Eye of the Hurricane

Hey...Where the White Women At?

2009-03-11T09:30:00.000-07:00

The Fall of the US

2009-02-27T09:45:00.000-08:00

I heard the following story on Glen Beck awhile back and it brought shivers to me again.....Apparently back in the '50's ( yep back when I was born....) Ezra Taft Benson, then Secretary of Agriculture under Eisenhower reluctently met with Russian Prime Minister Nikita Krushchev, when this exchange took place:

Ezra Taft Benson at the behest of President Dwight Eisenhower met with Nikita Khrushchev. Following is the transcript: “I have personally witnessed the heart rendering results of the loss of freedom. I have talked face to face with a Godless Communist leader. It may surprise you to learn that I was host to Mr. Khrushchev for a half day when he visited the U.S. I’m not proud of it. I opposed his coming in and I still feel it was a mistake to welcome this atheistic murderer as a state visitor but according to President Eisenhower, Khrushchev had expressed the desire to learn something of American agriculture and after seeing Russian agriculture, I can understand why. “As we talked face to face, he indicated that my grandchildren would live under communism. After assuring him that I planned to do all in my power to assure that his and all other grandchildren would live under freedom, he arrogantly declared in substance, ‘You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright but we will keep feeding strong doses of socialism until you finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you fall like over ripe fruit into our hands.’”

Scary ain't it?

Government Competency

2009-02-27T08:44:00.000-08:00

Boy I boy.....I feel soooo much more secure!

Famous Quotes by an Infamous Man

2009-02-20T08:40:00.000-08:00

"This year will go down in history. For the first time,a civilised nation has full gun registration!Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient,and the world will follow our lead into the future!"

"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty."

"Why nationalize industry when you can nationalize the people?"

"The great masses of the people ...will more easily fall victimsto a big lie than to a small one."

"Without law and order our nation cannot survive."

"The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies, but would be ashamed to tell big lies."

"What luck for the rulers that men do not think."

-Adolph Hitler

So Simple a Chimp Could Understand it....

2009-02-20T08:30:00.000-08:00

Finally, somebody gets the idea of the porkulus bill correct. So what happens? It inspires protests and near riots throughout the mentality deficient north....I guess what's good for the goose isn't good for the gander huh...

Great minds like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackoff call it "racist" and outrage grows.....Gee, it sure is swell to see el presidente and his administration of thugs, charlatans and losers melting down right before our collective eyes ain't it? I just hope they get 'er done before the damage is too great to repair. I'm sure not holding my breath though...

I think it's time to call a chimp a chimp.

Try THIS on for size

2009-02-12T11:55:00.000-08:00

Obamatrons

2009-02-12T11:51:00.000-08:00

Chili's

2009-02-12T11:36:00.000-08:00

Well, the latest local victim of the George Bush administration is the new Chili’s restaurant in Port Isabel. Hell isn’t everything George Bush’s fault?

Opened for a little over a year, I understand from insiders that their operating costs are around 30K / month, and their gross doesn’t generally exceed 18K / month, a rather large discrepancy.

However

Informed sources also state that a major chunk of the 30K / month operating cost is property lease and City taxes.

Nothing new here.

The City of Port Isabel has long been recognized for it’s arbitrary and confiscatory tax rates. Hell, the residents of the eastern part of the Fingers area pay something like 23 dollars a square foot, residential tax rates, while their neighbors right across the road, on the western part of the fingers pay about three and a half backs a square foot, and over at Port of Call the rate is eleven dollars. All of these areas are of contemporaneous property value, all waterfront, so these rates are puzzling to a number of the residents of the eastern Fingers who rightly feel that there’s just no rhyme or reason. Could it be because certain members of the City Commission hold land in select low tax rate areas? Nothing new here either….in fact politics as usual in the third world-third coast.

It is an area that would cut off it’s proverbial nose to spite it’s rather dumb face.
In the case of Chili’s, would it not be better for members of the City Commission, the esteemed mayor, Joe Verga to try and negotiate, perhaps even show up, hats in hand to see what can be done to try and encourage business to remain in this economically distressed area? Some income is certainly better than none.

But apparently a Machismo-Machiavellian attitude prevails, blinding these folks with visions of enrichment.

That is why Port Isabel has been, and always will be a second class city.

Uncle Teddy....One of my true HEROS

2009-02-05T09:22:00.000-08:00

Get Over It!

2009-02-03T08:20:00.000-08:00

-The more I think about it....
Old Billy was right
Let's kill all the lawyers
Let's kill 'em tonight!

-Don Henley, Get Over It

Oh! Bama

2009-02-03T08:12:00.001-08:00

The Leaning Tower of South Padre

2009-02-03T07:51:00.000-08:00

Graft and corruption in Washington?

High ranking politicians making hair brained decisions?

Hell, I think they might take some direction from the Laguna Desmadre area…..or maybe vice-versa. Take for example the Ocean Towers project located on the north end of the Island, just past Andy Bowie Park, there on Cameron County Land.

Ocean Towers SPI (OTSPI) was to be built as one of the first really big high rises on the sand spit that we call South Padre Island. The County Politicos….the infamous late, not-so-great, Pedro “peckerhead” Benavides, then precinct County Commish, (since his none-too-soon demise replaced by none other than his grieving widow Sophia “the talking sphincter” Benavides) along with the rest of the counties stooges: John “morning” Wood, , Edna “asshole” Tamayo, David “douchebag” Garza and of course the two most culpable criminals of them all, Gilbert “pussychaser” Hinojosa and his replacement speedy-gonzalez lackey Carlos “cuntface” Cascos along with nefarious Park Mis-management Javier “la rata” Mendez and Jolly Joe Verga (better known as the Mexican Laurel and Hardy’s) gave their unanimous blessings to the project, and of course the money exchanged hands beneath the table (accompanied by the jubilant grito) and everybody went away smiling.

The developer, a certain Mr. Clayton set about making the big building a reality. Between the county and the developer, engineering “studies” were held (with the requisite wink and nod), and an out of town firm, Coastal engineering gave the assurance that the project would work out allright.

Now I’m not sure where in the world they got this idea from. You see, South Padre Island is an delicate, shifting barrier island with a base that is a very poorly consolidated mudstone (actually a quasi mudstone) called the Prairie Terrace, something totally incapable of holding back the concentrated weight that the OTSPI was designed as. It was evident to anyone who had seen the plan that it would be like trying to anchor the thing in bread dough.
And sure enough, before the building was even complete it began to sink into the mire…..attaining a most evident lean, not unlike the leaning tower of Pisa.

Construction was halted and the area was cordoned off. The principals began the furious back pedal, but aside from a flurry of immediate publication in the local rags, the whole mess became back burner, manana news as is the case of so many failures, mistakes and political blunders here on the third world- third coast.

So what’s to become of this great eyesore? Nobody knows for sure.

Perhaps, like so many other local eyesores (and believe me there are plenty of them here, starting with the SPI City Manager Dewey Dickweed) it will simply be left to rot in place, eventually falling down across already raped and ruined sand dunes and formally pristine island expanse. It's what we want, it's what we deserve.

Who knows? Worse yet…..who cares?

Since I last checked in....

2009-02-02T09:39:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since I've added anything new to this site. Probably doesn't get a lot of viewing anyhow......

Well, that's fixin' to change yasee.....

A lot of things are transpiring (have transpired) since my last missive, and so I have some catching up to do.

Like talking about the leaning tower of South Padre Island....

Or the recent closure of Gabriellas Restaurant in Port Isabel, and the impending closure of the Chilis too (betcha some of you locals don't know that yet).....Yep, it has to do with weird tax rates, Laguna Desmadre good ol' conjunto politics and our downright penchant for corruption here on the third world-third coast.

Of course I haven't even begun to rant about the new boy in the White House yet, and his plans for "economic stabilization".

Suffice it to say me and mine are:

a) becoming well armed (and proficient with those arms)
b) seeking to creatively disburse / hide / protect assets
c) seek out other like minded individuals
d) plan escape routes

So just stand by. I'll get back here REAL soon....Until then, keep your powder dry.

The Great Isla Blanca Lifeguard Discussion

2008-06-16T12:42:00.000-07:00

There have been 4 drownings this year in Isla Blanca Park. Therefore it's time to enter into the Isla Blanca Lifeguard discussion once again.

Every few years when the heat gets turned up on Cameron Cunty, the administration of Parks and Recreation do what they do the very best.......they host a series of meetings and discussions and talk about the feasibility of implementing a life guard system at one of the busiest most dangerous beaches along the entire Gulf Coast. And so the park honchos, Javier Mendex and Joe Verga get their lunches paid for, get to disappear from any real work, and ultimately when the issue goes before the Cunty Commissioners, it is tabled again until the next paroxism of public outrage surfaces...every couple of years.

Lifeguards at Isla Blanca Park? Don't hold your breath or bet your life on it.

The Wisdom of Saul (Ochoa)

2008-06-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

Would you buy a used car from this man? No....but a lot of people entrusted him to be a Cunty Constable.....meanwhile he was selling dope on the side.

Of course the Cunty itself weighed in. The Cunty Judge, Karlos ("Napoleon") Casco-rones as usual talked out of both sides of his mouth, a couple of the cunty cumissioners expressed "surprise"...hell, how could an erected awful-official be capable of such a thing here en La Frontera, northmost Matamoros?

Buncha goddamn jerks.

They ought to be castrated (in the case of the males), or have their pussy lips sown shut in the case of the female type politico excuses for their complacence over generations of mismanagement of South Texas, so that neither genders has the ability to breed any more of their own worthless genetically inferior kind.

Hell, do we have to remind them of the pussy chasing Gilberto Hinojosa (who has recently resurfaced in another morph of human excrement), Conrado Cantu ("El Animo", I think "El Pendajo" is better though - one of the most corrupt sheriffs in recent history anywhere in the US.....oh I almost forgot....this ain't quite the US), Mark Yates (Who besides violating the Sherman anti-trust laws, inadvertently "gave" up all of the social security numbers to the public of all cunty employees by "mistake"....you should've seen the cunty scramble to try and save it's worthless asshole on that one!) or Rob Almon (tit grabbing fill in for Mark Yates) as just a few of the most recent shining examples of Cameron Cunty politics at its best?

Nope folks, thinks aren't likely to change till you demand better, and start watching over these worthless fucksticks with microscopic vision.

With respect to our history, I don't think that's too likely to happen though.

Two Minute Warning

2008-06-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

Well....Yesterday I quit my phony-baloney county administrators job after Edna ("The Cunt") Tamayo sent me several insulting and degrading emails. I finally had enough, and I fired back an email to the wrinkled old bitch admonishing her for being such a goddamn, self aggrandizing, ignorant, prurient asshole.

The I realized that most of the verbiage I used probably wouldn't even register in the first place. Hell, her grasp of the English Language is so fucking poor to begin with that she would have a hard time discerning between the words "aggrandizement", "aggregate" and "aggravation". So I sent the smelly old hag another missive with that in mind.

Then I sent my two minute warning to the management, shut off my county cell phone and put my ID badge in the desk and left....

No Enda, it does not take a village, an army or anything else to raise a child. It takes caring and involved parents (which apparently you never had.....the best part of you ran down your mothers hairy leg)....

All of the learning centers, parks and other edifices that you are building in all of the "economically depressed" areas of your precinct of the Tragic Valley will become more billboards for more graffiti and vandalism.

You see Edna, these "children" are simply the soul-less vermin that inherit this area after you and all of your kind who espouse "entitlement" and "compassion" for our "recent immigrants" in order to engender more votes for your political gain foster are left with. They are the orts and leavings of people who fuck for pleasure and do not worry about the consequences thereof. They are the unwanted and unholy, who will forever be a problem to society, and much of it is YOUR FAULT.

Better you take the 6.5 million Certificate of Obligation dollars you absconded with and plow it into involuntary sterilization clinics for these people.

So, therefore I have declared war on you and all of your kind, and will do my best to expose your plots to subvert and mismanage the taxpayers money on parks, learning centers and the other nonsense that will quickly become more third world problem areas.

Be aware, I'm watching you and the other clowns in the Cunty Commission, and I am hell bent on exposing your wrongdoings.

A Post from CB

2008-05-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

I received the following in email from my old friend CB who now lives in Austin (Autism)...."Keep Austin Wierd" motherfuckers...but keep it THERE...Don't bring it here!

Nonetheless this story was so good, and the lesson in discernment so profound, I just couldn't resist adding it here.

As I walked through the parking lot of Austin's toney Central Market this evening, a young man approached me with a prescription drug vial prominently displayed in his outstretched hand. His expression was theatrically plaintive. "Please, sir," he said in a trembling voice, "I've run out of anxiety medicine and I need just 4 dollars to buy more!" He sure did look stressed. I don't blame him, begging is a high-stress occupation. I stood silently for some time, considering what I would say to him (and no doubt worsening his anxiety). First, I wanted to recognize his superior effort in developing a unique pitch. I really thought he ought to seek employment in Austin's thriving theater scene.

A few years ago, in a strikingly similar encounter in an HEB parking lot in Weslaco, a man asked me for $10 so he could take his wife, who was dying of cancer, to the hospital. He didn't have any money, he just needed $10 for a taxi to the hospital. Leukemia, he said. She's dying. Please, sir. Uncharacteristically, I broke down and gave him $5.
"But sir", he said, I need $10 for the taxi." "Don't you have any family?" I asked. "Yes sir." "Well, you should get the rest from them."

A week later, the very same man approached me in the same parking lot and asked money for some other emergency. I looked him straight in the eye, and asked, "How's your wife?" "What?" He asked. "My wife? I'm not married." I then reminded him that I had given him $5 the week before to take his wife to the hospital. He seemed to ignore this fact, or perhaps had completely forgotten it altogether. As I walked away, he asked, "Well, how about giving me $5 today?"

I'm thinking now that he could be an advisory to Hillary's campaign. Despite all indications, he just kept pushing relentlessly on.
Every day I pass a dozen panhandlers at busy streetcorners with cardboard signs. Most are remarkably similar. Please! Anything helps!! ☺ Will work for food! ☺ Single mother of 3 - Need help! And so on. Lots of smiley faces and exclamation points. A few have pretty clever signs, because they know that if they can lure you into eye contact it will be a lot harder for you to get away without paying. They all appear to be able-bodied and at least have the where-with-all to carry on their acting routines until they have conned enough cash to get stoned again.

I went to lunch with a coworker today. The kitchen and cashier of the jewish deli were staffed 80% by Mexican immigrants who had managed to communicate passably well in English, despite a lack of formal training. They were efficient and pleasant, and appeared to enjoy working. In the median strip just outside the restaurant was another gaunt anglo panhandler with a cheesy cardboard sign.

Like you, I've worked since a young age. I was motivated out of necessity and a drive to succeed. I always enjoyed working, whether it was on the factory line, or waiting on tables, or out in the remote mountains of Guatemala, or in my cushy agency office job. I have no sympathy for people who will not work. You're hungry? You need medicine? Shelter? Clothing? Psychiatric counciling? Good. Maybe when you get really hungry, you will be motivated to be of some use to society. Have a nice day! ☺

I didn't have a penny for the anxiety-ridden limosnero, nor words of advice. However, one night a week ago as I pulled up to a gas pump, I noticed a car parked at an odd angle at one of the other pumps. As I began to fill my tank, the attendant emerged from the convenience store and began shouting to someone out of view "stage left." "Laty!" He shouted. "Yu CANnot leave YUR card heerd. Eet ees not Parking Lot heerd, Laty!" I judged from his heavy accept and appearance that he might be from Nigeria or thereabouts, and was struggling to learn English, though it is immaterial, except to note that there probably was a communication issue between the attendant and the woman he was addressing. I heard her responding from half a block away, and soon she entered the orb of light that illuminated our stage. I could not help but observe this performance as the gas trickled into my tank and the dollars whizzed by on the display. The woman, an angla about 30 years old, pleaded with the attendant. "Please, sir," she said, "I ran out of gas just now and barely had enough speed to make it up to the pump. But then I realized I left my purse at home. I just live a few blocks away. I'm just going to walk home and get some money, and then I'll be back to fill my tank." The attendant would heerd nothing of it, or better said, would understand nothing of it. "Yu CANnot leave YUR card heerd. Yu MUS park eet somewherd else." This dialogue went back and forth enough times to convince me that the attendant probably had no idea what the laty was saying. He was just a peon, and if he didn't follow orders, he would lose a job that probably supported 20 people in Africa. As he walked back to the store, perhaps to CALL de PolEEZ, the woman followed him, begging. She was about to cry (a unique last-ditch talent all women possess). I thought of offering her a ride home, but realized she would not know if I am trustworthy or not. So I pulled $5 from my wallet, walked over and stuffed it in her hands. "Lady," I said, "get yourself some gas." She seemed stunned. "And be safe." I then resumed filling my tank. She thanked me profusely, and went to pay for some gas. But when she came out, she found that her car had come to a dead stop about a foot short, and the hose wouldn't reach. Needless to say, the filler was on the wrong side of her car. So I went over to assist her in pushing her car forward, but the transmission was stuck in drive. She couldn't get it out. So I had her jiggle the steering wheel, which did the trick. We almost pushed the car far enough when it ran into mine. No damage done! I backed my car, then we pushed her car again, and this time I was just barely able to access the tank with the hose. As I was pulling out past her, she turned and smiled, and said, "Oh sir, thank you so much! You are so kind!"

You know, it was only then that I noticed how attractive she was. Not beautiful, like a pageant queen, but like a very decent person I would like to know. Of course the thought occurred to me to get her phone number or find some other ploy to "keep in touch," but I immediately realized that this would obliterate the value of the experience, for both of us. So I smiled and said, "Just get home safe!" And drove away.

MORE Pig Vomit....

2008-05-14T08:26:00.000-07:00

Sponge Bobs Song

2008-05-14T08:14:00.000-07:00

The EYE is back. With a Vengeance

2008-05-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

OK. I am going to try and keep up with this one again too.....it allows me to rant on things I can't elsewhere, and I can use powerful adjectives like "Shit" and "Fuck" and "Asshole", all great terms for describing the best of the worst....

For the past several years I have been a phony baloney administrator for "da county", and have been privileged (until now) to a lot of the soft underbelly of Cameron County politics....which politicians are stealing from who and to what extent. And to that end, I still have some ear, although several months ago I shot myself in the foot by trying to get these miserable fuckers (see there it is, the use of a powerful descriptive adjective!) to try and think (something way beyond the capacity of a "pubic servant") about what's going to happen in the future.... things like what will happen after Cameron County builds 6.5 million dollars worth of new parks (in economically depressed areas where they will be the immediate target of vandalism and destruction), and since it hasn't made any plans to increase the staff or operating budget, what will become of the maintenance and upkeep of these new facilities? Jeezus, they don't have enough personnel to maintain the existing parks as it is, and most look no better than third world efforts.

Shit, even an idiot can figure out those things.

I guess they'll just have to keep robbing from Isla Blanca Park (which doesn't even have enough budget for toilet paper right now) and live on the day to day basis....which is what these people are best at anyway. Instant gratification and entitlement. The typical. Nothing out of the norm here.

So anyway, whenever I run across anything funny, like Joe Rivera's (The County Clerk) assistants getting busted (again) for assault and battery with a baseball bat (how creative is that?) I will obligingly pass it along in a link.

Meanwhile, you can count on other county politicians like Sofie (a/k/a "Sonsa) Benavides absconding county funds to aggrandize her dearly departed husbands death anniversary by putting on a pachanga grande at the newly upgraded (the park was essentially new to begin with, but hey, we just had to get some new stuff there for the event....) Benavides (nee Browne Road)Park.

And then there's Edna Tamayo, the wicked witch of the west. Talk about ego centrism (try that word on for size bitch, and you....you were a region one administrator. You should've been wearing a dunce cap). In an internecine deal with the former County judge for some votes and supports she received the lions share of the money needed to construct the vast majority of the new parks, learning centers and Boys and Girls clubs, at the ultimate expense of poor old Isla Blanca.

Just politics as usual....status quo.

And so as not to become just another political blog, I vow to also include any manner of other rants here for my own goddamn aggrandizement. Just let me get a little of this squalid conjunto politico cheap third world federale crap off of my chest first.....

Learning to Fly

2006-11-28T09:24:00.000-08:00

When I was little we lived in southern California, Chula Vista, just south of San Diego. We lived in a ranch style house in a new development along with many other newly affluent middle class. My father was an aeronautical engineer working for Rhor Aircraft. He owned a white 1964 Chevy Corvair Monza, before Ralph Nader made it a crusade to stomp the thing out of existence in order to keep us all safe at any speed. What a crock of shit. I don’t need any goddamn crackpot lawyer setting the ground rules for safety for me. But that’s another story.

We would drive the thing across the border to Tijuana Mexico at least once a month to get haircuts at the old fashioned barber shop that smelled of brilliantine and talcum powder. I’d wait for my turn looking at cheap Mexican crime magazines complete with gory photos, trying to understand the language on the pages, understanding a few words here and there before the barber with the Yosemite-Sam moustache would beckon me up into the red naugahyde covered board that lifted me high enough for the barber to shear off whatever hair I had down to the number 4 or 6 blade length. The whole experience took the better part of a Saturday morning and was one I dreaded, and is probably the reason I no longer cut my hair.

My best friend Steve Warren lived across the gully and we’d made the fields and ditch our domain. On the west side, we dug subterranean forts beneath the old abandoned melon fields that Mr. Iwashita once cultivated, covering them over with discarded two by fours, burlap bags and dirt, leaving a shelf at one end where we’d make a fire over which we’d cook cans of pork and beans, pretending to be warriors. During one particularly dry Santa Ana day, around the time that Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedys’ head off a spark from our fire caught the adjacent dry vines and grass on fire. We tried to put it out, Steve and I frantically beating it with an old mildewed piece of carpet we kept inside our lair for creature comfort, stomping and pounding. Steve ran over to their property and turned on a long water hose, but it was too short, and the water just dribbled out of the end anyhow, there was no pressure, as the flames quickly spread across the field resulting in the Chula Vista fire departments response, and a general neighborhood scene. That was the end of our fort days, and our network of hideouts were filled in, never to be used again.

We were good at causing the trouble that only ten year olds can.

