God Bless Les

It's 3:00pm and Les is out of hours. Les is the tech who works at the lab, mainly doing the Texas Beachwatch sampling. Every week this time of year he samples stretches of the beach for water quality, usually on the four-wheeler. Les is the type who can make almost anything work by using common items one might find on any moderately well stocked kitchen shelf or garage. He's a genius with things like PVC pipe, wire and hose clamps. His collection of homemade items scavenged from flotsom and jetsom on the beach is legendary. He's a locksmith too, able to open just about anything with a narrow assortment of tools.

A consumate islander, Les moved here long ago from the inland city of Edinburg. His primary residence is Kellys Irish Pub up on the north end of town, where he spends almost every evening and earned dollar, downing rum and cokes, a fixture there, as vital as the eight liner game machines or Guiness tap handles that dispense draughts in that place as smokey dark as the beer. No doubt he's earned a personalized barstool, and has probably achieved patron saint-of-the-bar status too.

Once, on the way out, late at night, he backed his ancient rusting station wagon into the wooden parking lot fence, taking out a whole section, and forever closing a passenger side door. Next day he was over there fixing the damage to the fence. That's how Les is. The station wagons door is still crushed shut.

He doesn't like kids. He was married once to a woman who had a real passion for tarantulas and cats, and he'll still help her out whenever she moves from place to place between the Island and Port Isabel. One requsite for being a true islander is the ability to recognize treasure from junk on the beach. He's always finding orphaned clothes, kids life jackets, swimming suits and flip flops and lots of times they'll appear over by the communal washing machine, earmarked for our twins. He doesn't like kids, but I guess he makes an exception for ours.

Last year Les brought in an object that looked like nothing more than a long piece of pipe. Turned out to be a recording sonde that some oil company contracted to have airdropped into the Gulf of Mexico. This particular instrument transmitted weather information back to some shore station, as it drifted along on ocean currents. It was worth a two hundred dollar reward to Les. He said it financed his Kellys tab for almost a week. For awhile he was collecting hard hats, blown off of oil rigs into the water during heavy offshore storms where they ride the same currents, and sometimes appear on the beach like so many plastic mushrooms, sprouting from the sand after the rain. He'd clean them up, and sell them over at the Port of Brownsville, at Amfels offshore construction where they manufacture the same oil rigs, in sort of a cosmic full tilt circle. I think he was getting about a buck apiece for them, but after awhile it turned into too much work, and was seriously cutting into his Kellys time.

Les doesn't like to work any more than is absolutely necesssary to sustain existence, which means pay his bar tab, and if enough is left over, the rent. I mean, who really does in an island environment, custom made for screwing away the day on the beach or in the bars? He makes a pretty decent salary and can clock in for forty hours each week but seldom does. Every day, just after lunch, his shoes get real tight, and I can hear the sound of the time clock go click! Then he'll stop by my office and casually mention, "I'm takin' off...outta time", and off to Kellys he rolls.