Soaring with David Gessner

Into the Gulf, Day 11: Atlantis, the Basin, and the Sinking of Cities

Daily reports on the BP disaster on the Gulf

"War is over," sang John Lennon in different times.

"Oil is over," sang The New York Times a week ago Wednesday, heralding those two terrifically reliable sources, NOAA and BP, and letting us know that all was hunky dory down in the Gulf.  "It was too late to get the reactions of environmentalists," the paper added nonchalantly, which meant they basically passed along the government report as fact, propagating the new myth of the not-so-bad oil spill.  Only 25 % of the oil remains!  Um, but isn't that 25% ten times more oil than spilled during the Valdez?  Yes, but this is different, this is oil you can't see!  This oil only seems to be clinging to crab larvae and other out-of-sight stuff at the bottom of the ocean.  And anyway why are you still writing about this: don't you realize that the news cycle is officially over.

In fact everyone outside of the Gulf states is so upbeat that even hurricane season no longer seems the oily nightmare it was once envisioned to be.  Bring it on, we say, since we don't live here.  If there's really no oil out there then it won't be any worse than a normal hurricane season.

Oh yeah, we remember now.  Those normal hurricane seasons can be kind of bad....

Ryan Lambert has a plaque for being the first person to return to Buras after Katrina.  He also has a waterline in his lodge up above the stuffed animal heads that shows where the water finally settled, over twenty feet up.  He is one of the people who is not quite ready to buy into the new rosy Gulf narrative.  Recently he refused to organize and participate in the sports fishing tournament (with a free boat as a prize) that BP tried to sponsor as part of its all-is-well campaign.

By the way, here is what Ryan did on the day that Katrina hit.  He had been out fishing a day or two before, back when it looked like just another storm.  That was before it hit Florida and started speeding across the gulf on a beeline, as if it were seeking hasty reservations at Ryan's lodge.  "I've had a bullseye on my back for while now," he said of the oil and Katrina, but never was that bullseye quite as prominent as the day the storm hit, when his home would essentially be the touch-down point.  When this started to become apparent he loaded up his truck with what was most important, his guns and rods.  But as he was about to leave he got a call from a Mr. Bayle, a Vietnamese man who had worked for him for 14 years, who said, "My truck's broken."  When Ryan said that this was the real thing and Bayle had to get himself and his wife out of there, Bayle replied: "We old."  So Ryan drove by and scooped up the Bayles, who only carried a rosary and a picture of Jesus.  "We live now," said Bayle's wife.  They would survive but their house would not.  When they returned, weeks later, it was upside down in the middle of the road.

"People would come back with trucks and trailers to look for their stuff," said Ryan.  "And they would leave with a baggie."

This was the start of a very long day.  When Ryan finally made his way back to Lafayette, he got a phone call from his sister who said "Uncle Rich is trapped in the city.  He's got a broken ankle."  All the cell phones were out because the towers were knocked down but the land lines were working even as the water started to rise.  "I'm coming to get you," Ryan said to his uncle.  "I have no idea when I'm going to be there.  It might be midnight or it might be two in the morning.  But just know I'm coming.  Just go upstairs because if you get in that water and drown you're done."

His wife said you can't do this.  And he said what do you mean?  This is what I do for a living.  I hunt and I guide.  Now I got a license to do it.  So Ryan grabbed four or five guns and hitched up his boat and threw his bicycle in the back of the truck.  He drove down through St. John the Baptist Parish to St. Charles and somehow talked the policemen into escorting him across the 310 bridge into the city.  There was no light once he crossed the bridge and to stay above the water he rode downtown on top of the levee.  He had four wheel drive of course and every time he hit some obstacle on the levee he'd drive down the hill to the river road, driving over and under downed power lines.  It was pitch dark with no lights except those on his truck.  Finally he cut up Causeway Boulevard and started heading into Metairie.  When he got to the water it was really not enough to launch his boat but was too much for his truck.  So he grabbed his flashlight and a couple of guns and waded in.  On the way to his house, he saw nobody except for some National Guard people here and there on some high ground.  When he got to the house he beat on its side until a little flashlight came on and an upstairs window opened.  "Bogale, that you?" his uncle asked.  The old man then threw down the keys to his truck, that was on high ground and Ryan backed it up to the window, where his uncle could climb down along a pipe into the truckbed.  They drove slowly out through the submerged and deserted streets, the truck kicking up a substantial wake, and ditched the old truck for Ryab's once they reached it.  Then it was back up on the Levee.  They made it home about four in the morning.

I followed the same general route when I first drove into New Orleans, driving below the Levee on River Road and stopping a few times to walk up over the hump of grass to see the river, which sloshed against the hill with a brown, algal soup of microbial humus and Big Gulp cups.  The next morning I went birdwatching in the lower 9th Ward and saw two yellow crowned night herons on top of the wall that had cracked and flooded the famous, or infamous, neighborhood.  Many places still hadn't been re-built and there was an overgrown green jungle feel to the roads closest to the water, lots lush with tall grass and ferns.  Roofs and doors were still off some of the plywood houses where the water had come rushing through in a great wave.  A black snake with silvery marking crossed the road and marsh grasses grew so high it was hard to see around the corner.  I must have looked funny walking through the neighborhood with my binoculars around my neck.   On the drive out I stopped to talk to two women who appeared to be moving into a new house.  One of the women, Glennis, who had had her house completely destroyed by Katrina, was finally moving back from Texas.  She pointed at a green house that looked like an amphibious boat, which, it turned out, had been paid for by Brad Pitt as part of his project to restore the lower 9th. The Wall that Broke Open (with one yellow-crowned night heron on top).

"I don't like the way it looks," she said.  "But I like having a roof over my head."

She also pointed at the wall that still held back the water and speculated on why it had broken during Katrina.

"They say a boat hit it and cracked it open," she said.  "But I think they blew it up on purpose to flood us out."

I nodded and let that one sit.  When I asked about the oil she did not seem overly concerned.  She had other worries.

A storm was coming but the people at French 75 seemed no more worried than Glennis had been about the oil.  I sipped my Daisy on my last night in New Orleans as the customers scoffed at the notion that anything as puny as tropical storm Bonnie could scare people as tough and storm-scarred as themselves.  They turned out to be right, but as the nervousness under their bravado revealed, you never know with storms out in the Gulf.  Especially when you have just come off, as Bill McKibben recently pointed out, the warmest decade, warmest six months, and warmest April, May, and June on record.  (And I can testify that July has been no slouch.)  We all know that this will not be the season's last storm.   And as for a big one it's only a matter of time.

Over the last few years, before I came down here, I've made a study of sinking cities, including towns on the Outer Banks where the trophy houses seem to be migrating out to sea and the streets of lower Manhattan, that in some areas are only five feet above sea level.  A couple of years ago I drove out to Topsail Island, just twenty miles north of where I live, with the coastal geologist Orrin Pilkey.  Orrin pointed out the multi-story hotels and condos that perched over the eroding beach, dipping their toes over the scarp line, as if ready to dive into the Atlantic.

"These buildings don't have a chance," he said.  "One big storm from the right direction and they're done."

We passed Hot-Diggedy Dogz and a dozen other tacky beach stores-with signs that employed the subtle substitution of "K"s for "C"s, like "Krazy Krabs"-but the sign that really caught my eye was a small hand-painted one that said, with no explanation, "Atlantis."  A mile farther another appeared: "Atlantis" in simple blue letters.  I made a mental note of the signs though their real significance didn't hit until Orrin and I parked at the northernmost public access point and walked down to the beach.   And there it was.  Atlantis.  Or at least the beginnings of Atlantis.

If any place seemed a physical manifestation and confirmation of Orrin's warnings about the coast it was the northern end of Topsail Island.  Far out on the low tide sand, where you might expect to walk picking up shells or sea glass, stood large abandoned homes on stilts.  Below the buildings, hundreds of sandbags leaned against the stilts, though to call them "bags" is to not get the point across. They were enormous, ten feet long and terrifically ugly, great lumpish loaves that transformed the beach into a war zone.  Farther out water washed over the sandbags and waves sloshed in the spaces beneath the houses.  Useless electrical wires and pink insulation hung limp from the buildings' undersides.  The houses themselves, stranded out on the low tide beach, distanced from their usual surroundings of roads and neighboring homes and telephone poles, had the look of sci-fi space stations, floating far away from earth.  Stairs ran down off the houses and hung in the air, hovering above the water, and "Condemned: Do Not Enter" signs shone orange in the windows.  It was a truly wild sight, no less wild for the fact that the structures were manmade.

The sheer incongruity of seeing those water houses was startling, and maybe a little thrilling.  You got the sense of something massively out of place, and maybe knew a little how Charlton Heston's character felt coming upon the Stature of Liberty on the beach at the end of Planet of the Apes.

Water Houses.

"Holy shit," I muttered.

Orrin mentioned that if the more dire predictions for sea level rise came true, all of North Carolina's barrier islands would be underwater by the end of the century.  This was of some concern for me, as I happened to live on a barrier island.  A few months later we traveled together to another island, not a barrier island this time but a chunk of glaciated bedrock, home, not to a few thousand people, but to eight million.

New York City had never felt as primal as it did that day, touring it with Orrin.  We noted how the grided streets would act as sluiceways leading water from the rivers into and through the city and tried to imagine water cascading down into the subways.  Most primal of all was ground zero, a name that takes on different meaning when you realize how close it is to sea level.  All those years after the attack and the scene still seemed chaotic.  A car ramp led down into a chasm of gray cement walls and Porto-Pottys and erector set bridges and temporary worker trailers and staging and tattered American flags and piles of garbage.  This was just about the lowest elevation in the whole city, land that had once been in the water and might be again.  I imagined describing the particular configuration of land and water to a geographer, while stripping it of its specific over-populated locale.  What, I would ask, would you call a great chasm less than five feet above sea level that is also less than a quarter mile from a rising body of water?  Well, the geographer would answer, I know what I will soon call it: a lake.

In fact geographers and scientists already have a name for this lower tip of Manhattan, a name that graphically suggests how it might fare in the face of sea level rise and a powerful storm.  The Basin, it is officially called.  One of those scientists, Klaus Jacob, a Columbia geophysicist who is working on the city's Climate Change report, has gone even further.  He calls it The Bathtub.  Many New Yorkers used this name for the excavated Ground Zero site itself during the days before re-builidng, due to its tendency to fill up with water after rainstorms, but Jacob believes the name fits the whole of lower Manhattan.

What will happen if the seas rise as many predict they will?  Most obviously the Bathtub will fill to the brim.  Standing there that day I felt an odd conflation of disasters.  9-11 melded with Katrina.  Strange how our modes of apocalypse shift, like styles of clothes.  You rarely hear anxiety about nuclear winter any more, and the fears of terrorism have waned since the attack.  But other worries have filled the void.  Katrina signaled a shift in which nature itself began to play the role of the heavy.  Nature, and of course us, the great manipulators of nature.  And what is sea level rise if not the result of our use of oil and other fossil fuels?  It seems all strangely connected, both natural and un-.  I think of a trip I made to Belize, to a village called Monkey River Town, seven months after the towers fell.  Everywhere people talked about the great tragedy that had struck the fall before, but they weren't talking about September 11th.  The date they kept mentioning was October 9th, the day that Hurricane Iris, a category 4 storm, had slammed into the coast of southern Belize with winds in excess of 140 per hour, killing dozens and leaving 10,000 homeless.

