Long Island, 2010. After the Gulf Oil Spill.

I am writing this post from the beach in Southampton, New York.  The Halsey Neck access point to the beach in Southampton, New York, to be exact.  It’s a serene kind of beach:  it seems populated with thinkers and walkers and readers rather than body boarders and beer swillers and barbequers.  It’s not like the Florida beaches that I grew up with; it’s a more contemplative type of beach. A beach to simply look, and feel, and smell, and to think of nothing and everything, all at once. 

My kind of beach.

I’m sitting on the sand looking out in the water, and I am trying to imagine the salt water covered in thick, shiny, greasy masses of slime.  And I am especially thinking of another beach like this, far to the south, along the Gulf Coast. It’s another contemplative beach like this, where I used to sit and think of everything and nothing- like I am doing now; where I sat as a quasi-intellectual college student writing bad poetry.  Not much has changed- except I’m now a 41 year old quasi-intellectual adult writing bad blog posts along with the bad poetry.

Allen and I visited that beach a few weeks ago, down there in the Florida Panhandle, before all of this happened. It may have been a farewell visit; I suspect that it never will look like the way that it did in April.  What will all of that pristine sand and the clear green water look like covered in oil?  Will that fine white sand blow for miles down the empty beach and pile up in drifts?  Will there still be sand dollars buried in the sand?  I doubt that the sand will blow, or the sand dollars will stay alive, when the oil comes.

In April, the weather can be quite unsettled in the Deep South.  We headed down to our campground on the beach just as a line of severe weather was headed down the same direction.  We arrived in the late evening, and it looked like the worst weather had passed us by.  We were safe, in our campsite hidden behind the dunes.  There was nothing to worry about.

I woke up in the middle of the night.  The sky was flashing; I could see it even with my eyes closed.  Flash…flash……flash…flash. flash…FLASH…..flash flash flash…. The sky glowed greenish.  It was dead still.

 I have seen storms like that before in my life- the storms where the lightening comes so fast that the thunder can’t catch up, and the sky glows from all of the electricity.  They suck all of the air surrounding them inside- inhaling the atmosphere- so that you seem to be a in vacuum before the storm arrives. They are a living creature.

That storm lay off the coast, stalking us, and waiting to strike.  I lay there, feeling frightened and helpless. Our little cocoon of a camper suddenly felt thin and fragile. All we could do was wait….

That storm now seems to portend what was to follow.  We were fortunate that night:  the monster slunk back out to the open ocean and away from us.  This new monster- this oil from the broken well in the Gulf- I don’t think this one will retreat.  This one will not be content to sit offshore, menacing. This one is coming.

Like that night in the camper, I feel helpless today,  in the face of this oil spill, the dimensions of which I simply cannot get my mind around.   

Right now, the only thing that I can do is to ride my bicycle down to the shore in Southampton. I chose to not turn the ignition key in the car. 

Maybe this disaster will effect a change in the nation’s psyche.  Maybe we will consider consuming less fossil fuel.   Maybe some of those people who drove their luxury SUV’s down to the beach access at Halsey Neck Beach will leave them home, and ride their bikes instead – they can park them next to mine, in the nearly empty bike rack.  Maybe we could make our roads safer, so that the other type of “traffic”- pedestrian, bicycle- could travel without fear alongside the cars and trucks.

Maybe we won’t be able to kill this monster- but maybe we can stop a new one from being created.

St. George Island, Florida, and the rest of the Gulf Coast:  you are in my thoughts and in my prayers.