Archive for June, 2010

Lili Damage

The sky is different today. There are blue, sunny patches but instead of friendly white puffs decorating them, we have bands of low, dirty clouds streaking it…BANDS! And the air feels funny, like it’s unhappy…or threatening…kind of angry in a way. However you choose to describe what’s going on, folks like us living on the gulf rim know what it means. There’s a hurricane nearby.
When you first pop your eyes open in the morning and take a deep breath, you get the urge to check your storm supplies and see how many fresh batteries you have on hand. You dig out the gasoline can to see if any water has crept in, and while you’re at it, you grab your fresh water jerrycan, too. It’s almost automatic.
You start listening to weather forecasts on days like this. Today, they’re telling us Alex will hit near Brownsville, but all of us around here know. They’re capricious bastards, those storms…not to be trusted, and even if things go as predicted, we’re going to get wind and a lot of rain. Hurricanes throw squalls off randomly, like the beads Mardi Gras maskers shower us with…even this far away.
We bought a generator after Lili, but we haven’t ever used it. Actually, the only things critically dependent on electricity are our refrigerator and freezer, and we take care of them by shoving dry ice in. The fridge usually freezes solid, but the only real casualties are eggs. Try as we may, we can’t figure out how to cook them after they’ve been frozen. They don’t even scramble well.
We have battery-powered fans in our storm stash, and when the power is gone, at night we blow them over pans of ice. Otherwise, it’s hard to sleep, considering the heat…and that oppressive air. We used to have a battery-powered TV set, but the world decided to go digital. I looked into a replacement, but they cost a fortune and only run about four hours before you have to recharge them…without power? I always wonder about yo-yo’s who come up with ideas like that.
Still, the radio stations do a good job, shifting from mindless music to a sort of storm community forum. You can’t see what’s happening…like on TV…unless you step outside for a second. Then you see more than enough, but sitting in the dark, breathing the heavy air, somehow it doesn’t feel so lonely with the radio streaming information through the wind and rain.
You begin to think about other people who won’t make it through so successfully, people who didn’t prepare well. They’re usually newbies, but after one storm they become veterans. I always tell new people to keep a pad and pencil handy during the misery and write down stuff they’d like to have but don’t. Next time, they can use it as a prep list.
We have packets of freeze-dried food, too, but we’ve never had to rely on them. If the lights stay out more than a day or two, something interesting happens. People start cooking up all the stuff they have in their freezers…and they share it. The lively smell of roast pork and chicken, ribs, shrimp jambalaya, even deer and and wild duck turn that dead, ugly air into something wonderful. Block parties develop, and caravans laden with goodies begin snaking their way to shelters.
You wander outside and conference with people you normally only chat with briefly. There’s always a go-getter in the group, someone who knows exactly who needs what, who has damage, who needs a tarp to cover a hole in his roof, and the neighborhood unites like a tiny village in the midst of uprooted trees, mountains of trash, storm debris, and distant sirens.
The greatest need is almost always water. Most of us fill our bath tubs and jerrycans and buy cases of it bottled, but inevitably, somebody hasn’t done anything. That’s partly why people buy so much before a storm hits…to share, to add to the growing aftermath larder. Pretty soon, somebody figures out a way to get a TV set working, somebody else comes up with a guitar or a French accordion, and the whole scene shifts magically from depressing to friendly…even festive.
Tribulation, particularly in the form of a hurricane, affirms something important…and quite beautiful. Humanity is good. Deep down in their cores, people are compassionate and anxious to help…noble, really. Hundred mile-per-hour winds do more than uproot trees, puncture roofs, and throw garbage everywhere. They strip away our masks…and blow the windows open in our souls.

Vermilion Bay

Last week I went to Cypremort Point. In English it would be Dead Cypress Point, but if you called it that, nobody would know what you were talking about. Basically, it’s an arrow-shaped spit of land separating Vermilion Bay from West Cote Blanche Bay, two large, open bodies of water sustaining millions of creatures…and for me, Vermilion Bay also holds memories, easily a million memories.

