Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  “What is it you want, exactly?” she asked.

  Eventually she resigned herself to my presence, and soon we were standing in the corner of a cavernous warehouse, staring at a pelican. Miraculously, only nine birds had been oiled in the spill: a loon, a cormorant, a seagull, a spotted sandpiper, a black-crowned night heron, and four pelicans. With one exception, they had all been released back to the wild after being cleaned, fed, and housed until they were back in fighting form. The lone holdover was a brown pelican now living in a plywood pen with a sheet over it, in a temporary rehabilitation center downtown.

  A rehab worker raised the corner of the sheet and the three of us peered through the narrow opening. I held my breath. Inside, lit with the radiant orange glow of a heat lamp, the single pelican sat motionless on a low perch, a Buddha with folded wings.

  “He’ll puke if you pick him up,” Rhonda said. She was advising the rehab worker not to let the pelican take a test swim yet. “You can’t mess with them when they eat.”

  It had been a rough century for pelicans on the Gulf Coast. A hundred years earlier, fishermen had gotten the idea that pelicans were competing with them, and had slaughtered them wholesale. Worse still, by the 1950s, our release of pesticides into the environment had become a two-pronged machine of pelicanic destruction: DDT weakened their eggs, killing chicks before they even hatched; and Endrine killed off the fish that were their food, starving pelicans en masse. By the late 1960s, they had almost completely disappeared from the Texas and Louisiana coasts.

  The late 1960s and ’70s saw pelicans reintroduced from Florida, and a ban on the persistent organic pollutants that undermined their niche in the ecosystem. Today, the coast is once again crawling with them. Which is not to say they are invulnerable, even without oil spills.

  “We have a pelican die-off every year,” Rhonda said as the rehab worker closed the sheet over the pen. “There are some pretty harsh cold snaps. The fish move off, and the birds don’t get enough food.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m not a biologist.”

  Then she laughed. “These guys were actually lucky they got oiled,” she said. “They’ve been fed quite well.”

  The Hotel Sabine is the tallest building in Port Arthur, and the best vantage from which to watch the aftermath of an oil spill. There’s simply nothing more pleasant than to book a south-facing room on an upper floor and enjoy a gimlet as the cleanup workers buzz up and down the waterway.

  At least, it would be pleasant. The Hotel Sabine has been abandoned for years, and now stands vacant and eyeless, not only Port Arthur’s most prominent landmark but also its most obtrusive eyesore. Unless you plan on breaking in, there will be no tenth-floor views of the ship channel for you.

  Instead, I drove down to Pleasure Island, the grassy artificial landmass on the other side of the channel, to watch the men in Tyvek wrap things up. Oil Mop boats dragged lines of floating containment boom up and down the waterway, their hulls smeared brown with crude. The Eagle Otome had already been spirited away for repairs, and the mood was calm—pastoral-industrial.

  The channel’s surface was unremarkable from a distance, but closer inspection revealed that a not-yet-unnoticeable sheen of oil persisted near the shore. I crouched on a sloping concrete slab that formed part of the bank and watched the filmy rainbow burble over the rocks.

  There was a man standing on the bank just up the channel. He was short, with blue-tinted glasses and a suede cowboy hat jammed down on his head. And he was fishing.

  His name was Nelson. Originally from El Salvador, he said he had been in the United States for ages. He owned a dump truck in Beaumont and made his living hauling dirt and gravel for road construction jobs. In a drawl that was half Texas and all Salvador, he told me this was his favorite spot to fish.

  “Last weekend, they had that spill?” he said. “I show up here, a lot of oil. A lot of oil. I went further up the channel. Where it was clean.”

  We looked at the edge of the channel below our feet, where the waterline curled in colored wavelets of petroleum.

  He frowned with approval. “Today, though…I think is okay.”

  “It doesn’t bother you at all that there’s still oil on the water?” I asked. “I mean, there’s still guys in orange suits.”

  “No, man!” he said, and waved at the channel. “If you fish like this, with some oil there, then you don’t have to use no oil when you cook it!” He cackled. “That’s a joke.”