Manhattan is safer than Belize, and safer than New Orleans, thanks to the cooler waters off its coasts, giving hurricanes less energy to feed off.  But New York has seen its share of storms.  In 1821 a category 4 hurricane hit New York City directly, raising a storm surge of 13 feet in an hour, cutting the island in half, and flooding the entire city.  In 1938 the famous storm known as the Long Island Express hit the coast with a storm surge 25 to 35 feet high.  Perhaps most relevant to today is Hurricane Donna which struck New York on September 12, 1960 with 90 mile an hour winds and five inches of rain.  The images of Donna help one imagine the storms to come: people in lower Manhattan trudging through waist-deep water, others floating along in rowboats. The U.S. States Landfalling Hurricane Project predicts that there is a 90% probability that the New York/Long Island area will be hit with a category 3 hurricane over the next fifty years.  But the truth is that as sea levels rise it won't even take a hurricane to flood lower Manhattan.  A strong enough Nor'easter will easily do the trick.  That is why hurricane experts see New York,  despite the relatively low odds of a major storm, as the country's second most dangerous major city, behind only the hurricane bulls-eye of Miami and just ahead of New Orleans.  Consider that all three major New York airports, as well as the rail, and most obviously the subway, are less than ten feet above sea level, and storm surge predictions for a category 3 hurricane top twenty feet in most locations.  That puts JFK ten feet under water.

There are all sorts of plans to prevent this, but they sound a lot like the usual plans to prevent weather and seas and winds.  Boys with Toys again.  One plan involves building three large barriers at the Verrazano Narrows, Arthur Kill, and Throgs Neck, barriers that will theoretically shield Manhattan in the manner of the Eastern Scheldt barrier that protects the Netherlands.  But beyond staggering costs is the question of their potential effectiveness.  One man who questions how much good barriers would do it Klaus Jacob, the same Columbia geophysicist who likes to call Lower Manhattan the Bathtub.  Jacob, playing the Orrin Pilkey role in New York, is deeply skeptical about dikes and barriers; he thinks that barriers or walls will just give people a false sense of security.  "The higher the defense, the deeper the floods," he has written.

Jacob is one of the few people who has really thought hard about what a major hurricane would do to New York.  Unlike most of us, he has little problem envisioning, and describing, the devastation.  He sees streets like rivers, flooded subways, and little chance for true evacuation, a Katrina but with millions more people.  His only practical solution sounds a lot like the solution that Orrin has suggested for the Outer Banks.  Get the hell out of low-lying areas.

In fact Jacob has already suggested the same to the residents of New Orleans.  Not long after Katrina, he caused a stir by writing one of the first papers that proposed that it was foolish to rebuild New Orleans.  The idea might have been politically controversial, but Jacob argued that it was also innately commonsensical given sea level rise and the fact that parts of New Orleans are actually ten feet under sea level.  Why spend a hundred billion dollars to re-build when the odds are it's going to happen again fairly soon?   He wrote: "Some of New Orleans could be transformed into a ‘floating city' using platforms not unlike the oil platforms off-shore, or, over the short term, a city of boathouses, to allow floods to fill in the ‘bowl' with fresh sediment."  New Orleans, he went on, would soon become an "American Venice."

Which sounds nice in theory.  But what if you happen to live here? 

On my last morning in the city I drive out to Chalmette, where the town was completely submerged and the bulb of the giant water tank blew off its great stem and bobbed around like a beach ball.  I stop to fill my tank and then take a break to talk to the guy who is sitting on the bench outside the service station.  His name is Joe and his house was completely destroyed in Katrina.  It wasn't the first time.  His home had been destroyed by a hurricane in 1965.

"That was hurricane Betsy and my little daughter was one month old.  I remember it was '65 because the next time my house got wiped out she was forty."

He shakes his head slowly.

"If it happens again I'm leaving and not coming back," he said.

We shake hands and say goodbye.  But then as I start to walk back to my car he adds one more thing.

"Of course that's what I said the last time," he admits.

• Into the Gulf, Day 1: Baptism at Tarball Beach
• Into the Gulf, Day 2: Corexit, Ospreys and Tarball Wars
• Into the Gulf, Day 3: A Dawn Walk
• Into the Gulf, Day 4: Of Fishermen and Forms
• Into the Gulf, Day 5: Ecotones and Barriers
• Into the Gulf, Day 6: The Green Sun Rises
• Into the Gulf, Day 7: Castles & Shanties
• Into the Gulf, Day 8: The River
• Into the Gulf, Day 9: Field Notes from an EPA Meeting
• Into the Gulf, Day 10: In Search of the Oiled Pelican
  

Leave a comment »

Into the Gulf, Day 10: In Search of the Oiled Pelican

Daily reports on the BP disaster on the Gulf

I knew pelicans before they were famous.  I started studying them when I first moved to the South, seven years ago now, and after a couple of years here I wrote an essay about the birds, and about my daughter and learning to surf, for Orion magazine.  As I observed and read about pelicans, I learned how much water their enormous gular pouches can hold (21 pints or 17 and a half pounds), what they sound like (nothing, they are more or less mute), and even got to see a newborn emerge from its shell (disgusting and beautiful at the same time).  What I didn't and couldn't know was that some years off in the future, pelicans, particularly the oiled variety, would become the media darlings of one of the worst eco disasters in this country's history.   What I didn't know was that, while the egrets and laughing gulls and tricolored herons bristled with resentment, pelicans would claim center stage.

I've got nothing against my old friend, Pelecanus occidentalis.  It's just that the problem with telling the story of the spill in broad and simple strokes, as the national media has almost laughably done, as a kind of adventure story fit for Boy's Life-will they cap the well?  Will they fire the evil BP guy?  Look there's lots of oil!  Oh, now there's not so much oil-- is that once the obvious symbols go away the media can too.  They can say "Look there aren't so many oiled pelicans anymore," and then do exactly what the New York Times did a few days ago, and announce that it turns out the whole oil thing isn't so bad anymore.  Okay, back to business everyone.  Maybe a better, if less sexy, symbol than pelicans would be those periwinkles I saw in Grand Bay with Bill Finch.  They may not look good on the cover of a magazine but they get at the point of what this whole thing is about, what Finch called "connectivity issues."  The latest news on the connectivity front is that oil and dispersant droplets have been found on almost all the blue crab larvae that scientists have studied in the Gulf of Mexico.

From Buras I headed north to New Orleans, which is kind of an oiled pelican in its own right.  If I was joking about egrets resenting pelicans, then I am deadly serious when I say that Alabamans and Mississippians resent Louisianans for getting most of the media attention, and therefore most of the money, and that within Louisiana itself the rest of the state resents New Orleans for the same reason.  It took me almost two hours of driving north to reach New Orleans, which gets at one of the most common misconceptions about the place.  If you are like me you picture the city as a whole lot closer to the Gulf, and the oil, than it really is, and though I don't want to take anything away from a citizenry that has endured more pain than Job, the consideration of the spill seemed somewhat more theoretical than it did down in Buras, despite the obvious impacts on tourism and seafood.  I stayed at the first hotel I saw after pulling into the French Quarter,  The Maison Dupuy, and soon found myself having a drink at a wonderfully cool (I still wasn't using air conditioning in the car and before I changed my sweat-stained shirt it looked like it had been tie dyed) bar called French 75.   There I discovered a delightful drink, white rum and fruit and herbs, that I would order every night of my stay and then sit back and savor it, imagining myself to be a kind of Hemingway figure, masculine and romantic.  When I asked what it was they said something like "Pisco," which was actually the name of the rum, and it wasn't until the last night of my trip that I learned the real name of drink, a name that quickly burst my macho pretensions.  My drink was called a "Daisy."

My host at the bar was an outgoing and generous man named Kristian Sonnier, who was a regular and was therefore a pal of French 75's renowned bartender, Chris, a bald man with thick black framed glasses who strutted about the place in a white suit coat and black bow tie.  Chris fed me my Daisies and then my delicious Cornish game hen and these perfect little fries (excuse me, pomme frites) that looked like their middles had been inflated with a tiny bicycle pump.  I probably weighed about fifty pounds more than Kristian, but I noticed that as we shifted to beer and I started slowing down, he started picking up the drinking pace, something that I noted in every New Orleanian I encountered.   We took "walking beers" through the French Quarter and headed down to the river in search of the King of the Oiled Pelicans.  Kristian said the King was to be found in his natural spot-lighted habitat by the water, espousing about the spill, which the locals found comical since the oil was nowhere near their city.  But the locals also loved the King, and the attention he shone on their city, and that love was apparent as we closed in on the CNN truck.  Near the truck a small crowd had gathered to watch the white-haired man in the too- tight black T-shirt as he delivered his newscast.

David and Anderson Cooper.

My host the next night, who was somewhat more cantankerous than Kristian, would call Anderson Cooper "the biggest shit stain on the water."  I could see it, the whole phony baloney, superstar, simplistic take on  complicated issues.  But Kristian was more philosophical: "Of course it's kind of funny that he's broadcasting from the river, a hundred miles from the action.  But he gives voice to the people's anger.  He has Billy Nungesser on quite a lot for instance."  And, to his credit, Cooper, when he finished broadcasting, came over to where our small crowd stood and shook hands with the men and hugged the women.  If there was an edge of Beatlemania to it, the man did his best to conduct himself with dignity, signing things and getting his picture taken and when asked about a good place to get a drink suggesting a street outside of the Quarter (which, after all, is the oiled pelican of the city's neighborhoods) that Kristian said was a good, insider's call.  The only truly embarrassing moment was when some college kids began to slather over the poor man.  One particularly enthusiastic (drunken) boy went on and on about how much he loved "Anderson" and how he wanted to be him when/if he grew up, and after he got his picture taken next to his man went skipping off down toward the river, lifted on the wings of celebrity ecstasy.  That's when I saw my chance.   "I can't profess my love for you," I said.  "But how about a picture?"  At which point, just like the college boy, I threw my arm around him.

I worry about the disconnect between our stories and our realities.  I think of watching TV in the Cajun Lodge in Buras with Ryan, the Ocean Doctor and his brother Alan, and the Cousteau gang.  We were kind of embarrassed to be sitting there, after having spent the day out on the water, but there was also a kind of unacknowledged giddiness: would our story of heading out in the boat and sampling oysters and fish for contaminants, a story that had after all just happened, also be the lead story on the nightly news?  When the first couple of segments passed, and the focus turned to Chelsea's wedding, their was a palpable deflation in the room.  Our story wasn't the story.  We hadn't made it.  Had the whole day been a waste?

It was the only time since I've been down here that I watched a network news show and I did so with fascination.  First of all it was kind of funny, the whole over-the-top primary color thing, as if they were talking to children.  But more than that was the fact that what they were saying bore almost no resemblance to any of the stories I was finding as I explored the place.  In that way it was truly extraordinary.  There is a particular danger right now since the new oiled pelican is that there are no oiled pelicans.  It's dumbfounding to watch the media nod and accept BP's magic trick of disersants, as if oil out of sight means no oil at all.

