The fisherman's son: in the aftermath of last year's Gulf oil spill, the 19-year-old son of a shrimp fisherman considers whether to follow in his father's footsteps.

• Author: Harmon, Amy
• Position: NATIONAL - Aaron Greco

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Nineteen-year-old Aaron Greco has wanted to be a fisherman as long as he can remember. He grew up on his father's shrimp boats in a tight-knit village on the Louisiana Gulf Coast where fishing is a way of life.

Last year was supposed to have been the first he could start fishing full time. Then BP's offshore oil rig exploded in April, and 185 million gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the Gulf shrimp industry.

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In the wake of the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, Aaron has been trying to decide what to do with his life.

"It made you feel like it was just gone, like there was nothing you could do," he says of the spill. "It would come in and wipe us out."

Ten months later, deepwater drilling has resumed in the Gulf and the ban on fishing has been lifted for most areas, but the cleanup is far from over: In some communities, tar balls continue to wash up on beaches and an oil sheen can still be seen on the water. And though most agree the worst case scenario was avoided, the long-term environmental impact of so much oil in the water remains unclear. That's what worries Aaron Greco.

Few of his friends born into the Gulf Coast's fishing communities followed their fathers and grandfathers in the pursuit of wild seafood. Long before the oil rig exploded, rising fuel prices and competition from Asia's cheap farmed shrimp had made a risky and physically punishing profession far less profitable: Only a few thousand Louisianans now make their living fishing, down from more than 20,000 in the late 1980s. In short, it's a dying profession.

College or Fishing?

Yet Aaron was among those of his generation still drawn to this way of life. He wanted to be his own boss, to spend his days on the teeming marshes outside his door.

When the spill closed the waters around Delacroix Island, some 30 miles south of New Orleans, Aaron bounced between doubt and determination. His sisters pushed him to go on to college; his uncles warned of the lingering effects of the chemicals used to clean up the oil.

For his father, Buddy Greco, who had dropped out of school in 10th grade without ever learning to read, there had been no choice: Like almost everyone else in Delacroix, he never considered anything other than fishing.

Teenagers could make good money in those days in the Gulf. In 1986, wild-caught Gulf shrimp still accounted for nearly a quarter of the shrimp Americans ate, commanding the...