Got balls?

Auntie Ruth never said she was perfect. Recently, (“The lubricators,” July 30) she said those little balls of oil that squeeze up between your toes on the beach in Santa Barbara were left over from the horrendous 1969 oil spill. Not so, explains San Francisco reader Patrick Carroll. “I read your column about oil spills,” Carroll writes. “For your information, the black balls of oil you squeezed between your toes weren’t caused by the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. In fact, the Chumash Indians were squeezing balls of oil between their toes long before the padres came to California from Spain. They used oil to waterproof their canoes. In fact, there have been natural oil seeps along the Santa Barbara Channel as long as there has been a Santa Barbara Channel. You’ve just fallen prey to the ‘everything here was a paradise before we came and mucked it all up’ falsehood that is perpetrated by the enviros!”

Auntie agrees with Carroll that the paradise-lost theme has been played to death by many environmentalists. But she denies that’s what influenced her to link those little black balls to the big bad oil spill. In fact, as soon as Carroll corrected your Ruthness, Auntie immediately recalled that during her visit to Santa Barbara 10 years ago, a helpful local had relayed the same information. Auntie simply forgot. Fortunately, Carroll learned the same lesson on his visit to Santa Barbara, perhaps even from the same resident! It’s a small world after all.

What’s the moral of the story? It’s not always wise to stand by your own convictions. Sometimes, you have to challenge them. It would be easy for Auntie to complain that the column wasn’t about little black balls, but a backroom deal cooked up by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and a large chunk of Santa Barbara’s environmental community that would have permitted new offshore oil drilling for the first time in 40 years. Instead, Auntie owned up to the error and moved on. But here’s a caveat for backroom-dealing environmentalists everywhere: Sometimes, you have to stand by your convictions, particularly when the people you’re dealing with don’t have any.