Читать книгу The Tarball Chronicles - David Gessner - Страница 10

FORCES OF NATURE

When I return to the lodge from my early morning bird-watching I get some disappointing news: the weather has put the whammy on our helicopter ride. We will not be getting up in the air today. I sulk around the lodge for a while like a child denied a ride on a roller coaster and think of what could have been. Then Lupe comes to the rescue with a pitcher of ice tea.

Somewhat buoyed by the drink, I step out for a walk in the drizzle. It’s no helicopter ride, but it brings unexpected sights. I head instinctively toward the river, first hiking up the levee and then walking along the top. From here, on the hump that sometimes struggles to contain it, the river looks muddy, caged-in, powerful. I’ve heard lots of songs about levees, of course, but didn’t grasp the concept until now. Walking on top gives me a view not just of the river and the opposite bank, but also, to the west, of the wetlands that lead to the Gulf beyond. It occurs to me that I have never walked along the banks of the Mississippi before. Which seems an amazing fact, since I happen to be an American.

After a while the rain stops and the sun breaks through. The heat is overpowering. It slams you, stuns you, slathers you in sweat. Everything wilts, and I am part of everything. It’s the kind of heat that makes you want to lie down and give up, to throw up your arms in surrender. It helps you understand the logic behind siestas; every instinct telling you to crawl into a cool, dark place and lie there and be still. The heat even seems to stun the birds that fly overhead; they flap lazily and deeply.

Crickets blare and willows sag and down by the water the reeds grow as tall as trees. By the time I get back to the lodge, I am sopping with sweat. I find Holly at one of the high tables along the rim of the lodge, sitting on a barstool and typing on her computer. When I walk up, she tells me she will soon be interviewing a member of an organization responsible for surveying birds and counting their fatalities from the oil. She invites me to sit in during the interview. It turns out to be an odd and frustrating exchange that takes about forty minutes to go nowhere. Holly is gently prying and persistent, but no matter what she says the man will not divulge the number of bird deaths. Finally, sheepishly, he admits why.

“BP is now on our board of trustees,” he says.

The interview ends soon after. Once the man has left, all we can do is shake our heads and laugh.

The rest of the day passes quietly. The Cousteau folk are working on their computers and lying low. I decide to take a nap. But the quiet ends with the arrival of Ryan Lambert in early evening. He walks into the lodge as if he owns the place—which, of course, he does.

Not only does he own it but he nailed together almost every board with his own hands, or more accurately, renailed them after his lodge was drowned by Katrina. We shake hands and he points up at the rafters above the mounted animal heads, to a line in the wood over twenty feet up.

“That’s how high the waters from Katrina reached,” he says.

Soon we are all sitting around one of the long camp-style dining room tables while Ryan holds court. He takes the head of the table, while Holly and I sit on either side of him. The Cousteauians and I don’t say a word, which is fine with me. Ryan is a big man, not especially tall but burly, and you just know he has told a thousand fish stories to paying guests from his seat at the head of the table. He has huge hands and a big expressive face, red from decades in the sun, and he looks like he could pick you up and crack you in half over his knee. But more impressive than this implication of physical strength is the immediate impression of energy, his pilot light always on high.

“I’m the only lodge around that isn’t booked up,” he says. “The rest of them are filled with BP workers. But I’d rather meet interesting people than whore myself out to BP.”

Over the next hour I learn that Ryan was born and raised in Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans. His grandparents owned a place down here in Buras, where they rode out Hurricane Betsy. When Ryan visited as a kid he would roam the wetlands, hunting and fishing with his uncles and falling madly in love with the place. After high school he went right to work at a chemical plant, but he couldn’t get this wild place out of his head. After a few years at the plant, he decided to start doing the impossible. That is, he kept working at the plant full time each night and then drove down here to work as a fishing and hunting guide about twenty days a month. Which left about ten nights a month when he actually got some sleep. He kept this going for twenty-one years. Finally, at thirty-nine, he quit the plant and moved down to establish Cajun Fishing Adventures, which grew into a million-dollar business with over twenty employees including fishing guides, duck guides, house cleaners, and cooks. He had realized his dream, at least until Katrina struck.

“I’ve had a bull’s-eye on my back for a while now,” he said. “First Katrina and now this.”

He insists that I join him and the Cousteau crew for dinner, and when I tell him that dinner is not included in my deal, he laughs and waves it off. Lupe serves up spareribs and coleslaw while Ryan tells the story of how he rebuilt the lodge after Katrina. The others lean in to hear.

