© GettyThe clean-up begins on Florida's Pensacola Beach
Lisa Harbin shuts off the air conditioners at a Coden, Ala., bait-and-tackle shop to save money, worried about staying in business, fishing now but a memory. The live bait well has been drained and she's not sold a single ticket to the Mystic Striper Society Fishing Rodeo.
On Grand Isle, La., college students working a pelican emergency room don't have time to think about the fate of the oiled birds they've triaged before a crate harboring another shivering, oiled avian arrives.
And in Waveland, Miss., Nadine Brown frets about a falloff in tourists at the bar she rebuilt with more than just a little grit after Hurricane Katrina washed it away, along with most of the waterfront city's downtown.
For many in the weathered fishing villages and tiny towns along the Gulf of Mexico, the unrelenting eight-week siege of oil is taking a toll on the psyche. A drive along the coast from Louisiana to Florida finds towns still littered with hurricane debris, families struggling to recover and a mounting worry that oil will finish off what Katrina did not.
In Bayou La Batre -- the "Seafood Capital of Alabama'' -- Kenny Dang, 32, fears for his parents. "All they've ever known is shrimping,'' he said, coming in from a day aboard the family vessel -- this time spotting for oil off Alabama's coast.
In Pensacola, where enjoying the water defines life, marina owners like John and Anita Naybor -- who had to rebuild a marina, and their home, after Hurricane Ivan grimly consider the future.
