After traveling over one thousand miles from Florida’s Panhandle to Grand Isle, Louisiana and back to document the devastation wrought by the deadly sea of crude oil, I feel confident when I say that BP is not handling the disaster as well as their multi-million dollar TV commercials and newspaper ads would like us to believe. I encountered a cleanup effort that seemed to focus its greatest attention on easily accessible beaches frequented by tourists, leaving more secluded areas awash with death and oil. Boom languished uselessly near the shore as waves swept over and under and around it, allowing the crude to drift freely onto the beaches, bringing with it a ghoulish horde of dead fish and other marine wildlife. A long hike along the beach in Grand Isle took me to a deserted stretch of shore covered with dark brown pools of oil. The carcasses of birds, fish, and dolphins littered the sand and rocks – left under the fiery Louisiana sun to rot and quickly disappear at the hands claws of hungry crabs with more appetite than sense.

On July 19, 2010, John Aravosis reported on a “fake” photo of the Crisis Command Center found on BP’s very own website. The photo wasn’t even one that required hours of careful examination to spot what had been changed in Photoshop; it was blatantly and ridiculously obvious. The Washington Post picked up on the story and reported the following: “Scott Dean, a spokesman for BP, said that there was nothing sinister in the photo alteration and provided the original unaltered version. He said that a photographer working for the company had inserted the three images in spots where the video screens were blank.”

This image spotted by Aravosis inspired this commentary by Jason Linkins in a Huffington Post article:

“So why does a Photoshop image matter? It matters because of the pattern. A seemingly superfluous image on a website, the dispatching of a team of fake reporters, the deliberate — potentially dangerous — obfuscation of oil spill flow… these actions all spring from the same desire, the desire to deceive.”

While I’m hesitant to believe that orders to alter this image came from the top, Linkins raises a point that is sure to spawn debate. Was this Photoshop job simply the work of the photographer as BP claims, or did BP intend for their command center to look more busy with 10 active screens instead of only 7? Neither possibility makes much sense, and it’s possible that we may never know for sure.

I found a second image that had been altered, but the alterations seemed even more innocent than those in the first image. It seemed as if the only alterations made were for the purpose of darkening the over-exposed projector screen to make it more visible. Today a German blogger spotted another image that had been Photoshopped on BP America’s flickr photostream. This image is perhaps the most puzzling of all and yet again, I can’t think of any good reason for altering this photo either.

Despite some people sharing the opinion that the images have been altered to conceal something, it seems unlikely that these images are part of a truly elaborate conspiracy; BP’s flickr account shows dozens of photographs of oiled beaches, marshes, and animals, none of which appear to be doctored. There are some images in which the water looks suspiciously blue, but this too seems to be an aesthetic choice rather than an effort to trick the public. This debacle has left me a bit puzzled, yet one thing remains clear – the Gulf of Mexico will take decades to recover from this man-made disaster. BP’s website shows only living wildlife, much of which is either completely devoid of oil contamination or is in the process of being cleaned.

While they don’t seem to be doctoring any of those images, they certainly aren’t presenting the entire story, which doesn’t have quite the happy ending their photos would lead one to believe. There is still incredible beauty that remains in the Gulf, yet there are dark images of tragedy that should be seen to ensure that we never allow anything like this to happen again. As of July 20th, 2010 these are the numbers of dead animals (not including fish) that have been collected: 2,432 birds, 482 sea turtles, and 62 mammals including dolphins. It’s likely that we will never know the true death count, many creatures will simply be eaten at sea and on the beaches by other animals, others will sink to the bottom, some will wash ashore in difficult to reach areas, and others still will quickly decay in the summer heat before they can be found and counted.

You can see more photos like the ones below that show the less picturesque side of oil contamination and its tragic effects in Part VII and Part VIII:

Cleanup workers on Grand Isle struggle to keep up with the dark oil washing ashore.

A dolphin left to decay on a secluded beach in Grand Isle, Louisiana.

The bones of another dolphin, only yards from the other on a beach in Grand Isle, Louisiana.

An uncleaned and unprotected stretch of beach along Barataria Pass on Grand Isle, Louisiana.

What has consistently bothered me about BP’s cleanup and containment efforts is not simply that they are a multi-billion dollar corporation as some seem upset by, but rather that they seem to prefer to put on a show, instead of coordinating a response effort that would truly minimize the economic and environmental devastation. There are good people who work at BP, I’m sure of it, but a transparent, honest company must have leaders who realize that there is a time to admit shortcomings.

I’ve seen many people question why anyone should even care about the problems of people in another country when our own country has so many problems. My answer to this is simple; you can never have too much compassion. Helping one person does not have to mean ignoring another. It can certainly be overwhelming trying to involve oneself in several causes, all of which seem very worthy and deserving, but I think that it’s important for all of us to do as much as we are able to help as many as we are able.

My friend Amy King is working on a fantastic project to start a library in the community-center of Belle-Riviere, Haiti. Books for Belle-Riviere is collecting books, maps, globes, posters, and school supplies. Books for all ages in Creole, French, Spanish, and English can be donated and if for some reason they run out of room for all the books at the community center in Belle-Riviere, they will simply help to start a second library in another village.

This is a great project to involve your friends, family, and community in and if you need a little incentive to get you in the spirit of giving, all donations are tax deductible.

Books, globes, maps, posters, supplies, and optional monetary donations can be sent to this address:

Books for Belle-Riviere

c/o Amy King

5211 Primrose Ave

Indianapolis, IN 46220

Any checks can be made out to: STA HAITI FUND

To designate that your donation be used to help get these books to Belle-Riviere, write “B4B” in the memo field.

If you need a receipt for your donation of either books or money, just include a note with your donation.

Even if you aren’t able to donate any books, please share this information with others! To everyone who continues to help, you have my heartfelt thanks.

It should be noted that this entry is VERY heavy on photo content (and is very long in general). It may take up to a few minutes for all of the images to load if you aren’t using a high-speed internet connection. You can access a larger version of each image in every entry by clicking on the photo; a new window or tab will open with the larger image, which I highly recommend to see the most detail.

I exited Grand Isle State Park but accidentally made a right turn onto Admiral Craik Drive, which dead-ends just after the gate to Coast Guard Station Grand Isle. The Coast Guard Station is billeted for 46 active duty personnel and 4 enlisted reservists. It’s not a large Coast Guard station by any means, but it directly borders the lagoon where I came across the dolphin jaw in the previous article. Directly to the northeast beyond the lagoon, just a few hundred yards from the station, lies the oil stained beach that was strewn with the bodies of dolphins, left to decay and disappear on the shore.

I made a u-turn and headed back to Highway 1, intent on getting to Elmer’s Island. After seeing the dolphins on the beach in Grand Isle State Park, I had no idea what I might find on Elmer’s. I saw military vehicles parked at a beach entrance and pulled in, parking next to them. There were no soldiers or cleanup workers in sight and certainly no tourists, and as I crossed over the dune separating the parking lot from the beach, I found no one there either. Even as I gazed down the beach in either direction I couldn’t see a single solitary human. The break tents used by the cleanup crews sat empty, flanked by portapotties. Heavy machinery sat idle. I surmised that it must have been lunch time, but I couldn’t think of any reason why the workers should all need take breaks at the same time. It would certainly seem that staggering breaks and even the work itself into shifts would be far more efficient, ensuring that cleanup efforts would be constant, rather than intermittent.

I’ve read more than a few articles which characterize the cleanup workers as downright lazy. Some even go so far as to say that they spend all day under the tents and only scoop a few shovelfuls of sand each day. Undoubtedly there is some truth to these allegations; I too have witnessed many cleanup workers moving slowly and others not moving at all. To imply that all of the workers being contracted by BP are languorous and lethargic would be unfair; many of these workers are locals, equally frustrated by the devastation and motivated to clean it up as quickly as they can. Like everything else raising the ire of anyone watching the tragedy unfold along the Gulf, this is not a black and white issue. The devastation is spread across four states and the response effort I have seen in each is completely different. While there are undoubtedly individual workers who are content to sit in the shade all day, the real problem is management and leadership, both of which seem to be in short supply.

