“Something's coming, I can smell it… I also haven’t seen a pelican in ten days.”

Navarre/Pensacola Beach, FL

I arrived here late afternoon and almost immediately found myself being chauffeured around the area by Donna and Kerry Troy, friends of friends.  Kerry was a NYC police officer and after the events of 9/11 he and Donna  decided to move down to Navarre Beach and start anew.  What they had to show me was a study of abject beauty, if not laced with a very dark and terrifying unknown.  As you see from the pictures, the Beaches of the Navarre and Pensacola area are nothing short of tropical;  snow-white sand runs along a beautiful blue and green Gulf.  At one point during our tour, Donna noted that she’s “Never seen so many fisherman on the pier, (a pier that had to be completely rebuilt after the recent destruction of Hurricane Ivan) or so many people on the streets.”  A true note of optimism for an area that’s under a very slow but non-relenting siege.  Kerry put it best when he said, “Something coming’s, I can smell it… I also haven’t seen a pelican in ten days.”.  The birds that were usually to be found here by the 100s have all but disappeared in the last week and a half.  No explanation, except for the obvious.  Just two miles off-shore from these strikingly beautiful beaches sits an oil slick which over 55 days ago started to make its slow and inexorable trek down to one of Florida’s more beautiful areas.  An oil slick which has spread devastation along hundreds of miles of this coast, an oil slick that for all intents and purposes is still fed by a ruptured well head 5,000 feet deep.  It’s truly ironic that several years back, Florida voted against off-shore drilling as they wanted to spare their environment a potential disaster. And now this. It’s a heartbreak to look out onto the Gulf and know that it’s only a matter of time, a very short time.