DELACROIX ISLAND, La. — “Hold up, Aaron,” Buddy Greco instructed his son as they bent over a sheet of fiberglass on the docked fishing boat. “You still cuttin’ it wrong.”
His tone on that hot afternoon last June was not unkind. But Aaron, 19, was tired of listening to his father, tired of fixing up the boat for a shrimp season that might never open, tired of wondering whether the future he had set his sights on was dissolving in front of him.
This was to have been the first year he could join Buddy fishing full time, his goal ever since he could remember. And then a hundred million gallons of oil had spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s offshore well, with no sign of stopping.
A slim replica of Buddy with dark good looks and a normally ample supply of teasing repartee, Aaron straightened up and threw the razor knife across the refinished deck.
“Do it yourself then,” he said. “I’m leaving.”
While Americans were debating their reliance on fossil fuel in the wake of the worst offshore oil spill in United States history, Aaron Greco was trying to decide what to do with his life. His story illuminates the singular appeal and hardships of a livelihood in jeopardy.
And as the Obama administration paves the way for deepwater drilling to resume in the gulf, it is young men like Aaron who will shoulder the direct impact of the nation’s decisions about what energy to consume and what seafood to eat in the years to come.
Few of his friends born into the Gulf Coast’s fishing communities were following their fathers and grandfathers in the pursuit of wild seafood. Long before the oil rig exploded, rising fuel prices and competition from Asia’s cheap farmed shrimp had made a risky and physically punishing profession far less profitable: only a few thousand Louisianians now make their living fishing, down from more than 20,000 in the late 1980s.
Yet Aaron was among those of his generation still drawn to an elemental way of life. He wanted to be his own boss, to spend his days on the teeming marshes outside his door, 30 miles south of New Orleans and a world away. He wanted to pace himself to the rhythm of the oysters, crabs, and his favorite quarry since childhood, the shrimp.
“I want to chase the shrimp more than anything,” he told his girlfriend. “But I’m stuck.”
When the spill closed the waters around St. Bernard Parish, Aaron bounced between doubt and determination. His sisters pushed him to go on to college; his uncles warned of the lingering effects of dispersants used to clean up the oil. Even after the well was capped, Aaron questioned his own abilities.
Like any young man approaching adulthood, he clashed with his father even as he sought his help. And the day he grew frustrated over a sheet of fiberglass would not be the last that he had the impulse to bolt.
That evening, Buddy, 43, watched with thick arms crossed as Aaron packed a duffel bag, told his mother goodbye, and peeled out of the yard in his old Mustang.
Their son, Buddy complained to his wife, cared too much about his fast cars and fancy sneakers.
“He has to learn, Carolyn,” Buddy said. “He wants to do this, he has to learn it ain’t all peaches and cream.”
A Bayou’s Bounty
For Buddy, who had dropped out of school in 10th grade without ever learning to read, there had been no choice: like almost everyone else in Delacroix, descendants of Spanish-speaking Canary Islanders, he never considered anything other than fishing.
The time he did spend in school he used to advantage, singing “Sweet Caroline” to the pretty blonde in front of him on the bus, whom he soon prevailed on to marry him. But like many who grew up on the banks of the Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, he felt looked down on at the high school “up the road” — a designation that denoted social class as much as geography.
Others may have regarded them as poor, but the truth was teenagers could make good money in those days on the brackish waters that flowed into the gulf. In 1986, the year Buddy and Carolyn’s first child, Brittany, arrived, wild-caught gulf shrimp still accounted for nearly a quarter of the shrimp Americans ate, commanding the equivalent of nearly $2 per pound dockside.
And when Aaron was born, in 1990, Buddy covered the hospital bill with a few hundred sacks of oysters at $27 each.
“I paid for your stinky behind in that bayou,” he liked to remind his son, and it didn’t take long for the lesson to stick. Aaron spent his childhood catching minnows with a scoop net in the ditch near their home, his shrimper boots reaching up to his shorts. On fishing trips with his father, he lined up the little fish that dropped from the netting and stuffed them in his pockets.
“You take those out of there,” his mother commanded when she caught him. “They get in my washer and dryer, I’m going to have a smell out of this world.”
By the time Aaron was 13, he was lobbying to leave school himself. “Let me come on the boat,” he pleaded.
But Buddy wanted his middle child, and only boy, to have other options. The money in fishing was unpredictable, the work was dangerous, and there was no retirement plan. Carolyn’s father, a shrimper all his life, had had his hand ripped off in an accident with his rigging. Buddy’s father, stricken with lung cancer, hauled his oxygen tank with him onto the boat until a few days before he died in 2001.
