Still haven't showered. I'll add some words to this directly, come back soon...

From Ocean Springs I got to Dauphin Island, AL. It was frigidly cold, and the 3 layers of socks on my hands made stopping difficult, so I slowly ran into the closed gate of the ferry ramp and fell down. I camped for the night in the RV campground (rustic!), with the offer of staying warm in the "community house" if it got too cold. This turned out to be a large concrete bunker with a perforated and nonfunctioning wood stove, plastic cherubim, and a vast array of uncomfortable and non-insulating Christmas chintz. You see, the most important thing here, obviously, was to find something to sleep on, since in my excellent and far-sighted packing I brought tent, sleeping bag, and nary else. Which is fine in normal southern climes, but this was like wandering through a drawling, drooling St. Paul.

The end result was something like sitting in dark display room of merry concrete gremlins, discussing which episode of Dr. Who to watch in the back room, while Uncle Gus practices his bowling approach in the hall.

So: could I stuff the child-angels under my sleeping bag? No

Could I burrow into the yards and yards of plastic wreaths, filling the gaps with colored lights?

Maybe, but how itchy.

So, after a hearty dinner of canned green beans (and salt!) I ransacked the room, and found a midden heap of plastic tablecloths. I grabbed 8 of them, and rodent-like, tucked them away with me across the lumpy lawn and into my tent.

The next morning I was accosted by maternal and cackling hens who wanted to know why I was stuffing voluminous amounts of tablecloth under the sink.

This name on the gravestone is just quite good, and deserves immortality, thus I comply.

Aaaaaannd, off we go. Bike trip, Port Sulphur LA to Mt. Pleasant SC.

Only stumble upon internet once in a while, so you too can envision traveling at the speed of an angry bumblebee pulling a pony.

Port Suphur to Slidell, with help from Ricky.

Think my tires are too thin. Ditched extra weight after first flat 5 minutes into the ride, in full view of Subway. Damn their sammiches.

Took Pointe a la Hache ferry across the Mississippi River, the other side is much spookier.
Houses slowly slope into the river bank and the air smells faintly sweet, like a calmly eroding Eudora Welty.

Now just have to deal with shitty, shitty roads. My knees feel like they are 75. God, I hope they won't feel like this when we are 75...

Fixed flat on side of R. 47 in east New Orleans, a barren and sinister wasteland of nuclear twinkie sludge and 3 breasted women. Mutations palpable. Asked guy with dip lip and 4x4 hat for a ride across bridge (no shoulder, 70mph). He left me on side of highway -- I slung on the bags and coasted down the off-ramp.

R. 90 goes through the Bayou Sauvage Nat. Wildlife Refuge, nothing for miles.

Walking along with my thumb out after last flat (out of tubes and no patches) hearing interested and hungry sounds from the rosocanes, darkness falling.

Enter Ricky.

Ricky works for Zatarains (jazzitup!) and points to the logo on his threadbare shirt. I asked him if he ever got tired of eating it -- he said he guessed not, he'd been there 27 years, He drove me about 10 miles to Walfart in Slidell, where we shook hands and swapped names. I naturally, was Jimmy.

Bought 2 tubes and 3 patch kits, and fixed flats on the sidewalk listening to the Salvation Army man hustle. Apparently he drank espressos before they were big, and that all went down in Everett, ya see...

Used first patch kit to mend holes in brand new Walpoop tube.

Hooray then, cheap hotel room with hot water and wafflehaus hammagah. Living large.

Sleep, knees, sleep

It is strange to come to the end of something and realize that you haven't shared any of it. I have only 8 more days here in Louisiana, and yet photos go back almost three months now, to when I first arrived down here to watch the world burn and people write checks. Humbling too, to look back at some of my (few) journal entries from those first few weeks, and try to allow for those feelings of incredulity and madness at the entire process. Maybe I will dig them out and post them on here, if only to properly and modernly save them.

