In 1992, I left my home state and moved to Colorado, and I adopted this gorgeous area as my home. When people asked where I was from, the easy answer was Colorado.
But this wasn’t right. We’re from where we’re from. It took two disasters to pound that through my skull.
I am a Louisianan, and as more septic material from the Deepwater Horizon well leaches into the Gulf of Mexico, my heart is breaking for what I now call, without hesitation, my home state.
I get it; it’s a cop-out. But try getting plunked down in a Cherry Creek middle school as the only kid with an accent, a lazy drawl from the sticks of north Louisiana at that. It took this ugliest of ugly babies, a baby no one wants to hold, to finally break the last resistance.
Part and parcel of my newfound affection comes from a desire to commiserate with my fellow parishioners so profoundly shafted for what will be, most likely, the very last time.
What no one has dared say is that a way of life that pre-dates the founding of the country is over. I doubt any of the think tanks, national committees, federal offices, technocrats or other various and sundry bums has any idea what to do with a coast full of fifth-generation fishermen floating on poisoned waters. At this point, they may as well be stuffed and dropped in a museum. The salt marsh and Gulf fishers are dead as King Tut.
It probably will take awhile for the ramifications to truly sink in here at my adopted home, and like most things we will notice only when it begins to personally affect us. The next time we need a pound of shrimp, for example.
Mostly, we will try to keep it out of mind. Unless you’re the crackpot in Boulder trying to meditate the well shut, you probably feel pretty powerless to do anything about it.
A gaggle of Internet cranks, with Dmitry Orlov leading the pack, has pointed out that the United States finally has its very own Chernobyl. Just like the poor schmoes in the Soviet Union, we started nibbling on the hook of own unbeatable technological magnificence, and just like the Soviet Union, we’re getting snatched out of never-never land into the poisoned marshes of reality. Maybe we can grab onto an oil- soaked pelican for a life jacket.
Just like the Soviets chasing after surplus energy, we got what we wanted and a lot more than we bargained for. Gas is estimated to be cheap for the summer driving season, but if hurricane season churns up the Gulf, the United States taxpayers might find themselves footing the bill for a cleanup of every pond, gulch, swamp and neighborhood within 20 miles of the southern coast.
Having grown up around Louisiana politics and power structures, passing the buck is a fine, upstanding tradition that’s been polished to a high sheen. But to watch it on a grand scale is a treat. No one is sure which way the political wind will shift, but everyone is scrambling to not be downwind of the dung heap.
There probably won’t be any more soccer moms glibly chanting “drill, baby, drill” for the next few months — not until gas begins its steady upward drift. But powerful people, including a former president of the United States, support opening the Green River Formation in northwest Colorado for shale oil extraction.
There is much bowing and scraping and assurance that such things are safe, secure and environmentally sound — this is, after all, the United States, where such things do not happen.
Jonas Hogg (jonas.wright@ ) of Denver is a writer and photographer.
