The Tarball Chronicles. David Gessner
the sports posters on it. “But we’re part of it, too.”
I snapped to attention.
“It’s all tied together,” he said. “The oil we use in our cars and the oil that’s washing up on our beaches.”
I felt like standing up and clapping. How did this George understand something that the major media outlets couldn’t seem to grasp? It turned out this was another reason I had decided to throw everything in the car and head south. It seemed that no one in the national media was writing the bigger story, or at least the longer story, and I was pretty sure that the one oil-covered bird they kept trotting out for TV was not the story. “No more bullshit” was my blunt, businessman father’s favorite saying. No more bullshit indeed. This time around I would experience a story firsthand instead of letting the national media take me on its knee, like a kindly uncle, and tell me its sweet and homogenized version of the truth.
The next morning I drove through Georgia, mulling over my Applebee’s epiphany. My waiter reminded me of another natural philosopher, John Muir, who traveled this same route by foot nearly 150 years ago. “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” Muir said, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”1 Yes . . . synapses snapped and connections crackled as the miles passed and I drank too much coffee. Wasn’t the spill hitched to everything? Already the disaster seemed to be trying to teach me something, in dramatic fashion, a lesson that the world kept teaching me but that I had been slow to learn: on this planet nothing is apart from anything else—all of us, human, plant, animal: intertwined.
I drove all day. A friend in Mobile, Alabama, had offered me a place to sleep, and I had planned to go there, but then fate, in the form of weather, decided otherwise. A thunderstorm bullied me eastward, toward the Florida Panhandle, until I noticed a sign for a beach I had seen on the news a week before. That beach was known for its famously white sand, at least until the caramel sludge started washing over it. As I continued along the shore I noticed dozens of cleanup workers wavering through the mist like a ghostly prison crew in fluorescent vests, sweeping the sands. There were a couple hundred workers in all, and at first the scene made no sense, the people seemingly disembodied and floating. I soon learned that these workers—many formerly unemployed and mostly men—were being paid eighteen bucks an hour by BP to pick at the sand. I also learned that their job was to gather tarballs and toss them into huge plastic bags, then bring the bags to the command center where they were weighed and hauled away in trucks. Almost all of the workers were black, and I got the feeling that most of these men, many from the nearby city of Pensacola, hadn’t spent a lot of time at this particularly touristy beach before the last few weeks.
The second level of command—the sergeants—didn’t exactly look like beachgoers either. I pulled over and watched them for a while. Muscular but overweight—almost all white, incidentally—they barked orders and drove around in fourwheel-drive ATVs that looked like amped-up golf carts. At first I thought that they might enjoy their little taste of authority, but they never smiled. No one seemed to be having a good time.
“Don’t ask them any questions,” the girl back at the beer store had told me. “BP won’t let them talk to civilians.”
Her wording had sounded strange at first, but not after I saw the workers spread over the beach: they did, in fact, seem like a sluggish, corporate army.
I moved on to explore the campsites, scouting for a place to put up my tent, before eventually heading back to the beach. Once there I walked down to the water’s edge, my first real encounter with the spill, and found the sand covered with tarballs. Though they didn’t look like balls exactly. The small ones looked like dried rabbit turds or kernels of a not-particularly appetizing cereal. The larger ones were maps of rust-brown countries or jigsaw puzzle pieces, some the size of cow patties.
Other than the workers, I found only one person on the beach: a man sitting in a foldout chair and pointing a camera at the water. James was a surfer whose skin had been burned a crisp brown over the years. He was also an amateur photographer. He told me that the local surf report now specified where the oil was and wasn’t each day, but that one day, when he went to one of the spots where it supposedly wasn’t, his wife’s white bathing suit turned gray.
We had been talking for a little while when a truck with Texas plates pulled into the parking lot and a small family—dad, mom, and daughter—piled out. Before long the little girl was swimming in the oily water, holding hands with her mom. I wondered if I should say something. Then the man, the father, called out to them, not out of concern for their safety, but because he had stumbled upon a giant tarball. James had shown me the same tarball earlier, saying it was the biggest he had yet seen and suggesting that he should bring it to the attention of the EPA officials. But the Texas guy was now laying claim to James’s specimen, apparently interested in taking it as a souvenir or trophy. James was a peaceful man and simply shrugged when the Texas guy picked up the lump of oil and carted it off. The little girl, now out of the water, became defensive when she heard me suggest that James had rightful claim to the tarball.
“If he touches that tarball my daddy will kick his ass,” she said.
She couldn’t have been older than eight. The man placed the tarball in the truck bed, a toxic prize for home.
“They’re real good on the grill with a little paprika!” James yelled after them as they drove off.
Soon after James packed it in, closing his chair and taking his tripod and saying good-bye. I continued down the beach, staring out at the green surf. While I expected to find ugliness here, what surprised me was the beauty. When I had first driven through the gates to this beach—a park designated as a national seashore and therefore undeveloped—something lifted inside of me. Wind swept across the thin scrap of land and birds carved up the air. It felt like the end of the earth, which it was. There were no buildings in sight, just one road running down between a spine of dunes, and my car splashed through puddles of saltwater. The surf frothed and sand blew from the ocean back to the sea oats and marsh that made up the island’s leeward side, and terns—sharp angular birds like living check marks—rose up from the dunes and screeched defensively, protecting their colony. As someone who has always loved the ocean, I understand the appeal of crossing over a bridge or going through a gate and finding a place apart, a place to get away from the human world and into the world of birds, water, wind, and sand. Despite everything, that was how I felt upon entering the park. It was thrilling, really. But a “place apart” also implies seclusion and separateness from the world. It went without saying that, at that moment, the beach surrounding me was anything but.
Eventually I came upon a particularly ugly patch of tar, something the Texas family might have wanted to lay claim to. As I looked into these clumps of oily turds I began to suspect that this time we had really done it. I thought: We have passed a point, and the fact that many of our current actions are suicidal must be becoming obvious to even the most casual observer of the natural world. We have soiled ourselves. Less elegantly put, we have shat ourselves.
These were the kind of things bubbling in my head as I walked from the beach up the driveway to the ranger station. And then I saw it: This . . . what? . . . this symbol of what has gone awry. It was a truck, a white truck, oversized and muscular, larger than any truck has a right to be, with its motor running and windows up, air-conditioning blasting. I’d vowed not to use my AC during this trip, and had kept to that vow so far. It was just a symbolic gesture—being that I had just driven eight hundred miles down to the Gulf—but gestures felt like the only meaningful actions available. I knew I had no right to be outraged.
But outraged I was. When I inquired inside the station it turned out that the truck belonged to a fellow journalist, a guy making a documentary about the tarballs. Shouldn’t he, of all people, get it? He was talking to the rangers, something about the evils of BP, and I didn’t know what got into me—it’s not the kind of thing I usually do—but before I could stop myself I interrupted him by saying: “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