Greasy Bits
July 16, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Way We Live Now
You cannot travel to the 49th State, even the supposedly “pristine” parts where the machinery is not in eyesight, without feeling the sludgey sloosh of Big Oil beneath the workings of nearly everything that goes on.
I would never presume as a tourist to try and explicate the complicated and slippery relationship Alaksans seem to have with the petroleum industry. I’ve tried to make sense of these anecdotes and opinions, but can’t, other than to acknowledge that Alaskans are at least as good at the rest of the world in holding two or more contrary opinions in their minds at the same time.
Without further ado, random encounters of the greasy variety:
“It’s not the oil companies who are the enemy, it’s the people who use the oil.”
That’s from J, a late-30-something eco-tour guide father of five, by all indications an evangelical Christian (though he seemed careful to keep this last bit under wraps from his well-heeled, maybe even secular humanist clients from the Lower 48), a man whose family lives at least part of the year off the grid, with solar panels and a backup propane-fueled generator, who will cautiously talk about “the current administration” and its culpabilities vis a vis the environment if he feels his clients are inclined that way politically.
J explained, when I asked, a little bit about the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, the program where every October, every citizen, including the kiddies, who has been a legal resident for a least one year receives a check. From what I can tell, last year J in most likely got around $11,500 for his family of seven.
“I have no problem with them opening up ANWR. It would not be a problem if they started drilling up there.
Different day, different bay, different “J,” him also an operator of a wilderness lodge, this one much further out and more off the grid. He makes his money helping fishermen get to the fish and helping wildlife freaks like us drive around (gas!) in little ATV buggies looking for and then at bears.
When T and I admitted, under questioning, that we wrote things for a living (which is different from being a writer), he asked, “Do you know anything about grant writing?” He was interested in apply for grants to add to the wind turbine and solar panels he already has in place.
Same conversation, same breath, he said he’d worked on the North Slope for a year, was impressed with how the oil companies ran things, and didn’t think opening up the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve would have any negative impact on the land or the animals.
What he said was pretty interesting: apparently all the “vehicles” (and by the way he talked, it was pretty clear we were talking about some kind of massive trucks and other machinery things, not like an SUV-sized unit or anything) are all equipped with these big diapers so no drips or spills or other fluids will seep into the ground. Separately, he said there were as many “cops” as workers on the North Slope, but again he made it sound more like MPs or something than ordinary run-of-the-mill police officers. Apparently, it’s a rule, punishable by citation or whatever from one of these cops, that every driver has to walk all the way around his vehicle before getting in, because most accidents, they found, occur when drivers back up and hit something they didn’t realize was behind them.
[Huh: just went surfing for a picture of those diapers and found this instead, which doesn’t show any diapers but sure does seem to back up the point just below about what’s up on the North Slope. Blogger seems to be a pretty interesting and knowledgeable guy.]
“Prudhoe Bay is nightmare. It’s a pit. They count on people not going up there to see what’s going on.”
That was not an Alaskan but a Californian, R, with whom T and I had a beer in Homer’s super-funky dive bar, the Salty Dawg Saloon. He’s a 30-something school teacher, teaches Middle Schoolers somewhere south of Los Angeles in a town where the kids sound pretty hard up. He had taken the summer to ride, I think he said from Baja California, so from Mexico, all the way up to Prudhoe Bay, the tippy-tippy top of Alaska (and of our country), the place where they pump all that oil that flows through the pipeline that runs the length of the entire state down to Valdez, where…well, I’m hoping you know the Valdez part.
There’s a road, a service road, which I believe is still unpaved in most places, that runs beside the pipeline all the way up, and he was on that with his motorcycle most of the way.
He was unapologetic and visibly disgusted by what he saw of the oil-making machinery in Prudhoe Bay, that’s for sure. What if he had been talking to a couple of nice young Swellville free-market Republicans? We were pretty scruffy by that point, 2 or 3 days unwashed. I guess he assumed FMRs would never appear that beat in public. Even in a bar that dive-y (and I say that with deep affection. I adore dive bars, as long as middle-class me feels safe).
The gig in this place is you sign a dollar bill with a Sharpie and tack it to the ceiling. (I know, smart of them, what? Recession gets any deeper, they just take those bills off the wall and cash them, Sharpie signatures or no.) We gave R a dollar, because he didn’t seem like he was going to part with any of his for such a frivolous use, and all three of us signed one and tacked them up.