Still Waiting

The Gulf Coast is accustom to battening down the hatches and reading itself for the next disaster to drift in with the tides. You know hurricane season is nearing when your grocery bags begin sporting tracking charts so elementary schools can follow the path of the Andrews, Opals, and Katrinas. The lines at the checkout, the filling of every available container with water, the waiting and wondering, watching the progress of that dark patch gathering speed as it lurks just offshore. Some hurricanes rip through the region in a matter of hours, some crawl through over the course of days pouring all that water soaked up from the gulf down to flood rivers, streets, homes and shops. Some particularly delusional ones loop hundreds of miles around for another pass to see if they can find a tree left standing or a roof still intact. Over the years, as we waited, we looked down in shame to mutter, “just let it go east, or let it go west, please don’t let it land here. Let the destruction and the loss and the years of struggling to rebuild pass us by.”

But the latest dark mass on the horizon refuses to limit its appetite to a few hundred miles of the region but is slowly, irritatingly oozing its way shoreward. And this time, the Gulf is slated for an economic devastation the Southland hasn’t seen since Sherman went on a torch lit parade from Atlanta to the sea. The oyster harvest has stopped, the shrimp boats are tied up in Bayou La Batre, the fishermen now volunteer to deploy miles of booms to protect the delicate fishing grounds that are the livelihood of the area.

This disaster's extent they can not chart though they measure the tides and calculate the currents. It has been lurking offshore for weeks as its harbingers of death, those first small clumps of black tar wash ashore from LA to L.A. Every morning, I follow the growth of the slick knowing it will soon land on those sugar white beaches and wash into the rivers and bayous. That is when the real struggle will begin.

I think perhaps this hurricane season, with its barely predictable furies, may come as a relief.

*Gulf Oil, Caudled Milk, Acrylic, Oil Marker, paper collage on panel, 2009

In a side note, this painting was created last year for a series on what it means looking back at the South. It is not meant to implicate the now defunct Gulf Oil Company in the current state of affairs