Our Ocean of Oil
I keep driving to the beach every morning. My board in the back of the car is like a phantom limb — there but not really there. I can’t use it. Not today, not anytime soon. Instead of going for a surf I walk to the water’s edge and watch the helicopters overhead making sure I don't get too close to the ocean. I’m wearing shoes, guys, I promise I won't go in. I wander around on the sand, aimless and concerned like a visitor outside a hospital — pacing on the sand, looking for a vending machine or something to occupy my mind. The lagoon to my right is full of suffocating fish since they filled in the rivermouth with sand to keep more oil from flowing into the delicate wetlands. Osprey and pelicans pick off the vulnerable and toxic fish stuck between oil and dwindling oxygen. To my left, yellow tape twists in the south wind, warning me that the tideline replete with fresh tar is “not safe.” It’s a grim scene.
Over the weekend, 140,000 gallons of crude oil dumped in the Pacific Ocean just off Surf City, USA, shutting down So-Cal beaches from Dana Point to Huntington Beach. And while the cleanup effort begins, and we move through yet another tragedy of our time like it’s nothin’, and the news outlets try to piece it all together for us, we all know...as bad as it sounds, it’s way worse. It just is. Finger pointing will come next and the fish will eventually take their last breath and a CEO will foot the bill with last year’s profit. All good. Thumbs up. We’ll put up with tar on our wax and feet for a few years and the locally caught rockfish will come marinated in crude. C'est la vie!
Ironically, about a month ago I read a book called An Ocean of Oil: A Century of Political Struggle Over Petroleum off the California Coast while researching something else and here we are, front row again. My postmortem after the book: while the spill of 1969 definitely made it harder for the oil companies and sparked the environmental movement in California, it’s pretty clear the oil greed is rocket fuel for their persistence. Since the 1969 Santa Barbara massacre we’ve had four big spills in California alone — this being the second in Huntington Beach since 1990. So yeah, we know the drill (Ha.Ha.)
I don’t have the answer. I’m not extreme anything. I have a hybrid car that plugs in. I’ve paddled to platform Emmy off the coast once and touched it with my hand like a kid dared to ding dong ditch a neighbor. I grew up in Huntington Beach where the local high school football team is The Oilers. It’s all goofy and weird and there’s an oil derrick next to my friend's house that looks like an industrial stallion ready to be ridden. I’m pro new energy and it’s pretty clear oil is a complicated topic and something people are passionate about, especially if you like war and killing innocent animals for nothing. I mean, I’ll volunteer. I’ll try to raise awareness. I’ll go surfing as soon as I can and probably risk contracting something or other. I’m sad. I saw it coming. It’s always coming. The oil platforms offshore will continue to haunt California like ghost ships, some working, some retired, all rusty and casting big shadows over the sea below. We’ll mine death for fuel some more and the circle of life will go on and the pessimistic will continue to be right.—Travis Ferré
Umm, you’re welcome? Unidentified risking it all for a couple glassy ones Sunday in Huntington Beach.
