April 20, 2016
Ms. Stephanie Shinabery
Florida's Turnpike Enterprise
Florida's Turnpike Operations Center
PO Box 9828
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33310
RE: Highway Safety Memorial Markers
Dear Ms. Shinabery:
I write to request the installation of the Deepwater Horizon MEmorial Roadkill Tollbooth (hereafter referred to as the "Roadkill Tollbooth"). I make this request pursuant to the Florida Department of Transportation's policy "to allow placement of memorial markers within the Florida's Turnpike Right of Way."
The Roadkill Tollbooth is an Electronic Monument (or MEmorial) that honors the abject sacrifices of the animals killed during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010.
I believe that this MEmorial will not only honor these animals' sacrifices, but also increase public awareness of highway safety across a larger scope. If accepted, I'm open to the exact location where the Roadkill Tollbooth should be placed based on the needs and logistics of the Florida Turnpike Enterprise.
Please note that this tollbooth will not be collecting any monetary funds.
In conjunction with this letter, please find a video proposal that outlines the plan and motivation for the Roadkill Tollbooth. The proposal consists of ten sections, directionally oriented on the map as progressing southbound from the turnpike's northern origin:
- Main Title
- Introduction
- Background
- Technical Background
- Scope
- Approach
- Approach (cont)
- Plan of Action
- Qualifications
- Conclusion
These video installments correspond to the beginning, end, and tollbooth locations as currently situated on the Florida Turnpike (designated by the Roadkill Tollbooth official logo/signage).
Thank you for taking the time to view this proposal, and please feel free to contact me for more information.
Sincerely,
Sean Morey
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Instructions
This project may be read in a variety of ways. However, the most linear way would be to read through the Roadkill Tollbooth proposal (indicated by the Roadkill Tollbooth icon ) and then the Project Statement (accessed by the drop-down navigation tab in the upper right-hand corner), or vice versa.
The proposal is divided among the different tollbooth locations (again, indicated by the Roadkill Tollbooth icons ) and should be started by reading the letter of transmittal (indicated by the START icon 
), and then moving south through the Florida Turnpike until reaching Key West (indicated by the END icon 
), an end that extends past the Ronald Reagan Memorial Turnpike with which it co-exists.
The proposal videos may be viewed at any map zoom level. One may view the videos while taking in a macroscopic view of the region, zooming down to the level of the tollbooth itself, or at any zoom level in between. The videos can be maximized with the fullscreen icon 
for better viewing on both desktop and mobile devices.
Below each video frame, you may choose to turn closed captions on or off, or view the video's transcript (PDF).
If at any point you become disoriented by either zooming or panning too much, the Reset Map button 
along the top navigation bar will return the map to the starting orientation.
×
Introduction
"What kind of crime is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank?"
— Fredric Jameson (paraphrasing Bertolt Brecht)
"When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution."
— Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst
If we shift Virilio's observation to petroleum, we might say that the invention of the oil well is simultaneously an invention of the oil spill. Or to rephrase Jameson and Brecht, the BP oil spill disaster as a crime might have begun with its drilling rather than its spilling. But once the accident occurs and the oil has escaped the well, how should we memorialize those affected by the BP oil spill? How should we identify them? How should the community as a whole commemorate this disaster so that it can be read within individual and collective identity formation?
While most of the forensic analysis of the disaster was instrumental in assessing the technical problems with the oil rig, or critiquing the institutional problems of British Petroleum, Transocean, and Macondo, little attention has been paid to the broader faults that created the possibilities for the disaster, and little attention has been paid to the physical and psychic aftermath.
This project, the Deepwater Horizon MEmorial Roadkill Tollbooth, proposes an electrate alternative to memorializing the disaster of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. It also offers an alternative method to studying the causes, impacts, and implications of this disaster.
The Roadkill Tollbooth is a MEmorial, and focuses on public policy issues concerning domestic oil production and consumption through a digital, conceptual, and affective mapping of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, offering an alternative to how we communicate our individual and collective responses to such a disaster. This MEmorial theorizes how we might write our relationship to nature differently through digital media and digital writing, in particular the environments and beings affected by the spill and the public policies created around this disaster.
