Lovers of otters

Sierra, Sept-Oct, 1992 by Nancy Lord

Alaska's Kachemak Bay was a sullen gray, lumpy with whitecaps. I walked the beach, collar turned up, arms folded. Just offshore a gang of seagulls screeched and dove, following a driftlog. When the log rose on the next swell I saw it was not a log at all but a sea otter. Floating high on his back, using his chest as a table, he was leisurely pulling apart and eating something, a small crab perhaps. The gulls, flying at him with legs outstretched, were not attempting to land, but to snatch whatever bits of shell and scrap fell into the water.

The otter turned his furry, round, whiskered, button-eyed face toward me. Too cute, I thought. Don't fall for it. Cuteness is no measure of worth.

It's not that I dislike sea otters, but seeing one this drab day brought to mind the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Though Bligh Reef is some 400 miles off, oil from the disastrous grounding eventually washed into this bay in tarry pancakes. Three and a half years later I was still angry, and still uncomfortable with the otter's singled-out role as victim, as poster child of the spill. Less endearing animals and plants never gripped the public's heartstrings: Who ever shed a tear for a clam or a jellyfish, for a herring or a piece of eelgrass, for eagle eggs that went unlaid?

I watched the otter and wondered who was still paying attention, even to otters. The nation's televisions long ago tuned to new disasters. The scientific reports, dubbed "litigation sensitive" by lawyers, disappeared into secrecy. The long-term damage was hard to see in the oil industry's all-is-well photos.

But it was there--in fewer of a plant species on one shore, smaller plants on another, rocks bare of barnacles and mussels, empty bird nests, missing whales, carcasses of prime-age sea otters showing up on beaches. The official word from the government about otters is that "the observed changes in the age distributions of dying sea otters, continued declines in abundance, higher juvenile mortality, and higher mortality and lower pupping rates suggest a prolonged, spill-related effect on the western Prince William Sound sea otter population." That's death, death, death, and death--still.

And now fall, a time of stress when plants and animals that hadn't thrived during the short burst of summer were likely to die. Throughout Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska, many species were still coping with the spilled oil, adjusting to changes in available food and habitat, using their limited energy to metabolize hydrocarbons.

The otter dove, then reappeared, riding high on his back. He rubbed his paws through his fur, over his sides, his chest, his face and head, in a vigorous washing motion. The fluffing, I knew, filled his thick coat with the air that provides insulation and keeps water, in normal conditions, from ever reaching his skin. He rolled sideways now, spinning, fluffing, grooming his coat to perfection.

Despite my resistance, I found myself warming to the otter's behavior and, yes, to his cuteness. Like anyone else, I respond to individual animals, to what I can see. It's harder to feel for them as a species, harder still to muster compassion and enthusiasm for every rockweed plant, sea star, and diatom. Ultimately we can only connect with and care about what we have come to love.

Sculling with his tail, still trailed by harassing gulls, the otter backpaddled off along the beach. Cuteness is not such a problem, I decided. The problem is in making the connections: cute otter to clean-and-fed otter, clean-and-fed otter to unpolluted ocean, unpolluted ocean to personal responsibility for the very survival of our planet. We could do worse than be lovers of otters.

When I looked again, the otter was gone. Waves broke along the shore, pushing and pulling tangled ropes of burgundy-colored kelp, washing over the long, whitened backbone of a large fish. I breathed the smells of cool bone, damp wood, moldering seaweed: a bay still rich with life, another fall.