by Carl Safina
Anyway, when a car pulls into the driveway, Laney tensely breathes, “Car coming.” He’s afraid it’s BP’s Bully Police. How quickly the chill sets in. How easily. How thoroughly. When he recognizes the person, he says, “It’s okay; I know them.”
But it’s okay either way, because all we’re doing it taking photos from the deck of his friend’s private house.
On the ocean side, a man is visiting a friend; he’s brought along his family. His vacation home is in Gulf Shores, but Gulf Shores is closed. “And anyway, your kids go a couple hundred yards, then track tar all in your house and ruin everything you’ve got.” He gestures with his chin. “These berms, they’re useless.”
He’s part owner of an RV park. Recent acquisition. Bad timing. No tourists, no business, but it costs him twenty-three grand a month to pay his note. And in the midst of renovations, his contractors quit to work for Better Pay. “We have $3.2 million invested, and I just had to lay off all our help. In six months, we’ll probably lose the place.”
Right on the public beach where there’s almost no vegetation left, I see a little puff of green near the end of a miles-long berm. Around this vegetation, a little string fence and a few small signs announce that a sea turtle’s clutch of eggs lies incubating below the sand. All the other vegetation on the beach has been removed. If the nest hatches, the dark shape of the berm will look to the night-emerging baby turtles like land. Instead of marching to the sea, they’ll march away from the berm, inland, and die.
At a pile of sand forty feet high, I climb to take photos. A guy in a truck from a company called Clean Harbors, from Albany, New York, gets out. I’m sure he’s going to hassle me. Instead he says, “It’s okay to park here. How can I help you today?” I say he already has, just by being such a breath of fresh air. I ask if his company is contracted by BP. “I really can’t comment.” Okay, something less threatening: I wonder out loud how much it’s costing to make these miles-long berms. Just small talk. I’m not really asking him. He says, “I really can’t talk about any of that. I could get fired for talking.” The First Amendment protects corporations’ free speech, but not the free speech of people who work for those corporations.
It’s the Fourth of July. Two hundred and thirty four years ago, the United States won its independence from, guess who: the British.
Not so fast.
At the end of the road is a public park clearly marked “Open.” It’s noon when, on foot, I approach what looks like a little temporary trailer-style guard station at the entrance.
A young guy with a clipboard straightens up and walks quickly to the threshold of the park entrance. The power play is immediate. He’s joined by an older guy, sixties, who takes over the interaction.
“I assume this park is open,” I say, “since the sign says ‘Open.’ ”
“No.”
“Then why does the sign say ‘Open’?”
“Because they haven’t taken it down.”
“Why would they take it down if it’s a public park that’s ‘Open’?”
“It’s closed.”
“Why is it closed?”
“Because there are operations going on here connected to the oil spill. It’s been taken over by the National Guard. The National Guard is operating down here.”
“And they’ve closed the public park, even though it says it’s ‘Open’?”
“Yes. The city has closed it.”
“Does that seem right to you?”
“I have no comment on that, sir. All I know is, it’s closed to the public.”
“And who do you work for?”
“I work for Response Force One security.”
“What is Response Force One? I’ve never heard of that.”
“A security company.”
“And you’re hired by who?”
“Response Force One.”
“Yes, but who are they hired by?”
“BP,” he says with a lift of his chin, as though those two letters are the big trump card of the whole Gulf region. A foreign-based corporation has hired American citizens to keep other Americans off public property clearly marked “Open” on our national holiday. These are not even real cops. They’re what we used to call rent-a-cops, private security guards, the kind appropriate for guarding private property like office buildings and department stores. The kind who have no real legal authority. Local police or sheriffs, as I understand it, can grant authority to private security guards, but I can’t check whether they’ve officially done so here, since, after all, it’s a holiday. These guys, however, are not guarding the park or public property. They’re guarding, well, I can’t really see; looks like more booms and Porta Potties.
“So BP closed the public park?”
“No. The town has closed it. Because there are operations going on here.”
The parking lot behind the guard is pretty empty, and the equipment is idle. It’s a holiday, after all. “I don’t really see any operations going on here,” I say.
“Sir,” he says, starting to lose his cool, “I’m tellin’ ya—it’s closed. Okay?”
“Okay, and I’m asking why.”
“Because there are operations going on. It’s a secure area.”
“So, it’s the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and—”
“Sir,” he interrupts, now getting exasperated, “if you have any questions about the beach being closed, I’m gonna suggest that you contact somebody from the Town of Dauphin Island.”
“Okay. Who can I contact?”
“Anybody in the city. Contact the mayor.”
“Do you have their phone numbers?”
“They’re not working today. It’s a holiday.”
“But do you have phone numbers, any contact information?”
“No, I don’t.” Now he’s pretty fed up with me. Feeling’s mutual, I’d estimate. The eye contact between us is turning hostile. I ask if I can take a picture of him and the younger guard at their booth and, not surprisingly, he says, “No.”
“But you’re on public property,” I point out again. I assume he’d have a private right not to have his photo taken. Since he’s saying he’s acting in an official government capacity, however, I’m pretty sure I’d be within my rights taking a photo of an “official.” But this is not a discussion on the fine points of the Constitution. We’re miles and miles from the fine points. This, after all, is the Oil.
