Day Three: A Dawn Walk
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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.
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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 →
Drive Yourself Crazy with Thomas Wolfe
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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If a young person were to come to me and sit at my knee and say, “Old Professor Gessner, you seem so wise. (Here I would nod.) Could you tell me the best book for me to read if I want to drive myself insane with ambition and dreams of glory?” I would reply: “Yes, son/young lady. I recommend that you run out and buy a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and a River. That will do the trick.”
And it will, it will!
I should admit right now that this is really an advertisement of sorts. Here at Bill and Dave’s we have sworn off real ads, (though Pepsi has been pretty persistent.) But this is an ad for a very worthy product—this month’s issue of the Oxford American! The OA has lots of great stuff and this issue includes pieces by my colleague Clyde Edgerton and my former student, the talented Erin Sroka, who has a great and funny piece on bingo halls. And of course I probably Continue reading →
Now for Some Old Time Nature Writing…The Oyster and the Oil
categories: Cocktail Hour
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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.
Why I’m Going to the Gulf
categories: Cocktail Hour
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With writers washing up like tarballs on the Gulf coast (thank you for the image, Ken), why do they need yet another one?
I’m not sure, but next week I will climb in my car and drive from my home in North Carolina down to the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for it yet, but I am determined to join the mass migration of journalists southward. Yes, I understand the hypocrisy of traveling a thousand miles in a vehicle powered by a refined version of the same substance that is pouring out into the Gulf waters, and yes I, like the rest of us, am a big fat hypocrite. But I need to see the oil. My plan is to follow the same path that the great naturalist John Muir did as a young man, a trip that he later described in his classic book, A Thousand Mile Trip to the Gulf. Like Muir, I will not just look at the water once I get there, but get out on it, trading in my car for a kayak. And, like Muir, my goal will be to see the ecosystem of the Gulf as a complicated whole, that is, to try to see it, even in its current desperate state, as a naturalist would.