Seems like we were always setting things on fire. Fireworks were illegal there in southern California, but we seemed to manage to procure them, usually from Steve’s older brother. We’d pop black cats and lady fingers over by the bamboo stand that grew along the eastern margin of the gully, taking refuge in the drain pipe, where Steve had stashed some old copies of his dads Playboy magazines. I saw my first breasts on the waterlogged pages of those Playboys, wondering what it would be like to actually touch, smell, taste those wonderful appendages on a real life woman. Just the thought made me dizzy with lust.

Sometimes we’d accidentally set this domain on fire, but we always managed to quell it before it got out of control, but not before it left a tell tale smoke column. One day the smoke signal caught the attention of a cop passing by, who immediately investigated and caught us in the drain pipe, loaded us into the back seat of his patrol car and drove us to our houses, which caused another neighborhood uproar, all of the middle class housewives seeing the commotion, coming out into their yards to gawk as the blue clad cop marched us up to our respective parent unit much to our humiliation and their embarrassment.

Damn was I in trouble.

I spent the next several weeks on restriction, but that was OK because I had a balsa wood flying model of a world war one SPAD airplane that I needed to build anyway.

During those years I was a lonely only child, and I spent a great deal of time at the public library there in Chula Vista reading everything from ancient Egyptian history to the history of flight. My hero’s were the early aviators, people like Octave Chanute, Otto Lillienthal, Samual Langely and the Wright Brothers. I dreamed of flying.

Deciding to do just that, I designed rudimentary gliders after the designs of these early pioneers harvesting bamboo from the gully where we once popped fireworks, cutting it into sections with my dads coping saws, bending wing ribs and covering my big flying models with my mothers good linens, starching them to stretch them tight over their gossamer frameworks. Some of the designs flew, some didn’t. Some were wild designs, like the one I attached to my bicycle pedaling wildly down the nearby hill at Sierra Way, crashing before any sort of airborne takeoff could be achieved, smashing the wing and myself in the process much to the amusement of any onlookers.

I was the oddity of the neighborhood, and the other kids mostly thought I was completely stupid, crazy or both. They took to calling me Peter Pan, taunting me every time they saw me, so I began to conduct my experiments in secret in the gully on the hill that ended at the ditch where the bamboo grew. My friend Steve Warren remained faithful, often acting as my assistant, steadying the wing as I’d charge down the slope, trying to get the glider to lift it and myself into the air.

One day we succeeded, but I had no way to control the thing, and apparently the center of gravity was way out of whack, and the thing lifted me up, up into the air, nosing sharply upward in a profound stall, and like Icarus, I plunged back downward, except instead of crashing into the sea, I slammed into the hard ground, severely spraining both ankles, and splintering the glider into a pile of bamboo shards, twisted cloth and wire rigging. Steve was seriously worried as I lay there screaming and writhing, clutching at my swollen ankles which were beginning to take on a life all their own. I finally managed to hobble home, hiding my injuries from my parents and every one else, despite the pain, filled with wonder and awe that I’d actually flown aboard a contraption of my own design and manufacture.

It wasn’t long afterward that some of the older neighborhood kids caught me behind the oleanders separating our house from the neighbors, pinned me to the ground and proceeded to endow me with a “pink belly”, slapping and pounding my bare stomach as I lay there screaming, crying, taunting “Peter Pan, Peter Pan”, in a cruel manner that only children know. When it was over, I composed myself and went home, not mentioning that either, just figuring it was my fate for being different.

But, I never built another glider after that, and it wasn’t long before my father was out of work as the aviation boom of the sixties came to an end, and we moved from southern California.

I gave up my childhood fascination with flying things for many years, until much later when I became an aircraft mechanic, specializing in what else? Structural repairs and airframe fabrication.

Jokes on You

2006-11-09T14:07:00.000-08:00

Last night I stopped over at one of my favorite eateries to catch a quick bite to eat. I’ve been way busy lately, and dinner has been an afterthought.

So, we were enjoying a quiet beer and a pizza when some folks I know walked in and the husband immediately said to me; “well looks like we have a new County Judge…..”, “He’ll sure be better than what we’ve got!”

“Oh yea” I said to him. “Well tell me about this guys record, what has he done?”

The guy admitted that he didn’t know.

“Well” he said “he’s gotta be better than what we’ve got” and his voice trailed off.

By this time I was getting irritated. “Just how in the hell can you vote for a person and not know his qualifications, his record?”. “Jeezus H. that’s about as fucking stupid as you can get, are you on drugs or something?”. “I mean, just to get somebody OUT of office?”…”How do you know your guy will be any better, he might be worse.”

“That’s irresponsible”.

I could see the guy shrinking, his wife grimacing. I guess they hadn’t thought of it that way.

Yesterday the fiends of Isla Blanca held a 5th grade like pep rally at the park. “Go Cascos go” they chanted in unison.

Fucking rah, rah, rah.

Well folks, the truth of the matter is that you elected an (as Teddy Kennedy says) unelectable abomination. You didn’t bother to check out the mans credentials, you voted for him just to get your hated opponent out of office.

There was no mandate for Carlos Cascos. No, the mandate was against Gilbert Hinojosa. Because of this you have opened a pandoras box.

You were more concerned with preserving your pot smoking parking lot than the good of Cameron County. You don’t care if this guy is good, bad or ugly…..and as a result of your selfish selfcenteredness, Cameron County will probably suffer a period of chaos and disorganization as the faithful and the faithless battle it out. And there are a lot of innocent folks caught in the middle.

You didn’t give a goddamn about the welfare of this County. Hell, a lot of you only voted here under technicalities, establishing residences in Isla Blanca from Hidalgo County and even other states just so you could protect your vested interest, cheap rent, a good place to smoke dope, your hallowed surf break.

Pathetic bastards.

Do you really believe that this guy will take care of you now that he’s in office? Do you know his track record?

I thought not.

Keep smiling motherfuckers. The joke's on you.

Tom Bell

2006-11-06T10:22:00.000-08:00

Obituary here

A glowing testimony to a worthless piece of shit.

What they failed to mention was that he was a white trash, perverted, evil son of a bitch with a hair triggered temper who had no compunction against destroying relationships between fathers and children, eliciting violence, and pounding people in the face with coke bottles….

None the less, I feel strangely connected to this death as he violated me in a way I don’t think anyone ever has. In a rednecked rage, the man took me to the brink of my own death, and it was only by the intervention of God himself that I survived. It is a frightening and fragile part of my own psyche that I only take out on occasion to examine.

I have forgiven him, and tried (and try) to expunge the venom from my own life lest it consume me. My heart holds compassion for his children (daughters), and even his fucked up son who is a one balled, crack cocaine addict with the same penchant for violence as his father had.

I have a harder time feeling sorrow for his wife, who is a manipulative evil cunt, holding the same lack of values and honor as he had. They belonged together.

We all have to answer for the things we do in this life.

A dreadful chapter of this book is closed.

Coca Cola

2006-11-06T10:10:00.000-08:00

The trauma shrink said that peoples' minds are like mailboxes; someday I'd fill the mailbox with other mail that could be taken out and examined at my discretion. That this incident would fade like newsprint on an old paper.

It was a sunny Sunday day in February, I had returned the previous evening from a five or six day trip to southern Mexico, Colima and Michoacan doing some undergrad work in petrology, vulcanology, some required classwork for a degree in geology. I returned to find my world turned and twisted like the broiling lava flows that I had been mapping for a week.

When a child smiles at you for the first time, when you see their newborn face, the whole world is right, the awesome responsibility is worth it. You are complete as an adult.

This child would never see the world. It ended it's life as a 12 week old fetus, sucked down some ungodly drain in some unholy charnel house while I was gone. Neat and tidy, the entire cost paid for by plastic credit card, provided by caring Christian neighbors.

I did not understand.

We argued.

She left, went down the street to those caring Christian neighbors.

I needed to know.

I drove down to the end of the street where they lived, knocked on the screen door which was open.

No answer.

Like a fool I stepped inside and called her name. No answer.

Then like a whirlwind, big, fat four hundred and fifty pound Tom Bell flew down the stairs as if jet propelled.

I tried to ask him where she was, but before I could get a word, maybe two out, he sucker punched me, and I crumpled to the wooden kitchen floor on my back.

Equally as fast, he was suddenly sitting on top of me, pounding my head into the dirty floor, as if hammering a nail. He was cursing at me and spitting in my face. I did not understand.

I was clawing and scratching, trying to breathe as the weight of his grossly obese body pinned me to the floor.

With uncontrolled rage in his eyes he screamed at me, fleshy contorted face inches from mine; "Why did you have to bring up the abortion?"

We struggled as I tried to break free.

Somehow, he managed to turn me over. I saw his thick arm snake out, near the base of the water cooler, where a stack of glass coca-cola bottles were. He grabbed a bottle, and as if in slow motion, closer and closer to my face it came.

I could read the logo.

I knew I was going to die.

The bottle hit me square between the eyes, and it was as if someone had turned on a faucet of red. Blood poured from my nose in a frightening stream.

Then the bottle came again, only this time I did not feel the whack, I only heard it, a squishing, wet sound of cartilage and bone shattering.

Oddly, I felt myself being handcuffed, but there were no police?

The bottle came one more time, and I disappeared into a netherworld of crimson, drifting vaguely away, detached and musing that if this really were the end, than there truly was an oxymoronic state between violence and the peace.

Then I saw other people standing there, I heard my oldest daughter screaming hysterically: "leave my Daddy alone!".

And someone else was there too, I recognized her.

And then I heard her say, emotionless: "That's enough Tom…."

I could sense the handcuffs being taken off, and I was pulled roughly by the hair to my feet, shoved toward the door.

All I could think to say, to tell him was; "I'm going to kill you".

Somehow, I managed to leave, get in my car, and drive home, knowing that this was the end. I tried to clean myself up best I could. I held my young son in my arms, tried to comfort my little daughters who had been at the house alone.

Soon the police arrived, and took the kids. I could not understand why, but did not argue.

I knew this was the end.

Tom Bell went to church that Sunday morning along with his family, even sang in the choir.

I went to the hospital.

There's a lot more to the story, hell, I even ended up victorious winning court battles, winning damage money from the fat fucker, but to what end?

Needless to say, I never did kill him, in fact I forgave him (in my heart), sent him on his proverbial way. Doesn't mean that I'd eat dinner with him, or even acknowledge his life or death, just that I'd no longer destroy myself with the awful burden of that day.

The trauma shrink was right, I eventually replaced the images, filled the mailbox with other, happier mail. But not before several years of flashbacks to that awful day, which robbed me of time and space as I tried to finish struggling through college (I eventually did).

So when I hear that abortion is simply a private matter for the woman involved, I think back to that day and want to tell them that it's bullshit.

Trans Fat Free Island

2006-11-03T08:38:00.001-08:00

Well those jokers who identify themselves as the South Padre Island Board of Aldermen (and gals) are at it again according to inside information.

On Wednesday night the hot topic of discussion was whether to designate the Island a “Trans Fat Free” borough. Extraordinarily pressing issue.

I don’t know what the motive is behind this ridiculous waste of time, but I can just see it now, undercover City investigators showing up at the Palmetto, Jesses, the Seraton with sample kits….maybe a SWAT team, headed up by Dewey Dickwell busting into kitchens to make sure they only use cholesterol free oil. No manteca here folks.

Talk about micro-managerial. These guys really crack me up....

But wait....maybe I got it wrong, maybe they mean fat free transients? What are they gonna do, weigh everyone coming over the bridge? Pepper them with 20 questions "excuse me sir, but do you live on the island?", "when was the last time you consumed Mexican food?".....

Or perhaps they mean endomorphic transvestites? Seems a little more plausible, keeping in line with the Islands sense of tolerence for "alternative" lifestyles. Maybe they need to check each and every cross dresser for the proper amount of body fat? Don't want any fat queens ugly-fying the landscape.

.....OK so here's what I'm gonna do littleman. I'm gonna head over to the Radisson and start out with a couple of king sized shrimp cocktails, followed up by a great big goddamn 48 ounce porterhouse steak fer Chrissake, never mind the friggin shrubbery, just bring me some greasy onion rings, that'll suffice for veggies. I'm gonna tell the management that I'm doing it to honor these jerkoffs new silly assed resolution.

Hell, if they really wanted to trim the fat they'd get rid of do nothing douchebags like Dewey Dickweed and Cate Ballsack....

The Season of Our Torment

2006-10-31T08:12:00.001-08:00

The Winter Texans are back. We have entered the season of our torment.

Lord, it seems like they just left, migrating North late last spring in a drove of aluminum RV’s and shiny trucks.

Farmers on subsidies, milking the great American tit……

And now they’re back, with their cheesy jokes, and mid-western farm field bullshit. If I hear jalapeño pronounced jal-ap-ano one more time, I may have serious issues with the Oshkosh-overall clad fucker. They can get the silly umlaut right, but give them an enyay….

No, I don’t like lutefisk. Can’t even stand the smell of the stuff. Give me menudo any day.

How long Lord, oh how long must we suffer the bastards?

My friend Don thinks they snuck in on the heels of the Bikefest crowd, unnoticed among all of the motorcycle trailers. I think he’s right. And, now they’re here; doing whatever they do, driving slowly, like they’re still out in the fields on their subsidized John Deere tractors, lost to oblivion, why oh why can’t they just stay up North and drive badly on their tractors? And they're out on the bay in their walleye boats tossing shrimp and great chunks of squid at hapless hardheads and whiting, or crowding the streets of Nuevo Progreso looking to “jew down” the locals. Winter Texans are everywhere en todos lugares.

Everywhere you go, you can overhear them talking about how things are so much cheaper back home, how they do things different back home, how things are so much better back home. Hell, why don’t they just go back home then? Get out of our hair.

Friends of Isla Blanca?

2006-10-19T07:22:00.000-07:00

I was just made aware of the "friends of Isla Blanca" website. Apparently their message board has been rather active lately, and not all entries in favor of their cause either. Here is the link for your viewing pleasure. Let em know what you think (either for or against....Le Menagerie don't give a fuck).

Perspective

2006-10-16T08:03:00.000-07:00

The older I get.....the better I was.
-Overheard at the Leo Najo oldtimers baseball hall of fame celebration

Billy K.

2006-10-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

The third coast and its inhabitants gauge their existences by hurricane season, by hot and hotter by the tides rising and falling around oyster encrusted pilings holding up forlorn and ancient docks reticent with neglect, against which rusting shrimp boats lay, relics of another more prosperous era. They lay tied to the dock with umbilical cords of bleached and frayed three strand line wound in neglected figure eights around cleats thick with powdery corrosion, and no life pulses through the processing plants or the umbilical cords connected to boats and docks. The people of the third coast hurry and scurry like the Sally-lightfoot crabs that live under the ancient docks reticent with neglect, hurrying and scurrying to the shade, from piling to piling.

The people and the tourists on the third coast seek refuge from the relentless sun, ducking into ancient seafood and ancient Mexican food restaurants where humid air conditioning belches out of veiled vents, condensing the vapid air on windowpanes and the sunglasses of the tourists who scurry back outside to another destination of artificial shade and comfort, to palapa bars or bayside bars where they drink Corona beers and piss away their vacations on the third coast, or to the white sand beach where Gulf waters lap the shoreline and mullet swim in great schools between the legs of surf fishermen and children playing with bright plastic toys in the calm of the first sandbar.

There are no trees on the third coast capable of providing any respite from the relentless sun except for a few scraggly mesquite and tepegujues, and the omnipresent nopal which provides only enough shade for the rattlesnakes and tarantulas to escape the relentless sun, concealed in near lifeless torpor, until the relentless sun finally gives up her stranglehold on the third coasts’ southern latitude and the night wind begins to pick up, signaling the time to slither and crawl from ectothermic reptile and insect siestas in search of a midnight snack before the relentless sun makes its appearance again in a hurrying and scurrying few hours, in a unisonous and endless cycle like the tides, like hot and hotter, like the annual ebb and flow of hurricane season.

The National Weather Service calls it tropical cyclone development and they send in airplanes and instruments to measure, predict and verify, but the people of the third coast know it in their bones, in their psyches, and they suffer from June through October when the Gulf heats up like a bowl of Caldo Mariscos, and swirling bands of clouds converge to rotate in a counterclockwise dervish of convection, traveling over open ocean till for reasons that may never be understood by mere mortal, they join the shoreline in a rush of energy that the Mexicans call Chubaso, La tormenta, pounding la tierra with powerful winds and torrential rains before exhausting themselves over perennial coastal desert and monte ruled by the relentless sun, leaving behind a wake of carnage and cleansing.

Billy K. is a tall stooped man about sixty five years old with the countenance of forlorn beagle. The entire world is out to get him.

Perennial residents like Billy K. become the human counterpart to the perennial hurricane. Billy has lived in Port Isabel all of his adult life, working first as a commercial diver, salvaging valuables from the myriad of shipwrecks from the past, recovering gold, silver and other treasures, only to have the State of Texas claim their rightful share of the plunder, which Billy doesn’t think they have any right to. So he tried to hide the bulk of the take from one particularly well endowed Spanish galleon, but the State found out, and took the whole thing plus more since Billy tried to keep it all. They never did found the remainder of the stash though, and Billy invested a good deal of that into a Marine Salvage operation, where he has made a fortune over the years recovering the largesse from named and unnamed tropical tormentas and hurricanes.

He has a salvage yard full of treasures that savvy wharf-rats know are worth as much as their weight in the gold and silver salvaged from long sunken Spanish galleons. Brass portlights, lifeboats, life preservers, engines and deck machinery, everything from sailboat rigging, blocks and fairleads to fishing winches, trawl doors and nets.

Billy K. owns a giant rusting hulk, bleeding long trails of iron oxide down it’s sides to its barnacle encrusted waterline, a British built ferry boat he obtained through some back alley deal, lying against one of his docks, tucked in there between filthy tugs and abandoned shrimpers.

Billy contracted a couple of guys from up the valley, out west in the desert area to sandblast the hull, get it ready to paint so that he could sell it to some unsuspecting soul.

So they hauled and drydocked the boat there on his property, and began to sandblast it, letting the paint, rust and sand fall into the open channel, and onto the drydock where it could be washed into the channel at the end of the day with high pressure washers.

…..But since this ain’t the wild west nomore, pretty soon his jerry-rigged operation came up on the feds radar screen……The Coast Guard, and the environmental police showed up and shut Billy K. down. “Hell” he claimed, “It’s not my fault, they’re just picking on me”. “If I hire a company to do work for me, than how could it be my fault”? “If you hire somebody to paint your car, and they wash the unused paint down the drain, would it be your fault that they violated the law?”

Later Billy K. got a contract from Mr. Z who owns about half of the town, to put in some decorative pilings and cement rip-rap out in front of Mr. Z’s’ new waterfront eatery, the Pelican Station. Give it a real rundown coastal look. A perfect opportunity to use up some of that old trash lying around the salvage yard, out of sight, out of mind. When the feds caught up with him again, for not having the proper permits to place fill in the water, threatening to fine him fifty thousand dollars a day for illegally filling coastal waters, Billy moaned; “they’re just picking on me, they’re always picking on me, why me?”….”how was I supposed to know that there weren’t any permits to do that?”…. “I can’t be responsible for this!”….

Billy K. owns a restaurant over on the island, the Palm Street Pier. An open air joint on the bay, the Palm Street pier is classically furnished with salvaged bits and pieces from Billy K’s. Marine Salvage Yard. Fresnel lights and ships’ wheels, cabin furnishings dating back to the 1950’s all held together by turquoise paint over its weathered lumber.

Billy K’s. neighbor to the South, Tequila Frogs, own the property that Billy uses for a parking lot out in front of Palm Street Pier, and recently decided for reasons not clear to anyone except he and Billy K. that the parking lot property was now off-limits to customers of the Palm Street Pier, so in the middle of a busy Saturday night crowd, the island constabulary came bursting in (well, came bursting on to palapa covered restaurant and grill), announcing that the patrons would immediately have to move their cars to the parking lot that was included in the lease when Billy K. originally leased the property several years prior, a parking lot located two blocks distant.

There hasn’t been much business at the Palm Street Pier since that happened. Billy K. swears it isn’t his fault. Hell, everyone’s always picking on him.

Another Public Service message

2006-10-12T12:04:00.000-07:00

Well folks....it's time to call a spade a spade. The Isla Blanca controversy has turned into a strictly political battlefield. In this case, the candidate who portrays himself as the knight in shining armor is in reality, the wolf in sheeps clothing.

Come on Mr. Cascos, tell your loyal minions how you:

1.) As County Commissioner voted in favor of each and every rate hike increase for the park,

and

2.) campaigned to demolish a pefecty sound Convention Center structure within the park, so that the City of SPI could have a monopoly on a new, better structure (constructed in a hurricane washover no less).

Does this sound like the track record of someone with the best interests of a park in mind?

What makes folks think that if they succeed in getting this guy elected that he won't just sell out the park anyway? He's already proved willing to do that on numerous occassions.

Don't be ignorant folks. Question ALL motives....

(Not paid for or endosed by ANY political candidate, just common sense questions and observations)

Happy Trail(er)s

2006-10-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

The seasons spin by the older I get.

Sometimes I feel like the disappearing man.

It's the annual "bike fest" here on the island again, and the fuckers are showing up en masse. High dollar RV's and trucks, pulling trailers loaded with high end Harleys that only get ridden a couple of times a year.

Some of these people tow their two wheelers hundreds, maybe thousands of miles to their destination here at the "roar by the shore" so that they can ride up and down Padre Boulevard, a total distance of something like 6 miles. Real easy riders.

On Saturday they have a bike parade scheduled. They all act naughty, blasting over the causeway, and up the street to climax over at the convention center.

I have a novel idea for them this year.

Why not have a trailer parade? Cut through the crap. Their trailers get a lot more highway miles than their bikes anyway.

SPI makes a splash....

2006-10-10T15:17:00.000-07:00

Last week the wonderful berg of South Padre Island hosted “splash”, a homosexual debauchery on the sandspit, celebrating the cuteness of “being gay”

And what the fuck is “being gay”? I’m not the first to pen that the word “gay” used to have a totally innocuous meaning in more innocent times. Gay meant “happy”. Hell, I even had a “Gay Yellow Schoolbus”. Created when we were more innocent, and perverts stayed in the closet. It pains me to think of what that little toy would be today, or what the jokes surrounding it would be.

It pains me to see us having taken a giant step toward Gomorrah . Never mind Sodom .

