Prince William Sound, famed for its wild beauty, suffered its own day of infamy March 24, 1989, when the "Exxon Valdez" oil spill made it a symbol of manmade environmental catastrophe.
Fifteen years later, Marybeth Holleman has written "The Heart of the Sound" a wrenching and riveting tour through its physical and emotional landscape. The book reflects her deep love of the sound and the intrusion of tragedy into that relationship.
"What do you do about it, once you've fallen in love with a place?" she asks in her prologue. "How does this love make you act?"
Holleman tells her story in a series of essays spanning 20 years. She first discovered the sound in 1986 while working for a summer on the train run between Whittier and Portage. A kayak trip out Passage Canal was a revelation:
"Ice fields and glaciers, tongues of ancient snow alchemized into blazing blue ice, hugged sharp peaks and poured down valleys. Gushing from glaciers, streaking from the ice fields above, threading through granite crevices and spraying over mossy beds were dozens of waterfalls plunging into the fjord," she writes.
The sound's magic was a major factor in her decision to leave her family's roots in North Carolina and make Alaska her permanent home.
Holleman, who now lives in Anchorage, is well known as a writer of nonfiction and teacher of creative writing. She combines a poet's and a naturalist's insights. Her lyric descriptions of the sound, from the tiniest tidepool creatures to what she calls its "expansive, meandering maze," are beautiful.
But even when she rhapsodizes about nature, the author avoids going soft. She is frank about the oppressive rains, the chill and the presence of death. The place is gorgeous, but it is not easy, she notes.
Her relationship with the sound became even harder when the oil spill destroyed the idyll.
Holleman's dismay comes through clearly as she writes about shock, guilt and wandering throughout the spill area in 1989 from Valdez to a bird-washing center in Homer to a monitoring station on Perry Island.
The fact that our own society caused the damage loaded the event with corrosive emotions, making people such as herself both victim and criminal, she says.
Most of "Heart of the Sound" deals with the spill's aftermath and its repercussions in the author's private life. She links the spill with her own heartbreak ‹ the disintegration of her first marriage and her torment over divorce's effects on her young son.
"It was the kind of disaster that made people lost to each other, unable to reconnect no matter how much they might want to. I felt that way about my marriage," she writes.
Holleman often writes like a woman obsessed. She had a small vial of oil, collected from Green Island in 1994. For two years, she carried it in her purse, so she could show people that the sound is still oiled. She left her husband for oil-spill activist Rick Steiner, who shared her commitment to activism and grief for the wounded region.
She criticizes what she calls the "new industry" created from the settlement funding. Community pork projects, escalating tourism and biological studies that sacrifice the well-being of wild animals draw her pointed comments.
The traces of bitterness are honest, but they can be off putting. It would be a fairer book if she allowed those she criticizes, such as the biologists, to explain themselves. Instead, the only scientist whose views she depicts is Homer-based orca specialist Craig Matkin, whose methods, generally, earn her approval.
Despite her obvious slant, the author provides many astute insights. She recognizes that wildlife watchers may unwittingly harass the creatures they admire, and that environmentalists such as herself have trouble distinguishing between complacency and accepting changes.
Holleman has a lot to say, and she says it well, but sometimes her inward focus and intense emotions weigh down her book. She has created a raw memoir tinged with the conflicting emotions of bitterness and tenderness.
Readers who consider the oil spill old news will wonder at the fuss. But those who still feel the wounds and those who worry what the future holds for Alaska's wilds, will find Holleman a compelling voice and kindred spirit.
Shana Loshbaugh is a writer and former Peninsula Clarion reporter who now lives near Fairbanks.