The water varies, depending on where you are. Brackish near the northern rim, it gets saltier as you push toward Southwest Pass’s narrow corridor. On the eastern side, access to the gulf is open and at least five miles wide. At its extreme southern margin, only Marsh Island stands between Vermilion Bay and the sullen, often angry waters of the gulf.

When I was a boy, I learned to water ski on that bay, and over the years I must have taken hundreds of fish from it, so bountiful we never worried about bringing food. We knew we could always catch something; we even had a choice. We could catch a few fish, cut them up and go crabbing…or we could eat the fish. We could even dig up oysters, but shrimp required a trawl, not my favorite way to get a meal.

I was always port control on the trawl, my brother usually starboard. Dad drove the boat, but he had the most annoying habit of “kicking the trawl”, as he called it. When we were hauling it in, unpredictably and usually at the worst possible moment, he would gun the engines, generally throwing us against the transom. I offered to swap places with him every time he did it…to show him what it felt like…but he always declined.

The air was alive with birds of every description, on shore, flying across bayous protesting our intrusion. I liked the egrets best, pure white and gliding only a few feet above the waves. The pelicans didn’t even deign to notice us. Pelicans are the diffident aristocrats among Louisiana shore birds.

Sometimes when we were on a two-day fishing trip, we slept at Marsh Island, sheltering in one of the bayous. I fondly remember shrimpers coming in for the night, anchoring, noisily lashing their boats together. Raucus laughter and some pretty funny jokes came sailing our way through the bird calls.

One time dad brought a friend of his with us. Fascinated, he watched and listened, finally telling me they were speaking Bulgarian, which he spoke fluently. He said he could understand them perfectly. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I spoke French, and I could understand them perfectly, too.

Like I said…so many memories, but now the oil has reached Marsh Island…and a couple of spots even farther west. Fresh water pouring in from the north may delay it, but I don’t think anything can stop it. The eastern channel is just too broad, and if a hurricane comes screaming in, people in Erath and Delcambre will find it in their streets. They always flood after bad storms coming up the bay.

Last week Vermilion Bay looked the way it always has…at first glance. The day was warm, but a breeze off the water made it comfortable. The blue sky reflected in the water was filled with puffy white clouds, but one thing struck me. There were no birds in the air…not one…kind of eerie that silence, those empty skies, like something horrible was waiting just a few miles from the serenity. The end was beginning…all around me…and I was saying goodbye to an old friend.

She sat dutifully, nestling her brood until dawn. Her mate had not returned. I wonder if she felt concern…maybe she only acted instictively. Her chicks open mouths, begging for food, were enough to prompt her to action. They had eaten only once yesterday, the first time her mate went out. Did she realize they were starving? Did she understand motherhood? Whatever the mechanism, she took to the air.
She probably didn’t fly far, only diving near the shore for a quick pouch of small fish, but after her chicks had eaten their modest breakfast, she probably went farther. I wonder whether she found the surface different that morning, whether she could smell danger below, whether she noticed anything strange about the water when she dove.
What did she feel when she surfaced and found herself unable to fly? Did she panic and furiously try again and again, or did she instantly begin to paddle toward a sandbar? She must have noticed how heavy she had become, how difficult it was to move, how unusually cold she was.
How long did it take her to reach higher ground? How many times did she stumble and fall, and how long did she sit there caked in sticky, brown oil? Did she realize she had failed her chicks, or was she so confused she simply sat there waiting for her strength to return, for things to magically get better? It must have seemed like evil magic to her, what had happened to the sea overnight. Magic was in the air. Why shouldn’t she rely on it?
Sitting on the sandbar shrouded in oil, was she being patient…or was she waiting for death? Did she even understand what death is? What did she think when the boat nosed up, when people got out and began walking to her? She must have felt panic, tumbling and trying to drag herself away. All wild creatures run from man.
Did she feel gratitude when they began washing her, or was she so overwhelmed she only sat and tolerated what they were doing? Did she realize they were trying to help her? Did she even notice how much warmer she felt…and could she feel her feathers becoming freer while they were being soaked and scrubbed? Could she even slightly understand cause and effect? Probably not, most likely she only felt fear.
When she joined her fellows in the shelter, did she recognize any of them? Do Brown Pelicans have friends? Did she feel comfort to be with her own kind again? That night, crowded with other rescued birds, did she sleep? Did she dream, or was she repeatedly awakened by thoughts of her brood, slowly dying one by one, alone and uncared for in that nest in the marsh? Did she remember them…or their pitiful cries? In the stillness of night, was she crying, too?