Traditionally, we memorialize events through the construction of monuments, which demonstrate the collective values of a society through the nexus of the monument and the ideals associated with what it represents. But as Gregory L. Ulmer (2005) pointed out, the official values symbolized by a monument often mask the abject values and sacrifices that support these overt values. Through associative networking, the digital internet offers the possibility for a distributed monumentality that can raise these abject sacrifices to the surface. A distributed practice of monumentality can affect and change how we collectively read the oil spill, altering how we collectively read oil itself. Toward an abject synthesis of oil, this MEmorial considers reading oil in terms of writing oil, specifically through the practice of electronic monumentality, summoning the sub-surface traces into appearance.
×
Structure
The structure of this project relies upon three intertwined layers: a proposal, a monument, and a katabasis.
As a proposal—divided into ten video installments—what I present here is the methodology and plan for a virtual, potential MEmorial, and not a description of a physical structure already in place. Currently, you cannot actually drive down the Florida's Turnpike and engage with the tollbooth gantries through Twitter as this project imagines and describes through its videos and text. However, you could, if such a virtual MEmorial were to be realized and supported by the Florida Department of Transportation. But the realization of the MEmorial is not necessary for the project to succeed. While I would be content for any of the toll gantries to serve as the site for the Roadkill Tollbooth, the MEmorial works best as a distributed monument across all ten locations, creating a MEmorial that must be traveled through by route of the Florida's Turnpike, and not just visited as a single destination.
As a monument, the project demonstrates a virtual monument, Gregory L. Ulmer's MEmorial, constructing it through the networking of images from the BP oil spill, the infrastructure and practices of traveling on Florida's roads that depend on oil, and my personal association with these spaces and practices. As the reader navigates from node to node, they experience (or at least, witness) the building of the monument from an abstract, bureaucratic document toward a manifestation of individual and collective mourning. The MEmorial suggests how one might author a personal experience of oil and oil policy toward an application of this personal knowledge. Rather than a single MEmorial—as suggested above—the traveler must experience the total distance of a distributed memorial, picking up information and clues from each stop that help understand the next.
Finally, the overall path of the MEmorial—the linking of eight different tollbooth installations via the backbone of the Florida's Turnpike—traces a katabasis. From ancient Greek, a katabasis literally translates to "going down," and mythically refers to a hero's journey from the interior lands of a country down the coast to the underworld. As I have discussed elsewhere (Morey, 2015, pp. 28–31), Key West has become, for me, the underworld. Yet, it once served as my childhood home. This journey then, this katabasis, is also a going home, one that requires a sacrifice to be acknowledged in order for the traveler (me) to pass through each liminal space. The journey builds from node to node, from tollbooth to tollbooth, each offering a different insight into what it takes to go home. Overall, these three aspects compose that virtual memorial, the virtual progression from one state of knowledge to another.
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Method
This project takes Gregory L. Ulmer's (2005) work Electronic Monuments and the MEmorial as a point of departure, demonstrating the practicality of this theory of monumentality while shedding light on new ways to understand our (but chiefly my) relationship to the BP disaster. The Roadkill Tollbooth demonstrates an application of these concepts, scholarship that tests out these ideas, to offer how they work and how they might be transferable across disasters. In addition, this project offers a model for future research and extends Ulmer's original work, building upon the MEmorial as theory/prototype/methodology to refine and make new prototypes.
Although the MEmorial might be defined as a new media genre, I understand it more as a methodology, for a MEmorial might take many forms, many media, and many genres. For this project, the Electronic Monuments section provides the instructions for how to imagine the MEmorial. Rather than detail every instruction within this methods section, I refer you to Electronic Monuments as a whole.
This particular MEmorial commemorates the disaster of the BP oil spill of 2010. Ulmer noted that a "MEmorial witnesses (monitors) a disaster in progress" (p. xxvii). Although the BP oil spill occurred in 2010, the practices that made the disaster possible, as well as the abject sacrifices produced based on these practices, are still ongoing, priming the pump for the next disaster, or residually leaking from the last. Even though the well has been capped, the flow hasn't stopped. Instrumental knowledge can never totally eliminate leaks, and so when they do happen, it becomes an important task to recognize that we have established a system that requires this flow. The Roadkill Tollbooth monitors this specific disaster in progress.
Granted, it's easy for many to find the BP oil spill of 2010 to be troubling, and for a variety of reasons: the 11 human lives lost on the platform, 4.9 million barrels of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico, the underwhelming response by BP, and the unnumbered animals killed. However, this story particularly affected me for very personal reasons given my history with the area.
