The Beach Is Church

Jeff Klinkenberg: CAPE SAN BLAS

My favorite beach in the world is oil-free for the moment.

I worry about all our beaches but especially the one at St. Joseph Peninsula State Park near Apalachicola. It's the wildest you-might-see-anything beach in our state. It features 9 miles of white sand, mammoth sand dunes and graceful seabirds. Beyond the dunes is a forest where animals leap, fly and slither. At night, it's so dark the starlight casts shadows.

I stand on the crunchy white sand, among the innocent ghost crabs and the laughing gulls, and look out at the gulf. It's somewhere out there, the oil. The tar balls have already arrived on the beaches of Pensacola a few hours west of me. Over at Panama City Beach, 30 minutes from here as the pelican flies, worried folks are looking for clumps of tar, the harbinger of the thick oil cakes that have coated the beaches, plants and wildlife of Louisiana.

The idea of something so unnatural and so horrific happening to the astonishing beach at St. Joseph Peninsula State Park is too much to bear.