by Carl Safina
Dew and low fog hang heavy on the grass. Eighty-three degrees by 6:30. Roads lined with pines and worry.
Radio news: Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal is accusing BP of dragging its feet on paying claims; President Obama will meet today with grieving relatives of workers killed in the explosion. The president wants to include deepwater drilling “as part of a comprehensive energy strategy.” The radio says wildlife workers are picking up birds on islands. There’s concern about oiled pelican nests.
I think they should destroy all the nests and try to frighten the adults away; that would break the adults’ motivation to keep returning and continuing their exposure. For the population’s future, saving breeders is more important than trying to save eggs or even chicks. If adults die or get immobilized and rescued, their eggs and chicks are doomed anyway. That’s uncomfortable to say, but it’s true.
Along the interstate, signs for a concert venue advertise coming headline acts: Liza Minnelli (still?), Ringo Starr (still), the O’Jays (really?). The highway reaps its constant harvest of armadillos; our most heavily armored surviving mammal cannot survive our daily onslaught. More to pity. An alligator with an urge to roam has had its ambitions crushed. Glad I wasn’t in that car.
The sign reminds travelers, “Welcome to Louisiana—America’s Wetland.” Almost immediately the land seems lusher, greener, lower, wider. The rest area is stocked with pamphlets for tourists: fishing, seafood. Oh, well.
Radio talk show: A guy who runs a parasailing business calls to say, “Congratulations, BP. Today you’ve accomplished something hurricanes couldn’t do, banks couldn’t do, and even the greed of Wall Street couldn’t do: you’ve put me out of business.” He has made more than eighty phone calls trying to get BP to respond to his financial claims.
Three congressional hearings today. Five yesterday.
Kevin Costner has a solution to the oil; for years he’s invested in a machine to separate oil from water. There are thousands of other people making suggestions, promoting their ideas, hawking their own products. There seems no clear route for these things to get evaluated.
Time to have another look as the frigatebird sees it. Wheels defy gravity at Belle Chasse, Louisiana, a little after 10:00 a.m.
Our twenty-four-year-old pilot is Corey Miller. Up over the marshes, we’re oil hunters once more. Soon we’re flying in and out of clouds, and this makes me nervous. Increased air traffic in the last few days has brought planes close enough to blow kisses.
The curious and the dispersant dispensers and the helicopters crowd the sky. Slip-sliding by. Up here at these speeds, gaps close fast. You want good vis. We have bad vis.
Sometimes we’re whited out for minutes. Cat-and-mouse with other planes. Corey talks to his headset constantly. Young and alert, I hope; not cocky. Seems on the ball.
A rather alarming number of wildlife biologists get raked off in small-plane crashes. Do a computer search with the words “biologist plane crash” and you’ll see what’s on my mind right now. Once, in Honduras, I was about to board a small plane to an outer island, but agreed to go later so some other people could get back to the mainland first. During their flight the engine quit, and the plane crashed into the sea and sank. Luck put them close enough to land that someone saw the plane plummet and raced to pick up survivors. But I’d planned a much longer water crossing, and if we’d done my trip first, we’d probably never have been found.
Yet right now, I’m not worried about our plane. I’m worried about other planes. Our current destination, directly above the blowout, is also of much interest to the other fliers. Corey tells me they’ve worked out altitude separations for the different aircraft. I tell him good, thanks. I gaze down, and think of home.
Headed to 3,500 feet, for safety’s sake. A little high for seeing details well, but you see more if you’re alive. The clouds let us play peeka-boo with the ocean. They also cast Rorschach-test shadows. We see: barges, boats. Oil rigs, of course. Muddy troughs of river water slinking seaward, soils of the Great Plains, carrying their fertilizers and pesticides, maintaining the Gulf’s chronic illness. Like I said: problems besides petroleum.
The shimmering sea pea green now. The engine noise. When we open a side window for photos, the flapping wind.