“I said, NO!” he yells. I see hatred in his eyes and he’s starting to shake with rage. I guess he’s not accustomed to being challenged. Most cars coming to the park just turn around upon seeing the guard booth. He usually doesn’t even have to talk to anyone. His mere presence is enough to repel people. Everyone can see it’s closed, never mind the sign. And obviously, I’ve come with an attitude about this. I hate all of it. I feel myself pointlessly returning his glare of rage.
He reaches for his radio in a threatening way, as if to warn, “I’m going to call Daddy.” He’s got his finger on the key.
I should make him call some real police, who work in tax-paid uniforms and drive a real cop car. But I presume they’ll side with him and we’ll all get angry. I turn and leave.
Later, I do find a sheriff and ask how private security guards can keep people off public property, especially where the sign very clearly says a park is “Open.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “The park is closed; that’s true. But right now there’s a lot of screwy things on this island. I don’t understand it all myself.”
I guess you can’t explain something that doesn’t make sense.
Lunchtime. Shootin’ the breeze over a beer with Marion Laney. He says, “There’s a weird difference between what the government says to do and what this corporation does.” He can’t understand why, when the U.S. government tells BP to do something, BP seems to have the luxury of deciding whether to comply. “If this was a Venezuelan drilling company—or a Cuban drilling company,” he chuckles, “I wonder what the government tone wou
ld be.”
He’s spoken to some of the fishermen whom BP is paying in the idiotically named Vessels of Opportunity program. Laney says, “Guys who’ll talk when there’s no camera around say they just putter around, not getting much done; say there’s no real plan of attack. It’s just, like, get in your boat, get out there, come back at quitting time.”
He adds, “I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but I think it’s all just a big show. They’re spending a lot of money. But either they’re totally incompetent or there’s some reason behind putting a lot of people out there and getting very little done.”
Cooking up conspiracy theories here is easy as cereal and milk. Laney thinks BP wants the fishermen’s mouths zipped—everybody just stay calm—and for a day’s wages, they comply. But with bills to pay, what other option do they have? I think it’s exactly that simple.
On docks where no one would think to wear life preservers just to walk to and from the boats they’ve run for decades, everyone wears life preservers. Former captains of their fate now march to rhythms not their own. Second childhoods in their own prime. Fishing boats lie stacked with white absorbent pads, like the diapers for whole communities suddenly severed from the normal progression of a life’s memories.
At the marina, no one’s in the store; they’re not expecting customers. When a fisherman wearing a life preserver enters, we surprise each other. I’m not expecting “Abandon ship!” on land; I just want a few snacks. He calls a thirtyish woman, who takes her place behind the counter.
With a chuckle, she says, “We could be unemployed in the blink of an eye. Everyone’s working for BP. That’s all there is now. No one can think past next week.” She says, “Everyone’s worried in every way you can imagine.”
I can’t imagine. I get to go home.
Because it’s a holiday weekend, Marion wants to see if he can get any shrimp. In the seafood shop over which he presides, Gary Skinner sweeps back his golden hair. He’s a large man who describes his age as “fifty-nine, going on a hundred.” He’d been a jeweler and watchmaker. “Got to be a dead trade,” he says. “Cheap imports. Now we got cheap imported shrimp. That’s why we had to open this shop up, to survive shrimpin’. Couldn’t survive on wholesale prices.”
We get a little tutorial on shrimp. A connoisseur, Skinner says, “The pink shrimp is probably the prettiest shrimp. It’s beautiful. It’s got this unique little black spot on the back of it; the shell is firm, it peels real good, it’s real sweet. It’s just a good shrimp. They’re all good, but I think it’s just the best.”
He’s had the shop for six years. He’s been shrimping since 1975. His two shrimp boats supply his shop. Except now they’re working for BP.
“My big boat, last week they scooped up about forty barrels of oil. That’s, like, sixty seconds’ worth of what’s comin’ out that well.”
He tells me, “At first, my wife said, ‘There’s gonna be a big slick comin’ this way.’ I said, ‘Aw, they’ll stop it in a coupla days.’ When a week went by—. They started shuttin all the fishin’ down. I mean, they had to, or you’d be getting oil all over your net, contaminatin’ your whole catch.
“Right now, BP’s actually payin’ more than shrimpin’ pays,” Skinner says. He explains that the shop’s business has grown 20 to 40 percent each year, including 20 percent in the 2009 recession. It’s been a big success. “BP has figured in what our profit would have been this year, and what they’ve been giving me has been accurate,” he reports. “They’re payin’ on time, so it looks like that’s not gonna be a problem.”
The problem: “Business has really fell off since this oil. This weekend—and this is a big holiday—it’s down about 80 percent. Normally we have tourists, we have fresh shrimp off my boats. We’d sell forty or fifty ice chests full of shrimp for backyard parties.
