Where My Soul Lived
On Easter Sunday 2011
at a crawfish boil at Seaside, Florida
a man with a clipboard
makes his way along the sand
stopping to talk to each group,
mostly condo renting tourists.
As he nears I can hear him:
Have you been here before?
Is the beach clean?
Do you see oil?
Do you see changes?
Do you think we’re doing a good job?
So I sit in my chair waiting my turn.
He arrives in front of me
all tan, clean golf shirt,
khaki and a smile
to make an orthodontist proud.
He asks
Will you take part in a survey?
I smile back at him and
tell him I will be happy to.
He wants to know where I am from.
I point southwest
out over the water.
I was born on Galveston, Texas.
I point southeast
out over the water.
I live near Clearwater.
I look him in the eye.
I point straight west.
Half my DNA is from about a hundred miles
north northwest of Deep Water Horizon.
He pauses,
the smile leaving his eyes,
becoming fixed on his mouth.
He takes a careful breath.
Have you been here before?
Why yes, I have.
Three or four times a year
since 1981, 30 years come May.
He exhales a held breath
and marks a box on his
page about me.
Is the beach clean?
Pristine, I tell him.
the sand is white as sugar
and twice as fine.
But…
He raises his eyebrows.
But?
Where are the fiddler crabs?
You know, those cute little grey beige crabs
running out of the little burrow holes
they dug ceaselessly,
where they lived.
They run out, grab a bit of rot
and then run back in.
There used to be thousands on this stretch alone.
He looks at me.
Where are the sand pipers?
The little birds running
the tideline in flocks
eating bits and
never getting their feet wet
by an incoming wave?
He wrinkles his brow,
pen hovering over
the next set of check boxes
on the page.
Is the water clean?
Crystal clear, I tell him.
But where are the blue crabs
walking on the bottom?
Where are the black and orange starfish?
Where are the swirling masses of minnows?
They used to look like
dark tornadoes.
Where are the bigger fish
that make the children
and the northerners scream
when they swim passed,
brushing legs?
He wrinkles his brow again
now frowning at
the sanctioned answer boxes.
The margins are filling with
my unsanctioned answers.
He takes another breath
and tries another smile.
Have you seen any oil?
No, I have not,
but look.
I rise and walk down to the wet,
motioning for him to follow.
I scoop up
a double handful
of sand and water.
Where are the mussels?
The little bivalves in all the colors of the rainbow,
always wriggling back under the sand
as a wave recedes.
They eat microscopic pieces
of tide bourn food.
I look at him.
Did you know we can eat them, too?
Not just the birds?
He shakes his head slowly.
I nod.
Gather enough, boil briefly in sea water.
Like clams, only tiny, so it takes
a while to gather enough for a meal.
I drop the sand at my feet
and rinse my hands in the toe deep water.
I ruffle the tideline with my big toe.
Shelling is good this year,
No need to leave them in the yard
for the ants to clean.
Everything is already
dead and empty.
I meet his sunglass covered eyes
and watch him try
to hold a neutral expression.
But the beach and the water are clean?
Spotless.
Thanks to the chemical dispersant
ya’ll sprayed on the slick
before it reached here.
Never mind it’s more deadly than the oil.
Oil floats. It lands. It’s a mess.
Oh yes, I remember the Galveston spill
(probably before you were born).
Globs and chunks, so dirty and ugly
it wrecked the beach that year
and tar balls still stain your feet
even now.
Dead birds, dead fish,
whatever once lived along that stretch.
Expensive clean up.
A PR nightmare.
But it was a small spill
but today’s standards.
It healed.
I look out at the water and back at him.
Game fishing is great this year,
but weird,
the big game fish are coming right into the warm shallow bay
like they never did before.
You can catch a big cobia
on a hot dog chunk!
You see,
they are hungry.
Last year’s dispersant
killed this years food.
He stares at me,
his clipboard at his side.