  He had extra fishing rods. I probably hadn’t fished in twenty years, but it came back after a pair of somewhat hazardous casts, and soon we got on with the business of letting the crabs of Port Arthur steal Nelson’s bait from our hooks. The Oil Mop boats continued their rounds, and Nelson cracked open his supply of Coors Light.

  He seemed glad to have me there, and soon we were talking about his divorce, about how much he missed his sons. He told me he wanted to find a girlfriend from overseas, and about his complicated attempts to find one over the Internet. It sounded less like online dating and more like a Nigerian banking scam, but that didn’t seem to bother Nelson.

  What about you, man? You got a girlfriend?

  I told him I did.

  As a matter of fact, I was engaged. The Doctor and I were getting married. And once we were married, we were going to India, to take the world’s first pollution tourism honeymoon. That she considered this even tolerable seemed like further proof of true love. Cruising the world’s most degraded rivers, just the two of us…I was pretty sure it was going to be more romantic than it sounded.

  There was a tug on the line. I did as Nelson had taught: I pulled up sharply on the rod to set the hook—and waited. “You feel something again after that, you’ve got a fish,” he’d said. But so far the tugs on my line had signified only that my hooks were now empty of bait.

  But this time there was another tug on the line, and another—an irregular rhythm drumming against the rod and reel. I started reeling, and like magic, two large fish appeared in the water.

  Two.

  Nelson threw down his rod, whooping. “Pull him in!” he cried. “Pull him in! You got two!”

  I pulled and reeled and yanked the fish toward the bank, where Nelson grabbed the line and pulled them out of the rainbow-stained water, beaming at my success. The fish hung from the line, exhausted and gaping, each of them a good sixteen inches long. They were the largest fish I had ever caught. Larger, perhaps, than any fish ever caught in the history of the world.

  “That’s called drum,” Nelson said. Drum. I had caught oily drum. He slapped his leg. “That’s going to cook up real good!”

  Rhonda was on the phone. They were about to release the pelican. Over the line, I could hear her teeth grinding. She hadn’t wanted to make the call, but I had put in a request with the Coast Guard to ask her to.

  She sounded hopeful that I wouldn’t be able to make it, and gave me only very vague directions. Her team was already on the road, she said. It was probably too late for me to find them.

  But if she thought she could hide this pelican release from the world, she was mistaken. I sped across town, crossed an imposing cable-stayed bridge over the northeast elbow of the ship channel, and then doubled back to the south. Pavement turned to gravel, and the road plunged into a wetland park, stands of grass interlaced by channels of placid water. To the west, the horizon was decorated with the distant skyline of the refineries, tiny thickets of smokestacks and fractionating columns.

  Driving south, I passed the occasional clot of trash—a shattered television on the shoulder, a pink recliner submerged to its forehead in a placid side channel. Cormorants and pelicans wheeled by, and cranes and herons, and other long-necked beasties. Here and there, men sat by their pickup trucks and fished. The fish were not biting, they told me.

  Of course they’re not biting, I thought. You’re fishing in clean water.

  Finally I spotted a pair of SUVs parked by the canal that ran parallel to the road. It was Rhonda’s crew. I had caught
them in the act.

  The pelican was already in the water, floating next to the reeds on the far side of the channel, maybe fifty feet away. I walked up to Rhonda and her three colleagues. She registered my presence with obvious disappointment. The rehab worker from the warehouse was there, too. “Hey, buddy!” she said, proving that not all pelican ladies are grumpy.

  We watched the pelican. There was an air of expectation, even concern.

  “C’mon!” someone said. “Fly!”

  But the pelican did not fly. It merely floated. And the longer it floated, the more tense everyone became. At last, it dunked its head and unfurled its wings, and, with a broad flap, splashed itself with water. The crowd broke into applause.

  “Yes!” said Rhonda. “That’s what we’re looking for!” She took some pictures. “Do that again!” she shouted at the pelican, and it obeyed, stretching and flicking its wings over and over, bathing in the churning spray, improbably majestic.

