Posts Tagged ‘Cajuns’

Going, going...gone

I hadn’t planned another post quite this soon, but events compelled me. I live in Louisiana…most of you know that, and right now, gooey, nasty, toxic oil is slowly oozing ashore, destroying our wetlands, our hopes, our lives, and beauty nobody has a right to threaten.
We’ll survive; we’re tough, but I can’t help worrying about all those other weaker, infinitely more delicate non-human citizens in our world down here, not because they’re pretty or economically valuable or tasty, but because they’re part of our lives…and we love them. They provide joy, beauty, and happiness…and they’ve done nothing to deserve this. We Cajuns live close to the Earth, and we weep when harm is done…not just to us, but to our world, a world we feel anybody in his right mind should appreciate.
I know to a lot of you Louisiana means New Orleans, good food, an easy drunk, and Mardi Gras beads, but I feel sorry for you. You’ve missed the real Louisiana, the truth hiding where salt water flowing up from the gulf meets brackish water from bayous and marshes, miles of indescribable beauty…and magic.
It’s really our state’s beating heart, sensitive and vulnerable, and oil and goo are mercilessly eradicating it. You have only to watch fish gasping on the surface, a muskrat dying while it licks its toxic fur, or a desperate bird swimming to you begging for help to understand how intimate and personal this tragedy really is.
I watched a TV spot last night. A gannet covered with oil swam to a fishing boat seeking refuge, pleading to get aboard. Of course, the fishermen rescued it and took it to the wildlife people for cleaning and decontamination…but A GANNET? They hate human beings, fly away when we are anywhere nearby, but this one didn’t. It couldn’t.
Abandoning its prejudices, maybe its experience, knowing it was in mortal danger, it swam into the hands of the enemy…any port in a storm. It had run out of options in this new, unfamiliar world and chose hope, heedless of the fact that hope might contain more pain or even death. All across our shores creatures are seeking help and sanctuary like that gannet, but most of them aren’t finding it. They’re dying in masses of oily, orange muck. It’s heartbreaking.
I’ve seen the gulf go from enchanting and pristine to disgusting in only a few years. I remember going with my father and brother to the mouth of Southwest Pass outside Vermilion Bay where oyster beds lay just below the surface. Right there in the boat we shucked and ate them, our only condiment the sweet, salty water of the gulf. With the sea breeze at our backs, it was wonderful, but if you did that today, you’d probably get some sort of life-threatening disease.
After those beautiful days, viruses found their way into the oyster beds, and NOBODY’s been brave enough to do that again. Now we have toxic oil to drive the last nail home. Soon, those oysters will be dead, like the dolphins, the birds, the fish, and all the creepie-crawlies we never liked but didn’t know we really needed. Why does everybody want to kill the gulf? Maybe they don’t want to kill it…maybe they just don’t care.
I can picture myself wading in the surf outside Marsh Island, Grand Isle, or Isle Derniere and being hit by a blast of sea breeze laced with suffocating fumes. Even the air is part of our new world in which corporate greed trumps beauty, and hope, and culinary skill, and the essential goodness and wonder of the natural world. Of course, the plankton will die, then the small fish that eat it, then bigger fish, and ultimately marine mammals. They’re all interconnected. Anybody fancy a plate of sea worms? Like cockroaches, worms are survivors. That’s about all we’ll find after this…mud, worms, and dead water.
I think I feel worst about what’s going to happen to the dolphins. They’re SMART, but they’ll have no idea what’s happening. Dolphins live in the now. They don’t really understand consequences; they’re all about fun…relentlessly. I don’t know how many of you have actually seen dolphins in their natural habitat, but you should know they’re joyful, playful, happy creatures…more like children, really. And like children, their deaths are particularly painful. I don’t want to go out there and see their carcasses washing up on shore. They’re my friends; it would be too painful.
Nature is slow and deliberate. It takes millenia to create an ocean ecosystem, and oceans recover at the same pace…over other millenia. Man isn’t like that; he wants things done FAST, and like progress, damage can be fast, too, sometimes overwhelmingly fast, like the oil slick. Our government dutifully exresses concern in photo-op moments, but while they’re posturing, our world is slowly fading through gray to black…and we’re mourning.
You’ll eventually feel it too, wherever you are, but in a different way. When one single oyster costs you $15.00, you’ll wince, but you’ll probably arrange to get them from China or somewhere else and never really understand. It’s not about money; it’s about our failure to be good stewards.
When I wrote Dawn on Earth, I set it a hundred years in the future because I thought it would take that long for our world to disintegrate. I was wrong. Pretty soon, the waters will begin to climb…nobody’s really worried about that, either…and we’ll have to move to Arkansas or other points north while the place we love, the place we were born, our home slowly slips below waves of emulsified oil and dead shore and sea creatures.
You may not understand right away, but you will…in time. You can’t destroy beauty, hope, and love without destroying a part of yourself.