Shrimp boats continue towing boom through thick and thin oil with no significant effect on it. Most oil spills over their U of boom. Slicks greet the boats’ bows, slicks are their wake. They’ve been wasting time like this for weeks now.
We apply more altitude to defeat the thickening clouds. A worse and safer view of a sea streaked widely with oil. The sea keeps appearing and disappearing, blue sky appears and disappears. The one constant: oil.
Miles and miles of streaks, tendrils, fingers. Oil coats the ocean brick orange. Brown. Differing densities under varying light. Miles, miles, miles.
With his small camera, Corey is taking pictures. I remember being twenty-four. So will he.
At 11:30 we’re flying ellipses over ground zero. The clouds break nicely, revealing a couple of dozen ships. Ships large and smaller. The relief well drillers. The flare of burning gas. Choppers touch ships’ helipads like dragonflies grasp reeds.
The blue water looks like mere cracks between heavy brown billows of used motor oil. An absolute mess. The horizon-gobbling scale of this now.
My camera loads image upon image to its buffer before I give it a chance to save. Maybe I can get it all, take it all out of the ocean.
Corey’s had my headset turned off while he’s been talking to planes and air-traffic control. He hits a button and says to me, “A photo makes it look like one area. Until you get up here and see that it’s as far as you can see in all directions. You can’t get that in a picture.”
Picture that.
At 12:15 P.M. more or less, we’re back over the shoreline. Thick blobs near the shore. Waves lap darkly. The beach is stained. The emerald marsh, bordered black.
But only bordered. I sense the marshes’ restorative power. Nature hurls hurricanes, droughts followed by floods, diseases, famine. But in the long haul—and this will require time—nature is what can get us out of the trouble we keep getting ourselves into. They call it Mother because, though she can punish, she’s why we’re here in the first place. She’s the hope we have while we’re so hopelessly juvenile.
As the heat of June soars, anger mounts over the Obama administration’s recently declared six-month moratorium on exploratory deepwater drilling. The president is in a no-win spot, with people both demanding that he do more and condemning him for what he is doing. The goal was to give the government time to review the rules for oversight of such wells. Many Americans horrified by the blowout welcomed the shutdown.
But here, the moratorium on new drilling is deeply unpopular. Various people are calling it things like “a death blow to Louisiana” that “has and will continue to destroy tens of thousands of lives,” creating “an economic ripple effect that will be catastrophic to our entire region.”
Those working in the petroleum industry see the moratorium as a bigger threat than the spewing oil. Many of the affected rigs will seek to drill in other countries, imperiling an estimated 800 to 1,400 jobs per rig, including third-party support personnel. As many as 50,000 jobs may be affected, though the industry and Louisiana’s elected officials provide the highest estimates.
“From 1947 until 2009, there were 42,000 wells drilled in state and federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico and 99 days ago one of them blew up,” rages Democratic senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. “But no matter how horrible that is, you don’t shut down the entire industry.” She says that a temporary ban on drilling, even if it lasted for only a few months, could affect as many as 330,000 people in just Louisiana.
I’m not downplaying the dilemma here, but I don’t trust her numbers or her hyperbole. The Louisiana Economic Development department estimates that the six-month moratorium will cause the loss of up to 10,000 jobs within a few months. State figures sho
w that the area’s whole oil and gas industry—not just the deep exploratory drilling that is temporarily banned—supports 320,000 jobs, $12.7 billion in wages, and $70.2 billion in business sales.
To the industry, its supporters, and its congressional backers and lobbyists, a moratorium doesn’t make sense when more than 30,000 other wells have been drilled in U.S. waters, 700 of which are as deep as or deeper than the one the Deepwater Horizon was drilling. And they argue that the incentives are already there to avoid the fate of this ill-fated well; no one wants the kind of mess BP now has all over its hands. One rig worker says, “For us to stop drilling in the Gulf is like ending our lives as far as the way we live. It’s really that scary.” That’s what fishermen say about their inability to keep fishing. (The administration will lift the drilling moratorium on October 12.)
