John Ramsey Miller
We all have our favorite locations––places in our hearts that we put to the pen. Places change. Some locations change subtly or dramatically. I wrote New Orleans, a place that changed at a snail’s pace when it did, until Katrina decimated her down to the ancient bones. The city is coming back at a snail’s pace, and it will never be the same as I remember it.
For the past many several years I have fished almost exclusively for Redfish and Speckled Trout in the brackish inlets and marshes south of Houma, Louisiana. My friends and I stay at a cabin in Falgout Marina, and we fish the lakes, marshes and often around several of the oil rigs ten miles out in the Gulf with Captain George Landry. Landry has spent his life hunting and fishing those waters and he knows the lakes and marshes better than any pelican does. What we are seeing on TV–the weeds covered with oil––are rich fishing grounds populated with marine life as well as a huge variety of wildlife. During their mating season, I have seen flocks of Pelicans–huge clouds of thousands of them sailing in loose formation, falling and dipping up shrimp, small trout and then taking to the skies again to sail like kites. Alligators, bottle-nose dolphins, hawks, egrets, gulls, deer, rabbits, crabs, shrimp …the list is endless. When I see the reeds covered in oil, I think of the times I’ve watched those reeds move as huge Redfish cut through them chasing dinner. I hate what has happened to those grounds, but the truth is we have been heading toward destruction of those wetlands for decades as salt water incursion has been killing off those wonderful natural places thanks in large part to oil exploration, conservationists being relegated to “on the corner with a bullhorn” status, and Louisiana’s unmolested political and big oil corruption, lack of funds or the politicians’ true desire to do anything to save them. It was because of the ongoing destruction of the wetlands that Hurricane Katrina and Rita did so much damage, since the shrinking wetlands act as a natural buffer against those kinds of disasters.
So, I am buying BP gasoline almost exclusively because I want them to stay solvent enough to be able to pay the billions to fix what they have helped destroy. Not to reward them for getting caught doing what most oil companies do without the same degree of unfortunate results. The truth is that none of the oil companies have cleaner hands than any of the others and neither do we. The oil companies have NEVER cared about what they destroy to get to the oil we demand to run our cars, tractors, motorcycles, lawnmowers.
I may never get to fish Sister Lake, Lake Mechant, or Lost Lake again and that saddens me immensely, but I am sadder for the generations who will never enjoy those places as I have, and never marvel at the pelicans filling the skies, the dolphins flanking our boat as we skim the flat water with the wind in our faces and the smell of salt water in our nostrils.
I am sick at heart for the thousands of people who make their livings from the renewable bounty of the marshes and lakes, all of the people who love the seafood that comes from those places, the fish and animals who will perish, and for all that is being lost and will never be the same. I have little faith that the oil will ever be completely cleaned up, because government and industry and the rest of us have such short attention spans, and words of promise do not always translate in effective action. I cannot believe that the oil can be cleaned up. Our ability to screw up beyond the bounds of science to fix those things is growing exponentially. I suspect the oil will be there poisoning everything it can get to for decades, and I predict that the next big disaster will take our eyes off the oily creatures, the dying lakes and marshes. Beaches with tar balls by the millions, lost jobs from a lack of tourists… Oysters, shrimp, crabs and the fish we harvest for our tables will likely be produced in Chinese ponds, and the drilling will go on…
History proves that we can adapt and move on, accepting loss here for gain there…
I have used this place as a setting in several of my novels because it is an enchanting, fertile, amazingly beautiful, complex, delicate and mysterious. It is now lost to the past, but burned indelibly into my imagination. I suppose I will keep using what it was to me in my novels, and I don’t want to add what it is now to that memory.