But now I must end with a confession.  It's fine and healthy to mock simplistic thinking and all things cliché, but one danger is in building up calluses and no longer recognizing the authentic.  Because, as it turns out, my most authentic moment down in Buras, the moment when I felt the deepest empathy for the animal victims of this tragedy, came when watching none other than oiled pelicans.

It happened on my second to last night in Buras, at the animals hospital not far from where I was staying, an impromptu MASH unit in a large aluminum shed where everything-trash cans, barrels of fish to feed the birds, towels, and the boxes that held the birds themselves-was labeled either "oiled" or "not oiled."  The Cousteau crew was there to film their rescue of a tricolored heron, and they had let me join them, though I soon wandered off on my own down the rows of plywood boxes that held the birds.  On the first box was a sign that said "Escape artist-be careful," though I couldn't see inside to determine who the avian Houdini was.  But it was the second box that stopped me in my tracks.  Inside were five or six pelicans, huddled together, obviously stunned with fear, their great sword-like bills pulled into their chests.  They had come in just that afternoon, it turned out, and they clearly didn't know where they were, though they knew it was terrifying.  Their excrement mixed with oil stains on the white sheet below them and a small tub of fish went untouched.   They were too black for pelicans, and when one stretched out its three foot long wing, it looked more like the wing of an osprey or eagle.  I stared into one bird's black eyes.  I had always seen pelicans as a kind of symbol of imperturbability, since they seemed so much more stolid than the other birds I spent time watching.  But this bird was clearly perturbed.  It made a point to keep contact with another of the enormous birds, its fellow prisoner.  Its expression seemed to say "What the hell has happened to me?"

I stayed with the birds for a while, until one vet, tired of writers and photographers and camera people, decided it was time for us all to leave.  I had been surprised before how accommodating the vets had been when we first arrived, explaining what they were doing and answering questions while cleaning off oiled birds with Q-tips.  But now they, or at least this one vet, had had enough.  The Cousteau crew had been trying to film the triage being performed on the tricolored heron they'D brought in, and they were the most polite and least obtrusive of crews, but they were now being hustled out of there.  And while it would have been nice to film the complete journey of the bird that they had rescued, you couldn't help but empathize with the vets.  By that point everyone in Buras must have been sick of being filmed or written about.  It could be fun at times, energizing, like drinking six cups of coffee and running around in a house of mirrors.  But the vet was right: enough was enough.  It was time, at least temporarily, to expel those of us who were stalking the oiled pelican, and get back to the real work of tending to actual birds.

• Into the Gulf, Day 1: Baptism at Tarball Beach
• Into the Gulf, Day 2: Corexit, Ospreys and Tarball Wars
• Into the Gulf, Day 3: A Dawn Walk
• Into the Gulf, Day 4: Of Fishermen and Forms
• Into the Gulf, Day 5: Ecotones and Barriers
• Into the Gulf, Day 6: The Green Sun Rises
• Into the Gulf, Day 7: Castles & Shanties
• Into the Gulf, Day 8: The River
• Into the Gulf, Day 9: Field Notes from an EPA Meeting

2 comments »

Into the Gulf, Day 9: Field Notes from an EPA Meeting

Daily reports on the BP disaster on the Gulf

At Table Three, the Louisiana Spirit Coastal Recovery Counseling Program is handing out blue rubber “stress balls,” though I don’t see a lot of fishermen squeezing the little toys. I take one anyway, occasionally tossing it in the air as I walk around the EPA meeting that is being held just around the corner from where I’m staying, in the Buras Auditorium, a place that usually holds high school productions of “the Importance of Being Earnest” but today houses the Surgeon General, hundreds of angry fishermen, and half the reporters in the known world.

I am not acting as a reporter tonight but as a naturalist and, having pocketed my stress ball, I scribble notes and sketches in my journal, noting characteristics in the way of my breed. You can tell the real reporters, even when they are not jamming a microphone in someone’s face, because they are generally better looking than regular humans, and they speak with vaguely English accents, though most just hail (to paraphrase Roth’s Lonoff) from the country of pretentious.

Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish, of which Buras is a part, has become a lead character in the spill drama, in part courtesy of much face time with Anderson Cooper, and has tried to fashion himself as the voice of the people. He kicks off the meeting with a short, actually a very short, introduction. Nungesser has a kind of Colombo affect, disheveled, occasionally apologetic about his own flaws in a way that really carries some charm and effectiveness, with sleeves rolled up in a way that says, “I’m still one of you even if I’ve been on TV a lot lately.” There is a strategy contained in the brevity of his speech, and his quick dispersing of the larger group into smaller ones, each “need” -- counseling, complaints about not being chosen for the Vessel of Opportunity program, compensation questions -- being serviced at different fold-out tables. You get the feeling that if the larger group were to stay large for very long this thing could get out of hand. Already there is some yelling coming from the back of the auditorium, rabble rousing cries of dissent led by one pony-tailed former charter fisherman who seems to be at least partly enjoying the attention.

Billy Nungesser by David Gessner.

Nungesser briskly addresses a couple of the pressing issues. The first is BP’s hiring of outsiders, instead of first turning to those with a local address. The second is the word that BP is estimating how long it will be until things are “back to normal,” and beginning to consider offering settlement packages of two years, perhaps, or three. Nungesser assures them that he is on their side and cautions against jumping at these packages, despite their short-term attractiveness. And finally, he addresses a newly emerging fact that sparks more yelling from the back, the fact that any work they have already done for BP will now work against their overall compensation.

Sweating, gesticulating, apologizing, Nungesser quells what, led by another, might have turned into something close to a riot. Then he hands things off to the Surgeon General, Regina Bejamin, who also plays the “I am one of you” card, which is a little harder sell if you are a large African American woman in what looks like a white naval costume out of Gilbert and Sullivan. I have never really understood why our chief doctor is a “General” and now I’m wondering if “Admiral” wouldn’t be more apt. But whatever her rank, she too works the crowd well, and when I hear she is from Bayou la Batre, the fishing village I visited in Alabama, I understand that she really is part of this crowd.

She is unfailingly chipper during her talk, and remains so when I visit with her after we all break up -- jolly even -- and has a talent that may or may not be just political, that of lavishing attention on you when you talk, or at least appearing to, a talent I have seen before in the best politicians. We talk for ten minutes or so and when I say goodbye she says, “Let me get your name -- I’m going to look for your byline.” Of course she doesn’t actually scribble my name down, an assistant in the same silly white costume does that, but I am effectively charmed, it never having occurred to me that I had something called a “byline” before.

Less upbeat is Timmy, the Vietnamese fisherman who is distraught over the news that BP is already talking about full settlements. He stands with his arms crossed, his face stern and thoughtful.

“What worries me is when they talk about this as being over. When they talk about a ‘final’ settlement package and say they will now estimate how long it will take for the waters and fish to be back to normal. But how can they know that now? They say they will pay us for two years. But what if it takes five or ten years until people want to buy our fish again?”

I decide to put Timmy’s question to Nungesser, who is in front of the room, leaning against a table, handling questions from a vociferous group of fishermen and fishermen’s wives. There is no real line, just a spread-out gang, and it takes me a while to slip my question in, but when I do he turns the high beams of his attention on me. He leans closer, looking like an animated and amiable butcher, and, waving his hands to make his points, launches into this answer:

“That’s exactly why you don’t jump at the packages. We can’t have their scientists, their people, tell us when it’s going to be better. We have to have our own studies, our own scientists, and that will take some time. We can’t be rushed into this thing….”

He goes on, sounding pretty reasonable and caring. I have no idea what skeletons are in his closet -- all politicians have them, right? -- and I know he made some real missteps early on in the crisis, and some people say he has continued to make them, but if I were to judge the man just from tonight he would pass with flying colors.

As the auditorium gradually empties out, I take a seat and sketch those who remain. After a while I call it quits too, and take the short walk over to the Black Pearl, the only restaurant around, which is packed from the meeting. I take a seat at the bar next to a small, intense man with a gold cross dangling from his neck, who is staring hard up at the TV. Soon I am, too, since it proves to be an early documentary (by National Geographic, I think) about the Deepwater explosion and spill. Half the bar is watching, in fact, though most of us are straining to read the captions, since the volume is off. What I notice right away is that the language bristles with military phrases -- with attack, charge, war. In this language, the cropduster spraying the dispersants is a World War I flying ace. It is an action film, that’s for sure, and we are rooting for the good guys, as if there were any. Once again, I think of the little boys who made this mess. And who now insist they are the only ones who can be counted on to respond now that it has happened.

My undercooked steak, comes and between bites I get in a conversation with my neighbor. It turns out he is an ex-professional bullrider who now teaches teenage boys to ride, with an emphasis on the Christian aspects of the sport.

“Any time a kid gets on a bull in the first place it shows they are a man. It is a tremendous act of faith and courage. It’s more than 90% of the people in the world will do. Some people can stay on a bull for eight seconds, but not many can do that and make it look pretty. My job is to help these kids, and if they have a passion and want to do it, to teach them to do it in the safest and best way possible. If they’re doing it for the girls, or for other reasons, then they better not do it. They better do it from the heart.

“I’m interested in building character both inside and outside the ring. I’ve been down some bad roads, and I want to make sure these kids do it different. These are some of the best Christian kids I know. Fear is probably the biggest factor in stopping us from doing what we do. And every time these kids climb on a bull they are fighting fear and showing faith.”

I tell him that it doesn’t sound so different than teaching writing. But while faith is important in my game, too, I admit to my relative godlessness.

“It’s okay,” he says. “God, like you, came from out of town…”

It’s pretty cryptic, and I have no idea what he means really, but I scribble it down in my journal anyway.

It is only when my new friend turns back to the TV that his faith deserts him a little.

“What I seen a couple of years was a grandfather and a son and a grandson, going down a boat in the river, going duck hunting. And right off the bat it struck me that this was something the man had done with his son his whole life and now his son has his son -- the grandson -- and is doing the same thing, and it’s something that they’re going to do every year. Until this. And that way of life could very well end. If we can’t keep this stuff out of our marshes, we’re done.”

We talk a while more and then I finish my steak and say goodbye. I take one last walk down to the river to say goodbye. I’m going to miss this place, I think. I have no true connection to Buras, of course, to this part of the country, and when I leave, after visiting New Orleans for a couple of days, I will be heading home to my wife and daughter and we will buy our first home. So I have every reason to get back, and I’m anxious to do so. But I feel a strange tug in the other direction, too, and I really hate leaving here. Maybe, at this moment in time we are all a part of Plaquemines Parish. Okay, maybe not -- that’s overstatement if not pure bunk. But it is this f___ed up place in this f___ed up time, that I can say, without fear of overstatement, that we are all part of.

