Even Unseen, Oil Looms Large on 'Forgotten Coast'

APALACHICOLA, Fla. (July 23) -- The only gusher here spouts rumors.

A brownish sheen was spotted two miles off St. George Island. Oil washed up near Shell Point. Tourists on the beach swear they saw a loon covered in goop.

The Coast Guard hasn't been able to confirm any of it. Likely they were something else.

"People are freaking and psyching themselves out that they're seeing something they're not," said Samantha Goldstein, a waitress at the Blue Parrot beach bar on St. George Island.

But just because there isn't any oil on Florida's "Forgotten Coast" doesn't mean the BP oil spill disaster has left this corner of the Gulf of Mexico unscathed. In ways good and bad, simple and complex, the three-month-old crisis has churned up this languid former cotton port that's been largely ignored by a nation focused on the devastation washing ashore farther west.

"We are living in parallel universes," said Dale Julian, owner of Downtown Books.

One lives for today, thriving on the tourism that clean beaches have brought and the easy money that's poured in from BP and its contractors. The other lives in fear, anxious about the black poison that any day now could reach this commercial fishing town and end a vestige of Florida's cracker culture before it is subsumed by condos on every strip of sand.

BP may have stanched most of the leaking oil last week, but the specter of creeping underwater plumes and invisible dispersants dredged up and blown this way by a hurricane has folks here fearful of the unknown.

"All this oil is below the surface," said Joseph "Smokey" Parrish, a Franklin County commissioner and plant manager at a seafood dealer here. "You can't fight an enemy you can't see."

The oil may be unseen, but it is not out of mind. A billboard outside the historic Dixie Theater sported the cover of a recent New Yorker magazine -- not typical reading in a place where one in four is barely literate. It showed oiled marine animals.

Nothing Like a Hurricane

Apalachicola Bay produces 10 percent of the nation's oysters and 90 percent of those eaten in Florida, and is listed by UNESCO as a biosphere reserve. The area's twin economic pillars of seafood and tourism depend on preserving its beauty and bounty. And after years of fighting over water use upriver, many here worry that the latest man-made disaster could destroy one of the most productive estuaries in North America.

"This would be a ghost town without that estuary," said Beverly Hewitt, whose Seafood Grill restaurant sells the oysters, shrimp and grouper that thrive in local waters.

As Tropical Storm Bonnie hurtled toward the gulf, workers who just weeks ago laid oil booms across the bay rushed to haul them in ahead of the possible rough weather. While it was unclear if Bonnie would head this way or strengthen into a hurricane, locals know it's only a matter of time until it's their turn.

"Our biggest nightmare is this plume of oil subsurface, in a hurricane, will move onto the shore," said Curt Blair, owner of the Water Street Hotel and Marina. "If we got that, it would be hard to recover."

Remnants of Hurricane Dennis, the first of the deadly 2005 season whose main event was Katrina, are still everywhere. Across the bay in Eastpoint, where a tidal surge hammered the fishing village, exposed building foundations and boarded-up oyster houses still line the coast. What if, people wonder, the next wall of water brings oil with it?

David Barber rebuilt his Eastpoint seafood warehouse after Dennis and was doing well until BP spill closures cut off his supply of oysters from Texas and Louisiana waters. A day before the federal government reopened a third of the gulf's fishing grounds, the avid hunter sat at his desk beneath the heads of 11 deer and picked up the phone. It was the owner of an oyster bar in Melbourne, Fla.

"Tell 'em we got no oil in Franklin County," a frustrated Barber told the man to tell his customers who were staying away from the bivalves out of fear they were contaminated.

Smaller fishing grounds combined with weaker demand up north, where restaurants in New York, Chicago and other big cities have taken gulf seafood off the menu, have forced Barber to cut the hours of his oyster shuckers and lay off 10 truck drivers, dock workers and packers -- half his workforce.

The seafood processing plant on Water Street where Parrish works also has cut back because fishing boats have been unable to follow the annual shrimp migration path across the gulf from Florida to Texas. As workers unloaded bags of locally caught shrimp from a boat docked behind his warehouse, he glumly noted that business was down 50 percent.

"Nobody wants shrimp out of the gulf," he said.

'Circus Has Come to Town'

Beyond supply and demand problems, the biggest gripe among seafood dealers has been the shortage of oystermen willing to come to work. Since shortly after the spill, BP and its contractors have been offering $1,200 a day for deck hands to $5,000 for boat captains as part of its Vessels of Opportunity program laying boom, spotting for oil and doing other related jobs. Considering $200 is typical for a day's haul of oysters, that's unprecedented money around here.

But for many left to run businesses without enough help, there is resentment of those who've cashed in.

"That's easy money. They'd rather do that than harvest oysters. In the meantime, it's killing our industry," said Lynn Martina, owner of Lynn's Quality Oysters in Eastpoint. She laid off 10 shuckers and closed down a distribution route to Tampa because she couldn't get enough oysters to sell.

