I have been thinking a lot about my trip to Venice…Louisiana.

I went to Louisiana with a photographer about six weeks ago to cover the oil spill. We heard the action was in Venice. We bought a map and asked for directions because even with a map I had managed to get us hopelessly lost a day earlier in a small town called Houma.

“When you get to Belle Chase you take 23 and go straight,” we were told. “When the road ends, that’s Venice.”

Venice is in Plaquemines Parish, a 70-mile long peninsula that hangs off the toe of Lousiana. The first 30 miles or so seemed pleasant enough. Nice brick houses, convenience stores, churches, schools – the usual small town stuff. Then things started getting…interesting.

On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall about 15 miles north of Venice in a tiny town called Buras. It was the third time in 40 years that a hurricane and completely obliterated the town and everything to the south, including Venice.

One fisherman I spoke with said that a month after Katrina- while still displaced in Mississippi- he went on Google Earth to check on his mobile home. He could see the roof of his trailer under a foot of water.

When the Census numbers come out next year we will know how many of the 2,200 people that were in the southern half of Plaquemines Parish never came back after Katrina. Judging from the debris still on the side of the road – boats, overturned mobile homes and abandoned shells of buildings – it looks like a lot of folks did not come back. Many of those who did now live in mobile homes.

There are no movies, malls or main streets down here. No Starbucks, no grocery store and no wifi. There is a fair amount of drinking and a lot of fried food and mosquitoes. These are hearty, honest, hard-working people. Until the oil spill, these communities had some of the lowest unemployment rates in the country.

These fishermen and oystermen are not wed to these waters. They are  a part of the ecosystem itself. They and their ancestors have fished these waters for so long that they have become a link in the delicate circle of life here. The ecosystem here expects their annual harvest. This year, as the oil approached, the state opened the shrimp season early to help the shrimpers get what they could before the oil hit. Didn’t matter. The shrimp weren’t ready yet, the shrimpers said.

How will these people survive – mentally – if they cannot fish these waters? At least after Katrina they knew the shrimp and oysters and fish would eventually come back – and they did. Not this time. No one knows when – or if – anything will grow back or swim again in these waters. If just one species or plant does not come or grow back, the entire ecosystem could collapse. These people know that. They lose sleep over that.

People are going to die. They are going to kill themselves. For now it’s animals and plants that are dying. Soon, there will be people dying. A charter boat captain in Alabama killed himself yesterday. His fishing charters dried up when the government closed down the fishing grounds because of the oil. A couple of weeks ago he took a job with BP – the company that put him out of business. His crew found him in the wheelhouse of his boat, shot in the head.

There will be more suicides and there will be even more collateral suicides – the folks who drink themselves to death and overdose. Wives will be abused and kids and dogs will be beaten. Some folks will stop eating and others won’t be able to stop. Some will start smoking or smoke more. Hypertension and heart attacks will kill some. Drunken driving and homicides will kill others.

This is not only an ecological nightmare, it is a mental health holocaust. At least the fishermen in Prince William Sound knew that there was only a finite amount of oil in the Exxon Valdez and when the tanker had purged itself, the  oil would stop spilling. And those fishermen hadn’t lost their homes and everything they owned to a hurricane a few years before the Valdez ran aground.

There are limits to damn near everything in life. Credit cards, speed and hopefully the oil spewing from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I am afraid that many people will hit their limit and die because of this oil spill. Unlike the running tallies on dead turtles and birds, no one will keep track of how many people this oil spill will kill.

We will never know.

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From Psych Central's website:
PsychCentral (June 25, 2010)

World Wide News Flash (June 25, 2010)

    Last reviewed: 24 Jun 2010