Day 10: Beyond the Oiled Pelcian
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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 →
Day 5: Ecotones and Barriers
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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 →
