We’re in Mexico doing a story about oil, and how the sources of so-called “easy oil”—- the oil that’s relatively cheap and easy to get to—- are depleting. The trouble is, oil is a state-owned monopoly and accounts for almost 40% of the national budget. Which means with the easy oil gone, they’ve started drilling in much deeper water in the Gulf. Which has some experts fearing another catastrophe on the scale of “Deepwater Horizon,” because the Mexicans have never dug so deep before.
12/21/2010-Back from Mexico
Often when I finally leave a story, I find myself picturing some of the key people I’ve met, even long after I’ve gotten home. Just in the past year for example, I still sometimes think of the Colombian soldiers with whom last Spring, along with a crew from HDNet, I dropped down from combat helicopters into the damp wet jungle, the soldiers’ job being to take out camouflaged cocaine labs and fight off the bad guys who resist. And of the remarkably inspiring young man on whom I shot a piece in California and Connecticut, the man born with no arms and no legs, but hardly hampered by his shortcomings. There are still people I think about in the Middle East with whom I’ve spent time and admittedly grown empathetic, who struggle every day of their lives simply to survive, in ways the average American cannot begin to imagine. And those I saw a year ago in Vietnam, whose bodies are gruesomely mangled, apparently from absorbing the dioxin, Agent Orange, that we unknowingly used during the war there. It destroyed some American soldiers too.
Well, for the past week and a bit, I’ve been in Mexico, and there are two groups of people here who will stick with me a while. One is the group of men (and a handful of women) who staff oil rigs far from the shore in the Gulf of Mexico, literally isolated on a single rig for in some cases 14, in others 28 days at a stretch. The other people I won’t soon forget is a group of women—- society’s dregs—- who live in a damp cold house in one of the poorest and most dangerous parts of the city, but for whom the place is a refuge from the world they inhabited most of their sorry lives; it is a charitable home for retired prostitutes.
I often say I’ve got the best job on earth. Maybe you disagree, because reading about me spending my time with risky oil rigs and neglected prostitutes may not make it sound so hot. But look at the range of what I got to see and do just this one week. I was out on a high-tech oil platform in the middle of nowhere that can stay within ten centimeters of its ideal target…. and in a casa for washed-up puntas where dirty clothes are still washed in a sink. I’ve been with people whose energy and expertise generates billions of dollars for their country… and with others who sell their bodies for about ten bucks. I wouldn’t trade a moment.
