Book review: A Million Fragile Bones by Connie May Fowler. Twisted Road 2017.
For almost twenty years the novelist Connie May Fowler lived in Paradise. Then she found herself living in an oily Hell.
Alligator Point image: tugta.com
oil from the Deepwater Horizon image: livescience.com
Fowler’s childhood was cruel. Her father died when she was six, and her mother descended into brutal, terrifying madness. Connie May found her salvation in books and writing. She excelled in school and college, and wound up in graduate school in Kansas, but as soon as she could she returned to St. Augustine, Florida, the town where she had lived with her beloved father, from whom she inherited her love of nature.
St Augustine – Anastasia State Park image: orlandoweekly.com
In St. Augustine she became an avid birdwatcher and an environmental activist. But her marriage was failing and her best friend left town; when she discovered a tiny community on the Florida panhandle, she knew she had found her home.
The first half of this book is a celebration of the beauty of the earth, and her own particular place on earth – a wooden shack, once an army barracks, on a sandbar called Alligator Point that reaches out from Florida’s panhandle into the Gulf of Mexico. From her house she looked across a two-lane road to the dunes and the Gulf beyond, both teeming with life. The previous owner had planted an orchard of fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and plants to attract birds and butterflies, and built a Seminole-style chickee at the base of the dunes.
image: offexploring.com
She spent almost twenty years at Alligator Point, haunted by her memories, gradually finding healing and peace. She makes us fall in love with this place as she did, sharing her joy and wonder as she observes the daily miracles. Monarch butterflies stop on their migration to feed from the wildflowers on the dunes.
… I spy a ragged flotilla, colorful scraps of movement swirling along on the wind…[T]hey float downward, landing on the blossoms, transforming the dunes into a living kaleidoscope…Two butterflies I cannot identify land on my left foot. Then one monarch, then three, and then more than I have the presence of mind to count, light on my arms. Before long, I am a human being dressed in a sheath of butterflies. My skin tingles under the weightless scintillation of tiny legs.”
image: kidsgrowingstrong.org
As a hurricane approaches she watches a squirrel “weave an impermeable pine needle plug..[and] with his frenetic but strong little paws, stuff the woven plug in the opening of a bluebird house…Hours after the hurricane has moved on and the air has been scrubbed fresh and blue…[she watches the squirrel] pull aside the plug, gaze out the hole, and evidently deciding to err on the side of caution, pull it shut again…”
image: birdhousessupply.com
With her visiting nephew, she walks the beach and watches “…osprey fishing for mullet, bald eagles spiral on thermals. A large dolphin pod fishes the water just beyond the surf break and from time to time one leaps out of the water – a silver gray arc…We wade ankle deep through clear water teeming with horseshoe crabs and baby fish and shells that suddenly stand up and move…Stingrays breach the water, and fly, and fly again…Young nurse sharks zip by, unconcerned with us.”
leaping stingrays image:pinterest.com
After ten years living on the sandbar, mostly alone except for her dogs, she has found her rhythm, and the rhythm of the seasons. “In springtime, I feel as if I’m eighteen and in love for the first time. In the harsh northern winds of winter I wrap up in blankets and cook old people food – chicken soup, beef stew, corn chowder. In the summer I fish and stargaze and spend hours in or by the sea, both by day and night. And in autumn, with the temperatures cooling, I begin putting some of my garden to bed…”
She is in love with the abundant wildlife of the dunes and sea, she studies them and collects their bones. She spends her time writing, tending her bird feeders, gardening. She continues her environmental activism, and when she receives a financial windfall from one of her books, she donates it to Refuge House in Tallahassee to expand their domestic violence shelter, which serves eight counties.
She revels in solitude, and then falls in love with Bill, a man who is as immersed in nature as she is, and, as a bonus, can build or fix anything. Eventually he moves in, they marry, and are happy on their sandbar. And then…
The Gulf, a breeding ground for hundreds of marine species and the microorganisms that nourish them, is rich with new life in the spring. In April, 2010 the British Petroleum oil rig, the “Deepwater Horizon”, exploded in the Gulf forty-one miles south of Lousiana.
image: Grist.org
Connie May recounts the nightmare as she lived it, one day at a time. BP lies; the government lies. For five days they deny there is a leak. They assure everyone that the eleven missing oil rig workers will be rescued, until on the fourth day they abandon the search.
Eventually BP is forced to stream a live feed from its underwater camera, showing the oil streaming out of the exploded well, and Connie May watches it compulsively, the way she watches every bit of news about the disaster, and researches the history and science. She learns that BP has been fined 760 times for safety violations. The reports often cite cost-cutting as a cause, especially in safety, maintenance, and staff training.
She begins to smell the petroleum. Her eyes burn, her mouth fills with sticky ropes of mucous, and everything is covered with an oily black soot. Seventy thousand barrels of oil a day – almost three million gallons – are flowing into the Gulf every day. Compare this to the total spill of 260,000 barrels from the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.
It becomes clear that no one knows how to stop the leak. They deploy booms to enclose the surface oil slick. They dump hundreds of thousands of gallons of Corexit, a dispersant, which breaks up the surface oil into tiny particles and drives it underwater, out of sight. Corexit has been banned in many countries. After the Exxon Valdez disaster it was linked to respiratory, nervous system, kidney, liver, and blood disorders in humans. It is toxic to marine life.
containment boom; spraying dispersant images: earthrepair.ca
Turtles, birds, and baby dolphins begin washing up on shore. After a couple of weeks BP forbids residents to take part in the clean-up; it disposes of the corpses – the evidence – with its own clean-up organization.
By the end of June the oil reaches Alligator Point and a boom is deployed. The government issues a rule: no one is allowed within sixty-five feet of the boom, oiled animals, or the shore. To disobey the rule is a felony.
83 days after the spill, Connie May and her husband, walking on the beach, find themselves ankle-deep in a thick foam, like a mousse, of oil. That night a government spokesman announces on CNN that there is no oil on any Florida beaches. 87 days after the spill, BP announces they have capped the well. 152 days after the spill, they announce that the leak has stopped. But oil keeps appearing near the site.
“The Gulf’s deep sea reefs are dead and no fish are to be found among them. Tuna, shrimp, oyster and crab populations are decimated. Fishermen routinely haul in various species of fish that are covered in lesions and suffering from fin rot…the fish have diseased ovaries and livers…infections in fish and marine mammals are rampant.”
Connie May and Bill have to acknowledge that Paradise has been destroyed. They move back to St Augustine for a while, and then to the Yucatan.
A Million Fragile Bones is a vivid and moving picture of a woman’s love affair with nature, and the horror as she watches the destruction of her special paradise. Fowler has given us the gift of her memory of this place. Perhaps such writings are all that will remain to us as we relentlessly destroy our world.