A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [76]
I’m on a road paved right through an immense marsh that stretches from horizon to horizon. How many millions of wildfowl must once have swarmed into here. I’ve stopped in three places looking for a road map. No one sells them. But in each place stood a line of guys buying beer. I guess that’s what there is to do.
Contrast: In places like Shell Beach and Hopedale, the fisherfolk seem woven into the place like vines grown up on netting. Can’t be uprooted. Transplantation would be wrenching, possibly impossible. The rig workers, different. Just a job. Could be anywhere. Might as well be. Looking displaced. Their workplace distant and forsaken from whatever counts to them as home. Painful to witness. Everything here in pain, or bored.
It’s hard to imagine that anything but oil could have made it worth the time and money to build a raised roadbed and pave it. This road seems so tenuous, so vulnerable to harsh weather. All the houses here are on stilts. A Forster’s tern dives into a creek. Surprisingly, pleasantly, there are plenty of white, un-oil-stained egrets here.
And suddenly a cheerful “Welcome to Grand Isle.” Stylish roadside sign, letters three feet high. Blue stylized waves harken back to when the ocean was that color. Artful and colorful, of cut steel, with colorful steel marlin and redfish and tarpon swimming across it. Flanked by planted palms. Pretty and proud.
Anxious for a quick glance at the water, I turn where it says, “Welcome to Elmer’s Island. Open Daily.” When a sign warns, “Access at Your Own Risk,” I take it at its word. Where the sign says, “Beach Closed,” I continue.
Before reaching the telltale lineup of Porta Potties that have become BP’s major expression of Gulf architecture, I get repelled by security guards incredulous that police did not intercept me sooner. (Who’d have thought that Portosans, so innocuous at Woodstock, so reliable during the Age of Aquarius, would turn ominous and foreboding so soon into this millennium?)
“If you come back here, you’d have to get a BP representative to come with ya. This is a BP safety area. You need a hard hat, steel-toed shoes, safety glasses—”
Another impressive display of BP’s near obsession with keeping everyone safe. In the wrong ways, at the wrong time, sweating the meaningless small stuff.
“They got containers full of oil. You get a whiff of that crap—I don’t know; they just don’t want nobody passed out, y’know?”
No, I don’t. Because hard hats, steel shoes, and safety glasses won’t protect you from fumes. This is the company that refuses respirators. Talk to anyone with an ID badge, you can’t help feeling every word is bullshit. It’s not always their fault. Sometimes they’re just regurgitating the bullshit they’ve been overfed. Some of the bullshitters are nice: “If you get one of them BP guys to come with ya, you can come back,” he offers as I’m turning around. And some, less so.
This is a miserable purgatory of a place. The channels cut straight in a place where water naturally meanders. The raised roads trespass into low country where boats would belong. And now there’s oil where water belongs. Oil where honesty belongs. Everything at odds with the place’s soul.
It’s a contest for the worst kind of possession, the one that diminishes what it acquires, harms what it strives to hold.
Grand Isle is grand indeed, many miles long. Marshes and power lines on the north, sandy Gulf beach on the south. A horizon pierced and pincushioned by cranes. A weathered sign says, “Jesus Christ Reigns over Grand Isle,” but another new “Beach Closed” warning indicates that BP reigns now. I pass sheriffs and a couple hundred day laborers climbing aboard school buses in a big lot full of Porta Potties.
I duck down a road. On the beach: Porta Potties. Little shade shelters spaced evenly along miles of shoreline. Stacked cases of water. It’s already after quitting time, 7:00 P.M., so no one’s here. It’s still hot, and a bottle of water would be nice. Perhaps BP owes me a little clean water. I forbear. I