Read the series here:

• Into the Gulf, Day 1: Baptism at Tarball Beach
• Into the Gulf, Day 2: Corexit, Ospreys and Tarball Wars
• Into the Gulf, Day 3: A Dawn Walk
• Into the Gulf, Day 4: Of Fishermen and Forms
• Into the Gulf, Day 5: Ecotones and Barriers
• Into the Gulf, Day 6: The Green Sun Rises
• Into the Gulf, Day 7: Castles & Shanties
• Into the Gulf, Day 8: The River

1 comment »

Into the Gulf, Day 8: The River

Daily reports on the BP disaster on the Gulf

These days I take a walk by the Mississippi up along the levee almost every evening.  I have the luxury the local fishermen and oilmen do not, the luxury of letting my mind take a break from the oil.  As I stroll, I think about the book I want to write about all this, since I, like so many people down here -- from the fishermen turned oil boomers to the reporters hoping to advance their careers to the politicians seizing the spotlight to the scientists angling for BP money -- have complex and not always altruistic motives.  In fact, you could argue that my potential book is no less of a Vessel of Opportunity than the boats that putter out each morning.  But there is something else going on during these walks, too, something I didn’t expect.  I am growing genuinely and deeply fond of this place.  Who knew it was going to be so beautiful, this fragile green land, more water than earth, caught between river and sea, with, as is always the case in places of such abundance, birds out the wazoo?

Tonight it is the tree swallows that are putting on the show, carving up the air as they swoop after the evening insects (including one breed of dinosaurian dragonfly that looks as big as they are).  From up here on the hump that sometimes struggles to contain it, the river looks muddy, caged-in, powerful.  These swallows -- which are everywhere now -- with their blue backs and orange bodies, appear particularly muscular, though they aren’t likely any different than the ones I see at home.  There is heat and the blare of crickets and sagging willows and reeds as tall as trees.  I stare down from my grassy hump, away from the river, at the homes of the brave souls who are building just on the other side of the levee.  One house is hexagonal and up on stilts, fifteen or sixteen feet off the ground at the base of the first floor.  Not quite high enough if the number that gets thrown around down here is accurate: twenty-two feet the water rose during Katrina.   

Mississippi River deltaAs much as anyone or anything, the river has done its part to keep the oil at bay, pushing back against the Gulf’s inward surge, but that might change once its seasonal strength wanes.  The Mississippi, seen from above, from a helicopter with the Cousteau gang, say, looks like a sinuous brown snake, but once it gets down below here, past Venice, it snakes, not through fields and meadows, but through the sinking marsh itself.  Which creates the strange and vivid picture of fresh water, barely hemmed in on each side by green, weaving through salt water.  If it were not hemmed in, it would spread out naturally, like a watery hand, feeding the marshes with nutrients it has gathered during its powerful crawl and sludge from Minnesota down through the country’s middle and finally, to the Gulf.   “Free the Mississippi,” is the rallying cry of Ryan Lambert, my new friend and local lodge owner, though he is not talking radical freedom here, since without the levee his lodge would be underwater, and what he is really looking for is a series of diversions so that the river could feed the marsh at various points, rather than dump all it has to offer in one great slug out in the Gulf.

I hope I have helped you get a sense of the geography in this land almost two hours south of New Orleans, but it’s really hard to picture even when you’re here.  My car has been acting up, the engine light blinking and a noise like breaking glass coming from the exhaust pipe, and when I suggested to Ryan that it might be the salt water I’ve been driving through when I head down for my morning bird-watching at land’s end, he laughed at me.  “There’s no salt water down there,” he said.  “It’s all fresh.”  Which made sense once I thought about the direction the water rushed over the road -- it was spilling from river to Gulf -- though it was hard to get my head around the fact that it wasn’t salt when there were thousands of acres of salt marsh all around me.

During Katrina this little artificial valley got its share of both salt water and fresh, hit from both the river and Gulf sides.  And it will happen again of course.  “What’s wrong with protecting ourselves?” people understandably ask.  That is the same question asked by those folks who are still piling sand in front of their homes back on Dauphin Island.  And the answer is that of course there’s nothing wrong with it, though there was something wrong with building there in the first place, particularly if the place is dependent on artificial barriers.  One problem with false barriers and blockades is that they encourage people to live in places they shouldn’t be living.  And once they live there they want to live the way everyone else is living, thinking, “Hey, it’s this way in suburbia so...it should be this way here too.”  That is when they start to lay their straight-lined grid over whatever individual and varied place they have laid claim to, which is often when the trouble starts, nature having almost no interest in straight lines.  It is in fact straight lines -- canals built for boat travel -- that have helped sink the great marsh that the Mississippi weaves into.  How so?  I think back to when I was a kid on Cape Cod, how I loved to play on the small sandbar islands that revealed themselves at the beach at low tide and how, when the tide started to come back in, I would aid the rising waters by digging lines across the sandbars with my heel, creating canals for the incoming tide to run through.  I would often dig about a dozen of these lines across the sandbar islands, flooding them before their time.  The same thing is going on here on an enormous scale, and of course, the sinking of the marshes means less of a defense from the oil.

But enough with doom.  This place, like so many of our places these days, like Masonboro Island which I often paddle to back in North Carolina, is a temporary one, but that doesn’t make it any less joyous.  We had better not be too strict in our judgments since so few places we love are “natural” in any full sense anymore, and in fact Cape Cod, which I am prone to romanticizing, was transformed from peninsula to island a years ago hundred when someone decided to sever the Cape at the shoulder from the mainland.  And I think of another artificial and temporary place, a place called Pilottown, which can only be reached by boat or plane and is the very last town on this river, a place where the river pilots take over the great boats, only they being capable of navigating the river.  (Which is a place, incidentally, where Anthony, he of the fish camp, dreams of one day living while he awaits his own boat to captain.)   

So I worry about too strict definitions during this mess.  While I find myself growing more “environmental” by the day, I have a problem when environmentalism gets too rigid.  For instance, directly to the south of me, not fifty miles away, is what our president is calling the worst environmental disaster in the history of our country (apparently forgetting about the stripping of the continent of trees or the extensive bombing of the American West with nuclear weapons, and about a hundred other things). But despite this truly depressing event, the great shitting of our national bed, and the fact that what is happening here is bad, truly bad and tragic, I am right now walking along the banks of the Mississippi, something I had never done before this week, which doesn’t feel folkloric just because I’ve read so many books about it but also because these muscular swallows are shooting everywhere and because reeds and small trees are growing out of this old half-sunk barge in the shallows and because the trees are buzzing with insects and the sun is beating down and the wind is blowing along the dirty river and I am watching a fish jump out of the water and splash back down and I, sipping a warm Corona (the most exotic beer in Buras), am feeling something like pure contentment, a temporary animal feeling somehow unrelated to the disaster fifty miles south.  Because there have always been disasters and there has always been death and there’s always been a dark thing lurking right beside the light.  And because even when Whitman was whooping and hollering his way around the country there was a Civil War about to break out and TB killing thousands and god knows what else and everybody dying at 32.  But there was still some joy and still some euphoric moments and why does that matter?  Because that is the heart of what it means to be environmental, or at least half the heart.  Because if you strip the thing of its joy then all there is left is finger wagging and who wants that?   And more importantly there’s this: Why fight for a place if you don’t love it?

I hike down to the levee to a little marina and then down a side path to the surging river, where it looks like someone has set up a lawn chair where they come to have their nightly beer and watch the river and maybe occasionally throw a line in, and I, hoping the owner doesn’t mind, claim a seat in his chair and toast the river with my empty bottle.  I am exhausted and I need a rest from this place and, oddly, the place itself is giving it to me.  And what does it matter that I, one human being from someplace else, am feeling good for the moment and not thinking about the oil which is, of course, bad, so bad?   Not much, I think.  Not much, or, possibly, everything.

Read the series here:

• Into the Gulf, Day 1: Baptism at Tarball Beach
• Into the Gulf, Day 2: Corexit, Ospreys and Tarball Wars
• Into the Gulf, Day 3: A Dawn Walk
• Into the Gulf, Day 4: Of Fishermen and Forms
• Into the Gulf, Day 5: Ecotones and Barriers
• Into the Gulf, Day 6: The Green Sun Rises
• Into the Gulf, Day 7: Castles & Shanties

2 comments »

Into the Gulf, Day 7: Castles & Shanties

Daily reports on the BP disaster on the Gulf

A couple of summers ago I paid a visit to Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was one of the country’s leading authorities on the recent intensification of storms.  If you were to read a so-called balanced account of this issue in the newspapers you might come away believing that the scientific jury is still out on whether or not warmer waters lead to more intense storms.  In fact, this is a little like saying the jury is still out on evolution versus intelligent design.  The real spilt, Emanuel explained to me, was not in the scientific community, but between the scientists and the weather forecasters.  He assured me that what common sense suggested was true: warmer waters lead to more violent storms.  (Of course this was long before a sheen of oil was added to the warming mix.)

This was basically what I expected to hear and I scribbled down what he said in my notebook, playing the diligent coastal detective.  But then, right before I was getting ready to thank him and leave, I pointed to the wall and a Hooper painting of a house by the sea.  We moved from talking about storms to talking about buildings along the coasts.  As it turned out, he had strong opinions on the subject.

“We have a heavily subsidized coastline,” he told me.  “Subsidized by a corrupt insurance industry.”

He described how the insurance industry allowed people to build next to the shore without taking the financial risk.  How someone in Worcester in Central Massachusetts might pay as much as someone living on the shore on Cape Cod.

Then he said something that made my ears perk up.

“The natural human ecology of the coastlines tends to be a few castles or mansions built very solidly that will withstand anything nature has to throw.  But only a few–everything else is sea shanties.  Which the normal person would just go to for a weekend.   These shanties or cottages are disposable and people don’t put anything of value in them and don’t insure them.  Every now and then they get wiped out and that’s to be expected.  It’s the same all over the world….it’s very democratic.

In other words, throughout most of human history people expected their coastal homes to be occasionally destroyed.  I thought, not for the first time, of the difficulties that anyone or anything has in living by the sea.  To live by the ocean is to know uncertainty, whether you’re a homeowner or a mollusk or a lobsterman.  And it seems that one of the true challenges of living on the coast isn’t to try and control what can’t be controlled, but to learn to live in uncertainties.  This, understandably, is not an easy thing to do when an individual or family has invested hundreds of thousands, or more often now, millions of dollars in a property or home.  That’s a pretty expensive shanty.

I have seen my share of both castles and shanties over the last couple of weeks.  In Gulf Shores, Alabama, I drove along a stretch of many-storied hotels that stood right on the beach, as if taunting the next hurricane.  This was the day before a local event that rated second only to the spill itself in importance, the Jimmy Buffet concert on the beach, and by sheer coincidence I happened to be wearing my Tie-Die shirt and floppy birding hat and so was misidentified by the local amateur ornithologists as a Parrothead.  The row of hotels looked just like Emanuel’s castles in the mist, and I said the names out loud as I drove by: The Shoalwater, Windward Pointe (with that fancy final “e”), Pelican Pointe (again the e), The Sands (of course), Blue Water (not anymore), and Summer House(for a giant.)  After I passed the last one, I pulled a U-ey, and decided to spend the night in the smallest of the giants, a Holiday Inn that was tucked beside them like a little brother.  The next morning I took a walk along the shore at dawn, noting how similar the tracks of an ATV are to those of a great blue heron, both looking like peace signs without the enclosing circle, and in fact at some points the huge heron prints were superimposed on the tracks of the ATV.  I also thought about the sheer arrogance of building these monstrosities right on the shore, of essentially drawing a line in the sand and daring the ocean to cross.  Maybe they would stand—they were castles after all—but at the very least a good storm would destroy the beach that they stood on, paring the sand back to their very foundations.  Which means that quite possibly future customers would only be able to check in by rowboat.

