My Southern Journey

by Rick Bragg

  Here is the Magnolia River, one of the last places in America where the mail is delivered by a man in a boat, where in one bend in the river there is a deep, cold place once believed to have no bottom at all. You can see blue crabs the size of salad plates when the tides are right, and shrimp as big as a harmonica. Along the banks are houses on stilts or set far back, because the rivers flood higher than a man is tall, but the trees still crowd the banks, and it looks like something from The African Queen—or the Amazon.

  Then, of course, there is the bay. You can see the skyscrapers of Mobile on a clear day, and at night you see a glow. I pointed to a yellow luminescence one night and proclaimed it to be Mobile, but a friend told me it was just the glow of a chemical plant. So now I tell people Mobile is “over yonder” somewhere.

  You can see it best from the city pier, a quarter-mile long, its rails scarred from bait-cutting knives and stained with fish blood, its concrete floor speckled with scales. This is where Fairhope comes together, to walk, hold hands. It is here I realized I could never be a real man of the sea, as I watched a fat man expertly throw a cast net off the pier, at bait fish. The net fanned out in a perfect oval, carried by lead weights around its mouth, and when he pulled it in it was shining silver with minnows. I tried it once and it was like throwing a wadded-up hamburger sack at the sea.

  So I buy my bait and feel fine. But mostly what I do here is look. I kick off my flip-flops and feel the sand, or just watch the sun sink like a ball of fire into the bay itself. I root for the pelicans, marvel at how they locate a fish on a low pass, make an easy half-circle climb into the air, then plummet into the bay.

  I wonder sometimes if I love this so because I was born so far from the sea, in that red dirt, but people who have been here a lifetime say no, it is not something you get tired of. They tell you why, in stories that always seem to begin with, “I remember…”

  “I remember when I was about 10 years old, maybe 8, my mother and sisters and I went through Bon Secour and some guy in a little boat had caught a sawfish,” said Skip Jones. “And I thought this thing can’t be real—like I felt when they walked on the moon.”

  A lifetime later he is still looking in the water. “Last year I went out on the walk one morning at about 6 o’clock, and I looked down and there were a dozen rays, and I looked harder and they were all over the place, hundreds of them. Well, we have a lot of small rays, but these had a different, broader head. And I went inside and looked ’em up and saw that they were cownose rays that congregate around estuaries. I called my friend Jimbo Meador and told him what I saw, and he said, ‘Yeah, I saw them this morning.’ They came in a cloud and then they were just gone. I don’t know where. I guess to Jimbo’s house.”

  I would like to tell people stories of the bay, the rivers, the sea, tell them what I remember. But the best I can do is a story about cows. I was driving with my family to the bay, where a bookseller and friend named Martin Lanaux had invited us to watch the Fourth of July fireworks from his neighborhood pier. As we passed the cow pasture, the dark sky exploded with color, and every cow, every one, it seemed, stood looking up at it. It was one of the nicer moments in my life, and I didn’t even get my feet wet.

  THE LOST GULF

  Garden & Gun, August/September 2010

  Everybody feels something when they look at it, unless they are hollow. Standing in that sand, looking into that blue-green, liquid forever, I felt relieved. It was forty years ago this summer. I was going on 12, a boy from the red dirt, what people call the Alabama highlands. My leather work boots, my future, lay under my bed in Calhoun County, three hundred miles away. I didn’t need shoes here. I felt the sand pulled from beneath my toes, felt clean water rush around legs as pale as bone, because a serious man, a working man, did not strut around in short pants. My bathing suit was a pair of cutoff jeans, and when I turned the pockets out I found a handful of sand, white as a wedding dress, pure as salt. For some reason, a reason my grown-up mind cannot see, I laughed out loud.

  What I do recall, more than the lovely dunes and raucous seabirds and tiny fish that rode the waves straight into my cupped hands, was a feeling that I stood at the edge of something, not a place to fall off but to float away. The Gulf of Mexico, so vast, was just the beginning of a big world that did not end at the terminus of a dirt road, or a mill gate, or a bald hill stripped clean of pulpwood. From here, why, a fellow could go almost anywhere.