John, although I’ve spent little time in south Louisiana, I was raised, grew up, went to college, married and had the first of our two sons born in Pensacola, FL. It’s a friendly, deep south, easy going resort town that offers some of the freshest, best seafood on earth. It’s not uncommon for a menu in a seafood restaurant to state, “Your dinner slept in the Gulf last night”. Beyond that, Pensacola Beach is unique in the entire world. That’s because the beaches along that portion of the Gulf coast are made up of snow white, sugar sand that is so pure it squeaks when you walk on it. When I was a child, my family dressed up in heavy overcoats, caps and gloves, and stood in front of the huge white dunes of Pensacola beach, took a picture and sent it to relatives up north declaring we were snowed in down in Florida. Those beaches have withstood Opal and other destructive hurricanes. Over the centuries they’ve witnessed the landing and fallen under the control of five nations. Standing on that sand is enchanting, calming, and infectious. Until now.
Each night I watch the images of black tar and oil washing up on the miles of white sand. I see the pictures of empty hotels and restaurants. The fleets of bottom fishing and charter boats tied up, their engines cold. I see the treasure I have loved all my life being violated by greed, by criminals. It is heartbreaking and sickening. Like you, I still have those wonderful memories. But they are no substitute for the sickening loss of what was one of the most beautiful places on earth. My only hope is that it’s a big ocean out there and Mother Nature always has a way of healing the earth. Let’s hope we haven’t gone too far this time.
What’s happening in the Gulf of Mexico is like the end of a disaster movie, only in this one, no hero was able to stop the Multinational Corporation from destroying a major section of the ocean. What we’re left with, sadly, is only a learning opportunity–that we shouldn’t be careless with technology that we can’t control. We are leaving our children a battered, degraded Earth. I pray that they will have the wisdom and will to nurse it back to health.
A very moving post, John. We all mourn the loss of so much down in the Gulf.
Now, the next great challenge will be one of restraint–avoiding the temptation to “try stuff” to clean up the mess and in the process make it worse. We’ve already learned that the knee-jerk reaction to use dispersants in the early days of the spill have in fact done more harm than good.
There’s a lesson to be learned from the Exxon Valdez incident in Prince William Sound. That ravaged area is nearly pristine again–except, I’m told, for those areas where aggressive man-made clean up efforts were launched. Apparently, what comes from the earth is reassimilated back into it in time. Think decades, not millenia.
In the case of the ongoing disaster in the Gulf, with so much at stake ecologically, economically and politically, chances are slim that anyone will opt merely to let Mother Nature work her own miracles; but we all need to think five or six times before we start pouring millions of gallons of chemicals into the water to combat the millions of gallons of oil.
Those tar balls are ugly, but at least they’re organic. They’re toxic to plants and animals in the short term (again, decades not millenia), but the oil from which they’re formed is itself made of the earth. We need to make sure that everything we do to interfere with natural processes is rooted in hard science and proven capability, and not in political expediency.
John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com
Moving post, John. It’s a terrible tragedy. And Gilstrap is right, we have a tendency to make things so much worse…
Moving post, John. It’s a terrible tragedy. And Gilstrap is right, we have a tendency to make things so much worse…
I vote we make it worse.
Even though this post is several days old, I’m going to step in with both feet.
First, I need to mea culpa. I used to be an environmental engineer for an enormous oil company.
That said, I am appalled. In the early days of the spill, I tried to keep people calm saying that professionals were hard at work on this problem, that E&P engineers were the absolute cream of the cream technically and that the coffers were thick and fat with cash. This was a controllable problem.
Then came the Keystone Kops, Laurel and Hardy response. All I can say is that the industry has changed a lot since my days in the oil patch.
Even if it did nothing more than show solidarity, an entire cadre of managers would have been out shoveling tar balls for the cameras, not attending yacht races. Even as a front line grunt, I had extensive media training and knew how to handle myself during a crisis. Heck, my company owns a town. There was a spill, a bad one, and the shortest line between two points was to make every property owner an offer they couldn’t refuse and then contain it and deal with it.
John is right. The earth has an amazing ability to heal itself. The oil is biodegradable and wetlands are natural composters. It will take time, but the Gulf will heal.
BP, now that’s another story. I think the investers had better get used to the fact that there ain’t gonna be much in the way of profit for the next couple of years!
Terri