This personal essay was written the day after I collected oil spilled from the Deep Water Horizon rig in Bastian Bay, LA. In July, I made over 20 hand-made marbleized papers from the oil (22x30”), as well as over 50 postcards (4x6”).

“You’re machinery chugs on day and night without stop making gluppity-glup. Also sloppity-slop. And what do you do with this leftover goo? I’ll show you, you dirty old Oncler man, you! You’re glumping the pond where the Humming-Fish hummed! No more can they hum, for their gills are all gummed. So, I’m sending them off. Oh, their future is dreary. They’ll walk on their fins and get woefully weary in search of some water that isn’t so smeary.”

Dr. Theodore Seuss, The Lorax, 1971

June 9, 2010

Like an expectant mother, I feel the nausea in my head. Walking around the streets of New Orleans, images and colors are now more intense than normal. In order to relax, I duck into a Charles Street pub for something to eat, but the various shapes of burnt cheese on my pizza make me flinch without warning and the nausea consumes me. The burnt orange color of my Hefferveisen beer is also creepy. When I walk outside, a pattern of dispersed clouds in the sky reminds me of the oil spill patterns and I’m again overwhelmed with a wave of dizziness. The nausea moves with me, slowly dissipating until the next abrupt reminder comes of when Captain Patrick put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Are you alright?”, with his handkerchief over his nose and mouth. “That can happen when you lean over the side of the boat and then stand up quickly,” he said. But we both knew it was more. “It’s probably the chemicals, but it could be the dizziness from getting up.”

I didn’t believe so at the time, but while I was leaning over the boat I may have blacked out for a moment, or at least I have no memory of choosing to stop scooping up the orange glupp 50 miles from the Deep Water Horizon rig. I simply said, trying to overcome the nausea, “I’m ok, just taking it easy so that I’ll last the rest of the day.” Later Captain Patrick said he felt it too, and then he explained to me how to contact the Coast Guard in case anything happened to him. With a deep sense of responsibility, knowledge and professionalism, he maintained a confident composure for my sake.

It was for this moment that I traveled 1,000 miles. I had been making my own watercolor pigment out of the Chesapeake Bay waterways back in Baltimore and then making paintings out of their random ingredients. Now I used my entire Maryland State Arts Council grant in order to be in the brackish Gulf waters of Bastian Bay Louisiana, trying to repeat the project here. The more congealed masses I collected from the water, the more artwork I could make from it. Patrick had just picked up a pancake-sized one, the largest we’d seen all day and probably the same amount that I had collected in total, when a peculiar kind of nausea overwhelmed all rational objectives, as if we were in an invisible cloud of carbon smoke, and our raw instincts overwhelmed by any other thoughts than to leave the spot we had worked so hard to find. Patrick turned us starboard 180 degrees, and we soon composed ourselves. “Look at the horizon” he said. “It can sometimes help.”

Earlier that day at the shore, Patrick moved his fishing poles out of the boat while his friend said “you won’t be needing those out there”, Patrick chuckled that “we’re going out to actually look for oil, if you can believe that.” His friend pointed to the sky and said to me, “See that helicopter? They’re looking for oil over the mouth of the Mississippi. Because the water and fish gush down with a ton of force, nothing can go up it, it all comes down, it’s the last place that we’re still allowed to fish around here. But,” he continued, “if that helicopter finds one drop of oil, that’ll be shut down too, and we’ll be done.”

When we headed out, Patrick had an amazing eye for the waters. Driving the boat at 30 mph, he could see particle-sized changes in the texture of the waters surface. At first, we found specks when we rode past dozens of oyster colonies, which provide 30% of all oysters enjoyed in America. Then, in Bay Pomme d’or we found the largest piece of oil so far, about the size of a pea. Patrick eagerly slowed down to point out his successful find, and then abruptly murmured an understandable “Shit!” Patrick apologized for blurting his disgust over face-to-face contact with a pea-sized oil particle that was polluting his life. Later we entered an oil slick. It was a solid area, several acres in diameter and different in texture and light than the rest of the Bay. The angular caps of the good dark, cool-colored water were now a softer, warm ripple that looked like something between the plasticity of a Pixar animation and the solarizing effects of an early 1960s Nam June Paik video, when digital effects were brand new and unnatural color contrasts were big. If you bent down to eye level with the water, the contrast allowed you to see the hollow oval shapes of the shimmering oil sheen.

