bloody mary

Returning from even a few days at sea, it's not pleasant to find lots of telephone messages, that type of thing only reminds the mind of things unattended, removes focus from the task at hand, making it through another watch, another hitch, getting the boat from the Mississippi and through Venice Jump, Tiger Pass, and then into slip one, two or three knots of current astern. Part of the attraction to life on a boat is a postponement of exterior, excess stimuli, concentration on survival and a focus on the immediate, not making a mistake with the boat, or god forbid, getting someone hurt.

I make it back to the dock for the final time this hitch. I know I'm good for midnight crew change, money in the bank, will get a ride to the Satchmo Airport and be on the east coast by noon tomorrow. I've got multiple friends who wanna know about media reports that 75% of the ruptured oil is gone, eaten by bacteria, evaporated by sunbeams. It seems absurd to me, not just the estimate, but that a figure is published and dispersed to the masses, the only people having a possible clue, a still-wild guess, being obscure scientists, the type who don't get quoted. Nobody at NOAA or anywhere in our government has any clue how much oil went into the Gulf, is still in the Gulf--and therefore--how much is gone.

I pick up a morning paper in the airport, the Times-Picayune, review a map furnished by NOAA that shows boundaries of fisheries still closed by the Federal Government. Ridiculous. I've seen dozens of boats fishing those waters in the past weeks, even talked to one on VHF. It says NOAA is opening an area of the Florida Panhandle this weekend, will open more soon, further west. It says they'll open waters reaching 30 days oil-free. It will all be a failure of history. The moratorium is still being pushed by the current administration, although oddly enough it's been overturned by a local judge. But the Federal/State argument, the legal wrangling makes no difference because the drilling companies have basically agreed to suspended deep-water operations, although they are still free legally to continue drilling. They would have difficulty with certain permits, but it's the uncertainty, the gray area itself that keeps them from doing it. They're going to bide their time until a day in November, when Obama has agreed to let them continue.

Bumped to first class, a frequent flyer, a bloody mary at 0700. From the window of the plane, the carvings of man, the rare, unspoilt woods, the great oceans our sponges--the greatest trash bins we've got, all of it filtered by a brownish troposphere, the exhaust of the modern world, a perpetuating haze that's the essence of who we are, a tribute to our successes, a dark reminder, an eventual death. It's the gist of consumer culture, the economy, it's everything, most of us have our hands in it, every one of us has--or wants--some material, potentially meaningless piece of crap, a device containing plastic perhaps, or even intellectual property, a machine to get us around. But it's a guarantee, a slam-dunk that that device is somehow related to the burning of fossil fuels, to oil, to a conspicuous consumption, a diversion from mortality. I once read a quote from historian and social anthropologist John Collier, a scholarly white man who lived among the Native Americans in the 1920s and 30s. He said of their spirit, "Could we make it our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace." Well, who really wants to live that way, anyway? An incredible minority... another bloody mary.