head of the table. He has huge hands and a big expressive face, red from decades in the sun, and he looks like he could pick you up and crack you in half over his knee. But more impressive than this implication of physical strength is the immediate impression of energy, his pilot light always on high.
“I’m the only lodge around that isn’t booked up,” he says. “The rest of them are filled with BP workers. But I’d rather meet interesting people than whore myself out to BP.”
Over the next hour I learn that Ryan was born and raised in Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans. His grandparents owned a place down here in Buras, where they rode out Hurricane Betsy. When Ryan visited as a kid he would roam the wetlands, hunting and fishing with his uncles and falling madly in love with the place. After high school he went right to work at a chemical plant, but he couldn’t get this wild place out of his head. After a few years at the plant, he decided to start doing the impossible. That is, he kept working at the plant full time each night and then drove down here to work as a fishing and hunting guide about twenty days a month. Which left about ten nights a month when he actually got some sleep. He kept this going for twenty-one years. Finally, at thirty-nine, he quit the plant and moved down to establish Cajun Fishing Adventures, which grew into a million-dollar business with over twenty employees including fishing guides, duck guides, house cleaners, and cooks. He had realized his dream, at least until Katrina struck.
“I’ve had a bull’s-eye on my back for a while now,” he said. “First Katrina and now this.”
He insists that I join him and the Cousteau crew for dinner, and when I tell him that dinner is not included in my deal, he laughs and waves it off. Lupe serves up spareribs and coleslaw while Ryan tells the story of how he rebuilt the lodge after Katrina. The others lean in to hear.
“I got a plaque for being the first person to come back to this parish. I came by boat at first. It was a watery wasteland where you could only see the peak of this lodge. Everything was dead.”
He wanted to rebuild as soon as the water receded, but the insurance company refused to pay him, claiming the damage had come from water, not wind. He needed money so he came up with an idea. There was talk everywhere of trying to revive local businesses and of cleaning up after Katrina. He added these things up and put together a crew to clean debris and rebuild the parish. He worked hard and was paid well, well enough to in turn pay for the materials to rebuild his lodge, which he did whenever he wasn’t working on the cleanup. “I was possessed,” he says. Though I have only known him about an hour, this is not hard to believe. About a half year later, Cajun Fishing Adventures was up and running again.
“And now this,” he says, shaking his head. “This is worse than Katrina.”
Considering that Katrina basically flattened his town before drowning it when the Mississippi broke through the levee, I can’t help but ask: “Worse?”
“Worse, I think. Not just the oil but the dispersants. I was out on an island the other day and hundreds of small clams were rolling in with the surf, all of them covered in tarballs. The dispersants have sunk the oil out of sight of the cameras, but it’s down near the bottom of the ocean, at the base of the food chain. This is just the start of the death we’re going to be seeing in the future. The fisheries were already dying. This could be the deathblow.”
I have heard this before tonight, but never put so bluntly. While no one knows how the chemical dispersants will affect the Gulf ’s food chain, everyone is anxious. The original mixture BP proposed using on the spill—Corexit 9527—was deemed too toxic by the EPA. When they demanded that the company change to a less toxic product, BP simply switched to another version of the same chemical compound, Corexit 9500. Both versions of the chemical are manufactured by BP and neither are legal in England. At this point, over a million gallons of the stuff has been dumped in the Gulf.2 The fact that the EPA did not even attempt to enforce its own ruling says worlds about what is happening here. The immediate effect of the chemical is to first disperse the oil, and then to sink it to the ocean floor. This makes short-term sense to anyone, like BP, who wants to tamp down immediate panic about the spill, since it means that less oil will be washing up on beaches in a region that depends on tourism more than any other industry. The goal is to not have this look like the Exxon Valdez, which is to say the immediate goal is focused on appearances.
“It’s like a kind of magic trick that BP is trying to pull off,” Ryan says. “A sleight of hand, out of sight out of mind. It’s good PR if people don’t see the oil.” Whether it’s good for anything else is a question he leaves unanswered.
After a dessert of blueberry pie, we retire to the overstuffed couch and turn on the Weather Channel. Ryan sprawls out on the big pillows and then asks me what I found on the beaches of Florida and Alabama. I tell him and then he asks for an overall impression.
“Everyone’s got their hand in the till,” I say after a minute. “That’s what I’ve come to believe. Everyone’s a part of it.”
“I’m not,” he snaps.
I’m afraid I’ve offended him, but it turns out Ryan Lambert is not easy to offend. He is smiling now. His reply was not defensive. He was simply stating a fact.
After a while the others head to their rooms or to the various high-top tables around the big room’s rim, and Ryan and I stay up late talking. To an outsider we might seem an unlikely pair; and it quickly becomes clear that in many ways we are at the opposite ends of the political spectrum. As simplistic as it may be, he’s the perfect stereotype for the hunting enthusiast, salt-of-the-earth conservative, and I, the natureloving, college professor liberal. And yet we both possess an underrated quality often ignored in the televised and shrill national debates: a sense of humor. More importantly, it turns out we have birds in common.
Over the last fifteen years or so, my life has gotten tangled up with birds, and specifically a particular species of bird called ospreys. I spent an entire year on the marshes of Cape Cod observing them, and another migrating with the birds down the East Coast to Cuba and Venezuela. Majestic birds with six-foot wingspans and black raccoon masks, ospreys get their living by making high dives into the water for fish. When I heard the Gulf was filling with oil my first thought was: the ospreys will be diving right down into it.
Ryan is a bird lover, too, though of a slightly different sort. While I watch birds through binoculars, he likes to shoot them.
“The only difference between conservationists and environmentalists,” he says, “is that we eat our way through nature.”
Ducks, not ospreys, are his obsession, but we are both worried about the fall migration. As Ryan sinks deeper into the couch, he describes the spectacle of millions of waterfowl sweeping down through the marshes of Louisiana. He is a tough guy, and you have to remember that what he wants to do with these birds is kill them, but his voice softens when he talks about the coming migration.
“This estuary is the richest in the nation and the majority of the waterfowl in the United States will come through here. They come through in great waves. In late August the blue-winged teal will come through. They feed on the bottom where the oil is. They are a beautiful bird, meticulous, too, with never a feather out of place. When they preen they will spread the oily mousse all over them and when they get oiled up they can’t regulate their body temperatures and then they can’t fly. They will not be easy to find and clean. You can’t catch a duck the way you can a pelican. They’re elusive and can get deep in the grasses or underwater. You won’t be able to catch them. Not the scaup and redheads and canvasbacks. The numbers of these birds are down already. And now they will be living out in the oil.”
At one
