Tomas Alex Tizon: CORDOVA, ALASKA — By way of telling his story, and the story of this fishing village, Mike Maxwell — born, raised and hoping to die here — wants to talk about what happened to the herring.
They were the little kings of the sea in these parts. They ran so thick in Prince William Sound that some days, it was said, you could walk on the water stepping on their silvery-blue backs.
When the Exxon Valdez spilled its oil in March 1989, the world saw images of blackened seabirds and otters and seals, of bloated whale carcasses and once-pristine beaches covered with crude. Hardly anything was said about the herring.
No one at the time understood the fish's central place in the…
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