President Obama signals what might be the first inflection point from unmitigated disaster to silver linings. It’s part rhetoric, part counter-balance to the panic. He promises, “Things are going to return to normal.” Not only that, but: “I am confident that we’re going to be able to leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was before.” He declares seafood from the Gulf’s open fishing areas safe to eat. And he announces that he’s pried from BP an agreement to set up a compensation fund that will run into “the billions of dollars.”
In the same span of days, the biggest mess to come ashore so far is heavily coating Louisiana’s enormous Barataria Bay. Birds sodden in syrupy crude, stranded sea turtles, beaches blanketed in brown goo, marshes bathtub-ringed in oil produce some of the most heart-wrenching photos yet of the blowout.
“This was some of the best fishing in the whole region, and the oil’s coming in just wave after wave. It’s hard to stomach, it really is,” says one fishing guide. A resident adds, “We got little otter families that swim in and out, we got coons, all that good stuff, man. It’s good for the kids out here. They swim, work on the boats, fish.” They did.
Day and night, the well continues injecting more of the same into the oily Gulf. It feels like a siege. Like it’s hopeless.
Because I’d wanted to fly right over the blowout, we had to stay high. But in a different part of the Gulf, author David Helvarg and conservationist John Wathen were low enough to see wildlife. Their video is the most affecting thing I’ve seen yet about the blowout’s ongoing effects. In a TV interview on MSNBC, Wathen, in a mellow Mississippi drawl, describes seeing dolphins mired in oil. “You can see the sheen for miles and miles and miles to the horizon. We figure we saw over a hundred dolphins that were in distress. Some were obviously dead, belly-up in the water. And others, they looked like they were in their death throes.” He talks about seeing the Gulf set aflame, the towering columns of smoke.
Still ninety-three degrees at 5:00 p.m. Everything here is far from everything else. Grand Isle, on the seacoast side of Barataria Bay, is about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from New Orleans. The road runs along canals for many, many miles, the roadside vegetation beautiful, lush, green, summery. I especially enjoy seeing the draping Spanish moss hanging from trees. And those black vultures in that robin’s-egg-blue sky, effortlessly circling.
Lots of modest to run-down homes. Not a thriving place. Looks like money is tight. Beauty salons in people’s homes; their signs on the lawn. A sign advertises frogs’ legs and turtle meat. “Ducks for Sale.” Live minnows, live crabs. Docks every now and then. Boats. Bayou Queen, Lady Catherine, Captain Toby, looking both proud and forlorn, tied up, underemployed. “For Sale: Black Angus Bulls and Heifers.” Mitch’s Garden Center. Doc’s Body Shop. The Flower Pot florist. Debra’s Movie World. Tiresome billboards picturing real estate agents, insurance agents, car salesmen. A funeral home’s hand-painted sign. Austin’s Fresh Seafood bears a smaller hand-painted placard: “Closed Due to BP.”
Up over the Intracoastal Canal.
And now displays of grief and rage come bubbling to the surface. At one intersection, murals. Obama’s portrait and the words “What Now?” A Grim Reaper identified as BP, captioned, “You Killed Our Gulf. You Killed Our Way of Life.” A grim statue of a person holding a dead fish, accompanied by a child whose head is bowed, painted as though oil-drenched, labeled, “God Help Us All.”
On the main road, with a speed limit of fifty, I suddenly notice I’m doing eighty. It’s not that I’m in a hurry to get there. It’s that I’m in a hurry to get this over with so I can leave. I’d better watch my speed; a cop is occupied with someone who didn’t watch his.
The road narrows to one lane. The paralleling channel widens as I near the coast. Thirty miles to go. There are some pretty big ships here now. More port facilities for oil rig tenders and the like. More industrial plants related to oil and gas. Not quaint.
At the bridge to Grand Isle, the horizon is punctured by derricks, giant antenna towers guy-wired into the marsh, petrochemical tanks, helicopter pads, warehouses on stilts, tugboats and rig tenders. Chevron’s aircraft operations has its own small airport for helicopters.
