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Sparkle (0)
Driving along the Gulf Coast this morning, the oil spill never far from mind, Coldplay’s “Trouble” came on the radio. BP should license that song for their earnest apology ads.
"Oh no, I see,
A spider web is tangled up with me,
And I lost my head,
The thought of all the stupid things I'd said.
Oh no, what's this?
A spider web, and I'm caught in the middle,
So I turn to run,
The thought of all the stupid things I've done."
Complete with unassuming British accent, it’s really quite perfect. Plaintive pleas for forgiveness for all of the trouble they’ve caused, the sticky web in which they’ve caught themselves and us. They didn’t mean it, don’t you see?
Projecting BP onto Coldplay’s melancholy makes me feel almost sympathetic to the corporate giant’s plight. As a Gulf Coast resident, I claim the right to forgive them. I want this oil spill to get fixed, by them, in a hurry. Yes. I am armed to the hilt with hope that the oil spill will not wreak the long-term damage that we have every reason to believe will be wrought. And then I’d like to move on.
Make us whole. Then can we please share a stiff drink and put this behind us?
I am armed to the hilt with denial. Perhaps.
I am writing this article from a coffee shop on the shore of Mobile Bay in Alabama. We are on vacation, an effortless hour east of our home in Gulfport, Mississippi. The kids and I are spending the month of July at a beach house, conveniently toting ourselves back and forth across the Gulf Coast as needs arise for tending. An indulgent luxury, to be sure, as we don’t have an abundance of money to throw around.
But who needs money for a Gulf Coast vacation these days? Never one to let a good disaster go unexploited, record high vacancy rates and a mind for negotiation are this frugal traveler’s best friends. A month at a beach house? Honey, we are just short of seeing signs crying “FREE Beach House with purchase of a Large Sweet Tea!”
In other words, “Come on down, ya’ll! The water’s fine… -ish.”
Please do not let my impudent attitude offend you. This is how we get through disasters in the South. I didn’t put on 20 pounds after Hurricane Katrina because I was sitting around munching junk on the couch. Gulf Coast locals get together and make the most of a bad situation. Every damn time.
Mary Chapin Carpenter wasn’t far off when she said “There’s a hurricane party every time it blows.” Although I would like to point out that it’s prudent for those parties to occur just after the hurricane, not before. Before the storm, you should really evacuate.
My husband, Al Jordan, is a plaintiff’s attorney in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. He was recently on one of my favorite public radio programs, The Story with Dick Gordon. Answering questions about representing local fishermen and other parties suffering damages as a result of the oil spill, he hesitated when Dick Gordon asked him why we stayed on the Gulf Coast after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina. Dick had been taken aback when Al mentioned, in the offhand way we’ve grown accustomed to mentioning these things, that our home was reduced to a slab of concrete in Katrina.
Dick wanted to know why we didn’t leave in the gruesome aftermath of such loss.
The unspoken suggestion we so frequently hear in our minds, “Why are these Gulf Coast residents such insistent gluttons for punishment?”
After the question was asked the second time, Al finally responded in the only way that makes sense to any of us here, "The people. We stay because of the people. It's the reason [my clients] aren't going to leave because their livelihood is gone."
The culture that would make it entirely reasonable for our family to become tourists on our own Gulf Coast shorelines right smack dab in the middle of this crisis? The culture that would see a massive crawfish boil as the only acceptable way to brace for impact of the oil? The culture that would line
