“Kevin Costner just met with the BP bigwigs over in Port Fourchon,” the pilot says. “He’s got a ship that separates oil and water that his company developed. It’s going on the water today.”
Which of course makes sense, since the sinking land and rising water below are essentially Waterworld. I find myself smiling despite the grimness. It’s a common condition down here. If you are in the business of collecting small ironic tidbits then this is the right place for you. Take the fact that the day the rig toppled into the sea, two days after the explosions, was April 22, or as it is also known, Earth Day. 12 Or try this one on for size: President Obama announced that he was opening up more United States waters to offshore drilling, a decision that would benefit BP first and foremost, twenty days before Deepwater blew.13
The president let the press know this on March 31 but he missed a golden opportunity.14 Had he only waited several more hours, he could have made his announcement on April Fools’ Day.
THE CASE AGAINST STRAIGHT LINES
When we get back to the lodge I want nothing more than a nap. This will not be happening. The lodge hums, a nest of activity. The Ocean Doctor, aka David Guggenheim, has arrived. David is a scientist and radio personality who has traveled the world reporting on the state of the coasts, and today he is joined by an NBC Nightly News cameraman who circles him like a pilot fish. The cameraman, fresh off of a stint in Baghdad, another war-torn region, is South African and his words sound thick and garbled. (“He has a funny accent,” Ryan says in full-on Creole singsong.) Guggenheim’s brother, Alan, has also come along and we say hello as Holly and Ryan try to organize the afternoon’s expedition.
In the midst of the chaos I get a phone call. At the end of my trip out on the water with Captain Sal, we came upon a row of fish camps. Through the rain I stared out at the dilapidated shacks that lined the canal about a mile from the marina. They appeared fragile, permeable even, built as they were on a watery foundation. They were unabashedly ramshackle, pieces of plywood nailed here, a screen door thrown up there, rickety docks jutting out like the tray on a toddler’s high chair. I decided I needed to find a way to spend a night out in one of them. They reminded me of other modest coastal dwellings I had known, and they were right out on the frontlines of the oil. I ended up talking with a woman named Leona, who ran the Myrtle Grove Marina store. She told me to call Anthony, a sixteen-year-old local kid who liked to hang out at the marina and whose parents owned one of the fish camps. I got his outgoing message, a loud and blaring country song, and wasn’t sure I’d gotten through.
“Hallo,” he says now. “Are you the guy who wants to go out to camp?”
I am, I tell him, and he says that he could maybe get me out there tonight. I explain that I will already be out on the water for most of the afternoon and am not exactly sure when I’ll get back.
“That’s okay,” he says in a rushed musical mumble. “I’ll get the place ready. I don’t mind waiting.”
I hang up and within minutes we are driving two cars and towing two boats across the road to the local boat launch, not three hundred yards from the lodge. The plan is to head out on the Gulf in the Cousteau pontoon boat and Ryan’s single-console fishing boat. Brian and Nathan take the pontoon boat, a Zodiac VI, while I climb into Ryan’s boat with the Ocean Doctor, his brother, the cameraman, and, of course, Ryan at the helm. Soon we are racing across Barataria Bay, wind and spray in our faces, and it strikes me how strange it is to be traveling through the very same waters I was just staring down at from a half mile above. Meanwhile the Ocean Doctor is interviewing Ryan, and the cameraman is bouncing on the bow, trying to get good shots of both men.
“Look at my GPS,” Ryan says. “It still shows this as land. Not long ago this was 6.3 miles of solid grass. Now I can point my boat right over those 6.3 miles and never see a blade.”
Ryan pulls up to a spot where wooden posts thrust up through the water. Dozens of huge black and white Frigatebirds, the same type of birds I saw from above this morning, lift off. I have never seen this many Frigatebirds outside of Central America. They rise from the posts in slow motion, beautiful and gawkily elegant, as Ryan cuts the boat’s engine.
As we drift, he explains that the posts are not just a perch for birds, but also a kind of grave marker for an old bayou camp.
“Locals would come here—right here—and fish and trap and hunt and have fish boils and crab boils and shrimp boils and they would walk out their back door and hunt ducks. And now look—there’s not a blade of grass for miles.”
It’s true; we might as well be in the middle of a lake. In every direction we can see places where land used to be and where we now see only clouds reflected in the water. In the distance small strands of marsh islands barely keep their heads above the tide, just the hair of their grasses showing. In spots we passed earlier you could see dead trees going under.
“This is not something that is happening over centuries,” Ryan says. “Just a few years ago I could look as far as I could see and there was grass. Now it’s all underwater. Whatever the reason—sea level rise from warming, the land sinking due in part to oil extraction—it really doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s happening.”
I knew the seas were rising, of course, but before I came to Louisiana I didn’t know that the seafloor was sinking through a process called subsidence. Over the centuries, sediment dumped by the Mississippi has weighed down the Gulf floor, causing it to literally sink. And as the land sinks and waters rise, saltwater invades the marsh, killing cypresses and other plants that help stitch the wetlands together. Louisiana’s erosion rate is the worst in the country and the equivalent of sixty football fields of wetlands are lost every single day. Which means that if you stand in one place long enough, it might just turn from land to water.15
Among the things killing the wetlands are straight lines. Nature, of course, isn’t very fond of straight lines, and for centuries creeks wound sinuously through this area. But humans long ago decided that winding was not a good way to travel. They dredged straight canals to replace the creeks without considering the consequences. Straight lines are also required for the ten thousand miles or so of pipeline that travels through the wetlands, carrying oil from the offshore rigs to shore, unintentionally ushering saltwater deeper into the marsh.16
This morning, looking down from the copter, I could see how these straight lines crosscut the marsh, and I could also see the rectangular holes of water where oil rigs used to be. The juxtaposition of wild marsh and planned grid made me think back to being a kid at the beach. I loved playing on the small sandbar islands that revealed themselves at low tide: when the tide started to come back in, I would aid the rising waters by digging lines across the sandbars with my heel, creating canals for the incoming tide to run through. I would dig a dozen of these lines across the sandbar islands, flooding them before their time. The same thing is going on here on an enormous scale.
Ryan has stopped the boat for a reason. Though two of us aboard are professors who lecture for a living, we will learn now that we’ve got nothing on the boat’s captain. Ryan, it turns out, is not just a man with energy and passion. He is also a man with a cause.
As we bob on the water Ryan talks movingly about the loss of people’s livelihoods, the loss of animal habitat, the loss of human culture that has accompanied the disappearance of the marshes that made this one of the most biologically productive estuaries in the world. The barrier islands and outer marshes have always been the frontline of defense against hurricanes, and now they are the frontline against the oil, too, keeping it from working its way into the heart of the wetlands. A second defense, Ryan explains, is the Mississippi River itself, which had done more than its part to keep