Call me a homophobe if you like. I don’t give a shit.

To legitimize abhorrent behavior is to give the devil his due. Have we become a society so tolerant of deviancy that we will legitimize anything between two individuals, even at the expense of our own freedom, and the country in which we live?

Christ, I even saw a banner across the road welcoming participants of “splash” to the island. Real savory for families and children. What’s next? Hosting an annual convention of NAMBLA? It’s just a little further down the old (dirt) road. Thanks a lot SPI

I thought that Republicans were against this sort of thing? Seems like the political infrastructure of SPI is mostly the “R word though…..

So what gives? Could the town be so money hungry that it would sell its soul for a few lousy silver shekels? Could the City Manager (and I use that term loosely), Mr. Dewey Cashwell (you know him… of Hughy, Dewey and Louie fame) be persuaded to put aside principal for hotel occupancy? I tell you, I feel sorry for the hotel and condo cleanup crews after an event like this. Better wear full body protection, face masks and keep the industrial disinfectant nearby!

Ah well, what can we expect?

This type of behavior is totally in line with a place whose citizens are more concerned with building sand castles, putting on parties and catering to ill behaved annual spring break children, than with issues of morality, global crisis or the impending implosion of western civilization. I say keep fiddling while Rome burns ya’ll, it’s easy when you’re insulated from the real world.

Maybe too much THC and LSD during the ‘60’s?

Any town that bases it’s entire economy on this type of thing is only a shove from total economic and moral collapse. Better keep whistling past the graveyard.

Peace and love ya’ll

Isla Blanca Park is Never Safe?

2006-10-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

Surfrider Mission Statement:
-The Surfrider Foundation is a nonprofit environmental organization dedicated to the protection and enjoyment of the world's oceans, waves and beaches through conservation, activism, research and education.

Isla Blanca Is Never Safe!

That’s the rhetoric I spotted on the Marquis at “On the Beach” the other day when I drove past. It’s also bullshit. So is the above mission statement for “surfrider”.

Let me ‘splain again. This is getting to be a tiring topic, but one that is so deeply mired in politics that it probably deserves the weight of truth.

As you know, Isla Blanca County Park had been given a contract by the County Commission for development by a group called the Laguna Madre Enhancement Group. The park itself is located on the extreme south tip of South Padre Island, adjacent to the north Brazos Santiago Jetty. Because of it’s geologic setting, there is a net loss of property due to erosion produced by the inhibition of sediment transport by the northbound longshore current as a result of the granite jetties which were built in the early part of the 20th century. Bottom line, nature, and the acts of man are causing this small tip of the barrier island to disappear.

As a side product though, it is perhaps the most excellent wave riding spot on the Gulf of Mexico. Here the continental shelf is at its narrowest point, allowing deep water swells to roll all the way to the beach, which themselves play a role in the exaggerated rate of erosion. The same waves that “surfrider” is so concerned with preserving access to, are also relentlessly wearing down the beach front, and sweeping the park away.

On Tuesday I took my little ketch offshore, out the jetties, which are a great place to drill home the effects of nature and man by observation. When I was just about in line with the south beach, Boca Chica, I was able to turn around, and look west at the North beach (Isla Blanca Park), almost a half mile further west, a result of erosion and shoreward transport of this part of the island.

So there’s not much we can do about it. Nature will eventually have her way, always has. The island will continue its relentless march shoreward, eventually accreting with the western shoreline, subside and disappear in a process that will be repeated during the next regression-transgression of sea level.

I don’t think surfrider understands this, or if they do they certainly aren’t making their members aware of it, members who consist mainly of aging affluent still pot smoking yuppies, who only see a threat to their parking lot where they can conduct unrestricted hedonism. What else could it be?

Certainly, a development in Isla Blanca Park of the sort that the “enhancement group” proposes would have little, if any impact on the ultimate geomorphic process that I’ve attempted to describe. And in reality, as the plans showed, fewer inhabitants than currently utilize the RV park would be present at any given time, probably reducing “ecological impact”.

Wouldn’t this fit in with surfriders mission? Judicious development can produce beneficial results. Furthermore, in Texas, public beach access cannot be restricted, and the surf break that these former 60’s hippies are so adamant about is really a non-issue. So where is the problem?

Cameron Counties political infrastructure even negated the lease in order to placate these bastards, who, selfishly don‘t even realize that the income would’ve funded other low income facilities for the benefit of the rest of the counties population. Hell, I had one even tell me, when I asked him about what the underprivileged kids would do for recreational facilities, kids who don’t even have an opportunity to travel from their colonias to the beach; “let ‘em play at school”.

Real caring individual, unfortunately reflective of the majority of self centered surfers, who drive their high end SUV’s down to the park to “catch a wave”……These folks are isolated from the rest of their community, choosing to live here in the affluence of the island and coast, insulating themselves from the true reality of where they live, the same as they choose to insulate themselves from the reality of what really is happening at Isla Blanca Park. Wake up and smell the Sargassum folks, it’s really all about erosion.

I heard one of these assholes remark the other day about their petition with “over three thousand signatures”, but what they failed to mention was the percentage of signatures by folks outside of this area, this county, even this state. Can’t forget the almighty “Winter Texans” either (and yes Virgina….these bastards are returning again, all too early!), folks only concerned with their own ability to stay on the beach all winter cheap. They don’t give a flying fuck about this place either. Just what’s in it for them. What’s free. And that’s the sad reality.

It appears to me that from the beginning this has been a political issue, dominated by a single individuals quest for County-judgedom. The way I see it, this Cascos character has been in the fracas from the beginning, using the naiveté of the cannabis consumers as a forum, a moving billboard. Next to damn near every “Save Isla Blanca” sticker is a “Carlos Cascos” sticker…….Do people really believe that this man won’t parlay an opportunity into gain? Damn near every “rally” put on by surfrider et al has involved a political rally for this guy.

Now they’re at it again, over some perceived intricacy within the vestigial remnants of “the lease”, but this time there’s a problem. It’s blatant bullshit, and they’re caught, pants down. However, this doesn’t seem to make a difference. These people will not stop until they finally implode like the draft card burning jerks they once were. It’s like a Phoenix rising from the flames in reverse. I smell a rat, the unholy triad between Cascos (the father), Surfrider (the son), and the chosen few (the un-holy ghost).

I really don’t much care about political alliances, but what I do care about is this place, and that’s what’s got me so red-assed. All of this misplaced energy.

There are true ecological problems that should be addressed. For example, how can we mitigate the effects of erosion in a common sense way? What do we do about the denigration of water quality from an ever expanding population? How do we deal with the siltation of the navigable passes and channels? Limit trash on beaches?

I don’t hear these concerns voiced by Cascos/surfrider/the privileged few. They instead, have chosen to target a totally banal and political cause for their own selfish gain. In that, there is no difference between them and their enemy, the Laguna Madre Enhancement Group

The Great Midnight Procession

2006-09-25T12:43:00.000-07:00

I’m gonna get in trouble with someone sure as hell for blogging this one…

Back in the 80’s I had a couple of crazy friends who I used to hang out with quite a bit. RBY and Hunter. Now understand before I begin the story, we were fully grown adults.

RBY had gotten in trouble with us when we went to Pepes on the River following a three day road trip to North Texas. We had inadvertently left him there, and he had to catch a ride home with some old wrinkle-neck, and when he walked into his house, his wife noticed that he had his shirt zipped through his pants zipper. She suspected something.

So RBY got put on restriction. We tried to get him exonerated, even sent his then-wife a “Honey-do” basket, complete with flowers, toilet scrubber and paintbrushes. This resulted in an even tougher sentence.

After sitting around one night with Hunter drinking Cuba Libres, we decided we’d extract our own form of punishment on RBY for being such a pussy and not standing up to the old ball and chain. Show her who’s boss.

We jumped into Hunters mothers big black Lincoln Continental (he was babysitting the thing for her while she was out of town) and throwing a great fishtail, lunged off towards RBY’s house on the golf course with no real plan in mind. Once we got there though, we knew what we had to do.

Near the curb, Hunter gave the big old black boat the gas, and we hopped the curb into the finely manicured St. Augustine lawn, spinning the tires and digging a trench at least 6” deep the length of the front yard. We sideswiped the big green plastic trashcan, as Hunter looked in the review mirror and declared that he was going back for the two plump black trashbags laying alongside, so we repeated the offense in reverse…..

We decided that that’d show the bastard.

Well, this started years of payback. No sooner had one lawn recovered, than another one fell victim. First Hunter, the RBY then myself, in a revolving cycle of retribution, someone always had the handiwork of the midnight burnout in their front yard.

As the game escalated, we found new and creative ways to torment one another. One creative method was to stuff the head of a recently slaughtered deer (does only) into someones mailbox as a sort of scaled down version of the “Godfather”. This however came to an end, when one of RBY’s boys decided to copy the trick and try this on an ex-girlfriend. Her father however, failed to see the humor in this, and called the local sheriff, who, thinking it was an infestation of the mailbox by a rabid bat, shot the damn thing with his .357, and realizing his error, hauled the errant head away in a big ziplock bag labeled “exhibit A”. This ended the head incidents.

RBY got remarried, Hunter was trying to settle down (unsuccessfully), and I was an “older student” in college living out in the country, in a groovy little place I called “the nest”.

We used to have some insane parties out there.

It was my birthday in 1993, and there were about twenty five people out there, seven or eight cars. We had spent the evening barbequing, indulging in copious quantities of alcohol, and around midnight, in a fungal inspired haze decided to burn through Hunters lawn. It was something we hadn’t done in a long time.

Assembling in a procession of cars in the dark near the canal that bordered Hunters house, with me in the lead in my topless little Suzuki Samurai, we lined up. As if on cue, and with a sudden collective lurch, we each ground through his perfectly manicured grass, throwing great hunks of sod on the cars behind us, on the walls of his house, and into the street. Little man, at the tail of the procession said that he saw Hunter peeking out from behind the curtains. We dug a virtual Grand Canyon that night in Hunters lawn. Later we wound down by driving the unholy procession through about four or five other lawns of people we didn’t even know, unleashing all of the fury that Detroit and Tokyo could muster…..

I guess that was the last time I ever extracted the revenge of the lawn burnout on anybody. It was a wonder we never got caught anyway. As with all things in life, that which doesn’t kill me (or sends me to jail) makes me stronger.

Every now and then though, I get the notion to hop a curb, and leave my calling card across a well manicured front lawn in some quiet neighborhood….

Fences

2006-09-20T17:27:00.000-07:00

D wrote this as a letter to the editor. I am happy to pass it along:

I’ve just seen a new use for shrimp doors that I would have never thought of. Residential fencing, boy does it look tawdry. I was driving down to South Point Marina when I noticed the shrimp door fence adjoining a tastefully created southwestern style stucco fence belonging to the soon to be new Pirates Cove Subdivision that some are talking about. The owner for that subdivision has done a superb job in providing PI a badly needed facelift to a former industrial area, otherwise known by the old timers as “la palengana.”

In comparison, the trailer park on the North side that has provided “the shrimp door fence” is complete with requisite trash pile that the city of PI seems to ignore for mysterious reasons. Is this due to apathy, or deference to the property owner on the part of PI? Perhaps there are no enforceable codes?

This is the conundrum I pondered as I drove passed these two edifices which seem to represent PI as it is (status quo) and the potential of what PI could be.

I would hope that the future of Port Isabel is as it could be.

90 or 180 days

2006-07-18T16:34:00.000-07:00

We had lunch with my friend George the other day.

We decided to eat at Marchans, the all you can eat fish plate. It's pretty good, in my opinion the best all you can eat fish in Puerto Isabel. The tourists don't really know about it (yet), maybe the Winter Texan crowd does, but we don't eat there a lot in the winter time. The fish is light and flakey, with a killer potato salad (or fries), cole slaw and roll. Washed down with a giant glass of ice cold iced tea, well, it's one of the things that make living here in the summer time bearable. We usually sit by the window which overlooks the harbor so that I can admire all of the boats, especially one lovely little ketch on the middle finger.

The tourists stick to the glitzy places like Pirates Landing and The Lost Galleon, and that's fine with me.

Anyway, we noticed George and Scarlets van parked out front as we were going in. It had the utility trailer attached, with a freezer strapped down, and I wondered if they were doing a little free lance hauling along with eco tours and the nature center.....

Marchans was pretty crowded, the waitress told us we could eat over in the far room, where there was only one other family. On the way over there, we passed George and his friend Sam, getting ready to have the famous all you can eat fish. We stopped along their small table, and they invited us to sit, but being as we're all sort of big, we invited them to our table, which was much larger. George said they'd be over as soon as they got served as things were moving pretty slowly what with the rush, and they wanted to get their food first.

After a bit they came over and sat down, and we started catching up on things. George comes from a pioneer family in Port Isabel, his father ran one of the early ferry boat services to the island, long before the first causeway was even built. George has carried on in the tradition as a boat captain.

So naturally, a good deal of the conversation had to do with boats and the seafaring business. Most of the non-commercial work here revolves around the tourist trade, things like eco-tours, para-sailing, fishing, dolphin watching and party cruises. George has seen and done it all.

He chartered out to a bunch of McDonalds executives who were in town to celebrate the opening of the new McDonalds on the island, when it was first built years ago. He took them out, and they caught fish, they caught a buzz and in general they caught a good time. Afterward, they asked him; "90 or 180 days?".

George was bewildered. "90 or 180 days, what?"

"90 or 180 days terms for payment, that's the way it works, and by the way, where do we mail the check?".

George thought about it for a minute and replied. "Oh, I see....so that means that every time I want an order from McDonalds, I can just drive through, pick it up and ask the person behind the window...90 or 180 days?".

"That's how it works right?"

The Sailing Kabala of Doctor David

2006-07-17T18:41:00.000-07:00

On the ancient wall of China, where a brooding Buddha blinks, deeply graven is the message, ‘It’s later than you think.’

The clock of life is wound but once, and no man has the power, to tell just where the hands will stop, at late or early hour.

Now is all the time you own, the past a golden link, go cruising now my brothers, it’s later than you think.

All I want to do any more is sail.

Find a way to finance my habit. From the minute that I light the first piece of canvas, till the boat is washed and the sails bagged, I want to explore distant tropical islands and seas, maybe finding a homeport far from the chaos that is rapidly spinning out of control before us. I'll admit it. I spend countless hours in nautical catalogs, and have pushed google pretty much to the limit purusing infinite links to sailing sites. I am presently at work, outfitting Olivia in spartan, utilitarian splendor, provisioning her for the series of passages to the hinter world of the sailing promised land. My dreams are filled with azure water, warm trade winds and coconut palm covered islands.

I know the reality. Sailing is mostly work, hard work, with contrary winds, currents and seas. It is living in shoebox sized spaces often wet tired and dirty. It is worry about your anchor holding in some shitty rough bay, or the possibility that the dreaded H word will fuck up your day. It is also magical work, transported by the wind to destinations that otherwise normal people, in all reality, will never see.

My friend Jim, from Island Time says that they don't subtract the days you sail from your existance. This might be true. Better yet, I think that one day on the sea, under canvas equals twenty two point five days ashore, doing things you don't want to.

Like all addicts, I thought I might be alone in my illness, this obsession with the sea. The other night I was sitting on the back deck with my good friend Doctor David, an equally addicted sailor. We were drinking a couple of cold Spaten Optimator dopplebocks, watching late night fishermen coming in trying to trailer their boats in semi drunken stupors, and talking about all things nautical. I mentioned that I detest yard work, hate it, hate anything that has to do with lawn maintenance. For years I have wrestled with this apparent abnormal, deviant and antisocial behavior. I would rather be working on a boat, down in the engine room, covered in oil and diesel, or sweating in some closed compartment painting areas that require the contortions of a carnival rubber man.

I told David about this, said I didn't even want a yard and he laughed, said he hated yard work too....didn't want one either. I mentioned to him that every time I drive down the street and see some guy slaving in a yard that looks just like it came out of the goddamn Sunset Magazine, I wonder to myself "what's wrong with me?". He snickered and replied: "I wonder....what's wrong with them?".

So I have now decided that I will surrender to the sailing kabala, and consider all who don't understand, outsiders.

I won't be much of a party conversaionalist if you want to talk about varieties of roses, or mulch, or weed eaters, or sprinkler systems. I'll probably be over in the corner dozing off.

But if you want to talk about raritan heads, norseman fittings and Micron 33, things like that, you just might get a response.....

Whale Passage

2006-07-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

I had gone back to Kodiak in the Spring of 1980 for reasons that I don’t remember now. Most of my life following the military, I had spent running from one thing or the other. I had freedom, and no one could tell me when or where to go.

I probably was running from something, more than likely myself.

It was a rainy spring, as most springs on Kodiak are. I spent a great deal of time in the little bar adjacent to the bowling alley, drinking Christian Brothers Brandy (“someday I’m gonna make a pilgrimage to Reedly California where the good monks produce their fine elixir”), playing music and in general neglecting responsibility which was better attended to. Somewhere along the way I scored a term aboard the Bold Lady, a refit ugly old gulf coast, Benders shrimper that had been tanked and converted for multi use fishing in the Alaskan Waters. On April fools someone had left a seacock open, and the big white boat sank at the moorings. Flooding the engine room before being able to be raised, the main engine underwater, a major rebuild was now in order. The crew which consisted of the Chuck the skipper, Chucks brother, Hank (“Uncle tape”) and Glen Ingvie (who had owned a boat which had sunk the previous year) were busy rebuilding the big 12 cylinder diesel in order to retrieve the crab pots which were left in the water following the mishap. They were anxious to get that done in order to rig for shrimp season which was coming up.

So I got to watchdog the boat with the understanding that if anybody quit, I would be next in line as crew. It was a pretty groovy job, all I had to do was make sure the thing didn’t sink and that no unauthorized people came aboard in exchange for a warm place to sleep and cook meals. I would fish regularly, catching flounder, ling and bass right there in the channel where she was moored, side tied. Once the scalloper tied in front of the Bold Lady turned me on to a gunny sack full of giant succulent scallops, just waiting to be shucked and fried. The rain fell with regularity, mostly a light mist, as the island awoke from its winter sleep, and boats made their way up and down the Near Island channel to or from fishing grounds. The Alaska Star Cannery was busy pumping out the end of the season Dungeness and Tanner crab, and clouds of steam from the processing permeated the town, mixing with the smell of the ice cold Pacific, the surrounding primal forests mosses and lichens producing a nourishing almost edible smell that still lingers in my memory, and possibly always will.

Chucks brother decided to cash it in, and so I became a crew of the notorious Bold Lady. We finished overhauling the big engine, and finally one day we were ready to get out there and bring back the gear. Our first trip out, we rounded Cape Chiniak, a very rough stretch even on a good day, when the rudder post decided to snap, leaving us without steering. Chuck and I descended into the lazarette in pitching, rolling thirteen foot seas, and I held the two parts together, as best I could while Chuck welded them, both of us standing in shin deep cold water. The repair held, and we retrieved a portion of the gear near the southwest part of the island under gray skies and gray seas.

Delivering the gear to town, I felt like a king to be fishing again. We had tanked the few crabs that were in the pots (even though they were out of season), and sold them under the table to the Kodiak VFW. Back in town, we offloaded the gear (and illicit crab), split the money and lived like pirates for a few days, partying day and night.

The next trip out, we headed over to the Shelikof Strait, another bad piece of water, the large pass between Kodiak Island and the Alaska Peninsula. Leaving in the late afternoon, we hit Whale Passage around 2200. Whale passage is an area where, when the tide turns, the entire Shelikof Strait / North Pacific channel necks down to a funnel like the center of a giant hourglass. Whale Pass only lets one through on slack or standing tides. At the tidal change it becomes a howling, raging torrent of energy with great swirling whirlpools big enough to eat large ships, sucking them into the oblivion of the depths.

I had the first watch, everyone else was asleep down below, and I was simply minding the autopilot, making small corrections here and there as we steamed east under fair skies, a crystal sunset and glassy waters. Near perfect conditions.

Around 2300 were well clear of Whale Passage, and the night had fallen to a blanket of ink, with just the profiles of the jagged peaks framed like cardboard cutouts on a quilt of black. Scanning to the port side, I noticed a group of three elongated oval lights which seemed to be hovering above the mountains in the distance several miles away. I figured that they were just a Coast Guard helicopter hovering, out on night ops, or maybe a SAR. I watched for a minute with barely any interest, when almost instantaneously they accelerated, moving toward the starboard across our bow at a speed that I could not even comprehend, and were just as quickly gone, out of sight. As they crossed our bow, the autopilot suddenly kicked off, the rudder went hard to starboard, and the Bold Lady started chasing her tail. I shot below, woke up Chuck who reset the thing. I told him the story, but was met with skepticism, so I quickly backed off, saying no more.

The rest of the trip went uneventfully except for the return through Shelikof Straight, when we were in the midst of a raging storm, and the swell had kicked up to some 25 feet or so. I had the night watch then too, and was watching an approaching boat on the radar, watching him close on us down range, closer and closer. I couldn’t see shit through the driving spray and mountains of water. Out of the blackness to our port passed the target, another fishing boat no more than a couple of hundred feet away….way too close for comfort in those conditions. We made it back to town, offloaded the gear again and rigged for shrimp.

I learned how to mend net sitting there in the parking lot with the guys, singing a-capella to the rhythm of the net needles and twine. My tenure as a shrimper didn’t last long. On the first trip out, with barely 3000 pounds in the hold, the main engine broke a connecting rod, shot it right through the block with the sound of a hand grenade exploding. When we went below it was a surreal scene, broken piston rod playing hide and seek in and out of the engine block, spraying oil on everything like some mechanical artery had been severed. We were towed back in, and had to wait at Whale Passage while the tide turned. It was the first time I had ever seen that, and I suppose my own eyes were the size of dinner plates, as the tranquil scene was replaced by utter chaos from Neptune.

I got my three hundred dollar check for three months work, booked a cheap standby ticket and flew back South. Haven't been back since.

Free all the Freakin' Orcas

2006-06-16T11:34:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday we were up in San Antonio with the kiddies. It was hotter than hell, and sometime late in the scorching afternoon we decided to go to the Shamu show, the Orca exhibit.

They have something like five Orcas that they keep in captivity for our collective enjoyment. Beautiful wild animals, hunting machines that are kept in a couple of acres of artifical seawater and blue painted cement tanks. Gitmo bay for cetaceans.

