This is my first diary. I'm a reader, not a writer. But the Gulf disaster is haunting me. I'm a child of the Chesapeake, with my roots going back thousands of years. For what are we losing this magnificent world? More polyester? More big cars? Our food chain is dying. Our lives are ending. For what, I keep asking.
Thank you for posting. My heart is breaking as I hear from friends in Pensacola. I know what is coming. I have been in the bay, swimming with the turtles and porpoises and crabs and fish. A nightmare slowly unfolds.
I haven't posted before. More a reader than a writer. No one here knows that I grew up spending my summers at the mouth of the Chesapeake. My family depended on the sealife there from as long as people inhabited the area. From the Algonquins to the English settlers to beyond. My oldest friends and relatives are in Mississippi, Florida, Eastern Shore Virginia, and on up to Cape Cod. And recently, we have been calling each other, in crisis, depressed, mourning the end of a life that lasted thousands of years.
When I was little, I would swim out into the sandbars in the bay, admiring the sealife swimming around me, the crabs scurrying about, and the beautiful seashells on the bay bed. By the time I was a teen, I could not see even a few inches into the water. Despite the degradation of the Bay, I grew up loving the sight of the porpoises playing near me, loving their sheer joy and knowing it meant that sharks were not nearby.
The last time I thought I would ever swim in those waters, I knew I was moving to Hawaii. I went the beach in the early morning to see the porpoises. They were there, but far out. I kept swimming, farther and farther, but they moved away. Finally, I was too scared to continue swimming out so far from a deserted beach. I treaded water and waved at them, shouting goodby. Two members of the school turned and looked at me. And I swear, they swam to me. For one last time, I swam with them, one on each side. They are beautiful creatures, and swimming with them is a great joy! How lucky I am to have known such a wonder from an early age.
I think it was because they were concerned that I was drowning. They swam beside me for a few minutes, then moved on, rejoining their group. I cried tears of happiness and goodby as I returned to the beach and went on to my adult life elsewhere.
Decades later, I returned with my baby boy. The sand dunes and sea oats had returned to the area after years of overdevelopment. But the water was pea green and murky. No searching for shells or watching the fish dart by us. No porpoises playing in the surf. The Bay has suffered terribly from pollution and overdevelopment.
So I watch the people of the Gulf, angry, tearful, consumed with sadness and fear and rage. I really feel it. On a more national level, we are all dependent on the produce of the Gulf. Our oceans are already fished out, but this blow - this is a nightmare. We will grieve the dead birds and oyster beds and so forth. The loss of livelihoods. But this was also a major source of food for us. The impact is huge. Bigger than we will understand for some time - months? years? - to come.
Everyone who grows up on the Gulf or the East Coast knows the Gulf Stream. We know how it affects weather and sealife. We know the meaning it has for the seasons and how it brought the Europeans to North America. How it affects the weather in the UK.
To learn that the oil gush - not spill - is entering the Gulf Stream.... It is a nightmare in slow motion. For thousands of years, people lived in harmony with the ebb and flow of life on the stream. For over 400 years, Europeans joined into that life. After Vietnam, many immigrants from that country relocated to the US and took up a new life, harvesting the sealife of the Gulf.
This is a long rant, for which I apologize. Sort of. The sadness is quite overwhelming. I hope others with life experience on the shores will also post. This is more than a cement failure. This is the end of thousands of years of a way of life. And for what? An oil based economy less than 200 years old?