What happens to people when they get elected into our government? They leave home all sparkly new and hopeful, but it seems after only days in Washington, they wind up looking like bobble-head dolls. They can’t ALL be stupid, or spineless. I personally knew a guy who got elected to congress. For a while he did well, but far too quickly to me, he began to sound like the rest of them. Maybe something in all that marble is toxic to their brains.
They IMMEDIATELY forget simple basics, the things we peons rely on daily. Say for example, one day your toilet blows up like a bomb. You’d gasp and say, “What the hell happened?” but you’d call somebody who has a better handle on toilets than you…and sure as hell not the guy who put the toilet in. That’s just common sense, but there’s nothing COMMON about congress!
They’d appoint an “Exploding Toilets Comission”, study it, document it, and appear regularly on Nightline and Sunday shows to explain how they’re working on it. If they got stuck, the president would appoint a Toilet Czar. In the meantime, they’d tell you to wait for their conclusions. Hey, Guys, that’s all pretty and impressive, but MY TOILET BLEW UP! Find me somebody who can fix this…somebody who has NO RECORD of exploding toilets!
Asking the guy who put it in would be an invitation for him to hide whatever he did or did not do the first time. Hang dog and not too far from tears, he’d tell you, “I’m SO sorry! This was an aberration! NOTHING like this has ever happened before,” but you wouldn’t really be interested in his remorse. You’d want: 1. A better toilet that doesn’t explode, and 2. NO OTHER toilet to explode…ever…for the rest of time.
I bet by now you can see where this is going. Anyway, I was in danger of beating my metaphor to death. It’s not about exploding toilets. It’s about exploding OIL RIGS, and it’s not about feces flying everywhere. It’s about OIL spewing from the bottom of an ocean. Crap in our bathrooms is obnoxious but fairly easy to contain, but crap gushing into unspoiled waters, killing ecosystems and delicate wildlife, poisoning our future as completely as it poisons our air…that’s something else again.
I want to know why you government guys think BP can do a better job than Shell, or Exxon, or Holland, or Norway, or the people who work on those rigs, or ANYBODY ELSE. The people you relied on blew it…in more ways than one…let’s find somebody new.
Do everything you can, and if you can’t, GET OUT OF THE WAY! We haven’t seen anything worthy of a sticker so far. Give somebody else a chance, and PLEASE stop blocking people who might have a better idea, a clearer vision, or something other than protecting their next election in mind.
At first, I felt sorry for Tony Hayward, BP’s CEO. He wasn’t on that rig. He didn’t make the decisions dooming the gulf for generations. He was in an office in Britain…but he has to take the heat. I was on his side until I learned what he made last year. For $4.5 mil I bet a body can take a lot of torment…then retire to the Riviera…the nice, clear, pristine, unpolluted Riviera. Standing at the gulf shore these days, I envy him.
My advice to you guys in Washington is GO FIND GENERAL RUSSELL HONORE. If you want an ass kicked, he’s your man. You don’t need an oilman, you need somebody who’s proven he can cut through the crap…a retiree very unlike the retiree we have in charge right now.
You need a man who knows how to build a roadmap and stick to it. Along the gulf coast and in other countries, barges designed to help are sitting idle, while the man in charge dithers, like he’s having trouble even finding the exploded toilet. We need someone who can direct an organized, cohesive response, who isn’t as static as those unused barges…someone whose fire hasn’t fizzled out.
This is an extraordinary disaster. It BEGS for an extraordinary response. Figure out a way to put Honore in charge, do it, then go back to your offices, play with paper, and let him do his thing. We know he’s not an oil man or a sea man, but believe me, he’ll know how to find what he needs. Washington, you’ve already failed. Maybe this way you can turn things around and win your precious re-elections. If THAT thought doesn’t redirect your thinking, we really ARE done for!

