Travel Blog

The news of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is too painful to read, so instead I'm dipping into one of my favorite books about the region, Frederick Turner's A Border of Blue.

In the early 1990s, Turner traveled the Gulf's rim - from Key West to the Yucatan - and produced a beautiful travel book. Unlike some travel writers, he didn't depend solely on chance encounters; he sought out knowledgeable locals like Robert Davis, the creator of Seaside on the Florida Panhandle, and Barry Ancelet, the authority on all things Cajun.

On the Mississippi coast Turner wrote that he felt none of the "profound and unrelieved sorrow" he tended to associate with the state:

Partly, it was the presence of the water, which always offers at least the illusion of freedom or escape. With the wind blowing in off a wide, watery expanse whose horizon is apparently limitless, it is possible to believe that fate may be avoided and that if need be you can change your circumstances.

Of course, he hadn't imagined fate coming, inexorably, in the form of black water.