I have a real problem with that.

Of course, I'm not a tree hugger or even a "green person" by any means, but some things just shouldn't be done, and keeping magnificent, highly intelligent animals in captivity is one of them. However, they do put on one hell of a performance for a few measly pounds of squid and herring....

The kids wanted to sit in the "splash zone", the area where during the course of the show, the animals collectively pound the water with their bodies and tails, soaking everyone in the first twenty rows or so. Here, the sides of the tank are clear acrylic plastic, and you can see the entire animal as it pushes ice cold water onto the gleeful crowd. A great way to cool off on a very hot afternoon.

At a pre-rehearsed moment, a young Orca appears from the depths of the tank and stares at us for a brief instant prior to giving his massive flukes a flick, shoving hundreds of gallons of water onto the expectant audiance.

I stare into his baleful knowing eye, instantly transported back in time to a deep bay between two islands in Kodiak Alaska.

I am at the controls of the hydraulic reel of my boat Marusa as we pick down a mile or more of long line string, set in about fifty fathoms of water, soaking on the bottom, waiting for some giant Halibut to take the salmon heads bait. I like fishing for Halibut, you never know will come up on the next hook. In this same area I had recently hooked a gargantuan fish that we estimated to be upwards of maybe five hundred pounds. We never got it aboard, it thrashed far out on the surface, straightened out the big 26/0 hook and was gone, leaving us all in awe. The water here is crystal blue, as dark as navy blue velvet as it heads into the inky depths. Halibut fishing is a summer time fishery, and the air can be warm, with calm seas, air redolent with the scent of spruce and moss from the ancient mysterious islands.

On this particular day there is little wind. The surface of the water is unusually glassy. A few Codfish and small "chicken" Halibut in the hold, and we are busy rebaiting and laying the string back out as quickly as we work it. We are near the backside of Long Island, and the black sand beach, dark green spruce forrest and deep blue sky make a picture perfect back drop.

In the depths we spy a giant octopus entangled in the line, hooked and writhing, being dragged to the surface. Octopus make excellent bait for everything from King Crab to Halibut, and the canneries pay well for them, so naturally we are intent on landing the critter. This individual is probably around eighty or ninety pounds, outstreached, maybe fifteen feet from end of hood to tip of tentacle.

Anyway, the octopus comes alongside and predictibly sucks on to the port side of the Marusa, a thirty foot wooden planked longliner, clinging to the hull about two feet below the waterline. This creates a unique dilemma. How do we get it to let go to bring it aboard? If we keep applying pressure, the hook will pull out and we'll lose the animal.

I come up with an instant solution. Lets just sink four or five hooks on the line in the beasts hood, then let off the pressure. He'll think he's free, then we can quickly haul him over the rail before he has a chance to discover otherwise.

So we go to work. I lean over the side, reach down into the water and sink the first hook. Then another. All of the sudden, the water darkens as if some undersea cloud is gathering on us, and out of the blue flashes a goddamn Orca, halting just in front of the octopus clinging to the side of the boat. I do not have time to react, as we all stand staring for a moment forever frozen in time and memory, staring into the eye of the whale, which is staring curiously at the octopus, the boat and us.

Then, as quickly as it appears, the Orca disappears into the depths, sinking and gliding effortlessly downward. I don't even debate, I know I have to get the octopus off of the hull and into the hold, remove any temptation before the animal returns for hors' dervours, something that the old boat might not survive.

All the hooks in place in the critters hood, and I return to the starboard side controls to let off pressure on the longline. The Orca appears from the depth again just as the octopus lets go, and stares at it as it wriths, suspended in the blue. He stares at the boat and us again, then disappears into the cold deep Pacific for good, leaving us incredulous, if not a bit shaken.

We quickly haul the octopus over the port rail, and dispatch him with the end of an axe handle, putting him into the ice in the bottom of the hold. We continue to fish, never seeing the Orca again.

I want to think that he knew we had worked hard to capture that octopus, fishing just as he did, and so he just decided to leave us alone, let us have it for the effort. That's why I have a special soft spot in my preditory heart for those animals.

Mr. Smudge

2006-04-13T22:12:00.000-07:00

Mark O. Karl works for the US Inefficient Wildlife Service. He has some sort of namby-pamby title like “outreach specialist” or some such horseshit.

This means he doesn’t do a whole lot except suck the cocks of his superiors, and get Herculean pay raises on a regular basis. My botanist friend that works there can’t stand him.

“I’m gonna find some endangered species like Lila-de-los llanos just so it fucks up his plans for a project here” he acerbically commented over his shoulder as we walked a small finger of dusty fine sand jutting out into the Bahia Grande, which for all practical purposes is drying up ever since “the service” decided to cut a channel from the Brownsville Ship Channel into that dustbowl, in an effort to flood it back to its original state, which was altered after the Ship Channel was built in the first place.

The new channel has silted in just like I predicted before they went to great expense and fanfare to cut it out of the mangroves and salt marshes, routing it under the road. That’s the way it is with the feral gumment by God, and you just better get used to it buddy.

The same way it is with Mark O. Karl, a short grinning little bastard with an undefined job.

Mostly my friend says, he attends meetings and talks on the phone, but as long as he keeps his nose firmly planted up the refuse managers collective asses, well, the sky’s the limit. My botanist friend told me that recently one of “the Services” managers, a Herman Goering wannabe, a skinny putrid bastard named Joe Riparian called an office wide meeting to try and address the growing discord that’s spreading throughout the refuse like some sort of malignancy. Of course, my friend, whom I consider a consummate scientist and professional (if not a bit of a healthy iconoclast) along with most of the rest of the place brought a litany of observations concerning the managements lack of management skills to the table….all except Mark O. Karl, who just sat in the back with that shit eating grin, finally raising his hand and commenting; “ Gee…..I don’t know what’s the problem…..I think management is doing a swell job here!”.

The management seems to have a problem with people who really produce

I think it’s the threat thing. Nobody is allowed to succeed, hell no. This might expose the Joe Riaprians, the Lenny Demerits and the Mark O. Karls, people who represent the vast majority of do-nothings that inhabit the nebulous ranks of the feral gumment like giant amoeba waiting for a handout to swim by.

My botanist friend has recently been demoted for his achievements, the labor of over 15 years of faithful service, and is now relegated to a welding,-tractor driver-herbicide applying drone. He observes; “this is why I got a masters degree….to spray roundup”.

I worked among these folks for a couple of years, on a peripheral job, driving a tram, and talking to busloads of gente and viejitos, working as an interpretive naturalist.

A volunteer during that time named Scary K was working there, along with her then boyfriend, Eupatorium. When they broke up, she spent a lot of time shitfaced, and at almost every refuse function she’d show up lit. Sometimes she’d show up over at my friends house, late at night with a case of beer. He told me that he’d drink maybe one or two, and she’d kill the rest of the case. He’d always make her clear out, just send her home, to her house where she had about 12 cats, a house always in disarray, and stinking of unkempt cats and dirty clothes.

We were all friends.

He coexisted with an old tomcat at the time, a refugee from the alleys of Weslaco, that he named Mr. Smudge, due to its dirty complexion. Mr. Smudge was ancient, and suffered from an ailment common to all old male cats, a urinary problem. He figured that he’d have to euthanize old Mr. Smudge as soon as he got back from visiting relatives up in middle America.

When he got back though, Scary K had taken Mr. Smudge to the veterinarian, and against everybody’s better judgment (including the veterinarian), had an operation performed to remove Mr. Smudges' penis and balls, routing the piss hole back to his asshole so that urine would not back up in his bladder.

My friend was livid. He said that from that point on, Mr. Smudge just dribbled piss wherever he went, looking more morose and forelorn tha ever. Mr Smudge, he said, would look up at him with big pleading eyes, as if to say; "just put me out of my misery..... Finally my friend took Mr. smudge back to the vet and had him put to sleep.

Then he received the bill for the piss-routing operation, which he had never authorized in the first place.

Scary K was on his shitlist for a while after that, but my friend being the good natured cuss that he is got over it, and the neurotic community that represents the finest of the feral gumments US Inefficient Wildlife service settled back to its normal state of abnormal.

Scary K kept up with her drinking, but it all finally came to a head one Christmas when she attended a Christmas party at the home of another employee, another outreach specialist named Corky Braunfels. Corky has a reputation of being a true feral gumment maestro, one who truly lives up to the creed; “Never do today what can be put of until tomorrow”.

According to my friend, who read the documents filed after the fact, everyone was drinking. Around midnight, ol’ Corky bursts into the living room, where his wife, Scary K, and another woman were seated, and waving a bottle of half consumed champagne, bellowed; “ WHO WANTS TO GET LICKED SUCKED AND FUCKED?”.

My friend wryly observed that this in reality, was a perfectly legitimate question, certainly one unworthy and uncalled for Scary K to file a sexual harassment charge over.

”Hell” he said….”Who wants to get licked, sucked and fucked?”…..

“Everybody does”.

Las Palabras de Cuba Libre

2006-04-02T19:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks Joey for writing this:

CUBA LIBRE
By: Joey Tamayo / Performed by The Bongodogs

Hey
Cuba que vacer tu gente
Cuando se muera el Presidente
Y aqual vacer tu decisicion
Al enterrar lo en el panteón

Ojala…sea Cuba Libre
Cuba Libre deben de calar
Ojala….sea Cuba Libre
Cuba Libre deben de probar

Toda la gente de Havana
Y de Santiago y de las Cruces
Después de tanta agua salada
La Libertad es agua dulce

Ojala…sea Cuba Libre
Cuba Libre deben de calar
Ojala….sea Cuba Libre
Cuba Libre deben de probar

Cuba que vacer tu gente
Cuando se muera el Presidente
Y aqual vacer tu decisicion
Al enterar lo en el panteón

Ojala…sea Cuba Libre
Cuba Libre deben de calar
Ojala….sea Cuba Libre
Cuba Libre deben de probar
Andale Cuba

Vamanos

2006-03-29T16:29:00.000-08:00

....El Estomago

Snook Sandwich

2006-03-29T16:24:00.000-08:00

I went fishing with the New Sheriff the other day.

He wanted to go early, up the Brownsville Ship Channel looking for snook, wanted to leave around six AM, to which I reluctantly agreed. D and Jen (Ms. Sheriff) were having a yard sale, so it seemed like the perfect time to duck out. But then I decided, ahhhh, fuck it, six AM is way to early, so I laid around like a big bed pig until around ten or so, when I was awaken from a soporific sleep by the whistling wind outside rattling the windows.

Spring time is normally a windy season here on the coast when the late season northers march their way south, only to meet equally powerful high pressure ridges advancing from the distant tropics, colliding in a leviathan shoving match which usually creates severe weather along its boundaries somewhere up there, but leaves us with only a violent howling south wind that pushes great quantities of dust and dirt derived from the vast loma expanses to the south, and the dredge spoils heaped up along the ship channel fouling everything in a thirty mile radius. I spent over two hours cleaning Menagerie washing fine silt, leaves and garbage that had blown onto the foredeck and under the cockpit seats, only to have the winds return the next day and start the process all over. I felt like Atlas rolling the stone up a hill only to have it roll back down, over and over again….

So the New Sheriff called and said that he was going fishing anyhow, and did I want to go? Ah, what the hell. I grabbed a few things and decided to go flog the water for a bit anyway. We stopped and got ice, braving the spring break crowds. About ten thirty or so I cracked open a breakfast Tecate.

The New Sheriffs’ skiff is an ancient Jon Boat, resurrected from its final resting place at his dads house in Florida. The Rusty Duck has a center console, with a steering wheel that’s broken off, and is nothing more now than a stub, but it still turns, still works. It has an vintage Johnson Seahorse Sixty Horse engine that makes it go like a bat out of hell. Most importantly, mounted on the bow is a trolling motor. Now this particular trolling motor did not come straight out of the pages of Bass Pro catalog…no, this trolling motor has seen far better days, but it still works, and that’s the important thing. The corroded cover has been wrenched off, and the New Sheriff now has to use a cut off ax handle, jammed into the pinion gear to change it from forward to reverse, but he’s got the whole cantankerous thing under control.

Hell, I used to have a skiff like this one. Named “the pickle”, it was a modicum of idiosyncratic behavior. Like Steinbecks Sea Cow, it generally ran, but it generally never ran right. It did however lead us to catch a lot of fish.

And so it is with the New Sheriffs boat.

Like myself, he has fallen thoroughly in love with catching the mysterious snook that live up in the reaches of the Brownsville Ship Channel. We’re fortunate to live in the only place along the Gulf (outside Florida) where there is a population of them. I discovered fishing for them about ten years ago or so, when during a particularly strong cold front that had us shut out of the Laguna Madre, we decided to explore the Ship Channel and the adjacent shrimp basin. I was bored with drowning shrimp for mangrove snapper, so I tied on a topwater bait and mindlessly plopped it close to the shore along the rocks. After the ripple dissipated, I twitched the lure, made it do a big GLUG when instantly; WHAM!, the water swirled, and my rod doubled in a “U” shape. It was like tying into a largemouth black bass with a supercharger up its ass….

The fight lasted no more than about thirty seconds before the fish cut the line with its razor sharp gill plate.

I fell instantly in love.

Now launching the New Sheriffs’ boat in this gale, years later, I remembered each snooking trip, each savored experience, each one as much about the adventure as about the catching. However, I couldn’t help hoping that I might again tie into one of these rockets. ….

Heading out south towards the open channel from the Highway 48 ramp, past the Saturday crowds who were braving the sandblasting wind, throwing great hunks of mullet into the water in hopes of catching a big red or maybe black drum, or maybe even, a snook, the New Sheriff deftly steered the little skiff with the stub steering wheel through the chocolate whitecapped water. Other gente lined the shoreline crabbing with string and turkey necks. Once out into the open Ship Channel, the New Sheriff carefully put the Rusty Duck on plane as we bounce along the south shoreline.

Cutting back across the channel, we stop along the north shore, where we toss soft plastic baits up against the rocky slope. Almost instantly, something smashes my bait, doubling the road. After about ten minutes, I land a Jack Crevelle about ten pounds.

One of the strongest fish around, Jack Crevelle can make a wreck out of even the best fishing gear. I return this one to the water, and the New Sheriff and I have a laugh, and a fresh Tecate.

Working our way up the channel, we ease down a side cut lined with mangroves, one I used to fish in years ago. We watch a belted kingfisher flying along the shoreline, working the oyster lined banks. In here the persistent wind is almost calm, shielded on both sides by high banks and vegetation, mesquite and retama trees lining the banks, creating a cool and shady hideaway. We work the spot hard, but don't find any fish. That’s OK though, because the New Sheriff is a great guy, full of interesting stories, and so the intense silence is punctuated only occasionally by observations and commentary. The way any good fishing trip should be. Anyway, I’m always in a reflective mood on any good fishing trip, remembering friends and experiences from past trips, adding the current one to the collage.

We venture back into the wind, and working along a wall, just past the granary for awhile, trying to get the mangrove snapper to bite, but the wind is so violent that it is hard to get the bait down where it needs to be. Finally the New Sheriff catches a fat sixteen incher, which he immediately deposites into the fishbox where it protests by smaking its tail against the platic begging to be released. No dice fucker.. The wind here is so bad, that it was blows seagull shit and feathers off of the dock and down on top of us, and we are afraid that our open beers might get compromised, so we put away the trolling motor, and steam up to the end of the Ship Channel, near where long ago, was held the La Frontera Blessing of the Fleet (and Shrimp Festival)…that however is a story for another time.

Up here in the unprotected turning basin, the wind is blowing way too hard to fish effectively, so we flee and duck under the Montagine Fuel docks, where I used to fish with El Estomigo, Mr. Vamanos hisself. A former outdoor TV celebrity, we’d fish for huge snook there late at night, misbehaving badly in the process.

The New Sheriff and I cast up under the shady pilings to the snook we see laying there, finally enticing two small fat ones to bite, both of which we turn back. By this time it is about two in the afternoon or so, and we figure we better on meander back so we could get ready to do a full assault on Matamoros Mexico with the Ladies that evening….

Back out on the open water, and one last fishing spot. I was recounting a story about something, as I casually flipping the soft plastic bait up toward the shoreline. On the first cast a sizeable snook smacked the bait. I lead him to the net, deciding to keep this one for fish sandwiches….

The wind has now increased to a frantic speed, and the channel is eerily, obnoxiously obscured by blowing dust, which works its wretched way into every clothing opening, all of our pores, into open eyes, ears noses and mouths. We pass a bay boat, as it chugs along, deep in the hole. I guess they are afraid to get up on plane for fear of running into something. It is like a brown terribly toxic and abrasive fog. I feel like some sort of fucking aquatic Lawrence of Arabia or something, lost in a blowing sand/shit storm. I could barely make out the side channel leading to the boat ramp….

My eyes felt sandpapered for three days afterward…..

Back at the docks, I try to drive the Rusty Duck on to the trailer, but it is a losing battle. Like my own skiff of long ago, it only wants its owner and nothing else. We finally load up , and crack open the final Tecates of the trip, washing about a pound of silt and sand, down our throats.

I wasn’t hungry for over an hour after that……

Muy Pendejo

2006-03-24T16:04:00.000-08:00

Pendejos and the PMF

2006-03-24T15:38:00.000-08:00

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

Sorry Faith, there is no Santa Claus

2006-03-04T18:41:00.000-08:00

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Further South

2006-02-18T17:45:00.000-08:00

It started sometime before the turn of the twenty-first century…. Ironically, a time, a date disputed. Exactly when did the new millennium actually begin, did it begin in 2000 or 2001? This was a pressing question debated by talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and others, hours spent on this question of great scatological significance. It really doesn’t matter much now…it was a silly, academic question anyhow.

We were lulled and brainwashed into a mindless state of acceptance by the Y2K myth… an event which never was. I remember waiting up on New Years eve for the inevitable meltdown, consuming expensive ancient champagne while the ball dropped – and absolutely nothing happened.

Meanwhile, silent and ignored, or maybe accepted as necessary, the revolution of miniaturization moved relentlessly forward, a high tech amoeba – and catapulted us into the misty twenty first century.

A host of computer driven equipment, from car ignitions to tiny MP3 players, required more and more powerful microprocessors. Inside sterile laboratories in Silicon Valley, and Austin, more and more functions were crammed onto miniscule wafers, giving birth to a host of enhancements, designed to improve the quality of our lives. We were assaulted and indoctrinated on all sides. Dell computers, Pentiums and Ipods, digital cameras and safer brakes sang us a lullaby, and we nodded off into a state of complacency.

It began innocently enough….It wasn’t long before a microchip had been developed that could be implanted under the skin of your pet. The chip contained information the same as a neck tag would on a dog or cat – immunizations and owner history, all able to be read by a remote receiving computer.

In a few years, GPS technology was integrated into the same chip, and the government saw a great opportunity to implant them in our military troops, so that they could be identified and located in battle. Pertinent information including date of birth, social security number and blood type, along with hometown, sexual preferences, school records, family members, hobbies and just about any other type of information could now be linked into a central government operated, networked GIS data base of DHS and DOD employees.

It wasn’t long before the new improved version was being implanted in all government workers, to provide a greater degree of “homeland security”. Convicts and ex-convicts got a chip, and they were added to the GIS database. Teachers, doctors and lawyers were required to have a chip implant in order to work. So were welders, carpenters and mechanics. Just about everyone in the workforce had to submit in order to work -even resident aliens.

A special chip was required for children too, to ensure their safety, in case of abduction or abuse. If parents didn’t comply, they were charged with child neglect, fined and imprisoned until they would finally relent. In short order, each and every child was implanted at birth, for their safety – by mandate.

It became impossible to buy food or clothing, to fuel your vehicle, even to conduct business at the bank without an implanted chip. This was necessary because transactions involving coin, paper and plastic became a thing of the past - for security reasons.

That’s why we’ve been out here riding the winds and the waves, staying far offshore, where the blue water is, with the dolphins and the flying fish, sometimes putting into third world ports, working for fuel and food before setting sail again further south, searching for a land of freedom.

I keep asking the question on night watches when the stars are crowding the open ocean sky and the sea is calm and quiet;

How could this have happened to the land I loved?

The question is carried on the breeze by the Frigatebirds and the Petrels, to the distant shore, and they return silent.

Joke Night

2006-01-25T20:12:00.000-08:00

We just got back from the island. Tomorrow we have a tour to Guerrero Viejo with a load of viejitos, and our friends Don and Linda are going with us. Ought to be fun.

We decided to meet them at Fishbones, a normally innocuous bar / grill on the bay. It also has one of the only fishing piers around, so it’s always fun watching people waste money on generally unproductive waters. Mikey, our old friend from the Brewery now bartends there, and we go there sometimes on Wednesday nights while the kids are at church activities. Besides cold Shiner Bock beer (the national beer of Texas), they make one of the best burgers around.

I should’ve known something was up tonight when Mikey turned on the PA system that's normally reserved for the evening crooner who plays there. He plays about a thousand different songs, a la John Denver a real folksinger-wannabe, but he wasn’t there tonight. “What’s up with this?”, I thought to myself.

It wasn’t long till we began to find out, as a buttload of winter Texans began to stream in….this couldn’t be good.

And it wasn’t.

Turns out it was “Joke night” at Fishbones, a night when chingos of touristas get together and tell jokes to try and win a freebe dinner. Ah, the mention of anything free to a bunch of winter Texans brings out a feeding frenzy.

So we sit there trying to hold down our normally otherwise tasty food while a bunch of lutefisk eating retirees from Illinois, Missouri and Wisconsin told jokes. Terrible jokes. Where did these people learn this type of crap? We listened to jokes about transgenders, anuses’, Viagra, various bodily functions and other assorted sophomoric mouth-squirt. All the while we were snickering, not at their jokes, but at their apparent lack of shame. We began the comparison game too…..

After we hurriedly ate and paid the bill, my friend Don told us to go ahead, and we exited in somewhat, disgust. Once outside Don came up behind us, having left from the back exit, walking to the parking lot along the pier. He was snickering as he told us the following story:

“ I grabbed the Microphone and looked out at the crowd, and they all had big grins on their faces. I told them that I was from Texas, from the Island, and during the summer time, when they’re gone…..we tell jokes too".....

..... I asked ‘em “ Do you wanna hear one?” Of course, they all anxiously nodded, grinning from ear to ear".