  Rhonda turned to me. “See?” she said accusingly. “It’s not very exciting.”

  “It is exciting!” I protested. I couldn’t span the absurdity of not being able to convince a rescuer of wildlife that wildlife rescue was, in fact, interesting.

  Rhonda turned back to the pelican, now swimming in idle circles, and began screaming at it.

  “STAY AWAY FROM PEOPLE!” she bellowed. “FLY OFF INTO THE BUSHES! STAY! AWAY! FROM PEOPLE!”

  She caught her breath. “That’s the problem, is if he got used to people.”

  “He’s gonna miss that heat lamp tonight,” someone said. The forecast was calling for cold weather. “He’s gonna wish he were back in that warm cage.”

  “No,” said Rhonda. “He hated it in there.”

  It heaved toward us: a mountainside of black steel. I was standing on a gangway, clutching the rail as our boat rocked and turned. I was facing port. That means left. It was hard to look anywhere else; the thing approaching to port had no end. It spread up and out from the water, an endless wall of rust-streaked metal, and we were falling toward it.

  Duane was there, the trim Boy Scout of the sea, wearing a backpack.

  “Don’t let go of the railing until you have a good grip on the ladder,” he said. I made a noise like a strangled fish.

  The tanker was so tall and so wide that it seemed to outstrip my entire field of vision. Yet the distance between it and us was surprisingly nimble in the way it diminished. At this rate, I thought—

  Then we were at the ladder, a wooden ladder hanging down the rain soaked hull. Wood? Its treads hung from thick ropes dark with sea scum. I grabbed it and found myself clinging to the outside of twenty million gallons of Mexican crude. We had boarded the Pink Sands.

  When Port Arthur began its life as an oil town, ships came here to take the stuff away. But now, of course, they bring it in, by the half-million-barrel load. The question, especially pointed in the aftermath of a spill, is how to make sure these ships don’t crash, despite taking so much cargo up such a narrow waterway. Or perhaps the question is why they don’t crash more often. The answer, I was here to learn, is that any large tanker that enters the Sabine-Neches Waterway is required to carry a pair of Sabine pilots.

  On the wide, linoleum-floored bridge, we met Captain Tweedel, Duane’s colleague and president of the Sabine Pilots. A tall, clean-cut man wearing chinos and a braided belt, Tweedel had grown up in Port Arthur. (Though he now lived in Beaumont. His wife had insisted on not living in sight of a refinery.)

  The two captains got down to work, staring out the window with that look people get when they have just taken control of fifty-five thousand gross tons.

  “Full ahead,” Tweedel ordered.

  “Full ahead,” said the helmsman.

  I was on my second visit to Port Arthur, several months after the Eagle Otome oil spill, and the channel had long since returned to normal operation. But questions still lingered; the government had yet to finish its investigation into the cause of the accident.

  In the meantime, the Sabine Pilots had begun working with a public relations consultant, and were surprisingly willing to let me tag along. They wanted their story to get out.

  The trick to keeping an oil tanker from crashing and spilling oil all over your ecosystem, it seems, is to have Charlie Tweedel and Duane Bennett standing on the bridge. They stand there, staring out the window, at a piece of water they have studied and navigated for years, and occasionally tell the nice Filipino man at the helm to adjust the rudder by ten degrees. It’s more complicated than that—but not by much.

  “Port ten!” said Duane from the captain’s chair. He looked like a nicer, nerdier Captain Kirk.

  “Port ten!” came the response. Nothing happened. The deck continued to vibrate with the power of the engine. Then, six hundred feet in front of us, the nose of the tanker began creeping to the left.

  Hardly any major harbor or channel lets ships enter without a local pilot aboard. The stakes are simply too high—and the navigation too tricky—to leave it to some guy who doesn’t know the route’s every curve and shoal. The pilots meet their charges in open water, before the ships enter the channel, and clamber aboard—pirates by invitation. Tanker captains are more than happy to hand over the controls, as they must.

