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 figure her or her crew out: clearly they are not like the folks who usually populate this place, burly men who come down from Michigan or Indiana to hunt and fish and chew and spit. Not only are they a lot younger than me, but their general vibe says “California.”
The mystery is solved once Holly tells me that they are part of Jean-Michel Cousteau’s film team, here to make a movie about the oil spill and its effects on the sea life. As a kid, I was a big fan of the great Jacques Cousteau and loved his undersea adventures, and now I am more than pleased to be in the presence of his virtual descendants, a team of divers and cameramen. Since Jean-Michel is not here, Holly is in charge, and after we chat for a while, she introduces me to another member of the group, a young cameraman and scuba diver named Brian.
Brian and I hit it off right away. He is low-key with a ready sense of humor, and before long we are swapping war stories from our time so far in the Gulf.
“We were the first people to dive down and film what was happening underwater,” he says. “We dove right into the oil. When we got back the neoprene on our diving suits had bubbled up. It looked like it was curdled.”
We talk for a while more and then Holly, unprompted, does something wonderful. She invites me to come along the next day when they will be flying out over the rig in a helicopter. I thank her for her generosity. Since my plan was to have no plan and since my contacts in the area are nil, this is a ridiculous bonanza.
To top off the night, Brian and I head out to the patio in front of the lodge and drink a couple of beers. I tell him how I felt paranoid during the drive down and mention all the cop cars. He assures me I wasn’t being paranoid; it’s true that everyone who isn’t working for BP seems to be a cop, and cop cars lurk behind every sign and shrub. There is talk, too, of planes heading out at night to spray dispersants on the water under cover of darkness.
“Napalm” is one local name for Corexit, the chemical they spray. Another is “Agent Orange,” in part for the way it stains the water and shore.
“It’s a very strange place,” Brian mutters, shaking his head.
As if on cue a squat little truck appears near the top of the driveway. He points his beer at it and tells me to watch.
“It comes every night.”
It looks innocent at first, like it’s selling ice cream, minus the tinkly siren song music. Brian says it patrols the streets after dark, happily bouncing along and spraying a huge cloud of God-knows-what.
“I assume it’s some sort of insecticide,” he says.
It turns in at the lodge and rumbles down the driveway, as if to make sure it sprays us where we sit on the porch. We sip our beers and stare as the little toxic ice cream truck trundles by.
I wake at five and decide to drive down to the southernmost tip of Louisiana, the very end of the land. A chronic early riser, I make a cup of coffee and throw my telescope and binoculars in the car and head down, expecting the road to be deserted. But within minutes I am caught in a bizzarroworld rush hour on a too-dark, single-lane road, the cars practically bumper to bumper. I am driving south in hopes of seeing some birds, but the other drivers on this morning pilgrimage have very different goals in mind. Some are local but many have come from far away, beckoned apparently by the smell of opportunity that often wafts up from disaster. They’re headed to a harbor where they will climb aboard a motley collection of ships that includes pleasure boats, shrimp trawlers, and charter fishing boats—all called “Vessels of Opportunity,” the fine Orwellian name dreamed up by BP. VOOs, as they are known locally, are the ships hired by the oil giant to search for oil slicks and lay boom, a kind of absorbent guardrail, to stop the oil’s advance. Down here money is suddenly gushing along with oil, though not everyone is getting in on the fun. A few of the boat owners have managed to get rich by earning a couple grand or so a day to have their boats sit idle, as backups, giving birth to another new local term: “spillionaire.” But most of the local men are simply struggling to make up for lost income, lost because they can no longer make a living catching fish or shrimping or trawling for oysters.
Hundreds of cars pour south toward the harbor, all going from roughly the same origin to the same destination, from their homes and hotels in the north to the harbor in the south, but none of them doing anything as unmanly as carpooling. “You should see it on a weekday,” says the guy buying a tin of Skoal at the convenience store. I ask him if he’s from here and he says he’s not. He’s from Texas and is staying in the barracks-style hotel down the road that is putting up a lot of workers.
The cars crawl south for another mile or so before turning through a gate in a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire where two guards are posted. I pull over on the other side of the road as the commuters report for duty at what looks like a military installation. Paranoia fills the air here, thick as the humidity, and as I watch the workers park their cars, I also keep half an eye out to make sure no one is watching me.
It’s still the bluish dark of early morning as the workers trudge over to their Vessels of Opportunity. Street lamps spray down unnatural aureoles of light as if putting the men on stage. I know I’m in the thick of it now. Proof of that is the sign across the street that reads “Halliburton Road—Do Not Litter.” Good advice. The men climb aboard their boats. One of the small, sad sights down here is watching the boat captains, seamen who have likely not worn life preservers since they were toddlers, all buckled up in their vests as they putter out to sea each morning. It looks like a badge of shame, which of course it is, beholden as these men are—not to their own government, but to the liability lawyers of a multinational corporation. The life jackets are just a physical manifestation of an ugly fact: when you sign on with BP you also sign away the right to criticize the company.
It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been here how pervasive BP’s presence is. I think of a talk I had with Ken Heck, a scientist who works at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. Heck has been commissioned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to help
