Government Relations and Policy
Reports from the Gulf
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I’m Finished. We’re Finished. Our Way of Life is Finished
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
This sign on the side of the road represents a timeline for how people’s moods have changed towards BP and the oil disaster Zoom to see the signs.
© Dr. Darron Collins
I made it back home in time to celebrate Memorial Day at the local pool. There were plenty of hot dogs and hamburgers and cases of Yuengling and PBR and lots of laughter and levity all the while the disaster continued to unfold down South. I had fun, but the thoughts of the friends I’d made over the past weeks kept creeping in.
What’s ironic about this Memorial Day was that the very thing at the core of what makes this country great – ingenuity, creativity and rugged individualism – seemed to be radically suppressed just when those characteristics were needed most.
The ideas were there. Disaster inspires entrepreneurism. While waiting for President Obama to pass in his motorcade en route to the Grand Isle press conference a few folks showed up street side to try and peddle their wares and perhaps catch the President’s eyes, shaded as they were by the tinted windows of his SUV. That didn’t work. Neither did the youtube videos or the flyers prepared for town halls and other venues where BP took the stage.
Man peddles his wares as people wait for the President’s motorcade to pass
© Dr. Darron Collins
That kind of paternalistic “we’ve got this handled” approach by both BP and the Coast Guard is driving pins beneath the fingernails of folks down here.
Once the spill gets somewhat under control there will be a surge of private and public funding to better understand how the environment and species respond to oily disasters and ways that we as the world’s ecological stewards can best mitigate the effects of spills. But that funding will dry up far too quickly.
“That’s exactly what happened after Valdez,” Dr. Molly Lutcavage of UMASS Amherst told me last week, “and research was abandoned too early because of it, leaving us with not enough information on how best to respond the next time around. Well, we’re at that next time.”
Molly’s point also kept finding its way into my train of thought even during the pool’s Memorial Day “splash off,” which I figured prominently in.
I don’t want to throw a wet blanket on what is already a really moist situation, but where last week saw some sparks of optimism, by Memorial Day the depression and pessimism was running thick.
Immediately before heading down to watch the President’s motorcade I noticed three school busses full of workers make their way over the dune and onto the Grand Isle beach immediately past one of the “Beach Closed” signs. Dressed in blue and red and outfitted with shiny white shrimper boots, white hazmat suits and prickly straw hats they looked wickedly uncomfortable in the heat and terribly out of place once they arrived on the beach. I got complete silence when I asked what they were doing and was shooed away before I could watch.
Were these workers bussed in just for the President’s visit
© Dr. Darron Collins
Apparently they were all back on the bus not more than 45 minutes later, right after the President made his low pass in a helicopter. Of course there were claims that a good volume of oil had washed onto the beach, but, let’s be honest; it was window-dressing at its worst. Not even the smell of our Memorial Day barbecue could erase that sickening display from my mind.
Artie’s Sports Bar on Grand Isle is a good place to take the pulse of people down here. Even with the out-of-town DJ pumping her eclectic mix the mood was sour. Heads were held low and hands were never far from cold glass. I slid onto a stool next to someone that looked local and began the somewhat awkward shouting match over the music.
Adam. 56. An out of work shrimper. Thoroughly aggravated.
Just how long will the beaches be closed, could be decades
© Dr. Darron Collins
Back in 1956, a year before I was born, there was a spill out in deep water. It was small compared to this mess. Anyway, come 1963, I’m six and happy summer’s here so I can play on the beach. My mother must have whipped me a dozen times that summer for tracking oil through the house – oil from my feet. Seven years and the beach still had oil! With this disaster, who knows.
I’ve spent 35 years shrimping these waters and doubt very much I’ll see another season in my lifetime. It’s over. It’s all over.
Let’s just say I had to edit the dialogue a bit to keep it to PG. The moon was full and had just risen over the Gulf and, no kidding; you could see an oil rig silhouette in the moon. Adam continued.
See that moon? With that moon I would have shrimped out there all night. I would have come back to the shed with 400 boxes of shrimp. 40,000 pounds. My damn boat would have been kicking and screaming under the weight of those shrimp. The moon does something to them shrimp. Something magical. We were licking our chops for this season. A nice, cold winter set ‘em up good. Tonight would have been a record night and we would have piled them shrimp into Dean Blanchard’s shed ten feet high. But instead, I’m finished. We’re finished. Our way of life is finished.
Adam’s narrative was Shakespearean. It was perfect. Perfectly tragic. And it was Adam’s narrative that pestered my Memorial Day the most. I hope it pesters all of us for a good long time and pesters us in a way where we demand that some things change and where we think deeply whenever we smell those fumes as the pump.
Signing off until chapter 3…
