The marina’s manager, Chris Calloway, says that the only obvious evidence of the oil spill now are the new trucks and boats owned by the “spillionaires”  people who struck it rich by renting out their boats and land and services for BP’s cleanup operation that lasted months. Oh, and the occasional strip of forgotten boom, and the patches of dead marsh grass here and there.

The dead marsh vegetation, though, says it all for Ms. Kimble.

The Louisiana coast already has profound problems with erosion  with the vanishing of land  thanks to several factors: The great Mississippi River flood of 1927. The water-diversion projects that altered the delivery of the river’s silt and freshwater, allowing Gulf of Mexico saltwater to eat away at the protective marsh grass. The wells and boat canals carved into the marshes by oil companies over the decades.

Then came the oil spill, insidious now in its quiet presence. Ms. Kimble recently went out to examine the aftermath, from the brown, dead marsh grass in Bay Jimmy to the malodorous oil found with a shovel’s nudge in the beach sand at South Pass. The ducks rising in her honor may be virgin white, but what dark damage has been done beneath the water’s surface? To the shrimp, the oysters, the marsh grass that provides coastal protection?

“Where did it go?” she asks about the oil. “Can you account for all of it?”

The matter is deeply personal because Ms. Kimble is so deeply embedded in the narrow strip of Plaquemines that runs between the Mississippi’s eastern bank and Breton Sound. She went to Louisiana State University to study music therapy, but came home before graduating to help care for her ailing father, Gerald, the parish comptroller and parish bugler  the “Al Hirt of the Cut Grass,” he was called.

She started working for the parish 26 years ago, spraying pesticide out of airboats for $3 an hour, then moving up to other assignments  so many, in fact, that she has trouble remembering them all (“Oh, and I was with the mounted police.”). At every step, she made sure to challenge the male-dominant culture. When she was hired as a harbor patrol deckhand, for example, she responded to a barge’s pictorial array of naked women by hanging up a photographic celebration of naked men. That ended that.