"I'm being put out of business because of BP," Martina said, adding that she worries she will permanently lose customers who will go elsewhere for seafood.

Kathy Robinson's fishing charter company also lost business when nine of her dozen contract guides were hired by BP "to look for oil that wasn't there." Cash flow has gotten so tight that she and her husband have applied for emergency loans for the first time since they started their business 14 years ago.

"The circus has come to town," said Lois Swoboda, a reporter who has covered the spill fallout for the local newspaper.

The influx of money has not only thrown a wrench into the local economic order but has had a perversely Beverly Hillbillies effect, without the oil. Long-time employees quit their jobs. The local electronics store sold out of big-screen TVs. There was talk of fancy vacations. Over at the Franklin County Food Pantry, the number of families seeking help last month fell from 450 to 305.

But while all this is a good thing, Clarice Powell worries about what will happen after the buying "binge," now that BP money is starting to dry up. In June, the county unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 8 percent after four months of improved numbers. A county victims rights advocate, Powell is already seeing more cases of domestic violence, child abuse and threats of suicide.

And then there has been the increase of people who have come in for counseling for the first time. Many, Powell said, are stressed out by their uncertain future.

'Best Year Ever'

If residents are anxious these days, the tourists walking downtown amid the rusted cotton warehouses and sunning on the beach out on St. George Island have few worries in a place where local menus still list a prodigious number of ways to eat oysters.

"I made no thought to changing our plans," said Laurie Counsel, 49, of Indianapolis, who walked down the street eating ice cream with her sister, Suzy Gaudin, 45, of Clearwater, Fla. She'd read about Apalachicola in a magazine and loved the "very unspoiled, old Florida" feel.

Karen Murphy, a Tallahassee homemaker, usually takes her children to the mountains this time of year. But as they rode a Jet Ski in the surf off the beach, she said she decided to come here instead, "to help the local economy."

Though local business owners are careful to say they don't want to profit from others' problems, many report increased bookings from tourists whose vacation plans in Pensacola and other western Florida beach towns were ruined by tar balls.

Julian, the bookstore owner, has seen a lot of first-timers who tell her, "It's so nice to breathe air that doesn't smell like petroleum." She said this has been her "best year ever" since opening the shop nine years ago.

Not every new face in town belongs to a tourist. Hundreds of oil spill workers have snapped up resort houses and crowded into local restaurants. Contractors fill the Seafood Grill each night, a mixed blessing for Hewitt at a time when profit margins have been shaved by higher wholesale prices for oysters.

Most of the customers at Cafe Con Leche are "BP disaster people" from next door, said owner Tamara Suarez. Many buy coffee, maybe a sandwich, but ignore the scarfs, jewelry and other gift items tourists used to buy. About the only non-food item selling these days are paintings by one of her employees, local artist Frederick Kahler. The small paintings on the walls of the cafe depict oiled birds and oysters and nightmarish scenes of oil-splashed lighthouses underneath wilting BP suns.

One large canvas -- a pipe spewing black oil in a blue sea filled with dead fish that are nothing but bones -- is what Kahler described to a visitor as his version of Picasso's "Guernica." By the next morning, it was gone. Someone had bought it and taken it home as a souvenir of time spent in Apalachicola.

'A Black Cloud'

Not every business in town is thriving. Bookings at hotels and other lodgings in July are down about 35 percent compared with last year, said Blair, executive director of the Franklin County Tourist Development Council. While the overall economy may play a role, advance reservations indicate August will be much worse, down 60 percent over 2009. Tax revenues have fallen just as the county faces a big budget shortfall.

"We're worried that the phones are not ringing for future reservations," said Anita Grove, head of the local Chamber of Commerce. She said many would-be visitors from across the South are delaying decisions as they track the path of the oil.

Others are wondering if a second home along the beach here is such a good idea after all. Robinson, who also sells houses, said the BP disaster cratered a real estate market that was just starting to show signs of life this spring after a five-year slump. Before April 20, she had three prospects searching for vacation homes. Since the spill, "all e-mails stopped," she said. "There was silence -- the phone wasn't ringing."

Business has been steady at Apalach Outfitters, which had the unfortunate timing to open 11 days before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, but owner Tom Morgan worries about what lies ahead. "That was certainly not a risk I ever contemplated," he said of the gushing well. "The oil has created a black cloud over just about everything."

Morgan, a former real estate developer, moved his family from Panama City to open the outdoor apparel store. Others here aren't so mobile.

Out on the loading dock at Barber's Seafood, oysterman Jon Lemieux backs up his pickup truck to unload burlap bags filled with the day's haul. Lemieux, 42, weighs each bag, just as his daddy and his daddy's daddy and two more before them did. He hopes his 6-year-old son, Simon, who is looking on and is already learning how to cull oysters from their clusters, will become the sixth generation of Lemieuxs to make their living on the bay.

"This is what I was raised doing, and I hope Simon will do it too," Lemieux said. "But if oil comes in here, it's going to be all gone."