NBC News Correspondent Mara Schiavocampo spent five weeks in Venice, Louisiana covering the BP oil leak for NBC News and MSNBC. Along the way she met countless people affected by the disaster. As we mark 100 days since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Schiavocampo takes a look back at two fishermen and their stories.
Man of the Marina
Like so many in Southern Louisiana, Bill Butler has a permanent sunglasses tan. A pale strip of skin frames his eyes on an otherwise bronze face, giving him the look of a cartoon bandit. But in this story, it’s Butler who has been robbed.
As his face shows, Butler spends most of his days outside. A boyish looking 50-something with sandy brown hair (perpetually covered by a sun visor), Butler co-owns and manages the Venice Marina in Venice, Louisiana, one of the country’s most popular launching points for recreational fishing trips. Each year, thousands of fishing enthusiasts come to this tiny town with family and friends in tow, where they’ll charter boats, cast a line into the plentiful waters of the Gulf and have a few beers along the way.
Butler knows the fishing life well. As a child, he’d walk off the school bus and right onto a boat with his parents. They’d fish into the night and he’d do homework by the light of a lamp, surrounded by the Gulf’s calm waters. When the young Butler needed some extra money he’d grab his fishing pole and head out to sea, later selling his catches by the side of the road.
Butler still makes his living off recreational fishing, but these days all he can do is glumly gaze out at the Gulf. He can’t fish, which hurts him emotionally and financially. If Butler can’t fish for sport, no one else can either, leaving the fishing grounds – and his marina – as empty as a school parking lot on a Sunday afternoon.
“God’s Country”
For those who work in the Gulf, fishing is more than just an occupation. It’s almost a religion. Many wear a fishermen’s cross, a gold pendant that lays a crucifix over an anchor. The message is clear: God first, then fishing.
62-year old shrimper Tilden Creppel’s family has been fishing these waters for five generations.
“I was a fisherman before I was even born,” he says. What he means is that when he was in his mother’s belly, she was on a shrimping boat. He raised his own kids the same way, building an enclosure for them on the deck of his boat, lovingly covered with a mosquito net.
Creppel calls the Gulf coast God’s country. One look and you can see why. It’s nature’s paradise, a landscape of vegetation and water so thick with wildlife that fish literally jump out of the water. It’s enough to make a human feel like a guest.
“This is something that God has given us. That’s how we feel,” Creppel says.
Now, seeing his waters tainted by the oil leak, Creppel feels depressed and hopeless. For him, this is about more than lost income.
“They can give us all the money that’s printed in the world. It does not [restore] our way of life to where it was. Without any seafood we’re dead. It makes you want to cry. Makes a grown man want to cry.”