“I got a plaque for being the first person to come back to this parish. I came by boat at first. It was a watery wasteland where you could only see the peak of this lodge. Everything was dead.”

He wanted to rebuild as soon as the water receded, but the insurance company refused to pay him, claiming the damage had come from water, not wind. He needed money so he came up with an idea. There was talk everywhere of trying to revive local businesses and of cleaning up after Katrina. He added these things up and put together a crew to clean debris and rebuild the parish. He worked hard and was paid well, well enough to in turn pay for the materials to rebuild his lodge, which he did whenever he wasn’t working on the cleanup. “I was possessed,” he says. Though I have only known him about an hour, this is not hard to believe. About a half year later, Cajun Fishing Adventures was up and running again.

“And now this,” he says, shaking his head. “This is worse than Katrina.”

Considering that Katrina basically flattened his town before drowning it when the Mississippi broke through the levee, I can’t help but ask: “Worse?”

“Worse, I think. Not just the oil but the dispersants. I was out on an island the other day and hundreds of small clams were rolling in with the surf, all of them covered in tarballs. The dispersants have sunk the oil out of sight of the cameras, but it’s down near the bottom of the ocean, at the base of the food chain. This is just the start of the death we’re going to be seeing in the future. The fisheries were already dying. This could be the deathblow.”

I have heard this before tonight, but never put so bluntly. While no one knows how the chemical dispersants will affect the Gulf ’s food chain, everyone is anxious. The original mixture BP proposed using on the spill—Corexit 9527—was deemed too toxic by the EPA. When they demanded that the company change to a less toxic product, BP simply switched to another version of the same chemical compound, Corexit 9500. Both versions of the chemical are manufactured by BP and neither are legal in England. At this point, over a million gallons of the stuff has been dumped in the Gulf.² The fact that the EPA did not even attempt to enforce its own ruling says worlds about what is happening here. The immediate effect of the chemical is to first disperse the oil, and then to sink it to the ocean floor. This makes short-term sense to anyone, like BP, who wants to tamp down immediate panic about the spill, since it means that less oil will be washing up on beaches in a region that depends on tourism more than any other industry. The goal is to not have this look like the Exxon Valdez, which is to say the immediate goal is focused on appearances.

“It’s like a kind of magic trick that BP is trying to pull off,” Ryan says. “A sleight of hand, out of sight out of mind. It’s good PR if people don’t see the oil.” Whether it’s good for anything else is a question he leaves unanswered.

After a dessert of blueberry pie, we retire to the overstuffed couch and turn on the Weather Channel. Ryan sprawls out on the big pillows and then asks me what I found on the beaches of Florida and Alabama. I tell him and then he asks for an overall impression.

“Everyone’s got their hand in the till,” I say after a minute. “That’s what I’ve come to believe. Everyone’s a part of it.”

“I’m not,” he snaps.

I’m afraid I’ve offended him, but it turns out Ryan Lambert is not easy to offend. He is smiling now. His reply was not defensive. He was simply stating a fact.

After a while the others head to their rooms or to the various high-top tables around the big room’s rim, and Ryan and I stay up late talking. To an outsider we might seem an unlikely pair; and it quickly becomes clear that in many ways we are at the opposite ends of the political spectrum. As simplistic as it may be, he’s the perfect stereotype for the hunting enthusiast, salt-of-the-earth conservative, and I, the natureloving, college professor liberal. And yet we both possess an underrated quality often ignored in the televised and shrill national debates: a sense of humor. More importantly, it turns out we have birds in common.

Over the last fifteen years or so, my life has gotten tangled up with birds, and specifically a particular species of bird called ospreys. I spent an entire year on the marshes of Cape Cod observing them, and another migrating with the birds down the East Coast to Cuba and Venezuela. Majestic birds with six-foot wingspans and black raccoon masks, ospreys get their living by making high dives into the water for fish. When I heard the Gulf was filling with oil my first thought was: the ospreys will be diving right down into it.

Ryan is a bird lover, too, though of a slightly different sort. While I watch birds through binoculars, he likes to shoot them.

“The only difference between conservationists and environmentalists,” he says, “is that we eat our way through nature.”

