Chapter 9
Angel
In the middle of San Francisco Bay, the volunteers gathered on forested Angel Island to meet the oncoming black tide. Standing on the rocky shore, they looked like desperate defenders pitted against an overwhelming force.
On the pier in Ayala Cove, Jackson Harris fought to keep despair from crushing him. Three days, and the job still seemed immense, impossible—but if he let himself start believing it to be a hopeless task, he wouldn’t be able to go on. His stomach felt watery and knotted from his anger.
While corporate cleanup crews concentrated on the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf, and other high-visibility areas, Harris was outraged to learn that they had written off one of his favorite spots in the Bay Area. He and his wife Daphne had worked the phones nonstop to bring a team together on the secluded island state park in the middle of the Bay. Together, they had plugged into their own activist network and mustered volunteers to protect Angel Island. The group received equipment from a handful of Oakland industries, which had donated dozens of dumpsters and tons of plastic garbage bags to hold the oil-stained rags and other debris from cleaning the shoreline.
Acrid chemical fumes mixed with the stench of decaying bodies of birds and fish. Staring across the foul water, Harris spoke into his radio to the boats out on the slick. “Keep to your search pattern. Pick up all the birds and sea otters you can get.” They would try to save the live ones, but even carcasses were important for the lawsuits to be filed against Oilstar.
Harris lifted his thumb from the TALK button. He scratched his scraggly beard, still frowning. He hadn’t showered in days, not that primitive and isolated Angel Island had such facilities; he hadn’t slept much in the past three days either.
Off Point Stuart, the edge of the island closest to the spill, Harris’s group had sunk 55-gallon drums filled with cement to anchor a long string of buoys in an inverted V. Between the buoys, they strung heavy plastic fabric as a diversion boom to split the flow of thick crude and deflect it around the island. Yesterday when the spill struck, the V bifurcated the oil … but not enough. Now the black flow curled around to slop against the shore.
Harris left the pier and crunched down the crumbling, poorly maintained road. At the charcoal picnic grills, groups of volunteer kids cooked an endless supply of hot dogs and hamburgers for the famished workers. Harris stretched his aching arms, but decided he could stand some more heavy work. No time for rest. Never any time for rest. The spill would keep moving, keep destroying, and only he and his volunteers stood in its path.
At the water’s edge, people in rubber wader boots stood in the oozing crude. They dunked five-gallon buckets to scoop thick oil from the surface, passing each bucket to the next person in line. Once again dredging deep inside himself for just a little more energy, Harris slipped into the brigade line, relieving one of the brothers who looked ready to drop. The man nodded his thanks, then staggered to the grassy picnic area and collapsed onto a weathered picnic table.
A loud radio boomed music from a San Francisco Top 40 station, but few of the volunteers seemed to hear the tunes. Harris loved music, but in the last few days it seemed like his capacity to love anything at all had been smothered by the spreading blanket of crude.
The fire-brigade line skimmed oil, one bucket at a time. It would take his people ten million buckets to remove all the oil spilled by Zoroaster. Harris refused to admit it was a hopeless task, because that would pop the fragile soap bubble of stamina that kept him going.
After dragging another heavy bucket partway up the beach, Harris handed it to the next person in line, who lugged it to the reservoir tanks. Harris looked down at his thigh-length rubber boots, yellow rain slicker, and canvas gloves, all smeared with sticky brown oil darker than his skin.
The walkie-talkie at his side crackled again. “Jackson, this is Linda. We have to come back in. Boat’s overloaded.”
He handed off another bucket and stepped out of the brigade line, pulling off his gloves and grabbing the walkie-talkie. “All right, man. We’ll get another crew to take over.”
A few minutes later, a fishing boat puttered toward the dock. Harris yelled for another group to help off-load the cargo of carcasses and surviving animals the rescue crew had scooped up. Among the other volunteers, his wife Daphne ran up to help.
Trim and wiry, with very dark skin, she looked beautiful even with oil smeared on her face and frayed overalls and sweat trickling down her neck. When Daphne had studied law at Berkeley under a scholarship, she probably never imagined herself in a place like this. But Daphne wanted to help needy people, help the environment, taking a job in a small firm in Oakland so she could work in the volunteer legal-aid clinics.
She gave Harris a weary smile, bent toward him for a kiss, smudging him with oil, then laughed. On his lips, the oil tasted like vile medicine. The humor lasted only a moment before they both helped to off-load the stricken animals onto the pier.
They carried the live ones first—sea otters, terns, and gulls soaked in oil. Three people stood together, straining to haul the first sea lion from the boat. It panted, squirming in a slow-motion effort to fight. Its wide brown eyes were encircled by the red that indicated hemorrhaging.
Harris knew what the oil was doing to the internal organs of this struggling creature. Its kidneys would fail, unable to filter such massive amounts of waste poison from the bloodstream; its intestines would be immobilized, preventing the absorption of nutrients. He felt bile rise in his throat. He remembered hundreds of sea lions sprawled on Fisherman’s Wharf, sunning themselves and bellowing their contentment.
Most animals, even the ones “rescued,” would probably die from the spill anyway. Oil-soaked pinfeathers or fur no longer insulated the animals from the cold waters of the Bay. Many could not float, and would drown in the sludge-covered water.
Daphne and the others took the animals to hand-pumped shower stations, where they squirted soapy water and used brushes to scrub off the oil. Daphne worked quickly, waving her hands out of the way of an exhausted seagull, alarmed by the movement but too exhausted to struggle, as the panicked but stunned bird tried to peck any object that came near it.
The team worked in silence, unable to manage the usual banter of volunteers engaged in a large job. Even if the animals survived to be released again, they would simply return to the Bay, where they would get contaminated once more. Seeing the animals’ plight tore at Jackson’s heart; he could not just leave the creatures to die a variety of slow, cruel deaths. The odds were against them, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying.
The boom-box radio announced a spill update, and gave a short human-interest story on the heroic volunteer efforts under way on Angel Island, which drew a scattered but lukewarm cheer. Then the reporter said, “Oilstar Public Relations Officer Henry Cochran claims their efforts to clean up the spill are being hindered by environmental restrictions that prevent them from mounting an all-out response.”
A man’s voice continued, speaking for the oil company in a slow, reedy voice that sounded like a prepared statement. “We have well-researched and innovative solutions for coping with this problem, but the government says we need weeks of study before taking this action. That is ridiculous! Look out in the Bay—how can we just sit around, knowing we’ve got a possible cure? Tomorrow, Oilstar will hold a ‘town meeting’ to discuss a crucial plan to decrease the spill by 40 percent within a four- to five-day period, leaving no toxic residue. We may be restrained—again—by bureaucracy and finger-pointing, but we have a solution. If the state and federal governments won’t let us use it, don’t blame Oilstar.”
Jackson Harris stared across the water to the northern part of the Bay. He could see where the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge terminated near the Oilstar refinery. How could they make such preposterous claims? Forty percent of the spill gone in a few days? No toxic residue? Did they have some sort of magic wand?
He did not trust the big oil company, but they wouldn’t make such wild claims unless they had something. And after seeing the relatively minor success of his volunteers’ efforts, he was just about willing to give Oilstar a chance.
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