She Came to See, Then Stayed to Help and Outshined the ‘Professionals’ : First person: A rag-tag band of volunteers grab towels and start cleaning. They get little help and less encouragement but do get some oil off the beach.

I’m not a gawker by nature. I try not to make things worse by slowing down at car crashes or fires. Having worked as both a reporter and a volunteer firefighter, I know that in most emergencies, spectators only make it worse.

On Thursday, I couldn’t stop myself. I had to see what was happening to the beach.

Stay away, authorities announced on TV and radio. There’s nothing you can do to help. Call if you want; we’ll put your name on our list, just in case.

I went anyway, just to look. I stayed to help, as did hundreds of others. Nobody asked us to, and nobody gave us any instructions or guidance. As far as I could tell, nobody was in charge.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” someone shouted from the sidelines at one point Thursday night.

“No!” I yelled back emphatically. “But the important thing is, we’re doing something!”

I’m a die-hard beach person. I go there for long walks several times a week, and when it’s sunny and warm, I sit awhile and watch the waves. It’s where I do my best thinking. Without it, I think I would go crazy.

So news of the oil spill Wednesday afternoon nearly made my heart stop. I thought about the whales I’d seen spouting off the coast at Corona del Mar just last week, the anemones and sea hares in the tide pools at Crystal Cove. It was an accident, they said, and I believed that. Still, I had the uncivilized urge to find out who was responsible and punch their lights out.

Instead, I drove to the Huntington Beach Pier on Thursday afternoon. Except for the cluster of TV crews, everything looked fairly normal. In the distance, I could see the crippled tanker American Trader, with helicopters buzzing around it. But I couldn’t see any oil.

“The acrid smell of oil fills the air here at Huntington Beach,” said a voice on my car radio. I rolled down the window and sniffed. Nothing. I sucked in a deep breath. Still nothing.

I parked and threaded my way past TV crews to the sand. Still no oil smell. But I noticed that the wind had shifted and was now blowing, stiffly and ominously, toward shore.

“You know what this means,” said a man standing next to me. We were strangers, but strangers talk to each other at times like this.

“This means it’s going to come in, probably soon,” I said.

“Look at the bright side,” he said. “At least Huntington Beach made the national news.”

My curiosity satisfied, I drove home. On the radio, a reporter in a helicopter said the mass of oil was only 100 yards off Newport Beach, and the tide was coming in. “We don’t need any volunteers at this time,” some official said. “The professionals are ready to handle the cleanup.”

I stopped at home just long enough to put on several layers of old clothes and a pair of shoes I was planning to throw out. I didn’t expect they’d need my help, but I figured I might get dirty just walking around.

Reporters outnumbered ordinary folks about 3 to 1 at the Newport Beach Pier. I felt awkward, so I pulled out my notebook.

On the pier, the smell hit me like a wave.

A couple of fishermen still had their lines in the water. “See anything yet?” I asked. They pointed, silently, at the water below. Someone aimed a flashlight. There were small dark spots bobbing on the surface.

“That’s it, huh?” said a man somewhere behind me. “I thought it was going to be like a big black wave.”

On the sand, lifeguards posted signs: “Danger Beach Closed.” TV reporters were getting into position, and bystanders huddled around, some volunteering to be interviewed. Still no cleanup crews.

About 7:30 p.m., two trucks arrived and about a dozen men in blue coveralls got out. A few had rakes. Others grabbed packages of what seemed to be enormous paper towels and set them on the beach.

They began wiping the oil as it washed up, leaving black lines to mark where the waves had been. I watched from a respectful distance.

“This is it?” asked a woman nearby. “Twelve guys with Handi-wipes?”

“We should all be out there helping,” I said. “Those guys can work all night and it won’t make any difference.”

“We can’t do that,” another said. “You have to have gloves. And besides, there aren’t enough Handi-wipes.”

A TV reporter in suit and running shoes scooped a jarful of oily water. A bystander did the same, then wiped his jar with a cleanup towel, and tossed the soiled paper on the sand before leaving.

I took the towel to a trash bin, pausing to look at the printing: “Join the team. Help keep our beach clean.” OK, I thought. I will.

I drove to a nearby supermarket and bought a pair of rubber gloves. When I returned, the little black globs had been replaced by a sickly brown foam. Already, a couple of others were mopping up the foam with the towels.

I began wiping the way I’d seen the professionals do, scooping the foam toward me as each wave came in, then blotting as much as I could into the towel. When a towel was soaked, I carried it to the trash and got a new one. Soon, I was grabbing two towels at a time.

Some volunteers laughed as they worked, others looked stricken, and some cried. There was no time to exchange names or talk about why we were there, and no need, either.

Occasionally, one of the professionals would come by and hand us clean towels, or take away the dirty ones. But they never spoke, at least not to me.

We were completely unorganized and leaderless, and admittedly ignorant. But we kept busy. When I went scrounging for more towels, I noticed there was hardly an empty spot for several hundred yards.

I looked back at the parking lot and saw the crowd watching us.

“Please help us,” I begged. “If you don’t want to get dirty, you can hand clean towels to the rest of us. You can tear trash bags off the roll to pass out to us. Come on! Don’t just watch! We need you.”

I don’t recall when I’ve ever been so pushy. But several young men hopped over the low brick wall at the edge of the parking lot and began helping.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Thank you, “ one of them replied.

“Thank everyone,” I said.

Back at the wave line, I was scooping next to a father whose young son sat on his shoulders. “You know, you can go up there and help. . . . You could go around collecting the dirty towels. That way we wouldn’t drip so much back onto the sand.” He considered the idea, then grabbed a plastic bag. For hours, he walked the line, gathering the towels, his son hanging on the whole time.

The 10 o’clock news crews did their bits, then the 11 o’clock folks took over. They grabbed people at random to interview.

The TV people began turning their lights out. We kept mopping. Suddenly there was less foam to mop.

“Is it just my imagination, or does it seem like we’re making a difference?” I asked.

“There’s definitely less,” one said.

Another wasn’t so sure. “Maybe it’s because the tide’s going back out.”

But we were out of towels. I found the professional crew huddled around their truck.

“Are there any more towels?” I asked.

“No,” said one. It was the only word I’d heard any of them say all night.