First, I'm from the Florida Keys, positioned at the southern tip of Florida around which the Gulf of Mexico's loop current circulates. Second, I grew up near and around many of the animals whose oil-saturated bodies appeared in media reports. While I never had a Pete the Pelican of Flipper fame, the frequent animals around the house and out on the water nevertheless felt like kin (or at least neighbors), many known as individuals rather than simply members of a species. From the beginning, this oil spill felt personal. Though this disaster was a widespread story that sparked widespread outrage, the affective sensations that I felt were very locally situated.
Part of the method of the MEmorial is to analyze the mediascape for images of the disaster. For this project, most of the images come from media outlets and photojournalists. If there was a predominant method or feature of these images, it was to capture animals, dead or dying, in the throes of stuckness, covered in oil. Though many humans worked tirelessly to help save some of these animals, the photographed animals are dead, or are going to die. Like the animals stuck in oil, or the sheer mass of the oil column, the mood is one of being stuck, a helplessness, and the loss that results from not being able to do anything in the moment. The question of prudence becomes what—if anything—can be done to avoid the unpleasant mood? If nothing, then perhaps one should recognize that this feeling must be encountered as the cost of doing business with oil. What is my personal business with oil? What is my petroleum network? The MEmorial should make this appear, should make it felt.
In order to demonstrate the relationship between the official and abject values, an electronic monument should augment an existing monument, and the Florida's Turnpike provides an ideal system through which to build a monument that memorializes the animals killed in the BP oil spill. Officially, the Florida's Turnpike memorializes the late U.S. President Ronald Reagan on behalf of the state of Florida. On an individual basis, citizens are invited to request memorial markers for humans who have died when exercising their right to drive on the Florida's Turnpike. As indicated by the Florida Department of Transportation, these memorials "remind motorists to protect human life by driving safely" ("Florida Department"). The Roadkill Tollbooth, to be placed along the Florida's Turnpike, reminds motorists of the larger system and ecology to which the Turnpike is connected, the behaviors required to use the Turnpike, and the nonhuman lives that are taken each year through these decisions.
Should this MEmorial ever become physically implemented along the Florida's Turnpike, it would work like this: as the driver passes through the Roadkill Tollbooth gantry, the cameras and electronic tolling equipment would register this passing and send a message through the driver's social media platforms (set up online prior to driving) to acknowledge the death of the animal that made this vehicular passing possible. Rather than affecting public policy about oil at the national level, however, the question that the Roadkill Tollbooth addresses is my personal burning question: how to mourn for the nonhuman animals killed in this disaster? Through the Roadkill Tollbooth's construction, I learn how the Problem B Me. But because the Roadkill Tollbooth is potentially expansive and can incorporate other individuals, it speaks to larger systems of responsibility, toward Problems B Us. Since this is not your MEmorial, you may not recognize the answer, and you may totally refute the "we" that I cite. Fair enough—for, again, this site is really about me (but, as a method, can also be about you). But it's also possible that you will recognize some or all of it.
To this last point, while the methodology for a MEmorial is meant to be transferable, the specifics, again, are not (they might be, but this isn't a requirement). Ultimately, the point of a MEmorial is not to direct (or absolve) blame at others necessarily (who gets oil revenues?) but to uncover how I am at fault regarding a particular disaster. The specificity is not supposed to be transferable, for no one else can make this MEmorial but me. Others might make their own, and others' MEmorials could be very similar, but they will not be specifically so, and they will most likely notice other behaviors that contribute to the disaster that this one does not. Your use of the MEmorial as methodology will produce unique results.
×
A Virtual MEmorial
This project is not, in itself, parodic or satirical, although some might view particular elements as such. Or, in other words, this proposal's overall intent is sincere. Nothing would please me more than to see this monument physically installed along the Florida's Turnpike, a reminder to all motorists that routine actions can have large-scale repercussions.
However, as I stated in the introduction, what is presented here is a virtual MEmorial, and not a description of an extant physical structure. You can't actually drive through or electronically interact with it (yet).
But conceptually, perhaps this virtuality makes sense. The eco-disaster of the BP oil spill did occur in reality, but might be identified as what Timothy Morton (2013) termed a "hyperobject." Morton explained that hyperobjects are "nonlocal" and not directly encountered. For instance, global warming, because of its ubiquitousness and complexity, is a hyperobject that cannot be located in any one place. As such, any "local manifestation" is not directly the hyperobject, which is why excessively high temperatures in any single location cannot be claimed as a direct encounter with global warming. Or, the overall science of global warming may indicate its reality, but its precise scope is unknown; it exists in the virtual through modeling and simulations. Thus, hyperobjects are elusive and difficult to imagine, visualize, and conceptualize.
