fever. They found another beach on the southwest corner of Port Dick they refer to as Mini Gore Point. It was blasted with debris, but the area isn’t nearly as big as the isthmus. They have finished cleaning all of Port Dick and now are moving into Tonsina Bay.
You made a good decision on Montague . . . the weather socked in and will remain that way for awhile.
Take care.
Chris
In the following days, other unforeseen events would occur. Way out on Resurrection Bay, the Johnita I, John Cowdery’s other yacht, burst into flames. Fishermen came to Cowdery’s rescue. Cowdery attributed the fire to faulty wiring, but now a pesky reporter from the Anchorage Daily News was sniffing around for evidence of arson and insurance fraud. She wouldn’t find it, but she would, eventually, find incriminating evidence of graft—not enough to get Cowdery indicted. Later, though, on unrelated corruption charges, he’d serve three years in prison. During the course of her investigations, the reporter called Pallister with questions about the Johnita II and his partnership with Cowdery. The Anchorage Daily News would run a story that in passing mentioned GoAK’s attempt to win funding from the state legislature—how Cowdery had helped secure the allocation, how Pallister had hired two lobbyists. “I told [the lobbyists] right out of the get-go, ‘Listen, John Cowdery and I are partners in a boat. Keep him the hell out of this,’ ” the article would quote Pallister as saying. “ ‘I don’t want any linkage with John Cowdery or Veco or anything else.’ ”
To me—without a shred of evidence, let it be clear—Pallister would insinuate his own suspicions. He was convinced he knew who’d put this Daily News muckraker on his trail: Bob Shavelson. “Next year I might fold up shop,” Pallister would tell me. “I didn’t get into this to go through this crap—have people digging through my personal business, telling lies about me. I got into this to clean up beaches, you know?”
15 The toxicity of PCBs is well established, and their story has become a famous chapter in the annals of environmentalism.PCBs were first synthesized in 1881 and first brought to market as a nonflammable insulator in electrical transformers, a safer alternative to mineral oils, in 1929. In the U.S., until they were banned in 1979, their primary producer was the Monsanto Corporation, whose sorcerers of the lab, by playing variations on the theme of chlorine and carbon, eventually found myriad other commercial applications for this family of compounds. They polymerized it and sold it as an insulator for copper wiring. They added it to varnishes and paints. By the 1970s, PCBs were ubiquitous, despite mounting empirical evidence of their toxicity. In response to that evidence, Monsanto and its competitors deployed the tactics pioneered to great success by the tobacco companies: they produced studies that minimized the risks and confused the public. In the industrialized nations of the West, commercial production of the substances had all but ceased by 1989, but to this day in the environment PCBs remain ubiquitous, seeping out of landfills and superfund sites and electrical transformers, persisting in sediments and drifting on the surface of the sea.
What’s so bad about PCBs? Until the mid-eighties, according to the industry, nothing. Fears flamed by academic and government scientists were overblown, Monsanto and its competitors claimed. Finally, in 1987, they surrendered. In a study funded by the EPA, independent scientists evaluated the literature and deemed the evidence for the “carcinogenicity of PCBs” to be “over whelming,” and a peer-reviewed, industry-funded study found that “every commercial PCB mixture tested caused cancer.” For oceanographers the data were more troubling still: “It is very important to note,” the EPA notes, “that the composition of PCB mixtures changes following their release into the environment. The types of PCBs that tend to bioaccumulate in fish and other animals and bind to sediments happen to be the most carcinogenic.”
And PCBs aren’t only carcinogenic. They impair the immune system, increasing vulnerability to opportunistic viruses. They reduce fertility. In laboratory tests conducted on monkeys, they’ve been shown to stunt “neurological development,” specifically “short term memory and learning.” They concentrate in breast milk. And according to the laws of biomagnification, the predators at the top of the food chain carry the heaviest contaminant burden. The killer whales of the North Pacific are among the most intoxicated mammals on earth. So are human populations that eat a fishy diet. So are the albatrosses that nest on Laysan Island. Look again at the