Gateway to the Gulf. Photo by David Gessner.

I’ve already mentioned another set of wannabe castles, the homes on Dauphin Island, but time and time again, despite their proud and boyish insistence on their own permanence, they have revealed themselves as shanties, periodically plopping off into the ocean.   A scientist who shall go unnamed recently wrote me to say that with any luck Bonnie, due to hit these parts on Sunday, will un-do the months of illegal sand redistribution.

Though it now looks like Bonnie is losing steam, one decent storm will wipe out all those months of sneakily carting sand from the islands back to its front, and the residents will find that the laws of nature aren’t as easy to bend as the laws of man.  But if one of the themes of my trip has been the impermanence of life by the shore, then all the rest was just warm up for what I have seen in Southeastern Louisiana.   Here you have a real sense of the land as fragile, low, and temporary, with a corresponding sense that all of the buildings, however sturdy, are at heart shanties.   One misconception people have, one misconception I had until the last couple of weeks, is that New Orleans is in the very south of the state, sitting right on the Gulf.  In fact it’s almost a two hour drive south from the city to the town of Buras, where I’m staying, and another half hour to the appropriately-named Venice and beyond.  The land down here is a tentative strip, a couple hundred yards wide, a bowl between a levy that holds back the Mississippi, and another hump of land where the Gulf lies.  Unlike the deluded souls on Dauphin islands, the residents here are fully aware of the tentative and impermanent nature of their homes.  When Katrina hit, some of these places were twenty feet underwater, and Ryan Lambert, my host at the Cajun Fishing Adventures lodge, pointed up toward the rafters, above the mounted animal heads, where he, despite re-building the rest of the place with new materials, had kept the boards that showed where the water had reached.

By my second night in the lodge, I’d grown cynical enough about the political landscape, having encountered scientists and fishermen who had signed confidentially agreements with BP, to sigh and say: “Everyone down here’s got their hand in the till.  No one’s above it.”

“I’m above it,” Ryan said curtly, and he was, having his nearly empty lodge at peak season to prove it.  “I’d rather meet interesting people than whore myself out,” he said.  He didn’t take BP money for use of his boat and lodge, which was vacant except for me, the film crew of the Jean-Michel Cousteau, and the delightful Lupe, who cooked amazing meals and ran the house.  My wife was very impressed when I told her I had met the film crew, and I found myself saying the word “Cousteau,” in a name-droppy kind of way, over and over, but far from being intimidating, the group, led by the outgoing (and highly organized) Holly, were unfailingly generous.  They invited me along for anything from a helicopter ride to a trip to the bird hospital (where I got a press badge by posing as Key Grip), and their general vibe reminded me of the ultimate Frisbee teams I played on when I was younger.  The ride in the helicopter gave me a sense of just how far and wide the marsh spread, as well as how much had been submerged.  People down here love to tell you that they lose about a football field of marsh every half hour (how many football fields/how much time varies depending on who you talk to) but you can’t imagine that this sort of loss is possible.

My view from copter–taken with my high tech CVS disposable camera until you see just how vast an area we are talking about.  It is here the oil is striking, darkening the fringes of this immensely green and vital landscape like something dark and necrotic.

The day before the helicopter ride, I had taken a boat ride with a local charter fishermen named Sal, another man who had refused to take the oil money, and we rode out to the same islands I’d soon see from above, out to Bataria Bay, noting that some of the water we were boating through still showed up as land on the dated GPS maps.  “Firm ground is not available ground,” wrote the poet A.R. Ammons.  He was speaking specifically of beach grass, which has trouble finding purchase in the shifting sand, but he might have been speaking about this threatened land.  Around here if you stand in a place long enough it might turn from land to water.

Sal pointed out the air plans that had been ripping up the marsh as they flew across the top of it so they could get to places normal boats could not.  And why did they need to get to these places?  To lay boom to save and protect the marsh.  This is one of the consistent ironies you notice down here.  It began as a little boy mess—sure we can do it and nothing will go wrong–but once it happened it became an emergency that, according to the little boys, only the little boys can fix.  And so you have Blackhawk helicopters carrying sandbags for miles over to the threatened islands, burning thousands of gallons of gas in the process, and everywhere you look you have ships, cars, trucks, planes, and copters charging every which way to protect us from oil.

On the way out into the bay I saw my first oiled pelican, flapping heavily in front of our boat, and then we reached the marsh edge where the oil first struck.

“Erosion is killing us,” said Sal, pointing at the black fringe.  “And when the oil hit we got about five years of erosion in one night.”

The signs of defense looked feeble, a white absorbent boom known locally as “tampon boom,” and, the newest brainstorm, actually pom-poms—really–that had been spread over one marsh island, apparently with the hope that the many cotton tentacles would absorb better than a single-limbed boom.  When the oil first came in it was the viscosity of peanut butter, but now, while it is still possible to see its effects—the land actually looks burnt—we see no oil.  Sal thinks it’s due to the dispersants. “They must have increased the nightly dosage,” he said, shaking his head.  “We won’t know the real effects of this for years.”

It was beautiful out, a blazing sunset despite brewing storms and Sal said this was his favorite time to be out on the water.  But we headed back in when he saw a water spout to the east over the water, and the clouds on both sides of us darkened.  “Are there two different storm clusters?” I asked.   “Actually about five,” he said, pointing down at the GPS.  “And that one’s chasing our ass.”  Though we did our best to outrun the one behind us and skirt the others, the skies opened when we were about half way back.

Through the rain I looked out at the dilapidated fish camps, old marsh shacks that lined the canal about a mile out from the marina.  They stood out here on the front lines and had no illusions that they were castles.  In fact permeable might be a good word for them, built as they were on a watery foundation, and looking unabashedly ramshackle, pieces of plywood nailed here, a screen door thrown up here, rickety docks jutting out like the tray on a toddler’s highchair.   Humility, it seemed to me, was their strength and I decided then and there that I would find a way to spend the night out in one of them.  

My night in the shack is a post for another day, but I will add one detail that speaks to the strangeness of my stay in Buras.  My hosts in the shack, a couple of nights later, were a 16 year old named Anthony and his uncle, and when I got up at my usual godforsaken writing hour, a little before four, they slept on in the back bunkroom.  There was enough of a porch light for me to scribble down notes about the day before, but the canal was dark and even the birds, except for the occasional croaking of a heron, were quiet.   I’d been up and writing for about an hour when I heard the puttering of a boat, but I kept my head down in my book, ignoring it.  At least until I heard a voice come out of the darkness.

“Morning, David,” the voice said.

Until that second I had felt impossibly remote and removed from the world, and wouldn’t have been more surprised if someone had said good morning to me while camping in Antarctica.  But when I got up and walked down to the edge of the dock and the pontoon boat clarified itself in the light and I recognized Holly, who had said good morning, and the rest of the Cousteau crew, heading out for a day of looking for oiled birds.

Read the series here:

• Into the Gulf, Day 1: Baptism at Tarball Beach
• Into the Gulf, Day 2: Corexit, Ospreys and Tarball Wars
• Into the Gulf, Day 3: A Dawn Walk
• Into the Gulf, Day 4: Of Fishermen and Forms
• Into the Gulf, Day 5: Ecotones and Barriers
• Into the Gulf, Day 6: The Green Sun Rises
  

Leave a comment »

Into the Gulf, Day 6: The Green Sun Rises

Daily reports on the BP disaster on the Gulf

I am now in the green, beautiful, and paranoid heart of southeastern Louisiana, a sinking land less than fifty miles from the Deepwater site.  Things happen fast in this strange world.  Take yesterday for instance.  At dawn I went up in a helicopter with members of the Cousteau film team, and on the way out to the rig site we flew out over the patched grasses that make up over 13% of our nation’s marshlands, green jigsaw pieces in an ever-rising body of water.  The rig itself and boats around it looked like Tonka Toys, fitting for the work of little boys, and it was all lit up by the green nimbus of the sunny and flowering BP logo.

My day was just starting.  Almost as soon as I got back, I headed out by boat with the Cousteau folks and another boat captained by a charismatic sportsman named Ryan Lambert, who among other things runs Cajun Fishing Adventures, which is housed in the lodge where I’ve been staying.  The boat also held David Guggenheim (aka the Ocean Doctor), who was there to take samples and was constantly circled, in the manner of a pilot fish, by an NBC news cameraman with a South African accent that sounded thick and garbled.    [IMG_1483[1]] We cut out to the Gulf, riding past dozens of split-tailed frigatebirds on wooden posts, posts that acted as grave markers for a submerged bayou town (which made me think that it is fitting, if goofy, that Kevin Costner has become involved here: this place is the real Waterworld) until we finally landed on an island that held a thousand or so terns, not to mention beaches oiled with what looked like small orange rocks, toxic but flat and good for skimming.

Of course there was the usual angle of absurdity you find down here: at one point, as we crossed the island, I could look ahead to see David Guggenheim’s brother, Alan, filming one of the Cousteau cameramen (Brian, a new friend) who was filming the NBC pilot fish camera guy with the fancy accent who was filming David as he recorded (for his radio show) what Ryan, the only local, was saying.  Then, what the hell, just to add another Russian nesting doll layer to the whole thing, I, last in line, started to describe all this into my tape recorder.  Which got my head spinning-- the crazy self-consciousness of so many recorders, including myself—and so as an antidote I pulled a beer out of my pack and said goodbye and hiked off on my own.  I was about a half mile down the beach when I discovered the first of two dead pelicans.  Soon the rest of the gang caught up to me and the dead birds had their posthumous media moment.  As it turned out, it wasn’t oil but a too-big catfish that killed at least one of the pelicans, or as Ryan put it, as he drew the huge skeleton of the fish out of the bird’s throat and through its gular pouch like a magician pulling out a sword, “He bit off more than he could chew.”  While oil might not have kill the first one, we couldn’t be sure about the second and overall it has been a bad couple of days down here for oiled birds: yesterday at least a half dozen pelicans were rushed to the animal MASH unit in nearby Fort Jackson, as well as a tricoloroed heron that the Cousteau crew rescued themselves.

Photo by Alan Guggenheim.

