I wake at five and decide to drive down to the southernmost tip of Louisiana, the very end of the land. A chronic early riser, I make a cup of coffee and throw my telescope and binoculars in the car and head down, expecting the road to be deserted. But within minutes I am caught in a bizzarroworld rush hour on a too-dark, single-lane road, the cars practically bumper to bumper. I am driving south in hopes of seeing some birds, but the other drivers on this morning pilgrimage have very different goals in mind. Some are local but many have come from far away, beckoned apparently by the smell of opportunity that often wafts up from disaster. They’re headed to a harbor where they will climb aboard a motley collection of ships that includes pleasure boats, shrimp trawlers, and charter fishing boats—all called “Vessels of Opportunity,” the fine Orwellian name dreamed up by BP. VOOs, as they are known locally, are the ships hired by the oil giant to search for oil slicks and lay boom, a kind of absorbent guardrail, to stop the oil’s advance. Down here money is suddenly gushing along with oil, though not everyone is getting in on the fun. A few of the boat owners have managed to get rich by earning a couple grand or so a day to have their boats sit idle, as backups, giving birth to another new local term: “spillionaire.” But most of the local men are simply struggling to make up for lost income, lost because they can no longer make a living catching fish or shrimping or trawling for oysters.

      Hundreds of cars pour south toward the harbor, all going from roughly the same origin to the same destination, from their homes and hotels in the north to the harbor in the south, but none of them doing anything as unmanly as carpooling. “You should see it on a weekday,” says the guy buying a tin of Skoal at the convenience store. I ask him if he’s from here and he says he’s not. He’s from Texas and is staying in the barracks-style hotel down the road that is putting up a lot of workers.

      The cars crawl south for another mile or so before turning through a gate in a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire where two guards are posted. I pull over on the other side of the road as the commuters report for duty at what looks like a military installation. Paranoia fills the air here, thick as the humidity, and as I watch the workers park their cars, I also keep half an eye out to make sure no one is watching me.

      It’s still the bluish dark of early morning as the workers trudge over to their Vessels of Opportunity. Street lamps spray down unnatural aureoles of light as if putting the men on stage. I know I’m in the thick of it now. Proof of that is the sign across the street that reads “Halliburton Road—Do Not Litter.” Good advice. The men climb aboard their boats. One of the small, sad sights down here is watching the boat captains, seamen who have likely not worn life preservers since they were toddlers, all buckled up in their vests as they putter out to sea each morning. It looks like a badge of shame, which of course it is, beholden as these men are—not to their own government, but to the liability lawyers of a multinational corporation. The life jackets are just a physical manifestation of an ugly fact: when you sign on with BP you also sign away the right to criticize the company.

      It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been here how pervasive BP’s presence is. I think of a talk I had with Ken Heck, a scientist who works at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. Heck has been commissioned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to help figure out how to deal with the effects of the spilled oil on sea grass. This is challenging enough in and of itself, but made more so by the fact that BP has been included in all the discussions the scientists have had.

      “It’s kind of paradoxical,” Heck said. “The way it’s set up, BP is involved in every step of the scientific process. That means they know the problems we are having and what our weaknesses are. They’re in on the conference calls, so let’s say I mention that we really don’t have any good pre-oil data from this one coastal area. Well, now they know this and later they can use this when we press for damages and they say ‘Not a valid claim.’

      “This is particularly troubling when it comes to damage assessment, which is mostly what we are doing now. They’re not just in on every phone call, they’re out in the field with us. Their representatives came with us when we went to take pre-oil samples on the Gulf Islands, before the oil got this far. They watched us like hawks. You had to put on plastic gloves every time you took a sample to avoid cross-contamination. Well, one time we forgot to change the gloves. And you know they’re noting that and that later, when the divorce comes—and everyone knows the divorce is coming—they will say, Well, isn’t it true, Dr. Heck, that you didn’t change your gloves on every sample?’

      Now, as the VOOs putter out to sea, I find myself irked by the fact that a whole region is beholden to a company. I hadn’t anticipated feeling this way. I am no Libertarian and I won’t be attending any Tea Party rallies anytime soon. But what about the original Tea Party? What about our autonomy and independence and responsibility to our own citizens? Questions bubble up. How can environmental groups and scientists be reporting to a British oil company? Are we really buying this crap? I can’t quite get my head around the fact that BP’s representatives are out on scientific survey boats, noting facts that might be useful as evidence in some future lawsuit. Or that their minions have been allowed to run the show at Fort Pickens, which is, after all, a national seashore.

      Almost everyone along the Gulf seems to have signed a deal with the devil, a devil that in this case isn’t represented by horns and pitchfork, but by BP’s green and sunny logo. How can so many of our organizations,