"I said, OK, here goes":

“What’s the difference between a winter Texan and a canoe?”….

"Nobody made a guess, so I told ‘em”:

“Sometimes a canoe tips!”

Don chuckled and said; “The smiles instantly melted from there faces, and you could hear the ceiling fan, and the ice in their drinks”. “That’s when I took the exit, stage left, and went out the back, along the pier, out here”.

Krulls Research

2006-01-22T09:37:00.000-08:00

I was an undergraduate at UTPA back in the early ‘90’s. I had over forty credit hours in geology, when the bottom fell out of the program, and I had to transfer to the Biology department to pursue a major in critter counting. During that time, I worked as a diver on an NSF grant, monitoring seagrasses in the lower Laguna Madre.

Joe and Krull were two graduates working on the same grant during that time. Both were public school teachers, working on their masters degrees. Since I was the only certified SCUBA diver, I did most of the sub aquatic work, taking core samples and setting quadrats, spending long hours on the bottom of the bay in the verdant seagrass meadows. Joe and Krull would occasionally do their own underwater work as well, holding their breaths, which is a hard way to do things. Part of their plan was to evaluate seagrass growth and population statistics by coring random areas with a homemade 6” PVC core tool, sharpened on one end, and driven by a small sledge hammer into the substrate. They’d then pull the plug out, and bag the seagrass and mud core, to be counted and chemically analyzed back at the lab. The 6” PVC tool was a bitch to pull out, especially in hard substrate, like shell and sand.

Joe and Krull were opposite personalities. Joe was a dedicated scientist, sometimes almost too much so, but certainly balanced and affable. Prone to seasickness, even in the placid bay, once he and I were out on a collecting trip during a norther, when the swell was running about two or three feet, collecting his samples. Joe would normally insist on doing much of his own work; legitimacy and integrity throughout his project held a great importance to him. Later, he gained a certification in SCUBA which made things a lot easier for him, but on this particular trip he was free diving, coming up again and again for air, swallowing great amounts of seawater in the process. After he finished his work, he crawled aboard, and while marking his samples suddenly remarked “I’M GONNA LOSE IT!” leaning over the side to bilge great amounts of seawater and breakfast at Teds in a chum slick that stretched far aft of the little Dargel scooter in the chocolate turbulent bay waters. After we got to shore and loaded the boat, we went to lunch at Blackbeards as if nothing had happened out there. My admiration for Joe that day was manifold.

Krull, on the other hand was an ill tempered prima-donna, given to temper tantrums and fits of derision to those he considered “inferior”. Krull had a penchant for fabricating things, especially the statistics and results from his own “research”. Krull decided that the 6” core tool was insufficient for his “research”, and instead fabricated one out of 24” PVC. I snickered when he brought the goddamn thing onboard, determined to use it in his “research”. So one day we were out there just west of the island in a thick Thalassia bed and Krull goes down with that big-ass core tool, with a big-ass sledge hammer and proceeds to drive the bastard about a foot into the mud. He huffs, and he puffs and strains like shit to try and get it to come loose, with no luck. After about 45 minutes with still no luck, I decided to attach the bow line to it and drag the fucker loose. A bit of reverse throttle from the big 90 horse, and the thing popped out of the substrate with a massive swirl of mud, and Krull hauled it aboard. Now he had to get that huge plug of mud out and into a waiting garbage sack so that he could haul it back to the main campus for his “research”. No dice. Even though he had engineered a plug into the top of the core tool to release any vacuum that might be trapped, the plug wouldn’t come out. I sat on the stern of the scooter, trying not to laugh as he got frustrated, taking a big flat screwdriver and attempting to dig the core out of that big-ass core tool. It came loose allright, falling apart in small shit chunks all over the deck, chunks of Thalassia and gooey mud making the core totally useless. By this time Krull was gnashing his teeth, moaning and shaking in anguish. In a fit of rage, he picked up the tool and heaved it aft, where it whizzed by my ear striking a red metal fuel can on deck, putting a sizable dent in it before spinning to rest near the rail. We sat there in stunned silence, not speaking, even on the return trip, embarrassed and wordless after Krulls infantile outburst.

After that, Krull went back to using a 6” core tool, collecting samples to take back to the main campus to sit in the refrigerator for weeks on end until he had time to do his “research”. I was doing TA work in the biology department at the time, and that refrigerator was in my office. My friend, littleman, who had the displeasure of being abused by Krull, would in retribution, periodically take out the sample bags and urinate in them.

Joe got his masters degree, and has since contributed greatly to the aquatic understanding of the Lower Laguna Madre. I often see him both professionally, and as a friend. He continues his serious, but childlike fascination of this area.

Krull eventually completed his research, after handling many core bags, laboriously analyzing the chemistry, which were never over standard seawater parameters. Krull never completed his masters degree requirements. Occasionally, when I’m in need a laugh, I’ll go into TCA’s old office at the CSL and look up over the cabinets at the big-ass core tool and remember Krulls “research”.

Sirens Song

2006-01-19T18:25:00.000-08:00

Each wave spends its energy after traveling from some distant point, to die on our shoreline leaving us with memories only.

Bowling for Fuselages: Invasion of the Saudimizers

2006-01-19T17:22:00.000-08:00

“Life’s a dance you learn as you go
Sometimes you lead…sometimes you follow
Don’t worry about what you don’t know
‘Cause life’s a dance you learn as you go”
-John Michael Montgomery

It was 1981 and I was going to school in Waco, at Texas State Technical Institute (TSTI) getting certified as a gen-u-wine Aviation Mechanic. I moved there in August. Waco is a weird place, in the buckle of the Texas Bible belt. Its much bigger brother is Baylor University, a Southern Baptist college. On the cusp of the Texas hill country, Waco remains something of a holdout. It is much closer in nature to a town of the old pre civil war South, and in fact even had its share of slaves prior to the great war of Northern aggression.

The Campus of TSTI Waco is northeast of the town (which barely has any sort of recognizable nucleus in itself), and is near to the infamous David Koresch Branch Davidian compound. Religion plays a big part in these folks lives, no matter how cultish.

I was going to school with a lot of rather intelligent individuals, including my flying instructor, a 23 year old hotshot who had already amassed well over 3000 hours in the air, a lot of them as a flying hearse, shuttling bodies all over Texas and Oklahoma. Some of the other guys were college grads with degrees in fields like engineering, who for one reason or another decided that working on aircraft might be a lucrative means of earning an income. We were given to smoking giant Sherlock Holmes Meerschaum pipes and acting like avant-garde intellectuals instead of wrench turning grease monkeys.

The hanger where we all worked was filled with vintage, donated aircraft. There was an old DeHavilland Beaver, with an ancient Pratt and Whitney R-985 radial engine, a MASH era Bell 56 helicopter and various other salvaged pieces and parts. The hanger was a dirty collection of bird shit covered antiques, splattered with much excrement by the pigeons who had taken up residence in the rafters of the yawning cavernous old structure.

Outside resided an ancient DC-7 complete with engines and flight controls, where we’d disappear on breaks and smoke giant spliffs of bad ganja, pretending to be flying the ancient hulk, smoke billowing out of the hatches, windows and doors like there was an on board fire going on. I once saw a group of mechanic wannabes trying to hammer easy-outs into stripped screw heads on the wing panels, and it was at that time, like a revelation, that I made a conscious decision not to fly on commercial aircraft, unless under the direst emergency, knowing the quality of mechanics who happened to be headed for that field, a promise that I’ve kept for myself to this day…

Another aircraft sitting forlornly chained, like some sort of metal convict was the forward section of an old DC-3 sans wings and aft fuselage. This bird had killed a student just prior to my arrival in Waco when he leaned against the landing gear (which folds forward) while working in the wheel well, extruding his head though the nacelle firewall.

Around the back of the hanger were nine fuselages from old Cessna 150 trainers that the flight school operated, brightly colored little aircraft fuselages only, no interiors, engines, wings, or tail sections. The 150 is a tiny bird to begin with, and these sections were about 14 feet long, and 48” in diameter at the widest point, the engine firewall. They weighed less than a hundred pounds each.

One day we got the bright notion to set them up on end, on the firewall and arrange them like giant bowling pins. We’d take turns using an old tail wheel tire for a bowling ball, situating ourselves about fifty feet away. When the fuselages would fall, they made the most satisfying whack on the concrete, writhing and rocking in great metal anguish till they finally lay still on the hot August tramac, only to be picked up, re-set and bowled for by the next man up. Bowling for fuselages became a favorite pasttime along with hackey sack and copious ganja consumption which we did to alleviate some of the boredom of day to day life at TSTI, which could often resemble some sort of military training without the discipline.

Bowling for fuselages ended almost as soon as it began, when one day I launched a perfect strike ball, which, unfortunately took a hard hook after hitting an errant piece of two by four lying on the deck, bounced up and hit my friend John, who was the pin attendant, square in the nuts, causing him to immediately fall over in the classic Beavis and Butthead kicked-in-the-nads fetal position. The instructors decided to shut down our game then, before another lawsuit befell TSTI.

During that time, there were a number of Saudi Arabian guys going to school, taking aviation mechanics and flying. It was always a challenge being in the pattern with these guys. I was flying a lot too, and my flight instructor and I would often imbibe in a bit of ganja and then go out in the 150 aerobat to punch holes in the sky, doing screaming stalls, wing-overs and other fun maneuvers high above McLennan Community College, swooping down under the power wires that spanned the Bosque River, hoping that the pretty girls who went there would notice our valiant efforts. This all came to a halt one day too, when some shitstick decided to remove about six inches off of the top of the vertical stabilizer by flying too high under the wire…..fortunately he made it back, but the airspace around MCC was deemed off-limits for TSTI pilots. For our safety though, on the big flight board, whenever the Saudis were flying, there would appear in the Notice to Aviation Mariners (NOTAMS); “caution, Saudis in pattern!”…..

We renamed ‘em “Saudimizers” after the energizer battery, which just keeps going an going….Like the battery these fuckers would keep going and going allright, screwing up everything in their paths. You can’t polish a turd.

One day one of the Saudis walked in all covered with bandages, all black and blue bruises. Turns out that he’d crashed his new custom van (the old shag-vans from the ‘70’s and early 80’s) when he turned on the cruise control, and went to the back to mix a drink. Seems like one of the American students had told him that cruise control is just like having an autopilot.....

Because we’ve been in bed with the Saudis as a nation for a number of years, and due to the fact that they are a rich bunch of bastards from all of their oil and gas revenues, they were never failed in any aviation classes. I remember when we were all rebuilding engine magnetos, a complex job at best and damn near impossible without some sort of higher intelligence, the Saudi students couldn’t follow the directions, and got frustrated. Instead of reassembling the thing correctly, they just lobbed the parts inside and screwed the case halves back together. One of the instructors held up a Suadimized mag, and shook it like a fucking maraca before signing him off to go on to the next section of aircraft repair.

I enjoyed my tenure at TSTI Waco, and spent a good deal of hours flying, smoking ganja and in general having a good time. I finally graduated and passed my FAA exams. Later, I worked in San Antonio for Dee Howard Aircraft, modifying a giant 747 into a flying palace for the king of Saudi Arabia. I wonder if they allow Saudimizer mechanics to service it?

Remembering Gabe

2006-01-15T10:25:00.000-08:00

Winter on the island and the wind kicks up, the beach gets narrow, cold front born combers march in from the distant north-northeast, dying on the chilly wet sand, spending their energy without telling their tales.

Even the winter sun isn’t all that warm. It mimics its summer twin, shining limited sickly yellow light on the dunes forming damp, salty shadows where the beach plants, railroad vine and sea purslane struggle to survive the all too short South Texas winter.

Sea oats nod in the wind on the tidal flats, nodding in agreement that natures season will be replaced soon by the parched and sandblasted winds of summer. Days are short, and the water is cold.

The island hibernates for a little while, and the beach resorts and palapa bars only open on nice weekend days, hoping to snag a stray off season tourist or two for a cutesy rum drink and maybe a greasy burger. The madness of spring break is still months away, and the ugly island infrastructure that caters to that time of year is still dormant and buried under last years plywood and rusty nails, now sandblasted gray and weathered.

I’ve always loved winter on the beach. It is one of the few times when I’ve found some sort of solace. While my mother died back in ‘95, I came to the beach, sometimes neglecting responsibility in order to recharge and escape the horrors of the cancer that consumed her being piece by piece. I spent a great deal of time in the water, surfing, sometimes just sitting out there beyond the cold lumpy breakers, clearing my mind in the zen rise and fall of the swell. On certain occasions, ladies would accompany me to the winter island and we'd hole up at my favorite port-o'-call, the Yacht Club. Angelic, they'd mother and smother me with exotic perfumes and gentle embraces, another sort of wave, energy spent on an internal beach, on the coastline of the soul, leaving me filled with life.

On Tuesday the police recovered the body of Scarlets oldest son, Gabe from the dunes between highway access five and six. In one final and absolute act of utter desparation, he parked his car along the side of the road, walked west out onto the wind tidal flat and committed suicide, choosing to take his own life, for reasons only he could comprehend.

I knew him well. During that same horrendous period of my life, after my Mom died and at the same time, my marriage fell apart, I moved to the Island and met Scarlet, her then husband Tom and their kids. Scarlet home schooled the kids and they were far advanced, well beyond the average in terms of education and understanding. Scarlet and the boys volunteered at the lab, keeping the aquaria spotless and gloriously stocked with a wide assortment of local sea critters that they collected during that warm and magic summer.

I was taking care of lots of things at the Lab, including keeping the computer network running. Back in ’95 it wasn’t an easy task, and lots of the equipment was crude by today’s standards. It was the heyday of the 486…. I had just enough computer savvy to get me in trouble. Gabe taught me to write web pages (a difficult task in those days, pre- Front Page), troubleshoot the system, teaching me the finer points of computer maintenance. He was 14, I was 40.

I worried over Gabe that summer. His dad was working out of town a lot of the time, and so I took him under wing, shuffling him outside, away from the nether-world of silicon and data transfer, to the real world of surf, sand and sea.

I tried to teach him how to surf, pushing him into endless waves, only to have him get pounded in the shorebreak, skinny legs flailing one direction, board whipping the other. He returned time and again to the take off spot, determined to slide down the wave. Other times we’d go out collecting sea creatures for the displays, and sometimes we’d just hang out on the beach. I tried to visualize what sort of person Gabe would become. After I left in the fall, I frequently worried over Gabe. He was an enigmatic child, fragile and different from the rest. Hyper intelligent, I knew that he’d never find a way to totally fit in with the mundane masses. There was an ineffable yearning in him to be accepted and loved, vulnerable and gossamer. The world doesn’t provide for that sort of need.

I returned to the western side of the valley for awhile, and moved out here about six yeas ago. During that time, Gabe had left. He lived with his dad for awhile, and I heard that he’d moved up to Austin after a time. I had also heard that he’d found a bit of trouble, and knew that it was his rudderless nature, his intelligence and youth, and I prayed that he’d find his way.

He returned to the island a while back, and one day appeared at the lab, sitting back in one of the big rooms like the old days, working on a defunct laptop, trying to repair some sort of esoteric mechanical problem. He hadn’t changed a bit. Just gotten older. I’d see him periodically, and was proud and content. It seemed he’d finally found his niche, he had learned the locksmithing trade, and in his brilliance invented all sorts of gadgets and methods to get locks unlocked. I’d see him around town, and we’d always talk, with the connection of time between us.

Yesterday, we all remembered Gabe at the Island Traders bookstore, one of his favorite spots on this earth. It was a bittersweet moment, and Gabe was the cement holding us all together. The gathering, like Gabe himself was a collection of eclectic people, from the remember Che Guevara crowd, to the middle aged like us, family and friend holding hands - sometimes crying sometimes laughing. The day was as brilliant as Gabe too, bluebird sky and light warm wind, soothing us all in our grief. Afterward, we boarded a boat, spreading a bit of his physical being in the cool waters of the Brazos Santiago Pass, along with Dr. Pepper, cigarettes and flowers- all things that he loved.

Then we remembered him in the past tense.

I crossed the causeway after it was all over, brooding about life and death, youth and age. I headed over to Le Menagerie along with CB and two of his friends who had known Gabes father, and attended the memorial. Firing up the 9.9, we untied the boat and motored slowly out past 17, where we raised the main, set the full genny, sailing quietly, lost to ourselves.

I looked up past the top of the mast, to the heavens and gave thanks for finally having found my place after more than 50 years of living.

A dolphin rolled to our starboard, and I gave thanks for the community that I've adopted, the community that's adopted me.

As the big sails fluttered lightly in the gentle breeze I silently gave thanks for knowing Gabe.

As the water slipped laughingly past the hull, gurgling and speaking of things long ago, I prayed for Scarlet, George and Tom, Seth and Heather and everyone who were touched by this tragedy.

I thought about all of my friends and family and gave thanks for them, they are the cement that holds this crazy life all together.

Diversity Training

2005-12-10T10:52:00.000-08:00

I received this email from a friend of mine the other day. I felt obligated to pass it along:

JW:

I DO hope you have enjoyed the enlightening and informative training video, "Diversity: Every Officer's Responsibility," that was filmed and produced by members of the San Francisco Police Department.

I especially like the part where the officer runs over a black female homeless person, who nonetheless is able to raise herself up post-flattening sufficiently to give the officer the finger.

In particular, I feel great empathy for the officer (now suspended) who stated, "This film is not offensive to minorities, women, homeless people or homosexuals. We didn't intend them to see the film..."

I am inspired to produce a similar film for our illustrious agency. I will call it, "Diversity: Fuck the White Man." There will be extensive footage of heterosexual white men, motivated by Clintonesque patriotism and politically-correct self-hatred, voluntarily resigning from their jobs to make room for under-represented Persons Of Color (POCS) and/or Persons Of Repugnant Preferences Of Intimate Sexual EcstacieS (PORPOISES). The film will also depict white men voluntarily cutting off their own organs of generation, to demonstrate their solidarity with the repressed People We Feel Sorry For and People We Feel Guilty About Having Previously Stomped On. Then the white men will allow themselves to be verbally, morally and physically abused, and finally, will voluntarily lay their unworthy necks across a rail of the Southern Pacific Railroad until a freight train comes along and chops off their heads, because they know that life should be fair and that they can't dance and have no right to exist.

Oh No....They're Back!

2005-11-19T23:56:00.000-08:00

It’s that time of the year again. The first cold fronts are pushing in and with it the snowbirds are returning in flocks. They come streaming in, driving great huge dullies pulling fifth wheels half the length of a normal Wal-Mart store, driving gaudily painted motorhomes the size of Air Force one, careening down the highway, a menace to innocent life and limb. Most of these overall clad, gimme hat weaing mid westerners spent the majority of their lives driving John Deere tractors in expansive prairie fields, terrorizing woodchucks and gophers, driving their new-every-year pickup trucks down to the mailbox to pick up their subsidy checks for not growing non-existent crops in the fine American farmer tradition. Getting rich off of the government tit, till eventually “retiring”, driving down to the Rio Grande Valley to be a pain in the ass to the local population. Jeezus, I’ll bet their children are glad to see them go every year. I’ve threatened the fuckers (and I’m not kidding)” that when I get old, I’m going to move up NORTH and be a goddamn pain in the ass”….

Most of them act like they’ve done something good for the world. They drive around with cutesy bumper stickers that say things like “Support the American Farmer”. Fuck you. Goddamn subsidy whores.

And they all know everything there is to know about our home. Where to get the best deals, how to “jew down them meskins over in Progreso”, where the cheapest this and that is. And the fuckers have the attitude that we just won’t make it without them, if they ever stop coming here. Screw you. We did just fine before you came here, and we’ll do just fine when you find some other cheap ass part of the world to go to and be a shitheap in. And everything’s better “back home”. Well…..fuck you again…I say, go back home then.

They pull their goddamn RV’s for six months at a time into old fart RV parks that are empty the rest of the year…just dusty cement pads waiting for the viejitos to come back with their mobile monstrosities, waiting for them to plant yard signs out front that read; “The Edelmyers / Elmer and Eunice”, “God Bless this Winnebago / Bob and Betty Niemenstrudel” and various other wellkomen crap.

No, I’m serious. Each year they get worse. Or maybe it’s just me…my tolerance level is getting less and less.

I attended a meeting last week, a winter Texan meeting, and listened to them bitch about things for the better part of an hour. Terminally unhappy people, truly concerned with only one thing: themselves. I wanted to tell them the story, wanted to shame them by making them aware of how little they really know, how truly meaningless and pathetic their lives really were. I’ll bet they couldn’t even begin to tell how they got here…how it all began. They just blindly migrate, as if by instinct, no more intelligent than the sparrow, and a whole lot less visually pleasing.

But they come here just like my grandparents did, from the Midwest. Now they don’t come following the lure of cheap land and a 365 day growing season, riding the SLB&M through the King Ranch, in a Pullman car with the shades pulled down so they wouldn’t see the barren monte, in the middle of a moonlit night, to be shuttled, sleepily to a “tourist house”, only to awaken on a warm winter morning, thinking of “back home” where snow was piled high, wondrous at the smell of orange blossom and the sound of exotic peacocks screaming and fanning along the fountain lined gardens…the winter gardens. Greedily snatching up land that was snatched from the locals in a variety of methods.

My favorite method was incorporated when A.Y. Baker was running Hidalgo county. He’d post the tax rolls on the courthouse door and then only open the door from something like two to four in the afternoon so that folks could see how much they owed. Hell, old Eulalio out on El Rancho Pequeno couldn’t even read or write in Spanish, let alone English, and for damned sure didn’t have any idea that the gringos were stacking the deck against him. He only knew how to work cattle, and that the land had been passed on to him from his ancestors, land that had been originally awarded to them back in the 1700’s by the King of Spain as a procione, for their settling this malaria and mosquito infested section of the river. Land that had withstood almost two hundred years of turmoil, the Mexican American war, protected by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, only to be lost in the early twentieth century to unscrupulous mid western carpetbagger speculators with a vision to turn the Rio Grande Delta into their own personal mecca. And don’t think the poor “land seekers”, other mid westerners like my own ancestors didn’t escape the carpetbaggers tricks either. Some of the speculators went to jail for selling the same parcel again and again, and even when there was clear title, it was a living summer hell to try and irrigate the desert in the blazing hundred plus degree days. Dennis Bangs Chapin, the County Judge and speculator who was involved in the great Hidalgo County Courthouse heist was indicted for murdering an irate land seeker up in San Antonio, one whom had been sold land that had been sold to another. Chapins’ namesake townsite was changed from “Chapin” to Edinburg” in 1912 for that reason, the settlers just couldn’t abide a murderers name on their town. Not that I blame them.

