A visit to Alaska is an experience as much spiritual as physical. Envi­ronmentally, Prince William Sound is only occasionally a friendly place. Its 3,500 miles of ragged shoreline, its ring of icy alps, its frigid seas are as dangerous as they are lovely. Until now, we have gone there not so much because we wanted to rub elbows with beachcombing grizzlies or to swim in water cold enough to kill us in a few minutes, but because it was one of the earth's few remaining islands of innocence. It was a bastion of clean water and misty island distances, of breaching killer whales and loafing otters and red-eyed loons. It had a solitude that triggered primal memories that made us want to beat our chests; if we wanted to yodel, no one would hear.

Within two weeks of Good Friday, black sludge will plug a length of Alaskan shoreline roughly equal to the entire coast of California. Much of the oil is still out there. No one knows how much death will accumulate beyond the thousands of birds and mammals killed during the first week after the spill. We suppose that Prince William Sound will be around for the long haul; it may someday recover. But its innocence is forever lost, a victim of our complacent greed.

From Valdez and nearby Cordova, 600 fishermen normally ply the waters of the sound for salmon, herring, halibut, and Dungeness crabs. For them, and for the others who live there, it was that corruption of innocence that was the hardest to endure. What you and I have visited, they have nurtured. They fought the pipeline, they fought the terminal and the supertanker traffic, and they sued, time and again, to fight the practices that allowed 40 lesser spills and leakages into the sound over the past 12 years.

For five days after North America's worst environmental catastrophe, the fishermen stood ready to help but were frustratingly excluded as official efforts steadily lost ground. When their chance finally came, they had to settle for winning a few tiny but critical battles in a war they knew had already been lost.

This is a small part of the story of those five days.