Growing up in Santa Barbara in the 1970s, I distinctly remember the strange ritual that culminated each of our family visits to the beach: My sister and I would sit on the tailgate of our family van while my father used paint thinner to remove the tar balls stuck to our feet and legs.
To me, a 10-year-old boy who had been going to Refugio, Goleta, El Capitan, and other local beaches for years, it seemed like a normal part of a day at the beach. Doesn’t everyone dodge black globs of goo while playing football on the sand? Aren’t offshore oil platforms always part of the scene of Pacific sunsets? Doesn’t everyone’s dad keep turpentine in the trunk?
It was only later, after we moved to Northern California, which doesn’t have any offshore oil drilling, that I learned the truth. The tar balls that covered my childhood beaches came mostly from those offshore drilling rigs that marred the horizon, or they were remnants of the disastrous 1969 oil spill that blackened Santa Barbara’s coastline and helped ignite the modern environmental movement.