Heading to Horn Island
/Heading to Horn Island
April 20, 2018 marks eight years since BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a disaster that took eleven lives, cost billions of dollars in clean up, and forever changed the Gulf’s ecosystem.
Although I was born in Brooklyn and have lived in New York most of my life, my late maternal grandmother lived along the Gulf coast during my formative years. I have fond memories of summers boating, swimming and fishing in the warm Gulf. We often went to a small undeveloped island—Horn Island– to make these memories. When I heard that the devastation in the Gulf had reached Horn Island, I was beyond angry. I wrote a poem about it called “Heading to Horn Island” which you can read in its entirety below. My deep connection to this place has much to do with my grandparents, so I will start the story there.
Coal Miner’s Daughter
My grandmother, Theresa Julia –Terry to friends and family—was a coal miner’s daughter, born near Scranton, Pennsylvania in the first decade of the 1900s. She was not a Loretta Lynn/ Sissy Spacek Appalachian coal miner’s daughter, but the daughter of a Calabrian immigrant youth named Vincenzo. Searching for a life outside the crowded tenements of Manhattan’s lower east side, Vincenzo and his teenage bride, Catherina, took a train from New York to Pennsylvania. They would be together a decade. Catherina gave birth to many babies, lost several, wet-nursed several not her own, and had two children who lived to adulthood. But fate did not smile on Vincenzo when a mine collapsed and 24-year-old Catherina was forced to return to New York City penniless with two toddlers in tow, my grandmother Theresa and Rocco. (Read my poem “Piecework” in which I tell the tale.)
Life back in New York was a struggle in the tenements. My grandma Terry told me stories of the rats eating the food she made for herself and Rocco when her mother was off working two manufacturing jobs. Eventually, my great-grandmother did something unheard of at the time. A young widow, she scrimped and saved until she bought a house in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But tragedy struck again when Rocco, who called himself Robert at his job at a bank, was swept up in a flu epidemic of the twenties. His mother, Catherina was devastated. Then there were just two.
Theresa was as streetwise as she was beautiful. After high school she worked in a bookstore and as an insurance fraud investigator. In her late teens she married the tall lanky James, a Great War vet several years her senior. She continued working while she was pregnant with my mother, Rosalie, even after her employer asked, “Do you have something to tell us?” Nobody, but nobody did that. In 1925 my mom Rosalie was born in my great grandmother’s house in Brooklyn, and soon two more girls came along. Delicate Catherine died at the tender age of seven of pneumonia. Next came my feisty and fun-loving Aunt Madeline who would be the mother of our “southern fried cousins”, all of whom live south of the Mason Dixon line.
Just as my mom was about to graduate from Boro Hall Academy, her father James died of walking pneumonia. So it was a household of women once again: Catherina, Theresa, Rosalie and Madeline. My mother tells me how difficult it was to meet boys once she was out of high school and attending music conservatory. “All the good ones went to war. The only ones left were 4-F,” my mother said using the status for those unfit for military service. Luckily, she did find one of the good ones after he came back from the war and married my dad Joe in 1946.
But back to Theresa. She was a very attractive woman still in her forties. She had a friend named Mildred who played honky-tonk piano, wrote torch songs, and hung out with guys from Tin Pan Alley or returning from overseas. Mildred had always felt painfully wronged about a song that she said she wrote that someone had stolen and turned into a hit that charted in 1946. (There’s more to Mildred’s story in the video entitled Every Sad Girl Does.)
She convinced Terry to go out with an engineer just back from Saudi Arabia where he built ‘infrastructure’ for what was then Standard Oil, then later Esso, and now Exxon Mobil. This is where oil starts to enter the picture.
Terry: The Fish Didn’t Have a Chance
Her date turned out to be a tall guy with a twang named Wesley who came from the Texas town of Roaring Springs, (population 265 according to the 2000 census). He had only a few days in New York and was planning to go out west soon. He didn’t much care for New York save in small doses.
Wes was a Seabee, part of the naval construction force of the United States Navy. Seabees were skilled naval construction civilians who were given combat training and were stationed mainly in the 1940s Pacific. Wes was assigned to Pearl Harbor. On December 7, 1941, he and his buddies ran for their lives across Hickam Airfield after Sunday breakfast. The Japanese began strafing the tarmac. His combat training locked in place. We were at war.
Wes knew a lot about construction of any type, knew the words to “I want to go back to my little grass shack in Kealakekua, Hawaii,” knew how to use chopsticks, and was a champion swimmer and breath hold diver. On our family swimming adventures, he would dive in one spot and emerge what seemed like a mile away five minutes later. Although Theresa had been born in coal country, she was a real New Yorker who French inhaled unfiltered Pall Malls, played four-hand bridge, and listened to Puccini on the Texaco radio hour. Not much in common. But they had a whirlwind courtship and got married. I was the flower girl. They went out to the High Sierras in northern California for their honeymoon. A guide left them lakeside for a week.
It was high time Terry learned to fish.
It was trout mainly. She learned to fish for it, gut it, season it, and cook it up in the cast iron pan for breakfast, lunch, and dinner around the campfire. Gone was small talk and city problems. This was her new reality and she was thriving. She adapted to an outdoor life with Wes in the mountains, on the coast, even in the desert.
Because of his government contract work they moved around a lot. They spent much of the 1950s in California, from Eureka and Fortuna (where cannabis was not unknown to them) down the coast to Oxnard and LA where grandma went on the Art Linklater show when it was still just radio. She got to ask a question of a famous psychologist: Should my daughter and her family come out from New York to visit her in California? The psychologist said yes, of course, but he wasn’t paying for it. We couldn’t afford that big a trip with our growing Branca family. Terry won a pair of earrings, rewarding her for having the nerve to speak up from the radio audience.