Ducks, not ospreys, are his obsession, but we are both worried about the fall migration. As Ryan sinks deeper into the couch, he describes the spectacle of millions of waterfowl sweeping down through the marshes of Louisiana. He is a tough guy, and you have to remember that what he wants to do with these birds is kill them, but his voice softens when he talks about the coming migration.

“This estuary is the richest in the nation and the majority of the waterfowl in the United States will come through here. They come through in great waves. In late August the blue-winged teal will come through. They feed on the bottom where the oil is. They are a beautiful bird, meticulous, too, with never a feather out of place. When they preen they will spread the oily mousse all over them and when they get oiled up they can’t regulate their body temperatures and then they can’t fly. They will not be easy to find and clean. You can’t catch a duck the way you can a pelican. They’re elusive and can get deep in the grasses or underwater. You won’t be able to catch them. Not the scaup and redheads and canvasbacks. The numbers of these birds are down already. And now they will be living out in the oil.”

At one point I excuse myself and run into my room. I dig into my bag and find the book I’m looking for, a compendium on migration by Scott Weidensaul called Living on the Wind. Returning to the couch, I read out loud a sentence that I underlined just yesterday: “Migration depends upon links—food, safe havens, quiet roost sites, clean water, and a host of other resources, strung out in due measure and regular occurrence along routes that may cross thousands of miles. But we are breaking those links with abandon.”³

He doesn’t say anything at first and I’m afraid I seem ridiculous—a liberal, book-quoting caricature—compared to my manly host. But he doesn’t laugh at me. He nods and seems to chew over what I have read.

“There is no bigger haven than this delta,” he says. “Think what we’re destroying. Millions of acres of wetlands. If we lose this we lose everything.”

Millions of other birds, not just blue-winged teal and ospreys but a hundred other species, will pour down this central corridor as they make their arduous journeys from points north to Central and South America. Migration is always a gambit: everything has to go right. It is a time of both stress and opportunity, but in this strange and oily year, I worry that the former will overwhelm the latter.

It’s late by the time Ryan heads back to his house, which is just a few hundred yards from the lodge. Holly and a couple of the others are still working on their computers, but I keep to myself, nursing a beer and chewing over my talk with Ryan.

I think of the thousands of ospreys that will be heading this way soon, when the weather changes. Ospreys have become no less than a way of organizing how I think about the world. A lot of nature lovers pay lip service to trying to imagine the world beyond the human—the biocentric as opposed to the anthropocentric—but by getting to know one animal well, I have, almost despite myself, done just that. My thinking, more specifically, has become ospreycentric. The birds are the one thing in the universe I pick up and find everything hitched to.

And so, when I think about the millions-plus gallons of chemical dispersants being dumped in the Gulf, my mind keeps returning to ospreys. We don’t yet know what the long-term results of Corexit 9500 will be on fish and birds, and we may not truly know for years, but we know that both the oil and the chemicals are already deep in the water column and may soon pervade the food chain. If this happens it will not be the first time ospreys have been impacted by human tinkering. In fact, if the birds were aware of what was happening in these waters, they would no doubt be thinking the osprey equivalent of “Jeez, not again.” This is a species, after all, that was all but eradicated by chemicals in the recent past.

It was from learning about DDT and ospreys that I first came to understand the concept of interconnectivity. The story begins in the late 1950s when DDT was sprayed on fields and marshes with the goal of eliminating diseasecarrying insects. But what the chemical proved, in a giant science experiment not so different from the one currently going on in the Gulf, was that “the web of life” is not some fanciful notion that a groovy ecologist invented. In fact, the way that DDT moved through that web—killing the insects but also moving up the food chain to vegetation and smaller fish, accumulating in larger quantities with every step up, eventually settling in lethal quantities in top predators like ospreys and eagles—was almost as miraculous as the web itself. Almost. But while the web created life, the chemical brought death. The way it killed was particularly cruel: it caused a thinning of the eggshells so that when parents sat atop their eggs to incubate them, their offspring were crushed. Before the chemical was banned, the birds were almost entirely wiped out in the Northeast.

And now we are at it again.

The people who made and sprayed DDT were not evil. Who wouldn’t want to get rid of mosquitoes? They weren’t evil, but they just believed that they could control things. They believed they could make things better than they are; that they could always fix what got broken; never considering that some of the things they were breaking had taken a million years or so to make.