“You finish school, Aaron,” he told his son. “You take after your mother — you smart enough to go to college.”
The sinking of his rusty oyster boat in 2003 in a sudden squall further darkened Buddy’s outlook on commercial fishing: his meager savings would not cover a new one. And by the time Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, imported farmed shrimp — cheaper, but sometimes laced with illegal antibiotics and, Louisiana fishermen would argue, nowhere near as sweet as theirs — had ballooned to 95 percent of domestic consumption. There was talk of a “farm bill” for shrimpers that would protect them under the same kind of social contract that had subsidized America’s family farmers for decades. But the vaunted independent spirit of commercial fishermen made them hard to organize, and without assets like land and equipment, they had little political influence.
With no boat of his own, Buddy turned to building boats on commission in the yard of his family’s prefabricated home; Carolyn drove a school bus for the health insurance the job offered. For his part, Aaron eked out a 2.9 grade-point average, aced honors chemistry, was voted the Augustus of the high school Latin club and taught himself to fix used Mustangs. Aaron’s Latin teacher urged him to apply to community college: “You’re good at problem-solving,” she told him before he graduated, half a year early, in January 2009.
He considered mechanic school and took a job washing cars at a collision shop, with the promise to do body work eventually. But in April, when the job was given to someone less skilled, he quit to go crabbing.
“You nuts, Aaron,” his older sister, Brittany, told him. Her husband had recently given up fishing for more reliable work on the new levee.
But on a boat, he told her, he would not be subject to his bosses’ arbitrary choices. And in early June 2009, when he persuaded his father to rig up a twisted-up old boat damaged during Hurricane Katrina, Aaron’s fate was sealed — or so it seemed.
Talking Buddy into it wasn’t easy: The year was yielding among the smallest brown shrimp catches in a decade. “It doesn’t pay to put the riggings on, son,” Buddy said. “Nobody’s catching any shrimp.”
Finally, Buddy told Carolyn he was going to teach Aaron a lesson.
“He’ll be done with it then, Carolyn,” he told her. “He’ll be wet and miserable, and he won’t want to fool with this anymore.”
If, in his heart, Buddy hoped otherwise, the moon and the tide were in their favor a few nights later. As soon as they pushed into the bayou, father and son could see the shrimp jumping. With no winches to pull up the bulging tails of their nets, they hauled them up by hand, two hundred pounds of glowing red eyes writhing on the deck.
Buddy steered as Aaron threw the nets out again and strained to lift them back in.
“Hey,” he called to his father, “when are you going to stop sitting behind that wheel and come help me pick these tails up?”
“Here, let a man grab them,” Buddy complied, pulling from behind and then backing off, letting the weight fall on Aaron and laughing as his son turned to sucker punch him.
Finally they headed in, exhausted and drenched in warm, salty water, with 1,800 pounds of shrimp.
The price at the dock was about a dollar a pound, half of what Buddy got the year Aaron was born. But Aaron’s enthusiasm was catching.
A few months later, Buddy traded $800 and bartered time and equipment for a 51-foot boat that needed, among other things, a new layer of fiberglass. When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded 41 miles offshore last April, they were almost done with the seemingly endless repairs. Their goal had been to finish before the young brown shrimp, at their sweetest and most succulent, began to move in May from the marshes to spawn in the salty gulf.
And when the oil company’s efforts to cap its leaking well fell short, Aaron recorded it on his Facebook wall. “BP fails…. AGAIN!!!” he posted on May 29. Then, on June 15: “Sleepless night, lots of thinkin goin on.”
Chasing Rainbows
The one unequivocally good thing about the oil spill, Aaron reminded himself on the evening he sped away from home without quite knowing where he was heading, was Melanie Fink.
They had run cross-country together in high school. But he would never have asked her out if he hadn’t seen her at the Civic Center where he was attending BP cleanup training.
Though she lived in a more upscale part of the parish, Melanie seemed to enjoy what Aaron sometimes called his “redneck house.” On Facebook, his status shifted from “single” to “in a relationship.”
“So pretty,” he commented on her profile picture.
Still, as he listened to the daily oil sheen forecast and watched the live video of the oil flooding out of the well 5,000 feet under water, Aaron felt as if a brake had been slammed down. The money BP was paying for the use of Buddy’s boat, one of hundreds enlisted in the cleanup effort, was welcome, of course. Aaron, as his father’s deckhand, was making $560 a day to spread long chains of orange and yellow boom out and collect it again. But everyone knew that couldn’t last. And then what?
