ON JUNE 17, the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection et al., and the city of Destin, along with a lot of folks in the tourist industry, breathed a sigh of relief. The court held that the state could rebuild beaches, that rebuilt beaches were public, and that beachfront homeowners were not due compensation for what they claimed was “taken” from them.
But no one danced in the street with joy or jumped from the Destin Bridge in despair. Except for the beachfront folks who sued, city officials, the TDC, and a handful of people who had wanted the case to be all about property rights and “judicial taking,” nobody seemed to give a rip. Apart from the short Associated Press story that was expanded to reflect local views and an editorial or two, Panhandle newspapers had surprisingly little comment on the subject. A few days after the decision, one of the litigants wrote a column in the Destin Log arguing, more or less, that because his beach had not been nourished and probably would not be for a while, his beach was still private—the picture of the author, tuxedoed and smiling, seemed to underscore the difference between those who claimed to own the beach and the ones they wanted to exclude, the difference between upper crust and lower. The comments that appeared with the online column showed little sympathy for him or his cause, but few bothered to comment. When compared to the acrimonious debate that preceded the decision, the response was a near-deafening silence. Some locals suggested that the city should sue the ones who had filed the original suit so taxpayers could recover some portion of what had been spent winning the case. Others asked if the private beach owners were going to allow cleanup crews to trespass on their sand to get the oil when it washed ashore. Then, a few weeks later, the county agreed to leave the beach claimed by the column writer’s condominium out of the coming restoration project, a move some felt might have prevented all this controversy at the outset. The agreement still had to be approved by an administrative judge but with that compromise, for the moment at least, things settled down.
As for the good old boys and good old girls who had wandered the beaches as if they were their own, the decision (if they knew there was one) had little impact on their lives, so they paid it no mind. What they wondered, along with everyone else, was whether or not the folks who were supposed to be in charge would clean up the beach so they could wander it again. Oil was already washing up on Okaloosa Island and it was almost into Destin Pass and the bay. Oil was also threatening to halt the dredging of the pass and the nourishing of Holiday Isle. Although the antinourishment folks hinted at more litigation, most figured that the highest court had spoken and that was that.
Four days later, on June 21, more than sixty days after the blowout, I loaded my family and Libby the Lab for our annual trip to Seagrove Beach. My mood was somber. During the week before the trip, I had followed news that had become increasingly depressing and bizarre. Someone had finally got hold of BP’s 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf and discovered that among the “sensitive biological resources” that the company was going to protect were walruses, sea otters, sea lions, and seals. Signing off on this assessment was a “national wildlife expert” who just happened to have died four years before the plan was submitted, not that it mattered to the Minerals Management Service. Apparently unconcerned with logic or facts, mms approved the plan, which explained, finally, why BP didn’t have a clue what to do when the well blew.
In a sardonic attempt to look on the bright side, someone observed that if BP could reanimate the dead, and get the deceased to sign this “dumb-assed report,” restoring the Gulf Coast should be a piece of cake.
Oil-fouled Pensacola Beach. Redneck Riviera beaches from Gulf Shores to Pensacola were hit hard. The farther east and away from the spill the beach was, the less the damage. Courtesy of U.S. Air Force. Photograph by Tech. Sgt. Emily F. Alley.
Things were not going well for BP. Its stock lost nearly half its value as word circulated that the federal government was pressuring the company not to pay dividends until the damage to coastal economy and ecology was paid in full. Then, on day fifty-four of the spill, as BP once again upped the estimate of how much oil was flowing into the Gulf, state and local officials in Alabama issued an order that only vessels working on containment and cleanup could go through boom-protected Perdido Pass. Some locals on WaveRunners had been jumping the booms like they jumped waves in the Gulf. Unfortunately, sometimes they landed on what they were trying to jump, damaged the barrier, and let the oil in. So the governor and Pleasure Island leaders closed the pass to all recreational boat traffic, including charter boats going out. With that, fishing from the “Red Snapper Capital of the World” ceased. What government regulations on size and number had threatened, BP and the blown well accomplished. For the foreseeable future, fishermen were out of business.
