History.

Yesterday I participated in my first oral history interview. My life has been changed.

But before I get to that…

The archives have started an oral history project called I Remember Yosemite. The goal is to record interviews with people who have had a long and/or significant history with Yosemite National Park. One of my supervisors is the interviewer, and yesterday I got to tag along, help set up, and watch the incredible stuff unfold.

We went to the home of Lee and Ti Shackleton. Lee was the head enforcement ranger in the park for something like 25 years, and Ti taught school at Yosemite Elementary. Lee and Ti spoke of their time in Yosemite with a really lovely level of candor and warmth. They told of how as a young couple with two children, they watched a television program about Yosemite and decided they needed to live there someday. Their stories were fascinating and beautiful, and I won’t do them the injustice of trying to summarize their love affair with the park in my blog – they do a wonderful job of it themselves, and that is, of course, the beauty of oral history.

But I do have to share a moment that I really feel has been one of the most powerful of my life thus far, and it came when Lee spoke of his role in leading the National Park Service investigation of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The spill affected four national parks in Alaska. Lee spoke of how at 6:00 every morning, he and his team walked out onto the beaches to collect samples from the bodies of sea birds, fish, sea otters, and other marine life that washed up onto the sand. Lee estimates that on an average morning, three or four thousand dead and dying animals were left on every beach by the retreating tides. The team specifically chose the animals that were in their last death throes, because the samples they took would be the freshest, and thus the most damning.

Lee explained that every ship that transports oil uses a specific formula of additives in the oil that it carries. The samples his team took were tested for the chemical fingerprint of the Exxon Valdez. This had to happen because Exxon claimed that the oil spreading throughout the Prince William Sound was not necessarily from their ship, because other ships in the area could be leaking oil as well. Of the thousands of samples Lee and his team took, two came back not matching the chemical fingerprint of the Exxon Valdez. In the end, Lee’s team filled over 80 volumes with evidence ranging from test results to photographs. After two years of investigation, the NPS case against Exxon was set to go to trial. Lee was packing to fly to where the trial was going to be held when he got word that after examining the evidence NPS had gathered to use against them, Exxon had settled the case out of court.

Lee relayed all of these infuriating, heartbreaking details with such composure. He held up his photographs of oil-coated, nearly unrecognizable sea otters and bears for the camera. He spoke of scraping oil from the bodies of dying animals with precisely detailed, scientific calm. He was testifying for us, in full professional cop mode. When we finished that segment, we turned the camera off to give Lee a break. He took a drink of water and looked down at the pile of photographs in his lap. Then he said, “You know, it was good that they brought so many of us in from the lower forty-eight to work on this thing. The folks from the Alaska parks were never able to make it through a meeting without losing their composure. When they saw photos like these, it’s as if this was happening to their family. No one should have to deal with that kind of thing in their own park.” For a brief moment, Lee the investigator was gone, and all that was left was Lee the park ranger, who loved his job because he got to live in, work in, and raise his family in one of the most beautiful places in the world. And Lee the park ranger could say what Lee the investigator could not; that he understood the heartbreak of the Alaskan park rangers because if it had happened to his park, he would have felt the same way.

Ultimately, the National Park Service was the only government agency to complete an investigation of the Exxon Valdez disaster. According to Lee, the other agencies affected had quit early on because of “pressure from higher up.” The settlement that was reached between NPS and Exxon was one of the largest in legal history. Whatever the amount, it will never be enough.