By Bob Marshall

It was the first week of the disaster when I got to the message on my voice mail. His name was Fred, and he was calling from Pointe a la Hache, the hardscrabble fishing community where the road ends on the east side of the river about 60 miles south of New Orleans. He had awakened that day to read in the newspaper that his marsh had been closed to fishing because a huge tide of oil was coming its way. His voice was heavy with grief.

“Mr. Marshall, I just read the paper, and I needed to talk to someone, " he said, “so I called you because your number was at the end of the story.

“I feel like they just killed my best friend, and there’s nothing I can do about it. If I lose this marsh, I lose my fishing, maybe my duck hunting, too. That means I could lose everything I care about.

By Bob Marshall

When the "Drill, Baby, Drill" crowd re-emerges to downplay the BP oil disaster (and you know they will), sportsmen have a handy quote to use in reply, provided by none other than BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles.

Shortly after the "top kill" failed to plug the river of oil his company had unleashed from a hole in the Gulf 5,000 feet below the surface, Suttles was asked if the next ideas would work. His reply:

“People want to know which technique is going to work, and I don’t know. It hasn’t been done at these depths and that’s why we’ve had multiple options working parallel.”