It's like opening the front door again and again.

It's so funny to me that I feel possessive of Pensacola Beach when I don't even like going to the beach that much.  It's sticky, sandy (and when that sand gets in places it shouldn't be it'll make you swear off going to the beach for the rest of your life), and it's typically HOT out there.  I don't like hot.  So I don't really "do" the beach.  But by golly they have messed up MY beach and I don't like it. 

Massive amounts of crude oil washed up on Pensacola Beach today.  We've had tar balls for I think a couple of weeks now... honestly, time is all running together with this disaster.  At least when we had Hurricane Ivan there were specific stages.  There was the storm itself, which I survived with the aid of pharmaceuticals.  This lasted the course of one night.  Really more like an evening and a night because I started getting jumpy when the breeze picked up.  Then we had the morning after the storm.  I remember opening the front door of my parents' house and taking my first look outside... I remember the shock.  The realization that a tornado had gone through the front yard only feet away from where my entire family slept in the living room and master bedroom.  (Okay, so I would later learn that those of us with pharmaceutical aid had slept - the others notsomuch.)  But I remember that intense shock of opening that door and seeing the trees in our yard.  And later walking around the back yard... the neighborhood... the city... being met with more shock, though none of it as intense as that very first look.  Then there was the clean up stage where it seemed like the neighbors we had never met before all came together to clear the streets and the yards.  And after that was the waiting-for-the-electricity-to-come-back-on stage.   That was the longest.  I think we went 14 days without power.  But somehow, believe it or not, that wasn't the worst part of the whole ordeal.  It was miserable and hot and humid and eventually moldy in certain parts of the house.  But it didn't even touch the way I felt when we opened that front door for the first time.

And now...  I feel like someone keeps opening the front door on the oil spill.  Each new wave of tar balls, tar mats, media frenzy, clean up frenzy...  each time it happens the front door opens again and I'm slapped in the face.  That beach that I took for granted all these years is suddenly MY front yard.  The crude oil covering the beautiful white sand and soiling the emerald green waters is the equivalent of the pecan tree I loved as a child being ripped up by its roots and flung aside.  Discarded as though it had no value on this Earth. 

The biggest difference is that with Ivan we knew the end was in sight.  We survived the storm.  We had a house to live in.  We knew Gulf Power wanted to get back to charging us for electricity and they'd have the power restored as soon as they could.  We also knew what to expect because we had  been through it before.  But this is different.  The storm is still happening.  Instead of lasting the span of a single night it is still happening right NOW.  They still don't have a cap on the spill.  We don't know when it will end.  Simply put, this is the longest storm our Gulf of Mexico has ever experienced. 

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