style="font-size:15px;"> “No fish.”
I said this out loud without thinking about the larger repercussions of my simple caveman sentence. But. What if there really were no fish? I knew that this particular bird needed three or four a day, more when feeding a family.
Later that evening at sunset, I drove into the Fort Pickens picnic area and found a spectacular nest. The picnic area had become mission control for the cleanup efforts, and the birds now shared their habitat with trucks and Dumpsters and fluorescent-vested workers and dozens of Porta-Potties and hundreds of all-terrain vehicles. Still it was the perfect place to end the day, and not just because the nest was one of the most beautiful I’d ever seen, a nestled cup of sticks in the upper branches of a dead live oak. Three young ospreys—immatures, identifiable by both their size and checkered wings—perched around and on the nest, illuminated by the last shafting rays of sun. They let out high-pitched warning cries that told me not to come any closer.
Then I heard another sound that took a minute to recognize. The osprey cries were mixing with a different sort of music: the backward beeping of trucks. On the far side of the parking lot, air-conditioning blew through ducts into a huge billowing tent and men in Hazmat suits walked in and out. It looked like a scene out of Spielberg: the military trying to keep the discovery of the alien autopsy under wraps. But what might have been too clichéd for a movie was the fact that above it all the ospreys nested, the whole scene watched over by birds that had come back from the dead.
UP IN THE AIR
Today the weather cooperates. The helicopter arrives, landing on Ryan’s lawn at eight in the morning, splattering shadows outward. I run toward it, hunched down and sensibly worried, like any beginning helicopter passenger, about decapitation. While I’ve never been in a helicopter before, Brian and his coworker on the Cousteau team, Nathan, are old pros, having been out to the rig not long after it first blew. I, on the other hand, am like a little kid, clutching my disposable camera and notebook as we lift off. The blades spray wind and light across the grass below. A wavering turkey vulture flaps away from the noise. The lodge shrinks as we rise, and I see that my first impression—this land as a fragile strip between waters—was correct. Brian points down at a cop car hiding behind a tree. As we fly south toward Venice where we stop to refuel, it’s hard not to notice how much oil is being used to help clean up the spilled oil: helicopters are coming and going constantly from the pads. Once we are back in the air Brian points out the window toward a larger Black Hawk helicopter carrying a sandbag west over to one of the threatened islands. The huge bag hangs and sways below it on cables like a spider’s egg sac.
Thirty percent of domestic U.S. oil production now comes from the Gulf, and in the headlong rush to drill deeper and find more, that production has increased 34 percent just since 2009.5 If this began as a little boy mess, it has bloomed into an emergency that, according to the little boys, only they can fix. And so now helicopters fly all day long trying to save us from the oil, burning thousands of gallons of gas in the process. Everywhere you look you have ships, cars, trucks, planes, and copters charging every which way to protect us.
But for the moment I give irony a rest. What overwhelms the ironic, swamps it actually, is the landscape. It was one thing for Ryan to say that 14 percent of the country’s coastal wetlands span out from the road near his home, it is another to actually see them. We fly south but can’t outrun all the green, the great mangrove islands and marsh grasses. As an outsider, prone perhaps to regional prejudice, I somehow accepted that it didn’t really matter much that these waters were home to over four thousand oil and natural gas wells. We needed somewhere to dump our industrial complex, but how can this place be that place: it shimmers with green.
Suddenly, a hundred feet below me, I see black and white wings and realize that we are soaring above a half-dozen Frigatebirds, officially known as magnificent Frigatebirds. While they are spectacular, spending whole days in the air, the adjective in the bird’s name has always seemed overdone to me, since they get their living in a somewhat seedy manner. They are kleptoparasitic, never deigning to stoop as low as to fish for themselves, but instead swooping down from on high to steal fish from other, more industrious birds. They seem to float far above the mess we have made, but of course they can’t stay above it for long. Eventually they must dip in and steal fish that are just as dirty as they were at the moment they left the water.
In the landscape below you can see geology at work, how the Mississippi dumped its nutrients for millions of years and how the land then spread southward from the delta, extending itself in miles and miles of watery grasslands, which in turn became home to young fish and oysters and shrimp and millions of birds. Far from a shit hole, it is a wonder. Green jigsaw pieces of grass fit with blue pieces of water while a river runs through this already-watery world. A great snaking river, hemmed in still, even at this point, funneled by engineers toward the Gulf itself. It is a shocking sight: the great freshwater torrent running home toward salt. It is still almost beyond sense. The bayou world of marsh grasses and creeks and straight man-made canals is one thing, but then through them, or looking like it is superimposed on top of them, is the great brown weaving Mississippi. I have never before seen freshwater of that magnitude moving through a coastal water ecosystem.
Before I came here I boned up on the Mississippi, and read a book called Rising Tide by John M. Barry. Barry’s book told the story of the great flood of 1927, but what really struck me was the frontispiece. If ever a picture was worth a thousand words here it was: an illustration of the branching tree of the Mississippi and all its tributaries. The picture was called “Mississippi River System.” Somehow I had never thought of it that way before. When I pictured our largest river I saw it running straight down, expressstyle, north to south from Minnesota to New Orleans. But this picture told a different story, a story that stretched from the headwaters of the Missouri River in Montana to those of the Allegheny in upstate New York. It made it look like every creek in the United States fed the Mississippi, which isn’t far off. The feeder streams and rivers were capillaries and veins and arteries, a great cardiovascular system of almost the entire country from east to west and north to south. And all of it ends up here.6
We fly on. I would have thought we were past any towns at this point, but suddenly a human outpost appears below us amidst the watery grasses. Through my headphones the pilot says that this hamlet, which sits at the mouth of the Mississippi, is called Pilottown. Here local river captains take over ships returning from sea to steer them up the Mississippi—the sea captains don’t know the river’s currents and tides like the local river captains do. The only way to get to this little outpost is by sea or air. According to our pilot it’s a wild place, renowned for its drinking and prostitution as much as its frontier remoteness.
After Pilottown, we reach the end of land. Orange and red and blue lines bubble out around the outer islands, as if a giant child had clumsily tried to trace the land’s outlines. These are the lines of boom, a colorful, if ineffective, protection against the oil. As of yesterday, 3,474 kilometers of boom have been laid down. And yet, with any sort of good wind or storm, the water and oil will splash right over the boom, rendering it useless.
As important as doing something is right now, looking like you are doing something is perhaps more important. This is a lesson BP has learned well. “False hustle,” was what Red Auerbach, the old Celtics coach, called it, and false hustle has become a BP specialty. Just this week the company had to sheepishly admit that they had doctored a photo from their spill command center in Houston that showed workers monitoring great banks of video screens glowing with underwater images. There it was in the papers: three passionate and concerned workers keeping