  And my mama thought she was just taking me to Pensacola.

  People seemed happy here—sun blasted and smelling of squid bait and fried fish and maybe a little drunk, but happy—or at least that was how it appeared in the summer of 1971. Their pockets were picked clean by overpriced seafood joints and souvenir shops, but they would wear that T-shirt into rags when they got home, to brag that they had been to Panama City, or Gulf Shores. For generations of Southerners, this was the most escape they ever got, as if a five-night stay in the Castaway Cottages was a hole cut in a fence. It broke a lot of hearts, of course, because it was just a feeling, and a feeling can’t save you, really. It can only give you, as it gave a 12-year-old boy, a cool taste of hope.

  I have felt it all my life, though now walking in the shifting sand hurts my hips, and the sunlight bouncing off the water hurts my eyes. I did see the world, as it turned out, or at least the dark side of it, but looking at this water always made me feel better, somehow, like a laying on of hands.

  And now they have fouled it. The oil giant BP and its contractors built a rig in water too deep for common sense, too deep to repair if it all went bad. With some Americans slobbering “Drill, baby, drill,” the worst happened. Eleven people died on the rig Deepwater Horizon as a fireball climbed into the sky, the rig sank beneath the waves, and oil jetted into the Gulf and the life within. The oil company, it would turn out, had no workable plan to plug a leak five thousand feet down, at least none that did not take months to accomplish. The failures mounted and the oil billowed from the sand as April faded into May and May into June.

  They have left us haunted, and guessing.

  How bad?

  How long?

  My whole life has been bathed in these waters. I lived through a thousand undertows, ten thousand hush puppies, two honeymoons, five hurricanes, a never-ending sunburn, untold jellyfish stings, a dozen excellent drunks, two Coast Guard interventions, a hammerhead as long as a Boston Whaler, and one unfortunate misunderstanding in the Breaker’s Lounge. Here I saw the most beautiful mermaids God ever constructed, the ugliest oyster I ever ate, and a hermit crab with a Rebel flag painted on its back. As a child I moved ten tons of sand, one plastic bucket at a time, and as a grown man I waited two hours outside Captain Anderson’s in Panama City for a piece of grouper and some French fried potatoes.

  Now I wonder. I wonder if the only way I will see my Gulf in the future is through the open window of a dented Chevrolet Biscayne, Porter Wagoner on the radio, vinyl seats crammed with cousins, beach balls, fried chicken, cold biscuits, and a Coleman thermos full of sweet iced tea. We rush to it, slipping through speed traps, watching for the shrouds of Spanish moss, the first long bridge. And then there it is, the sand white, the water clean. I can keep it that way. I have the power, as long as memory holds.

  The first time I saw it was 1965. My mother was convinced the sharks could crawl on shore and snatch us, so we darted in and out of the water like magpies, my brothers, my cousins, and me. My grandmother wandered the shoreline, talking to herself and her dead husband under the brim of her bonnet, filling an apron pocket with shells. They found, him and her, some pretty ones. My mother and Aunt Juanita rolled up their blue jeans as if they might wade in, but just stood on the sand, looking. They rode a full day, changed a fan belt and a radiator hose, just to come down here and look. My big brother, Sam, unafraid of bull sharks, or sea monsters, waded in chest deep and did not cry when he stuck his hand in a jellyfish, a creature not of this world. We saw the remnants of sand castles, eroded ruins, but the bedtime stories ou
r mother told did not involve keeps or castles, so we did not know for sure what they were. But we understood moving earth. The descendants of well diggers, we dug a hole almost 5 feet deep, buried Sam up to his neck, and caused my mother a small heart seizure, because she was convinced every trickling wave was the incoming tide. At dusk we sent cannonballs pounding into a swimming pool the size of a stock trough, the water spiked with so much chlorine it turned our hair green and our eyes the color of cherry cough drops. That night we wandered aisles of coconut monkey heads, embalmed baby sharks, and plastic grapefruit spoons, putted golf balls through the legs of a cement dinosaur, and begged to stay just one more day. Later, our sunburn slathered in Avon lotion, we ate tomato sandwiches and barbecued potato chips by a rolling television screen. Matt Dillon had yet to make an honest woman of Miss Kitty, and paradise cost fourteen dollars a night, if you remembered to drop off your key.

