Voyage to an Oil Catastrophe

Voyage to an Oil Catastrophe

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world. H.D. Thoreau from the essay, Walking.

"It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.- Ralph Waldo Emerson on his friend Henry David Thoreau.

Walking is like writing in that each is a narrative, a collection of images one notices or is sometimes impaled upon. Walking, say, from one end of the airline terminal to the other entails countless decisions, small and barely conscious left and right turns, people we look at or choose not to, the way a thought influences the hunch of our shoulder or whether we are able to smile when asked for our photo I.D. The narrative of that walk is a never to be repeated and soon to be forgotten memory of it, though not memory as something vanished we might later recall, but the lingering, intangible atmosphere of it, how it felt to us and - a question we seldom ask! - how we felt to it.

Space and its atmosphere, its living flavor that we co-create with it, is what we walk though. Writing is the reconstruction of images and atmosphere, a selective process, a subjective chaos given an identity the writer discovers through writing. Thus walking and writing are practice.

After I fetched my suitcase from baggage claim, I exited Chicago's Midway International airport through a corridor that took me past a series of photographs taken by telescopes, some earthbound, others in orbit, such as the Hubbel. The photos were all compelling but none more so than the picture of our earth, with the Gulf of Mexico vividly in view and free of clouds. I was going there, to "witness the oil spill" to be in a place where the consciousness of many of us has become impaled, the oil spill a blunt reality and symbolic spear penetrating many issues and conflicts.

Even though I am traveling by bus, airplane, taxi and subway, I am still walking to New Orleans. That is the way I am experiencing it, that is the narrative I am choosing to live and write about.

After three days of being in New Orleans, I am finally writing about it. I have passed through the membrane of arriving as pure neophyte, a man who'd never set foot in the Deep South, and now know the look of Bourbon Street and Lake Pontchartrain. Names that entered me in the years since Katrina have now become tangible, such as the Ninth Ward, which I walked through yesterday in blazing heat to discover odd juxtapositions of the derelict and gentrified. Some houses boarded and rotting from the inside out, others seamlessly puttied and coated in glowing Sherman Williams latex paint. I stopped to film two young people on the porch of their house, white, tattooed, with a flask in a brown bag they were sharing; the young woman from California with the look a a runaway and the young man a native with a dog named Grimace. The man had grown up in New Orleans and agreed with me that everything here was beautiful, from this semi-wasted Ward to all the other concentric rings of the city.

I stopped at another porch, five young black women (though one was a grandmother) and a couple of under four-year-olds. The accepted me with the same good-humored tolerance that people in Cambodia would; some fool with a camera and an indeterminate purpose. I began the interview and, like a fool, later realized I hadn't pressed the video record button. I lost a thirty second statement by an eighteen year-old named Jasmine who, when I asked how it has been since Katrina, replied with a heart-breaking simple, gentle, plaintive candor, "It's been real hard and it's still real sad so many are gone." I asked her about the "so many" and in her case both her cat and grandmother were drowned in the flooding. Plus the rents are going up and the water around and under them seems poisoned.

In the membrane between neophyte and experience ("neophyte" also means an adult convert to Christianity; I have converted to falling in love with New Orleans) I am often in bewilderment, often hot and lonely, penetrated by an emerging but still confused sense of why I came here and for what purpose. I could have learned as much or more about the oil spill simply by staying at home and researching the Internet. In general, people here know only a little bit more than the rest of us, it is still abstract, tangible only through newspapers and television. The oil spill is moving closer and has now made contact with the shores of Louisiana. Fishermen are already effected, restaurant workers know they soon will be. I sense that whatever I "learn" or "experience" will be secondary to a feeling that is already upon me, that I have moved closer into the global calamity.

. . .

Perhaps what I can say that after a week in New Orleans is I feel better equipped to understand things I've sought or been committed to for most of my life. I arrived in Louis Armstrong International Airport without a telephone number, without a map, without having investigated websites about the oil catastrophe, without having read a history of New Orleans and without even booking a hotel. I arrived without an education but determined to decrease my ignorance. The expertise I gained was only in the experience that unfolded before me, hour by hour and day by day. Everything significant and that seemed to pertain to the oil catastrophe (my expressed purpose) seemed to happen by accident, through double-take or an unexpected glance into the rear-view mirror.

I also tried to take the view (as a practice) that everyone I met, every opinion I encountered, was a part of me. And that I was complicit in everything. I've long been influenced by similar statements of two Buddhist teachers. Thich Nhat Hanh argued that he could easily have been a Thai sea pirate (who stole from, raped and often killed the "boat people" fleeing Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975) if he had been born into circumstances that gave rise to piratetry. Pema Chödrön once asked her audience if there was a parent among them, including herself, who could not understand a child abuser because what parent had never lost their temper, had never shook their child, had never inflicted some degree of emotional or physical violence upon their son or daughter?