I wish we could talk to trees. I bet they’d have interesting things to say…and most likely, unfavorable opinions of us. I put a character who could do that into Dawn on Earth, and he found a range of intellects, from wise to idiotic. Deep in my soul I know oaks are wise, but I’m beginning to think crepe myrtles are idiots. The only thing they do really well is survive. A man I knew had a little group of them in his back yard. He hated those trees, and one day he had them bulldozed into a shallow stream on the edge of his property. Three years later, he had a couple of hundred enthusiastically forming a border.

Our Idiotic Late-Blooming Crepe Myrtles

We have some large ones at the front of our yard near the street, but they’re peculiar. Our neighbor across the way has them, too, but his, like the rest of the neighborhood, bloom at least three weeks earlier than ours; actually, his azaleas do the same thing. I had some plant people come in for a look, but they had no idea what was going on either.
Finally, they decided it was the strain we had planted…but BOTH crepe myrtles and azaleas? Didn’t make sense to me, and every early summer our subdivision is a sea of red, white, and pink…except in our yard. About a month later, ours pop out, look around and seem to say, “Where is everybody?” I was all locked into light patterns and soil, even though the tree guys didn’t think much of my ideas. “You know, you could always take them out and plant new ones,” they said.
TAKE THEM OUT? Are you crazy? In hurricane season? They’re our first line of defense against a hard blow from the south! On other fronts we’re well protected, but facing south it’s only those trees, some bushes, and a particularly viscious holly hedge protecting a large window. They’re the only thing between us and flying shingles, limbs, and most importantly, trash can covers, which seem to delight in recreating the Roswell incident during a storm, clattering, crashing everywhere. Everybody I know takes theirs in…where the hell did THESE come from? They must be from newbies…or unusually good flyers from Abbeville, fifteen miles below.
Besides, I like those trees. I can’t even imagine killing them simply because they tend to dawdle. Everybody has peculiarities, and even though they don’t bloom well, it’s nice to have some green out there near the road. In Dawn on Earth, the world is uniformly yellow, brown, and dusty. I don’t want my front yard to become the fulfillment of my novel.
Out back, we’re protected by two massive, ancient live oaks. The only negative thing I can say about them is that in the spring they shower us with tons of fuzzy yellow stuff. They rest of the time they’re quite friendly…and majestic. Once a determined water oak decided to join them. I accidentally mowed it down a couple of times but it kept on coming back. I decided to let it live…since it wanted to so badly, but that was a big mistake.
In no time at all it was sixty feet high and I thought quite beautiful, but it was antisocial…a juvenile delinquent, stealing water from the other trees and plants in the yard and killing the grass. When the tree people told me they have very shallow root systems and are the first to go in a storm, our energetic tree’s fate was sealed. We chopped it down, corded it, stacked it, and used it for beautiful fires during the next few winters, leaving the live oaks to suck up all the water they wanted, and they thrived.

Our Wise Old Oaks

One night a dinner guest went outside to admire them and came back in all bubbly and impressed. “You should REGISTER those trees,” she gushed. I gotta admit, I wasn’t too up on registering trees. It turns out you actually can do that, but by doing so, you relinquish all say in what’s going to happen to YOUR trees in YOUR back yard. I wasn’t crazy about that, so our trees never joined the elite.
As a matter of fact, last year we had them trimmed…severely. The tree people said they would be more effective as a hurricane barrier if they were less bushy…and pose less of a threat to the house. The oaks didn’t seem to mind, and I know I sleep a lot better at night, particularly when there’s a tropical depression in the gulf or the Caribbean.
Sorry, water oak, you weren’t up to the job. You never learned the art of sharing, but we remember you fondly on cold, wet winter nights. You couldn’t let go of your self-determined sense of primacy or accept the idea of others in your world who were equally deserving. We humans learned that a long time ago, at least most of us. I guess I’m going to have to put you into the IDIOT category…like the crepe myrtles…and the azaleas…and maybe a few human beings.

