They don’t look like balls exactly. The small ones look like dried out rabbit turds or kernels of a not particularly appetizing breakfast cereal. The larger ones are maps of rust brown countries. They could be jigsaw puzzle pieces—a rusty black red–and are sometimes the size of cow patties.

Someone—me?—needs to write a natural history of tarballs. I will say this, if I were walking down this beach without any sort of knowledge of the oil spill I might not notice them, or I might think they were a natural part of the ecosystem. But I do know and I do notice. And on this formerly pristine beach,(see before and after pictures below) jutting out into the Gulf of Mexico, they are everywhere. That and the fact that the tide has left a bath ring, an orangish coating that reminds me of the red color that the Cat and the Hat and Things One and Two spread all over the poor kids’ house.

If the tarballs are the creepiest thing about this beach, the second creepiest are the dozens and dozens of workers who I watch through the mist and wind, a half mile down the beach. They are a ghostly prison crew in flurescent vests, sweeping the sands, though sweeping seems a far too energetic word for the timid picking they do with their shovels. At various stops along this island stretch of beach, I’ve seen a couple hundred of these men, many formerly unemployed and now paid 15 bucks an hour by BP to pick at the sand. The second level of command, the sergeants, are muscular but overweight men who bark orders and drive around in 4-wheel drive ATVS and amped up golf carts. You might think that they would enjoy their little taste of authority, but they never smile. No one seems to be having a good time.

“Don’t ask them any questions,” the girl at the beer store told me. “BP won’t let them talk to civilians.”

Her wording may sound strange at first but not when you see the workers spread over the beach: they in fact look like a sluggish corporate army. It is an odd and truly startling fact: the same douchebags who caused this are now in charge of cleaning it up, which essentially puts them in charge of the beaches. (An aside here for Bill: I like Obama, I really do, but why is it that I can’t imagine Teddy Roosevelt putting a corporation in charge of cleaning up a national park?)

But despite the tar balls, and despite the ghostly clean up crews, this is still a beach, a beach like those I’ve known on Cape Cod and Carolina and California. A tern flies upwind with a sliver of minnow in its mouth. Directly upland from the tarballs is a sea turtle nest where a young Kemp’s Ridley incubates, soon to emerge and begin its crawl down to the oily sea. An osprey sits in a hurricane-deadened tree, tearing apart a fish. I didn’t really have much of a plan when I came down here, but now, on my first afternoon, I have at least the beginnings of a plan. It isn’t very sexy or reporter-like, but I think one thing I’m going to do is camp out here in my tent for a few days. Get to know this beach like I’ve gotten to know other beaches, and take field notes on both the terns and the tarballs.

It may sound odd to say, on a beach with hundreds of men with shovels, but as I walked back to the dunes, and cracked my first beer, I felt a little of that sense of solitude, and euphoria, that has always drawn me to beaches. I thought I’d gotten to a place where I was relatively alone but then I noticed the woman who walked down to the water and then back to a single hummock and bowed her head as if in prayer. I was going to say hello but then I saw she was placing flowers on the sand and realized that she had been spreading the ashes of a loved one.

I gave her another mile of space before setting up my own little camp. I took out my journal, my binoculars, another beer. This was my first look at the Gulf of Mexico, white-capped and wind-blown, and of course just looking at the water was not enough. I dove in and swam out a ways, despite the oil. Earlier, when I asked the Rangers—friendly, generous, though obviously in mourning for their beach—if I could swim, they repeated BP’s party line: “If it looks clean you can go in.” As if anyone, even the diving tern, with vision so much better than my own, would truly be able to see the quality of the water it was diving into, would be able to see not just the oil but the chemical dispersants that may prove to be so much more deadly to the ecosystem than the oil itself. As if the tern could see that the sliver of fish it held in its mouth carried BP’s gift of those chemicals, chemicals already doing their ugly work inside the fish and soon enough, the bird. As if the bird could discern that once again human beings could somehow not comprehend the simplest of notions, one it knew deep in its hollow bones, that everything in the world is connected, and that when you soil one thing you soil us all.

Unlike the bird, I had some idea what I was getting into. But I swam anyway. What the fuck. We are all part of it. The water might have been poisoned, but for the moment it felt good.

(I will not be using specfic beach names–or people names, for now–to protect the innocent {and me})

The beach, before and after.