  “We consider ourselves as the buffer, as protection to the environment,” said Tweedel, staying on message. “The government expects us to act to protect the waterway and the populace from some radical conflagration or pollution.”

  “And the accident in January?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about that much,” he said. “It’s still under investigation.” He told me there was no single factor the accident could be hung on.

  We slid forward through the cold, misty morning, passing from the outer harbor into the green mouth of the channel. Idle oil platforms lingered against the bank to our left, waiting for contracts or to be torn apart for scrap. On the navigation table, I had seen a map of the coast, marked with dozen upon dozen of offshore oil wells, punctuating the Gulf with surprising density. “They’re like fleas,” Tweedel had remarked.

  Port Arthur’s ship channel is not only so narrow that two large tankers going in opposite directions would have no room to pass each other, but also so shallow that Tweedel described it as a “muddy ditch.” He told me that, at the moment, we were drawing thirty-nine feet. That meant the bottom of the hull was riding thirty-nine feet below the surface of the channel.

  “What’s the maximum draft you can have in the channel?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Forty.”

  “Midship!” shouted Duane.

  “Midship!”

  The task of piloting a tanker requires continuous attention. “As a pilot, you’d really be taking a risk to leave the helm for more than a minute or two,” Tweedel said. He pointed at an oncoming barge. “If he ran aground, I’d have to immediately take action. And I’ve seen those guys run aground lots of times.”

  “We’re compensated for the risk,” said Duane. Piloting paid well.

  Tweedel peered out at the low, misty sky. It was also up to the pilots, he told me, to stop tanker traffic in the channel if visibility was too poor. Today’s conditions were just good enough.

  “It gets foggy for three or four days, and people start screaming for their crude oil,” he said. If the supply of oil didn’t keep up, the refineries might have to lower their production—and that would cost them money. There was huge pressure on the pilots to keep traffic moving.

  “We want to support the industry guys,” Tweedel said, “but we don’t answer to Motiva or Total.”

  We slid forward, an impossibly great momentum, a floating machine literally as long as a skyscraper is tall. I looked over at the helmsman. He was holding a semicircular wheel not unlike the steering wheel of a go-cart. It seemed like it would be very easy, had I wanted, to shove him aside and twirl that wheel, and create a new round of honest work for nearly everyone I had met in Port Arthur.

  “Starboard
twenty,” said Duane.

  “Starboard twenty,” said the helmsman.

  Starboard? Earth to Duane! Starboard? I would have said we needed some port rudder, if anything.

  “Midship,” said Duane.

  “Midship,” said the helmsman.

  And with that, subtly, our leviathan shifted its attitude and slid true, perfectly congruent to the grassy shores of the channel.

  Duane handed the command off to Tweedel and walked over to the window. I told him I had been playing a game called Drive a Supertanker, and losing.

  “It’s more art than science,” he said. “You have to know the science, but there’s a feel you get. If you can’t feel the vessel, you won’t be good as a pilot.”

  He took my notebook and started drawing diagrams, explaining the hydrodynamics of a large ship moving through a narrow channel. The size of a ship affects how it handles in such a limited space. As the ship comes closer to the side of the channel, the water being displaced by the vessel creates pressures and suctions that interact with the narrowing space between the ship and the bank. The ship begins to handle differently, steering itself, resisting in ways it wouldn’t in open water. These effects not only constrain how the vessel can be piloted, and how quickly, but also allow the person in control to sense the ship’s position in relation to the channel, based on how it’s handling.

  “A ship is a totally different animal in these channels,” Tweedel offered.

  Barges passed us coming the other way, carrying refinery products, wood chips, grain. We were the only large tanker; because the channel was too narrow for two such ships to pass each other, their comings and goings were scheduled so that it never happened. But even the movements of smaller craft had to be carefully coordinated to ensure safe passage through such constricted waters. So Tweedel and Duane were also traffic controllers, scrutinizing the approach of other vessels, ordering them around, negotiating what maneuvers they and the Pink Sands would take as they met.

  “I’m gonna need some of that water, Cap’n,” Tweedel said over the radio, cajoling an oncoming tug into position.