The Roadkill Tollbooth, then, is a virtual tollbooth—an attempt to make conscious the BP disaster as a hyperobject, one that does not exist directly upon Florida's roads, but yet which is created by the consumption of oil that makes such a hyperobject possible, one that remains both washed upon the shores as tarballs and across the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, six years later.
As a virtual version of a potential reality, the Roadkill Tollbooth works in a parodic way to create the (mis)recognition that parody can produce. As Morton stated, "[w]hat we desperately need is an appropriate level of shock and anxiety concerning a specific ecological trauma" (p. 14). To help conduct this shock, and borrowing from the political engagement of some forms of parodic satire, the Roadkill Tollbooth participates in what Craig Stroupe (2008) identified as the "rhetoric of irritation," the juxtaposition of "'inappropriately' opposed categories into a constitutive whole" (p. 245).
This inappropriate juxtaposition can "represent an ideologically expressive dialogue," where voices that are usually not in conversation create an irritation through the "discursive friction," "call[ing] attention to the interpretive dilemmas and cultural instabilities that exist socially beneath the veneer of appropriate assumptions (that is, ideology) at any moment in history" (p. 245).
The Roadkill Tollbooth juxtaposes the discourses of transportation with monumentality (and all that go with it: sacrifice, death, mourning, recognition, etc.), a simulation that imagines the w/hole.
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Electrate Ecocomposition
Writing about the natural calls into account not only human, but also nonhuman audiences. These audiences may not read what humans write, but become affected by writing in some way.
This inextricable writing is seen most clearly when our understanding of nature impacts our response to disaster. While humans argue about how to protect or ignore nonhuman animals and natural environments (Rush Limbaugh claimed that the ocean would fix itself after the BP oil spill), our natural relations cannot participate in our writing and rhetorical practices—they cannot participate in our standard modes of discourse, becoming marginalized in a communication system that privileges one species over all others. Altering the mode of composition would not give a "voice" to nature per se, but help ask questions about the blind spots created through existing writing systems.
How we understand and construct nature has historically depended on the apparatus of literacy as distilled by the natural sciences, which has broken the natural world into essences. Taxonomists use such essences to examine the relationships of different species of plants and animals, analyzing which relations belong most closely to each other, writing nature into parts. However, whether this writing occurs through Linnaean scientific nomenclature or DNA coding sequences of base pairs, it creates new relationships that intertwine with human institutions such as entertainment, law, business, ethics, and of course, the institution of the Internet.
From a rhetorical perspective, we often hear arguments that couch the impact on nature within economic terms. For example, that "the oil spill will affect the livelihood of fishermen" is one argument that has been used to suggest the human impact of the disaster. While casting the fish in an economic discourse rather than environmental may be more persuasive to some, the larger issue of separating the fish from the fisherman in the first place in this economic model (and even environmental) is overlooked. We need a discourse capable of writing the fish and the fisherman as a whole.
Toward such a discourse, the Roadkill Tollbooth experiments with how environments and ecological relationships may be written, attempting an ecocompositional address to Jonathan Bate's (2011) claim that "The relationship between nature and culture is the key intellectual problem of the twenty-first century" (as cited in Coupe, 2000, p. xvii). By juxtaposing the invention of driving (and all the supportive technologies and practices invented and developed to support this behavior) with the remote effects created by the accidents related to this behavior, the Roadkill Tollbooth imagines the ecological sacrifices necessary to support this practice, putting into relation one value (the right to drive) with the sacrifice needed to support that value (victims of the oil spill).
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Settling Debts
As an accidental enterprise, driving is risky, and so the Roadkill Tollbooth acknowledges what Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites (2007) identified as "modernity's gamble"—the risk societies take as they move toward progress:
Thus, one of the distinctive characteristics of modern life is the paradoxical relationship between progress and risk, or control and catastrophe. We label this condition "modernity's gamble." We find it most significantly in the fact that advanced societies devour nonrenewable resources at a rate that will be suicidal—unless it fuels development of technologies that can eliminate dependency on those resources. The gamble also is evident when technological benefits for individuals are magnified millions of times over by the scale, organization, mass production, and democratization of modern societies to endanger humanity. Here the overuse of automobiles and antibiotics are primary examples. A third variant can be found in the arguments about normal accidents and system effects, where intensive development and dependence on technology allows greater freedom and mobility while also creating individual loss of control and increased probability of catastrophes. (p. 244)
While Hariman and Lucaites pointed to airplane crashes as the most vivid reminder, the BP oil spill and the near impossibility to do anything about it (i.e., the logistics of depth, pressure, and light that were not problems in drilling the well, only capping it) provide an exceptional case of a bet gone bad. Because of the saturation that oil achieves within water, land, and living and nonliving compounds, the total biomass tally for the BP oil spill is part of a debt that is not yet settled.