The land seekers, the first midwesterners finally managed to carve out this fetid section of river, and by the 1960’s, when I was a kid, their children were migrating down here in the winters. We called ‘em “tourists” and “snowbirds” (I still do), and they’d usually stay with their kinfolk here, a few brought early airstreams and other trailers to set up out on the farms or along old 83 where the hub of city life was at the time. Mostly they were an innocuous bunch, kept pretty much to themselves. I remember them, but only vaguely. The didn’t swell our population, and clog our roads like putrid cholesterol in the arteries of this place, like they do today.

Now it’s subsequent generations, who no longer have the attachment that the early snowbirds did. Generations removed from the early ties. Our farm fields, citrus orchards and ranches have been converted to mobile home parks, and many businesses have sprung up to cater to these people. Now they’re too busy worrying about themselves to take the time and learn who we really are, maybe lend a helping hand to one of the poorest, least educated areas of the country, a true third world. I wanted to tell them that we’re survivors, and that their measly, pinche annual contribution to our economy could be done without.

If these people REALLY knew all there was to know about this place, they’d know what the names meant, names like Donna, Winter Gardens, Edcouch and Elsa, Weslaco, Sharyland, Pharr and others. I guess they’re too busy trying to figure out how to jew down them meskins over in Progreso though.

South Texas Fall

2005-10-23T20:35:00.000-07:00

Le Menagerie waiting on the change of seasons

Trailerfest

2005-10-22T15:38:00.000-07:00

Last week was Bikefest, an annual event on the Island where yuppies from all over with too much disposable income trailer their high end, mostly Harley scooters down here and act naughty for a few days, before returning to points north like Dallas, Houston and San Antonio to resume their comfortable three bedroom, two point five kids, nine to five lives as investment counselors, bankers, lawyers and other assorted boring corporate thieves.

The men don leather vests, adorned with many stainless steel chains, baubles and other assorted goodies that they think make them look tough and macho, and the women go braless, or worse yet, wear faux leather (wouldn’t want to offend the PETA members out there). Mostly they cruise up and down Padre Boulevard, a distance of something like three miles, trying to look and sound cool. They go from bar to bar drinking heavily, drinking many pina coladas and manhattans, and for the adventurous, straight shots of rot gut Jose Cuervo tequila. If they get especially lucky maybe their pre-menopausal wives will even lay a bit of pussy on them when they go back to their digs at the Sheraton, Raddison or other condos and hotels which generally are booked to capacity for the event.

The silliest thing I saw during the entire episode was a guy in shorts and Birkenstock sandals riding a fully dressed Road King. I was looking for a bumper sticker strategically placed on his fender that said something like “Visualize World Peace”, or maybe “Keep Austin Weird”.

Most of these ignorant fucks don’t even ride a bike, except on weekends, when the weather is just right….for them it’s a status symbol thing- something to take the place, or be added in addition to their Lexus’, Rolex Oyster Perpetual watches, Armani suits and Louis Vitton purses. Each bike polished to a showroom glitter, right down to the slick tire treatment. Heavy graphics on the tank and fenders, a gazillion dollars worth of chrome and steel. Trailer them to, and trailer them from the event in air conditioned “Wells Cargo” trailers.

The majority of “rally attendees” shouldn’t even attempt to ride iron of this size; instead they should stick to mopeds and little Vespa scooters.

We were staying in the Miramar, hoping to close on a house, so I was keeping the Shadow out in front, under a cover to keep the corrosive night air off of the thing. It’s hard enough to keep it clean and corrosion free when you ride everyday as transportation, and I had to leave it outside the front of the lab, exposed to the sun, sand and salt. All week long people were slowly populating the place as the frenzy of trailerfest got underway. The Miramar went from being a ghost hotel to a fully loaded parking lot for bikes, trailers and designer harleywear yuppies.

On Saturday night we decided to go and check out the Bongo Dogs who were playing one last time down at the Wanna-Wanna. I didn’t want to leave the Shadow parked at the Miramar, with all of the stupidly riding yuppies adjacent to us, so I decided to ride down to the bar, take my chances there. Due to some logistic problems, there was no one to watch the twins, so we decided to take them along with us, D and the girls took the jeep.

The Wanna-Wanna was rocking pretty good, and there were lots of yuppies in glittery steel and leather talking trash and trying to look mean. It was about ninety degrees, so leather is the first thing that gets peeled off when I get done riding. Not so with these folks, it's like a uniform. A sea of writhing sweating zeros some still even wearing their half gloves, cultched tightly around drinks in styrofoam cups, eyeing the vacuous women in halter tops, nipples erect in the hot evening air, excited by the thought of getting banged by someone that's not.

We ran into the Gib and his girlfriend out alongside the joint in the sand, and drank a few rums, and listened to the band from a picnic table in the sand on the beach, watching the show within. Later we migrated under the palapa as the drunken yuppies began to vacate, having had their fill of frozen margaritas and gin and tonics. The girls danced, with tambourines in hand to the approval of Joey Tamayo et al, and after many rumbalibres myself, I even got out on the dance floor, scooting my new big black boots along the floor to the salsa beat of tunes like Cuando la Luna and Aya por Aya. A good time was had by all, and by around twelve fortyfive the Dogs had ceased, and we prepared to go home.

D and the girls loaded up and headed for the house, and I started the Shadow, swinging my leg over the familiar saddle, heading off south down Gulf Boulevard, just enjoying the night air and the soft rumble of the engine. About halfway to the turn, two big old hogs with yuppy riders, complete with “old ladies” on the back blew a stopsign right in front of me, and careened out onto the road. I locked up both brakes, fishtailing for about thirty feet or so. As I swerved around them, I raised the single finger salute and muttered “fucking idiots”. It doesn't bother me if they want to crash their bikes by being stupid....but don't take me out.

The next day, early, before these same sort of jerkoffs were out on the road, I rode the Shadow over here to LV and put it in the garage, where it remained all week while we moved in. I had no desire to mingle with a bunch of wannabes.

On Thursday, long after the last of them left, I fired up the bike, and went for a cruise down the back road, 511. Approaching the bridge over the Resaca at Bayview, I passed a Sporty tooling along from the other direction, a guy with a woman on back. We both saluted, the salute of respect this time.

I’m sure he was glad they were gone too. The road belongs to us again.

Another Clarc-Nap Piece O' Crap

2005-10-04T17:02:00.000-07:00

We owned a 1994 Dodge grand caravan which we bought for something like 7500 dollars back in 2000. It was a blue tonk rocket, possessed by the devil. The van was a grand piece of shit from the day we bought it and I should have had my head examined for buying it, but self flagellation does no good now, after the fact.

We had been looking for a van for awhile. D owned a reliable Toyota Corolla when we got married, and we drove it effortlessly, with no problems for hundreds of thousands of miles, until some jerkoff insisted on backing over the hood with his F-350, crushing it like a peanut under the heel of a size 12 boot. We had a Dodge Dakota, which had been my truck, but that’s another story.

Anyway, we figured we needed a van because we had been thinking about taking people on “eco-tours” of the area. That was before we knew what sort of people frequented “eco-tours”. You know the type I’m talking about. Birkenstock wearing, spinach salad eating, Perrier drinking yuppies, with lots of disposable income….unless you happen to be a tour operator. Then they could really give a shit. They always complain that they “paid too much and got too little”, as they look down their thin aquiline Anglo-Saxon noses at you like you’re some sort of servant boy son-of-a-bitch. Maybe throw a little largesse your way before they ride off into the sunset searching for more fun.

I hate used car salesmen too. The fuckers start pushing you right away, as soon as you step on the lot. Like sharks in the water in a frenzy over fresh meat and blood, they broadside you with a smooth line of crap devised to get you to buy a worthless piece of crap, so they can get their daily commission. Lord, give us this day, our daily commish…Fast talking shitpumps, I’m sure there’s a special place in hell for them too. Maybe it’s to be doomed to forever wander the earth, going from used car lot to used car lot, possessing vehicles like that Dodge Caravan, a used car poltergeist, causing the poor bastard buyer years of torture and anguish.

I know better now.

The sansabelt clad, penny loafer wearing, greasebag used car salesman assured us that the vehicle was a 1995, and after a short test drive we decided to buy it. When we started the paperwork though, we discovered that the goddamn thing was NOT a 1995 blue piece of shit van…it was a 1994 blue piece of shit van. The bank had already loaned us the money, so in order to just get on with the whole thing, I insisted that the dealership, Another Clarc-Nap Piece O’ Crap, give us a bumper to bumper, one year warranty. And it was a goddamn good thing I did.

As soon as we brought the blue demon home, we started having trouble with it. First, the front end started making weird noises, clattery ominous noises anytime you went over a bump, like the whole transaxle was going to fall out. We had to take it to a mechanic one cold and rainy night to have the CV joints replaced, an act that caused the dealership to gnash their teeth and threaten not to pay for. This didn't make a bit of difference, the friggin’ thing just kept making more and more noise. Finally, the entire transaxle disintegrated and was changed out, then the noises finally stopped.

Sonn afterward, it started having random starting and idling problems, and would die at intersections when the temperature was hot, not to be coaxed back to life. And when isn’t the temperature hot around here? It took about three months in the shop for them to figure out that it was some sort of computer module. By this time I was getting pretty sick of the van, and of the sleazy dealership, Another Clarc-Nap Piece O’ Crap, whose solution to the whole thing was to sell us another, more expensive Clarc-Nap Piece O’ Crap, so in disgust I just decide that we’d keep the wicked thing. What else could I do? We were already well into the first year of payments, and I figured that we were stuck with this lemon. For the remainder of the year though, I drove around with a sign in the back window that said: “Another Clarc-Nap Piece O’ Crap”.

Then the warranty ran out.

Just about that time, the sliding door started to fall off at certain times when you opened it up. The track had rotted out at the back end, allowing the front roller on the door to fall through, sending that big heavy bastard slamming into the ground. Then the rear hatch gas struts broke off, and the rear door wouldn’t open up anymore. And then, I got so mad at the damn thing one day, that I slammed the drivers door hard, and the hinges broke, so I shut it, never to be opened again.

Perhaps one of the most excruciating experiences was the serpentine drive belt. It’s a belt about ten feet in diameter, that snakes sinuously around nine pulleys and accessories, driving everything, including the water pump, flywheel, alternator, power steering pump, air conditioning compressor, smog control pump and other things that run with indistinct and occult operations, keeping them all alive and functioning. Around about half of its path, there is little room to even get a finger wedged between the pulleys and the radiator. And it took a fucking schematic to even begin to figure out which pulleys it went over, and which pulleys it went under. If that belt ever comes off, God help you. The vehicle has about ten minutes before everything shuts down.

Whenever water splashed up from below, the serpentine belt would fly off, leaving you just enough time to find the nearest parking lot, or hopefully the nearest taller-mechanico to charge you ten bucks to put it back on. Because if you had to put it back on yourself, oh my god, what a giant nightmare.

We lost the serpentine belt no less than a dozen times over the course of our wretched ownership of the Clarc-Nap Piece O’ Crap blue van. The most memorable occasion was on the way to Brownsville when an unexpected, sudden turd floater came pouring down. Immediately, and without warning we found ourselves driving through water up to the axles on the tonk rocket. I was praying and cursing at the same time, creeping ahead slowly, hoping to find a place to pull over until the rain stopped and the water receded and dried up a bit when, pow-thud!, the fucking belt disengaged. No power steering, no alternator, no nothing, just a limited amount of time to find a pull over. We finally found a spot in the parking lot of a “Dollar General” store which had become an island, and I set about the task of reinstalling the belt. After about an hour or so, with black grease all the way to my elbows, and everyone around me learning new and unusual curse words and phrases, I finally managed to get the evil belt back on the pulleys, and somehow we managed to clear out of there, miraculously making it home, where I promptly passed out on the sofa with a beer in greasy hand, still mumbling vague and phantom curses at the blue Clarc-Nap Piece O’ Crap van.

One day, I went to open the hood to check the oil, and the hood latch handle pulled off, the wire just broke, right at the root. So now I had to open up the hood with a pair of needle nosed pliers and a screwdriver, applied just so between the grill and the hood.

Another time the muffler fell off, and I wired it back up with a piece of a coat hanger till I could get home and tig weld the bracket. Soon, the interior began to fall apart too, with random pieces of the dashboard coming loose to ultimately be lost in the vortex of items and other parts, tubes, hoses and belts that we abandoned inside. I had fixed many problems, tig welded the broken door track so that it now worked (somewhat), and even used a broomstick to hold up the rear hatch (because it was impossible to remove the broken pneumatic struts without further damaging the hatch). But every time I chased one problem down, two more would rear their ugly heads. The air conditioner quit, the jump seat broke off, the rear quarter panel fell off…it was a litany of never ending breakdowns and breakoffs. The most recent was the sliding door, a problem which had reappeared in a slightly different form, again. Although it now stayed on the track, it had developed a penchant for tripping the latch, causing it to not shut properly. Each time it pulled this trick, we had to use a screwdriver to pop the latch back open, gently re-shutting the door, holding our breath until we heard the faint telltale click that indicated the door was properly secured.

The final straw came when Kelani broke her arm, and we were rushing her to the hospital. At the emergency room, I swung the sliding door open, and D hurried her inside. Sure enough, when I went to close the sliding door there in the emergency room unloading zone, the damn thing wouldn’t latch. In frustration, I pried up the latch mechanism, and rammed it shut. The door stuck as if welded in place, never to be opened again.

We finally paid off the Clarc-Nap Piece O’ Crap blue tonk-rocket dodge grand caravan van, and by then, I figured we’d have a helluva hard time selling it, and probably wouldn’t get more than about a hundred dollars trade in value on it, so perversely, I decided to drive the shit out of it until it died, and then maybe just push it unceremoniously into the bay. It certainly didn’t deserve a proper burial.

So, for the remainder of the time that we owned the Clarc-Nap Piece O’ Crap, we all had to pile in and out of the passenger door, a sight I imagine was a bit more than amusing to most folks. I could just hear the comments; “Hey Elvira…did you see those hillbillies in that blue tonk rocket? They all got out of the passenger door! What a piece of shit.”

By now, the van had decided that it wouldn’t simply just die; no it decided that instead, it would just fall apart until nothing was left. That’s when we decided to buy the jeep and I thankfully parked Another Clarc-Nap Piece O’ Crap, hoping that it would just rot away. Soon the tires were flat, and the van was covered in a fine haze of salt spray and sand, out in front of our beach house. Periodically I would start it up, air up the tires and drive around, hoping it would die in front of some rich yuppies house, where I could strip all of the ID off of it and let it become someone else’s problem. No such luck.

We just sold the Clarc-Nap Piece O’ Crap about six months ago. We got something like 500 bucks for it. We told the guy all of the problems, but he seemed glad to have it, and I sure as hell was glad to see the thing go.

I did hold my breath though, as he was driving off. The sky was heavy with low clouds, and the first sprinkles of rain were spitting from the steely gray. I hoped that he wouldn’t hit any puddles on the causeway.

Word Verification

2005-09-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

NOTICE:
I just found out about WORD VERIFICATION for comments. I enabled it. So, if you want to leave me a comment, you'll have to go through this small inconvenience of copying a few letters in order to verify that yes, you really are a human being. It's the only way that I can cut out the annoying blog spam that I've been getting recently
Thanks for your patience,

Le Menagerie

CAUTION BLOG SPAMMERS

2005-09-27T15:01:00.000-07:00

CAUTION BLOG SPAMMERS
I am not going to tolerate blog spam any longer. I don't care about Lesbian dating services or Internet Opportunities to get Paid to Shop.

From now on, I am going to trace any blog spam back to its source and find out who you are and come over there and kick your arse, destroy your servers and put the shoes to your CPU's.

Understand?

Thank you for Complying
Sincerely,

The Management

Motorcycle Memories

2005-09-27T13:19:00.000-07:00

I was just outside in the garage, working in the afternoon heat with Gib. I was splicing some anchor lines for the boats, and he was fiddling with the carburetor off of one of the four wheelers, trying to get the thing to run. Bored with the task at hand, and insane with the oven like temperatures inside of the garage, it wasn’t too long before we drifted outside into the hellishly hot, red tide air day to take a look at our scooters, glossy black paint and chrome gleaming in the midday sun. I started thinking about bikes I've owned and loved.

It takes another biker to understand.

During the 1970’s I was stationed up in Kodiak Alaska at the Coast Guard Air Station. In those days, there was always a down and out cutthroat war between the officers and enlisted men …I think that in todays military where everyone is in there on a volunteer basis, the distinction between ranks is one of mutual respect and benevolence. During my incarceration in the military, which were the days of the draftee, officers were thought of as “zeros” and fair game for just about anything. We were barely past the days of fragging. There were no scruples…no honor, only abject warfare between the hierarchy and serfdom, a sense of eat or be eaten.

One time we streaked the officers club in the middle of their sit-down dinner time, penis’ painted red; ballsacks, painted white and blue. Just hauled ass through there, with paper bags masking our faces, genitalia flopping about, laughing insanely. It made the base newspapers, and I’m sure, more than one officers wifes’ evening.

My first bike was a little Honda 125 two stroke machine, custom made for zipping around the dirt roads and trails that crisscrossed Kodiak Island. My friend Martin did a lot of work on it, porting the cylinder and tweaking the carb so that it would get maximum wheelies. Then I got a DT-250 Yamaha, a much more powerful machine, and did much the same to it. I bought it fairly cheap because the previous owner had gotten the gas tank stolen by leaving it alongside the hangers where it was fair game to marauding thieves, among who were just about all of us. We ported and polished the exhaust and intake ports, sleeved and put in a new piston and rings, and bolted on a new exhaust...essential items necessary to make it stand on it's back wheel for a block or two.

Finally the time came to get the bike out there on the road and trails. I had a slight problem though, having neglected to order a fuel tank for my machine. Kodiak was, and is an island far out in nowhere, I would have had to order a new fuel tank, and that would’ve taken weeks to arrive via SeaLand. I was impatient.

In the dark and dusty recessed spaces of the hanger, sat stored until spring, a few bikes belonging to officers who thought that they might be safe from predation there. Not so. One of my friends spied a dust covered DT-250, the same vintage as mine, back among the piles of caribou antlers and spare lifejackets. It appeared to be a neglected and homeless machine, one prime for the recycling of clandestine parts. He suggested that I promptly remove the offending part, preferably in the middle of the night, and claim it as mine. I took his suggestion, it was fair game. Late one night, I carefully lifted the tank from the frame, stuffed it into a small duffle bag and smuggled it out of the hanger. Oh, consider the job done.

Over the course of the next several days, I stripped off the glaring purple paint , and primed and painted my new prize a beautiful electric yellow color. I installed it on the bike and went riding, proud of my accomplishment. Kodiak goes from the drearies of winter to the drearies of spring in a season almost unnoticable. The bears wake up and look around for the summer salmon run, and devils club and fidddlehead ferns pop out of brown barren hillsides, heralding the arrival of spring and all of its attendant mud, the time to haul out and dust off motorcycles, neglected during the long winter months.

It was late May, and the weather was improving. Everyone was starting to get out there. Everyone including the owner of the other Yamaha.

One evening he hauled the bike out of the hanger, and went blasting down to the officers club for happy hour. On the way back, the bike ran out of gas, having operated all the way down there and half the way back on a thimbleful of gasoline in the carb. As he was fiddling around with it, wondering why it didn't run…he noticed, yes, just noticed that the gas tank was missing. Jesus God, what a dumbass. And this guy was a C-130 pilot too....I couldn’t imagine taking off on my scooter and not noticing that the friggin’ fuel tank was missing. Forlornly, and I imagine more than a bit pissed off, he pushed the thing back to the hanger and back into the dark corner. The story made the rounds.

By this time I had come down with an extreme case of the guilts, hell, I’m not a thief, and was not raised to be one. The whole time I felt guilty and dirty, so I decided to return the fuel tank. One night I crept down there late and put the bright yellow tank back on.

The pilot who owned the Yamaha later told his friends; “yea, the goddamnest thing happened. I went down there to install the new tank that I bought for my bike (an oversized 2.5 gallon plastic one), and noticed that a new metal tank was back on my frame….Not the old purple one...a NEW yellow tank!!” he announced gleefully. And then somewhat glumly he added; “What am I gonna do with this plastic one?”

When I found that out, I contacted him and played stupid, and offered to buy it. I told him I was looking for a bigger tank for my Yamaha so that I wouldn’t have to refuel on the way out to Saltery Cove. He sold it to me for something like thirty bucks.

I kept that bike for about two more years, never even thinking about swiping another part, and always thankful that my somewhat compromised conscience made me (at least try) and right that wrong.

I made the mistake of leaving it outside the hanger though, when I had to fly down to Honolulu for four days, and some jerkoff stole the carburetor.

I never got THAT back.

2005-09-26T06:54:00.000-07:00

Salvaging food for his family?

Martin Looter King Day

2005-09-26T06:47:00.000-07:00

At the risk of pissing some of you off, especially if you don't live in a large metropolitan area with this sort of problem, I feel obligated to pass this story along, because it represents a fundemental ill in our society, one that we are all responsible for by not holding the gum'ment accountable. Our taxes fund countless billions of social programs designed to lift people from poverty. But, as we all know, most of these problems are hand outs, not hand-ups. Hand outs are a powerful drug, as addictive as heroin, with the consequences of that addiction the loss of self respect and motivation.

My friend Sean lives up in Pasadena Texas and had to bug out for the most recent chubasco, hurricane Rita which was taking full aim at Houston, until a series of last minute joggles put it on the Texas-Louisiana border. Sean makes about the best surfboards that I’ve ever seen, and spends a lot of time between his home in Texas and his adopted home on the beaches of western Mexico, chasing the fabled swell. In between we talk a lot, and sometimes he and his lovely girlfriend Michelle even find time to come down here and visit.

