For a good number of years my father kept his boat at Whiskey Island, a marina located directly at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland. Whiskey Island was a very convenient marina, especially since my dad’s business was downtown and a boat outing at lunchtime could be a real option on summer days. The downside to having a boat at Whiskey Island was having to wait in a flotilla of other boats in a no wake zone for the Conrail Bridge to rise or for an ore tanker to clear the shipping lane before you could to gain access to Lake Erie. One day I was complaining to my dad that my boating party of 4 had had to wait an hour for the railroad bridge. As soon as one train would pass, another came along. And we sat, in that unlucky flotilla of other boats, in the hot sun waiting to get out into the lake. “No, no, that’s a good thing,” my dad said. And he patiently explained that the steady stream of railcars meant that goods were traveling to and from port. That each ore ship drawing up the Cuyahoga (a sight to see if you’ve never experienced it) – was a load of steel to be smelted. That the crushing recession we had been living through in the early 80′s was coming to an end. He was right and, by that fall, the recession was officially over.
This weekend I drove my son to a summer camp somewhere near Paducah, Kentucky and on the way home I started to run out of gas. Let me say right now that I am not the sort of person who drives on an empty tank of gas. I know those people exist (I am, in fact, married to one of them) but I usually am compelled to fill up as soon as the needle on the gauge reaches the last quarter mark. My on-board computer told me I had 40 miles before the tank was dry, but I had been driving on this road all day and there really wasn’t a regular array of available exits with gas stations. I plugged in “Fuel” in my navigator and wound my way through back roads until we came to a service station. The only service station for miles.
It was a BP Station.
All the smugness of driving a hybrid and eating organic, locally grown food and eschewing high fructose corn syrup and reducing my carbon footprint was negated the moment I listened to my navigator and followed this breadcrumb trail to the nearest gas station. Now I had no choice, I could not make it back to the highway and on to the next exit. I had to buy my gas from BP. The irony of the situation was not lost on my traveling companion who bravely suggested I consider my purchase a donation to the clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico. To add insult, the piped in music playing at the pump was “Good Vibrations,” the Beach Boys classic. I bought $10 worth of gas, enough to get us back on the road and within range of gas and food. But the irony of the situation was not lost and it reminded me of my dad’s admonition so many years ago.
For me the Gulf of Mexico is the lake waiting beyond the railroad bridge – where the horizon meets the water and time endlessly marches on. It teems with life and generous space. But to the fisherman, the oil drillers and charter captains, it is a rich resource to plumb. The fact that there are oil deposits in the Gulf is a good thing. It is because of the rich natural resources it holds that the states fronting it have been able to grow and prosper. That doesn’t begin to excuse the enormous lack of judgement on the part of BP, Transocean or the federal government agency that was in charge of monitoring this, and other, deep ocean sites. But it does make feel a little bit sheepish to think of that young girl stamping her foot at the indignity of having to wait for the train to pass.
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