We Made this Bed

 Eddie Kurtich knows oysters, and he’s worried. The owner of Eddie’s Quality Oysters, Inc., he’s been eating Louisiana oysters since he came here from Croatia 50 years ago. He likes them grilled or sautéed in a little wine and olive oil; raw oysters he enjoys only when they’re really salty. But now the beds are closed, and some of the oysters are dying. Instead of running a bustling business, Eddie sits at his desk preparing his claims for BP, documenting losses for each interminable month that the crisis goes on.

 Eddie got into oysters by chance when he married in the 1960s. His wife’s uncle had a convenient store in Port Sulfur and there was an oyster-shucking shop next door.  Eddie eventually got both, but when traffic through the town slowed with the decline in demand for sulfur, Eddie closed the store and built up the oyster business, from shucking and retail to wholesale and shipping out of state.

 The degradation to the coast before the spill was already affecting the oysters, Eddie says, and the restoration projects are too little and way too late. “Oysters need current to feed,” he explains, ruminating on the crustaceans of the past when the vast marshland and bayous provided prime habitat. No one knows for certain why the oysters are dying now, but Eddie thinks they are being dealt a triple blow from the possibly toxic dispersants, the sand berms restricting the gulf’s flow, and the loss of oxygen in the water from the oil.

 With the future uncertain for Eddie and the oysters, he’s stuck in limbo, “I’m 66. I’ve done this or so long. I didn’t learn to fish, hunt or play golf,” he says, looking down at the mound of paperwork.  For those not out on the water helping with the clean up, there’s not much else to do. “I hear even the strip clubs are filing claims,” he says.

-Claire Layrisson

  

The World was his Oyster

Belle Chasse, LA
June 25, 2010

Highway 23 is familiar ground to Rennie Buras. “I’ve gone around the world so many times on that highway,” says the Belle Chasse attorney, who makes the long drive to destinations south over 100 times a year. In addition to his job with the public defender’s office, Buras manages roughly 2000 acres of oyster bed leases in Empire, Buras, and Wilkinson Bay that require his attention and oversight. The spill has closed the beds, but the highway still beckons. Today he’s headed down to the chaotic docks in Venice where one of his three boats, the New York, is being prepared to head out to Barataria Bay to collect oil as part of BP’s Vessels of Opportunity program. “They’re giving you an opportunity to work for them because they took away your way of life. What idiot made this up I have no idea.”

Buras has seen much more of the world than the stretch of Highway 23 from Belle Chasse to land’s end. He is a graduate of Loyola University and George Washington University law school and he spent a year abroad in Madrid, Spain. But he knew the wanderlust would eventually lead him home. “It’s just kind of in your blood,” he says. “My father was an oysterman, and his father. I don’t know how many generations we go back. Five would be a conservative estimate.”

The life of an oysterman is a good one, Buras explains. Good money, no bosses, no formal education required. And then there are the surroundings. “I think a sunrise on the bayou is more beautiful than in Hawaii,” he says. All that’s gone for now. “People are here because they want to be. There’s no Disney, no casinos. The two industries here, seafood and oil, have suffered. There’s nothing else.”

Frustrated and depressed with the failed attempts to stop the oil flow, Buras blames both BP and the government. “We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t plug a hole?” he asks. But he’s angriest about the government’s missed opportunities to protect the coast earlier through restoration. His father and grandfather literally watched the barrier beaches disappear. “I only saw my grandfather cry once, but he would be crying right now.” Buras’s father, who died in 1999, wanted to be cremated and have his ashes sprinkled over the bayou. He didn’t do it because his grandfather protested.  But what if that was now, he wonders. “What would I do? Sprinkle his ashes over oil?”

-Claire Layrisson
Photo: Mary Clayton Carl