My lady...in better days

Hi, Readers! I know I’ve been kind of dark and gloomy lately…maybe it’s from the fumes floating in on the night air. Indulge me a little; it HURTS to live down here just now. Actually, you guys are good therapy, and my lady has been very helpful, throwing me out of the room whenever she thinks dead dolphins might show up on TV. She knows how I feel about them, and I love her for caring that much, particularly since I know she’s crying inside, too.
By venting to you, I don’t have to pick a fight with my neighbors…or kick our cat. She’s a nice cat…and I know she wouldn’t understand. Hell, I don’t completely understand either. I promise you I’ll write something light, funny, and frothy pretty soon, but these days I’m in an opaque, black mood. Here goes.
There’s a veil between us and reality, a really thick veil, but it’s invisible. I first ran into it when I was tromping around in Central America photographing Mayan ruins. I like Mayan ruins; they’re beautiful, and Egypt was too far away and much too expensive. I was poor and did the best I could with what I had. Anyway, in the evening I watched the local and national news, just like I do at home, and I became interested in several continuing news stories and followed them night after night.
When I got home, I tried to find those stories, but they weren’t anywhere, like they had never happened. Some of them were pretty big things…but they were absent from our news coverage. I started watching Spanish channels, trying to find out what had happened, but it wasn’t there either. I had run head-on into the veil.
Roman emperors called it bread and circuses. Fill their essential needs, distract them, and you can keep them from noticing what’s really going on. It really rankles me. A pattern of deception and deceit created thousands of years ago is STILL operative…and successful today. Box ‘em in, feed ‘em, entertain ‘em, keep ‘em in the dark…My God, IT STILL WORKS…and they know it!
I don’t know about you people, but I’m getting tired of trying to see through that massive veil, tired of the endlessly inventive and colorful fantasies they’re feeding us. Personally, I’d like to go back to basics…you know, right and wrong, black and white, good and evil, but they don’t like that idea, even ridicule it when it pops up. They want everything to be a sea of gray…lifeless, unproductive, endlessly dissatisfying gray.
Blue is nice…like the sky, and I like green, too. It’s the color of life, but I know they’re going to force-feed us that gray glop until we choke, or go away, or die out. What do they want? They want us to stay where we are…while they stay where they are…it sounds like Caligula. Protests, uprisings, righteous anger, moral questions are messy…and not a little threating to veil weavers, but think about it, Guys. Caligula was nuts!
Whatever your background, wherever you live, you have a model. Jesus, the Prophet, the Buddha, Confucious, and thousands of other good and holy men and women have provided it…and now the weavers would like to silence them! But they can’t; words matter, and their concepts will always be with us, guiding us, helping us, leading us toward truth. I have to say…I have no idea what athiests look to…but I bet it’s more gray stuff, proving that athiests are boring, and pretty much irrelevant…at least, to me.
But I envy those who illuminated our lives for another reason. They trod uncontaminated soil, breathed unpolluted air, and ate pure and wholesome food. Being alive was good, and the Earth was a tender, loving, and respected mother. Most people can’t remember a time even close to that, but learning what’s been lost is not an impossibility. Actually, I think people ARE learning…maybe, slowly…and a little fearfully.
I touched on that in Dawn on Earth…you know, people getting pissed about having no say in what’s happening, but I didn’t explore the anger people feel when they discover truth is being hidden from them. It turns out that’s even more infuriating. I know it has ticked me off…ever since the Mayan pyramids.
Hey out there, self-appointed guardians of Earth’s culture, we’re onto you! I’m sure you know Lincoln’s all of the some of the, some of the all of the comment, but it’s time to add one more phrase: none of the none of the…and that group is growning. You could try to fight it, but you won’t. You can’t believe it’s actually happening…it’s been this way so long.
With the world drowning in pollution, our food lethal from time to time, our seas blanketed in sludge, our lives shrinking, and our hopes withering, I think we’re beginning to sense what our leaders and our media have tried so hard to hide from us. Light is peeking through…a little…at last. Veil weavers, you’re going to have to produce a thicker barrier. We can see through this one, but I bet you won’t be able to find enough thread. To tell you the truth, I think you’re done. Transparency…my ass!

