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Panhandling
| John Friel
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>> Published Date: 6/15/2010
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 I’m back in Pennsylvania after a week as a Panhandler. No, I wasn’t cadging coins in the street. Put your checkbook away. But thanks for the thought.
The Panhandle is that skinny strip of northern Florida that stretches west into Central Time. But it isn’t Kansas, Toto, and it’s a lot more Dixie than Disney.
The Panhandle is a hard place to pin down. The food is excellent if you stick to fresh local seafood and eschew the South’s unfortunate default cuisine, deep-fried everything. I never see amberjack or royal red shrimp up north, presumably because it gets Hoovered up near the source.
The flora is a lush, interesting mix. There are shrubs, perennials and ornamental grasses that grow everywhere, mixed with palm trees, live oaks and crepe myrtles of a size that just doesn’t happen here in Zone 6, and tender grasses like Cortaderia that we Yankees can only dream about. In Florida, they’re a cliché.
The fauna is equally rich. But birds abound, the bugs are exotic and often pretty, and lizards go without saying. Lizards everywhere, desert to tropics, have the same weird habit: They’re always doing pushups. A cute 6-in. neo-dinosaur did his reps under the greenhouse bench where I was photographing.
I’ve yet to spot an alligator, though I’m assured they’re around. The only armadillo I saw was, sadly, fresh roadkill. Armadillos are primitive critters with an ancient startle reflex: They leap three or four feet straight up. Probably effective against coyotes, but suicidal with SUVs.
I’m writing in circles around the elephant in the room: No, I saw no oil on Florida or Alabama beaches. But two days after I got home, basketball-sized tar wads befouled those brilliant white sands. Sickening.
Like many others, I fantasized about piping the spewage from that ruined well into the bedrooms and boardrooms of BP executives and the slipshod government inspectors who ignored numerous violations. Let’s garnish the mess
with the stinking corpses of a few hundred pelicans. That’ll teach ‘em!
But the inconvenient fact is, however righteous my outrage at the evil, cretinous petroleum industry, we’re all their enablers and beneficiaries. Every time I fuel my car, or my chain saw; every time I board a plane or raise a thermostat, I put those pelicans at risk. Every skid of pots, every roll of greenhouse poly ... and so on.
I was wondering how and whether to express such thoughts during a flight delay in Charlotte where, in the Observer, columnist Mark Washburn had already nailed that irony of this “slow-motion tragedy.”
“We are a nation absolutely addicted to energy,” Washburn wrote. “We want hot showers, refrigerated food ... we want to drive wherever we want, whenever we want. We want our gadgets (and) our freedom and we want it all without any mess.”
So while the responsibility is widespread, the impact is not. Coast residents will bear the brunt, but they don’t deserve this disaster any more—or less—than North Dakotans or Pennsylvanians. We all buy, burn, work with and wear the output of the thousands of wells that haven’t leaked ... yet.
The idea that oil wells are okay if we can’t see them is a dangerous tradeoff, a cynical gamble. Odds are, the gushing poison will eventually be sealed, or captured and refined, like before. But we’ll all be lucky if life along that coastline is ever like before.
Twenty-one years ago, a tanker spilled 257,000 barrels of oil off Alaska, and some of it still lingers. The Deepwater Horizon rupture vomited at least that much in the first week and is still disgorging it as I type. Here’s hoping the dragon is slain as you read. Here’s hoping that on future visits to the Panhandle, the seafood on my plate doesn’t have to be shipped in.
The only sane response is to reduce our insane consumption. They won’t stop drilling for oil, in ever riskier ways, until we stop needing it so much. Washburn called himself “an unindicted co-conspirator. I’m an energy junkie, you see, and BP was working for me.”
Me, too. And we can’t fire them. GP
John Friel is marketing manager for Emerald Coast Growers and a freelance writer.
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