Cocktail Hour
Day 11: Atlantis
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“War is over,” sang John Lennon in different times.
“Oil is over,” sang the New York Times a week ago Wednesday, heralding those two terrifically reliable sources, NOAA and BP, and letting us know that all was hunky dory down in the Gulf. “It was too late to get the reactions of environmentalists,” the paper added nonchalantly, which meant they basically passed along the government report as fact, propagating the new myth of the not-so-bad oil spill. Only 25 % of the oil remains! Um, but isn’t that 25% ten times more oil than spilled during the Valdez? Yes, but this is different, this is oil you can’t see! This oil only seems to be clinging to crab larvae and other out-of-sight stuff at the bottom of the ocean. And anyway why are you still writing about this: don’t you realize that the news cycle is officially over?
In fact everyone outside of the Gulf states is so upbeat that even hurricane season no longer seems the oily nightmare it was once envisioned to be. Bring it on, we say, since we don’t live here. If there’s really no oil out there then it won’t be any worse than a normal hurricane season.
Oh yeah, we remember now. Those normal hurricane seasons can be kind of bad…. Continue reading →
That’s Entertainment!
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Laurence Sterne, postmodern writer.
The Huffington Post has picked up a list of the 15 most overrated writers by a writer in no danger of being overrated, at least not quite yet, one Anis Shivani of Houston and Harvard, or so he identifies himself. You know it’s going to be no fun, but there’s the item and it’s about books and so second or third time through Huffington at cocktail hour I clicked on it, hoping for I don’t know what, entertainment, I guess, since that’s what reading is, right? Even reading the news? I might even have hoped for a smart conversation (which is also entertainment, come to think of it), but.
#
Mr. Shivani rails in an introduction about conglomerate publishing and the stranglehold of, um, MFA programs, also the gutlessness of critics, also the clubby world of literary prizes, Continue reading →
Day 10: Beyond the Oiled Pelcian
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I knew pelicans before they were famous. I started studying them when I first moved to the South, seven years ago now, and after a couple of years here I wrote an essay about the birds, and about my daughter and learning to surf, for Orion magazine. As I observed and read about pelcians, I learned how much water their enormous gular pouches can hold (21 pints or 17 and a half pounds), what they sound like (nothing, they are more or less mute), and even got to see a newborn emerge from its shell (disgusting and beautiful at the same time). What I didn’t and couldn’t know was that some years off in the future, pelicans, particularly the oiled variety, would become the media darlings of one of the worst eco disasters in this country’s history. What I didn’t know was that, while the egrets and laughing gulls andtricolored herons bristled with resentment, pelicans would claim center stage.
Reunion Season
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Mount Cardigan
It’s been a season of reunions… First my family in New Hampshire, the yearly bash, bunches of cousins for Elysia and most of my siblings and their partners (Carol and Mac, sadly, left behind in Washington State—this no economy for traveling, though they’ve sent their kids), also a giant whoopee pie, not to mention the neighbors on the lake, and their kids and grandkids and platters of gingerbread, bowls of whipped cream, also brownies and ice cream cones, chocolate-chip cookies, fruit in a pinch—I don’t know—and Kale strudel courtesy my genius niece Isabella. The Fourth of July was over and done but we got out the fireworks (my Continue reading →
Day 9: Field Notes from an EPA Meeting
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At Table Three, the Louisiana Spirit Coastal Recovery Counseling Program is handing out blue rubber “stress balls,” though I don’t see a lot of fishermen squeezing the little toys. I take one anyway, occasionally tossing it in the air as I walk around the EPA meeting that is being held just around the corner from where I’m staying, in the Buras Auditorium, a place that usually holds high school productions of “The Importance of Being 
Earnest” but today houses the Surgeon General, hundreds of angry fishermen and half the reporters in the known world. I am not acting as a reporter tonight but as a naturalist and, having pocketed my stress ball, I scribble notes and sketches in my journal, noting characteristics in the way of my breed. You can tell the real reporters, even when they are not jamming a microphone in someone’s face, because they are generally better looking than regular humans, and they speak with vaguely English accents, though most just hail (to paraphrase Roth’s Lonoff) from the country of pretentious. Continue reading →
Day 8: The River
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These days I take a walk by the Mississippi up along the levee almost every evening. I have the luxury the local fishermen and oilmen do not, the luxury of letting my mind take a break from the oil. As I stroll, I think about the book I want to write about all this, since I, like so many people down here–from the fishermen turned oil boomers to the reporters hoping to advance their careers to the politicians seizing the spotlight to the scientists angling for BP money–have complex and not always altruistic motives. In fact, you could argue that my potential book as no less of a Vessel of Opportunity than the boats that putter out each morning. But there is something else going on during these walks, too, something I didn’t expect. I am growing genuinely and deeply fond of this place. Who knew it was going to be so beautiful, this fragile green land, more water than earth, caught between river and sea, with, as is always the case in places of such abundance, birds out the wazoo?
