Jeanne Devon (“AKMuckraker”)Managing Editor of themudflats.net

It’s 5 a.m. on the 4th of July, and the alarm goes off. I open one eye and think surely I must have set it for the wrong time, but then I remember. Today I’m heading to Prince William Sound with Shannyn Moore and Zach Roberts. Our goal is to document the lingering effects of oil, still present in the Sound after the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in the spring of 1989.

I was not in Alaska back then. I, like the rest of the country, watched the news footage in horror at images of oil-soaked otters and birds, and people hosing off the rocky shoreline, and aerial photos of a tanker surrounded by boats and thin ribbons of ineffectual orange boom. I didn’t know that people I would some day know and love were working on the cleanup effort even as I watched the pictures on the news from thousands of miles away. I never imagined I’d live anywhere near Prince William Sound, but I felt the loss of this faraway place, and I was sad and angry. I had a wild notion that I’d go to Alaska to see if there was anything I could do to help, but warnings came across the TV that oil spill responders were there in droves and people who wanted to come scrub otters were becoming a burden, and people shouldn’t go to Alaska expecting to be able to help. So I stayed on the East Coast and left it to the experts.But I did find myself in Alaska about a year and a half later. And almost as soon as I arrived, my relationship with Prince William Sound began — sailing past Columbia Glacier amid crackling icebergs; the city of Valdez; camping in a sandstorm in Jeanie Cove on Montague Island; my first sperm whale sighting from the air; the anxious drive through the newly blasted tunnel to Whittier; hiking on the alpine flower-covered high ground of Perry Island, Bering glacier with its endless swaths of lupine; the sculpted rock formations on Kayak Island, the biggest tree I’d ever seen hidden in the forest of Little Johnstone Bay, beach combing, campfires, sailing trips, fishing… over the years, the Sound became a very real and beautiful place, no longer a distant abstraction.  Source Article