The Tarball Chronicles. David Gessner

in front of him, a group that includes Brian, the Cousteau team cameraman, who is in turn filming the cameraman from the NBC Nightly News with the fancy accent, who is in turn filming the Ocean Doctor, who is holding out a microphone and recording (for his radio show) what Ryan, the only local, is saying. Then, what the hell, just to add another Russian-nesting-doll layer to the whole thing, I take out my microcassette tape recorder and speak the words you are now reading.

      My head is spinning—this is what we’ve come to, the crazy self-consciousness of so many recorders, including myself. Enough, says a voice in my brain. I decide I need a little break, and veer off from the line of recorders and yell a too-quiet good-bye. I hike off to the east, cutting across the hump of the island. Once I can no longer see the rest of the group I pull out a beer from my pack. It’s warm but I drink it quickly anyway, trying to smash the hall of mirrors in my brain. I am Bruce Lee at the end of Enter the Dragon.

      It is important for me to be honest about my motives. The Vessels of Opportunity captains aren’t the only ones who see potential gain in disaster. Writers and reporters and filmmakers are washing up on these shores like so many tarballs. This, after all, is a big story, and these days our storytellers migrate immediately toward any story deemed big. I am part of that national migration, and I make no claims to be above the baser motives that drive such a movement. But while I want to be honest, I don’t want to denigrate my motives. It is easy to take a single swipe and say that the media is bad and superficial, and that all storytellers are just in it for their own sake. Accepting the fact that self-interest drives us all does not necessarily mean racing toward bleak conclusions. To try to make a narrative out of a thing is not an entirely dishonorable endeavor.

      One thing I do know: down here the stories gush like oil. By the time I arrived in Louisiana, I thought I had seen enough already, and in fact considered the possibility that I didn’t even have to visit Louisiana to be able to tell the story of the Gulf. I was dead wrong. With apologies to Florida and Alabama, this place is so terrifically strange that it makes me want to cry and laugh, usually both within every ten minutes or so. Never before have I experienced so intensely the disparity between hearing a story on the ground, from the people it is happening to, and the way it is told to the country. Never before have I been so deeply a part of the sheer Lewis Carroll strangeness of the modern storytelling machine.

      I continue hiking up the beach, which I soon discover is full of small, orange, oil-covered rocks, perhaps toxic but also flat and good for skipping. The tar is thick here and I pick up a handful of clams and find that they are covered in the same orange goo. We are really out on the edge of it now, beyond the millions of acres of wetlands, facing the Gulf, the oil, and the rig. Despite all the self-consciousness swirling nearby, it only takes about a minute or two of strolling along the water for that good beach-walking feeling to come over me. I leave my sneakers above the wrack line and start swinging my arms. This island is a lot like Masonboro, the undeveloped barrier island I often kayak to near my home in North Carolina. Both will be underwater soon, if the scientists are right, but for the moment I’m not interested in thoughts of doom. I’m interested in the heat rising off the sand and the swaying grasses and the hundreds of terns. I stare toward the east, where thunderclouds are building, the usual dark afternoon gathering.

      What is real? What is authentic? What stories do we choose to tell? Is it all contrived, with so many of us on this planet pointing cameras at the rest of us? In an age where everything is recorded, how do we wedge downward and find the story we consider true? We, or at least I, need to break away from it all every now and then, but even those breakaways are often later transmuted into stories.

      When I curl around the island’s bend and can no longer see the others, I feel the old excitement of solitary freedom. I reach some marsh muck where fiddler crabs seethe along the sand, the whole place breathing. The crabs scurry down into their now oily holes, holes that aerate the sands, which in turn encourage plants to grow. Hundreds of these creatures, thousands perhaps, run from me, a giant in their midst. The land hisses with them.

      I am briefly free of other people, or partly free, and exhilarated for it, until two sights lasso me back to community and narrative. First is some tampon-boom tossed up onshore, coiled there like a python. My exhilaration is immediately dampened: there is no breaking away from what’s going on here. The second sight is more dramatic: a dead pelican sprawled on the shore. Its face is buried in the sand, its wings spread like a pterodactyl, posing in death like an emblem on a flag.