facing the Gulf, the oil, and the rig. Despite all the self-consciousness swirling nearby, it only takes about a minute or two of strolling along the water for that good beach-walking feeling to come over me. I leave my sneakers above the wrack line and start swinging my arms. This island is a lot like Masonboro, the undeveloped barrier island I often kayak to near my home in North Carolina. Both will be underwater soon, if the scientists are right, but for the moment I’m not interested in thoughts of doom. I’m interested in the heat rising off the sand and the swaying grasses and the hundreds of terns. I stare toward the east, where thunderclouds are building, the usual dark afternoon gathering.
What is real? What is authentic? What stories do we choose to tell? Is it all contrived, with so many of us on this planet pointing cameras at the rest of us? In an age where everything is recorded, how do we wedge downward and find the story we consider true? We, or at least I, need to break away from it all every now and then, but even those breakaways are often later transmuted into stories.
When I curl around the island’s bend and can no longer see the others, I feel the old excitement of solitary freedom. I reach some marsh muck where fiddler crabs seethe along the sand, the whole place breathing. The crabs scurry down into their now oily holes, holes that aerate the sands, which in turn encourage plants to grow. Hundreds of these creatures, thousands perhaps, run from me, a giant in their midst. The land hisses with them.
I am briefly free of other people, or partly free, and exhilarated for it, until two sights lasso me back to community and narrative. First is some tampon-boom tossed up onshore, coiled there like a python. My exhilaration is immediately dampened: there is no breaking away from what’s going on here. The second sight is more dramatic: a dead pelican sprawled on the shore. Its face is buried in the sand, its wings spread like a pterodactyl, posing in death like an emblem on a flag.
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