More likely, tho, that I will take your hand and show you some of the foolishness. To those of you that haven't talked to in too long, I have been working down on the Gulf of Mexico, attempting to put a dollar sign to some small parts of BP's Business as usual Policy.

I lived for the first month in a genuine, authentic FEMA trailer in a real-live FEMA trailerpark, complete with poisonous chemical smells, angry child graffiti on the walls (MarlonmarlonMARLONNONONONONONONO) and federally funded crockpot. The roaches were shoe-sized; the walls on one side, when I arrived, covered in mud, as if the trailer had fallen over, filled with water, and then been righted, drained, and left alone. Each night at 7:30, as if it were the 1950's again, a truck came by without warning or sound, spraying enormous amounts of mosquito-quelling gas from a large tank on the back. It pulled into each driveway along Highway 23, passed close to each trailer, and moved on. Missing only were the children frolicking in the ice-cream man's DDT clouds, concluding the ominous comparison.

Evenings were incredible and often fierce, with colors borrowed from another palette than I had ever seen before.

We left mostly out of Delta Marina, below the overpass from Buras down to Venice, south of New Orleans. Once out in the bayous, it was difficult to keep my bearings, until I discovered the catfood plant.
Under the highway overpass was a fetid, foul-smelling concrete structure that belched smoke at all hours of the day. It processed the waste "pogey" fish that were caught by the thousands in giant purse seins that scoop up everything else living and unfortunate enough to be near-bye, to be made into catfood, makeup, and fertilizer. A large operation, 6-8 80 foot soiled blue and yellow boats oozed and tottered out to the bays together, fishing in unison and clued into the location of the schools by ciircling airplanes overhead. The plume of smoke from the factory was noxious to the point of making me puke in my mouth routinely upon passing through downwind. Depending on the day, the smell could either stretch miles to the south, or limply coil its rotting, ropey flavor directly down onto the remains of the town beside it. It was an excellent navigational beacon.

The shrimping season began after about a month, and all the boats that had been loafing along the sides of the canals and marinas, came to life.
In the morning, we would head out at around 7:00am, greeting the returning boats, swollen and bloated with shrimp, as they waddled drunkenly home to port.

The shrimp boats have, almost to a one, a wonderfully rackish, devil-may-care approach to construction, upkeep, and appearance.

What sometimes subsides into decay and floating rot is much more often a squinting amalgamation of pie-eyed F-yous' to the laws of flotation and sea-worthiness, at least as per what the Coast Guard would have us believe.

Rarely did I see what I had assumed this part of the world would be like, after a steady diet since childhood of National Geographic's looming cypress and echoing swamps. That exists, but where I was working, it is mostly gone. Routinely, boat captains would point off the bow to an otherwise unremarkable, indistinguishable stretch of open water and say, "Had a camp here, for 60 years. Used to be all marsh. Now its just the pilings...".

Heavily drilled for oil since the early 1950's, the landscape was much more often one of Mad Max afloat, derricks' and wellheads', abandoned and left to oxidize slowly into the Gulf.

Once, passing an open natural gas flame over the sign "Poisonous: Do Not Breathe", I came upon a slick the size of several footballs fields', a wide, greasy, smooth expanse amidst otherwise riffled water on a windy day.

The air smelled like death, and a shrimp boat passed by just outside the slick.

The captains all used GPS, of which the only useful function was the depth-finder. Most had units in their boats that were 4-5 years old, the information and maps in which were already rendered obsolete and inaccurate by rapid wetland subsidence. Often we would run-aground with a shuddering, wallowing groan, and then resort to more antiquated means of navigation. Here I am tromping about, seeking deeper water to push the boat towards. "I like the GPS, tho", said one captain. "Islands 3 years ago are good fishing spots now".

I am Buras, Louisiana, working the BP spill. Images swirl, and they are difficult to net. These are a beginning.

Nesowadnehunk Stream, 2:30 a.m.

Mt. Coe main slide, covered in water. 4:30 a.m.

Doubletop Mountain, between north and south peaks. 5:15 a.m.

South peak of Doubletop. 1944 A.D.

Black Nubble