Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A rehab worker raised the corner of the sheet and the three of us peered through the nar-
row opening. I held my breath. Inside, lit with the radiant orange glow of a heat lamp, the
single pelican sat motionless on a low perch, a Buddha with folded wings.
“He'll puke if you pick him up,” Rhonda said. She was advising the rehab worker not to
let the pelican take a test swim yet. “You can't mess with them when they eat.”
It had been a rough century for pelicans on the Gulf Coast. A hundred years earlier, fish-
ermen had gotten the idea that pelicans were competing with them, and had slaughtered
them wholesale. Worse still, by the 1950s, our release of pesticides into the environment
had become a two-pronged machine of pelicanic destruction: DDT weakened their eggs,
killing chicks before they even hatched; and Endrine killed off the fish that were their food,
starving pelicans en masse. By the late 1960s, they had almost completely disappeared
from the Texas and Louisiana coasts.
The late 1960s and '70s saw pelicans reintroduced from Florida, and a ban on the per-
sistent organic pollutants that undermined their niche in the ecosystem. Today, the coast is
once again crawling with them. Which is not to say they are invulnerable, even without oil
spills.
“We have a pelican die-off every year,” Rhonda said as the rehab worker closed the
sheet over the pen. “There are some pretty harsh cold snaps. The fish move off, and the
birds don't get enough food.” She shrugged. “I don't know, I'm not a biologist.”
Then she laughed. “These guys were actually lucky they got oiled,” she said. “They've
been fed quite well.”
The Hotel Sabine is the tallest building in Port Arthur, and the best vantage from which
to watch the aftermath of an oil spill. There's simply nothing more pleasant than to book
a south-facing room on an upper floor and enjoy a gimlet as the cleanup workers buzz up
and down the waterway.
At least, it
would
be pleasant. The Hotel Sabine has been abandoned for years, and now
stands vacant and eyeless, not only Port Arthur's most prominent landmark but also its
most obtrusive eyesore. Unless you plan on breaking in, there will be no tenth-floor views
of the ship channel for you.
Instead, I drove down to Pleasure Island, the grassy artificial landmass on the other side
of the channel, to watch the men in Tyvek wrap things up. Oil Mop boats dragged lines
of floating containment boom up and down the waterway, their hulls smeared brown with
