A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [102]
I can’t imagine. I get to go home.
Because it’s a holiday weekend, Marion wants to see if he can get any shrimp. In the seafood shop over which he presides, Gary Skinner sweeps back his golden hair. He’s a large man who describes his age as “fifty-nine, going on a hundred.” He’d been a jeweler and watchmaker. “Got to be a dead trade,” he says. “Cheap imports. Now we got cheap imported shrimp. That’s why we had to open this shop up, to survive shrimpin’. Couldn’t survive on wholesale prices.”
We get a little tutorial on shrimp. A connoisseur, Skinner says, “The pink shrimp is probably the prettiest shrimp. It’s beautiful. It’s got this unique little black spot on the back of it; the shell is firm, it peels real good, it’s real sweet. It’s just a good shrimp. They’re all good, but I think it’s just the best.”
He’s had the shop for six years. He’s been shrimping since 1975. His two shrimp boats supply his shop. Except now they’re working for BP.
“My big boat, last week they scooped up about forty barrels of oil. That’s, like, sixty seconds’ worth of what’s comin’ out that well.”
He tells me, “At first, my wife said, ‘There’s gonna be a big slick comin’ this way.’ I said, ‘Aw, they’ll stop it in a coupla days.’ When a week went by—. They started shuttin all the fishin’ down. I mean, they had to, or you’d be getting oil all over your net, contaminatin’ your whole catch.
“Right now, BP’s actually payin’ more than shrimpin’ pays,” Skinner says. He explains that the shop’s business has grown 20 to 40 percent each year, including 20 percent in the 2009 recession. It’s been a big success. “BP has figured in what our profit would have been this year, and what they’ve been giving me has been accurate,” he reports. “They’re payin’ on time, so it looks like that’s not gonna be a problem.”
The problem: “Business has really fell off since this oil. This weekend—and this is a big holiday—it’s down about 80 percent. Normally we have tourists, we have fresh shrimp off my boats. We’d sell forty or fifty ice chests full of shrimp for backyard parties.
“There’s been a lot of sleepless nights,” he acknowledges. “The money’s one thing. Mainly it’s been hard watching the business going down. What are we gonna do if they find out everything’s contaminated, that it’s killin’ the nurseries inside, where shrimp grow. Or it’s on the bottom offshore, where the shrimp spawn. It could be all over with. If they get it stopped, there might be some light at the end of the tunnel. Nobody knows, man. This is new for everybody.”
His daughter-in-law works in the shop, with her babies calling and crying. His sons are running his boats. He comments, “My own two little boys started coming out on the boat when they were three years old. Now they’re captains.” He says he built the business to leave to his grandkids, “if they want to go fishin.’ If they want to go to college and be a doctor, I support that, too.” He adds, “People say, ‘Oh, how can you keep doing this?’ Well, we’ve had a good life. Money’s not everything. We’ve had a lot of good times.”
But we’re not having good times today. This is the sorriest Fourth of July I’ve ever seen, and—because I like boats, I guess—it seems saddest at the boat ramp. Fishing is closed, but boating is allowed. Yet right now, the boat launch is empty when it should be packed.
Marion says, “Normally, there’d be dozens of boats here, jockeying for position, launching, hauling, standing off waiting to get in or out. It would be a madhouse. Normally there would have been hundreds of boats launched this morning, hundreds coming in at day’s end.”
There’s not one single boat. No motorboats, not a single sail anywhere in view.
Dauphin Island has canceled its official fireworks. I guess no one is feeling sufficiently independent. I hear that BP offered ten grand toward fireworks but the town had the pride to decline.
Plenty of private fireworks, though. Zip—pop!
I get myself invited to a deck party. Lots of locals and a lot of great food on the grill. Nice view of the ocean, the sunset. Bottle rockets, Roman candles.