As tragic and awful as the oil spill is, the use of dispersants could prove worse in the long term. You can at least argue that the first mistake, the spill itself, was an accident, an accident born of arrogance and greed and oversight, but still an accident. The second mistake grew out of opposites: conscious decision and panic. A friend who works with the BP administrators in Mobile told me that during those first weeks everyone’s eyes were wide from fear. Fear has quickly led to a desperate need for the illusion of control.

I don’t claim to know what Corexit or other dispersants will do, how exactly they will infiltrate and affect fish and birds. But I know that good science is born of skepticism, and that those who confidently claim that they do know are exhibiting the thinking of little boys. By this I mean a rambunctious, occasionally effective, headstrong, and insistent way of being. I mean a demented can-do philosophy that wants wants wants and so will find a way to get. I mean a way of being that most of us, boys and girls, eventually grow out of, a way that can actually lead to the building of some pretty neat-o things, but that also leads to pouring boiling water on ants. If you think I am exaggerating, if you think that this isn’t the kind of thinking running rampant down here, then consider this: last week a number of people started discussing the possibility of detonating a nuclear bomb to plug up the well.⁴

But forget nuclear weapons. Who needs them when you have Corexit? How do little boys deal with things they break? Sometimes they hide them. You break a lamp and don’t want Ma to see it so you put it in the closet. The ocean floor is now the closet. If the Gulf is our national sacrifice zone, then the ocean floor, where life starts and where the dispersants are sinking, will be the Gulf’s own double-secret sacrifice zone. Talk about sweeping something under a rug.

To a lot of fairly knowledgeable people, the spraying of dispersants seem as much a disguise as a solution. “A magic trick,” Ryan called it. And a good one. “Out of sight, out of mind” could be our national motto. We put so much energy into pretending, into avoiding, into not seeing what is. And what are dispersants if not a way to hide reality? A way to make a problem appear to be gone. In this regard they are an embodiment of both our belief in the importance of appearances and our own unwillingness to acknowledge oil—both oil in general and oil in the Gulf specifically—and its consequences. In other words the perfect solution, from a poetic if not practical point of view, for a society that doesn’t want to face its own reality.

The problem is that it’s hard to sweep things under the rug in nature. Things insist on being part of other things. Ospreys know this. What DDT taught is that the invisible can kill, and all our denials and disguises and PR moves don’t make a thing any less lethal.

Luckily my trip so far has been filled not just with osprey ideas, but with actual ospreys. On that first night in Fort Pickens, I camped next to a forest of dead trees. The trees, killed by the salt from Hurricane Ivan, twisted up into the sky like mushroom stems. The hurricane had created perfect homes for ospreys, leafless branches allowing panoramic views of the dunes and water. In their crowns sat many great shaggy nests.

On the beach beyond the dead forest I watched a single osprey as it hunted. It hovered above the crashing waves, its black and white wings semaphore flashing. I first came to bird-watching as a sports fan, craving contact, and that day didn’t disappoint. Soon enough the osprey dove, pulling its wings into a W shape and hurtling toward the water. Ospreys don’t twist and plop into the water like pelicans, or dart down in the manner of terns. They dive.

As it happened, the bird missed on the first attempt. 0 for 1. It shook off in the air like a wet dog, shivering, and then tried again, but pulled up at the last minute, as if it were all a feint.

“No fish.”

I said this out loud without thinking about the larger repercussions of my simple caveman sentence. But. What if there really were no fish? I knew that this particular bird needed three or four a day, more when feeding a family.

Later that evening at sunset, I drove into the Fort Pickens picnic area and found a spectacular nest. The picnic area had become mission control for the cleanup efforts, and the birds now shared their habitat with trucks and Dumpsters and fluorescent-vested workers and dozens of Porta-Potties and hundreds of all-terrain vehicles. Still it was the perfect place to end the day, and not just because the nest was one of the most beautiful I’d ever seen, a nestled cup of sticks in the upper branches of a dead live oak. Three young ospreys—immatures, identifiable by both their size and checkered wings—perched around and on the nest, illuminated by the last shafting rays of sun. They let out high-pitched warning cries that told me not to come any closer.

Then I heard another sound that took a minute to recognize. The osprey cries were mixing with a different sort of music: the backward beeping of trucks. On the far side of the parking lot, air-conditioning blew through ducts into a huge billowing tent and men in Hazmat suits walked in and out. It looked like a scene out of Spielberg: the military trying to keep the discovery of the alien autopsy under wraps. But what might have been too clichéd for a movie was the fact that above it all the ospreys nested, the whole scene watched over by birds that had come back from the dead.