My Louisiana

We’ve left too many places too many times. Kicked out of British Nova Scotia because we were French, wandering around for ages, aggregating in COMPLETELY unfamiliar territory, and surviving a civil war in which we had absolutely no bone to pick, we felt lost, homeless in a confusing world…until we discovered the wonder and bounty of the gulf just south of us. It wasn’t hard for our forebears to adjust. They were used to cooking lobsters; shrimp cook up just as well, and crawfish are really tiny lobsters. Louisiana felt homey to Cajuns like me.

We settled down to living off the land, enjoying life, and creating unique music and an unrivaled cuisine. We thought we had it made…until hurricanes started coming in. THEY were something new to us, but we adapted, changed the design of our homes to withstand them, and went back to crawfish etouffee, gumbo, and Zydeco.

We felt comfortable here and life was good. Even the storms helped us; after a really big one, the crabs and shrimp were even better. After the worst storm in anybody’s memory, Audrey, I understand the crabs were so fat we had a special name for them. We called them AUDREY CRABS, and they were delicious.

We knew one thing for sure…the gulf would always be there, and we would always be able to share in its bounty. We even built industries around sharing that bounty, but now it’s dying, drowning beneath masses of sticky orange goo…sometimes black goo.

But, I can tell you one thing….WE AIN’T LEAVING AGAIN! We’ve done that too often in the past, and we’re tired of it. We’ll figure out a way to scratch out a life down here…whatever happens, however disgusting BP makes the waters we love. I may relent and find a nice cabin in Arkansas for my lady, my dog, and me…mostly to give her a break from the oppressive depression settling here like an unwelcome fog. We’ll head up when the atmosphere gets unbearable and return after recharging, but we won’t stay away long. This is our home. We’ve earned it. We’re LOUISIANIANS…even the Texas girl. She just doesn’t realize it yet.

