You rarely meet a more natural & charismatic storyteller than Chris Hernandez (second from the left below).  He puts his full self behind his narratives, whether he’s spinning harrowing stories about the devastation Katrina caused on Grand Isle or voicing his frustration about the chaos early on in the Deepwater Horizons spill summertime. 

By calling him a storyteller and thinking about his stories as performances, I don’t at all mean that they aren’t true, or reliable, or meaningful.  Just the opposite — it’s in listening to a powerful narrator like Chris that the real facts of a catastrophe can communicate themselves across the gap of lived experience.

But Chris’s palpable authenticity doesn’t exempt him from what we literary types calls the laws of genre, and I found I thought a lot about literary form while listening to Chris describe his experiences of hurricanes and the oil spill.   I thought Chris had two different kinds of stories to tell.  Both were tragic, but they weren’t like each other.  That difference might pose a problem.

The first kind of story, the hurricane story, was familiar & even cyclical.  A “natural” disaster, if you will.  It was the sort of thing that’s been happening on Grand Isle as long as recorded history, or longer.  The storms comes, washes over the island at horrific cost — Chris’s rendition of walking past his own home in the dark after Katrina to find that his father-in-law’s house had disappeared was powerfully moving — but the storm passes, and the community rebuilds.  It’s a narrative that moves fairly quickly, along familiar routes, from tragedy to salvage to recovery.  That’s no consolation, perhaps, for those who lose homes or boats or loved ones, but it’s a story that Grand Islers know how to tell. 

The oil spill disaster was very unlike that story.  It happened in slow motion, in broad daylight, with more plumes of oil perhaps still lurking to wash up on the beach.  Its toxic remnants are still there, under the sand, 3 feet down.  (We brought a shovel and checked.)  The post-spill salvage operation brought several hundred BP-hired workers down to this (literally) insular community, introducing new human chaos to the summer season.   No one really knows that long-term consequences of such a spill, though other large spills, such as the Ixtapa spill in the Gulf near the Mexican coast in 1979 or the Exxon Valdez in 1989, suggest a long horizon.  There’s still lots of oil in both those places today.

What I heard from Chris’s narration of these two different stories, the familiar tragedy of Katrina and the unknowable disaster of the oil spill, was a master storyteller trying, with all the resources at his command, to assimilate the unknown story into the known.  To believe that the long history of cultural and environmental resilience that has defined the human history of Grand Isle can process this disaster as it has so many others.  To borrow the phrasing of Bruce Barcott in the great National Geographic article on the spill, he told the story “As if speaking the words would propel them toward truth.”

I hope he’s right.  I think he’s right.  But I can’t help worrying that oil is a very different kind of thing.

When David Carmodel (red shirt on left) was spinning tales about Grand Isle and hurricane rescues, he spliced in a short aside that made my historicist ears prick up.  Dolphins, he said, are great weathermen.  When they slap their tails on the water, a storm is coming,  Maybe not right away, but sometime soon, so it’s a good idea to listen to them and bring the boat in, gather the family, etc.

That claim — that dolphins are weather-signs, and more specifically that they presage storms — may or may not have much empirical truth behind it, but it’s an old and resonant story.  Shakespeare alludes to it in Pericles, when a fisherman (who, like David and the residents of Grand Isle, lives in intimate contact with the sea) observes that dolphins “never come but I look to be washed” (2.1.25).

I don’t think that David was remembering his Shakespeare, or of the host of other authors from Lucian & Ovid forward who employ this metaphor.  But I do think that this story, whenever it’s repeated, points to a deep and powerful human fantasy about how we want our bodies and our culture to interact with the ocean.  If maritime mammals such as dolphins are communicating with us, and are in sympathy with human experiences, it may be that we needn’t be so merely terrestrial after all.

I’ve written about how dolphins figure an oceanic humanity recently in an article that’ll come out next year in a book collection, The Indistinct Human.  Dolphins are bridge figures that thrive in a world of ceaseless change.  They measure a fantasy of physical intimacy and connection to an oceanic world that’s mostly a place in which human bodies can’t survive.

Or, as I put it in the essay —

Unlooked-for allies and sometimes-reliable weather signs, dolphins are near-humans that remind humans of what their bodies cannot be (aquatic) and what their minds cannot do (foretell storms).  Living in the inhospitable ocean, they are, as a Fisherman says in Pericles, “half-fish, half-flesh,” with their straight-and-crooked bodies astride the boundary between land and sea.

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From left to right, that’s Mayor David Carmodel, Chris Hernandez, a kind of ambassador & jack-of-all-trades for Grand Isle, and a liaison to BP who goes by the nickname, “Moose.”  Three very interesting folks, about whom I’ll post a bit more later.

They are standing on stage in the high school gym.  The waterline after Katrina (or maybe it was Rita?) was up to about waist high on the stage.