We might also say that the balance owed on this gamble partially results from the balance between instrumental reason and prudence, a balance that may not be consciously considered. The Roadkill Tollbooth seeks not to directly debate whether this balance is achieved, or how it should be tilted in one direction or another, but to simply honor the sacrifices, the silent screams, of those who have made the outcome of this gamble possible. For whatever payoffs were gained, sacrifices were made on behalf of a value that made the risk worth taking. The Roadkill Tollbooth seeks to imagine the worth of these sacrifices as data for future gambling decisions.
Hariman and Lucaites's larger point asks us to consider the icons that capture these various disasters. The image of the Hindenburg explosion is iconic. So is the image of the Challenger explosion, especially the Y-shaped plumes formed from the faulty booster separation. Several iconic images may be said to have developed from the attack on the World Trade Center, from the image at impact of one of the jets hitting the tower, to the image of the "falling man."
But which image of the BP oil spill is iconic? Many of the shots were aerial video of the burning oil rig, animals covered in oil, or the oil slick itself. In addition, the rig seemed to burn unceasingly, without a terminal collapse as we saw with the towers. Despite some amazing photographs, there were too many animals harmed for a single one to emerge as iconic. The slick changed shape and size so quickly that its amorphous nature resisted codification and capture into any fixed iconic image: again, Morton's hyperobject. If any image became iconic, it was the BP logo, which was remixed into a variety of parodies based on the company's incompetence to repair the well and prevent environmental damage. The Deepwater Horizon disaster still needs an image.
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Everting Networks
In his 2007 novel Spook Country, William Gibson turned away from the term cyberspace which he became famous for, and instead turned toward the term everting to describe our relationship to digital information. If his novel Neuromancer described a version of the internet that humans entered "into," Spook Country shows digital information everting into the everyday physical world.
This eversion is also captured in the term Internet of Things, which identifies the networking of everyday objects and environments so that they become "smart" objects and environments. For instance, this includes refrigerators that can text you when you're low on milk, the ability to lock one's door from a smartphone, and other integrations of internet-driven sensors, access, and control. Steven Jones (2014) identified this current trending of eversion as a salient moment:
Nowadays, it feels as though the digital network is breaking through to the physical world, to the everyday physical dimension in which we live, as if through cracks that have opened in the fabric we once believed separated the mundane world from cyberspace. The result is irruption, eversion, a new mixed reality in progress, still haunted by the earlier metaphor of different dimensions. (p. 48)
Research in digital media must contend with this irruption, but also in the effects that such new metaphors and theories produce. I would argue that this eversion is not a feature of the network that must be taken for critique only, but also something that the humanities can participate in building.
In other words, the Internet of Things is not just something that computer engineers and usability experts design, but it consists of technological and cultural networks that humanities scholars have the ability to invent, create, and build as well—to connect different parts of experience, via the internet, to things. That is, while we certainly create spaces as we inhabit, navigate, and participate in them, part of that participation can be building those spaces, inserting our own "things" as points of eversion. This is a practice guerrilla artists have long performed, from graffiti to performance art. The Roadkill Tollbooth makes such an intervention as a networked thing to be placed in an environment (highway systems) that is increasingly networked with digital information.
But this eversion of the network is only one half of the eversion. Psychic networks also evert to become extimate in another kind of Internet of Things. Jeff Rice (2012) and Heidi Rae Cooley (2014) have both posited the self into spaces and places, everting personal recognitions, experiences, moods, feelings, affect, onto buildings, roads, landmarks, and other physical objects, many of which are not "smart," at least not yet. This project attempts to imagine the relationships between disaster, space, and myself through the database of this particular disaster and the database of my routine, a necessary integration, as Rice argued:
Following Lyotard's definition of database rhetorics, one must be able to imagine ways to connect information that previous set-ups have not yet allowed for. One must, in a metaphoric sense, travel through the information, going "from the territorial to the transient (Clark 12)." (p. 39, emphasis in original)
The Roadkill Tollbooth attempts to bridge both of these networks, these databases, creating a current from the Macondo well to me, and vice versa, with the tollbooth as the liminal space through which this passage occurs. The Roadkill Tollbooth as MEmorial provides a method and thing toward what both Ulmer and Rice argued for generally, and what I am ultimately arguing for specifically: new "set-ups" to understand and imagine environmental problems and conversations.
