Creek Running North

This photo (by Michael Macor, of the San Francisco Chronicle and more of his work on the subject can be found here) is one for the history books. Each generation has its oiled scoter photo. I used one from the 1971 Standard Oil spill in San Francisco Bay on the front page of Terrain a decade back. That one was perhaps more iconic, more deadly looking, the Golden Gate in the background and the bird an abstract mound of goo with a haunting eye.

Macor’s is softer, more intimate. It is thus all the more devastating. These are hands soaked with oil, this is recognizably a fluffy bird with fouled feathers, and while the 1971 scoter is so slicked it surely died, the bird Macor shows us might survive. His photo thus has a greater sense of urgency, that feeling of armchair triage.

His photo has been following me all day. I resort to analysis of photographic artistry, of composition and semiotics. If I did not, the rage in me would insinuate itself into every pore, cover every surface in me, like 58,000 gallons of heavy residual fuel oil on the bay.

This is not the worst spill the Bay has known. That 1971 spill was more than ten times larger, and in the thirties almost three million gallons of crude poured into the sea from a wrecked tanker just outside the Gate. Spills of like size have fouled the Bay’s fringing wetlands from broken pipelines, and these are rarely counted in lists of such disasters despite their hitting the Bay’s most important wildlife habitats. And atop it all, who knows how many gallons of oil wash into the bay with each season’s first rain, the leavings of a summer’s automotive habits?

I repeat these facts to myself lest I explode. This is just a bad day for the Bay.

Already, a dozen beaches are closed in two counties. A showpiece tract of urban wetland in San Francisco, the crown jewel in a necklace of restoration projects around the Bay, is closed to visitors. Oil has been washed into it with the receding tide: the stain drawn along its edges as the ocean sucked it out the Gate. Baker Beach, where Laura Taflinger took this photo, is closed. Kirby Cove, where once I sat with a loved one’s back against my chest, spray in our faces as big waves rolled in from Japan, is closed. Alcatraz and Angel Island are befouled.

Bunker fuel oil is closer in consistency to tar than gasoline. Imagine powering a ship on what you drain out of your engine block after 50,000 miles. (This was literal truth for a while: shipping companies would buy used motor oil to add to their fuel, until they decided the liability from unknown contaminants was too much for their insurers to handle.) From crude oil the refineries extract natural gas and naptha, gasoline and kerosene, diesel fuel and motor oil, and then whatever is left that still flows faster than asphalt in Tucson in July is called “residual fuel oil.” Most bunker fuel is “grade six” fuel oil: the sludgiest of the lot. This stuff, with twenty to seventy carbons in each molecule’s chain, will not volatilize. It will not be metabolized by bacteria, broken into methane and ethane. What the Coast Guard cannot pick up will stay in the Bay, essentially forever.

Today a wind out of the north raises stiff waves on the Bay, and containment is thus made more difficult. The slicks will break up, spread themselves.

I grabbed my camera and was headed out the door to Kirby Cove to document this atrocity, for whom I do not not know. Shaking in anger. This is our Bay they have defouled. This is our Bay. The living heart of California and they have poisoned it again through carelessness, through unwillingness to moderate their avarice enough to move their ships’ fuel tanks away from the hull. This is our Bay they have used as a sewer. This is our Bay, which we must share with the salmon and the pelicans and salt marsh harvest mice. They do not even see it: it is a highway or an obstacle, and casualties of their transit mere roadkill. Murderers. Murderers!

I had my hand on the door of the truck and I stopped.

I stopped for a long moment.

I turned and walked down to the creek instead.

The tide was up, water flooding the creek’s lower reaches, and yet none of the oil had yet reached this part of the Bay. The sewage treatment plant was there, and the train tracks with their sweating tankers, a tangle of sodden plastic bags on the shoreline and two oil refineries in shouting distance, Asian clams and Chinese mitten crabs and invasive Teredo boring worms and pestiferous striped bass, 99 percent of the biomass in the visible Bay made up of invasive exotic organisms, but

but

but today, the native cordgrass and the pickleweed still grow.

But today, scaups and scoters swim more un-oiled than not above the tide-drowned cordgrass beds.

But today, mallards burst into joyous flight as though they had not read the news.