I drove on towards the turnoff for Elmer’s Island, about two miles southwest of Caminada Pass which separates the island of Grand Isle from that of Chenière Caminada and Elmer’s Island. I found the road blocked by two Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office vehicles – one marked Crown Victoria cruiser and a marked pickup truck. Two deputies, a middle aged woman and a younger man sat in the cruiser with the engine running and windows up. I pulled alongside as our windows simultaneously descended. I presented my media pass and told them that I’d like to head out to Elmer’s. The female deputy told me that she’d have to escort me out there and that I’d have about twenty minutes there before I had to leave. She would lead the way on an atv and I would follow behind in my car. Like the official at the command center, she told me that there wasn’t much to see there.

A white delivery truck pulled up as she was about to climb on the atv. She waved for them to stop and approached the truck, asking the driver where he was going and where his pass was. He replied that he was delivering ice and didn’t have a pass. She seemed unsure of whether to let him proceed. As I sat in my car, listening to their dialogue, I wondered what the reason for this roadblock was. Were officials worried that ice trucks filled with journalists or anarchists or foreign soldiers were going to storm the beach? The law enforcement presence on Grand Isle seemed more fitting for a city under threat of terrorist attack than for one experiencing a tragic man-made disaster.

The deputy apparently deemed that the driver of the ice truck was neither a rogue journalist nor an anarchist. She walked back to her cruiser and instructed her younger partner not to let anyone without a pass through while she was gone. Orders given, she set off on her atv, leading our motley parade along a gravel road that cut through the wetlands towards the beach. I could see a small group of people clustered around a truck parked on a side road – they seemed to be gathering samples of marsh grass. Forced to follow behind my escort who I could see checking behind her every few seconds to make sure her charges were still dutifully following, I was unable to stop and explore the wetlands for oil contamination. We continued in a southwesterly direction, the gravel stretching out in front of us for one and a half miles before we reached the beach, a vast area of sand that stretched for nearly four hundred feet to the water’s edge. The ice truck stopped at a staging area and the deputy signaled for me to follow her further toward the water. We drove past several parked cars, military vehicles, tents, and machinery. We kept going until we reached the sand berm and Tiger Dam, several hundred feet away from the staging areas and workers. I exited my car and gathered my equipment as my armed escort remained mounted on her atv.

They had all been right, there wasn’t much to see here. Not because there was no oil on the beach or in the marshes – there may well have been (and I’m certain there was), but because I was unable to see either from my vantage point, still at least one hundred feet from the shore and even further from the marsh. There were only a few solitary workers nearby, none of them on the beach itself. A few hundred feet away to my right I could see a  tent with National Guard soldiers milling around and beneath it. What looked like a Kawasaki Mule 4×4 utility vehicle was parked beneath the tent, it’s occupants still seated and taking respite from the merciless sun. It seemed to be lunchtime there on Elmer’s Island too. I asked my escort if I could walk towards the staging area, but my request was denied. I was told that I could only stay in this one area and had to make due with photographing from only one vantage point.

When I was first told that I would have only twenty minutes to take pictures on Elmer’s Island, I found the time limit to be ridiculously short. How can a photographer possibly document environmental devastation in twenty minutes? As I stood there on the beach, my movements confined to only a small area in front of where I had parked, the twenty minute time limit began to seem more like an eternity. If I had been free to roam about, photographing where I wanted, the time limit would have quickly expired. Confined to only one spot on the sand with absolutely nothing to see from that spot, the time limit was unnecessary – a cruel joke. I took all the photos of nothing that I could possibly take and still had fifteen minutes remaining. I chatted with the deputy for a few minutes. She was a nice woman but her words seemed guarded and carefully chosen. I felt that I could sense an unhappiness with the whole situation – surely no one, law enforcement officer or not, could be pleased with the way BP was handling the disaster. Forced to toe the official line though, she wasn’t willing to say much.

pardon the sheep.

The birds and marsh I wasn't allowed to see.

As I followed my escort back toward Highway 1, I reflected on what I had encountered in Grand Isle, trying to sort out my thoughts and feelings. The trouble with photography is that it’s very easy to tell a story that perhaps differs from the truth, simply by selecting which photographs to show. Perhaps it’s not possible to ever show the truth with any medium; the truth varies depending upon perspective. My experiences in the Gulf have brought me to beaches inundated with thick oil and to beaches nearly devoid of it. I’ve seen workers sweating and shoveling furiously and I have seen workers doing as little as possible. Many news outlets choose to show only photographs that show the cleanup workers relaxing in the shade of tents and only the beaches covered with thick oil, but this is as dishonest as showing only clean beaches and hard working cleanup crews. The late novelist Robert Parker wrote these sage words, “…you probably can’t figure out the truth, if you think you know ahead of time what the truth is supposed to be.”

It’s easy to set foot on the beach with preconceived notions expecting to find conspiracies, but more difficult to separate what constitutes conspiracy from inefficiency and apathy. Rage is a natural response after seeing this sort of annihilation – of wildlife, habitat, culture, and economy. It’s easy to blame and point fingers, and undoubtedly some people deserve whatever blame they receive. More difficult though is the task of questioning ourselves and our own actions.

In America, the citizens are the government, the corporate employees, the cops, the soldiers. The BP security guards blocking the beaches and trying to keep the media out, the police who threaten us with arrest, the Coast Guard officers who seem more interested in protecting the interests of BP than those of the American people, the government officials who are content to look the other way and not dig deeper into the murky reality…..these people are all family, neighbors, friends, fellow citizens, politicians we elect. Their actions are deplorable and perhaps even evil, but they too are citizens.

These man made tragedies continue to occur because these people are afraid of losing their jobs and instead of standing up to the unlawful instructions they are given, they blindly follow them. They are little different from the majority of the populace, who, while perhaps not actively participating in denying access, is certainly content to let it be denied with little more than a whimper. We are quick to affix the blame to faceless entities, CEOs and presidents, and government agencies but we must remember that we are America, we are the citizenship which continues to choose profit and convenience over principle.

“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.” Robert Maynard Hutchins

It should be noted that this entry is VERY heavy on photo content (and is very long in general). It may take up to a few minutes for all of the images to load if you aren’t using a high-speed internet connection. You can access a larger version of each image in every entry by clicking on the photo; a new window or tab will open with the larger image, which I highly recommend to see the most detail.

After capturing hundreds of photos of dark, oily waves rolling ashore beneath the pier, I descended the wooden stairs down to the beach itself. I photographed the workers from the beach now, separated from them by the berm and the bright orange Tiger Dam. I started to hike east across the loose sand in the direction of Barataria Pass, an opening between Grand Isle and Isle Grande Terre where the waters of Barataria Bay merge with those of the Gulf of Mexico. Decaying redfish (Sciaenops ocellatus) dotted the sand, most of them appearing almost mummified by the blazing sun. Their bodies lay belly up, internal organs missing and scaly skin hardened like a medieval suit of armor. Their mouths were frozen open in wide, ghastly frowns, their eye sockets empty and dark.

Plastic garbage bags filled with oil.

As I walked farther east, away from the pier, fewer and fewer workers were present. The sand berm began to get smaller and smaller as I neared the rock jetty lining the shore along Barataria Pass until eventually it disappeared altogether. As I neared the rocks, I could see that they were covered with the dark stains of crude oil, which clung to them and dripped slowly down like thick, cold molasses. The sand behind the rocks was covered with thick pools of oil too, cast ashore by crashing waves. Buffeted by the waves, an oil drenched containment boom foundered against the rocks. The wide expanse of Barataria Pass was open with only a few short booms extending out from the shore, seemingly placed at random and with no real intention of keeping oil from reaching the beach.

The beach along the eastern side of Grand Isle bordering Barataria Pass completely covered with crude oil with no cleanup crews in sight.

