One of the questions that has haunted me since BP anointed the Gulf of Mexico with raw crude has been: What’s to become of Horn Island? Will its sugar-white sand be caramelized by the petroleum gushing up from the Gulf's floor in the aftermath of the April 20 oil-drilling-platform explosion off the coast of Louisiana?

As BP tries one method after another to stem the black tide, my thoughts go back to a column I wrote more than 15 years ago about a small-town tinkerer in Surgoinsville, Tenn. The column has long vanished from my archives, and the tinkerer’s name has vanished from my memory, but not the idea he came up with for mitigating an oil disaster of the ‘90s.

But first, a few words about Horn Island. I’ve never visited Horn Island, but I’ve heard many yarns about it from my son-in-law, Joe Tardy of Mobile, Ala., who took our daughter, Cherie, there by boat around 15 years ago to pop the question. The island covers about 4 square miles, and it lies 14 miles out in the Gulf from Pascagoula, Miss. Part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, it is without human inhabitants except for the folks who boat across the Mississippi Sound to man a small ranger station. Its more-or-less permanent inhabitants are the alligators, ospreys, terns, pelicans, ducks, herons and other nomadic creatures that use it as a regular isle of sojourn. It has long been a destination for hardy Gulf-Coast residents with a yen to get away from it all. To get there you need a reliable, seaworthy vessel and the daring to navigate 14 miles of open water with no guarantee of cooperative weather. Those prerequisites keep the island lovely and lonely.

There are ominous signs that the oil spill resulting from the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil platform 50 miles from New Orleans is extending its tentacles toward Horn Island and its neighbors. An oil-soaked royal tern rescued from Horn Island has been taken to Mobile, Ala., where it was treated and apparently saved. Its rescuers weren’t sure whether it ran afoul of the oil on the island itself or in nearby waters.

Sparsely scattered tar balls, the result of the oil spill, have turned up at Horn Island, two other barrier islands and the Mississippi mainland.

As this is written, BP is trying to put the toothpaste back into a tube that is being squeezed from the other end. It is pumping mud into the bleeding pipe in hopes of stopping it up long enough to cement the opening permanently shut. It was, after all, mud and rock that kept the petroleum safely pent under the sea floor until the oil drills bored through to unlock the black treasure.

The effort to stanch a hemorrhage beneath 5,000 feet of seawater has thus far frustrated the ingenuity of oil-drilling engineers.

I have fought the urge to make light of these efforts, because the consequences are serious for those who make their livings in Gulf waters or through the tourism nourished by those sugar-white sands along the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama.

But when BP proposed to put a dome over the spewing pipe at the bottom of the Gulf and to pipe the oil from the dome to the surface, it reminded me of that old gentleman in Surgoinsville, who was constantly dreaming up solutions to the world’s problems. He suggested, for instance, that the walls at NASCAR tracks be built of metal rollers so that when the race cars collided with a wall they would roll harmlessly on their way instead of being scraped and torn and maybe demolished.

But his most ambitious proposal was for a method to put out the oil-well fires set off by Saddam Hussein as the coalition army unleashed by President George Bush I chased the Iraqis out of Kuwait in Desert Storm.

Saddam’s forces set fire to hundreds of wells, burning billions of gallons of oil. It took about eight months to extinguish the fires. The gentleman from Surgoinsville suggested that the job could be accomplished quickly by building giant metal candle-snuffers that could be lowered over the burning wells, thus smothering the flames.

The idea wasn't all that farfetched. One of the methods actually used was called “raising the plume.” A metal casing 30 to 40 feet high was placed over the wellhead. This brought the flames well above-ground and made them easier for the firefighters to reach. Liquid nitrogen or water was then pumped into the casing, cutting off the fire’s oxygen supply.

There's no danger of fire a mile under water, but similar ingenuity will be needed to stop the gushing petroleum that threatens to devastate the Gulf, its shores and its islands for years to come.

I’ve heard other, more whimsical, suggestions. One is that motorboats be equipped with tubes that would extract the oil from the surface and feed it directly into their motors. That might work if BP were pumping refined gasoline instead of crude oil.

If the automaker could design engines that ran on crude, we could all take our siphon tubes down to the Gulf and skim the stuff off the surface. That would beat $2.80 a gallon at the BP station on the Interstate. And the Gulf would become one giant fuel tank until we sucked all the oil out of it.

But flights of whimsy won’t solve the problem or remove the danger to the sea life and the sunny beaches that annually attract hordes of tourists to the Gulf Coast.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take as long to stanch the gusher at the bottom of the Gulf as it did to put out the fires in the desert of Kuwait.

Maybe BP should dispatch a team of engineers to Surgoinsville. My old friend, if he’s still there, might put a fruitful idea into their heads. It would be nice if it bore fruit in time to save the sugar sands of Horn Island and its mainland neighbors.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or by e-mail at WadesDixieco@AOL.com