Frustration continued to grow. Even as the passes into the bays and marshes were being closed, counties along Florida’s Redneck Riviera began demanding that they be allowed “to secede from the unified command of the oil-spill response and declare independence from everything but BP’s money.” According to the Destin Log local officials wanted “BP out of the decision loop.” Since the Unified Command seemed incapable of keeping the counties informed of the progress of the oil, the counties wanted to set up their own warning system. They wanted to deploy booms to protect their beaches and bays without having to wait for the Coast Guard to tell them it was OK. They wanted to build their own berms when and where they felt the need. They wanted to try their own ideas and do what had worked in the past without having to seek permission from anyone. True, they were only making a request, but in it was the implied threat that they were going to do it anyway and they dared the government to stop them and BP not to pay.
Getting BP to pay was not a sure thing. As the first fingers of oil washed up on Orange Beach protesters gathered at Perdido Pass to listen to environmentalists familiar with Exxon’s response to the Alaska oil spill tell Alabamians to expect BP “to break every promise it is not forced to keep.” A “testy” letter from the Coast Guard to BP’s chief operating officer telling him to pick up the pace of containment in anticipation of the president’s imminent arrival on the coast was greeted with skepticism by folks who wanted the pace picked up no matter who came down from Washington. A lady who owned a condo out on the Fort Morgan peninsula and rented it most of the year was getting cancellations. So she called the BP Spill Service, and during “two very long and complicated telephone calls” she learned that to file a claim she had to give them her “life history, ss#, tax returns, etc.” When one guy on the phone “assured [her] that all the info would be secure,” it was all she could do not to say, “But this is BP! How secure can anything be?”
As cancellations at Gulf Shores and Orange Beach increased, over to the east, where the oil had not reached, chambers of commerce and tourist development councils were telling folks looking for a summer getaway that on their beaches “Serenity is now more attainable than ever” and more affordable than it had been in years. Seafood restaurants near the coast reported doing a booming business as locals anticipated the price of everything from the Gulf would be going up and they wanted to get in one more taste before it did. Then, to add perhaps even more urgency to the message, on June 12, a storage tank that had been on the Deepwater Horizon rig washed up on Panama City Beach, fifty-four days after the rig had exploded. If debris from the explosion could make it, the oil could not be far behind.
Finally, BP seemed to be getting the message. Complaints of the halfhearted and ineffectual measures taken to protect the Alabama coast brought more pressure from the White House. The company responded by hiring private boats, “Vessels of Opportunity” they called them, to go out into the Gulf to look for oil and skim it when they could. BP also stationed a two-hundred-ton freighter off Destin to serve as a decontamination station to clean boats coming in from the toxic waters. Most of the Vessels of Opportunity came from the coastal fishing fleets, and the money helped cover some of the cost of lost charters. All this was well and good, but still folks wondered why more than fifty days had passed before the company launched this full assault.
Others knew why. The oil giant was in the middle of a public relations disaster that threatened it as surely as the environmental crisis threatened the coast. Efforts to muzzle the press and keep workers from talking to reporters made little difference as the oil washed up. The underwater oil plume that BP so long denied even existed was real and rolling in. Once scientists finally got the information they needed, the estimated flow into the Gulf rose to 2.6 million gallons a day. The “modest” impact so cavalierly talked about proved to be catastrophic instead. CEO Tony Hayward became the poster child for how to make a bad situation worse. The company’s upbeat commercials assuring everyone that it would “make this right” were greeted with hoots of derision, and Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen wrote that BP’s effort reminded him of a scene from the movie Animal House in which a smooth-talking fraternity man explained to the pledge whose brother’s car he had just destroyed—“You f***** up. You trusted us. Hey, make the best of it.”