The rocks along the pass continued to the north and I followed them. I felt as if I must surely have been somewhere that BP would not want anyone to see, but as an atv zoomed past me heading west its rider waved. With the lone rider past me and not a single soul in front of me, my racing heartbeat began to slow. Before long, my senses were overwhelmed by the unmistakable scent of death. I began to notice bones and bodies on and between the rocks, those of birds and fish. On a large rock, two young seagull chicks were baked into a pile of decaying skin and feathers. They were recent victims, perhaps only dead for a day. A few feet away, the large bones of a brown pelican and its oil stained feathers lay between rocks spotted with oil. Brown pelicans were just taken off the US federal endangered and threatened species list in November of last year. Just beyond the rocks, the beach began to open up, formed by sand that washes through the pass and collects along the rocks. This beach was completely drenched with crude oil and it looked as if a cleanup crew had never set foot there.

The little bit of orange visible between the rocks is boom that has failed to protect anything and washed onto the jetty.

Boom stretches out from the shore a short distance into Barataria Pass, easily allowing oil to flow around it (and over it) into Barataria Bay and onto this beach.

Beyond the oil soaked sand, Isle Grande Terre can be seen across Barataria Pass.

To the west of the rocks stretched the marsh and the lagoon, home to hundreds of shorebirds and wildlife. I walked toward the lagoon and noticed a strange bone sitting on top of the mud. A tiny piece of flesh clung to the end, and as I knelt down to get a closer look I could see that it was the toothless jaw of a dolphin. Crabs scurried about, a testament to the fact that the bone must be from a relatively recent death. I had seen a few pictures of the dead dolphins that have been falling victim to the oil, but nothing really prepares you to see and to smell the death in person. If there was a jaw in the marsh, I knew that there must have been more remains not far off. I walked back towards the rocks and beach, the sounds of the shorebirds wading in oily water receding behind me.

As I neared the northern side of the island and Barataria Bay, more bones dotted the sand. Bigger ones. As I approached them, the stench grew worse and worse and soon I could see the carcasses of what were clearly more dolphins. A pile of large cetacean vertebrae and ribs, nearly devoid of any flesh, lay partially covered in the sand. The bones were marked with spray paint to show that they had been recorded. A cluster of crab burrows surrounded the bones, a clue to where the soft parts had vanished. Closer to the water lay a nearly complete dolphin carcass, most of its skin still present, what was left of the internal organs spilling out onto the sand. It too was covered with spray paint. The smell was overwhelming as I stood over the dolphin, the sight heartbreaking. Never before have I wanted to leave a place as badly as when I stood there on the east end of Grand Isle.

It’s my understanding that deceased animals are supposed to be collected so that an initial examination can be given to ascertain cause of death. For animals where the cause of death is not readily apparent, a more detailed examination is to be administered and in some cases a partial or full necropsy will be performed. If exposure to or ingestion of oil is found to be the cause of death, that would place BP as the liable party, responsible for paying hefty fines and potentially facing criminal charges. It would be easy to prove that BP is responsible if these animals were collected from the beaches, but it seems to me that leaving the bodies on the beach to decay (and with the presence of scavenging animals it can take only a few days for a body to be reduced to little more than bones) ultimately will make it easier for BP to duck responsibility for many of the deaths. It’s very difficult to figure out what the real story is when no one is talking.

Over the 73 days since the oil began to flow, I have come across only a few photographs from this area, none of them taken by photographers for the major wire services or published in any mainstream media outlets. This area was not cordoned off, nor were there any security personnel (or anyone at all) present. While my heart was pounding as I photographed the dolphins, no one stopped me. As abhorrent as the actions of BP are that continue to lead to the deaths of thousands of animals, so too is it appalling that more images and accounts of these deaths are not being shared with the world. These images are hard to view and the description unpleasant to read, but perhaps if more people were able to see the very real toll the oil is taking on the wildlife of the Gulf, fewer people would still be able to insist that the oil disaster isn’t that bad. I was issued a media pass with a number near 300, meaning that 200+ journalists, news crews, and photographers had been on Grand Isle over the course of nearly two months. In this day and age it is almost unheard of for a photographer to capture anything completely unique – there are usually dozens of nearly identical photos taken by different photographers working for the various wire services, all from slightly different vantage points. Why do I seem to have the only photos of these dolphins on the east end of Grand Isle?

Certainly this area is not one where visiting politicians are taken or where the press is given directions to, but it was not difficult to find. When President Obama visited Grand Isle, he was brought to a stretch of beach nearly devoid of oil, patriotic red and blue absorbent pom-poms scattered about, uncontaminated and recently placed. Perhaps if he had been shown what I was so easily able to see, there would be a greater sense of urgency and a very tangible example of what is at stake as the oil continues to spread out across the Gulf. As I’ve said earlier, hope is important, but painting an unrealistic picture for the world is not beneficial to anyone. Damage cannot be fixed if people are not fully aware of what the damage truly is.

As I made my way back toward the pier, I swapped out the memory card in my camera that contained hundreds of photos of the decaying dolphins with a new card. I wasn’t willing to take any chances and though all of my experiences with security and law enforcement so far had been relatively tame, the knowledge of what these pictures depicted left me unwilling to risk  any chance of losing them.

The sun was directly overhead and the petroleum fumes were as thick as the humidity that saturated the 95 degree air. I began to wish that I had brought a bottle of water with me. I should have, but I never expected to walk as far, find what I did, or to linger as long. I had walked more than two and a half miles and my body began to feel the effects of the heat. As the pier came into sight, I could feel my pulse racing and chills running through my body. The sun was blazing down, but in spite of this I was cold. It just wouldn’t do to pass out on the middle of the beach, as much as my body was telling me that it was a good idea. I managed to pull myself up the stairs and onto the pier and then back through the staging area and toward the car.

Several buses had just arrived in the staging area and were discharging hundreds of passengers who would soon find themselves on the beach scooping up oil. I passed through the crowd and made my way back to the car. As I approached the road that I had parked on, I heard bootfalls behind me for the second time that day. This time, it was two BP security contractors wearing blue t-shirts emblazoned with a Talon security crest. “A little bit too late, guys,” I thought to myself, knowing that hundreds of photos of dead wildlife were safely stored on a memory card hidden in my pocket.

“What are you doing?” they demanded.

“Walking, is there a problem?” I replied…not quite as friendly this time, since BP’s contracted security guards certainly have no official right to question anyone, especially in a state park.

“Why are you coming from the staging area? You don’t have any business being in this area.”

“Actually, I’m coming from the public beach,” I responded as I turned and walked away.

Talon Security contracted by BP.

Equally aware as I was that they had no powers to physically detain anyone exiting a public beach, they didn’t follow after me. For a company that is spending millions of dollars trying to reassure people that they are not the most villainous corporation in the world, BP might consider instructing their contractors to be a bit friendlier and perhaps to try not to come across like mob enforcers. By the time I made it to the car, my hands were shaking furiously, not from the ridiculous encounter with security, but from heat exhaustion. My skin was covered in goosebumps and it was only after drinking half a gallon of water, eating a banana, and relaxing for half an hour that I felt almost back to normal.

It should be noted that this entry is VERY heavy on photo content (and is very long in general). It may take up to a few minutes for all of the images to load if you aren’t using a high-speed internet connection. You can access a larger version of each image in every entry by clicking on the photo; a new window or tab will open with the larger image, which I highly recommend to see the most detail.

The road north from Venice was nearly deserted. The few vehicles that passed me in the opposite direction were mostly police cars and military vehicles hauling sandbags. As I drove north, back toward New Orleans, I couldn’t help but feel angry on the behalf of all the people living in and around the bayous who have made their living from the sea for generations. Not only have they had their lives turned upside down and been forced to watch their would-be income floating ashore belly-up, but to add insult to injury their only hope for income now is to work for the very company that ruined their lives.