On a journey to actually see the oil that had just made contact with shore, I bought a map, rented a car and drove to a town that more than one local referred to as "the end of the world," Venice, a dot on the map at the south end of Hwy 23, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. All the ABC and CNN and other news crews had already been there, but I didn't see a trace of them in the brief time I spent. What I saw was a restaurant with a Harley parked in front, a couple of motels and a tangle of piers, harbors and construction cranes with lots of sheriff patrol cars parked about. The gravel road I followed eventually led to a fence, a keep out sign and a large hanger with the name Hallliburtan on the side.

Like the returning bodies of solders killed in Iraq that photographers were denied access to until recently, I seemed to be in the symbolic tableau most of our citizens find themselves in. If we think of our country and the global economy as a "family system" there are, naturally, many things the more privileged children should not be allowed to see. Combat, factory conditions in Juarez and oil coating the white sands of the Louisiana shore must be as off limits. This impression was amplified later in the day when I stopped to film an oil refinery along the side of Hwy 23. A Sheriff pulled up, questioned me and announced he "had to report me to the FBI." I had ostensibly broken no law, but in the post 9/11 Patriot Act era an oil refinery is a "potential terrorist target" that obliged the Sheriff to conflate my legal act into an interrogation and a final stern warning that he "never wanted to see me on this road again."

. . .

News reports speak about the "crystal blue waters" of the gulf, as if the spill is is a toxin entirely new to an otherwise unspoiled area, yet scientific studies have long-cited the Mississippi River coast as "the single dirtiest, most imperiled coastal ecosystem on earth." It's not that the river itself is so highly polluted, but it provides continuous flows of nitrogen and phosphorus into the ocean, the vast runoff of chemical fertilizers from American farms which promote algae growth and so greatly decrease the oxygen content of the water that large "dead zone" had been created, no longer able to support marine life. To acknowledge this is in no way to discount the sweeping destruction of the oil spill but to acknowledge the insidious degradation that continuously goes on below the waters surface, often belied by a surface that may still look "crystal blue."

Scott Nixon (University of Rhode Island, USA) explained that this process, known as eutrophication, is not a recent phenomenon, but one that first appeared with the spread of urban sewage networks in the second half of the nineteenth century and has been accelerating sharply since 1970. According to Nixon, “we are seeing a clear global increase in the incidence of hypoxia in coastal ecosystems,” a phenomenon whereby the oxygen concentration in water drops so far that it causes catastrophic mortality among marine organisms. Prof. Nixon went on to add that “there is a relationship between the health damage done by the excessive consumption of meat in developed societies and the health damage done to coastal ecosystems by the massive nitrogen emissions associated with meat production.”- Science Daily

Shortly into the eighty-mile drive from Venice back to New Orleans I stopped, somewhat uncertainly, at a restaurant named Kristy's, which consisted of a double-wide mobile home with a single automobile parked in front. Here I spent one of the most remarkable hours of my trip (if not my life) in the company of three oil rig workers and the sole cook and waitress of Kristy's, its proprietress, a black grandmother who called herself "T." T took my order and later talked to me at length with a head-on wit, so gracious, guileless and shrewd that I felt I'd encountered a new and more exhilarating form of love, fast food style (though her fried-food took twenty minutes to prepare). We talked about catfish, her nine grandchildren, the poverty of the region, and her hat, a headpiece to keep her hair out of the food that I found attractive and even elegant but that T claimed made her look like Aunt Jemima - which became the cause of much laughter and the reason she steadfastly refused to let me take her photograph. T agreed with me wholeheartedly when I told her she was lucky to have given love to so many people and had so many people who loved her.

. . .

Three weeks ago I decided to spend a week in New Orleans, traveling there after a wedding I was invited to attend in Chicago, and before visiting my son in Portland, Oregon, where I am now. Now I am standing in my son's bathroom (he is still asleep, this is where I can work without disturbing him) before my computer and a large, toothpaste splattered mirror. Now I am left facing myself in the mirror, as one always, so to speak, is.

Thanks to a comment a reader made, I have changed my usage from oil "spill" to oil catastrophe; a word defined as "an extremely large-scale disaster, a horrible event." I went to New Orleans to "investigate" the catastrophe and now I am looking over the photographs, video footage and notes I took in to order assimilate, along with my memories, what I have learned. My body feels distinctly different after the trip. Of course I have aged and of course impermanence is the rule, but a more telling reflection says I have encountered something both symbolically and viscerally potent (like meeting a teacher?) and it is my duty to unfold the symbols and treasure the viscera, to let none of this drop from my hands.

In sacrifice, the viscera or organs of the slain animal were part of the augury priests were compelled to divine. New Orleans has suffered a double catastrophe, a "natural" one in the form of Katrina and a "man made" one in the form of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Besides 9/11, there are not too many examples of a post WWII American City being devastated by an event. Perhaps ideally a disaster is supposed to decrease hubris and increase sympathy or love. Collectively it may be hard to claim that America is a less proud and more loving country since 9/11, but when I visited New York City earlier this year I was struck again and again by a kind of exuberant courtesy, an enthusiastically choreographed helpfulness that I encountered from subway attendants to just about anyone I asked anything of on the street.

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