Pendejos and the PMF

It’s twenty eight miles from beach access 5 to the Port Mansfield Jetties. I used to drive that long stretch of beach once a week, more often if there was a turtle, dolphin or other chingaso reported up there. On weekends it could be hell. First, you have to make your way through the throngs of partiers between beach access 5 and 6…mostly folks from Brownsville, all parked just above high water, barbecues sending fragrant smells of fajitas, costillas and hamburgesas wafting on the breeze, making everyone inside a two hundred yard radius lust for Miller and Bud light….in great quantities. Children running amok, back and forth between the waters edge and the parked cars….vintage piece o’ shit vans (like I used to own), lowriders, troques with elaborate murals painted on the tailgates, tiny wheels dug deep into the sand, prime candidates for later towing out…the whole nine yards. And the adults, well, they’re generally unconcerned with anything more than swilling gallons of beerungas, sitting in circles getting thoroughly shitfaced.

Usually on this stretch, there’s always at least one, and often times several vehicles stuck in loose sand, throwing huge plumes of flying sand as they futilely gun the engine, spinning the wheels until ultimately, they’re stuck down to the frame, up to the doors. There’s a few “towing services”, who will unstick you, for around a hundred bucks in this area, which is still pretty close to town. The last time I ventured up the beach (and I hadn’t been there in a long time), there was a motorhome stuck in the sand. Big bastard, new, with a buncha spring breakers looking forlornly at the rear dullies stuck deep in the sand.

During the season, the “Winter Texans” line the beach from here to the Mansfield Cut, throwing bait into the surf, hoping to load up on our gamefish….mostly whiting, but sometimes reds, trout, shark and jacks. I’ve seen them take huge stingrays and toss them on the beach. I usually stop and try and explain that they shouldn’t ought to do that, the stingray is an important part of the whole system, and besides it’s a gentle fish that would much rather get out of your way than bury its stinger in your foot, in your leg. I try and explain to them that the stingrays stinger is strictly defensive, that if someone were to step in the middle of my back (my kids excluded) that I’d get pissed too, and probably try and whack ‘em right in the balls to get ‘em off….it doesn’t do much good though, cause the Winter Texans know just about every goddamn thing there is to know, and of course the only good stingray is a dead stingray, hell, everyone knows they’re dangerous as all get-out…I’ve even overheard the pinche bastards discussing the fact that they catch enough fish down here every winter to take “back home” for fish frys all year long. Bet they wouldn’t like it too much if I were to go on up to “back home” during the spring and summer, maybe Minnasooooota, and rape, pillage and plunder all of their goddamn walleye so that I could have fish fries all winter down here…

Just past all of the madness, the beach opens up as you pass a wide expanse of hurricane wash-over flats and pristine dune fields. Past the end of the paved road. Sometimes coyotes hunt along the beach, and flocks of Sanderlings, little legs running furiously, chase the water as it laps at the shoreline. I always watch for groups of gull and terns diving in the water, giving away the telltale location of feeding big fish.

About sixteen miles north of the end of the road, a shrimp boat is slowly sinking into the sand between the second and third sandbars. About all you can see now are the outriggers, top of the wheelhouse and the antennas, just visible above the surf. I was there the morning after the night it went aground. The Coast Guard had chased it, and once they hit shallow water, the shrimpboat crew bailed, and swam / waded ashore, where they were promptly apprehended. Just to the south was the reason why. A stretch of gillnet over a half mile long lay on the beach, jammed with hundreds of sharks, mostly sand sharks, blacktips and spinners, but there was one big blue about seven or eight feet long, and in among the sharks, a bull redfish about forty something inches in length. I untangled the red, looked at his gills and eyes, which were still bright red, and threw him in the bed of the truck, a fish destined to become blackened redfish and tasty bowls of ceviche.

Up here, the beach gets strewn with all manners of goodies. Once, D found a sonde, a buoy normally dropped from an aircraft, a regular old data gathering tube washed up on the beach. She sent it off to the address on the side, and got a 250 dollar reward. There’s gold in them thar beaches. And just north of course, is the nudie beach.

Marked by a spray painted giant log of driftwood (how apropos) is a stretch of beach that has been designated since I can’t remember when, as the naked beach. Of course, to a normal guy, a naked beach conjures up images of big breasted bronze blonde bathing beauties, lounging lugubriously on sweltering white sand beaches, bodies begging for suntan oil.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the winter, most often, the nudie beach is populated by knarly old viejitos, refugees from the lands of endless snows, people who popularized nudist camps back in the 60’s. Now in their sixties themselves, they are leathery skinned bastards, women with saggy wrinkled tits and veryclose veins, the men, hunch backed and ancient, with flaccid ballsacks and weenies atrophied from eons of disuse. There used to be one who would sit in a lawn chair and smile and wave as we’d pass, just as happy as a pig in shit. In the summer, the naked beach is inhabited mainly by gays who ply their wretched morality far from the disapproving stares of town.