The "set-up" here is similar to the set-up of a joke. The Roadkill Tollbooth combines the domains of traffic tolls and animal sacrifice to invent a new way to memorialize abject sacrifices, but also to understand our role, fault, and responsibilities in everyday practices and sensational disasters. One salient feature of the tollbooth is its wordplay on roadkill, mocking its common usage to instead refer to animals killed not on the road by cars, but at sea by cars, killed so that one can travel on the road—road becoming a descriptor of what is gained rather than location of sacrifice.
The practice of driving demands kills for the sake of the road. If there is a joke that comes from this pun, it's the joke on the driver, who, at great highway speeds, no longer even has to put a token in the tollbooth. This joke is an inverse of the one played in Blazing Saddles, where the posse could simply ride around the tollbooth rather than pay the dime. The driver passing through the Roadkill Tollbooth must pass through, but must not pay a monetary toll. Still, the logic of the tollbooth demands that a toll must be made, and to get the joke (or perhaps better, riddle), the driver must solve the punchline (not that this joke is particularly funny, even though the laughing gulls guffaw in each tollbooth clip).
At another level, tollbooth refers not just to a location where a toll is paid—for in this case, the toll is not paid. Instead, the tollbooth as place does not require that one must pay a toll, but recognize a toll and a tolling. The would-be transponders on the Florida's Turnpike tollbooths would emit a beep-like tone when passing under a toll gantry, letting the driver know the toll has been paid. For whom does the "beep" toll? It tolls for thee, for the toll acknowledges the toll paid for by the animal sacrifice on behalf of the driver.
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Mile Marker 0
The end of US 1—and the virtual ending of the Florida's Turnpike, allowing for my extension past its official ending in Florida City—is located on the corner of Whitehead and Fleming streets in Key West. This location is indicated by standard Florida Department of Transportation signage, Mile 0. This signage has become a circulated icon of Key West, often appearing as bumper stickers on cars that have made it to this underworld.
Key West's Spanish name, Cayo Hueso, translates to "island of bones." Upon their arrival, Spanish explorers found the key covered with the bones of native inhabitants. Key West has long been an underworld. However, these are not my ghosts. Or, these are not the ghosts summoned by this particular MEmorial.
In addition to a katabasis, this MEmorial also performs a nekuia—the summoning of ghosts to question them. I do not travel to the underworld to rescue a soul (as did Orpheus), but to commune with them; Odysseus sought to speak with Tiresias's ghost so he could eventually find his way home to Ithaca.
Having completed this project, I now experience an affective sensation each time I pass under a toll gantry when traveling the Florida's Turnpike. I summon the ghosts from those animals killed in the BP oil spill, and I ask them to help me get home.
Even though the Roadkill Tollbooth does not exist as a physical structure, it now exists in the virtual. Through my SunPass electronic transponder, I pay a monetary toll each time I pass under a toll gantry. But I also pay another toll. I can no longer drive underneath a toll gantry without consciously recognizing the losses that have occurred (and continue to occur) to make this trip possible, a journey that has now become almost wholly for selfish pleasure and nostalgia as my blood relatives have all moved away.
Each time I pay a toll, the total cost builds, both physically as I use more oil and other resources, but psychically as well. Each trip is bittersweet, soured, and I consider my transport to an uncomfortable and melancholic mood a sign that the Roadkill Tollbooth has worked. Each time I pass under a gantry, I encounter ghosts, and they remind me. They remind me of their sacrifices. They remind me of my responsibility to do something. They remind me of my inability to do something other than remember. They remind me that I can do something, but that I am unwilling to take action and sacrifice my own escape home.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to the following individuals and organizations for their insight and support of this project:
Nic Guest-Jelley, who co-authored the first version of this project, delivered at the 2011 Annual Conference on College Composition and Communication (Atlanta, GA).
The Pearce Center for Professional Communication.
The Idol-South Award from Clemson University's Department of English.
The Kairos editorial board, especially Dan Anderson who served as the Tier 3 mentor.
