The Istoriaphile’s Corner

Life on the Gulf is hard.  Follow your nose past the shiny hotels and condos that block up the view and look at the rest of the world.  The ground is flat, the air is heavy and the heat will knock you stupid two-thirds of the year.  The highways are lined with billboards advertising pain doctors, tourist traps and attorneys promising high settlements and cheap divorces.  The scrub grows high and thick here.  The trees you see are either young matchsticks with impossibly high trunks or  old, gnarled things that have survived too many hurricanes to die. The people aren’t much different.  For generations, they’ve lived by the Gulf, a few in financial comfort but most of them eaking out a living on hard work, low wages and luck that runs thin on the ground.  They hold jobs without benefits, without paid vacation and without too much of a future.  The life here already made these folks resourceful, tenacious, colorful and tough but right now life’s even harder than usual.  The BP oil spill took a look at Gulf life and punched it right in the gut. Tom Cooper knows this and put the story of these folks in his…