Just north of the nudie beach is an area that we all affectionately call “the narrows”. Here, the sand dunes extend down to a narrow beach which, at high tide, and during big storms is inundated, and impossible to cross without driving through the water. It is an odd area, out of place with the rest of the beach. At low tides, the prairie terrace, the ancestral consolidated base that the island rests on, a material which resembles mudstone is exposed. I have hauled ass through this area, screaming down the beach at sixty miles an hour plus, when big storms threaten to close off this section rather than get trapped north until the norther blew herself out. I always puzzled over why the narrows were there, until one day I was looking at a map of the island trying to determine where the old Singer ranch had been. It suddenly occurred to me that the narrows lie directly east of the mouth of the Arroyo Colorado, and when sea level was much lower, during the last ice age, this was the course of the river channel. Voila!

The island is segmented in various sections after large hurricanes breach it in numerous places. These areas of wash over eventually heal, but can always be identified by their lack of dunes and dune fields. One such wash over occurs just north of the narrows. The last time it was breached, there was a salt water stream which ran between the open Gulf of Mexico and the Laguna Madre which you had to ford in order to get to the Mansfield Cut. Those of us who’ve lived here our lives know how to do it, and if in doubt, get out and wade across to determine where the best crossing is. There’s almost always some space where the sand starts to fill in first as the river grows less and less pronounced, before finally being totally strangled off, and the wash over flat begins to heal to pre hurricane topography. On one trip some pendejo just decided to ford his new Ford wherever through the stream, and it sat in cockeyed mute testament to his lack of higher intelligence.

Of course, there are lots of pendejos who think they know better. Last time I drove the beach with D there was a maroon truck who passed us going about sixty or so (yea I know I do it, but I know when to), bouncing, vaulting up into the air and almost fishtailing out of control as it disappeared up the beach. We figured we’d come up on it flipped over. Later we saw the same truck up at the PMF jetties, with the driver pouring salt water on the engine, which had apparently overheated. Dumbass. They flew past us on the way back, with a sealed Texaco Oil Co. barrel which we had seen on the way up, a barrel that had washed ashore during some big offshore storm, one filled with probably some sort of toxic shit like benzene or hexane or something worse. Anyway, they were hauling ass again, with the truck sometimes becoming airborne, barrel jumping up independently in the truck bed as the truck careened almost out of control through the shallow water along the shore, sending huge roostertails high into the blue winter sky. We figured these guys life expectancy couldn’t be too long. For sure their vehicle wouldn’t probably last the week.

This far up the beach the flotsam and jetsam become large and odd. People can’t too well salvage the huge tanks, buoys and other industrial crap that washes off the decks of ships, boats and oil rigs, and so the beach hosts a graveyard of shit. Recently I found the remains of a pedal boat, the kind you see in ponds and little lakes washed up on the beach and wondered who the fuck would ever attempt to use one of those thing around here? Another time the beach was littered with computer monitors.

Finally you reach the Port Mansfield South Jetty, the Cut, PMF. This dredged cut through the island was created about fifty years ago, and since it’s not natural, has the tendancy to silt in. That’s the way it is right now. Without intervention, the island will heal herself again, and totally close off the cut, and once again one could (theoretically) drive all the way from the Brazos Santiago Pass to Aransas Pass along the beach. When the cut was first opened up, dredged, the remains of an old sunken Spanish ship yielded artifacts, gold and silver, but the state stepped in and claimed it all for itself, screwing my friend Billy K out of a fortune. I used to camp up at the cut, sometimes floundering at night along the channel edge for big old saddle blanket fish. Other times, I’d paddle across to go surf with friends, a caravan of gypsies on surfboards, the lead board being an ancient Dewey Weber longboard, with an ice chest of beers balanced on the nose, gingerly paddling across keeping a sharp lookout for the chingos of sharks that inhabit the cut.

I had a friend from Oregon that I’d fish with up there long ago. We’d fish in the channel, catching all kinds of fish. Jacks, Kingfish and Mangrove snapper, along with the ever present scourge, hardhead catfish. One time he got so mad at a catfish that he’d caught, one that had swallowed his bait, that he kicked it in disgust. Of course the catfish had extended his filthy, poison filled pectoral fin spines in self defense, extended them straight out, and when my friend kicked the wretched thing it drove the spine through his sneaker and deep into his big toe. My friend promptly fell down on the hard granite, writhing in burning pain, screaming “I’ve been hit!”…..”this is really it!”.

I had a hard time keeping a straight face…….

Pendejo