Tocky on 1/5/2010 at 04:34

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Thus quote the redwing blackbird of Ship Island. We picked the wrong vacation to take this year. If I had known it would be the last time I would see the hermit crabs scurry in the clear blue surf, if I had known I would never hunt thier soft shell cousins by flashlight, if I had known I would never stand on the battlement of the old fort and smell the clean salt air, I would have gone. Never again will droves of gulls chase the ferry catching popcorn no matter how poorly thrown. Never again will the cutting bow kick up herds of flying fish sparking in the morning sun. Never again will I see the demarcation of the Mississippi backwash from the sweet turquois of open ocean and know I'm almost there. Pristine, beaten by wind, cut into by hurricane Camile, weathered grasses on dunes sheltering birds and the cold stones of history now forever tainted in my lifetime.

I will miss it. It was the first vacation my wife and I ever took. I can see her standing next to the massive cannon staring out to sea and feeling so very alive in the clean wind off the water. All a memory now.

The oil will take it's beaches. It will drive away the dolphin and bluefin tuna. It's sheen and smell will permiate all coating all with sterility. There will be no delicious tuna steak, no flounder, no ice chests of gulf shrimp big as your hand to take home. The beaches of Gulfport and Biloxi will smell of poison and be bitterly abandoned. So too will Fort Morgan of "damn the torpedoes" as well as Orange where waves once kicked up sheets of silver sardines wriggling for breath. Destins white sands will no longer be thier pride. Perhaps the college kids will still party in the tiki bars of Panama beach but it won't be the same. Nothing will.

I heard Rush Limbaugh sneer insinuation that it was the fault of environmentalists who had likely bombed the oil derrick and I was dumbstruck with the idiocy of such a statement. Anyone who had been there, who had written words in the sand to be washed away by the tide, would know what a horror it is to spoil such a place. There are a lot of people of the gulf coast who are aching and empty and trying to hold on to some hope. But they know. When you can still dig down six inches along Alaska beaches and watch the hole fill up with oil they know.

"Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got till it's gone."

Nicker on 1/5/2010 at 06:45

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It is heart breaking. My sympathies to the people of the Gulf. My apologies to the wildlife.

And still BP does not want to spend the extra 3 years it would take to drill a safety relief well that could avert exactly this sort of disaster, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (and should have been in place to mitigate this spill). Arctic spills are even more dangerous and persistent. Chemical dispersants don't work at arctic temperatures and you can't even burn off slicks.

Do we really have to turn the world into a greasy cinder before we change our ways? Environmental collapse heralded the end of many a civilization in history. People dispersed to as yet unexploited parts of the globe, to start again. But where will we run to this time?

kabatta on 1/5/2010 at 13:06

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Don't worry, soon enough we will be enjoying our soy based steaks with our vegetables and drink that are also based on soy in tiny confined Elysiums built in the concrete jungle. Those will be barred so we will be safe. The trees will not make shade for they will be palms or other exotic ones. It will be mostly empty as the sun will be too dangerous for the skin, but our chlorine filled recycled water will keep our skins moist and safe because it will have tested natural ingredients made in laboratories. You'll have a way to pass the time tough. A nice modern book written by an enthusiastic intellectual new writer will be constantly there to make you ponder on teenage love between two different races and make your mind tingle on what really happened in the obscure passage important in giving the plot a meaning. You can actually share the intense meditation collectively in a group of friends and debate whether some things are true or not changing the aesthetic story every time. The birds comforting your ears and need for the beautiful will not be gone, but changed into some lovely singing birds of the night; pink beaked birds that constantly rehears the mating song at every occasion revealed. Really modern bacchantaes to guide your spiritual experience induced by soy based flavored preferred alcohol. Oil will be common, for it is the stuff of life that differentiates the weak from the strong. We have small cages to keep the extinct animals anyway safe from themselves and naturally oiled beaches. Why, you can even enjoy a nice surprise extinct soy pie (the surprise is that most are soy based and some have exotic ingredients for the lucky winners).
but the human spirit will always be protective of natural and beautiful. Each house will have a small fern so that the house will have fresh air. Each generation will continue to go on pilgrimages with foodstuff wrapped in plastic and alcohol bottles with them to enrichen the already lovely portrait of the beach colored in golden weeds, maroon sand and black sea. The drugs are not optional however, for how one can achieve the destination of adulthood without going on a material and spiritual trip. A pilgrimage between cities in the sand is hard at least.
I could go on and on forever, but the short story will still show how clearly we are ( screwed ) evolved.

Vivian on 1/5/2010 at 16:18

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You fuckers eat Bluefin? Way to undermine yourself there

BrokenArts on 1/5/2010 at 17:18

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I never said that. This is much bigger than just the bluefin, you know that. That region will be destroyed for years to come. Only time will tell the real scope of this disaster. Throw in hurricane season, and throw that oil around, what a mess.