Cocktail Hour
Day 5: Ecotones and Barriers
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No one is popping champagne down here quite yet. Pardon the locals if they have become a little dubious about ingenuity, American and otherwise. The more realistic attitude is less “hoo-ray” than “we’ll see.”
I’m in Mobile now, and even before I came down I planned on using the whole “stuck inside of Mobile” Dylan line. But the fact is I’m not stuck. In fact, I am the guest of the generous Bethany Kraft, Executive Director of the Alabama Coastal Foundation (if you want to write a check that will do some real regional good, and not get used for Yacht upgrades, this is the place!), and her Continue reading →
Day 4: Of Forms and Fishermen, or, The British Are Coming/Here
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Before I say goodbye to camping at the national seashore, I need to mention something a new friend pointed out yesterday. The park where I was staying used to be a fort, and remnants of that fort still stand, as well as bunkers that grow out of the side of hills like hobbit holes and grass-cracked stairs that lead up hills to nowhere. This fort was built after the War of 1812 to defend the Southern coasts and to keep the land here from being conquered by the British. Which it did successfully until about three months ago. If there is anything that all Americans—conservative and liberal alike—should agree on it’s this. Get these fuckers out of here. Yes, we’ll take their money, and we should, they need to Continue reading →
Day Three: A Dawn Walk
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Thanks to all for your great feedback so far and my aplogies for not checking in for a couple of days. Just too much is happening. Yesterday, for instance, I spent the morning wading through the marsh of Grand Bay, Alabama, with a delightful and knowledgeable naturalist named Bill Finch (who looks like Bill Roorbach’s skinny twin brother). Deep in the marsh, in the salt pan, we saw puddles of oil nearly the same blue as the backs of the small fish (Sailfin Mollies) that swam below the film. Then, after a lunch of BBQ pork and noodles at Pho, a Vietnamese restaurant in the hard hit fishing town of Bayou La Batre, we headed out to Dauphin Island, where emergency money and the urgency of the situation, are being used to move great piles of sand from one side of the island to another, nominally to protect residents from oil but actually to protect their homes from erosion, just one more example of the cynical ways people are taking advantage of the situation. Continue reading →
McBride’s
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Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge
After the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference (about which more soon—I want to start a conversation about writers conferences and tell you more about what made this one so good), eight participants took part in a post-conference workshop, led by yours truly, to take place at the Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge, off across the bay. With Rich Chiappone’s help, I mailed home about twenty pounds of beach pebbles and books and dress clothes (including my shiny shoes). Later, Carol Swartz, the conference director, let me leave my still unbelievably enormous suitcase in her car and dropped me with my Continue reading →
Day 2: Corexit, Ospreys, and The Tarball Wars
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The guy from Texas is taking the giant tarball that the guy from Pensacola wants. The guy from Pensacola, a good guy named James who I met about an hour ago, thinks he should collect the tarball, which is the biggest one he’s seen, and bring it to the attention of the EPA officials. But James is a peaceful man, a surfer whose skin has been burned a crisp brown over the years, and he simply shrugs when the Texas guy picks up the lump of oil, a lump that is definitely bigger than a bread basket, and carts it off. The little girl, the Texas guy’s daughter who had been swimming in the oily water (holding hands with her Mom) a few minutes ago, turns defensive when I suggest that James has rightful claim to the tarball.
“If he touches that tarball my Daddy will kick his ass,” she says.
Day 1: Baptism at Tarball Beach
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They don’t look like balls exactly. The small ones look like dried out rabbit turds or kernels of a not particularly appetizing breakfast cereal. The larger ones are maps of rust brown countries. They could be jigsaw puzzle pieces—a rusty black red–and are sometimes the size of cow patties.
Someone—me?—needs to write a natural history of tarballs. I will say this, if I were walking down this beach without any sort of knowledge of the oil spill I might not notice them, or I might think they were a natural part of the ecosystem. But I do know and I do notice. And on this Continue reading →
Kachemak Bay
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Dinty Moore
I like to get to a distant writing conference a day early to get my bearings and have a look around, adjust to time and place before things turn social and everything I say and do is basically in front of an audience. Friday morning at the Kachemak Bay conference I had no duties. First a big breakfast at Land’s End, including reindeer sausage, which was pretty good with eggs and etc., nine bucks, way too much food but with a view—kids fishing for fluke or maybe baby halibut—I don’t know my Pacific fishes, and of course the mountains and the hundred boats passing in a Continue reading →
Sarcasm (wink, wink), or, Maybe Small Presses are Doomed too.
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Over the last few years I have reviewed a couple of nature books for the New York Times Book Review, including one called Wild and Crazy Guy, happily uniting my love of Henry David Thoreau and (the early) Steve Martin. However, in my continuing effort to destroy (help?) my own career, I bit the hand and wrote the letter below in January. I am not un-combative, and certainly expected some spirited disagreement when I wrote my letter. But what I didn’t expect was the angle of attack in the e-mail exchange below. (I hope it is not a comment on the future of small presses.)
Over Packed
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View from Land's End, with Time Bandit
Alaska got its statehood when I was six, in 1959. The great event was the subject of My Weekly Reader stories, and filled the newspapers. Sled dogs. Jack London. Walruses. Salmon. Seward’s folly. It’s one of those icons in a New England kid’s imagination of adventure, huge and scary and wonderful, far away, possibly a dream.
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A mere fifty years later I’m flying in to Anchorage, nothing but clouds from airplane windows, then suddenly some clearing, and there it is—the steely Alaskan ocean running up against a hundred sharp peaks all buried in snow. The Anchorage airport is unaccountably Continue reading →
Now for Some Old Time Nature Writing…The Oyster and the Oil
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The Oyster and the Oil
The oyster siphons water in though its gills between waving cilia as the tide rises again. Above fly several white ibises, birds that make their living by poking crazy curved orange-red bills into crab holes in the marsh muck, bills that, thanks to millions of years of evolution, fit those holes like scimitars in sheaths of mud. Above the ibises soars an osprey, black masked like a bandit, scanning the waters. A light breeze from the south hushes through the marsh and fish, born not fifty yards away, leap in the air in what appears to the human eye to be sheer exhilaration.