Making the best of it was getting harder and harder. For a number of years my buddy Mark and I had taken our sons fishing on the Huntress out of Destin. We were scheduled to go out again on June 30. But on June 15, day fifty-seven of the spill, I got an e-mail from Captain Mike. “The reports of oil were not good,” he wrote. “It’s now four miles off beach.” And not just sheen, he said. “I’m talking the real deal big thick ugly mass.” He and his mate “Groovy” were “going to try and fish till they shut us down,” but no one knew how long that would be. That same morning the lead story in the New York Times ran with the headline “Efforts to Repel Gulf Oil Spill Are Described as Chaotic.” The article was mostly about Louisiana, but it could have been about Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, Pensacola, or Destin, for according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration there were more miles of “potentially beached oil” along the Redneck Riviera than along the marshes of the Pelican State.
That was all the Okaloosa County commissioners could take. Tired of having to go through the maze of federal and state regulations and having to wait on BP to provide the support they requested, the commissioners voted unanimously to strike out on their own. “We made the decision legislatively to break the law if necessary,” Chairman Wayne Harris told the press. “We will do whatever it takes to protect our county’s waterways and we’re prepared to go to jail to do it.” With that they budgeted $200,000 to add additional protection to the pass into Choctawhatchee Bay and dared folks at the state Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee and the Unified Command in Mobile to do anything to stop them. In a room packed with angry people, the commissioners told the BP and Coast Guard representatives present that while they would continue to cooperate with the various state and federal agencies, they wanted to “send a loud and clear message” that they wanted their requests acted on immediately. When Martha LaGuardia, commander of the Coast Guard, expressed sympathy but told them that “moving ideas and plans through the chain of command was the proper way to do things,” the commission would have none of it. Fed up with the chain of command, Harris told LaGuardia, “We’ve played the game. We’re done playing the game.” Citizens, who had long considered county commissioners just a bunch of upcountry good old boys who couldn’t care less about the coast, applauded.
Ever since the well had blown, ideas for what to do next had been coming in to BP and the Unified Command, where most languished. Someone proposed that rather than fine BP for violating the Clean Water Act and having the money go to EPA, this revenue should be used to pay people to “prospect” for the tar balls along the beach and be paid when they turned in what they collected. But turning folks into “prospectors” did not get far. Neither did the idea of turning loose oil-eating microbes and letting them gobble up the spill. What did catch BP’s attention was a machine developed by a company funded by actor Kevin Costner that used centrifuge processing technology to separate oil and water. Now you might have thought that an oil company, drilling underwater, would have already tested and approved something like that, but given BP’s record for being prepared, it was considered by some remarkable that it took the company only one month to agree to purchase six of the machines for testing and another month to announce to the world how “excited” the oil giant was about the plan. Some cynics said that Costner’s testifying before Congress about the lack of interest BP had shown in schemes like his might have had something to do with BP’s decision. But even when the company agreed to buy and deploy thirty-two of the machines, it would be August before enough of them were in place to make a difference. By then nearly four months would have been lost.
Meanwhile, President Obama showed up at Tacky Jack’s in Orange Beach, where he ate something fried, drank sweet tea (no beer), and got an idea of what was happening to the Alabama coast. From the restaurant he could see efforts to protect the pass from incoming oil, could see the charter fleet sitting idle, and could see places at the entrance to Cotton Bayou that were already stained by the spill. The president talked to folks, most of whom had voted for the other guy, had his picture taken, and then headed out to the meetings that locals hoped would be more productive than what had taken place so far. Along his route, people waved flags and gawked. A few held up signs. One read “You have two ears. Use them.” Those two ears got filled the next day when the president met with people who wanted him to do more than listen. They wanted action.
