Plunder
Page 30
I reached New Orleans, crossed the river, and hung a left. Sunset lit the everpresent clouds as I settled into a borrowed house in Myrtle Grove. (Of course, clouds are everpresent. Water is everywhere, even underfoot. Why shouldn’t water gather in the air above?)
Driving south the next morning, I stopped at Fort Jackson. The fort has been a military site since 1822, but it’s a national monument now, so I didn’t expect the constant thwap-thwap-thwap of helicopters taking off in quick succession. Something unidentifiable dangled from each chopper’s belly.
When I asked two gentlemen in protective gear what they’d seen, they just said, “The oil’s fifteen miles out.” The twisting river makes local geography mind-bending, so I couldn’t relate the fifteen-mile distance to any familiar place—Venice? Grand Isle?—but I did know that fifteen miles wasn’t very far.
As helicopters lifted above the old fort, the men explained that the choppers were dropping sandbags into passes between barrier islands. Again, the enormity of their task staggered me. Sand is heavy. Each helicopter carried just a few sandbags. How many trips would it take to move enough sand to make any difference whatsoever? But we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t try.
In Venice, the highway ends. A command station there sent out throngs of workers and lots of boats and miles of boom. At Myrtle Grove, I saw yet another command station. More workers. More boats. More miles of boom.
Next day, a friend took me out in a borrowed boat, looking for oil. Again, we saw workers and equipment but, for a long while, we saw no oil. We didn’t even smell it.
Eventually, we reached Barataria Bay. Still, the water looked clear. Then my friend said, “Look at the grass.” That’s when we noticed the stains at the base of the grasses extending along the shoreline, as far as we could see. Perhaps the tide had brought the oil in to foul the wetlands, then receded. Or perhaps the hard labor of all those workers had skimmed any oil from open waters. But you can’t skim a swamp and you can’t rip out several parishes worth of wetland grasses. Some mistakes just can’t be fixed.
During the ride back, I finally got a good noseful of oil. Why was that odor so elusive when I was on Barataria Bay, surrounded by the stuff? The chemical engineer in me says that the most volatile compounds had evaporated as that oil made its way to me. And the oil I did smell? Perhaps that air blew in off the gulf, where fresh oil had bubbled to the surface. And it was, still.
I take research trips to add realism to my books and to find perspective. What perspective waited in the river delta?
I saw herculean efforts to set things right. I saw helicopters, people, boats, and equipment in quantities that would be staggering if they could be gathered in one place. Spread across such vastness, that effort is simply dwarfed. We’re only human.
And I, for one, felt small.
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