The Tarball Chronicles. David Gessner
said anything and feeling guilty when the guy stormed off.
I expected that the rangers would be put off by my behavior, but instead they acted amused. After the truck guy was gone, one of them turned to me with an unexpected smile and started talking. Right away I liked her—she had sympathetic eyes, a quick wit, and an obvious love for the beach. Before long she was showing me pictures of what she called “her” beach, in the same way someone else might show you pictures of her kids. She held out one of a hidden place she went to every day for lunch, tucked between the dunes, a place far away from the tourists where she could “get away.” But the tarballs had discovered her secret. Yesterday she’d had an apple with lunch and showed me a picture of a huge tarball dwarfing the leftover core.
As we talked she informed me that the fort that gave the seashore its name was built after the War of 1812 to protect our young republic from British invasion. Which had worked pretty well until three weeks ago.
She also told me about watching as the BP supervisors and contractors and their work crews descended on the park. It was a strange twist. “The British are coming!” she’d wanted to yell. And then, before she knew it, the British were here.
“We used to be in charge of this beach,” she continued. “Now we are bossed around by these people. But they don’t know the place. They trample things. At first they ran right over the turtle nests in their ATVs.”
She described the dark day the caramel-colored tide came in and coated her beach.
“It was the color and texture of a Baby Ruth bar left out on a hot dashboard,” she said.
What she felt was a sense of creeping powerlessness.
“It’s not just the oil on the beach, it’s the fact that we’re not in control. We’re like people in an occupied country.”
We exchanged e-mail addresses and phone numbers and promised to keep in touch. Before I left, though, I asked her if I was allowed to swim in the water. I have traveled the coasts a lot in the past few years and at every beach I’ve visited—from Alaska to Cape Cod to Nova Scotia to the Outer Banks—I have made it a point to mark my arrival with a plunge into the ocean. I may not have liked seeing the little Texas girl playing in the surf but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to see myself in it.
She shrugged.
“We don’t make the rules anymore, but BP’s party line is: ‘If it looks clean you can go in.’”
“That’s pretty scientific.”
“Yup,” she replied, shaking her head but still smiling.
After bidding her good-bye I hiked back down through the dunes. Before long I felt better, swinging my arms and looking out at the water. The world opened up: a rush of wind and salt spiced with the vague smell of oil. An osprey flew above the surf, peering down for fish. Up the beach from the tarballs was a sign for a sea turtle nest where, below the ground, a newborn Kemp’s ridley lay snug in egg and sand. I knew that soon enough the turtle would emerge and begin its crawl to the oily sea.
Far off in the distance, I could still see the tarball farmers. But they were tiny chess figures way down the beach. It’s odd to say on a beach where hundreds of men wielded shovels and trash bags, but as I stopped to crack a beer, I was filled with that sense of solitude and euphoria that has always drawn me to the coast. I moved away from the workers and thought that maybe I had reached a place where I was relatively alone. That is until I noticed a woman walk down to the water before circling back to a hummock. When she reached the hump of sand she bowed her head as if in prayer. I walked over to say hello but then I saw the flowers and realized that she might be spreading the ashes of a loved one.
Or she might have simply been mourning for the beach itself. Either way, I gave her another mile of space before finding a spot tucked into the dunes. There I took out my journal and binoculars and studied the surf and sky. I watched a single tern dive, slashing downward and then lifting back up into the air. Success! It flew upwind with a sliver of minnow in its mouth, heading back toward its colony in the dunes.
So this is our national sacrifice zone, I thought. It was my first good view of the Gulf of Mexico, whitecapped and windblown, and of course just looking at the water was not enough. I stripped down to my boxers and walked to the edge. Then, after some brief hesitation, I dove in and began swimming out into the sea.
“If it looks clean you can go in,” says BP. As if anyone, even the diving tern, with vision six times better than ours, can see the quality of the water it dives into. As if anyone, even the tern, can possibly peer into the fish it holds in its mouth and see the gift of chemicals inside, chemicals perhaps already doing their ugly work. As if it can discern that once again human beings somehow can’t comprehend the simplest of notions, one the bird knows deep in its hollow bones: that everything in the world is connected, and that when you soil one thing you soil it all.
Unlike the bird, I had some idea of what I was getting into. But I swam anyway, rising and falling with the waves. It was an unctuous baptism but a baptism still. I had come a long way and now I was part of it, and I knew, as my philosopher-waiter reminded me, that we were all part of it. I also knew this: There would be no more sitting on the sidelines. If the tern was going down, so would I.
And while the water might be poisoned, for the moment it felt good. I am glad to be here, I thought. There is no other place to be.
THE GREEN SUN RISES: JULY 16, 2010
I’ve been down here ten days now. From Fort Pickens I traveled to Mobile and from Mobile to Bayou La Batre, fictional shrimping grounds of Forrest Gump and real shrimping grounds to hundreds of now-unemployed men, and from there on to Mississippi and Louisiana. I keep thinking things can’t get any stranger but then they do. Everyone is either angry or giddy-drunk with the money that BP is handing out to assuage their bile. This afternoon I saw New Orleans for the first time and was tempted to stop for a drink and some pommes frites, but blew right through, intent on getting down here, a hundred miles south of the city. I am edging closer to the source. As I left New Orleans I couldn’t help but feel that I was driving downhill as well as southward, even though the city itself is, in places, below sea level.
The nearer I get the more obsessed I become with the need to see the rig, the oil, the whole ugly mess of it. It is dark, past nine, by the time I finally close in on the town of Buras. I am feeling a little paranoid, and not just because I am foolishly sipping the beer that I hold between my legs as I drive. Hardly any vehicles are on the road but the few that are seem to be almost exclusively cop cars. I toast them in the rearview after they have passed, acting bold but feeling scared. In the darkness I can see nothing other than the road, but I sense that the land is growing narrower, and that big water is closing in from both sides. The place bursts with water, water hungry to swallow the thin and tenuous land. On my left is the Mississippi, straining against the earthen mounds of levee, and on my right are millions of acres of wetlands. Straight ahead lies the Gulf and the blown Deepwater rig.
Following instructions, I pull a U-ey after the giant flagpole and circle back to the Cajun Fishing Adventures lodge where I will stay. Inside, the cavernous lodge is almost empty. Empty except for Lupe, short for Lupida, the Mexican cook and caretaker, and a small group of men and women who look less like fishermen or hunters than a band of scruffy Ultimate Frisbee players. The lodge’s emptiness seems odd, given that I noticed several No Vacancy signs on the way down, but I forget about this when Lupe hands me a glorious sandwich stacked high with turkey, mayo, tomatoes, and lettuce. I wolf down the sandwich with a beer from my cooler, and before long Lupe and I are chatting away despite the fact that she barely speaks English and that my Spanish is comically primitive.
When we are done talking, I walk over to say hello to the other lodgers, approaching the only one who seems close to my age: a pretty woman who tells me her name is Holly. At first I can’t