Later when we got back to camp, Dr. Guggenheim put the purple liver of the redfish we’d caught in ice and mailed it off to Maine as a sample, but my day still wasn't over.  I had to leave as everyone huddled around to see if we’d made the evening news (we hadn’t, pre-empted by Chelsea Clinton’s wedding) because I was driving north to Myrtle Grove Marina.  As I drove my car bucked because, as a local who looked suspiciously like Javier Bardem’s character in “No Country for Old Men” told me, there’s lots of water in the gas down here (as well, obviously, as gas in the water).  But I made it to the marina where I had arranged for interesting accommodations for the night.    At dusk I got a lift from a bayou kid named Anthony out to his fish camp, a dilapidated shack deep in the soiled marsh that had somehow survived Katrina with just the roof blowing off.  I spent the night surrounded by herons, swallows, egrets, and, downstream, a hunting alligator.  When Anthony grilled a redfish for dinner it occurred to me that this is  a whole new way to take a sample, and I thought it might be interesting if someone put my liver on ice and mailed it to Maine.  While it may have been dangerous to eat the local fish, I was in full-on When-in-Rome mode and would have probably dug heartily into a baked nutria if that’s what he had served up.  The night was peaceful but it grew less so at six this morning when the Vessels of Opportunity, as the clean-up boats are called, started their morning commute through my canal out into the Gulf.  The laughing gulls also made an appearance at this point, following the boats, begging for breakfast.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  It’s Monday morning as I type this, and since I first landed here about sixty hours ago I have tasted the oily pang of paranoia in the air.  You’ll have to trust me when I say that I’m not usually a paranoia-conspiracy theory kind of guy, I’m really not.  No tin foil for me, thank you very much.  But something deeply strange is going on down here.   Maybe it’s a fact that everyone who isn’t out on a VOO (the local shorthand for the Vessels of Opportunity), seems to be a cop, and cop cars hide behind every sign and shrub (which became even more apparent as we lifted off in the helicopter and got a bird’s eye view.)  Or maybe the feeling is due, or at least aided by, the crazy DDT truck that patrols the streets at night like a toxic ice cream truck, spraying a huge cloud behind it (and last night even came down our driveway as if to make sure it got us while we sat on the porch).  Or maybe it’s the guy from the bird organization I talked to who has been out surveying the damage but couldn’t tell me, even off the record, the figures because, as he said when pressed, “B.P. is our trustee” and he had therefore signed a confidentially agreement.     

Is it me or is this last fact particularly insane?  Almost everyone here seems to have signed a deal with the devil, a devil that in this case isn’t represented by horns and pitch fork but by that same green and sunny logo I saw out at the rig.  The other day I suggested that, after two hundred or so years of independence, we, or at least our Gulf States, have been conquered by the British.  And I need to ask again: how can this be happening?  How can so many of our organizations, scientists, fishermen, and workmen be beholden to a foreign corporation?  I understand that the template for this response was created during the Valdez crisis but how about breaking that mold and creating a new template for this one, given the much different circumstances?  How about someone sensibly saying, “Hey guys, I don’t know about you but it seems kind of wrong to me to hand over so much power—so much, excuse the word choice here, of our freedom—to a foreign entity, particularly one that just soiled our waters and coasts.”  Sure they should pay for the mess, but here’s an idea: what if we bossed them around and not them us?  As it stands it’s a little like having a house guest who takes a shit in your bathtub and then, loudly and boorishly, orders your children to clean it up.  But worse still the guest slips your kids each a fiver and then has them sign a piece of paper promising that they won’t tell anyone what happened.   The truly wild thing down here is that we have all nodded and gone along with this plan, carrying it out as if it makes sense, nodding and going about our unsavory business like a pack of unquestioning zombies.

This blog of course is supposed to focus on nature, or at least natural history, but both of those topics are really about connections and it would be hard to say that what is happening here, both to the homo sapiens and the other animals, is not connected to politics in the deepest way.  Even my attempt at birdwatching, on my first morning in Buras, turned in an unexpected direction.  I’ve always been an early riser and I got up at about 4:30, threw my telescope and binocs in the car and headed out with a fresh cup of coffee, thinking of course that I’d have the road to myself.  Which was when I got caught in rush hour on Route 23 south.  This was an earlier version of the parade I would see a couple of days later from the dock of the fish shack, the morning commute down to the VOOs, hundreds of cars pouring south toward the harbor, all going from essentially the same origination to the same destination, but none of them doing anything as unmanly as carpooling.  “You should see it on a weekday,” said the guy buying a tin of Skoal chew at the convenience store.  When they finally turned off, through the gate with the guard, I drove south a few more miles, through three feet of standing water where the tide had rushed over blacktop, to the very end of the road, a rundown marina where the sign said, “Welcome to the Southernmost Point in Louisiana.”   In the water covering the road I observed a black capped night heron in my headlights, and I wasn’t surprised to see so much water on the road since it felt like the land here was somehow below the water.  I found a spot beyond the fish scaling table covered with bolts, between some weeds and paint cans and a midden of empty Bud Lites.  There I set up my lawn chair at the very tip of the land, the southernmost of the southernmost, and rested my cold coffee on an upside down white plastic bucket.  I had a fine view of a half-sunken tugboat that looked like it had never recovered from Katrina, and of the birds of course, which suddenly were everywhere.  A green heron hunted from the dock, a half dozen white ibises skirted an oily puddle, and egrets, splashes of white, dotted the trees.  It was satisfying but not as good as what I saw on the way back, right before the sign that said “Haliburton Road—Do Not Litter.”  There I pulled the car over by the side of the road, on a causeway an inch or two above the water level, and stared out at three cypress trees that must have held a couple hundred rooting ibises, all of them settling and fidgeting, settling and fidgeting, like fussy sleepers.  The birds had already lit up the tree but then behind them the orange ball lit up all of it, the world greening as it lightened.  There is a vibrancy here that reminds me of a word I learned from a former chiclero, a worker who helped find and tap rubber trees.  It is a Maya word called “yax,” meant to describe a particularly vibrant and wild green.  Here there was yax aplenty, from the cypresses to the marsh grasses and ferns and what I took to be some sort of elder plant.  One thing I noted, though, was happily devoid of the pervasive color.  The sun still brandished its usual blazing colors and, despite what was no doubt considerable pressure to sell out, it rose freely, having not yet donned the green and yellow.

Read the series here:

• Into the Gulf, Day 1: Baptism at Tarball Beach
• Into the Gulf, Day 2: Corexit, Ospreys and Tarball Wars
• Into the Gulf, Day 3: A Dawn Walk
• Into the Gulf, Day 4: Of Fishermen and Forms
• Into the Gulf, Day 5: Ecotones and Barriers

1 comment »

Into the Gulf, Day 5: Ecotones and Barriers

Daily reports on the BP disaster on the Gulf

No one is popping champagne down here quite yet.  Pardon the locals if they have become a little dubious about ingenuity, American and otherwise.  The more realistic attitude is less “hoo-ray” than “we’ll see.”

I’m in Mobile now, and even before I came down I planned on using the whole “stuck inside of Mobile” Dylan line.  But the fact is I’m not stuck.  In fact, I am the guest of the generous Bethany Kraft, Executive Director of the Alabama Coastal Foundation (if you want to write a check that will do some real regional good, and not get used for Yacht upgrades, this is the place!), and her husband Alex, who have let me turn their guest bedroom into my command center, and have quietly put up with a house guest who gets up at 3:30 to type and stumble loudly around their house.  As it turns out, they live in an ecotone between a poor black neighborhood and a more well-off white one, their house being the exact spot where the change occurs.  Yesterday I walked in the poorer, blacker direction, many of the houses propped up on cinderblocks with a bombed out look to them, and asked everyone I ran into about the oil spill.  (Though the neighborhood is reportedly dangerous, little bravery was required on my part since I happened to be walking Bethany’s dog, Moby, a chocolate lab the size of a small lion.)   One shirtless guy (it’s about 110 by breakfast) with cornrows and a Yankees cap (boo) complained that he hadn’t been able to go fishing, but in this neighborhood the ties to the Gulf are not always direct.  There was general consternation but lots of cynicism, too, a cynicism I have heard wherever I go, about who was getting the money and for what.  I stopped and talked to a woman who was about my age who was sitting on her front porch smoking a cigarette and drinking her second Miller Lite  (if the empty next to her was any indication.)  “Well whoop-de-doo,” she said when I mentioned the possibility of capping the oil.  Someone else mentioned that his brother, formerly unemployed and now being paid well to clean up the beaches, had said, “The spill is the best thing that ever happened to me.”  Everyone rich, poor, and in-between wants a piece of the big BP pie while it lasts.   And everyone is pretty sure that pie is going away just as soon as the spotlight does.

* * *

Heading in.

Today I spent the morning wading through a different sort of ecotone, the marsh on Grand Bay below Bayou La Batre, with a delightful and knowledgeable naturalist named Bill Finch.  Into the MarshBethany came along, too, as did Alex, who was introduced as “E.O. Wilson’s photographer,” since he is down here shooting pictures for Wilson’s book about his childhood in Alabama.  We rumbled down a red dirt road toward the marsh, a road that served essentially the same function as Bethany’s house, though instead of sitting between black and white it served as the dividing line between fresh water and salt water habitats.

“I wish they’d take it out,” Bill said of the road.  “It acts as a causeway and doesn’t allow for interaction between fresh and salt.  Without it you’d have a lot rougher edges between the two.”

I’m all for rougher edges and said so.  But then I also said something foolish as it turned out.  When Bill brought up carnivorous plants, I boasted, with newfound regional pride, that my current home in southeastern North Carolina, home of the Venus fly trap, was a kind of unofficial capital for bug-eating plants.

“Yes,” Bill admitted.  “You have almost a dozen species of carnivorous plants.”  And then he dropped his naturalist’s hammer. “Here we have over a hundred.  This is the world’s capital.”

He went on to prove his point out on the long leaf pine savanna, pointing and giving Latin names until I was ready to cry “No mas.”  Tiny SundropActually, the plants were beautiful, especially the tiny sundrop, that brings dewy death to bugs who think they’ve struck water, and a larger red-veined beauty that looked like it might take pleasure in its work.  But the real treat was just ahead.   A couple miles down the road we climbed out of the car and cut in through a slash pine forest and into the marsh itself.   I can say with confidence that I’ve spent more time tramping around marshes than most people but I usually stick to the mucky earth and don’t wade right in.   But that’s what we, led by Bill, did, tramping first through the brush of a slash pine forest and then wading, in our long pants and sneakers, through the thigh-deep water of the salt pan that borders the taller grasses of the marsh.  We sloshed along and as you already know if you’ve been reading these posts, we soon enough struck oil.  Not the goopy black variety of our nightmares, the kind I imagined before coming down here, but a light blue sheen, beautiful really, that wove and curled around the marsh grasses.  We picked up the oil and rubbed it in our fingers and it left a rusty red film.  This was deep within the marsh and when Bill and  I cut over through the taller grasses to the shore itself, there was no obvious sign of oil in the Gulf waters.  In other words, ours was subtle oil and so Bill talked about the subtle, and ultimately deadly, damage it could do.  He pointed to the periwinkles that clung to every single blade of grass in the salt pan.     

“How many periwinkles do you see?” he asked.

“Millions,” I said.

Read the series here:

• Into the Gulf, Day 1: Baptism at Tarball Beach
• Into the Gulf, Day 2: Corexit, Ospreys and Tarball Wars
• Into the Gulf, Day 3: A Dawn Walk
• Into the Gulf, Day 4: Of Fishermen and Forms
• Into the Gulf, Day 5: Ecotones and Barriers
  

Leave a comment »

Into the Gulf, Day 4: Of Fishermen and Forms

Daily reports on the BP disaster on the Gulf

Aerial view of the Gulf Islands National Seashore Park.

Before I say goodbye to camping at the national seashore, I need to mention something that a new friend pointed out yesterday. The park where I was staying used to be a fort, and remnants of that fort still stand, as well as bunkers that grow out of the side of hills like hobbit holes and grass-cracked stairs that lead up hills to nowhere. This fort was built after the War of 1812 to defend the Southern coasts and to keep the land here from being conquered by the British.  Which it did successfully until about three months ago.

