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.
As of this morning, the Deepwater Horizon rig has been gushing for seventy-seven days, filling the waters in front of me. Some think of the Gulf as our least coast, the place where we dump all our shit. That shit includes hundreds of other leaky wells, as well as nutrients, waste, and fertilizers that are carried down rivers from Midwestern farms and emptied in its waters. No matter how we try to dress it up, it’s an afterthought, a dumping ground, the country’s toilet where we flush our waste. Now added to the mix are, at most recent count, about forty million barrels of oil and millions of gallons of dispersant. The president just called this the “worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.”
And yet, if the Gulf is a hell of sorts, it’s a beautiful hell. I walk up the road and stare out at three cypress trees that must hold a couple hundred roosting ibises, all of them settling and fidgeting, settling and fidgeting, like fussy sleepers. Beyond the ibises, I catch sight of a roseate spoonbill, an anomalous patch of bruised pink in a green cypress.
I am here to see what is left, and part of what is left is beauty. I need to be honest about that too. I have grown weary of avoiding things; it takes a lot of energy. Bring on the beauty and the ugliness both. Show me the honest math. What are we losing? What is being gained?
The birds have already lit up the trees, and now the orange ball lights up all of it, the world greening as it brightens. There is a vibrancy here that reminds me of a word I learned from a former chiclero, a Belizean man who helped find and tap rubber trees. “Yax” is a Maya word meant to describe a particularly vibrant and wild green. Here there is yax aplenty, from the cypresses to the marsh grasses and ferns to what I take to be some sort of elder plant. In counterpoint stands the rising sun. Despite what must be considerable pressure to sell out, it still rises freely, brandishing its usual blazing reds and oranges, not yet willing to don the corporate colors of green and yellow. It is nice to know that there are still a few realms beyond the reach of British Petroleum.
I sip my cold coffee in salute to the sunrise.
FORCES OF NATURE
When I return to the lodge from my early morning bird-watching I get some disappointing news: the weather has put the whammy on our helicopter ride. We will not be getting up in the air today. I sulk around the lodge for a while like a child denied a ride on a roller coaster and think of what could have been. Then Lupe comes to the rescue with a pitcher of ice tea.
Somewhat buoyed by the drink, I step out for a walk in the drizzle. It’s no helicopter ride, but it brings unexpected sights. I head instinctively toward the river, first hiking up the levee and then walking along the top. From here, on the hump that sometimes struggles to contain it, the river looks muddy, caged-in, powerful. I’ve heard lots of songs about levees, of course, but didn’t grasp the concept until now. Walking on top gives me a view not just of the river and the opposite bank, but also, to the west, of the wetlands that lead to the Gulf beyond. It occurs to me that I have never walked along the banks of the Mississippi before. Which seems an amazing fact, since I happen to be an American.
After a while the rain stops and the sun breaks through. The heat is overpowering. It slams you, stuns you, slathers you in sweat. Everything wilts, and I am part of everything. It’s the kind of heat that makes you want to lie down and give up, to throw up your arms in surrender. It helps you understand the logic behind siestas; every instinct telling you to crawl into a cool, dark place and lie there and be still. The heat even seems to stun the birds that fly overhead; they flap lazily and deeply.
Crickets blare and willows sag and down by the water the reeds grow as tall as trees. By the time I get back to the lodge, I am sopping with sweat. I find Holly at one of the high tables along the rim of the lodge, sitting on a barstool and typing on her computer. When I walk up, she tells me she will soon be interviewing a member of an organization responsible for surveying birds and counting their fatalities from the oil. She invites me to sit in during the interview. It turns out to be an odd and frustrating exchange that takes about forty minutes to go nowhere. Holly is gently prying and persistent, but no matter what she says the man will not divulge the number of bird deaths. Finally, sheepishly, he admits why.
“BP is now on our board of trustees,” he says.
The interview ends soon after. Once the man has left, all we can do is shake our heads and laugh.
The rest of the day passes quietly. The Cousteau folk are working on their computers and lying low. I decide to take a nap. But the quiet ends with the arrival of Ryan Lambert in early evening. He walks into the lodge as if he owns the place—which, of course, he does.
Not only does he own it but he nailed together almost every board with his own hands, or more accurately, renailed them after his lodge was drowned by Katrina. We shake hands and he points up at the rafters above the mounted animal heads, to a line in the wood over twenty feet up.
“That’s how high the waters from Katrina reached,” he says.
Soon we are all sitting around one of the long camp-style dining room tables while Ryan holds court. He takes the head of the table, while Holly and I sit on either side of him. The Cousteauians and I don’t say a word, which is fine with me. Ryan
