What the Spray Allowed

On the night of the fourteenth of September, 1997, in the first squall band of a blow that never got a name, a man went over the rail of a shrimp boat working the inside grounds off Cameron, Louisiana. The boat was the Coralee B, sixty-two feet of wood and rust out of Cameron, named for the captain’s mother. Junius Hebert was the man: twenty-nine, out of Hackberry, the lead deckhand, with a wife and two little girls and a laugh that carried over the engine. The sea that took him did not splash. He was working the winch on the starboard side, and the first green sea stood on the deck amidships, and the second one came over the rail where he was standing, and when the deck cleared the winch was running empty and Junius was gone.

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Drowning in Oil and the Suffocating Shore

The British Petroleum oil spill currently poisoning the Gulf of Mexico and saturating the American coastline with a thick, brown, three-inch, frosting of petroleum gunk, is both tragic and completely expected.  When “Drill, Baby, Drill” becomes the hubristic political mantra of a radical wing, the end result of such an insane and insensitive notion is the punishment currently shattering the shores of Louisiana that will shame the previous, and preventable, Katrina damage by a magnitude of suffering humanity and rotting wildlife.

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