Even on the beach, my twelve year-old All Star can’t stop playing baseball. Danielgrips a driftwood “bat,” tosses rocks in the air, and hits them into the waves.
 
But something disturbs his hitting. He steps out of his imaginary batters box, peers at the bottom of his feet, and frowns. “Lots of tar today, Dad.”
 
My bare feet are similarly tar-globbed, and I nod my agreement. “The oil companies say the tar on the beach comes from natural seepage, not from the drilling rigs,” I tell him.
 
“Yeah, right.” Daniel shakes his head at the offshore wells and resumes hitting rocks into the centerfield breakers.
 
My thoughts stay with the tar. During Santa Barbara’s disastrous 1969 oil spill, when I was not much older than Daniel, I pulled screaming birds from the black tide that rolled over this beach.
 
I wander the shore, pulling birds, most dead, some alive, out of the muck. The oil covers my hands, sticks to my sneakers, spatters on my shirt and pants. But it isn’t so much the feel of the oil as the sight and smell of it. Especially the smell, the smell of hell, fumes that catch in my throat, that make me cough and choke and heave, dry heave because I’ve eaten nothing, can’t eat anything, not with birds dying screaming in my arms, not with the black tide bringing ever more corpses to a shore that is itself dying. I gasp for air, every now and then walking away from the shore to catch my breath, then returning to the bedarkened beach and the tormented birds, feeling the pain of a world gone black, the agony of creatures screaming in their death throes. This is the look of hell before the Devil lit a match.
 
Daniel drops his driftwood bat and we resume our walk up Hendry’s Beach. He’s a great hiker and we’ve hiked hundreds of miles of the California coast together from the sands of San Diego to footpaths through the redwoods. We reach a reef and Daniel rock-hops over to a trio of bright orange starfish and checks out the hermit crabs scurrying around the tidepools.
 
During the Time of the Black Tide, I watch the deployment of the full arsenal of American industrial might: boats, barges, airplanes, helicopters, miles of plastic and wooden booms, thousand of bales of straw, dozens of vacuum trucks, dump trucks, and bulldozers. I watch men steam-blast the oil off the rocks of the harbor, killing the bacteria that eventually would have decomposed the oil; then the tide comes back in, coating the rocks again, and the men come back to steam-blast them again.
 
The spill was dubbed “the ecological shot heard ’round the world yet, 40 years later, the waters off Santa Barbara are still filled with oil wells, more of them than in ‘69. By day the drilling platforms are an eyesore, by night they appear as garishly lit ships forever at anchor.
 
At the Santa Barbara Zoo, we bathe the oily birds in the best of modern chemistry, Polycomplex A-II; not a soap, Union Oil tells us, but a nonsudsing dispersant that will remove the bad oil but leave the natural oils, the birds’ waterproofing, intact. We don’t believe a word Union Oil tells us.
 
After we wash the birds, we rinse them, rewash them, rerinse them, towel them dry, force-feed them vitamins and butter (the latter to cleanse their insides of oil) and put them in pens under heat lamps. At every step along the way, some of the birds die. And amidst the squawking screaming waterfowl come the radio reports. The secretary of the interior says he’ll stop oil drilling. Then he’ll re-start it, then he’ll stop it again. We work into the night, cheering and jeering the radio, comforting the birds and one another, wondering if the black tide will ever recede.
 
During the 2008 presidential campaign, offshore oil boosters insisted, with all seriousness and against all evidence, that drilling off Santa Barbara’s shores would reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. Developing amnesia about the eco-catastrophe that occurred on this coast and pandering to the cry of the petro-mob to “Drill baby, drill,” the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors voted to support offshore oil drilling.
 
Forty years after the great spill, local politicos and more than a few so-called conservationists just can’t say “No” to more offshore drilling. Shockingly acquiescent, they fell for a recent slick proposal by a Texas-based oil company that offered to trade the shut-down of four offshore rigs for permission to drill new wells. Fortunately the State Lands Commission rejected this proposal, wisely noting that such an arrangement would signal to the nation that California welcomed increased offshore oil production. Like swapping land for peace in the Middle East, exchanging one drilling locale for another in the Santa Barbara Channel is a terrible idea. We need to remove the oil wells not move them around.
 
These recent views of offshore oil development, whether serious, ridiculous or seriously ridiculous, point to a de-evolution in coastal consciousness over the years, and serve as reminders that the price of living in paradise is constant vigilance.
 
My son and I walk on toward Hope Ranch Beach. We must not forget what we have. We must not forget what we could lose. We owe the next generation no less.