They did not get it. That night the president spoke to the nation and when he was done folks along the coast were still wondering just what he was going to do about the oil. The idea that this crisis would give the nation the opportunity to finally develop a comprehensive energy policy was not going to save birds and fish and the beach. President Obama may have been looking at the big picture, but even his supporters on the coast, what few there were, were disappointed. “He still doesn’t get it,” an old friend and loyal Democrat living down there wrote me not long after the president finished talking. “Yes cleaner energy is spiffy. It’s a political issue. Let it go for now.” However, she continued, “we want our damn water cleaned up. Now. What we have down here is a cluster fuck. We want a plan with objectives and specific knowledge of what will be done to achieve those objectives. We want SOMEBODY to have the authority to make a decision in a matter of hours, not months. We’ve had enough meetings to make an academic administrator envious. Now go to work.”
Going to work was what they were doing over in Destin. After the county commissioners voted to strike out alone if their plans got held up in red tape, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection quickly approved all the outstanding permits, and plans to block the pass and keep the oil out of the bay went ahead. Because of this rapid response, local officials continued to seek permission for strategies such as a stronger boom system, which had finally been approved by the Unified Command to put in place at Perdido Pass, but if permission was not forthcoming then they were prepared to go ahead and ask forgiveness later. Although reports varied, oil was said to be as close as two miles off shore, hovering, waiting for the wind to push it in. Everyone seemed willing to help. There were volunteers aplenty and developer Peter Bos told the commission that he could get them barges to block the pass. Around 80 percent of the charter boats had signed up as Vessels of Opportunity, but a few kept fishing. Still, they knew, or at least feared, there wasn’t much time left. Boats were going out “back-to-back-to-back,” one captain reported. “We’re trying to get it done, before life as we know it is over.”
About the only thing coastal folks liked about the president’s speech was when he spoke of BP’s “recklessness” and renewed his promise that “we will make BP pay for the damages their company has caused.” So they waited to hear what came out of the closed door meeting scheduled for the next day, the first (critics noted) direct encounter between the president and BP executives in the fifty-eight days since the well blew out.
What came out sounded good—a $20 billion escrow fund to guarantee that BP would pay what it promised to pay and what the law required. But there was still the gnawing fear that the money would be too difficult for working folks to get and would be slow in coming for everyone. Riviera residents wanted something done for them and to the people responsible. They liked the idea, floated by Louisiana congressman Joseph Cao, who told BP executives at a house committee meeting that rather than resign, they should do what “in the Asian culture we do.” Rep Cao, a Vietnamese-American Republican, suggested, “We just give you a knife and ask you to commit hari-kari.” Filet knives the fishermen weren’t using anymore would work just fine.
All of this was on my mind as we approached Seagrove. What had been planned as a quiet summer, revising this manuscript and writing up reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Destin nourishment case, had turned out anything but that. I was in a foul mood driving down. Traffic did not improve my attitude: there wasn’t any. At least not the old kind—lines of suvs with kids inside and bikes on the rack trying to pass rvs driven by retirees from Indiana. My mood darkened.
We got to the bay, the landmark that told us we were almost to the beach, the place where we always roll down the windows to smell the Gulf. What would I smell this time? I wasn’t sure. Almost kept ’em up. But I didn’t. And it hit me—salt air with a delicate bouquet of decaying marsh grass. Wonderful. We arrived at the house and saw people riding bikes, walking, jogging, just like last year and the year before. So we walked across the road and stood on the bluff, looking out over the Gulf—no slick, no sheen, no slime. Emerald green near the shore, darker further out, green again at the sandbar, then dark blue on to the horizon. There were lots of people on the beach, a few in the water. Cleanup crews walked along the tide line, picking up what had washed in. You could spot ’em. They were the ones wearing long pants. And moving slowly—it was hot.
My mood improved. I even began to appreciate the efforts of some friends to find humor in the situation. And the absurdity of it all—according to one who sat in on some of the BP meetings, “the acronyms specific to the oil spill seem to have been conceptualized by some adolescent boy.” “Surface Cleanup Assessment Technique” becomes “SCAT.” “Cell on Wheels” is “COW.” And, the best yet, “Tarball Underwater Recovery Device” is transformed into “TURD.” It was, a friend wrote, a “surreal experience . . . sitting in a conference room filled . . . with stern expressions while agency officials discussed how the SCAT teams were communicating via cow about the TURDs.” It was hard “to keep a straight face while I scanned the room for a hidden camera and Alan Funt!”