“There’s been a lot of sleepless nights,” he acknowledges. “The money’s one thing. Mainly it’s been hard watching the business going down. What are we gonna do if they find out everything’s contaminated, that it’s killin’ the nurseries inside, where shrimp grow. Or it’s on the bottom offshore, where the shrimp spawn. It could be all over with. If they get it stopped, there might be some light at the end of the tunnel. Nobody knows, man. This is new for everybody.”
His daughter-in-law works in the shop, with her babies calling and crying. His sons are running his boats. He comments, “My own two little boys started coming out on the boat when they were three years old. Now they’re captains.” He says he built the business to leave to his grandkids, “if they want to go fishin.’ If they want to go to college and be a doctor, I support that, too.” He adds, “People say, ‘Oh, how can you keep doing this?’ Well, we’ve had a good life. Money’s not everything. We’ve had a lot of good times.”
But we’re not having good times today. This is the sorriest Fourth of July I’ve ever seen, and—because I like boats, I guess—it seems saddest at the boat ramp. Fishing is closed, but boating is allowed. Yet right now, the boat launch is empty when it should be packed.
Marion says, “Normally, there’d be dozens of boats here, jockeying for position, launching, hauling, standing off waiting to get in or out. It would be a madhouse. Normally there would have been hundreds of boats launched this morning, hundreds coming in at day’s end.”
There’s not one single boat. No motorboats, not a single sail anywhere in view.
Dauphin Island has canceled its official fireworks. I guess no one is feeling sufficiently independent. I hear that BP offered ten grand toward fireworks but the town had the pride to decline.
Plenty of private fireworks, though. Zip—pop!
I get myself invited to a deck party. Lots of locals and a lot of great food on the grill. Nice view of the ocean, the sunset. Bottle rockets, Roman candles. Zoom. Boom. Firecrackers crackling by the pack—a regular good time after all, maybe.
We solemnly drink a shot of tequila to sundown. The whole scene is beachy enough to shake the fog of oil for a little while. Like, thirty seconds. It’s all anyone is talking about. And here, where the blowout has turned things upside down, most people are thoroughly confused.
“How deep is the well?”
“I think it’s eighteen thousand feet.”
“It’s seventeen hundred feet. The well itself starts five thousand feet from the surface.”
“No, it’s a lot more than seventeen hundred.”
“I think it’s seventeen thousand.”
“I think that’s right.”
“Or it’s seventeen thousand feet from the surface—”
“Maybe it’s seventeen thousand from the surface to the bottom of the bore?”
“No, no; from the floor of the sea, it’s seventeen thousand—. Uh, wait; you’re right. Correct, correct.”
“I don’t understand these numbers; how can they do this drilling?”
“There’s nobody in the Coast Guard who knows—I mean, the oil companies are secretive. You can’t find out anything from the oil companies.”
“That’s—to me—the government should be keeping the transparency.”
“Y’know, we put observers on fishing boats.”
“We had observers in Iraq.”
“Observers do visit, but—”
“They should have observers on all these rigs. And they should report to the public what’s going on.”
“Instead, Minerals Management Service, literally in bed with them; what I hear.”
“That whole department needs to be washed out. Start over.”
“BP’s hiring for a lotta different things. Look for oil, put out boom, check boom, move boom around—a lotta different stuff.”
“What do they tell you not to do?”
“Can’t pick up birds; gotta call them in.”
“And they got, like, a gag order. They tell you anything you find is the property of BP.”
“These past weeks have felt like months. You know it’s gonna really hit. You’re pretty sure, anyway.
You don’t know when. But with these onshore winds, you know it’s coming. Don’t quote me; I have a contract. Been to training. Got my yellow card. Got my credential card. Hopin’ to get called.”
A diesel mechanic says, “All the work’s slowin’ down. People don’t use their boats, nothing breaks.”
“Recently I went for three days’ fishing in the blue water, about a hundred twenty-five miles from shore. These guys I was with are very knowledgeable about catching fish. We caught one dolphin and a barracuda. Normally at this time of year, we should’ve loaded the boat. We should’ve had lots of yellowfin tuna, wahoo, a bunch of dolphin-fish, prob’ly hooked a blue marlin. It shoulda been phenomenal. This is a very good time of the year. We were shocked. We did not see oil—but the fish are gone.”
A man named Jack, retired after thirty years of working seafood safety for the Food and Drug Administration, says in frustration, “If only the guys from Transocean had said, ‘Y’know, we’ve got a problem with one of the gauges not working right and we feel like we shouldn’t remove the fluid from the well,’ and the BP guy had said, ‘Let’s take a couple of extra days and do it right.’ That’s all they had to say. None of this would have happened. But they did the exact opposite. They forced this catastrophe on everybody.”
“And the second wolf said, ‘I can save you money by …’ ” By the bottle rockets’ red glare, I shake hands with a guy who says he was in Vietnam in 1968. I say, “That must have been unspeakable.” He says it was. He says, “What kills me about this present atrocity with the oil is that when you’ve had an investment in this country like I have made, seeing the lack of mobilization is staggering. I can’t believe this has been allowed to happen to the United States. I can’t believe that the United States allowed this to happen to itself.”
On July 7, the Thadmiral tells America via CNN.com that a relief well is “very close” to being completed, adding that he expects it to intercept its target in a mere month to five weeks.