John Tinnell, Jacob Riley, Sarah Arroyo, Sid Dobrin, Gabriel Hankins, Walt Hunter, and David Coombs for early feedback.
And to Jacob Greene and Madison Jones, who provided thoughtful comments on this piece: No, Thank You.
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References
Texts
Cooley, Heidi Rae. (2014).
Finding Augusta: Habits of mobility and governance in the digital era. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.
Coupe, Laurence. (2000).
The green studies reader: From Romanticism to ecocriticism. New York, NY: Routledge.
Florida Department of Transportation. (2016). Highway signing program.
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Gibson, William. (1984).
Neuromancer. New York, NY: Ace.
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Jameson, Fredric. (1978). Reification and utopia in mass culture.
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Jones, Steven E. (2014).
The emergence of the digital humanities. New York, NY: Routledge.
Morey, Sean. (2015). A network of bones: Key West as underworld. In Jeff Rice (Ed.),
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Morton, Timothy. (2013).
Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and space in the age of the network. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
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Ulmer, Gregory L. (2005).
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Hahn, P.J. (2010). Massive fish kill [Photograph].
Reuters.com. Retrieved from
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McNamee, Win. (2010). A brown pelican coated in heavy oil. [Photograph].
GettyImages.com. Retrieved from
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McNamee, Win. (2010). A dead fish coated in heavy oil. [Photograph].
GettyImages.com. Retrieved from
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/dead-fish-coated-in-heavy-oil-floats-near-shore-june-4-2010-news-photo/101619648
Moore, John. (2010). A dead porpoise dries. [Photograph].
GettyImages.com. Retrieved from
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/dead-porpoise-dries-as-a-bp-cleanup-crew-works-to-remove-news-photo/100505310
Riedel, Charlie. (2010). A brown pelican covered in oil. [Photograph].
APImages.com. Retrieved from
http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Gulf-Oil-Spill/9508c6b9d373401bb612da752c79c8da/1/1
Riedel, Charlie. (2010). A dead turtle floats on a pool of oil. [Photograph].
APImages.com. Retrieved from
http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/APTOPIX-Gulf-Oil-Spill/2a68ab7f8c2d42acbb580645ca58fe9c/3/0
Riedel, Charlie. (2010). An oil-stained brown pelican chick. [Photograph].
APImages.com. Retrieved from
http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Gulf-Oil-Spill/43c040b4f5ec478295c6b352db82bf53/4/0
Riedel, Charlie. (2010). Dead dolphin. [Photograph].
APImages.com. Retrieved from
http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Gulf-Oil-Spill/d0d67602184744299333ae1ab47c48e9/141/0
Riedel, Charlie. (2010). Hermit crabs struggle. [Photograph].
APImages.com. Retrieved from
http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Gulf-Oil-Spill/c580e02c211e4f098fc785be93786c3c/5/0
Riedel, Charlie. (2010). Oil-covered brown pelican chicks. [Photograph].
APImages.com. Retrieved from
http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Gulf-Oil-Spill/b07bc917f85740c8859edf989a6dfbb6/1/0
Videos
Associated Press. (2011, February 23). More dead dolphins in the Gulf raises questions [Video file].
YouTube. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36MqUXm07jc
Best Documentaries. (2013, November 1). Profit, pollution and deception: BP and the oil spill [Video file].
YouTube. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zGFvzMMO9w
Brooks, Mel. (Director). (1974).
Blazing saddles [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros.
Cope, Jerry. (2011, March 3). More dead dolphins wash up on Orange Beach Alabama [Video file].
YouTube. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq_eNJpI5rQ
Coppola, Francis Ford. (Director). (1972).
The godfather [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures.
Davis, Desmond. (Director). (1981).
Clash of the titans [Motion picture]. United States: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Dermansky, Julie. (2010, June 18). Crab with BP oil on it [Video file].
YouTube. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3avo818yQ78
Dermansky, Julie. (2010, August 20). Dead dolphin and tar balls on beach [Video file].
YouTube. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMw2ZdexkXU
Dugan, Dennis. (Director). (1999).
Big daddy [Motion picture]. United States: Columbia Pictures.
Federaljacktube4 (2011, March 2). FLASHBACK: Jack Hanna - A lot of animals are going to die [Video file].
YouTube. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vae8PicJEPo
FoxNews (n.d.). Deepwater horizon animals covered in oil marine life facing devastation in Gulf of Mexico Oil [Video file].
