Rolls and rolls of ready cash were eagerly spent, from the meanest cannery workers all the way up to the biggest richest Japanese fish buyers, who routinely carried briefcases bulging with greenbacks. Everyone was throwing the dough around like it was going out of style and there was no tomorrow.

You couldn't blame the shopkeepers for being good businessmen. Their seasonally adjusted (read: shamelessly inflated) prices for their wares and services only seemed appropriate in a flush little fishing town, up to its ears in a bonanza season.

A steady parade of barges and container ships called at the city's ocean dock, disgorging trailer loads and trailer loads of liquor, beer, and viands, and every other conceivable hardware and fishing gear known to man. Tobacco and razor blades, the newest metal-cassette tapes, and fancy power blenders, and every manner of sundry item in between, came stuffed to the rafters in the Sea~Land containers.

The delivered containers were replaced on the barges with hundreds of out-going trailers, every square inch of them jammed with salmon ....all kinds of salmon. Pink salmon, chum salmon, red salmon, and silvers. Sockeyes and Cohos, Steelheads and Kings. Frozen salmon, canned salmon, salmon heads for bait, and salmon roe.

Yes ....even frigging salmon eggs, ....meticulously packed, pressed, and salted, by an army of Japanese technicians, and shipped to Japan practically under armed guard, where they are eaten as a venerated delicacy. The salmon roe is ceremoniously consumed during a special annual celebration, a holiday for some one thing or another, in vast quantities and at heavenly prices.

Such was it during the frenzied height of the 1980 salmon seining season in Corona, the jewel of Prince William Sound's fishing villages. The round-the-clock hustle and bustle lasted here for weeks and months unabated, all sublimely but oddly illuminated by the seldom-setting, sub-arctic summer sun.

Yes, this was how it was in 1980 in Corona, nine years before the unforgivable incompetence of an oil-tankers' crew rendered much of the western half of Prince William Sound an apocalyptic wasteland. Initially grotesquely visible, the massive oil spill spelled immediate doom for untold amounts of wildlife, ...on sea and land. The wreck of the Exxon Valdez was the penultimate wreckage of Alaska, and now largely unseen, it still endures perniciously beneath the waves to this day. Up until that fatefully egregious and monumental blunder, nature's rhythms and cycles had bestowed her gifts upon Corona with unimaginable generosity.

Nineteen years later, Corona's streets still rumble, but not with the heady enthusiasm of a fishing town in a boom year, flush from top to bottom, but with the rapacious roar of huge logging trucks carrying their cargoes of irreplaceable and ancient trees from the once lushly forested foothills surrounding the Copper River delta. Now virtually denuded, the scarred and naked hillsides illustrate a sad irony. Ironic indeed, that one result of the Native Claims Settlement Act, would ultimately lead to the rape and pillage of Corona's surrounding wonderlands, on a scale very comparable to the devastation previously wreaked upon her pristine waters.

Ironic, indeed, that a people whose ancestors thrived and communed with the flora and fauna of the Sound, should now blithely play an unfeeling and greedy part in its wanton and mercenary destruction.

It is written in the Bible that man is incapable of comprehending God, or His actions and purposes, simply because man just isn't that smart. Certainly, this is true, as far as my own comprehension of the decline of this once magnificent and unsullied region is concerned. Perhaps the events and circumstances which have occurred here recently have nothing to do with the actions or the will of God. Though I find this notion far more palatable than the alternative, it is very likely not the case...... I would refer you back to the Bible, specifically, the book of Job.

Talk about your basic incomprehension! If you are not familiar with the scriptural passages in the book of Job, allow me to give you my take on the whole deal. It goes something like this....

(.... now don't take my word for it, look it up yourself!)

....You see, God and old Satan got into a little pissing contest one time (they were wont to do this now and again), and somehow poor old Job got caught up in the middle of it all. Well, to make a long story short, Satan bet God that he could shake Job's faith if God would let him try anything he wanted (old Job was a staunch and devout God fan) and so of course, God said,

"No way you can do it!....Then the Lord said to Satan: Behold, all that he hath is in thy hand: only put not forth thy hand upon his person. And Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord."

Now Job, as the story goes, was a prosperous father and husbandman, faithful and true to his Lord, his family, and all of his holdings. By virtue of all of his God-fearing and righteous straight-shooting, Job had fathered a small army of sons and daughters, had built for himself a comfy and well appointed hacienda, and had a shit-load of cattle, sheep, and asses, ....and all those other animals that were all the rage in the holy lands. All this, not to mention the phalanx of people he could number as his good friends. In a word, Job was one rich sumbitch!

Anyway, to settle the bet and see if Job's faith would crack, God and the devil, repeatedly screwed Job over big-time, progressively more severely each time, ....and without mercy, ....as Job clung tenaciously all the while to his faith. You see, this Job cat was one tough hombre.

God and the old devil had Job's sons and daughters killed and raped, his herds slaughtered and stolen, his fields and crops ravaged and decimated, and they even trashed his pad ...just for good measure. Job's buddies told him that he was a fool to trust God in the face of his recent calamities, but Job reportedly said, with a saintly and calm acceptance,

"The Lord Giveth, and the Lord Taketh away."

The whole story gets even worse on our hero near the end,

And Satan answered, and said: Skin for skin, and all that a man hath he will give for his life: but put forth thy hand, and touch his bone and his flesh, and then thou shalt see that he will bless thee to thy face. And the Lord said to Satan: Behold be is in thy hand, but yet save his life.

Ever hear the expression, "the patience of Job? And his wife said to him: Dost thou still continue in thy simplicity? bless God and die. And he said to her: Thou hast; spoken like one of the foolish women: if we have received good things at the hand of God, why should we not receive evil?"

In the light of all this, you may wonder about my faith. ....Suffice it to say that I believe it to be unshakable, though as of yet, not as thoroughly tested as Job's. I did not acquire it by diligent effort or painful striving, nor was I seeking any loftier spiritual goal in life than my own lusty and sybaritic self-gratification. My man, the Big Guy, just parted the clouds in the sky one sweet morning, and for reasons unbeknownst to me, He told me.

In a wordless beam of unfathomable light and purity (an over-worked clichè perhaps, but based upon a "seeing-it-is-believing it" fact), a mega volt beam brilliantly shining down right straight through me, God said in no uncertain terms,

"I Am Here!"

Well!! This young, quasi-perverted, bearded and surfeiting, agnostic-hedonist (me), said unequivocally,

"Yes, Sir!

I'm older now and hardly even perverted any more, intermittently surfeiting-suppressed, and only slightly hedonistic. I am most certainly and eternally not agnostic. I will not begin here to attempt to describe the feeling of profound relief which I experienced upon the realization that I was not the center of the universe. ....Thank You, God.

No, ....He is unfathomable, ....and probably for good reason. Reminds me of Jack Nicholson in the movie, "A Few Good Men," when he was on the stand screaming,

"You can't handle the truth! ....You can't handle the fucking truth!"

No, ....the big picture might be just a little bit too much for us mere mortals, ....but when I close my eyes and see a majestic bald eagle soaring, in the same sky in which He graciously showed Himself to me, I exult in the knowledge of His presence, ...and the might and the power of the truth!

Yes, ....in the sky over Corona, ....in the sky in which He appeared to me, ....the eagles still soar, and I know, somehow, that He is still there, too, biding His time as His plan unfolds.

....Who knows? Judging by all accounts, maybe there's a brand new pissing contest going on over Prince William Sound right now!

©lowell_potter ..