Sean called from Spring Texas where they had gone for refuge during the great big evacuation of Houston last week. He said it wasn’t too bad to get there, except for a few spots, because they had taken the back roads. The worst spots were going through the ghettos he said. There, the people appeared unconcerned, and were even standing around drinking “40’s” like it was some kind of party with no consequences. At one point he said a young girl of about sixteen rode her bike right into the middle of the street and handed a package to another girl who in turn, handed her a wad of bills. A drug deal in the middle of the street, because all of the cops were preoccupied. Life as usual as the big storm approached. It was his conjecture that much the same had happened in New Orleans. And the harsh reality was that people died, and who was really to blame? Was it the government, or some infrastructural snafu that didn’t take care of the poor because they were oppressed minorities, or was the system simply overwhelmed with the stupidity and arrogance of people who have been used to being handed things for so long that they simply no longer can even think for themselves ? People who didn't care if they could get out or not. People who waited for the government to take care of them.

Sean returned home yesterday, to find his house still standing, although it sustained a bit of damage that he'll have to work at to repair this week. He called me to tell me some hurricane stories.

He told me a story about what really happened up there in Houston. It seems that the media has been covering things up in order to play down a problem that is much bigger than either Katrina or Rita themselves. He told me about a friend of his whose mother was evacuating by car prior to the storm. Unfortunately, she had not had the opportunity to fill her tank with gas prior to leaving, and found herself in much the same situation as Sean did as she was traveling through the backroads on her way out of Houston in order to avoid the massive traffic jams.

Running low on gas, she turned into a convenience store in the middle of one of Houstons ghettos, and found the store to be abandoned, but taken over by looters. Yes looters. These people were helping themselves to freebies even before the storm hit. I thought about the recent political controversy in New Orleans, the media firestorm comparing a picture of a white guy getting some food, labeled something like “man salvages food to feed family”, and a photo of a bunch of true looters, blacks, stealing TV’s and other “essentials”, and the outrage it inspired in my liberal friends.

Sean went on to tell me that somehow, the looters had found a way to turn on the gas pumps, but were only dispensing gasoline to other blacks. The end result was that his friends mother had to travel on, at the risk of running out of fuel until she was finally able to find a station somewhere in a civilized area.

So I worry today about things like this. I worry about them much more than natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods. The fabric of America is rotten, and we’re more concerned with rebuilding the buildings that house it. I see in the not to distant future, a country thrown into chaos by our own notion of survival of the weakest, the lowering of the common denominator, the guilt over things of long ago that has led us to oppress folks by making every opportunity available to them without the necessity of having to work for it, an oppression that’s enslaved them to the government.

Now, can someone tell me what a “tonk rocket” is?.......

2005-09-23T10:38:00.000-07:00

Where does he go?

The Osprey on the Post

2005-09-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

This morning as I was riding to work, I passed by the large intertidal area just south of the Causeway. It is an area filled with mangroves and salt loving plants with exotic sounding names like Salicornia, Borrichia and Batis. The wind was from the northwest, and there was a feeling of something in the air. Further west the bay glimmered sparkling blue as little whitecaps began to form on its otherwise placid and expressionless surface.

I ride this way almost everyday. During times of big tides, when the water laps around the prop roots of the mangroves, tiny shorebirds; plovers, killdeer and Dunlin forage along the margins of the wetlands while secretive night heron peer from behind the foliage, oblivious to the traffic speeding over the bridge, on the ribbon of blacktop, well on their way to another day of work, people just filling in time before they die.

I always pass the “for sale” sign planted out there, advertising this acreage as prime real estate, and to contact so-and-so reality company for more information. Someday probably, someone will buy this piece of land. They’ll fight and wrestle with the various agencies who administer the regulations which make it difficult for any self respecting developer to “improve” this wetland he now owns, and if and when they finally get their appropriate permits, gleaming buildings will rise up out of the primordial muck, like giant excavated fiddler crab burrows and docks and piers will jut defiantly out into the bay and the developers, investors, buyers and town fathers will all grin a smug self satisfied grin, satisfied in the knowledge that they have “improved” this formerly worthless piece of real estate.

Today I saw an Osprey sitting on an old broken post in a clearing in the middle of the mangroves, watching the water which had inundated the area because of a recent storm far up the coast, watching for mullet or other small fish to prey on. I see this same bird often, sitting on his perch. This is his sanctuary, his kitchen, dining and living room. When the “improvements” inevitably come, he’ll simply fly off and occupy another space, until that one inevitably gets improved, until inevitably, there are few sanctuaries left, and those that do remain will be far back in areas that are worthless pieces of real estate, waiting patiently for the chance to someday be “improved”.

Undoubtedly it will be an area filled with Mangroves and plants with exotic sounding names like Salicornia, Borrichia and Batis. Little plovers, killdeer and dunlin will work along the shoreline, bills bobbing and dipping, foraging like miniature sewing machines, and night herons will peer secretively through the foliage at the whole scene, oblivious to the relentless march of civilization.

2005-09-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

Chris' Flying Fish

Chris' Canoe, Part Two

2005-09-22T13:13:00.000-07:00

I got this picture from my friend Chris. He finally launched his canoe after about eight or nine years of working on it. Launched it up in central Texas in the Hill country, on the Guadalupe River.

He called and told me that everywhere he went, people asked him; “Where did you get that boat? and “Did you build it yerself?” and inevitably also “….yer not gonna put it in this river are ya?”. You see, the rivers up there are shallow and full of rocks, sharp rocks which could produce gashes of monumental proportion on a fine wooden craft like that. Up there people only float plastic boats, and they all have the deep scars and gouges to prove it. But Chris remained undeterred. He was gonna put that boat through its paces, see what it could do. It’s his boat, and torpedoes be damned…full speed ahead! The Texas Hill Country is a fine place to christen a canoe no matter what. It is an especially fitting place to take a boat like this, a craft that is more a work of art than a vessel. I can imagine the sight of the boat framed by tall cypress and oak lining a river gurgling an inviting melody, the air redolent with the incense of cedar and moss, in the hot Texas day, a canopy of blue overhead. I'm sure it was a joy that made the tedium of construction all worth it.

The years that Chris lovingly studied the plans, worked the fragile wood, and assembled the craft with all the hope and care required a place as special as the hills and the crystal clear cold streams to bring it to life.

My friend Rene and I always get a kick out of Chris' single minded dedication, his attention to some inner song that no one but he can hear. The results are things like large areas of once scarred and abused land supporting lush vegetation and life, masses of unconnected people working together to share a common vision, and things like his canoe. Chris has the training of a botanist and the heart of an artist.

So he told me “I first put the canoe in Town Lake, in Austin, and it tracked as straight and true as you could imagine, turning heads wherever we silently paddled through the water”. “Later I put it in the river and floated downstream…in some places, in the whitewater, I could hear the hull scraping against the rock, and it made me cringe”. “We portaged it a few places, and even the canoe hauler was worried that I might fuck up my new boat.” “ So what, I built it and I could fix it”. “But…. there’s nothing like the sound of wood against rock”. When he took it out of the water and put it back on the roof of his car he noticed that there was not much damage, because he had used epoxy for a final coat, and the damage was in the epoxy layer, cutting down into the mat…not the beautiful wood that he used to create the planks.

Chris’ Dad was a sailor and a man of the water. The stories he tells me, tell me of a man who loved the sea, lakes and rivers, a man drawn to the liquid element. Chris’ Dad died when he was young, but I know that he would be proud of him today, on the day he launched his boat, on the day that he took the tiller of Le Menagerie and felt the power of the wind. Chris’ Dad died when he was young, when he needed him the most, it is a lifelong heartbreak and a cruel fate for a child. I always feel his loss, and know that deep inside he’s trying to please the man, somewhere far out there in the stars. Maybe that’s why Chris is so dear to our family, he understands that value, and is reciprocal to it. He’s learning to be a sailor, has constructed his very own boat, and is listening to the sirens song of the water. It is something that runs in him and through him…not so much now to please his father, but because…that is who he is.

The genetics that rumble along inside of him were given to him by the man, and now they’re being nurtured and developed, with a life of their own – and somewhere out there in the stars his father smiles.

He called me last night with a few questions about putting on another layer of epoxy over the sanded one, to fill in the gouges and dings. He’ll be bringing it over to the bay soon to chase the fall fish, and I can’t wait to go for a ride with him.

Mr. Rod

2005-09-15T11:20:00.000-07:00

My final duty station when I was in the military was at the Hale Boggs Federal Building in New Orleans Louisiana, the eighth Coast Guard District Office, somewhere high above the City.

I was flying a desk. Processing travel and flight orders.

My direct supervisor was a civil service employee, Mr. Rodriguez. Mr. Rod was a coonass, a true Louisiana Cajun, and as cynical and crusty as they come. I had just arrived from Alaska, with a fine ghostly pallor from not having seen any prolonged sunshine for almost three years, and New Orleans was culture shock. The City was a unctuous caldron of humanity, oddball history and poverty bound together by the oppressive swamp humidity, each lung full of air redolent with the odor of gasoline, automobile exhaust and moldering buildings was excruciatingly painful, as the body struggled to assimilate it into its own depths.

I had been busted just before transferring and reduced two pay grades, and money was tight. Stupid adolescent behavior. I lived in ancient quarters with no air conditioning just outside the Vieux Carre, so working in a climate controlled office was almost like a reward. To pass the time, I practiced pen and ink sketching, and it wasn’t too long before some of my work caught the attention of Mr. Rod, who asked if I would do an eight by twelve pen and ink of an eagle sitting on the limb of a tree. No problem. Mr. Rod was pretty benevolent to me, even before that, so with gratitude I got to work. The day came when the drawing was finished, and I presented it to Mr. Rod unceremoniously one morning before work. His eyes grew wide, and he asked me how much I wanted. I refused, hell, it was just some spare time anyhow, and I figured that it would always be remembered.

That day, at lunch, Mr Rod asked me if I had ever tried a muffalata sandwich before? I didn’t even know what that was, and he said “just follow me”. We walked outside into the blazing heat of the mid day, and over to the French Quarter, Decatur Street, to a store called the Central Grocery, where he ordered two muffalata sandwiches. The woman behind the counter split the round buns, piled them high with meat, cheese and a curious looking green dressing, wrapped them up in wax paper and put them into a paper bag. We walked over to Jackson Square, and sat down on ancient iron benches, and I enjoyed for the first time a muffalata and a Barqs root beer, digesting that wonderful sandwich along with the flavor of the French Quarter in springtime. In the following days Mr. Rod took me to places like Antoines, Furdys and Galatoires for epic lunches, and quick street meals, always reveling in showing a newcomer how good the food was in the City, always giving a bit of history as if throwing largasse from floats during Mardi gras.

It wasn’t long before the sitting eagle, now framed and hanging on one of Mr. Rod’s office walls began to get the attention of other civil service employees on the floor where I worked. So I began to trade artwork for food. Wonderful New Orleans food. One big black woman, kindly took me under her wing, and each Monday would bring me a generous portion of red beans and rice, on special days, jambalaya, gumbo and etouffee. Everyone treated me with kindness and respect, adopting me into that strange gris-gris of Nawlins culture. I learned to eat crawfish (mudbugs) the right way, sucking the pungent juice from the head, gorged on oysters, drank countless hurricanes and juleps, all accompanied by the hypnotic, chaotic jazz that was everywhere in the quarter.

All the while, I did more and more artwork at the eighth Coast Guard District, sometimes for civilians, sometimes for the other Coasties. I did party invitations for the Vice Admiral. I worked by request and suggestion, never charging, knowing that maybe I was going to leave behind something good in New Orleans.

Soon the day for my discharge came. I had made no secret that I just wanted to be a civilian again. During my final week, I was called into the main mans office, the eighth district admiral. I thought maybe I had done something wrong, but he kindly gestured for me to sit down across from a small coffee table in his outer office, as he took a chair directly across from me. He began with; “I’m going to dispense with the re-up talk, because I know that you just want to be a civilian again”. I nodded. He went on; “I don’t know why they had a problem with you in Kodiak, and frankly, I don't care. Here we’ve enjoyed having you aboard, and as a small token of our gratitude….”. He produced two roof slates off of the ancient French Quarter buildings, upon which were decoupaged street scenes of old New Orleans, and handed them to me. “We wanted you to have these”. I was caught by surprise, and could feel pride welling up inside, I knew these were treasures to hold onto. I don’t remember much of the rest of that conversation, other than there was a feeling of warmth and respect between two very different people and ages.

In the ensuing years, most of the artifacts of my life have been lost, carelessly strewn like so much flotsam and jetsam on the beaches of time, but one of those tiles still follows me around as a reminder of my time in New Orleans. I worry each time we move that it might somehow get broken or left behind.

I made gumbo the other night, something that felt strange and yet familiar in light of all of the recent tragedy there in New Orleans. In it’s essence, I remembered my time in the French Quarter, my friends at the Hale Boggs Federal building, and most of all, the experience that was New Orleans, the experience that was the food. I have never lived in another place where food attained a status as holy as there.

Mr. Rod and many of the others are probably long gone, long before Katrina wrought her wrath on that place, because they were old even then. Somewhere out there in the stars though, they watch us and smile each time we do things like make gumbo, red beans and rice or boil up a pot of crabs. New Orleans is by definition a geographic location, and one which will never be the same now that the river and the sea have taken their toll.

For me, that swampy Cajun City will always be the same, an immutable force, a spicy, mischievous cosmic roux of history, people, music and most of all, food.

The Princess

2005-08-31T11:09:00.000-07:00

Princess Exstrawment was out trying to surf the other day. I always get a kick out of watching him flop around, standing up in an uncoordinated mess of flailing arms and exaggerated movements, never in sync with the waves. This guys is a fiftysomething white haired little puke who hangs around with Gore (probably one of the few people who will tolerate him). He’s a former wind faggot, which is a truly disingenuous yuppie sport, and one where he should’ve stayed. He operates the local Tow Boats “R” Us franchise, where he charges folks a small fortune to go out and tow them in if they break down, or end up on the shallow spoils of the Laguna Madre. Sort of the twenty first century answer to the good Samaritan who used to help people out in the bay, knowing this was a rule of the sea. You help out the guy in trouble, because the next time it could be you. So this guy helps out folks in trouble, but extorts exhorbitant amounts of dinero from them in exchange. He’s pretty universally disliked around here, not so much for his towboat “service”, but just his general nasty, self centered demeanor. I know of several stories of his getting punched out when he’s shot his mouth at the wrong person. In fact Rocky, of the Night Magic punched him out once, and I hear they were (are?) friends. I’m still trying to get the details on that one. When I finally do, it’ll make a good story I’m sure.

It’s something about guys with the name Rick, or Ric. Whatever. Rick is a dick, as are most of the Ricks I’ve ever met. Now if you’re a Rick, but you’re not a dick, then let me apologize, and forgive my mere stereotyping…..

If you’ve followed the Eye for any length of time, you know that back in July I told you about an incident involving another Rick, the brother-in-law of Mark, who owns Anchor Marine. In an agro, drunken stupor, he mooned the TPWD game warden and got a bunch of folks thrown in jail on the fourth of July. And before that there was Rickthedick from up north…. and, there are other Ricks I’ve known and disliked who have exhibited similar fucked up ethos and egos…..soooo….

The Princess settled here a few years ago after having made a substantial amount of money (at least for this area) running cargo barges in the Netherlands or somewhere. Originally from San Fransisco (with a lisp), he went to Europe during the Vietnam war, dodging the draft. Real classy guy. Later he tried his hand at a number of things including owning and managing a local flophouse and marina, and other quasi- legitimate endeavors. Unlike the other pirates of this area, there are no endearing qualities to this pathetic moron, and really, I don't know for the life of me, why I'm even bothering to legitimize him at all by writing this. Might just be a personal catharsis, so humor me on this one. Always unsuccessful at business, the Princess somehow always manages to prosper by ripping everyone else off. You know the type, only concerned with their own personal aggrandizement.

We had the misfortune of crossing paths with this jerkoff back in 2003, when we rented a small house from him and an adjacent piece of property where we parked the Queen Mary, our beloved motorhome that we had lived aboard for the previous three years. An uninsured fire which occurred as we were about to bug out during tropical storm Claudette destroyed just about everything we owned, and the final result was that this little fella filed a suit in small claims court for “damages to his property”. Now in Texas, a renter is protected from such suits by law, but in small claims court…well one can sue for any reason. To add insult to injury, I’m pretty sure he filed an insurance claim on our loss, because not long after the fire he was driving a brand new motorhome hisself, and later moved to a real nice house over on the bay….but I digress.

We call him “the Princess” because one day, we were behind him at the stoplight and we noticed him fussing with his hair, just like a girl, arranging the front curl with his thumb and forefinger, trying to get it to cooperate just so. I don’t believe that he knew anyone was watching, and when his eyes focused in the mirror behind him and he saw us imitating his primping, he stalled this truck when the light went green in an effort to get out of there real fast.

He has a wife yaknow….do you know what she’s called?.....she’s called….incontinentia….incontinentia buttocks.

I put two and two together after having first met this woman, I mean here's the epitomy of butt-ugly. Wrinkles, gnarly hair, swellulite, veryclose veins and all, a putrification of the living corpse. A gen-u-wine female reflection of the princess himself.

Hell, if I had to fuck something like that on a regular basis, I’d be a pretty miserable bastard too. Probably goes a long way in explaining why he’s the way he is……

Waiting for Sunset

2005-08-25T07:10:00.000-07:00

Gloria Cruz

Catatonic

2005-08-24T14:51:00.000-07:00

Most people think of summer as June and July with August beginning to see a cooling down, a tapering off toward fall. Not so, here on the far south, third coast. August and September are the hottest of all, hellishly hot months, with all of the fury of the earlier summer unleashed at once. Sidewalks can melt flipflops if you stand in one place too long, and even SPF 600 sunscreen isn’t enough as the sun sits relentlessly in the sky baking skin and bone, metal, paint and fiberglass, concrete and asphalt into a searing vision of what a small piece of hell might be like. The Gulf of Mexico continues to be a flat expansive desert, the monotony only broken by the occasional lazy jump of a shell-shocked mullet, or a sea turtle cautiously sticking its head above water to gulp a steaming breath of air before diving back down to the cool of the depths far below the surface.

Yesterday, I went offshore fishing with my friend Don O. and two other guys. Don owns the Catatonic, a 34 foot Baha Cruiser that he takes divers and fishermen out on. He’s traded the sky for the sea and seems to love it, and like a kid with a new toy is always enthusiastic about learning new and vital information about this new home of his.

We fueled up around eight AM and headed offshore, towards a spot out on the continental shelf some sixty miles away called the BFR. Our plan was to get out almost to the area, troll around the shrimp boats laying on anchor and then bottom fish the BFR (Big Fucking Rock) for Big Fucking Snapper and Amberjack. Seas were running only about a foot or two, and the Gulf, even that far out was like a big lake. No birds were in the sky, and only a few puffy clouds dotted the horizon, leaving the sun to chastise us for being so brain damaged as to be out on the open sea this time of year. A few flying fish vaulted into the low air just above the ripples skimming along like scaled kamikazes before splashing down again and disappearing into the indigo depths.

We put out the baits and trolled, cruising along about five or six knots as the white deck heated up to way past unbearable, making it difficult to even walk across without shoes, shiny chrome rails beaconed mockingly, waiting to burn hands if grasped for stability against the occasional groundswell passing lugubriously beneath. Spying a lone shrimper we made several passes, a ring around the rosy, but with no luck. Don set the autopilot to BFR and we continued to haul the baits behind us, until finally one of the other guys, Ike who has a lot of experience trolling out there suggested that we kick up the speed to about twelve knots or so, and soon the lures were skipping over the water at a speed tempting big fish like marlin and wahoo to take a big bite out of the wood and plastic baits .

Even at that speed the breeze generated by the boat was hot as a jen-aire range, and unlike our trip on the Soul Mate, no fish even bothered to look at the spread. Too damn hot. So we trolled past weed lines and other flotsam and jetsam without luck, heading for the BFR some fifteen more miles distant.

Near the BFR we cut bait and bring in the outriggers. It is now high noon, and the sun is brutal. We rig bottom rigs with several pounds of lead, multiple hooks, and drop them down with great anticipation through the crystal clear water. Not even a nibble down there at three hundred feet, and taking a bait-check is a major ordeal. Crank, and crank and crank, a good test for back and arm muscles, and my recently surgically repaired elbow. Several more passes, without success. Don decides it's time to move.

So, we try another spot, with the same non-results. Then another. Finally, about 1600 we decide to move to a spot closer in, and ran full throttle for almost an hour before finding it.

In the fighting chair, gazing back at the churning blue water, I listen to the hypnotic throb of the engines, occasionally staring off at the clouds on the horizon and the vista of nothingness before me. I am inward and introspective. Out here, for me it’s the opportunity to let my brain free spool, abstractly associating any event it wants to pick up on, from early fishing experiences as a child with my own dad, to my life as it stands today. Most importantly, it is my own time to connect with my creator in an environment uncluttered by the things of the land and people. I am in the presence of God, and I am small and unimportant in the great plan, yet as if in oxymoron, I am important enough to have this connection, and a place in the hierarchy of all things created by this inestimable power, important enough to be allowed a glimpse of understanding in this mystery, and the chance to be an eternal part of it. I am always in awe out here. Always reverent and listening, always at peace. Quiet and stilled for a seeming instant.

The engines slow, and we drift over Murphys Hole. Immediately, we all get vicious strikes in the one hundred foot depths. I haul up two big red snapper at a time, twisting and visible far below, white bellies flashing against the inky nothingness. Everyone else is catching fish, mostly keeper size, a few throwbacks. A huge shark lunges at a throwback struggling to head for the bottom, swallowing it in one eager gulp. The next drift over the hole, same results - more fish. The deck is slick with fish slime and blood. A school of cobia gather under the boat taunting us, as the air begins to lose an imperceptible amount of heat, barely a degree or two, but enough to give a sense that the day is waning away, the sun now at shoulder height in the west. Two more passes, and we have our collective limits of red snapper, just as a school of bottlenose and spotted dolphin invade, jumping and playing, chasing fish and managing to finally turn off the bite, as the sun starts to make its grand exit. Tiredly, we haul in the lines.

The run back in is long and rough as a groundswell begins to arrive from a recent tropical storm which lays dying on a distant shoreline far down in Mexico. The boat pounds and shakes, throwing plumes of frothing white water along the sides, and some up onto the back deck, washing the red slurry out of scuppers and back into the sea. About ten miles from town, from the island, the night descends in a sudden coma of pitch black blank, we cautiously reduce speed and creep in using the spotlight, radar, lighted buoys and markers to guide us back to the fingers and Dons boat stall across from where Menagerie sits.

