Hard to believe it’s been almost a year since the devastating BP oil spill off the southern U.S. Coast. This was written last summer a few weeks after the explosion which caused a huge effect along the coastlines. I never expected to see such pristine beaches in Alabama.

Gulf Coast, ALABAMA – Stare straight ahead towards the horizon at the edge of the Gulf Coast of Alabama, and the oil drifting on to the shore can easily be mistaken for something natural dragged in by the tide.

From a distance above, the scattered coppery splotches floating on the surface of the ocean cannot be anything else, and up close, the mud-brown globules on the pale sand are unmistakable.

Still, there are people around me on the beach who can’t – or won’t – believe what is washing up on their beach until it sticks to them.
Jennifer Munoz, tipsy, weepy, clutches her son’s arm with one hand and her beer bottle with the other. She adds to her existing unsteadiness by lifting up an oily foot.

“Look,” she demands to no one in particular. “This is a goddam thing. Now it’s on me.”

For weeks after the BP oil started billowing into the Gulf of Mexico, the people of Alabama were in denial. Surely it couldn’t reach their little share of the Gulf shore. So much beach, so little of it in Alabama. There was a blind hope that the tides would be different, the winds shift.

As with every year in this region, hurricanes threaten; few turn out to be more than bluster .

Ivan and Katrina, back-to-back hurricanes in 2004 and 2005, racked up billions in damages to homes and businesses, but after those two years of havoc, relative peace, storm-wise, returned.

Then on April 20th, 66 kilometres off the coast of Louisiana, a drilling rig exploded, 11 workers died and the slick began advancing towards the shorelines of the Gulf states.

“We’re used to storms, hurricanes,” says Mark Foster with the Alabama Gulf Coast Visitors and Convention Bureau Director. “Everyone down here initially thought, well now this is a terrible thing but we’ll get it fixed up, cleaned up and go on. But we now know there’s no time table for this.”

The gulf shores of Alabama, like its neighbour Florida, is despite its hardiness, a fragile mix of highly erodable shorelines and low-lying marshes. One of the best books detailing the geography of the area is Living on the Edge of the Gulf: The West Florida and Alabama Coast

By June, ads trumpeting that the Alabama coast was oil-free had to be scrapped. Booms began attempting to encircle floating fragments of the slick in hopes of keeping more from reaching the beach, and the double red flags went up banning swimming in the greasy ocean.

The beach has been part of Kristie Taylor’s life every summer for as long as she can remember; after the four-hour drive from Tuscaloosa, arriving at the shoreline has always been followed by a beeline for the ocean. This year, she bursts into tears as she says she had to physically restrain her toddler from doing the same this summer.

“As soon as she gets on the beach, she’s running,” says Taylor. “We love our little section of the world here. This is our beach and the whole world, including us, is guilty for what happened because we have become so dependent on oil. Now there’s oil here where we don’t want it and we’re responsible.”

The Gulf Coast is home to about 9,000 people spread along Alabama’s 52-kilometre stretch of beachfront, one of the smallest shorelines in the gulf. During the summer, the population triples, with most visitors coming south from other regions in the state.

Except for this strip, Alabama is as vast as the prairies with the same timelessness that could be any era when you turn your head from the road ahead to look sideways and see nothing but land.

On a billboard, a familiar name and recognizable face, George Wallace, is campaigning to be the state treasurer and it doesn’t seem that odd. Think about history and dates during the drive from Mobile to the Gulf Coast and realize the name and face cannot be right. Keep going until the billboard appears again and the word missed that explains the recognition and memories is visible this time. Junior.

Arrive at the Gulf Coast and there is no doubt that time has moved on. Here in this notch, a corridor to the ocean, an Asian-like city of high rises. Southern Alabama is flat but this most southern most tip is stacked upwards.

Florida, next door, has more than 1,000 kilometres of beach and is so close that every year for the past quarter of a century, there has been a competition, inspired presumably by alcohol, of tossing a mullet (fish, not the hairstyle) between the state lines. Local proudly call this stretch the Redneck Riviera.

Talk to anyone on the shoreline long enough and they start to choke up. Then a forced cheerfulness.

“I’m calling it oil spill brown,” says Stacie Russell of Kilmichael, Mississippi, pointing to her fresh pedicure, green toe nails smeared with rust-coloured clumps. “I picked green cause I thought it wouldn’t clash.”

White-suited clean-up crews called Hazwopers mingle among the beach-goers during the day, scooping up oil-soaked debris, gooey tar balls. At night, mechanical harvesters comb through the sand and out over the ocean, lights from clean-up ships glow far into the horizon, turning visible the specks that are lost in the horizon. The beach shimmers with circles of brightness as flashlights turn on as those on the beach like Kristie Taylor and her family family and Stacie Russell and her girlfriends who all went for pedicures before their beach vacation stay late into the night.

A few hours later at dawn, the sand once again looks pristine. The tide rolls in and the sheen returns.