Next stop was Billings, Montana. Grandma said that they spent the best New Year’s Eve ever because they started partying at midnight in Times Square and just continued as the new year celebration moved through time zones westward. The next year, when Wes got his new assignment, they loaded up folding furniture, dishware, camping gear, and a few fine paintings into their fishing boat, hitched it to a Cadillac with fins and headed for Baton Rouge.
They came to know every bayou and barrier island from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Mobile, Alabama. Wes built them a house in Pascagoula, Mississippi, that stands today—the only one on that block that survived the wrath of both Hurricane Camille in 1969 and Katrina in 2005. Wes was always out looking for the best fishing spots and grandma got good at fishing for mackerel, seining shrimp and luring crabs. Wes took pictures of her with the day’s catch. On one snapshot he’d written “Terry—the fish didn’t have a chance.” (Although he was praising Terry’s fishing ability, his caption was quite prescient regarding the overfishing that would soon occur.)
On his forays, he discovered Horn Island.
Horn Island
According to the US Geological Survey, Horn Island is part of an east-west chain of offshore barrier islands sandwiched between the Mississippi Sound and the Gulf of Mexico. The undeveloped island is several miles long, but narrow enough to walk from the Sound on the north side to the Gulf on the south even at its widest point.
A 1990s USGS study tells a tale of sea-level rise and the migration of Horn Island to its present position at the seaward margin of Mississippi Sound. Core samples reveal silts and very fine sands near the surface of the island, perhaps some windblown, with deeper samples of loose, medium to coarse sand probably deposited as early as the Pliocene epoch some five million years ago. The core showed dominance of pine pollen, dinoflagellate cysts (a cousin to the “red tide” organism), mollusks, and tiny foraminifera with their calcium carbonate shells that add brilliant sparkle to the island’s sugar white sand.
It was an exhilarating boat ride out of Pascagoula or Ocean Springs aboard the Terry (what else?) to take us kids swimming and fishing on a pristine beach where we could see pelicans and osprey among the sea oats and short pines that interspersed the long stretches of white sand.
But it would not last forever.
Gentle waves lapping the sugar white sand
Gentle waves lapping the sugar white sand
We interrupt this memory
To bring you news of a brown sheen
Oily waves lapping the dark tainted sand
Oily waves lapping the dark tainted sand
On April 20, 2010, an ecological tragedy enveloped the Gulf.
A video of me reading of this poem while actually heading to Horn Island by outboard. Many thanks to these generous folks: Melissa Schneider for making arrangements and shooting video, Kate Seymour Bruening for water-proofing my text, and to Andrea Christine and her father Nathan Jones for providing the sweet ride.
HEADING TO HORN ISLAND
Heading to Horn Island
Hum of the outboard
Hint of diesel
Hot Mississippi sun
Heading to Horn Island
From Biloxi, from Ocean Springs
From Pascagoula, the Singing River
Sitting up in the bow
Salt spray on my face
Horizon of endless brilliance
Gulf lazy, azure, flat
A spot all to ourselves
Gentle waves lapping the sugar white sand
Gentle waves lapping the sugar white sand
Here on Horn Island
We break out the nets
Take hold of an end
Encircle a bounty of shrimp
Shrimp for boiling, shrimp for frying
Shrimp for etouffe
We bait strings, hang them off the stern
Soon crabs come
Crabs for crab cakes, crabs for stuffing
Females for Grandma Terry’s she-crab soup
After a good swim
Grandma doles out sandwiches and sweet tea
And all the while
Gentle waves lapping the sugar white sand
Gentle waves lapping the sugar white sand
We laugh about the time the
Baby blue Ford pickup got stuck in the mud
When we forgot our bathing suits
Pa Wes taught us the joy of skinny dipping
Gentle waves lapping the sugar white sand
Gentle waves lapping the sugar white sand
We interrupt this memory
To bring you news of a brown sheen
Oily waves lapping the dark tainted sand
Oily waves lapping the dark tainted sand
Deepwater offshore explosion
Eleven dead
Horizon of Hades
Sinking platform, sinking hearts
Hemorrhaging millions of barrels
Oil boiling, men toiling
No relief in sight
Horizon of endless arrogance
Blow out preventer, truth out preventer
No back-up plan presenter
Barrier islands barrier to truth
Tar balls and top kills
Baby birds covered in glistening greed
Waves of dead fish on Waveland beaches
Pelicans in peril
Fishermen finished, trawlers troubled
Marshes murdered
Horizon of endless arrogance
Dispersant used to hide the bodies
A mile down under the surface
Oil coating diamonds of diatoms
Fragile fish lacerated larvae
Food chain of failure
Oily waves lapping the dark tainted sand
Oh how I long to head to Horn Island
Horizon of endless brilliance
Sand sugar white, Gulf azure flat
Oh how I long for gentle waves lapping the sugar white sand
Gentle waves lapping the sugar white sand
Epilogue: A Sad Irony
Pa Wes, as we knew our step-grandfather, worked for Fluor Corporation, a multinational engineering and construction firm known for building oil refineries, pipelines and other essentials for the oil and gas industry. Around the time that Wes passed away in a VA hospital in Biloxi, Mississippi in the early 1990s, Fluor's mining business, Massey Coal, grew substantially. Massey Coal split from Fluor and became Massey Energy who owned and operated Upper Big Branch Mine where 29 miners were killed on April 5, 2010, just two weeks before the Gulf disaster. It’s sadly ironic that the longtime employer of the husband of the Coal Miner’s Daughter was guilty of the same unsafe practices that killed her father a century before.