If there is anything that all Americans -- conservative and liberal alike -- should agree on, it's this: Get these f___ers out of here.  Yes, we'll take their money, and we should. They need to pay for their mess. But BP should not be running the show. And they are running the show. Believe me, if you're down here, you know that they're running the show.  The only things missing are those red coats, pointy hats, and rifles with bayonets.

But I'm getting carried away.  I've barely finished my first coffee, and the daily fulminations have begun.  Smoke coming out of the ears and all that.  That's because this place provokes fulminating.  Not just the oil, of course, but the money flowing everywhere.  Yesterday, after I packed up my tent and drove over the bridge to the mainland, I decided on the spur of the moment to head into the enormous seafood store that I saw along the road.  I talked my way back into meeting with the store's owner, giving him a copy of my first osprey book, and talking birds for a while.  When he said that he'd seen a lot of "water turkeys," I assumed he meant cormorants, though someone later told me he was referring to Anhingas.  He invited me back into his office, where he spoke in a deeply accented and rumbling voice, obviously used to holding court.

"Fishermen are like farmers," he told me.  "But they're farmers who can't see their crops.  It's never been an easy job.  Now it's impossible."  Seafood is all about trust, and now the trust was lost.  I had noticed that all the fish out in the store were labeled by their origins in large print:  haddock filet from Gloucester, snapper from the East Coast and the Yucatan, grouper flown in from Costa Rica.  His had been a $13 million-a-year business, but profits had been cut by more than half.  The chemicals were worse than the oil; at least with the oil you could "let Mother Nature have a shot" at cleaning the Gulf with winter storms.   But the chemicals eroded trust.  Who wants to eat fish with that inside it? 

There was a dock next to the store where two shrimp boats, his own and that of a Vietnamese fishing crew, would pull up and supply the company with shrimp.  But no one wanted Gulf shrimp, and the two boats had become "vessels of opportunity," the Orwellian name for the boats that are being hired to search and skim for oil.  The pay was pretty good -- $2,000 a day for his larger boat and $1,500 for the smaller vessel owned by the Vietnamese.  But as Miranda, my waitress the next day in the fishing village of Bayou La Batre, put it succinctly: "The solution is temporary, but the problem is permanent."  As soon as the lights fade, and they are likely going to fade if the cap works and America moves on to its next spotlighted crisis, the payments will dry up.  And there would be no fishing to go back to.

In the meantime, there is another problem.  As soon as you sign on with BP, you also sign away the right to criticize your new boss.  Before I shook hands and said goodbye to my new friend, his store manager chimed in about the money that BP was paying fishermen: "It's just hush money, plain and simple."

* * *

There is a story you hear and may have even heard.  You hear it from locals and you read it in the paper and it even got printed in USA Today.  But though it is a new story, and though it is a particular, tragic story that happened to a particular, grieving family, it has also taken on some of the resonance of myth.  It will be, when all this is over -- if you believe that this will ever be over -- one of the remnant legends of the spill.  The story goes like this:

He was a good man, a strong man, who owned his own charter boat and made his living by bringing others out fishing and pulling fish out of the sea.  He led what the writer Henry Beston once called "an elemental life," a life of the outdoors, of wind, sun, rain, sweat.  Of course he lost his job when the oil started pouring into the Gulf, followed by the chemicals that were poured on the oil.  Of course he had little money saved to support himself and his children, two boys and a little girl, and his wife.  And of course he hated working for the idiots at BP -- they didn't even know how to tie a line to a cleat, let alone a thing about the Gulf weather -- though he admitted that the overall purpose of his new job was not a bad one: to spot and boom and eventually get rid of the accursed oil. 

But then came the form.  It was more than fifty pages long, an invoice filled with questions that had nothing to do with running a boat.  They wanted him to fill it out before sending him out on the water, needed him to fill it out, they said, in able to properly insure themselves and compensate him.  But it made doing his taxes look like a joke -- and when you're self-employed, taxes are no piece of cake.  A lot of things were pushing him, I imagine.  The oil gushing, the BP folks running the show, the prospect of a future where the Gulf yielded no fish, or if it did, no one wanted to eat the fish it yielded.  But in the end it all came down to this thing, this form.  It came to symbolize all that was wrong with what was happening.  What is a form after all?  A shape, a physical embodiment.  (The form I am writing in right now, for instance, is a blog post, and shapes the way that I write.)  And this thing, this form, became an embodiment of everything that was wrong in his world.

What had been right in the world?  Even before the oil, there had been a ton of stress, and the fish weren't as plentiful as they had been.  But still there were deep pleasures.  The camaraderie of the docks, the pleasure of pulling out in early morning, a fresh start each day, the cyclical feel of both the days and the seasons, the fact that he knew this place and that on the best days, when they puttered back in as the orange ball sizzled down into the water, he knew that, despite all the crap, what he was doing felt right.

The form was not about the season's cycles and was not about hard, honest work.  It came from the top down, the way the whole disaster did.  He hated it, and there was a meeting that morning that made him hate it -- and the whole thing -- even more.  Of course, he was angry and depressed about what was happening, and it would be wrong to say that the invoice, a mere stapled sheaf of papers, was the reason he ended his life that morning on his boat.  But it would not be wrong to say that those stapled pages symbolized something to him, something that he was perhaps unable to put into words, and it would not be wrong to say that it was in those pages that that something -- a feeling of rage, impotence, and sorrow -- found its lasting and final form.

• Day one: Baptism at Tarball Beach.
• Day two: Corexit, Ospreys, and the Tarball Wars.
• Day three: A dawn walk.
• Day four: Of fishermen and forms.
• Day five: Ecotones and barriers.

Leave a comment »

Into the Gulf, Day 3: A Dawn Walk

Daily reports on the BP disaster on the Gulf

Photo by James Emery.

Yesterday I spent the morning wading through the marsh of Grand Bay, Alabama, with a delightful and knowledgeable naturalist named Bill Finch. Deep in the marsh, in the salt pan, we saw puddles of oil nearly the same blue as the backs of the small fish (Mollies?) that swam below the film. Then, after a lunch of BBQ pork and noodles at Pho, a Vietnamese restaurant in the hard-hit fishing town of Bayou La Batre, we headed out to Dauphin Island, where emergency money and the urgency of the situation are being used to move great piles of sand from one side of the island to another, nominally to protect residents from oil but actually to protect their homes from erosion, just one more example of the cynical ways people are taking advantage of the situation.

But I am getting ahead of myself. For now let me take off my Woodward-and-Bernstein visor and put on my John Muir cape. I promise some breaking news over the next couple of days, but for now I’m backing up and returning to my sassy lyric roots. Let’s do some nature. Here goes:

* * *

I sleep poorly in the National Seashore campground. I may like to quote John Muir, but I can’t emulate him. He walked down to the Gulf, after all, and then strolled through most of California. He usually just brought along a blanket and slept on the ground. By contrast, I need three pillows to sleep: one for my head, one between my legs (bad back), one clutched to my stomach (not sure why). Anyway, I toss and turn and wake well before dawn. I decide to turn insomnia to my advantage and throw on my pack and hike down the beach in the dark.

There is beauty in this world still. This I think as I hike among dead trees that twist up into the sky like mushroom stems, reaching upward to a new moon, just a sliver really, a lopsided orange grin above the black silhouetted trees. It’s funny how things work, the way that a deadly hurricane named Ivan, for instance, can create what turns out to be perfect osprey habitat, just what the birds are looking for: leafless trees with a panoramic view of dunes and water.

I cut up through the hummocks to the beach, happy to leave the road in a place where humans are undoubtedly the scariest animals. (Notwithstanding the photo my new friend James the surfer showed me yesterday of the rattler he found in the park.) I feel even better when I reach the water. Contaminated or not, it’s still the ocean, and at this hour, black patches of seaweed are indistinguishable from black patches of tarballs.

I walk hard for a while and, soon enough, a huge orange ball starts ascending over the sea oats, setting them afire. James tells me that the sea oats are in their prime. Which means that their budding heads are full and they are starting to bend low, just as Montaigne said of wise men, comparing them to wheat that bends down humbly as it grows fuller. The sea oats sway in the light wind, but the rising sun also illuminates the omnipresent signs: OIL SPILL RESPONSE—UTV ACCESSS ONLY. A dragonfly the size of a bird zips by, and then the birds themselves start showing up: terns shooting everywhere, willets letting losse their see-saw cries, two jaegers engaging in aerial battle over the dunes, an osprey working the coastline, hunting for breakfast, and then a great blue heron, standing straight up, that I almost bump right into. The bird shoots me an irritated look but doesn’t fly off, and I give it a wide birth, cutting up to the dunes and then back to the shoreline. Just as I return to the shoreline, I see an osprey diving right in front of me, pulling its wings into a shape like an upside down M and hurtling down toward the water. Ospreys don’t twist and plop into the water like pelicans or dart like a living check mark in the manner of a tern. They really dive. The only bird that I watch regularly that can compete is the spectacular northern gannet, which dives into the winter waters all along the East Coast, gathering in clouds of hundreds, and then slicing down from great heights into the water like white feathery arrows.

As it happens, this osprey misses. Zero for 1 on the day. He shakes off in the air like a wet dog, a kind of shivering, and then tries again, but pulls up at the last minute, as if it were all a feint.

“No fish,” I say out loud.

I say this without thinking about the larger repercussions of my simple caveman sentence. But. What if there really were no fish? This particular bird needs three or four a day, more when feeding a family. I may like to see the bird’s life as being about flight or freedom or athleticism, but one thing that is truly central to the life of ospreys, and any bird or animal, is energy calculation. How much fuel is put in the tank, how much energy is then expended. Every individual bird lives by this calculation, and each species does their math in different ways. The Great Blue Heron I almost bumped into, for instance, lives out an almost stately calculation, practicing the art of patience, of calm: a quiet stalking before spearing. While both osprey and heron pursue fish, at some point the two species branched off of the same evolutionary tree, moving toward their opposite strategies of survival. But while ospreys embraced a species-wide calculus of relative excess, they are far from the most extreme bird in this regard. That title, in my experience, belongs to the northern gannets I mentioned. Theirs is the math of more, and they repeat their high dives again and again. Because they dive so much, they need more fish, and because they need more fish, they dive so much. But the funny thing is this works. There are plenty of fish, and they have plenty of energy thanks to the plenty of fish. What might look like squandering is in their case strategy.

You have probably made the mental jump before me. Americans have long been proud gannets. And why not? Rather than beat ourselves up about this fact, why not admit that for many years the math made sense. It worked for us. We stumbled upon a wide-open, relatively sparsely populated country (whose people we would soon attempt to exterminate), a country full of trees, animals, fossil fuels, gold, you name it. How were we expected to respond given the circumstances? With caution and frugality? My field guide calls gannets “gluttons,” and they have to be to supply their non-stop internal engines. It’s a crazy way to live, though it seems to work for them, and should continue to work for them as long as there are fish in abundance.

I am not wagging my finger here. For my part, I’ve always been a squanderer, charging ahead, pushed by my own ambition, rarely pausing. For one thing, it seems more exciting: who wants to go through their one life bored? And if I have lived a gannet life and we have long been a nation of gannets, what of it? As long as there are fish a-plenty, why change?