First Class
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Wallowing in this bloody sty.
At the Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge one of the many things I was aware of was that I wasn’t strictly speaking in the wilderness. The electric grid had reached the place somehow, wires on poles climbing the hills behind the campus, boats and floatplanes moored in the tide basin, Homer only a half-hour away by water. Contrails of Europe flights in the sky above us. Not that I was complaining—it’s an extraordinary place, beautiful, alive, alluring, even pretty wild, but no wilderness. And in Homer I was aware of the reach of the oil economy—the gorgeous auditorium wherein keynote speaker Michael Cunningham read his fiction, for example, this rich theatre built into the gorgeous Homer high school, built with the mandated assistance of some small portion of oil royalties—the stuff most states give away or go beyond giving away to offer insane subsidies (note to self—call Maine governor Continue reading →
Day 7: Castles and Shanties
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A couple of summers ago I paid a visit to Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor of meteorology who was one of the country’s leading authorities on the recent intensification of storms. If you were to read a so-called balanced account of this issue in the newspapers you might come away believing that the scientific jury is still out on whether or not warmer waters lead to more intense storms. In fact, this is a little like saying the jury is still out on evolution versus intelligent design. The real spilt, Emanuel explained to me, was not in the scientific community, but between the scientists and the weather forecasters. He assured me that what common sense suggested was true: warmer waters lead to more violent storms. (Of course this was long before a sheen of oil was added to the warming mix.)
This was basically what I expected to hear and I scribbled down what he said in my Continue reading →
Day 6: The Green Sun Rises
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This blog was paid for and sponsored by BP. Not.
I am now in the green, beautiful, and paranoid heart of southeastern Louisiana, a sinking land less than fifty miles from the Deepwater site. Things happen fast in this strange world. Take yesterday for instance. At dawn I went up in a helicopter with members of the Cousteau film team, and on the way out to the rig site we flew out over the patched grasses that make up over 13% of our nation’s marshlands, green jigsaw pieces in an ever-rising body of water. The rig itself and boats around it looked like Tonka Toys, fitting for the work of little boys, and it was all lit up by the green nimbus of the sunny and flowering BP logo.
My day was just starting. Almost as soon as I got back, I headed out by boat with the Cousteau folks and another boat captained by a charismatic sportsman named Ryan Lambert, who among other things runs Cajun Fishing Adventures, which is housed in the lodge where I’ve been staying. The boat also held David Guggenheim (aka the Ocean Doctor), who was there to take samples and was constantly circled, in the manner of a pilot fish, by an NBC news cameraman with a South African accent that sounded thick and garbled. We cut out to the Gulf, riding past dozens of Continue reading →
Katmai Air
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Note the huge black fucking duffel bag.
Before I left home I emailed some of the Alaska writers involved in the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference and asked for suggestions: what should I do with a free week after? I’d had the vague idea to rent a car and poke around, maybe drive into Denali National Park among the Winnebagos and do some hiking. Rich Chiappone emailed straight back, said Denali was nice—if you wanted to stay on the road system. He’d even try to hook me up with a sleeping bag and tent, then this: “To decompress after the conference, I’m heading out to Katmai for a week of camping with the brown bears from June 18 to 24. You could join me Continue reading →