After hearing the other journalists in Venice telling horror stories about being denied access to the beaches in Grand Isle, I wanted to try my own luck. I made up my mind to continue driving through the evening to Grand Isle, not knowing what I would find there. I had seen photographs of dolphins on the beach there in May and all accounts seemed to indicate that the situation there was dire. It was nearing 11pm by the time I arrived in Port Fourchon, Louisiana’s southernmost port, located in Lafourche Parish. The port is one of the major hubs of the oil industry, with over 600 offshore oil platforms within 40 miles, providing nearly twenty percent of America’s oil supply. This is oil country as much as it is fishing country, and as I drove past the glittering lights of the port, parking lots filled with rig workers and service personnel, it was easy to see why tensions are running high here. I drove as far as I could towards Fourchon Beach, but as I was expecting, the road was blocked by law enforcement vehicles, their blue lights lighting up the night sky.

I was exhausted, and as midnight drew closer I knew I needed to find a place to sleep. The hotels near Port Fourchon and Grand Isle were all filled with BP contractors and government employees. There was absolutely no chance that I was going to drive around in the middle of the night looking for a motel back on the mainland, so it looked like I was going to spend a night in my car. I’m not at all opposed to sleeping in cars, it’s really not much worse than half of the hotel rooms I’ve stayed in. I drove around for a bit looking for a good overnight parking spot; I wanted somewhere that was private enough that I wouldn’t find the state police banging on my window in the middle of the night, but public enough that I wouldn’t find myself totally isolated if something were to go bump in the night. I found a perfect spot right next to the water in front of an empty dock illuminated by the orange glow of a streetlight, in a quiet but populated area near Port Fourchon Marina. The real downside to vehicular accommodations in Louisiana is the heat and humidity. The humidity is inescapable, but a steady, cool breeze was blowing in from the Gulf and across the bayou, seemingly solving the heat issue. I opened the sun-roof, rolled down the windows, reclined my seat and swung my legs up and onto the passenger side dashboard. With a towel rolled up behind my head as a pillow I was pretty comfortable. Within minutes, the cool breeze had filled the car with swarming mosquitoes, not only biting me but also buzzing loudly in my ears. At a certain point once you’ve been bitten by enough of these horrible little insects, your skin starts to feel a bit numb and the individual bites no longer bother you as much. The buzzing, however, never gets less annoying. I was forced to roll the windows up and soon I could feel the sweat trickling slowly down my neck. Slumber finally came though, and I managed to sleep until 6:30am.

With the early-morning sun already beginning to turn my car into an oven, I quickly brushed my teeth with the water from my metal bottle, and with at least my mouth feeling a bit more refreshed I set off in the car towards Grand Isle, just a few miles away. The town was quiet, but the signs along the road loudly proclaimed what the locals thought of BP. “BP. Cannot fish or swim. How the hell are we suppose to feed our kids now?” read one sign. A toilet sat in someone’s front yard, with a placard above it designating it “BP Headquarters.” I pulled into the parking area for one of the beach entrances. It was nearly 8am now, but the beach was still deserted. I could see a few small figures in the distance, but there was no one on the beach for thousands of feet in either direction. The oil was not terrible in this particular spot I had chosen to explore. Small clumps of crude dotted the sand, much like what I had seen in parts of Florida and Alabama.

Bright orange, water-filled Tiger Dams had been placed along the entire beach, about 50 feet from the edge of the water to keep oil from encroaching further up the beach and into the wetlands and neighborhoods beyond. Tiger Dams are interlocking rubber bladders that can be filled with liquid to form a continuous barrier. Typically used to stop floodwaters, the Louisiana Army National Guard had completed an 8.2 mile long stretch of Tiger Dam to stop the flood of oil. A small sand berm had been constructed next to the Tiger Dam, about 2-3 feet high in most places. These barriers seemed as though they would keep oil out of resident’s living rooms, but they certainly weren’t doing anything to stop oil from reaching the beach. At the waters edge, the retreating tide had left behind small puddles of brown oil on the beach, scattered randomly across the sand like fallen raindrops of chocolate.

I drove about a mile farther down the beach, heading east towards the end of Grand Isle. I pulled off into another beach entrance and once again walked down onto the beach. Within moments a Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Deputy roared up on an atv. It’s important to note that I was on a public beach, supposedly open to the public. I was also nowhere near the sand berm or Tiger Dams. The deputy asked me what I was doing and I told him that I was a photographer documenting the oil disaster.

“Do you have a media pass?” he asked.

“No, I just arrived in Grand Isle. Do I need one to be on the beach?”

“Yes, who are you working for?”

“I’m a freelance photojournalist…”

“Well, I don’t know if they will give you a media pass if you are freelance.”

“Where I can I go to at least try and get one?”

“You have to go to the command center at the end of the island. I guess you can’t really hurt anything by being where you are so you can take a few pictures, but you cannot cross over the berm.”

“Ok, thanks.”

“If you cross over the berm we’re going to have major problems.”

“Alright, I won’t cross over the berm.”

“You’ll be arrested if you do.”

He gunned the atv back the way he had come, zooming over the sand. Well, that wasn’t quite the attack by military sharpshooters clad in black that I was almost expecting from some of the stories the other journalists had been telling me the day before, but it wasn’t exactly a warm invite to those who come bearing cameras either. Still, the deputy was more or less cordial, even if he seemed a bit confused that I was on an open public beach, where I, even with a camera slung over my shoulder, was still a member of the American public. I decided that the best thing to do was to go off in search of this apparently hard-to-get media pass so that I could avoid this sort of hassle from every atv-riding cop in town. The Huffington Post has reported that the atvs have been purchased by BP for use by the law enforcement officers, which seems to me like a massive conflict of interests, but I’ve seen few things so far that aren’t. You could write a dozen books and film a hundred documentaries on the ridiculous conflicts of interest going on all around me (and I’m sure several people will soon).

I reached the end of the island and found dozens of air conditioned trailers, all of which looked as if they could be the command center I was looking for. I parked near one that looked promising and walked over to a security tent posted outside. The guard told me I needed to go to the trailer “over there” and pointed to the east. I headed over there only to be told by some National Guard soldiers that they thought the command center was back the way I had come. I retraced my steps and found myself asking another group of soldiers where to go a few minutes later. They directed me to yet another security tent where I finally found two young Guard soldiers posted who seemed to know where I needed to go. I needed an escort, so the young soldier who seemed the most bored with sitting around in the morning heat seemed eager to help me. He led me into a giant tent, the sort rented for weddings and galas, that appeared to be the break room for cleanup workers. One official directed him to another official who finally directed us to the elusive command trailer. With the command trailer virtually impossible to find, I wondered what exactly they were in command of.

Finally, we had found the Shangri-La of Grand Isle, a blue air conditioned trailer filled with men entrusted with the power to issue media passes to the public beach. My intrepid guide, seemingly finding the runaround as ridiculous as I, knocked on the door but got no response. He opened it and we entered, only to be ushered outside by a man with a clipboard.

“You WILL be arrested if you cross the berm,” the official with the clipboard issuing me my media pass said authoritatively.

“ok…” I replied calmly, used to the typical displays of machismo that are par for the course when speaking with police and government officials.

“Do you understand? You WILL be decontaminated and then arrested if you cross over the berm,” he said again with a little more force just for good measure.

“I understand,” I said again casually.

With the pissing match over, we were able to move onto the subject of where I was allowed to go. I was surprised to learn that I could, in fact, go anywhere on the beach (except over the berm or I would be arrested) I wanted and anywhere on the island. Anywhere I wanted to photograph and ask questions was fair game, though it seemed this memo had been lost in translation somewhere between the blue trailer and the rest of the island. The only place I would actually need their media pass to gain access to was Elmer’s Island, where I would need a sheriff’s department escort. The official told me that there was really nothing to see on Elmer’s Island, but I decided that I would be the judge of that so I asked for the media pass anyway, figuring that at the very least it would serve as a sort of paper armor against the roving bands of badge-wearing, atv riding enforcers of berm safety. The media pass was a a small piece of printer paper, about the size of a business card and with the words “Jefferson Parish” juxtaposed against the skyline of a city I am nearly certain is not in Jefferson Parish or anywhere near it. There were fields for the media pass number, the date, and my name.

