The Tarball Chronicles. David Gessner
but it seems kind of wrong to me to hand over so much power—so much of our, excuse the word choice here, freedom—to a foreign corporate 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?
I’m feeling worked up as I drive farther south, but the place quickly pulls me out of my overheated head. Soon I am splashing through three feet of standing water where the river has rushed over blacktop. My headlights flash on impromptu wetlands that cover the road. I observe a blackcrowned night heron along the edge of the water. My car sloshes through the overflow until I reach a small, rundown marina where a sign says, “Welcome to the southernmost point in Louisiana.” I find a spot beyond the fish-scaling table covered with old screws and rusted bolts, between some weeds, paint cans, and a midden of empty Bud Lights. I set up my lawn chair and telescope at the very tip of the land, the southernmost of the southernmost, and rest my now-cold coffee on an upside-down white plastic bucket.
It’s still half-dark, but I can make out a partially sunken tugboat that looks like it never recovered from Katrina, and the birds, of course, which are suddenly everywhere as the sky lightens. A green heron hunts from the dock, a half dozen more white ibises skirt an oily puddle, and egrets, splashes of white, dot the trees.
This is ground zero for the spill, or at least about as close as you can get to ground zero on the mainland. The oil is spewing some fifty miles across the water from where I stand. Yesterday, on the drive down from New Orleans, I pulled over and parked next to the water and called Rocky, my contact for the environmental magazine I am on assignment for, and explained that I wanted, needed, to get out on a boat. He replied calmly, “I can probably get you out on a boat tomorrow or the day after.” He did not understand. My world was not calm. Things were crackling in my head and I needed to seize the moment. I needed to get out on the water immediately. I tried to explain this. Though he still didn’t seem to get it, he gave up the name of a local charter fisherman.
Captain Sal’s line was busy but when I finally got through he agreed to take me out for a short ride, warning that some thunderstorms were coming in. Half an hour later we were pulling out of the Myrtle Grove Marina and down a canal in the bayou, heading toward the Gulf. As we flew across the water I saw my first oiled pelican. It was black and flapped heavily in front of our boat.
“There are too many rules about the oil,” Sal said, shaking his head. “We were out looking for birds and we saw a pelican sitting on some boom and we pulled up to him and the guy I was with grabbed him. If the bird had got over the boom he would have died. He was too oiled up. So we get him in the boat and then we call the hotline for the oiled animals. The girl on the phone says: ‘What’s your nearest cross street?’ And we say we ain’t near any streets—we’re on the water. And she says ‘Well, what’s the closest restaurant nearby?’ Well, I say, there are no restaurants—we’re on the water. So finally we get hold of the wildlife rescue people. They come up in their boat and meet us out on the water. We reach the bird out of the tank where we’d put it and they say ‘Whoa, whoa, don’t touch the bird.’ They put their white space suits on and their masks before taking the bird. All the while the poor bird is suffering. So we say ‘Hurry up. You don’t need the suits—just wash your hands after.’ And they tell us that if any of us are caught handling the bird the authorities could shut down our whole operation and fine us. They would rather have the bird escape and die than get in trouble for helping the bird.”
After a while, Sal and I made our way to the outer fringes of marsh. It was there that the oil first struck in large quantities, the great wave of it darkening the fringes of this immensely green and vital landscape, turning it into something dark and necrotic. What I saw was black and burnt, to the point where, if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought it was the result of a small forest fire. The place looked devastated.
“Erosion is what is killing us here,” said Sal, pointing at the black fringe. “And when the oil hit we got about five years of erosion in one night.”
It wasn’t a pleasant sight, but it was good to see with my own eyes. Even before the oil started to gush, I had started to connect the dots between our need to consume and our intensified storms; between our rising water and our use of fossil fuels; between the destruction of the wild places we love and our hunger to exploit the energy in those places. I am not alone in making these connections, of course. We are all vaguely aware that our gluttonous ways are unsustainable, but we’ve also got our lives to live, thank you very much. And yet. There, staring at the burnt marsh, it was harder to pretend that everything was hunky-dory, harder to pretend that we can skip through our lives with no consequences. There, staring right back at me, was the dark result of our choices.
I am not that hopeful about our ability to change. But this is not about hope. It is about looking a thing in the eye. It is about keeping an honest ledger sheet. It is about adding up what is lost and what is gained. Are we so desperately hungry for this one particular type of fuel that we are willing to sacrifice our beautiful places, our homes, in a desperate attempt to slurp up what is left? Maybe the answer is yes. But if it is, we can at least do the math with open eyes. What are we getting and what are we giving up? If this is really our national sacrifice zone, then we had better figure out just who or what is being sacrificed and who is doing the sacrificing. Sacrifice is tricky word, and as a verb, it cuts both ways. It’s also a broad word and many things, from paying more for twisty lightbulbs to sacrificing an Aztec virgin, fit under its tent. So far it has also been an ineffective word, with most of us turning our backs on the notion that anything really has to change.
We are all happy enough with the idea of sacrificing as long as that doesn’t involve sacrificing anything ourselves. But at some level we all know something has to give. Know it but don’t want to see it. Maybe the first step is seeing honestly, which means at least owning up to what is really happening. Looking it in the eye. The good thing about being here is that I can’t help but face it now.
Captain Sal pointed at the feeble signs of defense against the oil. The boom looked like a child’s flotation device, the pool noodles my daughter uses, only hundreds of them lined up. If they looked frivolous, their job was not: to corral and keep oil out of fragile wetland ecosystems. Lately they had been trying out a special white absorbent boom, which, Sal told me, was locally called “tampon boom.” It floated ten yards from the grasses, while the newest brainstorm, boom-like cheerleader pom-poms, had been spread over one marsh island, apparently with the hope that the many cotton tentacles of the pom-poms would absorb better than the single-limbed boom.
“When the oil first came in it was the viscosity of peanut butter,” Sal said.
It was still possible to see its effects—most obviously the burnt look along the marsh edges—but we saw no actual oil. Sal thought this was due to the dispersants.
“They must have upped the nightly dosage,” he said, shaking his head. “We won’t know the real effects of this for years.”
Still, it was beautiful out on the water. Storms were coming—we could see them both on the GPS and with our own eyes—and a pink hue lit up the sky where a fingernail clipping of a moon hung. The undersides of the high clouds burned a reddish pink and when the lightning hit the whole sky turned electric. Despite the brewing storms, Sal said this was his favorite time to be out on the water, and I agreed. But he decided to head back in when he saw a waterspout—a small watery tornado that rose up out of the ocean—to the east. It looked quite beautiful but could reduce the boat to splinters in seconds.
“That’s nothing to play around with,” he said.
I noticed that the clouds on both sides of us had darkened.
“Are we between those two different storm clusters?” I asked.
“Actually about five,” he said, gesturing down at the GPS. He pointed to a particularly large cluster. “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 halfway back, leaving us soaked through.