And here’s another question: Is it really possible for me, and for the rest of us, to be happy with less? Is it possible to make sacrifice as attractive a virtue as ease? I’m not sure. You could argue that homo sapiens are about as likely to change our ways as gannets: we are what we are. But even the dimmest of us seem to have become aware of certain connections -- between our consumption and the world -- that almost no one considered forty years ago. Now, with our luck running out along with our resources, we are perhaps starting to notice things we didn’t notice before -- didn’t notice or pretended not to notice. Which in turn creates a cognitive dissonance between the way we live and the way we know we should live. It would be easy enough to shrug and say, “Hey, we’re gannets, what can we do?” Except for the fact of that singular human trait that some, like the evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, claimed defines us: our adaptability. The fact that we can change over a lifetime, not just over evolutionary eons. I don’t want to get hokey here and say that in the face of the spill something is being asked of us. But maybe something is being asked of us. And maybe this time around we’ll dignify what is being asked with an answer. Even if the answer is: “Well, what the f___ do we do now?”

I don’t have any answers, but I do know the question is out there, permeating the air along with this tarry stench. If my waiter at Applebees the other night could preach to me about energy and connections, you know it’s in the air. And then yesterday at the ranger station, I did something I’ve never done before. The rangers here are great and they have fed me pictures of tarballs and other tidbits. They must feel a sense of powerlessness, though, like the people of an occupied country: their territory, their land, has not just been conquered but is being administered by a foreign corporate force. I don’t know about other places, but here BP rules. At some point they’ve got to start feeling beaten down.

Anyway, as I walked into the ranger station on my first night here, I noticed that there was huge white truck outside that was still running with its AC blasting. It turned out that it belonged to a guy who was making a documentary about tarballs. Inside he was talking to the rangers, something about the evils of BP, and I don’t know what got into me but before I could stop myself I had interrupted him and said, “So maybe you should shut off your truck when you’re not in it.” Right away I felt bad and he got defensive, muttering about how hot it had been out on the beach and how his personal energy use was “just a drop in the bucket.” Of course by the end I wished I hadn’t said anything. And I knew I didn’t have a leg to stand on, having just driven almost a thousand miles, my Rav IV slurping down fifty or so gallons of gas.

But still. Still I felt, and still feel, something cracking in me, a sense that I am crossing a line. My plan now is to trade in the Rav for a Prius when I get home (I know they are yuppie cars, but they are also affordable), but that’s not really what I’m talking about, either. I have vowed not to use my AC during this trip, and have kept to that vow so far, but I understand that this is just a symbolic gesture. And I know I am a big fat hypocrite, just like we all are. In fact, it is usually this thought that stops me cold in our tracks. I am a hypocrite. So why say anything or why try to do anything at all? Why not just shrug and say, “Once a gannet, always a gannet.”

Well, here’s why not. “We are all hypocrites,” said my friend the environmental planner Dan Driscoll, who has fought for twenty years to green the banks of the Charles River. “But we need more hypocrites who fight.” I will amend this slightly and say that we also need more hypocrites who try to think their way toward something new, despite their self-acknowledged hypocrisy. That is why we can’t let the fact of our current hypocrisy stop us in our tracks as we try to imagine something new.

Or so I’m thinking this morning. Now, as I hike back toward my campsite, the whisper of a ghost crab -- a tiny albino speck -- scuttles in front of me. It has taken a long time for most of us to understand that our wild national orgy just might be over, and there is no better evidence of that than the soiled beach I’m walking on and the sight of a diving bird coming up empty. By November, thousands of gannets will be back here, plunging again and again. What will they find? Fish or no fish? Stay tuned. But one thing is certain: if the seas are empty, they will not have the luxury of our species, that of fast adaptation. Gannets, unlike us, have no other way of being.

• Day one: Baptism at Tarball Beach.
• Day two: Corexit, Ospreys, and the Tarball Wars.
• Day three: A dawn walk.
• Day four: Of fishermen and forms.
• Day five: Ecotones and barriiers.

Leave a comment »

Into the Gulf, Day 2: Corexit, Ospreys, and the Tarball Wars

Daily reports on the BP disaster on the Gulf

The guy from Texas is taking the giant tarball that the guy from Pensacola wants. The guy from Pensacola, a good guy named James who I met about an hour ago, thinks he should collect the tarball, which is the biggest one he’s seen, and bring it to the attention of the EPA officials. But James is a peaceful man, a surfer whose skin has been burned to a crisp brown over the years, and he simply shrugs when the Texas guy picks up the lump of oil, a lump that is definitely bigger than a bread basket, and carts it off. The little girl, the Texas guy’s daughter who had been swimming in the oily water (holding hands with her mom) a few minutes ago, turns defensive when I suggest that James has rightful claim to the tarball.

“If he touches that tarball, my Daddy will kick his ass,” she says.

She can’t be older than eight, and she follows her father back to their truck, where they place the tarball, a toxic prize to bring home with them (though now Texas has tarballs of its own).

“They’re real good on the grill with a little paprika,” James yells after them.

After the commotion, James and I settle back in our beach chairs and do what we have been doing since we met: watching birds. I had other ideas for the afternoon, but I pulled over at this empty beach lot because I saw an osprey working the line of surf, and ospreys have a way of scuttling my best-laid plans. I kept trying to leave, but the bird kept returning to hunt, hovering above the crashing waves, its black and white wings semaphore flashing, its yellow eyes burning behind a black bandit mask. When James showed up to take pictures of birds, he noticed that I couldn’t take my eyes off the osprey and said as much. Then he added what many people have said to me over the years:

“You really seem to like those birds.”

I could have said, “Little do you know, James, that I have in fact written two books about ospreys.” But since I’m not a giant dick, I went with, “Yup.”

We pass the afternoon sitting in our fold-out beach chairs, drinking beers and watching the osprey, along with diving terns, a couple of pelicans gliding through the trough of waves, and the highlight -- a black skimmer with its dazzling candy corn upper bill and its lower mandible dropped so that it cut a wake through the surf. James reminds me a little of the actor who played Dan-o on Hawaii 5-0 (who my father knew in college), maybe because of his amiable way, short stature, and the fact that the show featured surfing during its theme song. He tells me that the local surf report specifies where the oil is and isn’t each day, but that once when he went to one of the spots where it supposedly wasn’t, his wife’s white bathing suit turned gray. Still, he is relatively optimistic about the spill.

“That’s a big body of water out there. Everything in there gets diluted. And nature’s resilient, you know. The winter storms will help clear it off the beaches.”

Surfers, almost by default, become amateur naturalists, and he does admit that he has seen fewer dolphins and far fewer jumping fish. We speculate on whether or not the oil is hindering the diving birds, like the osprey, and whether or not they know something is up. Can they taste a difference in the fish or see it in the viscosity of the water? If they are aware of what is going on, they must be thinking -- and of course I’m anthropomorphizing here -- the osprey equivalent of “not again.” After all, this is a species that was all but eradicated, along with the local pelicans and bald eagles (which James says are now making a comeback), by DDT not too long ago.

The Rachel Carson story, and the story of the banning of DDT, are old chestnuts of the environmental movement, anachronistic in a hopeful way that may not seem applicable in these darker times. But as I spent the morning reading articles about BP’s use of Corexit and watching marine toxicologist Chris Pincetech talk about how using the dispersants was turning the Gulf into one giant science experiment, I found myself thinking again of DDT, and the old story seemed newly applicable. The story, which most of us know by now, begins with the spraying of DDT on fields and marshes, with the non-malevolent goal of eliminating pests (insects). But what the chemical proved, in a giant science experiment not unlike the one we are undertaking right now, was that “the web of life” was not some fanciful notion that a groovy ecologist invented. In fact, the way that DDT moved through that web -- killing the insects, sure, but also moving up through the food chain to the vegetation and smaller fish and then, through biomagnification, settling in larger quantities in top predators like ospreys and eagles -- was almost as miraculous as the web itself. Almost. But while the web created life, the chemical created death. The way it killed off ospreys was particularly cruel: it caused a thinning of the egg shells so that when the parents sat atop the eggs to incubate, they killed their own offspring.

And now we are at it again. Look, the companies who made DDT and the people who sprayed it were not evil people. Who wouldn’t want to get rid of mosquitoes on a marsh? They weren’t evil, but they just believed, in the manner of little boys, that they could control things. They believed they could make things better than they were and could always fix what was broken (never thinking that some of the things they might break had taken a million years or so to make, in concert with other creatures and ecosystems).

As tragic and awful as the oil spill is -- and it is truly horrific -- the use of dispersants could end up being worse. You can at least argue that the first mistake was an accident, an accident born of colossal arrogance, but still an accident. The second mistake grew out of opposites: conscious decision and panic. My contacts down here tell me that the BP people operate with eyes wide from fear, and fear has quickly led to a desperate need for the illusion of control. I don’t claim to know what Corexit or other dispersants will do, how it will infiltrate and affect the web of life of fish and birds. I am not a scientist. But I know that good science is born of skepticism, and that those who claim with confidence that they know what the Corexit will do are thinking the thinking of little boys. Which means they are thinking that you can fix nature like you fix a carburetor. And forgetting that everything is connected in way that surpasses any sort of human conception, let alone human engineering. “When you pick up one thing, you find it connected to everything else on earth,” wrote John Muir. Exactly. And when you spray, pour, poison one thing, you will quickly find that you are doing the same to all.

* * *

Lecture over (for today).

James and I watch ospreys and drink beer until the sun starts to set. I smoke a small cigar I bought at a store called The Tobacco Exchange back in Gulf Shores. We say goodbye (and James promises to send me the pictures that I’ve attached here), and then he tells me where I can get a good look at an osprey nest from up close, at a picnic area farther up in the park. It is a perfect way to end the day, and not just because the nest is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, a nestled cup of sticks in the upper branches of a dead live oak, a tree that was likely killed by the salt overwash from Hurricane Ivan. Three young birds -- identifiable as immatures by both their size and checkered wings -- perch around and on the nest, illuminated by the last shafting rays of sun. They let go with high-pitched warning cries that tell me not to get any closer. But what makes the scene so apt is not just its beauty, but the fact that the osprey cries mix with another sort of music: the backward beeping of trucks. And that is because the picnic area has become mission control for the clean-up efforts, and the birds now share their habitat with trucks and the dumpsters and the fluorescent-vested workers and dozens of port-a-potties and hundreds of all-terrain vehicles. It looks like a scene out of Spielberg: the military trying to keep the discovery of aliens under wraps. But what might be too cliché for a movie is the fact that above it all the ospreys nest, the whole scene watched over by a bird that came back from the dead.

P.S. If you are interested in the nature of this beach, here are some nice bird photos by a local blogger.

P.P.S. If you want to scare yourself about Corexit (corrects it!), there are plenty of great articles to read. But maybe the simplest way is to just read the brief Wikipedia entry. Last I heard, Wikipedia was not a radical environmental operation.

• Day one: Baptism at Tarball Beach.
• Day two: Corexit, Ospreys, and the Tarball Wars.
• Day three: A dawn walk.
• Day four: Of fishermen and forms.
• Day five: Ecotones and barriiers.

Leave a comment »