This year is predicted to be an unusually busy hurricane season. To a lot of us down here, it seems like storms are getting a lot worse, more frequent, and much more powerful. Of course, I attribute it to global warming because after all, HEAT is the engine driving those monsters. I used them to kill New Orleans, beautiful New Orleans, in Dawn on Earth, but I didn’t write the chapter about that city, destroyed and rotting, until Katrina hit.
That was a bad weekend for me, watching that wonderful city fall apart beneath waves of chemicals, storm surge, and human waste. My heart bottomed out when I went to Google maps and found my old apartment under eight feet of water…with debris slammed up against it. That place had been my haven. I can still smell the fruit, fresh from the docks on a horse drawn wagon parked at the corner of Claibourne and Nashville on Sunday mornings…only yards from my front door.
I also remember one night, walking with a friend fresh from Maryland. He took a deep breath and said, “Night-blooming Jasmine!” I only knew New Orleans smelled unusually sweet during the summer, except in the morning. In the early hours, New Orleans always smelled like coffee, rich, dark-roast, chickory coffee, and I miss those things. I loved that city, which felt more like it should have been in Europe than the United States…and I loved its spirit, its wonderful devil-may-care, often over-the-top spirit.
Once, I took a date to a dixieland jazz club. We had just been seated when a waiter came up and asked us to follow him. It turned out I had helped one of the world’s greatest jazz pianists one day, even though I hadn’t the remotest idea who she was when I did it. I was just trying to help a fellow human who seemed to need it. The waiter took us behind the bandstand to some comfortable, stuffed armchairs. He asked what we would like to drink. I don’t remember what my date wanted, but I asked for Scotch.
We sat and enjoyed the music. I didn’t really appreciate the love showering us that night…but I learned. From that day on, whenever I visited that club, I was shown backstage to my armchair, a glass of Scotch waiting for me. They never asked for a penny, and when I heard my friend playing Muskrat Ramble out there, I felt like it was for me. God, I loved those people!
Now, thanks to Katrina, they’re scattered all over the place…those who weren’t killed. Most of them will never make it back to that soggy jazz club…like me, and that’s the real tragedy, uprooting people, moving them from places they love to places they’ve never seen or wanted to go to. People can build a million spiffy new homes there, in thousands of new neighborhoods, but it won’t be the same. New Orleans has died…the real New Orleans, dirty petticoats, torn lace, drunken tourists, magnificent restaurants, lively people, wonderful music, and all. It’s gone.
We’ve got to get used to that…A LOT. There are going to be bigger, more horrible hurricanes, and with the gulf dying under a blanket of oil, a lot of places are going to follow the crescent city into oblivion, not just tiny fishing villages, but all the cities relying on seafood, or water sports, or fun, or beauty for its livelihood. Some say it will take hundreds of years for the gulf to recover. I think it will take at least that long for people to realize what they’ve lost.
It was good while it lasted. No…not good…it was SPECTACULAR…while it lasted. I pity all those people who never saw life down here before it started to fall apart…as it was, as it wanted to be, as it should have been forever…but I have pictures in my mind…no, not pictures. It’s more than that. I can still feel the evening breeze off Lake Ponchatrain, still smell the jasmine at night and coffee in the morning, still find myself in that chair listening to the best jazz anyone has ever heard. I have memories, but that’s all. The rest has vanished like a forgotten dream.

When I wrote Dawn on Earth, I set it comfortably in the future and saw it as both a precautionary tale and a prediction, with the world in shambles and life returning to a subsistent level last seen during the eighteen hundreds. Still, in my book the seas were beautifully pristine, though gigantic. I based our disintegration on global warming, which is still operative, but this oil spill will give it impetus I hadn’t even remotely considered.
The latest projections have oil swirling around Florida and up along the Atlantic seaboard, essentially killing all sea-based industry for our southern and eastern coasts. THAT’S A BIG HIT…from an economic point of view, not to mention the loss of countless species and endless beauty. The only good news is that we won’t have to drill for oil. We can go to the beach and scoop it up in buckets.
We’re heavily in debt, mostly to China. If we utterly failed economically, there’s a fairly good chance China would follow us pretty quickly. Two of the biggest dominoes will fall, taking a lot of other smaller dominoes with us. Europe will be safe…for a while, but those projections have oil visiting them, too. It’s a potential world killer…and all spewing out of a little six inch pipe.
I tend to focus…very sadly…on the loss of beauty and wonder, the undeserved deaths of all those pitiful creatures, even the eradication of whole species, but it turns out those are only dominoes, too, part of an inevitable world-wide disaster…which is growing as I type. When the air stinks and the oceans are brownish-orange and our beaches are only graveyards for millions of animals, we’ll ALL mourn like Louisiana is doing right now. We just got a head start.
My book had aliens, too, but you’re right…that’s a way out on the edge, over-the-top kind of concern. We have a much more immediate one washing up onto our shores this very minute. When it’s finally all done, I can’t help wondering what poets will sing about, what children with grey, lifeless eyes will hope for, what adults old enough to remember will mourn for.
I can picture a family sitting in a dirty hovel, the children gathered at their grandfather’s feet as he begins. “Once upon a time long, long ago, the oceans were blue, the air sweet and pure, the skies filled with birds, and the waters bountiful with all kinds of fish and other wonderful creatures…”