The City Wire special report: A ‘slimy’ vacation at Orange Beach, Ala.

Editor’s note: Roy Hill, a faculty member at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith and freelance writer for The City Wire, provides this first-person account of a family vacation to an Alabama beach.

photos and story by Roy Hill

My mother-in-law has been coming to Orange Beach, Ala., for five or six years, and this year was going to be our family’s first time to come with her.

In the months leading up to our first visit to Alabama’s Gulf Coast, I spent hours on the Internet, checking out dive shops and researching what baits and angling techniques worked on redfish and king mackerel and cobia. But then the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew.

We almost didn’t come, but decided to check it out anyway. As we drove along the roads leading to the long narrow island that contains Orange Beach and Gulf Shores, we saw signs that things were not normal.

OBAMA AND OYSTERS
The first sign was in front of a small seafood shop that read, “Mr. President please help us.” President Barack Obama had visited the island just hours before we arrived. As we drove in, we saw a large helicopter we guessed might be Marine One, accompanied by a smaller military chopper. They both flew up and down the beach area, stopping here and there to hover.

Local papers the next morning had photos of Obama walking on the beach, sampling local food and drink. But the locals aren’t talking about Obama. They’re talking about the oil spill, and how few people are down here because of it.

“[T]he parking lots look more like October instead of June,” said Lee Sentell, spokesperson for the Alabama state agency responsible for tourism. “Since the oil arrived, the reservations have slowed dramatically.”

Near the condo complex we’re staying in, an oyster bar featured a sign out front: “Serving oysters fried, stewed, nude, but no crude.” Another restaurant had a sign simply noting, “Why worry? Let’s eat.” But even with all the friendly invitations, there are plenty of empty seats, which mean lost revenue.

Baldwin County contains both Orange Beach and Gulf Shores and may lose up to half of its $2.3 billion tourism business, according to several news sources. County officials “fear that they are facing a billion-dollar loss in tourism revenue this season,” Sentell said.

SLIMY SHELLS
After we got settled into our two-bedroom condo unit, I went down to the beach and saw another type of sign. Every few yards double red flags were flying on tall metal poles. Double red means the waters are closed. An Internet video I had watched earlier said it was illegal for anyone to enter the waters along Orange Beach or Gulf Shores for any reason other than helping with the spill cleanup efforts.

As I walked down the boardwalk from the pool area to the sand, I noticed bathroom soap dispensers attached to small boards next to the hoses used for washing sand off feet and legs. Next to the soap dispensers were more small signs that read “Oil and Tar Cleaning Station.”

I watched the Gulf of Mexico sunset and enjoyed the brilliant red, soft pink, and burning orange hues in the clouds. The ocean was blue at the horizon, and darkened to green at the shore. The small waves sloshed on the fine sand, and a few times I let the water run up over my bare feet. Every ebb and flow of the waves brought a few more little dark globs — tar balls — onto the beach. They looked like some sort of small animal scat. I picked one up. It was squishy and had only the faintest odor of petroleum, like fresh motor oil.

Here and there people stood on the beach, looking into the water. A few got close enough for the waves to wash over their feet or up their legs, but nobody actually got in. I found some seashells for my three-year-old son who loves such things. But before I could give them to him, I had to wash a slimy oil film off the shells. The washing left the corner of the white bar of hand soap stained a dark grimy orange, like the darkest, thickest, nastiest ear wax you’ve ever seen.

When I reached the sand washing station, I noticed my feet felt greasy after the waves hit them, like I had put too much lotion on them and it hadn’t quite dried.

TARBALL TEAMS
The next morning, I saw more signs. We put up a red canopy tent for shade, and my mother-in-law remarked that usually, there’s a double row of such tents, crammed thickly together. But we had plenty of room, yards and yards of space between the few canopy tents dotting the sand.

Tractors carrying men wearing white HAZMAT suit pants and rubber boots drove up and down the beach, stopping occasionally to allow the men to rake up tar balls and oil residue. Sometimes when the tractors stopped, the men would form a circle with everyone’s rake rising and dipping into the middle of it. After they left, the waves brought more scattered tar balls, but no thick waves of oil like those that have washed ashore in parts of Louisiana.

"We have a little oil that may come with the morning tide, and it’s quickly cleaned up," Sentell said.

The full sunlight also revealed another sign I had missed in the water the previous evening. As each wave broke and sloshed up onto the beach, a little flat spot formed in the water in the trough of the wave. In each flat spot, the swirly iridescent sheen of oil shown in the sun until the next surge of water obscured it.

BP ANGER
We drove around Gulf Shores looking for a restaurant, souvenirs and groceries. I noticed more signs. A bumper sticker on a red Honda read “Beach Polluter,” which puzzled me, until I realized the words were printed next to the green and yellow sunburst logo of British Petroleum. We drove past a BP gas station with only a couple of cars at its pumps. At the Shell gas station just across the street, cars lined up two deep at its pumps. Both stations had regular unleaded for the same price.

A sign in front of a hotel in Gulf Shores read, “Prayer Works. Thanks for all the beach support.”  A sign in front of a real estate agency sought to encourage, noting, “Now is the time for courage, not fear.”

Just down Highway 182, the main drag connecting Orange Beach and Gulf Shores, the Gulf State Park fishing pier was deserted.

After spending all day in Orange Beach and Gulf Shores, I opted for the 22-mile drive out to the western end of the island and a special candlelit tour of the Civil War battlefield site Fort Morgan. But even out there, I couldn’t get away from the signs. A little restaurant halfway to Fort Morgan had a big, hand-painted sign next to the road: “BP Sux Tarballs!”

The tour of the fort took my mind off the oil spill for about an hour. At the very end of the tour, the Fort Morgan park interpreters fired a Civil War cannon out toward Mobile Bay. As they loaded the cannon, a man standing next to me pointed out into the bay at a tall structure covered with bright lights. As he pointed, he said in a very thick Alabama accent, “They oughta aim that cannon at that oil rig out there.”