  In one awful moment, an oil company accomplished what a drumbeat of hurricanes, pollution, and insane overdevelopment had been unable to do. It threatened the sanctity of the Gulf in a way most of us could not even imagine, sending a stain from horizon to horizon across the surface, and giant plumes of oil, miles long and miles deep, drifting through its depths.

  The oil came first to Louisiana, to the marshes, bays, and delicate ecosystems that are the Gulf’s cradle of life, as people elsewhere on the coast just waited, waited, for their bad dreams to drift ashore. In Mobile, across the bay from my home, it first slid into Mobile Bay on the oil-slimed hull of a giant freighter, peeling away at the impossible dream that, somehow, all this might pass us by.

  In the fifth week, Spencer Johnson sat behind the counter of his Fairhope Fly Shop, looking at a chart of the tides, talking about how a man could catch all the speckled trout he could stand if he cast not from the Fairhope pier but at it, at just the right time in the evening, with just the right fly or bait, and only if the pier lights were shining, and…and then he began to think of the oil. The lovely way he talked of fishing seemed to grow dull, as if the colors had been bleached away, and he began to wonder if he would recognize his Gulf and its sisters, the bays, as the oil drifted closer and closer.

  “I’m 67,” he said. “I won’t enjoy the bay again in my lifetime.”

  Now, suddenly, every big one that got away is suddenly bigger, more important.

  “It was three years ago this June, in the Gulf on the Lady Ann, four miles southwest of an oil rig called the Beer Can,” he said, thinking back. It was deep water, and something—he thinks probably a wahoo but maybe a shark—took off with his fly, fought, ran, then took it down to coral, “and cut me off.” Now he wonders if there will be another fight, another chance.

  The island was called Anna Maria, on the west coast of Florida where the Gulf swirls into Tampa Bay. The captain’s name was Joe Romeo and I was his third mate, behind a grandson who was in grammar school and whoever else was in the boat. The truth was I was such a poor seaman that I would have been third mate to a tackling dummy or a mannequin at JCPenney. But Lord I did love to go fish with that man. He knew where the specks lived on the flats, and if we caught enough—and we always did—his wife fried ’em up and we had fresh trout and grits and it was a reason to live. In the early evening, a bad time to swim, I would choke down my fear of sharks and wade out to my neck, hugging close to a circle of old ladies who waded out there every evening to do exercises. I learned a good bit about burial plans and assisted living, bobbing in their orbit. They say Ponce de León believed the fountain of youth was here somewhere, but I don’t know about that. But I can tell you where to find a good early bird special, or a comfortable shoe.

  It may be it will not be as bad as we fear. Some places will be poisoned, some begrimed, some spared. But by summer, even as the bulk of the oil still rolled offshore, people along the Gulf began to speak of their way of life here as something lost, something ripped from them. They began a massive cleanup and animal rescue in Louisiana in what would be called the greatest ecological catastrophe of its kind in U.S. history, and the hateful thing was the oil still poured.

  All this misery, because our government believed an oil company—an oil company—when it said trust us, we got this, it’ll all be fine. Republicans called it Obama’s Katrina, and Democrats blamed a culture of greed and collusion in the past administration that set the stage for a disaster. Meanwhile, BP gouged at the leak with robots, tried to cap it with a big mixing bowl, shot trash and golf balls and mud into the breach, and generally flopped and floundered until it became clear to the people of the Gulf Coast that the oil company did not have the smarts or skill to repair such a snafu, and no solution—no timely one—had ever really existed. They made jokes about it on Saturday Night Live, about the hapless oil company, as the stain spread, but it wasn’t all that funny.

  Smart people, people with doctorates and others with decades of experience in the oil fields, worked for a solution, thought hard, thought long, but eventually, every time people onshore heard the term brain trust at a press conference, their hopes sank a little lower, and they ground their teeth.

