A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [88]
“We won’t go to the staging area,” she says. “They won’t let us down that road at all. That part’s gotten a lot worse.”
Other road. Another sheriff booth. We’ll park before it, plan to walk through. Our calculus on their psychology is that walking is less confrontational, somehow, than driving on a public road. That’s how distorted things are. Mandy tells the guard we’ve gotta talk to Frank Campo. Dropping a name earns us permission to walk on a public road.
Just a little bit down the road is an open-air fishing station with a corrugated aluminum roof, a dock, tanks for live bait, fuel pumps. Fishing’s been closed for a couple of months.
Campo’s ancestral ethnicity is Spanish via the Canary Islands to Louisiana. His fishing station normally sells bait, fuel, and ice to commercial and recreational fishermen. He’s spent a lot of time in the sun.
Hurricane Katrina sent twenty feet of water through here. “There’s only two things here that’s old, besides me,” Campo says, pointing, “That post, and a piece of pipe in the front. The rest, Katrina destroyed. The whole parish was destroyed. You couldn’t buy anything. You couldn’t get here to work because the road was destroyed. All them power poles, they were all gone. They never rebuilt the gas lines, not for the few people here. We knew we were gonna rebuild, but the question was ‘Where the hell do you start.’ My dad was dead. But I asked him, ‘Dad, where the hell do we start?’ And we talked about it and he said, ‘We have to rebuild; this is what we do.’ ” It took about a year to get back in business. Campo’s son Michael, late thirties, is fourth-generation in this family business. Michael says he’s “tryin’ t’ stay positive.” So much of this is psychological warfare.
Campo the elder says, “When I first heard about the oil, to be quite honest, I didn’t think much of it. Rigs blow up all the time, y’know. Then I saw that eleven people lost their lives. That really bothers me. That’s not good. You got kids? I sure wouldn’t want to be rubbed out because somebody did something stupid. I mean, I got grandkids and I know I’m not gonna be here forever; but I wanna be here, y’know, as long as I can. So I feel really bad for the people who lost their husbands and their fathers.
“Katrina destroyed us—but it didn’t kill us. A hurricane takes everything, but you know you’re gonna come back. You know you’re gonna have the seafood, sport fishing—. I mean, it takes a while, but you know you’re gonna be back on top of the ball again. But the oil really bothers me. The oil could take all this away from us. What do you do then? And where we gonna go? What’s the use of coming here if you can’t fish?
“I fish, y’know what I mean? Louisiana produces most of the seafood that’s eaten in the country. They got shrimp comes outta other states but they ain’t no good; I wouldn’t eat ’em. Our shrimp are so good, it’s not even funny.
“I’ve fished out of so many places, I got friends all over the doggone country. Biloxi, Gulfport, Houma. I’ve been all over. I got friends in Texas. I didn’t have to punch a clock. And I didn’t have to drive. I went with the boat, everywhere.
“This fishin’ is a learnin’ process. You get to meet interesting people. And you learn a lot from everybody. When I started, you used a trawl. Well, all right. Then they started using what they call a tickler chain ahead of the net. It makes the shrimp jump up. Well, that improved the catch—greatly.
“As we travel through the jungle, you gotta change with the times. But now—. I don’t know what we’re gonna do. Because if the oil moves in, it could kill the marsh. I don’t feel confident we’ll survive this. This is a significant threat to our well-being. This is not something to take lightly. This is very serious. This could destroy a way of life for everybody in this part of the world. If they don’t stop it, then we’ll be dead. Eventually, this is gonna go away. Whether it’s going to take everybody with