The slick was strange, horrifying and almost mesmerizing in its subtle character. To be surrounded by it was a sad and calm experience, not the visceral experience that was to come. Soon we moved from this soft, warm rippled water into smaller, white capped ripples — as distinct a transition as moving between the former East and West Berlin, including color, light, sound and the symbol of it all.

A few minutes later Patrick cupped his hand in the water and gleefully pulled out an infant bait shrimp. He watched it like his pet as it danced in the pool of water in his hand, announcing, “It’s alive. Imagine something so small alive in all this.” Then he released it with a sigh. “Not for long.”

Within an hour I had witnessed Patrick’s emotional range toward the pea-sized pollution to the same sized shrimp-life. While Patrick may have been experiencing something similar to myself physically that day, his cool demeanor didn’t show the burden he must bare from the moment we found thousands of dispersed orange balls polka-dotting an oval shape like a flock of birds or a school of fish that it had indeed replaced. What this second generation fisherman looked forward to most in the world was to one day bring his 4 year old son fishing in these waters in the same way his dad had taken him. This dispersed oil was nothing like the solarized slick. This oil was clearly inundated with chemicals. Most distinct from the non-chemical oil was the orange color and the dispersed pattern. The odor and the texture of a branching web, like the estuary landscape as seen from an airplane, were all secondary characteristics to the color and pattern. It was not clear how dangerous what we were inhaling was, until after only a few minutes when we both nearly collapsed. We couldn’t see it directly, nor was the odor strong enough to warn us of the effect it was about to have on our minds and bodies. What one news commentator described as an overwhelming urge “to get out of here” was an apt description.

It’s about 24 hours since the moment when I first inhaled the mysterious oiled dispersants and I haven’t had a proper meal since. Small encounters with food or patterns that remind me of the dispersed oil bring back the nausea. All odors, and even colors, have intensified, and if it’s not some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome, I doubt it’s because I got up too fast.

Patrick explained to me that the currents naturally form parallel circular patterns that bring these dispersed oil pieces together and keep them together. Unfortunately these are the same opposing currents that bring the smallest critters on the food chain together, from plankton to bait shrimp and briar shrimp together. Therefore the food and oil will naturally congregate, and the basis of the ecosystem will immediately die. Patrick offered his knowledge and passion for details of both the ecosystem and the technologies of the oil and gas rigs alike. It was clear he grew up impressed with the harmonious balance in which the two worlds had co-existed. His pride was diminished with each blob of oil, rather than fish, that we were catching. We passed another boat where one of his buddies was trying to get an oil covered brown pelican to fly off a rock into the water where it would be easier to catch it for a cleaning. The stubborn pelican didn’t want to be caught, and finally, like most of the oil stained pelicans that we saw, this bird was still able to slowly fly away with just a little more of a struggle. The bird was gone and on his own. In the same area it was refreshing to see so many porpoises that made healthy arches in and out of these seemingly less toxic waves. Patrick thought that these creatures would be okay; they were smart and will figure out how to stay away from the polluted oils.

On the drive down to the coast from New Orleans, I was struck by how visible the oil industry was from folks who pumped a small family rig to Conoco Chemical’s fire-breathing silos and a dozen tanks, and everything in between. While clearly this was a region with distinct character from anywhere in the world that I knew, I nevertheless saw a bit of the Australian sublime here. I saw a community-centered region with a connection to the eco-system that so-called cultured urbanites dream of in their community gardens and other micro-pastoral moments. Like the working class Australians, these Louisiana folks had no disdain for what made them modern, but rather embraced it. Utilities, silos resting among beautiful bushy marshes exposed the harmonious design of life, like the Parisian Pompidou Museum celebrates civility of systematic interiors — societal or technological — in harmony with their natural community.

Of course like oil and water, this disaster is separating pastoral nature from the advances of culture. The strips of beaches that created the bay marshes and waters had through invasive drilling as well as natural causes, eroded over time. It was these gaps in the beaches that allowed the oil to come into the bays; these were the places where oil had to be stopped at all costs. The fisherman were thrilled that sandbags were coming; they hadn’t seen any other truly useful methods being deployed to protect their bays and marshes. 50 days after the rig exploded and the oil had already entered the bay, we thankfully watched state funded military helicopters dropping sandbags in these gaps.

“SO…
Catch!” calls the Onceler.
He lets something fall.
 “Its a Truffula Seed.
 It’s the last one of all! You’re in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds.
And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs.
 Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.”

Dr. Theodore Seuss, The Lorax, 1971

Lisa Moren, June 10, 2010