Then there was fishing.
News reports from Louisiana dwelled on how the oil was threatening a culture, a way of life. It was no less for the fishermen along the Redneck Riviera. The oil was depleting the oxygen in the water. As it did the fish fled. There were reports of schools of fish swimming east as if they were being “herded.” What could not move that fast—the shrimp, oysters, minnows, and such—died. The captains and mates wondered when they would ever fish deep water again. My son and I wondered the same thing.
But there was still the shore. We could fish the surf. For as the oil depleted the oxygen out in the Gulf, some of the fleeing fish came in and schooled in the shallows. Not all of these were welcomed. Just in time for the thirty-fifth anniversary of the movie Jaws, a number of sharks, big and small, were seen off the Alabama coast. As the oil pushed them toward us my son speculated that we might catch one. I hoped we wouldn’t.
Even after three months, it was still difficult to get clear information about what was going on. Crews hired by BP were told if they even acknowledged someone from the media “with a wave or a nod they [would] be fired on the spot.” When a boat full of newsfolk pulled alongside one of the decontamination ships the members of the crew working for BP “scrambled below and hid.” The media complained about being shut out, but to little avail. “You can understand why,” the wife of the ship’s captain told me. “Who would want the press interfering with efforts to save the Gulf walrus?”
Meanwhile BP CEO Tony Hayward, the one who promised to “make this right,” went back to England to watch his yacht race off the Isle of Wight. Folks on the coast, whose boats were docked and tethered, were not pleased. More than a few offered to loan CEO Tony a knife. Haywood was not the only BP executive to rile up residents of the Riviera. BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, a Swede whose English needed polishing along with Hayward’s pr skills, told the press that BP was not one of those “greedy companies.” “We care about the small people,” he said. The response to that was predictable. There was outrage and there was disgust, but there was also the reaction from folks like Orange Beach mayor Tony Kennon, who laughed and said, “They can call me anything they want. . . . Just write the check and send it to us.”
As the spill spread along the Redneck Riviera, folks began to consider its impact on other cultural aspects of the region. What would happen if Spring Breakers did not return to Panama City Beach, if mullet no longer flew at the Flora-Bama, if no one came to redneck it up with the Trashy White Band? And what would happen to the folks who sold shrimp from the back of their pickups? Over the years I often bought fresh shrimp, heads on, from shrimpers who were part of a network of independent operators who considered their association with the government an adversarial relationship. They would take part of their catch and sell it directly to the customer—no middle man. The customer paid in cash and the irs never knew.
Now this time-honored tradition of not reporting on-the-side income was about to come back to haunt them. As the waters they once fished were closed, as their boats became Vessels of Opportunity working for BP, there was no longer any out-of-the-truck-bed selling to go unreported. How could they apply to BP for what they had lost when there was no record of their having had it? BP was paying, when it paid, lost income based on calculations created by someone who didn’t fish who was trying to figure out what folks earned who did. And naturally, the calculators used reported income as the basis for their calculations. Unreported income was not taken into consideration. Yet that unreported income was often what determined the difference between “just scraping by” and “doing well.” So what could they do? How could they convince BP that they made more than what they reported to the government? Who kept records of unreported income? And even if they did, by reporting it to BP, would they be opening themselves to an inquiry by the “gub’ment” and maybe a bill for back taxes? It was a dilemma.
Meanwhile, there were more protests. The biggest and best organized was Hands Across the Sands, which was begun by Dave Rauschkolb, owner of a beachside restaurant at Seaside, as a protest against plans to allow drilling off the Florida coast. On June 26, sympathetic coastal residents stood on shore and joined hands in a silent statement that was impressive in its dignity but questionable in its effectiveness. Cynics, and there were many, pointed out that some protesters arrived in gas guzzling suvs and left the motor running to keep the air conditioner going while they made their stand against the policies that gave them the gas to burn. Others noted that despite the impact that the spill was having on the coast, this was a political, rather than an environmental problem, and until the hand-holders came up with a political solution, it would be business as usual for the oil industry.