On their days off, he and Buddy continued halfheartedly with the boat repairs. Talking with Melanie eased his anxiety. Spotting a rainbow arching across the sky as he drove her home from the WOW Cafe and Wingery that night, he took up their running argument: “I’m telling you, it has an end,” he insisted. “Look, see it over there? It hits the ground.”
She shook her head. “It’s a sunbeam.”
“The sun is over there!” he said, pointing.
“It was a moonbeam, then.”
“It was a moonbeam,” he repeated with exaggerated incredulity. “Oh yeah, that explains the whole situation.”
At the command center BP had set up on the Delacroix dock, where his father relied on Aaron to read the paperwork for him, the fishermen chafed at the unfamiliar oversight. Told to wear their life jackets or risk being fired, they left them unzipped. Instructed to wear safety gloves, a cousin of Buddy’s noted that somehow, in the months he had been working for BP, “I ain’t found nothing that fits my hands.”
And whether anyone would buy their seafood once they were allowed to catch it again was another matter. On the news Aaron saw a clip showing a restaurant in New York with a sign saying it did not sell gulf seafood.
“People are worried about it,” Aaron told Melanie with a grimace. In early July, the dock gossips greeted with skepticism reports that dispersants had cleaned away much of the oil. “A gallon of oil is still a gallon of oil, no matter how much you think it out,” one of Aaron’s uncles warned. The admonition weighed on him.
Frustrated with the limbo, Aaron buried himself in his car magazines and dreamed of buying his first new Mustang, the 2011 model, with his BP earnings.
That week, when an uncle offered him a deal on a shrimp boat Aaron did not give him an immediate answer.
Then, on July 15, Buddy and Aaron were instructed to drive out to look for oil in Black Bay, where Buddy had sunk his oyster boat years earlier. With the GPS, they navigated to the precise spot, where his dredge-post was still sticking up out of the shallow water.
It was hard to relive the sudden storm, the old boat going under in seconds, standing up to his neck in water, hoisting up 100-pound sacks of oysters to the rescue boat. It was maybe the worst that could befall a fisherman, other than drowning.
“It’s not a good feeling,” he told his son.
It was pretty in the bay that morning. The air smelled good.
Aaron looked at his father.
“Oh, Daddy,” he said, with no mockery in his voice. “You just caught yourself too many oysters that day.”
Carolyn called with the news as they arrived back: the well had been capped.
But Aaron had already decided to buy his uncle’s boat.
Striking Out on His Own
On Nov. 2, soon after the Obama administration lifted its moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, Aaron posted a status update on his Facebook page: “Tested out the boat! LOL Caught 13 pounds on a little bitty push.”
The Grecos had worked for BP through September, loath to give up the paycheck even after the Gulf Coast waters were deemed safe. But by late October the cold fronts were upon them, sweeping through the marshes, sending the heat-sensitive white shrimp moving to the deeper, warmer waters of the gulf.
It was the best time to catch shrimp. They worked frantically to weld Aaron’s rigging onto the boat and sew Buddy’s nets. But they had to move fast.
The plan had been to do a longer test-run together. But they stood to make twice as much if each took his own boat.
Aaron wanted to go out on his own. Buddy hesitated.
“I’m 20 years old,” said Aaron, who was still 19. “You can’t tell me what to do.”
His first solo run, a few hours later, was a disaster. His nets got tangled and ripped. He caught crab traps in his rigging. The knots holding his rigging slipped. Two of his baskets that were meant to hold shrimp blew overboard.
After barely an hour, he headed back to the dock. “This is a mess,” he raged in self-disgust.
But the next time, and the time after that, were better.
With the dock price for shrimp now only $1 per pound, Aaron was barely covering his fuel costs, but he would go every day, he vowed, to catch the volume he needed.
“This was a good day,” he told Melanie over wings a few nights later. “I got used to everything. I felt — accomplished.”
And if Buddy missed Aaron’s company, he did not tell his son. “A real fisherman,” he said to Carolyn, “goes out on his own.”
The bigger white shrimp would be gone for the season before a presidential commission reported this week that another accident like the BP spill was likely without major changes in both industry and government policy.
But Aaron managed to get in one last run.
It was cloudy at first and started to drizzle. But when it grew brighter, three rainbows arched across the sky.
Peering into air thick with moisture, Aaron was quite sure he could see their ends.