As I walked away from the command trailer, media pass in hand, I headed in the direction of a giant outdoor wedding tent. I started to snap a few photos when I heard bootfalls behind me. My young national guard escort to the command trailer ran up behind me and breathlessly exclaimed, “You can’t take photos here. It’s US government property.”

So much for taking photographs anywhere on the island I wanted, but the lunch tent wasn’t that interesting anyway, so I decided not to press the issue. The guardsman was a nice guy and I needed to get out onto the beach asap. Ultimately, I was surprised to encounter less resistance. After reading dozens of articles about other journalists and photographers being turned away by BP officials, the Coast Guard, and police I was expecting to meet a similar fate. Still, the simple fact that I was required to seek out permission from my government to photograph on public beaches bothers me. The issue of safety was hardly a legitimate excuse for the red tape either, for just a few hundred miles away in Alabama, oil covered beaches remained open as toddlers ran through the viscous brown ooze.

A national guard soldier and I talked for a while about the ultimate folly of restricting access to the beaches. He felt that conspiracy theories were only furthered when people were denied free movement and available and accurate information. Ultimately, I have been left with a feeling that the red tape and restricted access is more a result of countless government and law enforcement agencies jockeying for control than any real government conspiracy(although the same cannot be said for BP who seems to be cutting corners and blocking access at every turn). This disaster illustrates government inefficiency at its absolute worst. Too many agencies were involved with a poor central leadership and what seemed like almost no communication. It was as if all of the inefficient bureaucracy of Washington had been airlifted to the bayous of Louisiana.

Since my departure from Grand Isle, I have read dozens of stories about the intimidation tactics used by BP security and law enforcement officers on the beaches, many of them comparable to what I experienced. Some of the authors took issue with being told they weren’t allowed to cross the berm and go down to the water’s edge. I usually try to examine these sort of things from both sides, but having been there myself I’m still a little unsure about how I feel regarding this issue. Without a doubt, there are a lot of people out there who are lacking a bit of common sense – some wear official badges, others wear badges with no official authority, and others wear press badges. Does the media have a right to show the world the devastation unfolding on the beaches, in the marshes, and in the waters of the Gulf? Absolutely and without question. Much like free speech itself, other issues quickly come into play and only serve to further confuse things. The question then becomes, should the media have the right to enter oil contaminated areas without wearing proper protection from the oil? I can almost understand the official response of “no” from the perspective of law-enforcement officers who tend to expect the worst to happen – certainly they wouldn’t want a bumbling photographer to trip over his tripod face-first into a pool of crude oil. Really though, if it’s so dangerous to be exposed to oil, why aren’t cleanup crews being provided with respirators and adequate equipment?

With a zoom lens, not being able to walk a few dozen feet further didn’t pose a huge problem for me during much of my coverage, but the question of whether I should have the right to walk those few dozen feet and stand directly in and over the oil has been bouncing around in my mind. Of course, official rules have rarely stood in the way of good journalism, so there will always be a few photographers around not afraid to venture beyond the red tape, or in this case, the Tiger Dams and sand berms.

I made my way down the highway, past humvees and deserted restaurants. Entering Grand Isle State Park, devoid of tourists and onlookers, I parked as close to the staging area as I could get and hiked to the beach, lugging along my heavy camera equipment. The tinted window of a large pickup truck idling with it’s engine on next to the road rolled down as I passed it and I was instantly ready to defend my right to be there. “I have a media pass,” I blurted as the window descended, only to be surprised once more to find the truck’s occupant giving me directions for how to pass around the staging area to reach the pier. The day was proving to be full of strange encounters.

It was about 11am, but the sun was already high in the sky and the temperature had been climbing steadily into the 90′s. A cocoon of humidity made every movement laborious and within seconds sweat was streaming down face. I passed through the staging area, still largely deserted as the workers had yet to arrive on their buses from Houma and New Orleans. No one hassled me as I made my way to the pier.

The scent hit me before I could see it, a thick, invisible wave of nauseating petroleum vapors rising off the ocean and evaporating from the oil drenched sand. A small crew of workers scooped shovel-loads of oily sand into garbage bags in a losing David vs. Goliath battle that saw a nearly infinite tide of oil washing ashore for every drop that was scooped away. From my vantage point only a dozen feet above the workers, I could hear their mutterings as they cursed the obvious futility of their labor. One of the workers looked up at me and jokingly asked me to come down and give them a hand. I shouted back that it looked like they would need more than just me to put a dent in the dark ooze piling up around their boots. “Yeah, we’ll need a miracle,” he replied.

As the men sweated and swore and heaved shovelful after shovelful of oil and sand into their bags, the oil rose slowly from beneath the sand and rolled in on the surf to fill the spots they had just “cleaned.” It was truly a losing battle. A dolphin swam in languid circles a few yards offshore, its dorsal fin creating a small wake in the dark waters, a foreboding reminder of just what was at stake. The waves coming ashore were black and the first several yards of the beach a deep brown, contrasting against the beautiful cream colored sand beyond the berm. The view from the pier offered an aerial view of the disgusting mass that floated on the water. The once-blue waters were now covered with swirls of brown and a deadly rainbow spread across the surface as far as the eye could see. The sun was overpowering and I could barely see the lcd display on the back of my camera to review the images I was taking. It wasn’t until later that I was able to truly see what I had captured, a sickening sight of oil coated waves so horrifying that the liquid pictured is barely recognizable as sea water.

I made my way back through the overgrown field to my car and headed south toward Venice. One might expect to see people lining the streets, protesting and lamenting the slow death of the Gulf in their own backyard, but the streets were silent and the people even more so. In this part of Louisiana, there are two types of people; those whose jobs are oil related and those whose jobs are fishing related. Much of the industry in Venice is related to service and transport for the offshore oil platforms, and it’s easy to understand why few from the oil industry are breaking formation to bite the hand that feeds. Harder to understand are the fishermen, now jobless, but still largely silent. It becomes easier to understand once you realize that they too now rely on BP for a paycheck.

I pulled into the parking lot of the Lighthouse Lodge and Villas, whose website proclaims, “Venice…It’s Where You CATCH Fish!” Two large US Coast Guard Mobile Incident Command Center trailers were parked on the north side of the hotel and two trailers belonging to the US Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 Emergency Response Team were parked to the east. I continued south, passing by another trailer parked at the intersection of 23 and Jump Basin Road, this one emblazoned with the catchy logo, “Jails on Demand.” A tall pile of plastic bags sat to the right of the trailer, filled with oil-absorbent boom.

Everybody's here.

I continued south on Jump Basin Road, which curves into Tide Water Road. On my left I passed by Chevron Road and then Halliburton Road and then Coast Guard Road. I continued south, entering an area of unspoiled natural beauty. The bayou extended in all directions, cypress trees rising out of the water and birds winging their way overhead. It was high tide as I drove south and the last few bends of the road were submerged, the bayou attempting to reclaim, at least for a few hours, what once belonged to it. Venice Boat Harbor Drive led me to Venice Marina, a sprawling complex of docks that sits on the last spit of land before the mighty Mississippi River rushes into the Gulf, it’s murky water spreading out in all directions like tendrils of a curling vine. Time moves differently in Louisiana and nature is always fighting against mankind in a battle to consume the abandoned remnants of civilization. Cranes, houses, cars, and boats can be seen scattered throughout the bayou, rusting as they slowly sink into the rich mud. Abandoned and forgotten by their human owners, this detritus quickly becomes as much a part of the landscape as the herons that wade slowly through the reeds.

Even as hundreds of shrimping boats sat idly in their slips, the marina was alive with activity. News crews stood on the docks and under the pavilion, on boats, and near the marsh, all of them elaborating to their distant viewers the dire situation. A boat docked next to me, discharging another news crew. It’s hull was streaked with brown, the merit badge of a voyage into the floating sea of crude oil. Cameramen shook their heads in disbelief.

