A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [89]
Over on the Ellie Margaret we find Charlie Robin—“S’posed to say Ro-ban,” he acknowledges, “but it’s Robin.” His boat, designed for shrimping, is laden with that elongated pacifier of the Gulf summer of 2010: boom. But Robin isn’t quite pacified yet. He’s mad as a buzz-worm. Angrily, but amiably—he knows who his enemies are not—he sits astride the side of his battered boat. Not a lean man. Talkative. Worried. On top of it all, mechanical problems. Hit some leftover hurricane debris. Bent the propeller. “Destroyed it.” Broken exhaust. Clothes covered in grease. Hands full of grease. Last week, he cut his finger off in a winch. “Dat little-bitty winch right there? Cut it off.” Reattached, heavily bandaged.
Gesturing to the boom on his deck, he says, “Ninety percent of the boats here are workin’ de erl. Nevvah thought it would still be comin’ out in July.… Gettin’ my flares. Gettin’ all my safety equipment. Dat’s what I’m doin’. Dat way we’s good t’ go. We been practicin’ in a lake. We pull two twenty-four-inch booms. And we tow at, like, one knot. You got t’ go a certain speed. Don’t want the erl to go over, don’t want it under. So you go slow. Other boat’s behind you; he skims it. Pumps it on a barge. That’s the way you go. Mop it up. Exactly what we doin’. So, pretty cool. I’m excited about it. Because I know it’s gonna help our fisheries out. Anything we do to save our land, save our area, it’s good. I’m five generations. If I go shrimpin’ and de erl comes in, I’m screwed, right?
“We don’t know what’s the effect all this gonna be. Dat’s de scary part. Dat’s the part we feah de mos’. No one not knowin’. Hurricane comes in, we clean up, lick our wounds, go back workin’. We might bust a few nets on debris, but we back to livin’. But this?” His voice drops to an emphatic whisper: “We don’t know the outcome of this. We don’t know, we don’t know.
“The ground you standin’ on been in de family a hundred and fifty yeauhs. My great-grandfather lived on it. It means a lot to me. And it’s worth savin’. This place goes, what we gonna do? Is BP gonna give us back owah culture? Hell no. There’s not enough money in the world to pay for five generations of freedom. You don’t buy dat.
“And to give you fresh seafood, Mother Nature’s home brew—instead of some farmed frozen foreign chemical-raised shrimp. You follow dat? Okay.
“Well, dat’s how we feel. Dat’s how angry. Their ignorant mistake—is gonna cost all this. To try to save a million bucks. Dat’s a penny to us. Now I’m gettin’ mad. I’m sorry.”
As we’re walking out, back up the road to Mandy’s car, we pass a handful of young people hanging out, leaning against a parked car. One, in his early twenties, is wearing the little orange life vest of the body snatchers. (He’s on land, mind you—safety!)
Just after we pass he yells, “Hey. Hey. HEY!” Apparently he’s “working,” but doesn’t know the difference between adolescence and a job.
We’re walking out, on the public road, and he’s yelling at us. Mandy has the courtesy to stop, so I turn around, too.
He suspects we’re “from the media.”
Mandy says we’re not “the media.”
“Then what’s that,” he demands. She happens to be carrying a folder bearing the business card of a Los Angeles Times reporter. Seeing that, the guy believes he’s caught her lying to him. These are the banal ways the Gulf becomes a police state.
As if he deserves any answer, as though he has any scrim of real authority, Mandy calmly tells him that, no, it’s someone else’s business card. It’s a good thing he’s talking to her (that’s an easy choice for him, of course) and that she’s doing the talking, because I can feel my next breath forming the words Go fuck yourself.
As oil speckles Mississippi beaches, Governor Haley Barbour complains of not being given adequate resources. A Democrat congressman says he’s “dumbfounded by the amount of wasted effort, wasted money and stupidity that I saw.”
Oil spreads. Pain deepens. “Seeing everything that you’ve been used to for years kind of slowly going away from you, it’s overwhelming,” says a boat