For days now I have imagined everything I see and love and admire, consumed by the sludge. The trees in the forest, the animals in the field, the birds in the air, drenched in a blackening murk. I even experience what it would be like to feel it penetrating my own lungs and filling me with its black death. The sadness of the mothers as they watch their young dying in the thickening waves. Their final desperate attempts to save them met in a fateful moment of resignation, as they themselves succumb to the suffocation.

This is an event that will redefine the destruction we are capable of. It only appears in the guise of Valdez, until even that tragedy is exceeded and eclipsed by times two and three and four. What was lifted from the seabed in desperation ahead of the approaching slick, will not be nurtured in those places for generations to come, if ever. Again there is an initial moment of normalcy to be contended with; from here we move forward diminished, with the spirit of the world weakened. On the far side of this catastrophe, the entire universe will have changed. The sacred estuaries of the earth poisoned and sickened and corrupted with greed and contempt. No more will humans be nourished by those exquisite organisms.