Crude oil clings to the fiberglass hull of this boat, having just taken a news crew offshore into the sea of oil.

Oil sheen in the harbor

BP has been compensating fishermen here with $5,000 monthly payments, a sum that many shrimpers and fishermen were able to earn from their catch in just a few days; that is, before the crude oil started to contaminate and kill the marine life, rendering vast areas of the Gulf off-limits to fishing. The shrimp season in Louisiana lasts for only 90 days, but these three months of income provide for the fishermen and their families (and ultimately for the local economies) for the remainder of the year. While the $5,000 checks have ensured the silence of many angry fishermen, there is obvious fear about what will happen if the checks stop coming. Some fishermen and their families are tired of silence, and have been speaking out vocally against BP and what they consider to be a grossly insufficient response.

I talked with a young man named Ben for a few minutes; he used to work as a photojournalist in New York City and was now an inventor. He briefly described a product that he had developed, an environmentally friendly oil dispersant. He had been traveling all over Louisiana trying to find someone in charge who could actually listen to him for a few minutes and consider his product for use or even allow him to test the product on a sample of the crude oil. Like countless other inventors, many of them with legitimately brilliant ideas, he was getting the run-around, being bounced from one “official” to the next, none of them quite official enough to make a decision. This seemed to be the general trend that was beginning to make itself apparent to me – there were lots of people in charge, too many even, but no one had any power to do anything useful. Halfway through a sentence, Ben spotted his business partner waving him over to where he and an environmental officer were talking. Ben sprinted off, hopefully to an ear more receptive to his ideas.

After spending a sleepless night in Biloxi, Mississippi I pulled myself back to the realm of the living and returned to the road at 5am as the stars were beginning to fade into the sunrise. I followed Highway 90 west along Mississippi’s coast, crossing over the new Saint Louis Bay Bridge, reopened in 2007 after being left looking like a collapsed line of dominoes by Hurricane Katrina. On the western side of the bridge, the coast turns south and Highway 90 continues inland, turning into 607 and eventually intersecting with I-10. Continuing west and then southwest on 10, I passed by Slidell, my car bouncing up and down on the infamously bumpy stretch of highway that tests the shocks of any vehicle and then over Lake Pontchartrain on the new Twin Span Bridge, recently constructed to replace the old span that was also left in ruins by Katrina. I was pleased to see that New Orleans looked more and more like its grand old self, having still appeared in bad shape the last time I passed through the city a few years earlier. Grass no longer grew from the roads, signs no longer were covered with rust, skyscrapers were no longer windowless, and while I still passed by neighborhoods filled with abandoned, flood damaged homes, things were definitely looking up.

Tragically, just over 50 miles to the south of the city the beaches, marshes, and bays were being inundated by a vast sea of crude oil. I faced a quick decision; whether to head first to Venice, a relatively isolated town 80 miles to the southeast, or to Grand Isle, 110 miles due south. Separated by only about 30 miles of water, the two towns are geographically neighbors, but require a four hour drive to travel from one to the other. I made my choice to head to the closer Venice, departing New Orleans around 10:30am. I drove south on Highway 23, which skirts the western bank of the mighty Mississippi river.

As I neared Boothville, ten miles north of Venice, the air was filled with the deep, resonating sound of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters taking off and landing. I followed their path across the sky to a landing site at Fort Jackson and watched as a Louisiana National Guard Black Hawk passed low over my vantage point and touched down for refueling. Half a mile south on the right side of Highway 23, I could see even more Black Hawks hovering in the air, waiting their turn to pick up massive sandbags to transport to nearby barrier islands and sandbars to fill in gaps caused by coastal erosion in an effort to halt the flow of oil into the marshes and bays. I quickly drove to the staging area, located off Compactor Road. Thousands of enormous sandbags covered the ground, each weighing 3,000 pounds. I photographed the scene, capturing the helicopters as they lined up, long cables trailing beneath their metal bodies, and then descended to six feet above the ground, allowing a guardsman to hook a load of two sandbags to the cable. Sandbags secured to the cable, the guardsman would dash away to avoid the rotor wash that flings stinging grains of sand and debris through the air like shrapnel as the twin 1,890 hp General Electric turboshaft engines power up and slowly lift the massive helicopter and its payload out of a hover and high into the air.

In sharp contrast to the disorganized cleanup efforts taking place at the beaches, the sandbagging effort was moving like a well-oiled machine. Like any other disaster, the Deepwater Horizon leak was spawning all sorts of conspiracy theories, many of them including tall tales about military involvement and others even insisting that there was no oil spill. Some theorists were peddling tales of martial law being imposed and telling of heavily armed convoys of “battle hardened” soldiers. Well, there I was, standing under the black helicopters themselves, yet what I saw was a much different tale. This operation was going smoothly and efficiently and unlike the poorly equipped civilian contractors on the beach who often seemed to spend more time under the shade of tents than actually cleaning up oil, these soldiers were hustling in the heat. Ten Black Hawks, two twin rotor Columbia 107-II helicopters (the commercial variant of the Boeing Vertol CH-46 Sea Knight), and a Sikorsky S-61 (the commercial variant of the Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King) were working all day, every day. At the time of this article the National Guard has airlifted more than twenty-four million pounds of sandbags. While I’m pleased to see something being done, the actual effectiveness of the sandbags is up for debate; they do not form a completely solid barrier and oil seems to find its way over and through these sandbags with relative ease. If and when the oil leak is eventually stopped, Louisiana will be faced with yet another dilemma; how to remove tens of millions of pounds of oil contaminated sandbags.

I drove back to Highway 23 and headed north about thousand feet, pulling into an old hunting camp on the west side of the highway that I had noticed earlier and where I thought I might find a better vantage point. Another photographer was already parked there, his car window rolled down with a long, white zoom lens protruding. I walked past his still-running vehicle and climbed a wooden ladder into a hunting blind that rose about 10 feet above the ground. To my left I could see the helicopters taking off and landing and in front of me spread a vast field of waist-high brush. Below me, an enormous speckled kingsnake, known to the locals as a salt-and-pepper snake, slithered slowly through a pile of dumped refuse. Having never been content to photograph the action from afar I wanted to get closer to the staging area. Cognizant that there were likely less benign snakes taking shelter from the mid-day heat(copperheads, water moccasins, coral snakes, and three species of rattle snakes call Louisiana home), I left the blind behind and entered the brush, picking my way cautiously through thick grass, vines, and trash toward a mound of dirt about 500 feet away that looked like it might offer a perfect place to photograph from. A merciless sun glared down from the sky, huge Cumulus clouds looming tantalizingly in the distance. I was drenched with sweat by this point and I could only imagine how the uniformed guardsmen were feeling.

I finally reached the little hill I had seen and clambered up the side, camera and lens bag swinging painfully against my hip, as my shoes sunk into the loose dirt. I paused to wipe the stinging perspiration from my eyes and then began to photograph. My position put me directly in front of the staging area and gave me a perfect view of the helicopters as they came in to collect their sandbags. It also put me directly under their path away from the staging area and I felt a knot forming in my stomach as the six thousand pounds of sandbags spun on their cables less than fifty feet above me. I could see the pilots of the 107-II’s peering below their massive crafts out of the protruding bubbles that flank the main cockpit windows, watching as the guardsmen hooked the bags onto the cable and then signaled that they were secure. A guardsman with his feet dangling out of the open side of a UH-60 Black Hawk waved to me as they passed overhead, so low that I could feel the warm wind from the rotor wash pushing down on me and threatening to send my hat aloft. I descended my hill and moved even closer to the staging area, leaping over a mud-filled drainage ditch and entering a grove of what appeared to be some variety of tall, invasive Jatropha shrubs, with leaves reminiscent of a papaya’s. I captured a few more frames as the helicopters rose into the air directly above me but soon the Black Hawks all disappeared and after fifteen minutes of scanning the skies for more I came to the conclusion that it was lunchtime.

A UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter approaches the sandbag staging area sending up a thick cloud of dust and sand.

We left off in the last entry on the beaches of Dauphin Island, Alabama. For many migratory birds heading north in the spring on their 600 mile journey across the Gulf of Mexico from the Yucatan Peninsula, this barrier island is the first land they encounter, and serves as a resting area for several species, many of whom take refuge in the Audubon Bird Sanctuary at the east end of the island. Fall migration can begin as early as July, bringing thousands of shorebirds to the island as well as the birders who come to observe the incredible displays of the winged masses. An amazing 347 species of birds have been reported on Dauphin Island, taking shelter and a much needed rest after their incredible journey and leading some to cite the island as one of the top 10 most important sites for bird migrations in the world.

Unbelievably, toy beach shovels like this were actually being used by BP contracted workers to clean up oil from the beach on Dauphin Island, AL.

A group of three workers contracted by BP to help clean the oil off the beach in Dauphin Island, AL work using only toy beach shovels and pails made for toddlers.

Another photograher captures an image of cleanup workers scooping oil using kitty-litter scoops.

Workers labor behind an ever-increasing mound of oil-filled garbage bags.

I left the beach around 8pm as the last traces of pink faded from the sky. The workers were still shoveling and scooping as I departed, some of them working with a sense of urgency and others moving at a relaxed pace filled with frequent smoke breaks. A cheer went up among the crews as a load of larger shovels was delivered, not enough to equip everyone, but certainly an improvement over the hopelessly ineffective toy shovels being used by some.

Back at my car I opened the hood, checked to see that the engine was still warm, and stuck a can of ravioli between the spark plugs and the oil dipstick. This is a great trick for any on-the-road photographer to know; you get a hot meal without having to search for somewhere to eat. While my dinner “cooked”, I changed into a bathing suit and took a quick and very cold shower next to the beach’s bathroom facility. A few tourists straggling off the beach gave me some funny looks (Who uses shampoo in an outdoor beach shower? Apparently only me.) Feeling somewhat refreshed and with the days sweat, sand, and smudges of crude oil washed from my body, I retrieved my can of ravioli from under the hood and enjoyed a nice, moderately warm meal as I uploaded the images I had just taken.

Stomach somewhat filled and photos safely on my laptop and backup drive, I returned to the road and headed north back over the Dauphin Island Bridge. I stopped again at Cedar Point, where I had photographed the decaying catfish in the previous entry. As I stood on the rocky shore, powerful gusts of wind threatened to knock my heavy tripod over. Gusting at well over twenty knots, the wind pulled the salty bay water into the air, tossing the spray over the rocks and against my face. It might sound too ridiculous to describe the cold salt spray that clung to my face as the Gulf’s way of crying, but as I watched the oil stained marsh grass swaying in the wind, the description seemed appropriate. Waves crested over the oil boom, demonstrating just how hopelessly ineffective the booms were against waves of only a few feet, in protected inland waters no less. In the Gulf itself there was no possibility that these booms could prove themselves to be truly useful on anything but the calmest day.

In this 3 second long-exposure taken at Cedar Point, waves can be seen washing over the boom intended to stop oil from reaching the marshes.

Returning to the protection of my car, I decided to head north to Highway 10 and drive to Biloxi, Mississippi for the night. It was only a 70 mile trip, but as my girlfriend would tell you, for me that usually results in a four hour drive. My bottles of hot trunk-water were empty and I was about ready to do anything for a drink. I pulled into a gas station (not a BP) and purchased a ridiculously overpriced gallon of water that I guzzled half of in under a minute. Thirst quenched, I promptly got myself lost somewhere in a dark, sparsely lit neighborhood of Grand Bay, only to discover half an hour later that I-10 was only half a mile away the entire time. Typical me. Finally on a road I couldn’t get lost on, I made good time getting to Biloxi, taking the exit for Highway 57 and heading south to Highway 90.

Biloxi is a beautiful city, especially at night. Driving over the Highway 90 bridge that stretches gracefully out over Biloxi Bay, one is met with the gorgeous twinkling lights of the city, home to over a dozen casino resort hotels forming a sort of Vegas, Jr. far removed from the deserts of Nevada. Passing under the shadows of the luxurious hotels with their glamorous entrance-ways and million-watt lighting, I headed west to the outskirts of town. I had heard no reports of oil on the beaches in Mississippi and after a few flashlight assisted investigations later, I too could confirm that the beaches near Biloxi were indeed still oil free.

Part V (coming tomorrow) will bring us ninety miles west to New Orleans and then another eighty miles south to Venice, LA.

By this point into my journey west through the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, my skin had called it quits on its old color (oatmeal) and had started its own rapid journey towards a crispy shade of burnt umber. The sun in Gulf Shores was beating down oppressively, thunderclouds hanging ominously near the horizon yet keeping their distance and allowing a merciless heat to wrap its heavy arms around everything that moved. The humidity was as high as it could get and sweat poured from my flesh like the rain that stubbornly refused to fall. My bottles of water were no longer cold nor even cool, even in the trunk of my car they had become unbearably hot, the water rendered as useful for quenching thirst as a handful of sand.

Having heard reports of other members of the press being hassled by law enforcement and BP security, my usual paranoia was magnified to full alert. Photographers are easy targets and our memory cards even easier, so I was anxious to get the images from my cards to the relative safety of my laptop, slowly roasting in the trunk along with my water. After filling my memory cards with photographs, I returned to the otiose shade of the car to upload the images. Once on the laptop, I backed the images up onto an external hard drive….one can never be to safe. With the tragic photographs of the beaches of Gulf Shores, Alabama doubly saved, I decided to continue my travels west.

The gulf coast is not the ideal place to travel by vehicle; it is dotted with dozens of bays, peninsulas, lagoons, and barrier islands that make traveling in a straight line west impossible. My next destination was Dauphin Island, Alabama. In retrospect, I should have taken the Fort Morgan Ferry across Mobile Bay directly to the island. My brain, scrambled by 95 degree temperatures and the constant inhalation of the sickly sweet scent of light sweet crude, opted to take the nearly two hour long drive around Mobile Bay instead. I can’t complain too much about the long drive; this is one of the most beautiful regions of America and in any other situation I could easily spend weeks exploring the old Southern towns. A light rain began to fall as I drove north, then west, and then south, taking a horseshoe shaped path around Mobile Bay.

The sun was beginning to dip below the horizon, but night in these parts comes slowly and I knew that I still had a few hours of good light remaining. Mobile Bay seemed to be free of oil in all of the places I checked to the east of Highway 193, but the west side was not so lucky once I reached Cedar Point at the north end of the Dauphin Island Bridge. A yellow oil boom stretched out across the water in an attempt to protect the marshes to the north of the fishing pier, but oil had obviously managed to make its way past the flimsy barrier, coating the shore and marsh grass. A decaying catfish floating belly up rolled slowly in the waves from side to side, sliding over oil covered rocks. This was the first dead creature I had come across and while death is never pleasant to witness, I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t a dolphin.

I made my way over the Dauphin Island Bridge and onto the island, parking at the Dauphin Island Pier. A staging area was busy with activity and as I was readying my gear a buss rolled up and discharged a new group of cleanup workers. I trailed behind the workers down to the waters edge. The oil on Dauphin Island was washing ashore in large quantities, but unlike in Gulf Shores, where the oil was collecting in thick puddles on the shore, the oil here was in little silver dollar sized lumps. There were millions of these oil-cakes though, rolling up with each wave quicker than the workers could scoop them up.

