2010-05-30: Shades of Santa Barbara

As Mr Mo knows all too well, I am apt to be teary-eyed and a bit surly after I emerge from another round of reading about the catastrophic BP gulf gusher, for all of the same reasons that other people are in tears of grief and outrage about the fish and birds and marine mammals killed, the beaches and wetlands irremediably destroyed. It isn’t just American shorelines and livelihoods that are mortally jeopardized: Mexican and Caribbean shores and workers stand to be victims as well. As I write this, the gusher is still going strong, with no solution in sight for weeks to come. With every passing day, the potential for damage beyond the limits of the Gulf increase exponentially: the eastern seaboard of the U.S. may be affected, and even Europe may get a taste of oil via the Gulf Stream.

To all this, I add my memories of going to the beach after the much smaller, but still calamitous oil spill off of Santa Barbara in January 1969.

We didn’t go to the beach more than a handful of times each summer: although the beaches look pretty close on a map, it was a fairly long drive on the winding roads through the coastal mountains from our home in Tarzana to our usual beach, Zuma. (Santa Monica beach was closer, but my mom did not want to deal with traffic nor parking issues.) After the spill, the aftermath of such outings wasn’t just an inevitable painful sunburn, but also nearly always discovering patches of oil and tar on my skin after peeling off my swimsuit at home. It didn’t matter that I might not have actually seen any oil anywhere on the beach (though there usually were streaks on the sand, and nearly always oil just below the surface, as we would discover when making our sand castles) — visible or not, I ended up having to repeatedly scrub and scrub and scrub parts of my skin after every outing. 

And now, because of criminal negligence, rampant deregulation, and holdover industry toadies still infesting the Department of the Interior, the Gulf of Mexico is on its way to being irreparably damaged — and my skin is tingling just as it did when I was a young teen. But perhaps it is my conscience, and not my skin, that is tingling: I write this knowing that in a few hours I will be driving Mr Mo to the Marseille airport, burning hydrocarbons as we go.


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