Oil spill update from the field: A way of life is scorched, for both fishermen and their dogs

The oil slick seeps and swirls. For a photo, and to satisfy curiosity, this blogger sticks his finger in. (Photo by Kim Hubbard/Audubon magazine)
Pass a loutre, Lousiana, May 28
Cauliflower, caterpillars, liver spots, Italy. Twister, typhoon, egg yolk, placenta. A genie in a bottle, a scorpion’s tail, the woman in the moon. A face howling like Munch’s Scream. Like cream in your coffee, like suds in the tub, I see shapes in the swirling slick, as it laps against stalks of cane grass, leaving the bases black, crude somehow seeping up the stalks, so that even the spindly green leaves well above the waterline are etched in oil. The entire marsh has been dipped in it, a gunky seam between high tide and low that from afar resembles a thick black bathtub ring.
 
I am with a camera-laden Kim Hubbard, Audubon magazine’s photo editor, an unshaven fisherman with a gold marlin necklace named Carey O’Neil and his yellow lab Bullet, in a small fiberglass boat. Carey has steered us into a pear-shaped cut in the cane where a vast slick has accumulated so that Kim and I can document the effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill. We are in Blind Bay, near one of the Mississippi’s final four fingers to the sea. “We can ride this coastline for miles,” says Carey, “all you see is spots like this.”
 
According to new government estimates, 30 million gallons of crude oil may have gushed from the Deepwater wellhead. Nearly 900,000 gallons of chemicals so toxic that the EPA ordered BP to stop using them have been pumped into the Gulf to disperse the oil. Sea turtles are stranding in numbers three times the norm, a series of islands with brown pelican colonies were at one time entirely surrounded by the slick and thousands of people like Carey have lost their livelihood.

Carey O'Neil, a fishermen out of work because of the spill, checks to make sure oil isn't sticking to his boat. Growing up in the marshes outside Venice, Carey took a school boat to school. (Photo by Kim Hubbard/Audubon magazine).

“I’m gonna show you where I grew up,” he says, navigating through marsh alleyways. Along a wide channel lined by Katrina collapsed homes and derelict pilings, he points out where his best friend used to live, where his ex-wife used to live, where his grandpa used to live. As a child Carey took a school boat to school. There were no roads and no electricity. Venice, a town that once held about 1,500 people, was the big city. “As kids we used to get in a pirogue and just paddle all day and all night and go back the next day,” says Carey.
 
He kills the engine and we drift. Plants called elephant ears thicket the waterline and above them towers a reedy forest of what locals call roseau cane. Willows blow in the breeze, bearing the cottony remains of blossoms. A gator surfaces, only its eyes and snout visible, then another. Blackbird babble drifts from the marsh and a pair of great egrets sail overhead, white as snow. “That bird is our magazine’s symbol,” says Kim, as she snaps them. “You know what the local Cajun people call those white birds,” says Carey. “White birds.” A carp jumps into the boat and lands with a thud beside Bullet.
 
Venice is a mecca for shrimpers and fishermen but much of the land, including the marshes where Carey grew up, is owned by energy companies; in town there is a Halliburton Road. Each September, Morgan City, a few parishes to the west, hosts the Louisiana State Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, the symbol is a giant shrimp with a hardhat clasped around an oil rig. After high school many kids here face a tough career choice, shrimp or oil; hard-workers can make $60,000 a year right off the bat in either. One year Carey made $180,000. He stays out for days, sleeping in his boat, listening to cane grass rustle in the wind at night. I ask why he chose shrimp over oil. “Some guys just can’t get it, some guys do,” says Carey. “I’m no lawyer, I’m no plumber. I’m a shrimper.”
 
We enter the Mississippi and a breeze kicks up. There is a refuge tower with zigzag stairs and an island with oil tanks. Pilottown, where the bar pilots, who steer freighters from the river’s mouth get off and the river pilots, who pilot them to New Orleans take over. Raphael Pass leads us to Blind Bay. There we find pontoon boats, white tubing is coiled across their decks like an immaculate beast’s disemboweled intestines. This is absorbent boom and each day Carey’s childhood friends are paid by BP to lay it out. They wear orange life jackets and hardhats, many complain the company is paying them to do its dirty work and worry the job is hazardous to their health. Just yesterday, their worst fears were confirmed; several fishermen skimming oil in Breton Sound were rushed to the hospital, having experienced nausea, dizziness, headaches and chest pains. But Carey's friends don’t have much choice. “They got a wife and kids at home and the light bill’s due,” he says.

It's all Greek for Carey's dog Bullet, who pants happily as we pass both pristine habitat and oiled marsh. (Photo by Kim Hubbard/Audubon magazine)

With Bullet’s pink tongue lagging low and saliva dripping from his gums we enter the pear-shaped cut in the cane. Here is the oil, accumulated in giant orange lily pads, thick brown seams and thin black ribbons. Our boat drives in a wave and the slick reacts like mercury, regrouping and splitting back apart in ways unknown. The surface of the water is smothered, the marsh is black.
 
For the sake of a photo and to quell my own curiosity I sacrifice the middle finger on my left hand and dip slowly into a seam. Drops scatter and my fingertip is gone. The feeling is unlike what I expected. The oil is actually soft, warm on the outside where it has soaked the sun, cooler on the inside, where it is in contact with the water. It clings to my skin, but isn’t sticky, until I pull my finger out. Attached is an orange glob, no longer pretty and shifting shapes; now it feels like poison. Kim photographs it and I quickly wipe away the oil with a wet nap and paper towels. Bullet is still panting happily. Carey looks crestfallen.
 
“Right where we’re floating at,” he says. “I shrimp right here, I fish crabs right here.”

Justin Nobel/Audubon Magazine

The slick shifts shapes constantly, resembling cauliflower, Italy or Jupiter's Great Red Spot. (Photo by Kim Hubbard/Audubon magazine)