While I’m driving through Leeville, the radio conveys that “BP said it was unaware of any reason for the stock price drop.”
I’m on a road paved right through an immense marsh that stretches from horizon to horizon. How many millions of wildfowl must once have swarmed into here. I’ve stopped in three places looking for a road map. No one sells them. But in each place stood a line of guys buying beer. I guess that’s what there is to do.
Contrast: In places like Shell Beach and Hopedale, the fisherfolk seem woven into the place like vines grown up on netting. Can’t be uprooted. Transplantation would be wrenching, possibly impossible. The rig workers, different. Just a job. Could be anywhere. Might as well be. Looking displaced. Their workplace distant and forsaken from whatever counts to them as home. Painful to witness. Everything here in pain, or bored.
It’s hard to imagine that anything but oil could have made it worth the time and money to build a raised roadbed and pave it. This road seems so tenuous, so vulnerable to harsh weather. All the houses here are on stilts. A Forster’s tern dives into a creek. Surprisingly, pleasantly, there are plenty of white, un-oil-stained egrets here.
And suddenly a cheerful “Welcome to Grand Isle.” Stylish roadside sign, letters three feet high. Blue stylized waves harken back to when the ocean was that color. Artful and colorful, of cut steel, with colorful steel marlin and redfish and tarpon swimming across it. Flanked by planted palms. Pretty and proud.
Anxious for a quick glance at the water, I turn where it says, “Welcome to Elmer’s Island. Open Daily.” When a sign warns, “Access at Your Own Risk,” I take it at its word. Where the sign says, “Beach Closed,” I continue.
Before reaching the telltale lineup of Porta Potties that have become BP’s major expression of Gulf architecture, I get repelled by security guards incredulous that police did not intercept me sooner. (Who’d have thought that Portosans, so innocuous at Woodstock, so reliable during the Age of Aquarius, would turn ominous and foreboding so soon into this millennium?)
“If you come back here, you’d have to get a BP representative to come with ya. This is a BP safety area. You need a hard hat, steel-toed shoes, safety glasses—”
Another impressive display of BP’s near obsession with keeping everyone safe. In the wrong ways, at the wrong time, sweating the meaningless small stuff.
“They got containers full of oil. You get a whiff of that crap—I don’t know; they just don’t want nobody passed out, y’know?”
No, I don’t. Because hard hats, steel shoes, and safety glasses won’t protect you from fumes. This is the company that refuses respirators. Talk to anyone with an ID badge, you can’t help feeling every word is bullshit. It’s not always their fault. Sometimes they’re just regurgitating the bullshit they’ve been overfed. Some of the bullshitters are nice: “If you get one of them BP guys to come with ya, you can come back,” he offers as I’m turning around. And some, less so.
This is a miserable purgatory o
f a place. The channels cut straight in a place where water naturally meanders. The raised roads trespass into low country where boats would belong. And now there’s oil where water belongs. Oil where honesty belongs. Everything at odds with the place’s soul.
It’s a contest for the worst kind of possession, the one that diminishes what it acquires, harms what it strives to hold.
Grand Isle is grand indeed, many miles long. Marshes and power lines on the north, sandy Gulf beach on the south. A horizon pierced and pincushioned by cranes. A weathered sign says, “Jesus Christ Reigns over Grand Isle,” but another new “Beach Closed” warning indicates that BP reigns now. I pass sheriffs and a couple hundred day laborers climbing aboard school buses in a big lot full of Porta Potties.
I duck down a road. On the beach: Porta Potties. Little shade shelters spaced evenly along miles of shoreline. Stacked cases of water. It’s already after quitting time, 7:00 P.M., so no one’s here. It’s still hot, and a bottle of water would be nice. Perhaps BP owes me a little clean water. I forbear. I don’t actually want anything of BP’s. As far up and down the beach as I can see the dry sand is thoroughly crisscrossed with tire tracks. Was a beach, is a disaster site. BP’s D-Day.