  My daddy loved to drink and he loved to fish, and though he took me with him drinking a dozen times, he never took me fishing. I never had a boy of my own. But when I married Dianne in 2005, I inherited a 10-year-old boy, Jake. He can whup a guitar like it’s going out of style, and sing like a fallen angel, and I am glad that he is mine, at least part of the time. I took him fishing in the Gulf because that is what a good man does, or at least a man trying to be. We left from Orange Beach and went out in the blue with a friend of his we called Taco, because he likes tacos, and we caught fish after fish, red snapper and mackerel and fish I had never seen, and I would have liked it if the boy and I could have talked about life a little bit, or adventures, or maybe even dreams. But instead he and his buddy just hooted and giggled and acted like the dumbasses little boys are as the spray from the speeding boat drenched them on every bounce, and they laughed out loud.

  At first, people just wanted the comfort of numbers, how long their Gulf would be fouled, how many fish or birds or turtles would die, how many shrimpers, oystermen, fishermen, hotel maids, short-order cooks, and all the rest would be wiped out, run off, how many families who made their living here for generations would be ruined, or just leave. Then, as attempt after attempt failed, they began to imagine the unimaginable, that the whole damn thing would become a dead zone, a kind of poisoned lake, leaching into the Atlantic and beyond.

  The skeptics and the old salts said such people were just a bunch of Chicken Littles, said there was just too much water out there to worry about doomsday, that the Gulf would cleanse itself, even as the oil rolled into balls of tar in the waves. It was just thin oil, they said, not thick crude, and chemical dispersants would break it up so that the microorganisms in the Gulf could just gobble it up. When it did not immediately foul all the beaches, bays, and estuaries of states east of Louisiana, indignant, desperate sea captains and chamber of commerce officials said it was just a scare, that it was environmental types who were really putting them out of business, with rumors and lies.

  And then came the pitiful proof. Oil-slimed pelicans struggled to lift off the glistening water and just hung there in the mess, confused, beaten. Tar balls rolled in the dingy surf, gummed up the beaches. The fish and the shrimp and the turtles and the crabs ingested the toxins, and began to die.

  People strung booms, built berms, prayed.

  In June, the oil rolled just offshore in Baldwin County. We went, my family and I, to wade, and bob in the water, and just look at it, before the oil crept in. But it was no good. Every cool wave just reminded me of what would be lost. I thought of that line from Tennyson, about casting a shade, a shadow, on such a delightful thing as this, and I wanted to beat the water with my fists.

  THE YANKEE MYSTIQUE

  The cold had teeth in it, in ’93. I walked from the old house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I felt it bite me through my clothes, before I
had taken a second step. There was snow on the ground but it was old snow, weeks old, glittering, frozen hard as marble. By my third step my legs were already going numb. It was dark, just a few steps from Harvard Yard, from those great halls of enlightenment, but the Southern gothic in me could not help but wonder if I might just freeze stuck to the ground in this foreign place, freeze into a statue that the students would gaze upon with great curiosity in the morning light. I turned around and almost leapt back onto the porch, snatching at the door, almost clawing for the warmth inside. Say what you want to about these Northerners, but don’t call them weak-willed, don’t call them soft. A creature that can live in this, live like this, deserves our respect, even our admiration. But I could not help but wonder if maybe my kinfolks had been right, when I was a child. Maybe the Northerners are an altogether different people, maybe even a different species. “They ain’t like us,” my kin used to say. Well at least, I thought as the door closed behind me and the feeling came back in my legs, they have much finer long underwear.

  The next winter, a record one for nasty cold on the island of Manhattan, I stood at the doors to my apartment building in Midtown as the doorman looked at me with something close to pity. He was a nice man, a New Yorker to his bones, and was especially kind to me after he heard my hillbilly accent. He told me everything twice, to make sure I understood. I steeled myself for the bite, that cold, cold bite, and stepped boldly onto a sidewalk crowded with Northerners who thought this was just brisk. I hit a patch of hard snow before I made it a block and a half, to slide and stumble spectacularly onto iconic Broadway itself, where a sea of dirty yellow taxis flowed around me as if I was Moses. No one even blew a horn. And again, I had to give them respect. Say what you want to about these Northerners, I thought, but these people do know how to drive in the snow.