Fox News. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW_4RF9KR4M
FloridaKeysTV. (2009, October 16). Florida keys overseas highway is named all-American road [Video file].
YouTube. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDmBtMuHZac
Florida's Turnpike Enterprise. (n.d.). All-electronic open road tolling [Video file].
Florida's Turnpike. Retrieved from
http://www.floridasturnpike.com/all-electronictolling/index.cfm
Freeman, John Craig. (2010, September 10). Ulmer tapes 05.08 [Video file].
YouTube. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih6_-jwW-Vo
Granada Wild. (n.d.). Socotra cormorant caught in oil slick [Video file].
Arkive.org. Retrieved from
http://www.arkive.org/socotra-cormorant/phalacrocorax-nigrogularis/video-14.htm
jayrockfish. (2010, August 20). Fly fishing film tour presents world angling [Video file].
YouTube. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGDtt61vNNg
Jones, Chuck, Levitow, Abe, & Monahan, Dave. (Directors). (1970).
The phantom tollbooth [Motion picture]. United States: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Medical Arts Productions. (2002, July 16). As boys grow [Video file].
Internet Archive. Retrieved from
https://archive.org/details/AsBoysGr1957
Medical Arts Productions. (2013, July 30). Labor and childbirth [Video file].
Internet Archive. Retrieved from
https://archive.org/details/0027_Labor_and_Childbirth_03_00_49_00
MrRyPete. (2011, March 24). Double-crested cormorant 1 [Video file].
YouTube. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiJlfs2ls-8
pulse3tv. (2013, September 22). Clash of the gods (Hades) history channel [Video file].
https://vimeo.com/75172943
RT America. (2014, April 10). Oil from BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster continues killing wildlife [Video file].
YouTube. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g3ckvJ9qS4
Spielberg, Steven. (Director). (1977).
Close encounters of the third kind [Motion picture]. United States: Columbia Pictures.
Torre, Nicole (2009).
Houston, we have a problem [Motion picture]. United States: New Angle Media.
United States Coast Guard. (2010, May 12). Crater plume gassing [Video file].
Defense Video Imagery Distribution System. Retrieved from
https://www.dvidshub.net/video/85289/crater-plume-gassing#.VT2DLSF4qJ
United States Coast Guard. (2013, December 17). Deepwater Horizon fire [Video file].
Defense Video Imagery Distribution System. Retrieved from
https://www.dvidshub.net/video/315073/deepwater-horizon-fire#.VT2CqyF4q
United States Coast Guard. (2010, May 12). Deepwater Horizon spill site [Video file].
Defense Video Imagery Distribution System. Retrieved from
https://www.dvidshub.net/video/85187/deepwater-horizon-spill-site#.VT2DxyF4qJA
United States Coast Guard. (2010, June 10). Drill site [Video file].
Defense Video Imagery Distribution System. Retrieved from
https://www.dvidshub.net/video/87707/drill-site#.VT2EWyF4qJ
United States Coast Guard. (2010, June 10). INSITU burn (controlled burn) [Video file].
Defense Video Imagery Distribution System. Retrieved from
https://www.dvidshub.net/video/87708/insitu-burn-controlled-burn#.VT2DcCF4qJA
United States Coast Guard. (2013, December 13). Oil clean up, safety and contamination checks [Video file].
Defense Video Imagery Distribution System. Retrieved from
https://www.dvidshub.net/video/315539/oil-clean-up-safety-and-contamination-checks#.VT1-pyF4qJA
United States Coast Guard. (2013, December 20). Marsh clean up [Video file].
Defense Video Imagery Distribution System. Retrieved from
https://www.dvidshub.net/video/316692/marsh-clean-up#.VT2B9yF4qJA
WorldANGLING. (2010, December 17). Satori trailer: Fly fishing for permit [Video file].
Vimeo. Retrieved from
https://vimeo.com/17922104
Sound Recordings
Buffett, Jimmy. (1990). Changes in latitude, changes in attitude. On
Changes in latitude, changes in attitude [CD]. Santa Monica, CA: MCA Records.
Buffett, Jimmy. (1990). Margaritaville. On
Changes in latitude, changes in attitude [CD]. Santa Monica, CA: MCA Records.
Buffett, Jimmy. (1987). Volcano. On
Volcano [CD]. Santa Monica, CA: MCA Records.
Johnson, Jack. (2010). Only the ocean. On
To the sea [CD]. Los Angeles, CA: Brushfire Records.
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