It was too much for some. In Orange Beach Captain Allen Kruse signed his boat the Rookie on as a Vessel of Opportunity. It seemed the only thing he could do. Tightened restrictions on catch, a shorter snapper season, all the forms to fill out just to fish, and then the oil spill—all of it had taken its toll. He went to the BP training meeting, listened to what his new line of work would be, returned to the Rookie, sent his crew on an errand, and climbed up on the flying bridge—that was when they heard the “pop.” Returning, the crew found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Years before, Kruse and his twin brother had agreed that when they died they wanted friends to spread their ashes in the creeks and coves around Orange Beach, in the places where a younger brother’s ashes had been spread. But his friends couldn’t carry out his wishes because of the oil.
Another casualty was optimism. Even in the worst of times that was the one thing to which folks along the Redneck Riviera continued to cling. Now optimism was fading fast. Local promoters tried to perk people up with free concerts. Taking some of the money BP had given to revive tourism, Okaloosa County officials brought in Kenny Loggins and the Doobie Brothers for a “Rock the Beach” extravaganza. The weather cooperated, thousands attended, and the effort was judged a success.
Over on the Alabama coast they had even bigger plans. Jimmy Buffett was coming home.
On June 21, 2010, the Mobile Press-Register announced that on July 1, Jimmy was going to do a free concert in Gulf Shores to promote tourism. With him would be Kenny Chesney, the Zac Brown Band, and some others. For those who could not make it, or could not get one of the thirty-five thousand tickets that would be “given away,” “Jimmy Buffett and his Friends Live from the Gulf Coast” would be broadcast on CMT. Alabama governor Bob Riley applauded the plan and promised that the state tourism development department would pick up some of the production tab—causing a few folks to wonder why BP wasn’t paying for it all. Still, it seemed like a great idea and everyone was happy.
Until they tried to get tickets.
Within minutes of the tickets becoming available online, they were gone. A short time later some appeared for sale on eBay and the anger grew. There was no shortage of theories about what had happened: the tickets went to scalpers, the tickets went to out-of-towners, the computers threw out local requests, and so on and so on. Promoters fought hard to explain that there was no conspiracy to exclude people who lived on the coast; that a third of the tickets had gone to local hotels, motels, and condos to offer as incentives for people who would come down and stay a while; and that the rest went to fans on a first-come, first-served basis. The demand was just too great.
So the ticketless began making plans to watch it on TV. The city of Foley announced it would put up a big screen outdoors and invite everyone to the party. “Making the best of the situation” was becoming the alternative to optimism. One cafe owner was telling folks, “Come see the worst manmade disaster in history.”
Then they cancelled the concert. Delayed it, actually. With Hurricane Alex churning the water off Mexico and sending swells crashing onto Gulf beaches it was decided that the weather was just too uncertain so promoters put it off until July 11. This sent those with tickets—those who offered tickets as part of a rental package and those who had changed vacation plans to come down and boogie on the beach—scrambling to figure out what to do next. Meanwhile, Buffett dropped in unannounced at his sister’s restaurant and played a two-hour set for an audience that word-of-mouth swelled to around two thousand—mostly locals, along with some concert ticket holders who had come down despite the cancellation and were glad they had. At a time when meaningless gestures had become common on the coast, this one meant a lot—even to those who only heard about it the next day.
Jimmy Buffett concert on the Alabama coast after the spill. Courtesy of the Mobile Press-Register.
Meanwhile, everyone watched the weather, watched the water, watched the shoreline, and waited. BP’s damage control efforts weren’t helping a bit, but there was general agreement that the folks doing the hot, thankless job of cleaning up the oil when it came ashore were performing up to expectations—though in some cases those expectations were not very high. Trying to finish this book while in Seagrove, I would begin my day with online reading of the latest reports of how far the oil had drifted. Then I would take Libby the Lab down to run on the beach while I checked to see if anything had come ashore. It was a deathwatch of sorts, waiting for the inevitable but trying to do what could be done before it came. Turtle Watch people began moving eggs from identified nests and transporting them to the East Coast, far from the oil. Turtles that hatched from the eggs that remained would have to get over the ruts created by cleanup crew vehicles and get by the beach stuff that overworked beach patrollers were no longer taking up and carrying off, and if they made it, the water would probably kill them anyway. And to the water they would go, because the turtle light regulations were working, so at night the beach was dark.
With prime fishing areas closed by the federal government the Destin Swordfish Tournament was cancelled. However, more out of hope than conviction, officials from the Destin Fishing Rodeo announced that for the sixty-second straight year the event would be held in October as scheduled. “We’re not going to let some silly little oil spill ruin our history,” one of the rodeo board members told the press. Another member added, “If you don’t go forward, it could put this town in a state of shock.” Come October, he said, “there will be dead fish . . . on the docks.” But the effort to revive the region’s flagging optimism fell flat. Though most agreed that it would be a shame to cancel the rodeo so far in advance, they noted that the charter boats that signed up with BP would not be able to take part. There were others who wondered if the “dead fish on the docks” would be those caught or some that washed up. Cynicism was taking the place of optimism.
With all this happening my family and I settled in at Seagrove to wait for the Fourth of July. The beach was clean, thanks to the crews that picked up trash as well as bits of tar. The water was sort of nasty with seaweed churned up by the recent storm, but the wind was offshore and easterly so if there was oil out there, and reports said there was, it was being held back. We were ready.
July third. By 10:00 a.m. the beach was filling up with tents and umbrellas. By noon it seemed like half of Puckett, Mississippi, was there, returned for their annual outing. Word spread among the better-bred that the Puckettians were the riff-raff from Gulf Shores, come to our beach to escape the oil. Apparently the better-bred had not been around the year before or the years before that, or if they were they weren’t paying attention, for people like the Puckettians were enjoying the beach long before the upscale arrived.
Since there was no oil, local boaters held the revived Rags to Riches Regatta and once again the catamarans sailed back and forth between Seagrove and Grayton until someone was declared a winner. I watched from the beach and wondered how Tony Hayward’s yacht would do against this competition. A fireworks display was promised for the evening, just as in the past, so we kept watching for the barge that was usually towed offshore and used as the platform for the pyrotechnic extravaganza. None appeared; BP had leased all the barges. This year, the fireworks would be launched from shore.
Tents on the beach, Fourth of July weekend, 2010. Although there were fewer tourists after the oil spill, the hardcore kept coming. Photograph by Walter Lydick.
On July Fourth, they held the parade. There were the usual politicians and the usual businesses, but no church floats because it was Sunday.
That night we sat out in front of the house, in lawn chairs, drinking beer and talking to people as they walked by on their way to Seaside for dinner or a concert or something. The contrast between the two groups was, one might say, striking. There was our contingent of lower South people, friends and family, adults and children, descendents of the folks who founded the Redneck Riviera so long ago and gave it to us as our birthright, our heritage, telling stories of how it used to be and concluding that if it got any better we couldn’t stand it. And there was their contingent, the ones walking by, dressed like Abercrombie and Fitch models, going to Seaside to see and be seen and probably glad we weren’t going with them.
Fourth of July Parade, Seagrove Beach. Although businesses and politicians are still parading, there are more and more community groups and collected individuals like the Margarita MeMaws. Photograph by the author.
A couple of days after America’s independence was celebrated the folks from Puckett went back to Mississippi, home to jobs and responsibilities. There were crops to harvest, lesson plans to write, online courses to finish, stores to stock, kids to get ready for school. The Puckettians had to ease back into being farmers, teachers, firefighters, state troopers, school administrators, nurses, secretaries, and students. For most, it was an easy transition, for even though they might have done things at the beach that they normally would not do, they remained what they were before they had arrived—good, decent, hardworking folks, the kind that have always come to the coast for a break from the routine that they know will be waiting when they return home.
A week later BP took off the well cap that was siphoning some of the spill, and while Jimmy Buffett played his delayed concert and gave the coast a much-needed psychological lift, oil gushed full force into the Gulf. But the beach where Buffett played was clean and the folks who watched it on CMT saw what local business leaders wanted them to see—white sand, sparkling water, rolling surf. When Buffett added the line “It’s all BP’s fault” to his signature song, “Margaritaville” the crowd cheered. When he closed with new lyrics to an old favorite and sang “I hope that I’m around to see, when the coast is clear,” some cried.
On July 14, BP got the new cap on the well and after eighty-five days and over 180 million gallons, oil no longer flowed into the Gulf. It was not a permanent solution. That would come when a relief well plugged the hole. But it was better than what had been before.
About the time the Puckettians left, the Beach Issue of Florida Travel and Life appeared online. It announced that the coast along Highway 30-A, Walton County’s stretch of the Redneck Riviera, was the “Pearl of the Panhandle,” the place where visitors should go for “southern hospitality in a trendy setting.” Pearl of the Panhandle. Another name to add to the list.
But when the magazine described the “ethos of 30-A” and told of the “anyone-can-do-it activities” being done down there, it did not chronicle the sort of “anyone-can-do-it” doings done by the folks who first came down to visit the coast. Florida Travel and Life was not writing about the Redneck Riviera but about what the region’s “raffish Rotarians, pirates with cash register eyeballs, and hard-handed matrons” wanted readers to believe the Redneck Riviera had become. The article focused on places like Rosemary Beach, Seaside, and WaterColor, places with neat yards, picket fences, front porches, and color coded cottages, places where the successful and sophisticated come to enjoy the fruits of their labors.
During the years covered by this book the sort of people who visited the Gulf Coast changed, and the coast changed with them. Beach promoters, sensitive to popular tastes and trends, created attractions and events designed to appeal to those who were coming and to those they wanted to come. Visitors arrived looking to have fun in an exotic setting where the rules were different. But as people changed, so did the rules. Where earlier tourists were loose and laid back, the newer ones demanded order, organization, and in some cases an investment opportunity. They got all of these. Politicians, prosperity, class, culture, and commercialism combined to stifle spontaneity and turn much of the Redneck Riviera into a playground for the affluent, the intense, and the opportunistic.
Much of it, but not all. In some cases, redneckery remained, to the distress of many who wanted it otherwise.
Although local boosters applauded the idea of BP-underwritten free concerts featuring mainstream music makers, they wanted concerts that would show the rest of the country that the beach was open for business and the business of the beach was good clean fun. However, when it was announced that Lynyrd Skynyrd, whose song “Free Bird” has been called “the redneck national anthem,” was coming to Okaloosa Island, the reaction was different. A Skynyrd concert, one critic wrote, would attract people who were not good for the region’s image or its economy. “Every toothless redneck from a hundred miles,” the writer complained, would “bring in [their] own Busch and Natty Lite and food,” set up lawn chairs, groove to “Sweet Home Alabama,” and then leave. The only way for local businesses to make any money would be to “open a cheap cigarette and Confederate bandana shop.”
Despite these misgivings, and despite some rain, the concert went off without a hitch. The crowd that collected there looked a lot like the one that had gathered to hear Jimmy Buffett over in Gulf Shores. And the people at both were not unlike the people who had always slipped down to the Redneck Riviera. They were the children, and in some cases the grandchildren, of beachgoers who over the years came to the coast to swim, fish, ride rides at the amusement parks, dance at the Hangouts, listen to the Trashy White Band at the Green Knight, and throw mullet at the Flora-Bama.
As for the folks who weren’t there, the ones who stayed comfortable and secure in condos and gated communities, they missed a good time.
