Night Watch in the Oily Gloom

Friend "DJ," also known as Barrier Island Girl, is on volunteer turtle patrol this week. She's looking out for mother turtles whose instincts lead them to seek a nesting place on the toxic, oiled beaches of Santa Rosa Island. (Volunteers then move the nests elsewhere.)

She's assigned to the night shift right now. As it happens, this gives her a close-up, extended view of the clean-up workers who labor all night long and into the dawn to clean our beaches of BP's poisonous effluent. DJ writes affectingly of all the hard work she has seen them doing -- just before she collapses, herself, after a long night in the dark and oily gloom of Pensacola Beach.

Give it a read, please. So few trouble to thank the workers who, for very little money and at great risk to their own health, labor quite literally night and day in the near-futile but necessary effort to try to clean the Gulf Coast.

Into thy maw I commend my body
But the soul shines without
* * *
One step forward
Two steps back
Will soon be over
Hear it crack!
* * *
Day and night
Night and day
Till life is turned
The other way.

-- Dorothy Livesay, Day and Night