It left a cloud on the bottom
instead of globs on top,
hundreds of feet deep
and hundreds of miles long
where the larvae live.
Write that down.
Write. That. Down.
He does.
Yes, you kept the beaches clean.
Yes, you will pay out
far less
to the hotels and restaurants,
the tshirt shops and tiki huts,
the businesses that suffered
“economic loss”
and all the people who worked for them.
And you can show pretty pictures of
white sand, sterile and barren,
and clean water, turquoise and jade,
instead of the mess.
I point again.
Write!
He does,
and looks back up
at me and my friend,
two crazy old beach ladies
drinking illegal beers
out of Starbucks thermal mugs.
I smile at him.
This is not what you wanted to hear, is it?
No, no, he waves my words away.
We want to hear it all.
You live near here? What did you do Before?
Walking the beach was not what
an MBA did
before The Crash.
This is so obviously
one of those BP
promised jobs.
Freeport, he says
and I don’t remember which
economy tanked job he had.
I have held him here 20 minutes now.
I know by the way he looks at his watch
and then down the beach
that he is being paid by the page.
I’m sorry to keep you,
but one more thing.
Smell that?
He sniffs. Smell what?
Exactly.
Where is the sea smell?
That slightly fishy organic soup
carried on the Gulf breeze?
The scent of the creatures
that live in and off of it.
Gone.
Gone.
Write that down, too.
He does.
Ok, I’m done.
Be on your way.
I extend my hand to shake his
and thank him for his patience
and wish him luck.
He tucks the clipboard under his arm
and takes my hand.
One more thing.
A pained look crosses his face.
Will you be back next year?
He looks down the beach.
I don’t know.
He waves and walks to the next group
of condo renting tourists.
I turn to my friend
and the tears start to fall.
I lay my face in her neck
dropping tears down her back
while breathing the
salt perfume tobacco sunscreen
scent of her.
*******
A year has passed.
Eight months since
my friend died
and I have finally arrived
at that place in mourning
where I can leave the house without a chore.
Sunscreen, cooler, Starbucks mug, chair.
I head to the big water
where my soul used to live.
Not the groomed tourist beach,
the local fishing spot on the causeway
where the locals and the poor people go.
So here I sit
wielding the word net
her ghost gave me.
I wait for the fiddler crabs,
but they don’t live here anymore.
I wait for the sandpipers,
but they are gone, too.
One species of gull instead of five.
No pelicans at all.
The rocks are covered with silt
instead of seagrass,
which is washing up dead, broken and decaying
on the tideline.
No mussels
Not even any shells this year.
I watch a speckled bird walking,
turning over rock after rock after rock
looking for what doesn’t live under them anymore.
I look across the blue and green span
of Hurricane Pass at the Clearwater Beach high rise hotels
in the distance
with their clean white sand and blue umbrellas
and spring break families braving
the still cold but sparkling clean water
with no scent,
serving shrimp from Thailand in their restaurants.
I watch the people come here to fish
one of the best spots
in the county,
only to give up and leave.
I watch 3 different men
cast nets for bait,
come up empty and leave.
I sit at the no wake border
and watch the wakes keep on washing up.
The Guaranteed Dolphin Sightings
With Free Beer and Wine Boat
makes a u turn when a dorsal fin is spotted.
I saw it, too,
but that was a shark, not a dolphin.
The pilot cuts the engine
and I can hear the distant muffled speaker
telling the passengers the history
of Hurricane Pass
carried on the wind.
********************
Some line was crossed
that changed me into
one of those telling the stories
instead of listening to the old ones,
stories of the old days.
No.
No.
Not old, not that long ago.
Just stories from before,
of the way it used to be,
a grandmother passing memories,
details to be forgotten
by the new listeners
of how things used to be.
April 17, 2011
Update April 19, 2012 Just in case you think this is hysteria, here is some documentation: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/18/gulf-fishermen-report-eyeless-shrimp-malformed-fish-hearts-after-oil-spill/
