Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

weakened their eggs, killing chicks before they even hatched; and Endrine killed off the fish that were their food, starving pelicans en masse. By the late 1960s, they had almost completely disappeared from the Texas and Louisiana coasts.

The late 1960s and ’70s saw pelicans reintroduced from Florida, and a ban on the persistent organic pollutants that undermined their niche in the ecosystem. Today, the coast is once again crawling with them. Which is not to say they are invulnerable, even without oil spills.

“We have a pelican die-off every year,” Rhonda said as the rehab worker closed the sheet over the pen. “There are some pretty harsh cold snaps. The fish move off, and the birds don’t get enough food.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m not a biologist.”

Then she laughed. “These guys were actually lucky they got oiled,” she said. “They’ve been fed quite well.”

The Hotel Sabine is the tallest building in Port Arthur, and the best vantage from which to watch the aftermath of an oil spill. There’s simply nothing more pleasant than to book a south-facing room on an upper floor and enjoy a gimlet as the cleanup workers buzz up and down the waterway.

At least, it would be pleasant. The Hotel Sabine has been abandoned for years, and now stands vacant and eyeless, not only Port Arthur’s most prominent landmark but also its most obtrusive eyesore. Unless you plan on breaking in, there will be no tenth-floor views of the ship channel for you.

Instead, I drove down to Pleasure Island, the grassy artificial landmass on the other side of the channel, to watch the men in Tyvek wrap things up. Oil Mop boats dragged lines of floating containment boom up and down the waterway, their hulls smeared brown with crude. The Eagle Otome had already been spirited away for repairs, and the mood was calm—pastoral-industrial.

The channel’s surface was unremarkable from a distance, but closer inspection revealed that a not-yet- unnoticeable sheen of oil persisted near the shore. I crouched on a sloping concrete slab that formed part of the bank and watched the filmy rainbow burble over the rocks.

There was a man standing on the bank just up the channel. He was short, with blue-tinted glasses and a suede cowboy hat jammed down on his head. And he was fishing.

His name was Nelson. Originally from El Salvador, he said he had been in the United States for ages. He owned a dump truck in Beaumont and made his living hauling dirt and gravel for road construction jobs. In a drawl that was half Texas and all Salvador, he told me this was his favorite spot to fish.

“Last weekend, they had that spill?” he said. “I show up here, a lot of oil. A lot of oil. I went further up the channel. Where it was clean.”

We looked at the edge of the channel below our feet, where the waterline curled in colored wavelets of petroleum.

He frowned with approval. “Today, though…I think is okay.”

“It doesn’t bother you at all that there’s still oil on the water?” I asked. “I mean, there’s still guys in orange suits.”

“No, man!” he said, and waved at the channel. “If you fish like this, with some oil there, then you don’t have to use no oil when you cook it!” He cackled. “That’s a joke.”

He had extra fishing rods. I probably hadn’t fished in twenty years, but it came back after a pair of somewhat hazardous casts, and soon we got on with the business of letting the crabs of Port Arthur steal Nelson’s bait from our hooks. The Oil Mop boats continued their rounds, and Nelson cracked open his supply of Coors Light.

He seemed glad to have me there, and soon we were talking about his divorce, about how much he missed his sons. He told me he wanted to find a girlfriend from overseas, and about his complicated attempts to find one over the Internet. It sounded less like online dating and more like a Nigerian banking scam, but that didn’t seem to bother Nelson.

What about you, man? You got a girlfriend?

I told him I did.

As a matter of fact, I was engaged. The Doctor and I were getting married. And once we were married, we were going to India, to take the world’s first pollution tourism honeymoon. That she considered this even tolerable seemed like further proof of true love. Cruising the world’s most degraded rivers, just the two of us…I was pretty sure it was going to be more romantic than it sounded.

There was a tug on the line. I did as Nelson had taught: I pulled up sharply on the rod to set the hook—and waited. “You feel something again after that, you’ve got a fish,” he’d said. But so far the tugs on my line had signified only that my hooks were now empty of bait.

But this time there was another tug on the line, and another—an irregular rhythm drumming against the rod and reel. I started reeling, and like magic, two large fish appeared in the water.

Two.

Nelson threw down his rod, whooping. “Pull him in!” he cried. “Pull him in! You got two!”

I pulled and reeled and yanked the fish toward the bank, where Nelson grabbed the line and pulled them out of the rainbow-stained water, beaming at my success. The fish hung from the line, exhausted and gaping, each of them a good sixteen inches long. They were the largest fish I had ever caught. Larger, perhaps, than any fish ever caught in the history of the world.

“That’s called drum,” Nelson said. Drum. I had caught oily drum. He slapped his leg. “That’s going to cook up real good!”

Rhonda was on the phone. They were about to release the pelican. Over the line, I could hear her teeth grinding. She hadn’t wanted to make the call, but I had put in a request with the Coast Guard to ask her to.

She sounded hopeful that I wouldn’t be able to make it, and gave me only very vague directions. Her team was already on the road, she said. It was probably too late for me to find them.

But if she thought she could hide this pelican release from the world, she was mistaken. I sped across town, crossed an imposing cable-stayed bridge over the northeast elbow of the ship channel, and then doubled back to the south. Pavement turned to gravel, and the road plunged into a wetland park, stands of grass interlaced by channels of placid water. To the west, the horizon was decorated with the distant skyline of the refineries, tiny thickets of smokestacks and fractionating columns.

Driving south, I passed the occasional clot of trash—a shattered television on the shoulder, a pink recliner submerged to its forehead in a placid side channel. Cormorants and pelicans wheeled by, and cranes and herons, and other long-necked beasties. Here and there, men sat by their pickup trucks and fished. The fish were not biting, they told me.

Of course they’re not biting, I thought. You’re fishing in clean water.

Finally I spotted a pair of SUVs parked by the canal that ran parallel to the road. It was Rhonda’s crew. I had caught them in the act.

The pelican was already in the water, floating next to the reeds on the far side of the channel, maybe fifty feet away. I walked up to Rhonda and her three colleagues. She registered my presence with obvious disappointment. The rehab worker from the warehouse was there, too. “Hey, buddy!” she said, proving that not all pelican ladies are grumpy.

We watched the pelican. There was an air of expectation, even concern.

“C’mon!” someone said. “Fly!”

But the pelican did not fly. It merely floated. And the longer it floated, the more tense everyone became. At last, it dunked its head and unfurled its wings, and, with a broad flap, splashed itself with water. The crowd broke into applause.

“Yes!” said Rhonda. “That’s what we’re looking for!” She took some pictures. “Do that again!” she shouted at the pelican, and it obeyed, stretching and flicking its wings over and over, bathing in the churning spray, improbably majestic.

Rhonda turned to me. “See?” she said accusingly. “It’s not very exciting.”

“It is exciting!” I protested. I couldn’t span the absurdity of not being able to convince a rescuer of wildlife that wildlife rescue was, in fact, interesting.

Rhonda turned back to the pelican, now swimming in idle circles, and began screaming at it.