The Beast

"Offensive: nasty, coarse, foul, impure, abominable, beastly, reeky, fetid, moldy, musty, rancid, bad, touched, rotten, corrupt, tainted, putrid"

- Roget's Thesaurus (def. 653)

"We will have to wait and see if the Monster decides to move. As long as it stays in the valley we'll be out of danger." - It Came From Outer Space

Scientists and engineers watch and study it but they don't know how to stop it or even slow it down. They are not even sure why it is coming. But coming it is, and soon it will rear its ugly face and spew black slime all over the coast. It will kill the wildlife, disgust the villagers, and spread disease as it baffles the top minds of the country. The putrid presence of the Beast will eventually affect the lives of everyone. . .

I wrote that way back in 1974 and it appeared in a little, local, Long Island eco-zine of the time called Wetlands. I suspect my parents may have had a hand in getting the publisher to accept it, and it remains my first, and close to only, actual published manuscript. I was writing at the time about "the collective crap of New York City," a mass of processed sewage that had been dumped offshore but was migrating back toward the coast. A year later, I was actually on the beach the day some of that sludge started washing ashore.

Today, I thought about my words from over a quarter century ago as I watched the news about the BP oil spill. The oil is now washing up on the beaches of the Florida panhandle, the "Redneck Riviera" as it's called down here, and the news is full of heart-breaking pictures of oil-coated pelicans and turtles and dolphins, and reports that the oil slick seems to be indeed heading toward the Gulf Stream and the Atlantic Ocean. Sadly, it seems that we haven't gotten much wiser about protecting our fragile eco-systems since the time of that article, despite all of the environmental standards and regulations passed over those years (Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, RCRA, Superfund, and so on).

And speaking of lack of wisdom - some people are actually starting to champion the hair-brained (hare-brained?) concept of using a nuclear bomb to stop the oil leak. The conservative website of the conservative magazine National Review actually posted a sadly-not-ironic article urging President Obama to literally go nuclear on the leaking well, and so many people were enthused enough about this idea that this week a spokeswoman for the Energy Department had to issue a statement saying that no federal officials were thinking about a nuclear blast under the gulf. The nuclear option was not — and never had been — on the table. “It’s crazy,” one senior official said.

Not that "crazy" has ever stopped us from doing anything before.

Re-reading the old magazine piece, it also strikes me how little my style has changed. Despite all the years, it still reads like it could have been any one of the entries in this blog. So I'll close this post with the eerily still-applicable close of my 1974 article:

So the Beast keeps crawling along the ocean floor like a monster from a grade B horror film. But then, maybe it would be easier to cope with a prehistoric creature from the primordial slime, then a nebulous ooze from the toilets of Brooklyn.