I was dismayed to see that the cleanup crews were poorly equipped; some had big shovels, but many were using only small kitty-litter scoops, while others were even relegated to using lamentably ineffective toy beach shovels of the sort sold at dollar stores for toddlers. Even worse, others were using modified sports drink bottles with the bottoms cut off as scooping tools. Surely, I thought, BP could afford to equip its contracted employees with better equipment as soon as they arrived at the beach. With hundreds and thousands of little clumps of oil washing ashore every few feet, cleaning the beach with kitty-litter scoops and baby shovels was hopelessly and repulsively pointless. Ever the rationalist, I tried to come up with a reason to explain the problem from the other side, but with the oil leak on day 50 I could think of no reason why BP couldn’t manage to equip its troops with effective equipment so long into the disaster. Despite the obvious scent that accompanied the arriving oil, not a single worker was wearing a respirator.

At first I thought that I wasn’t speaking loud enough to be heard over the crashing surf. Then I thought that perhaps BP had hired only deaf-mutes as cleanup workers. It’s a bizarre and unfamiliar sensation to a human, to have a greeting of “hello” or “how are you?” go unreturned. For most of us, the response is a subconscious reaction, but when your paycheck depends on your silence, even human decency falls by the wayside as the oil washes ashore. Were I asking questions such as, “Do you personally blame BP for this horrifying destruction of pristine beaches?” I could better understand the silence, yet many workers refused to even look in my direction. Not all of them were unfriendly though, some even came up to me to ask if they would be in the news. The crew leader told me that lights would be set up and that they would be working until 11pm.

Some of the workers on the beach were professionals contracted by BP, working for United States Environmental Services, which despite the very official, government agency sounding name is actually a private corporation specializing in emergency response services for oil spills and other hazardous materials. These better-equipped workers were very cordial and unlike most of the bussed-in workers they didn’t seem to be afraid of speaking to the press, though of course no anti-BP sentiment was expressed. As I moved through the crowd of workers putting on bright yellow rubber boot covers and black rubber gloves, even more workers arrived and began ambling toward the shore. These were clearly not professional oil remediation workers, though it takes little training to scoop a never ending tide of crude oil into plastic bags. The bags of oil and sand began to pile up and every so often an Environmental Services truck would drive down the shoreline to collect the filled bags.

I chatted with a news crew from the BBC Russia, who were interviewing beach-goers. Their news organization had equipped them with only a small point and shoot camera and a hand-held recorder and they jokingly asked if they could trade their camera for mine. They left to continue on to Gulf Shores and I lingered on the beach to continue photographing the cleanup efforts. By this point, the sky was beginning to darken but with my trusty 85mm Canon lens that has a maximum aperture of 1.2, allowing me to continue photographing the scene without a flash well into the evening.

Boom used to trap oil sits on the beach, ready to be deployed.

Lagoon Pass has been blocked off to prevent oil in the gulf from entering Little Lagoon. Gulf Shores, Alabama. This panorama is made up of 42 high resolution images, stitched together to allow a 180+ degree field of view. The light brown coloration on the rocks in the lower right of the image is crude oil left behind by a high tide. The Gulf of Mexico is to the right and Little Lagoon is to the left.

The previous entry left us in Gulf Shores, Alabama and I think it’s important that we linger there for a bit longer before journeying farther west. I’ve spoken to countless people as I have been on the road and so many of them have been echoing the same sentiment that the media isn’t giving them the big picture. Some have been quick to run up the conspiracy flag, yet I’m more cautious about flinging accusations. I have definitely seen some excellent reporting and fantastic coverage of this disaster, but unfortunately so many articles are written and newscasts given without any firsthand knowledge or experience. This epidemic of press-release journalism results in incomprehensible numbers being tossed into the airwaves without any real understanding of the significance by those doing the reporting. 1,000 barrels, 5,000 barrels, 200,000 gallons, 1,000,000 gallons… The numbers are constantly changing, and understandably so, as the real scale of this tragedy becomes apparent. Without seeing the oil stained shores firsthand though, it is difficult to report on the true nature of the spill and impossible to correlate vague numbers with real world damage in a way that makes sense to the reader/listener/viewer.

Large pools of thick crude oil and contaminated seaweed coat the sand on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama. The rental properties bordering the beach were largely empty, many renters choosing to vacation elsewhere for the summer.

While incomprehensible and continuously fluctuating numbers abound, one thing notably absent from so many reports is hope, something that is so vital and intrinsic to the American spirit. In many of my photographs that you will see published here and in the days to come, you will notice that I often try to capture in the same frame both the devastation wrought by the oil and the natural beauty that still abounds beyond the shoreline. There is an invisible toll that the oil is taking on the environment as it deals a dark hand to innumerable living organisms, yet there is still life that prevails in the face of this ominous and toxic invasion. The tragic effects of oil in the Gulf of Mexico and even in the waters beyond will remain for decades, yet as with so many other tragedies there will always be amazing stories of survival.

While there is room for hope, now is indeed the time for outrage too; a time for all of us to question our leaders and ourselves, to evaluate the toll of our oil dependence. It is difficult to balance this outrage with optimism and even more difficult to work realism into the mix. As much as it is impossible to place the blame for this disaster on any one person (though many will try) it is equally impossible to ignore the undeniably important role that oil plays in the lives of even the most ardent environmentalist. As with so many issues, especially those pertaining to the environment and to the livelihoods of so many, it is not a case of left versus right, Democrat versus Republican, American versus British, but rather one of working together to fix the problem, clean the mess, and ensure that it never happens again. In our industrial world oil is a necessity, yet so is the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the environment we live in.

We left off in the last entry in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Gulf Shores is a coastal resort town dotted with beachfront condos and large rental houses. Usually booked solid through the summer, these houses and condos were largely empty, rentals canceled and trips planned to beaches not enshrouded by oil. The small pass leading from Little Lagoon north of Gulf Shores into the Gulf of Mexico had been blocked off to prevent oil from washing into the lagoon, home to countless birds and other wildlife. Brightly colored booms lay pathetically in the water of the pass on the gulf side, surrounded by oil sheen on all sides. Cleanup crews worked slowly on the east side of the pass, fighting a losing battle against giant blobs of oil washing ashore.

As I mentioned in the last entry, there were still families on the beach, apparently determined to get their money’s worth of vacation in. The sight of thick brown puddles of oil coating the beach was a truly sad sight to see, but the thought of young children running through the toxic goo was tragic. I noticed a group of men fishing from the shore and asked them if they actually intended on eating their catch. “Of course,” one of them replied, “it’s going to take more oil than this for us to not eat the fish.” He went on to tell me that he had been to the beach more in the last two weeks than he had in the previous ten years, not knowing whether he might ever be able to enjoy the beach again in his lifetime. This seemed to be the prevailing sentiment among many of the beach-goers, obviously an understandable sentiment, but one which also begs the question of why we seem to value things the most only when we are about to lose them.

A great blue heron eats a fish caught from oily waters on the west side of Perdido Pass

Hundreds of feet of thick pipe lie on the beach. The long pipe was used to dredge sand from the beach of Gulf Shores, Alabama to fill in the entrance to Lagoon Pass, preventing oil from entering Little Lagoon.

A Coast Guard aircraft flies low over the beach of Gulf Shores, Alabama.

Passing by several staging areas I noticed a significant lack of Coast Guard presence. There were a few official vehicles here and there and the occasional aircraft, yet I found it odd that the military branch supposedly in charge of the cleanup and containment operations was largely absent. To be fair, this is a massive disaster, and I chalked their absence up to the fact that the eastern coast of Alabama was still pretty far from the worst of the spill so perhaps they were simply elsewhere. I would certainly find out the answers to many of my questions as I traveled west.

Many local communities have complained about the media scaring away tourists with horrific descriptions of oil soaked sands, dying creatures littering the shore, and toxic fumes. Unfortunately, there is truth to both sides of the story, depending largely upon where one visits. Many beaches are relatively free of oil and some have so far been spared entirely. Others are covered in thick, dark pools of it, horrifically splattered across the sand like a tragic Jackson Pollock painting. One thing is for certain; if you are considering visiting the gulf states and don’t really care for swimming and sand, now is the perfect time to visit – rental rates are low, crowds are nonexistent, traffic is light, and beauty still abounds.

A woman and child dodge oil as they walk on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama.