JACKSON — Legendary Methodist minister Pierce Harris of the First Methodist Church in Atlanta is remembered for this quote from one of his sermons: “Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.”
From my childhood walking along the beach at Pass Christian the first time I ever saw the Gulf of Mexico until the last time I walked along the beach this weekend with my wife, I have cherished the memories.
It never mattered exactly where I was along the Gulf. From St. George Island — the pristine barrier island in Apalachicola Bay that is among the most beautiful places in the world to the orange sunsets of South Padre Island on the tropical tip of Texas — I have picked up shells and sand and memories that bookend youth and age.
My wife, my daughter, her boyfriend and I made a hurried trip to Orange Beach, Ala., last weekend to attend a family wedding. We had all been to Gulf Shores for our annual long weekend with the Denley family less than a month ago.
The difference a month made was depressing. In mid-May, the waters off Gulf Shores remained clear and clean and the beaches covered with white sand and children. As I always do, I picked up a pocket full of shells and small pieces of driftwood.
But on this trip, the shells and driftwood were in many cases coated with tar balls and oil sheen. Some of the tar balls were as small as a pencil head, and a few were as large as a washtub. It was difficult to walk from the hotel to the beach without stepping in one of the patches of oily brown muck. Getting the stuff off one’s hands and feet required strong detergent.
The oil sheen was visible as angry copper scars among the white caps. There was an odor like kerosene.
From Gov. Haley Barbour to Sea Coast Echo Publisher Randy Ponder to Ocean Springs Mayor Connie Moran and state Rep. Brandon Jones of Pascagoula, the basic message in Mississippi has remained the same and I believe it to be true — the Mississippi Gulf Coast is clear and indeed remains open for business. For now.
Mississippi has benefited greatly from the barrier islands — Cat, Deer, Petit Bois, Horn and Ship — as a means of keeping what’s happening in Louisiana, Alabama and the panhandle of Florida away from Mississippi’s shoreline beaches.
That said, the oil and the dispersant chemicals are in the water. That said, the “few” tar balls found on Mississippi beaches are the likely harbingers of more and larger ones to come.
That said, Mississippi is in the long run facing the same environmental consequences from the BP oil spill.
Barbour, state legislators and local officials should be commended for trying to salvage every last moment of the 2010 tourist season for Gulf Coast businesses. But there is a greater danger of too much political Pollyanna dismissals of what’s happening in the Gulf by Barbour and local officials.
The Gulf Coast is facing years of environmental and ecological ramifications from the BP spill — ramifications that will translate into economic pain as well — as more and more people realize they would no longer let their granddaughters play in the Gulf.
Barbour went on national TV over the weekend and told the nation about tar balls occurring naturally in the Gulf. With all due respect, Governor, nobody who has spent a lifetime walking the Gulf of Mexico’s beaches is buying into that argument.
