience this may have caused
its customers.

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