Month: March 2025

They Call Him Droopy

Every Delta fisherman knows Droopy Williams. Or at least knows of him. You’ve probably seen him as you’ve zoomed along the Causeway – a sort of roving landmark, sometimes in the waters above the highway, sometimes below. 

For nearly six decades he has been a shrimper for the bait shops along that raised ground between Spanish Fort and the city. I say shops. Once there were a dozen or more, but now there is only one. 

Droopy Williams grew up in the Delta in a cabin on the Tensaw River at Cloverleaf Landing. He was raised by his grandparents. Since he was a kid he has been called by that name. He says most folks don’t know his real name (don’t expect to get it here) but there is one who does – his aunt is Lucy “Pie” Hollings, proprietress of the Cloverleaf boat launch and a local Delta legend. The family lived off the land and water when he was growing up; crabbing, running trotlines, and raising hogs and cows on Gravine Island just across the river. They were different days indeed.

These days, driving into Mobile in the early morning hours you might catch him working the Blakeley River in his 24-foot trawler, the words LIVE BAIT painted in bold red lettering on the side. It’s a reassuring sight. For all the change behind us and all that lies ahead, no matter what comes you can rest assured that the sun rises, the sun goes down, and that Droopy is out there catching shrimp.

At age thirteen he went to work for Autrey’s Fish Camp, as soon as school let out for summer, and it was during those summer months that he first lived on the Causeway with Billy and Queenie Wright, who ran the shop. It was the mid-1960s and everybody fished. In those days you could rent boats by the hour at Autrey’s or Stauter Boat Works, and try your luck for redfish or trout on your lunch break. It was a sort of Golden Age, but of course all that changed in ’69 when Camille showed up like a woman scorned and let everyone know the party was over.

In his years on the water, Droopy has seen all manner of change. There has been sustained development, increased dredging operations, and an oil spill, to name just a few of the things that have left their mark. These days the shrimp are smaller and the fish are less plentiful. There are more gators and bald eagles, but less snakes. The hogs his family once raised on Gravine Island are no more, but their progeny now run wild and roam the woods of the upper Delta. There is only one bait shop left standing on the Causeway, for which he still supplies shrimp, and as Williams is a bait shrimper, not a licensed commercial operator, he can only sell directly to bait shops.

Droopy is the only Black shrimper on the local scene — a fact he seems to take pride in. He’s tried to take on numerous deckhands, but it’s tough work and most can’t cut it, so these days he prefers to work solo. He says he doesn’t mind going it alone though: every changing wind and tide is like a greeting from an old friend.   

Today he lives on Cloverleaf Landing, just up the road from where he grew up, shrimping in the morning and fishing for bream most afternoons, and he says there is no better place on earth to live.

We met up with him one cold, January morning at Cloverleaf when the tide was low. We couldn’t launch the boat, so we stood on the bank and heard his many tales of a life on the water.

— Read the rest in CURRENTS.

In the shadow of the spill

It’s been fifteen years since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig suffered a blowout and spilled five million barrels of crude oil into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The 87 days that followed the explosion on April 20, 2010 — forty miles off the coast of Louisiana — left residents gripped in a white-knuckle, teeth-grinding frenzy, as the slick continued to grow and approach the coast like some kind of atavistic, sci-fi horror show.

By the time The Great Blob was finally contained, it had affected 70,000 square miles of the Gulf, roughly the size of Oklahoma. It was the worst industrial disaster in U.S. history by volume. To this day, the extent of ecological damage is unknown.

At the time it went down, the explosion and its ensuing spill wasn’t nearly as surprising as BP’s seeming inability to stop it. Three months is a long time to watch Anderson Cooper report on scenes of sheer devastation coming out of your own backyard. Less than two months after the explosion, BP, who had leased the rig from drilling contractor Transocean, had even stooped to soliciting suggestions on its website for ways to stop the flow. 

For anyone who loved the Gulf and called it home, or had even enjoyed a Bushwhacker at the Flora-Bama during a Spring Break in the long ago, the spill was a major wake-up call. There was a period in those three months where Life As We Knew It on the Gulf Coast might conceivably be over. 

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Fifteen years later, we are more vigilant about threats to our waters, and, in many ways, ecological efforts are more robust. The 2012 RESTORE Act helped lead remediation efforts, and NOAA has been stalwart in their efforts at restoration. Safety standards have reportedly improved at rigs since the Deepwater Horizon. But are we truly protected from another major spill — who knows? 

Ninety-seven percent of offshore oil and gas drilling in the U.S. happens in the Gulf, and, currently, only a fifth of the Gulf’s 2,200 active leases are in operation, due to a large production supply and the high costs of drilling, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a federal agency that manages offshore drilling. 

It’s clear that drilling in the Gulf will be around for some time. Let’s hope the regulatory framework remains intact as well. We have too much to lose.

— from CURRENTS (SPRING 2005)

A Mind of winter

It takes a mind of winter to see the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Wallace Stevens wrote that in 1921, in a poem called “The Snow Man.” The line has haunted me since I first read it in college, during the snows of yesteryear, somewhere in the stacks of UVA’s Alderman Library.

The poem still puzzles me. The scholarly consensus is that Stevens is talking about the nature of human perspective — how our view of the natural world is defined by our emotional conditioning. It ends with an invitation to find the beauty in Old Man Winter — but with the caveat that only those who’ve frozen their butt off can truly appreciate “the spruces rough in the distant glitter/ of the January sun.”

It’s been a warm November in Alabama, so we may not get those polar lessons. But you get the picture.

Winter is a season for reflection. Our watershed in Coastal Alabama has faced numerous threats over the past year — wetland loss, sewage spills, coal-ash pollution, and mud dumping from dredge spoil have taken their toll. Reckoning with these challenges head-on, and witnessing the damage they’ve already wrought, helps us recognize and reflect on what’s worth protecting.

We started CURRENTS to tell the stories of Mobile Bay and its people, because it’s those stories — good, bad, and ugly —  that give it meaning. 

As we wind down another year, we ask you to reflect on what’s important to you about our waters, and to consider giving to Mobile Baykeeper as part of our End-of-Year campaign. You can do that by donating directly at MobileBaykeeper.org/give, or subscribing to CURRENTS.