Flooding has finally forced the hand of the Army Corps of Engineers, who appear to be ready to divert the swollen Mississippi to the Atchafalya, which is where the river has been wanting to go for decades.  The problem, of course, has been that if the river switches its course, New Orleans gets stranded.

Interesting to see how this plays out. 

Update: Here’s some video of the floodgates being opened.

The speaker here on the right calls himself “Moose” — I never caught his full name — and works as liaison between Grand Isle and BP.  He’s quite a storyteller, though not quite in Chris Hernandez’s league, & also a charmer.  David C. mentioned, perhaps b/c we were in the basketball gym, that he’s been helping out with the high school team, which seems to be  a point of pride for Grand Isle.  Moose is a Southerner, though not from Louisiana, & I gather he’s been on the island for a few months, helping negotiate financial settlements and smooth over relations between the BP cleanup workers and the local population.

To borrow a Shakespearean coinage, I would trust him as an adder fanged.

His job is to make people happy,to reassure them that BP will “put things right” and support everyone on the ground.  I don’t doubt, I suppose, that he might well be a decent man.  He certainly has a strong dose of physical charisma & charm.  To hear David tell it, he’s managed over the past few months to make himself a part of the Grand Isle community.

Like so much down there, seeing Moose reminded me of my first experience with the aftermath of a major North American oil spill, when I was working on the clean up of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska the summer of 1989, right after I graduated from college.  I’ll try to do another post later on the Moose-equivalent I knew up there, whose name was Rex.    I got to know him pretty well, since we all lived together that summer on the Fv. Optimus Prime, a king crab boat temporarily housing clean up workers.  Another charmer, but I did, by chance, get to hear a little truth from him.

“Corporations are like children,” said Ken Well, a bayou-bred novelist and author of a great book about the aftermath of Katrina, The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous (Yale, 2008), to me in an email a few days ago.  He meant that you have to hold them to their promises b/c, given the chance, they’ll walk away if you stop watching, as Exxon ultimately did after its cleanup.  I’d like to think that BP, whose spill was in a much more visible and populated part of the US, won’t be able to do that.  It certainly was a shrewd move by Obama to get them to pony up a huge cash fund up front.  But I wonder.  Why would a man like Moose really stick around?

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.