Off we go again

Oh, foggy day.

This morning was to be an early one, dressed and rushing by 7am, piled into the boat by 730 and shooting off across the gulf of mexico, out to Timbalier Island. But spring is groaning and clanking, not quite waking up yet, but turning over in her sleep and mumbling a little, so we have a brief burst of warmth for a few days. This means, on top of the Grackles grackling and the overjoyed gnats fast remembering who and where to bite, that there is amazing fog in the morning, as the cold of the water meets the warmth of the air and condenses. Every morning I get up at 7, check the weather over my grits (grits! who knew they were so perfect?) and wait for the call from my boss, who lives up in Baton Rouge, 3 hours from the coast, and who thus should be treated with respect and duly ignored.

A week ago, in similar warmth and weather, I made the call to venture out, at 7:30 and before the fog warning had been lifted, into Terrebonne Bay, the body of water that lies within the embrace of the barrier islands separating it from the Gulf, -- it seemed clear when I looked out the door in my underwear, blinking in the sun, still half asleep. Because we work in part for the National Government, a body called NRDA (Natural Resource Damage Assessment, a small arm of the fed. gov.) there are numerous, repetitive safety precautions that we must go through every morning -- turn on our spot tracker (a radio beacon in case of emergency) radio NRDA to establish of area of operation, don our gargantuan flotation suits that we take off as soon as we are out of eyesight, etc etc...

This rigamarole takes a good long while, and JUST as soon as we finished it, while putting out towards the open water of the Bay, we thlopped into a bank of fog so thick, so like pudding, that up became down and all sound was muffled. It was eerie, beautiful, and terrifying... Fog this thick refracts the sun until, through the woolen blanket of mist, light seems to trickle weakly in from everywhere and nowhere at all, creating the illusion of being suspended in what I imagine blindness to be like. This is not necessarily bad; at times, fog rolls in and you can simply drop anchor and wait it out. But we had just entered the main shipping channel, where enormous monster ships with fog-thwarting instruments and interstellar horns boom up and down at highway speeds, running by watching only the radar screen, certainly not thinking to encounter a small bobbing cork in the grey flannel morning, and who would likely not even know it if they ran us down.

All of which is to say: this morning, this foggy morning, we take our time, we eat our grits in bed, and I write here as the world changes back from slate to color once more.

from the Timbalier Islands

This flask held inky black, inorganic ooze, and was marked with a number and the emblem of an oil well. Maybe a sample bottled for testing and lost to the depths?

There is still oil everywhere down here, and it's very much in flux, not just the remnants of a finite amount that arrived and has been sitting since a certain day. Storms churn up more, the stronger wave action of rough winds brings up larger bricks; on Timbalier Island, above the high rack line, there are mats the size of garbage can tops. The consistency varies as well, from hard stratified nuggets to creamy molasses cookies that goop onto your boots.

This I am unsure what to make of. If something is non-explosive, why label it? The entire produce section of the grocery store would have to be helpfully labeled "Non-Explosive". Unless, of course, it is a cunning national defense program aimed at evermore intelligent dolphins who still trust signs.
If you have ever been to Seattle, you have probably seen the sidewalk dance instructions with little dancing brass footsteps on Capitol Hill's Broadway: the cha-cha, the samba, the foxtrot. This is a old local favorite, the french raccoon schottische.

Sergio Leone is alive

and shrimping in Cocodrie.

Mudboat is the new Boatboat!

LUMPCON

It is cold cold cold, although the thermometer would not agree with me on that; the eternal dampness lets the air cut right through you as if you were wearing nothing at all, so 45 feels a hell of a lot colder. Federal Baboon regulations state that when the combined of the air and water temperatures are below 120, a heightened state of alergency is entered, known ominously as "60/60" This means you must open your special secret government happymeal, pull out and don a voluminous orange coat of olympic proportions, and attempt to function as normal. Normal becomes rotating at the waist, and then not rotating at all, it is so exhausting. Should the weather dip down to the fated "50/50" zone, one must open the second secret happymeal, wherein is contained an absolutely ridiculously huge, full body and hood, brilliant orange jumpsuit that looks like it should be for working in the Mars moon-mines. They were all made to fit towering Nigerians, but since their weather is pretty mellow, me and the Korean have to sit on each others shoulders inside one. Of course, once rendered thus warm, you are also rendered absolutely and uselessly caccooned in this monkeybusiness. Needless to say, I wear mine all the time, regardless of the temperature.

I have just been made a captain. They have given me my own boat with a whacking huge engine, so now I can get stuck in the mud all by myself without help. I even have a crew, consisting of a 4'7" korean girl named April, who waves at pelicans and shouts at dolphins. She gave me an apple, in Korean custom, because she felt sorry for me. "Why," I asked? "Because you don't have an apple". We fit right in around here, with the swamp people. Yesterday my giant foolish boat arrived on a trailer, and today I managed to back it into the water. A large crowd gathered and watched as my miniscule mate and I struggled to keep our boat, in which you could very literally smuggle buicks from demolishing all the surrounding craft. One duly impressed local coon ass (this is what they call themselves) exclaimed "you could fit 12, 15 alligators in dat boat, with you and dat little baby chile you got dere..."

The entirety of everything is skewed slightly to the side of normal... I work out of a building called LUMCON (Louisiana Marine Consortium of Nincompoops), which looks like a 1970's set from an underwater space lab show, complete with penile turret and highly official and yet non-functioning appendage/wings jutting out from the center. It is visible from far and wide, and often I navigate back to it from way out in the gulf. Yet it is very hard to get mail here, and if you talk to anyone in the surrounding area, they claim not to know where it is, and ask instead if you live at the Piggly Wiggly. Here, just like in other parts of the world that have not yet discovered credit cards, the Piggly Wiggly is a glum grocery store, and in fact houses frozen chickens and generic cough medicine, not humans. However unlike the rest of the world, this name takes on embarassingly erotic undertones when it is spoken by the locals, often men with no idea how frantically I have to clench to keep from giggling when they say "Ohhhh, you mean dahn by de Peeyaggly Weeyaggly...."

The gulf as an ancient corner of the world's rubik's cube.

Why?

I am up in a tower, exhausted and unable to sleep, and the never-ending salt marsh of Cocodrie takes my face.

Not stay the same

Moments of overwhelming nostalgia often elude any subsequent efforts to connect quality or meaning to them. Like a certain sign on the highway, framed by a dying sun and the cracked rubber of rattling pickup's window seal, or a particularly and locally specific sound heard on the same jukebox 8 years ago, these ghosts bite and then flee. The sign passes, the song ends, but shit, what a taste while it hits.