How Can You Miss The Shit?!

Last Tuesday evening I went to the Pensacola Beach with a small group of friends.  It's kind of a new ritual we have started amongst ourselves to help the Gulf heal from the oil spill.  Each of us collects water from the Gulf of Mexico, in a glass container, and we tape words/affirmations onto the glass, such as Love, Gratitude, and Heal.  Then we take it home and sit the glass container somewhere special and/or pretty and meditate on it here and there, until we meet again in a month.  Usually on or close to a full moon, and then we return the water to the Gulf again.

Anyway, I had just returned from a weeks trip to Ohio, so I grabbed my back pack, which just happened to have two cameras in it along with the other items I needed, and made my way to the beach to meet my friends.  I wasn't planning on video taping oil on the sand or Corexit in the water.  But low and behold, we're standing at the waters edge, collecting new water to take home, and I see this brown foamy crap right there on the shoreline not even five feet away from us.  This is like the fourth or fifth time I've collected water for the purpose of healing, and this time my water had a yellow tint to it, and the sand in the bottom of the container is brown (vs. white). 

I do not normally go to the touristy beach, known as Casino Beach, because I don't like being crowded.  But it seemed logical to go the pier to return the water we had collected four weeks before, instead of standing on beach, where the water comes ashore. Knowing this is the tourist spot, it is kind of scary when you think of all the people from around the country who came here and played in the sand and in the water.  I wonder how many people are walking around wondering why they don't feel well?  There doctors clueless, because they are not aware of the symptoms that accompany chemical exposure.  But that's not what my blog is about today.

Instead, it's about how easy it is to find oil on Pensacola Beach, especially after a good storm.   On March 5th, 2011, I recorded a video that showed a lot of dead sea life that had washed ashore after a blustery storm had passed through the Gulf.  And on Sept 3rd, 2011, while Tropical Storm Lee passed through, I recorded a thick oily substance all over the Casino Beach.  It was awful.  Both of those videos went somewhat viral and afforded me the option to become a YouTube partner.  That's how badly the beach looked!

And here we are on a calm day, Sept 13th, and this brown shit is floating along the shoreline.

Two days later, Celia and I go to the beach to chill for a minute.  Walk-out #27.  The temps are in the seventies, it's a beautiful day.  We set our chairs up, and Celia goes for a walk, and I sit there and take it all in for a minute.  And I swear, I don't know where it came from, but it begins to rain.  I rush to pack out stuff up, then Celia come along finishes, while I bee line it to the truck to shut the sunroof.  I know if we give it a minute, the rain will pass. And we decide to take a ride to pass the time.

So, we head toward National Seashores (Navarre).  And before we made it to the first parking lot, where you're allowed to pull off the road, I know we're going to turn around and take this trip again, because the sand looked that bad.  But when we made it to the parking lot, that's when I first grabbed my camera.  BP workers began pulling up into the parking lot.  And the area looked as bad as Casino Beach did when Lee splashed oil all over the place.  Immediately after pulling out of the parking lot in Nat'l Seashores, we spotted an area on the sound side of the road, where water had collected in between the dunes, and the sand was brown all the way around it.  Then after doing a second drive-by from Pensacola Beach through Nat'l Seashores, we went to Casino Beach. 

Casino Beach had little tide pools all up and down the beach.  Out of the two we investigated, one looked really trashed.  A sea gull was sitting in it.  When he seen me hesitate, he began squawking and looked up to the sky, then back down to the water.  He splashed at it with his beak, as if to say, "Hey, come look at this shit!" 

So I did.  There's some kind of black shit along the edge of this tide pool.  And there's thick brown bubbly crap as well.  And I know that birds going to die.  There are three other birds sitting on the beach with there legs folded below them, who do look sick.  And there's people everywhere playing in the tide pools and digging in the sand.  And for the first time, I said something to a couple who was sitting in black sand, "Do you know you're sitting in oil?!"  I said it so matter of factly, like how could you miss it idiot, that the dude looked at me like what?  You didn't just say, what I thought you said, did you? 

Surprised at my own words, I said nothing more and walked away.

SEPTEMBER 03, 2011 - TROPICAL STORM LEE - PENSACOLA, FL

SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

SEPTEMBER 15, 2011 - PENSACOLA BEACH & NAT'L SEASHORES