A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [68]
In mid-June, another vocabulary word hits Alabama: “mousse.” Think of it as crude oil the consistency of chocolate pudding. But remember, it’s not pudding. If you step in it, you can’t wash it off. You need some kind of solvent. If it’s just a little, you can maybe rub until you’ve gotten most of it. If it’s on clothes, throw them away. If your kids or dog track this stuff into the house, you need a new rug or maybe a new couch.
On June 14, 300 birds get coated with oil—in Utah.
Car radio: “… We’ve just been hearing from Riki Ott, author of Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. She was heavily involved in the Exxon Valdez disaster. If you have any questions for Riki Ott about what’s going on in the Gulf, give us a call.…”
I once met Riki Ott; I’ve been in her home, actually. She lives in Cordova, Alaska. Former salmon fisherman with a PhD. Unusual woman.
“Riki, you’ve been saying—”
“In this country, we’ve made the decision to depend on the oil industry for cleanup. We put the spiller in charge. In Norway, the government nationalizes the spill; they have the equipment, they do the cleanup. In this country, we put the irresponsible party in charge.”
“So we say, ‘You’re irresponsible, now you’re in charge—’ ”
“Right. We’ve been trying to get the workers respirators. Something as simple as respirators. We need federal air-quality monitoring. Because if we rely on BP’s monitoring, it will end up where Exxon’s air-monitoring data ended up: disappeared—sealed into court records until 2023.”
“You were saying earlier that there’s some trouble with just getting to the sites.”
“The oil companies learned a heck of a lot more than the citizens in the wake of the Exxon Valdez. And what the oil companies learned is this: control the images. No cameras. No evidence. No problem—right?”
A royal tern and a brown pelican watch Captain Cody McCurdy pull the Gray Ghost from its pilings at Orange Beach, Alabama. Tommy Gillespie, mate, wears old tattoos on weather-beaten arms, a Confederate bandanna, two packs of cigarettes in his T-shirt. Fishermen. Until last week or so.
“I don’t see a way out,” Cody says, but he means it literally.
The marine police are enclosing the inlet with boom. Various boats stand by in case they’re needed to deploy more boom. There’s not enough for all to do. The Oil inflicts a certain aimlessness.
All boats, many of them recreational boats, are now “workboats.” BP’s money flows like oil. BP’s managers can’t turn it off, either, or they’ll trigger another eruption: people’s anger. They know that to keep people Busy and Paid—no matter how useless the errand—serves their bigger purpose: to quell, to calm, to keep the masses anything but idle. The people are Being Pacified. This busywork is theater. And to that extent, BP is now the Gulf’s biggest patron of the arts. The obvious calculation: paying for theater to suppress rage is well worth it.
The folks on the boats don’t see themselves as being manipulated. They are desperate for the income, and it’s enough that they’re getting what they’ve Been Promised. They can’t afford to look behind that curtain. Many feel—deeply—that they are defending their home waters and wetlands, defending the most important and meaningful thing in their lives.
While we wait to see if we can get out of here, I notice that everyone aboard all the other boats wears a silly little orange life jacket, the uniform of Being Paid, even in water calm enough to reflect one’s tightening anger. Most professional fishermen have probably never in their lives worn a life