MONDAY, MARCH 27
Overnight the winds have raged at up to 73 miles per hour, smearing oil 30 miles out into the sound. Planes can't fly to see just how far it has gone, but word crackles in via fishing vessel radios that the eastern ends of several islands have been hit hard, with oil coating shoreline spruces to a height of 30 or 40 feet. The gale has whipped the oil and water into a froth, which the oilmen call mousse, that can double the volume of a slick. Exxon announces that the stranded tanker has shifted 12 degrees in the wind. Of the million barrels left aboard after the spill, 120,000 have been pumped into the Baton Rouge, with 880,000 left to go.

Steiner and the three fishermen, up all night, have decided to hold a press conference of their own.

"It wasn't exactly a press conference as much as it was an education forum," Grimes will recall later. "We were tired of hearing Exxon tell these nightly bedtime stories to the nation about the harmlessness of biodegradable oil." The press had realized that the locals were angry and the fishermen out of work. They weren't going to hear about that from Exxon, and they weren't going to hear about how oil kills fish, other animals, and aesthetics.

They hold the conference early, right after the news people have eaten breakfast, and it works. The phone at Sea Hawk Seafoods starts ringing off the hook with interview requests. That evening, millions of people will begin to see news features on how oil kills.

Monday afternoon, a coincidental meeting finally catapults the sound's 600 fishermen to the front line. It happens when Lamb and Grimes drop by the state building "to raise Cain" with the DEC. They are peeved about a report that Exxon has sprayed oil dispersant illegally in a herring catchment area.

Says Lamb: "We were standing around jabbing charts and saying how we thought things should be, when Larry Dietrich wanders in and listens for a while."

Dietrich, one of the DEC's two top officials on the spill, has just been told by an angry Governor Cowper to sidestep Exxon, get creative, and do something. In Lamb and Grimes, he creatively sees several hundred fishermen who have boats that can corral oil with strings of floating booms, deliver crews and absorbent cloth to shoreline cleanup sites, haul hardware, and shuttle cages of oil-tainted wildlife,

"You fellows have a minute?" Dietrich asks. "We'd like to get you involved in a group on this thing."

Five minutes later he has the two fishermen behind closed doors. "Listen," he says, "we're going to try to do something. What do you think it should be?"

Lamb goes to the chart of Prince William Sound—there's one on most walls in town these days—and points out the three hatcheries at Port San Juan, Esther Island, and Main Bay. "We have to protect where the most salmon are," Grimes says. "If we save these, in a worst-case scenario we could reseed the natural environment from the hatchery stock."

At midnight, Lamb, Grimes, and Steiner—along with Riki Ott, a marine biologist and a board member of Cordova District Fishermen's United—are ushered into the presence of the oil spill brass: Exxon Shipping President Iarossi, DEC Commissioner Kelso, Coast Guard Ad­miral E. Nelson, Jr., and their respective lieutenants.

Kelso, of course, knows that the fishermen are coming; but the oil executive and the admiral at first "looked at us like, `Who are these nobodies?'" says Grimes. "Then pretty soon Jack is telling them how the water flushes in here and flushes out there, and I'm telling them how the sound is a Gaian heart, and Rick and Riki are giving them some impressive biology, and they're leaning forward in their seats to see the chart better, and they start asking us questions ..."

In the odd late-night lucidity, the fishermen and the bureaucratic muscle realize together that there is no way to halt the spreading slick. "That shouldn't stop us from acting, though," says Steiner. "What we have to do is focus on something else, something that is based on a probability of success. We can defend with success if we put all our effort into a few key defenses: here at the hatcheries, here at the herring catchments of Herring Bay and Snug Harbor, here along the northwest shore of Montague Island, and at the mouths of a few escapement streams."

"When there's nothing you can do," says Grimes, "you're freed from limitations. You can go for it."

When the meeting ends at 3 a.m., Dietrich pulls the Cordovans aside. "OK, folks, you're in. You tell us what you need and somebody'll get it.

Steiner and Grimes are too exhausted to drive back to Sea Hawk Seafoods, so after everyone else leaves they stretch out on the DEC's kitchen floor. For half an hour it's quiet. Then Grimes asks the darkness, "You know what happened in there?"

"They put us in charge," says Steiner.

"We walk in like bums off the street," says Grimes.

"In the same clothes we've worn for days," says Steiner, "and they put us in charge."

Simultaneously, the two men start to giggle. They won't be able to stop.

"Listen, Admiral," says Steiner through his tears. "I'll tell you what I want."

"Yessir, yessir," says Grimes in the admiral's voice.

"And Frank," says Steiner to the memory of Iarossi, "we need booms. Lots of booms and lots of helicopters."

At first light, Roy Corral beaches the Pagan's skiff on Ingot Island. The oil ashore is deep, more than a foot deep in depressions, and has been splattered by high winds up among the rocks and spruce. Ashore, he sees no life, no death. There is only the sticky silence, broken by the chugging of the Pagan out in the bay, where crew members Ian Payne and Torie Baker work to contain a patch of sludge within the loop of an absorbent boom. Then Corral realizes that one of the oil-covered rocks he is looking at is not a rock at all. With a stick, he lifts the body of a cormorant that looks as if it has been dipped in molasses. He scans the beach. It is covered with lumps, some obviously rocks, some now obviously not.

After a while he climbs up to a high grassy point from which he watches and photographs flock after flock of floundering seabirds, families of otters, small herds of blackened sea lions on rocks, the futile efforts of Payne and Baker against a mere drop in a wasteland of oil. When he finally lowers the camera and walks away, he knows that he will be a rabid environmentalist for the rest of his life.