Back inside the boathouse, I tiredly clean fish, thinking about this day and how it really doesn’t matter anymore if I catch anything or not. I thank Don as we leave, and he seems a bit nervous, as if relieved that he was able to finally put us on fish. He's a good Captain, and a true kind hearted human, always concerned with the other person. I assure him that it would’ve been OK either way. It’s fishing, not catching that makes the experience. I caught what I needed to, a moment of fleeting, elusive connection between eternity and existence.

No Need for a Leash....

2005-08-19T09:06:00.000-07:00

Starboard tack, closehauled. Full power

The East Cut

2005-08-16T07:35:00.000-07:00

Last winter, I did a seagrass survey in front of the remnants of the old Redfish Inn up at Port Mansfield. On the way through the town I looked for old familiar landmarks, like the Windjammer restaurant, which had been moved and is now in a sterile steel building on a back road in a field, instead of it’s traditional location guarding the entrance to the harbor where you could have giant margaritas while watching the boats returning with drunken fishermen at the end of the hot summer days. I looked for the East Cut Bar where I used to drink with my friends R and the Faceman, but it too was gone, replaced with a family Barbeque joint. I thought about my friends and fondly remembered many nights in that bar in a town I consider to be the least friendly in all of Texas.

I get email forwards now from my old friend R. We used to hang out quite a bit together about fifteen years ago. But then he got married and settled down, became a God-fearing man, his new wife wouldn’t allow him to play with me anymore. Today, I’m thankful for those emails, because at least it keeps a thin thread of connection to someone I consider one of my dearest friends in life.

Back when I was learning to fish the Laguna Madre, we used to stay in a fishing shack in Port Mansfield on weekends, a place we called the clubhouse. The clubhouse was an abandoned run down 1960’s vintage flat roofed shack with minimal comforts, a window air conditioner that barely worked, but gave the impression of doing so by periodically belching clouds of wet air like a horizontal old faithful or something, a few pieces of rickety furniture in the process of shedding upholstery, a toilet that would only accept liquid waste, and a kitchen best left to the cockroaches and scorpions that lived in the dark, dank recesses of the place. It was a place to kick back after a long day of fishing from the Land Cut, down to the Saucer, maybe blacken some redfish filets out in the yard on the grill. The clubhouse was about two streets from the bay, and wasn’t much used for anything other than passing out in after drinking the evenings away at the East Cut Bar.

Sometimes we’d fish with our mutual friend, the Faceman, these sessions would generally turn into a combination of matches and gasoline. Faceman was pure crazy in an explosive and chaotic manner. Once we were drinking in a bar in downtown McAllen when he suddenly turns to two ladies at the table next to ours. These women were minding their own business and were obviously enjoying a quiet evening of good conversation. So Faceman casually remarks to one; “Hey baby…I got five minutes if you’ve got five minutes….Why don’t we go out to R’s van and fuck like a couple of rabbits?”. The women promptly left, rather indignant. The Faceman turned to us and said with a leer; “Well, it never hurts to try…”

Those guys could fish. Our trips into the bay were always filled with drinking and carousing but were also always serious, focused events. We were all transformed into predators in the water, relentlessly stalking our prey. Few redfish, trout or flounder were safe from our lures and lines.

At night we’d drink at the East Cut Bar, one of the few true scoadholes left on the coast. A dingy, dark fishermen’s bar, about the most exotic drink that you could order was a cuba libre, which we drank by the gallon. A pool table and a jukebox completed the scenery along with the ever present neon beer signs and cigarette machine. There was one purpose of the East Cut: To get drunk. And most nights that’s just what we did. Sometimes we’d score the phone numbers of women who happened to be there, serious women with the scars and baggage to prove it, promising to call them later. The scraps of paper adorned the walls of the clubhouse like wallpaper. Other nights we’d stagger out, and drunkenly drive around the little town, tearing up flowerbeds and front lawns in Facemans truck.

One night, we were in the East Cut late. The scene turned surreal. I think it was during the infamous “no name fishing tournament” where just about anything goes. The place was jammed with a sea of writhing bodies, and a cacophy of voices obscured the sound of country music wailing from the distant jukebox, ensconced in a dim corner. Yuppies mingled with rednecks and some of the strangest women I’ve ever seen were there. Women with great piles of buffant hair and wild crazy eyes. There was an old woman we just called “the wrinkleneck” at the bar. Rumor has it that she had been the snatch on the side of R’s father in law, back in the old days, the heyday of the clubhouse, long before we started our tenure there. History does in fact tend to repeat itself.

I was in the back of the place staring through the yellow smoky lighting, watching the Faceman cavort on the floor with a young Mexican woman who he was trying to convince of the fact that he was a professional dancer. I think this night he might have been, as he slid his flipflops around the floor in a perfect samba with her. On each pass, he’d look out over the crowd with that maniacal leer, knowing that he had this one in the bag. Over at the bar, R had his head down, cradled in his arms, in an apparent attack of narcolepsy, rum still clenched in his right hand. The wrinkleneck was sitting next to him, and it appeared as though she had her withered old claw of a hand down his pants. I knew he was in trouble, so I sauntered over toward the bar intending to steer him out of there, along with the jitterbugging Faceman. When I got to the bar, the barmaid caught my attention and sternly nodded toward R. “Your friend can’t sleep in here” she insisted. I knew she meant business, as she glanced toward one-eyed Jack, the crooked Sheriff. One-eyed Jack was the only law in town and he had a mean reputation. He had a dollar sign tattooed on the palm of his right hand, and worked during the season for the El Sauz unit of the King Ranch too. He was later stripped of his constabulary when he drunkenly entered the house of a friend and discharged a shotgun, blasting through the ceiling into the second floor and shattering a porcelain commode causing great volumes of water to destroy the entire upstairs of the house. I shook R awake and he regained consciousness for a moment, a thin line of drool escaping from the corner of his mouth. The wrinkleneck looked surprised as she detached her hand from his pants. One eyed Jack, was watching the scene with blithe interest, ready to get his bribe if any trouble ensued. I hissed in R’s ear…”We need to leave….now”….

By now the Faceman had caught wind of the situation and we escaped like the three stooges, and as the door closed behind us, outside the thick hot August air revealed the glassy water of the harbor reflecting a million stars in the black Texas sky. I’m not sure how we made it back to the clubhouse that night, or what sort of catastrophe we left in our wake, but early the next morning over raw oyster sandwiches somewhere along the real East Cut, in a spoil bank pass loaded with cow tongue sized sweet oysters, and tailing redfish we laughed about that evening in the East Cut Bar.

Port Isabels Hatfields and McCoys

2005-08-07T13:03:00.000-07:00

The City Attorney for Port Isabel owns the Queen Isabel Inn on the Bay. He’s a client of ours, and although I have a strict policy of hating attorneys, I tolerate this guy because he’s a surfer and musician. I figure he just took a wrong turn somewhere.

We recently took a trip up to Corpus Christi to a JEM meeting with the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies to discuss his plans for adding some additional docks on the bay behind the Inn. On the way up there, we talked of everything from the impending collapse of society (it’s amazing how almost everybody has this view, but still we go along, drawn in by the media into thinking everything’s swell…but that’s another story), to surfing and how Port Isabel and the Island used to be. The trip up to Corpus goes in a straight line through miles of endless King Ranch, unpunctuated by civilization, a true western vista, and it was a good place for conversation.

When I was a kid, the causeway crossed the bay further south, a small two lane bridge just over the water. Once on the island, there were few buildings and businesses. The Sea Grape motel and the Palmetto restaurant, some fishing shacks along a poorly maintained road heading an indeterminate distance north (depending on how covered by the shifting sands it was), were some of the only features of note. Where I am sitting now and typing this, there were a few cabanas facing the restless Gulf, ramshackle pastel buildings where you could get out of the incessant wind and sun.

Driving back across the bay from the island, on the right hand side was the old Queen Isabel Inn. The hotel was originally built by Robert Kleberg, another attorney from an earlier time, one who gained fame through his association with Henrietta King, widow of Richard King, all principal players in the infamous King Ranch. He built it as a getaway, at the end of the railroad line during the early twentieth century. The hotel was later managed by Doc Hockaday, the towns only doctor, pharmacist and taxidermist. A true renaissance man, Doc Hockaday founded the Tarpon Rodeo, which later became the Texas International Fishing Tournament (TIFT) one of the oldest and most prestigious saltwater fishing tournaments in the state. The hotel still has many of the good doctors mounted fish and waterfowl adorning the walls, and has been lovingly been restored by my client JH, who lives there. The grounds are immaculate, with a pool overlooking the Laguna Madre, and tropical plants and trees, perfectly manicured. Still, with all of the glitter and come on of the Island, and other more modern facilities in Port Isabel, JH says occupancy could be better. He usually only gets fans of nostalgia like myself.

So JH is trying to add a few more amenities to the old Isabel in order to attract more clientele. One of the things he wants to do is add more boat slips. He just improved his boat launch ramp, and added a fish cleaning table adjacent to it, an awesome thing to behold, first class, all brick and cement, covered and lighted with running water- a mini taj mahal. Painted white, it is an integral part of the brick barrier fence he has that insulates himself from the new establishment next door, the Pelican Station.

The Pelican Station is owned by an old nemesis of JH, Mr. Z, who made his fortune in the shrimping business, back during the time that sort of business was profitable, parleying the “brown gold” into various land holdings and subsequently power holdings within the City. Mr. Z sits on the zoning board, so when it came time to zone and tax the shrimp fleet, exemptions were granted and special dispensations were issued.

Construction started on the Pelican Station about a year ago, and the snazzy modern building went up in a hurry. During the construction a series of decorative creosote pilings went into the bay out in front of the building, along with assorted rip rap rubble in the form of large chunks of concrete. Mr. Z thinks these will attract Pelicans, thus providing authentication for his establishment.

JH moans the fact that the kitchen smells from the Pelican Station, as well as the luffing sound coming from the obscenely giant American flag that Mr. Z proudly placed adjacent to the Queen Isabel will prove annoying to his hotels clients, and states; “Can you imagine?”, “Late at night when these fuckers are drunk and stumbling out of the bar over there, they’re gonna wander over here wondering about this place, maybe urinate in my bushes while they comment about what in the hell this old building is…I can’t have that kinda shit”….

Meanwhile Mr. Z isn’t all that thrilled about the white brick fence with the fish cleaning table that separates the two buildings. The demilitarized zone. He’s especially concerned about the area of fence closest to the bay, where he’s sure seaweed will pile up during storms, creating a malodorous condition which will drive off his clientele. He was so concerned about it that he contacted the Army Corps of Engineers, with an angry letter requesting that they do something about the condition, immediately. When the Corps came down to check out JH’s proposal for new boat-slips, they obliged to look at it, even though it wasn’t in their jurisdiction. When Mr. Wong looked at it, a lightbulb went on over his head, like in the cartoons, and his normally placid expression turned into one of anger as he spied the pilings and rip rap in the Bay in front of the Pelican Station, all placed in the water without permit or sanction. A letter later came threatening a fine of up to 10,000 dollars per day if Mr. Z and Whimpy, his contractor didn’t make things right.

This really pissed off Mr. Z, who was sure that JH had turned him in. Now he’s going to really fix the old Queen Isabel, that goddamn fish cleaning table has got to go, because as everyone knows, a fish cleaning facility that might be viewed by his customers eating their seafood meals overlooking the Laguna Madre is bad for business. He checks the survey, and calculates that the fish cleaning table is maybe eighteen inches or so into the City property easement, and so at the next zoning and planning meeting, triumphantly declares that the damn thing has gotta go! By now the whole City knows that the feud is on, and the newspaper even picks up the story, page one. Somewhere JH finds a loophole. A legal loophole (after all he is the city attorney), and when I spoke with him yesterday he says the table ain’t going nowhere.

Somehow though, I don’t think this is the last that we're going to hear of this, and my guess is that some sort of midnight modification might occur in the immediate future. I’ll be standing by. I’ve been staying away from there recently though, at least until the smoke clears.

That's a Lot of Pills

2005-08-03T15:02:00.000-07:00

The last John Wayne is dying.

Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma, metastasized to various and sundry other organs and tissues. Primary liver cancer. Inoperative and widespread, a painful and indignant way for a cowboy to die, it reaffirms my own sense of outrage toward this disease. The body is now fighting itself, with him as the loser.

We all lose, with him dies a little bit of us all.

He’s emaciated and small, wasting away, and I am angry and helpless in life again. His son immediately took him to one of the finest cancer diagnostic and treatment centers around, where he’s been in and out of for the last two weeks. Soon it will be time to bring him home and let him go to the ranch one more time.

For now though, instead of jeans, boots and hat, he wears blue warm ups hanging limply from the hulk of a man who I long to hear roar with drunken laughter again, ever ready to lend a smile or a helping hand. Now his boots are replaced by moccasins, his head is uncovered, valunerable, and he's subordinate to the minions of doctors and administrators who attend him like so many techno-mechanics trying to repair an old totaled out pick up truck.

There's still some dirt road cowboy left in this man though.

Yesterday I waited with him at the reception desk where he was handed a pager, like the one we get whenever we eat over at the Pirates Landing, one that lights up with a UFO like circle of LED lights when they’re ready to see you. He hadn’t gotten the news yet, but I think for sure he suspected.

While we stood there waiting for the receptionist to input his information he spied a huge clear plastic bag sitting on a chair, stuffed with maybe thirty five or forty different amber plastic pill bottles, belonging to a cancer treatment patient. His eyes grew big as saucers, he swallowed and croaked in a sort of half whisper;

“Gawdamn that’s a lot of pills”. And then he chuckled.

He’s quiet now, digesting the knowledge that he’s looking at the last chapter of his life. He doesn’t speak much, the fire is gone as he tries to understand what’s happening, and how to handle it with dignity and style.

In the consultation room, the doctor reads his chart and states somewhat triumphantly that the cowboy "liked to drink beer". I detect just a hint of rancor in his voice, because cirrhosis is a big factor in liver cancer. As if making fun of the doctors attitude, he smirks and answers “I like to drink A LOT of beer”, to which the doctor queries; “It says here that some nights you drink as many as twelve beers?", again he replies in a voice strong and confident, eyes crinkling with laughter around the edges; “I like to drink as many beers as I can!”

Just for that brief moment, his spirit returned and I could again see the man in his dirty jeans, dusty boots and sweat stained cowboy hat, arms crossed, bellowing that infectious laugh, spitting in the face of his own death.

Wesley Van der Sloot

2005-07-28T10:32:00.000-07:00

Post Hurricane Emily, and the heat has descended on us like a sick smelly old blanket, causing all life to slow down to a sticky, oozing molasses pace. The seawater is boiling, and the last vestiges of swell and wave are depressingly gone, replaced by a vast expanse of flatness across the Gulf. Water quality is off the scale bad, as tons of raw sewage has found its way down the Rio San Juan to the Rio Grande from distant Mexican towns like Monterrey following torrential rains and floods, courtesy of the remnants of Emily. The sewage plume has discharged from the Rio Grande into the Gulf of Mexico at Boca Chica, now transported by wind and current along our beaches where thousands flock to escape the oppressive heat, playing unsuspectingly in the water, always aware that sharks populate the ocean out here, but never realizing that tiny organisms like Enterococcus pose a far greater risk, lying in wait with huge bacterial teeth….waiting….waiting…..

My son has spied a feces or two merrily bobbing along in the swash zone, waiting to be deposited like nuclear sea beans on the shoreline, waiting for some unsuspecting jogger or beachstroller to run through it. He hasn’t got much time to look for that sort of thing right now because he’s working for the Murphies as a deckhand aboard the Hardbottom. He’s baiting hooks and removing fish for pinche fresas from Monterrey who don’t tip worth a shit.

The other day as we were watching “The Endless Summer” he told me about Wesley and Sara breaking up.

Wesley is just about one of the hottest young surfers on the coast, carving the waves to pieces, catching giant air, and pushing it to the extreme. Sara, his girlfriend is my sons girlfriends cousin. Wesley and Sara have been together for maybe six months or so, but in young adult time, that’s forever.

Wesley broke it off last week. Hooked up with somebody new. Sara was devastated, stopped eating and spent a night or two in the hospital according to my son, who’s pretty sick of the story himself right now. Said it’s wasting his time.

Of course the gossip lines are buzzing. Sara moved back to San Benito, where she continued to be devastated, as rumors flew from both camps. She and Wesley had held a joint bank account, which Sara, although devastated, had the presence of mind to totally loot after the breakup. This in turn devastated Wesley, who had been saving his money as a deckhand aboard an offshore sport fishing boat so that he could make the summers ritual trip to Mexico to get a fix of waves in places with names like Pasquales, Tikla and Punta Mita during this time, which is the flattest time of our season. So threats were made, names were called, and the trauma continued.

Last night my son told me that Wesley and Sara had hooked back up, and that it was on again. Oh, and by the way they’re going to go to Mexico to celebrate.

Profiles in Cowardice

2005-07-21T16:58:00.000-07:00

" Do we operate under a system of equal justice under law?
Or is there one system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty? "
~ Senator Ted Kennedy, 1973

The Eye the Hurricane Emily

2005-07-19T20:08:00.000-07:00

As the bullet hits the bone.

Gored Again

2005-07-19T12:18:00.000-07:00

We finally got everything buttoned down for the Hurricane that almost isn’t. The aforementioned, Emily scheduled to make landfall down south in a few hours. It’s windy here, and squalls are moving in. Yesterday we secured the lab, the buccaneer and Scott and Bonnies house down the street.

Today we woke up pretty tired, but I checked the web for the various forecasts, including Gores. Gore used to be our neighbor here, but moved about a year ago close to the jetties where he can teach surfing lessons and tend his webcams up on the pavilions in Isla Blanca. The guys a genuine dick, and usually lasts in one spot no more than than about two years. He came from Seaside, up by Houston, and I’ll bet his own bad karma ran him out of there too. So now he’s down here, along with his wife and hapless kids, making…I mean, riding waves. I keep threatening my friend Sean, who lives up there, to send Gore back, but Sean promises to buy him a house down here to keep him away.

Anyway, I checked his site, and as I was scrolling down, there was about a two hundred and fifty word tirade lambasting the Cameron County Parks system for it’s “unpermitted solid waste landfill”. He figures that the seaweed that gets pushed up against the dunes is full of trash, which constitutes a dump. I figure that he’s just being a jerk and is still pissed because the county won’t hire him to be a lifeguard, so he’s just getting a few sabots in, burning another bridge. Holy shit, he certainly doesn’t expect to make friends and influence people with rhetoric like this. Maybe he sees himself as some sort of modern day Don Quixote, but I tell you, I’ve tried that route, and it gets you nothing but an enlarged asshole.

We drove over to the lab, and of course the park is closed off. Totally. But since they all know us, we got the insiders treatment, and went through the back gate. After filling up about ten bags of ice from the labs ice machine, we left, checking the surf at the jetties. It’s already up to about ten or twelve feet, and the wind is blowing over 35 knots or so. On the way out, I ran into JV the assistant director of the parks.

I snickered and said “Hey, what about that Gore?” JV bristled and told me; “We gave that guy free run of the park…allowed him to put up his webcams on the beach, gave him permits to run his business…and this is the way he treats us”. He went on to say; “It started when this kid drowned, and Gore gave an interview to the local paper criticizing the county judge…said something like “how can he sleep at night, knowing people are dying on his beaches?” then he denied saying that, but wouldn’t send a letter to the paper, so…we had to cut our ties with him…it’s a shame it didn’t work out…”. I told JV; “yeah, the guys a surfer, and a damned good one…but he’s a shithead of a person, and doesn’t have a clue about what surfing really is…”

The conversation drifted off to the tasks at hand, and we all got back to work, but I couldn’t help muse over the fact that one of Gores biggest supporters is the Princess Ecstroment…another true shithead. The owner of the local tow boat franchise, this guy would sue his own mother for the ugly abortion that turned out to be him. A real piece of work. People like he and Gore are always beset by their own self created troubles, and yet the irony is that they never realize that they’re the cause, the root of the trouble. It’s always someone else’s fault. Pathetic representations and poor excuses of adulthood.

We’re finishing last minute preparations and waiting on the storm. Winds are now up over forty, blowing to fifty. Maybe this squall will blow bad rubbish like these folks out to sea, and make some substantial progress in cleaning up a couple pieces of unpermitted solid waste

Blowin' Like a Bandit

2005-07-18T20:03:00.000-07:00

`Cause out there in the Gulf
The wind's blowin' like a bandit
I'm talkin' `bout a hurricane
and your riggin will not stand it
-Guy Clark

2005-07-07T09:13:00.000-07:00

Sol Mate on our stern

Fourth of July: Never Moon the Game Warden

2005-07-07T09:12:00.000-07:00

Fourth of July we went over to Port Isabel, over to the marina to go out on Sandras 35 foot Chris-Craft cruiser to watch the fireworks. We had run into Sandra and her Sister Judy about a week ago over at the Palm Street Pier and had many beers and fried oysters with them, and during the course of things, had conspired to accompany them out on the bay for the fourth. We were packing a big pizza for the kids, but no alcohol, because it’s a war zone out on the water this time of the year. Every agency is out in full force trying to drum up a little revenue, and I certainly wasn’t going to let them shake me down, not to mention the fact that the kids were along, so their well being was of course my first concern.

Sandras Chris-Craft looks like a cigarette boat, long and mean, twin 350 Chevy engines, an interior of white rolled naugahide topped off by a racy looking bimini, and a small cockpit capable of holding about 10 adults comfortably, A real cherry 1980’s vintage cruiser. Mark says Sandra wants to sell it, get about 35 grand or so, but I reckon it’s not worth half that. Age and deterioration are beginning to set in, just like it is on all of us. Personally, I'm a little saltier and more barnacle encrusted with each passing season.

Getting across the causeway was a bit of a challenge, people were already driving erratically, like amateur stunt drivers after a long day of drinking and sun on the beach, and my traffic temper was beginning to flare. I felt obliged to cut off some stupid fuck towing an ancient eighteen foot tri-hulled boat with an aging sears seahorse engine when he started to weave in and out of traffic like a damn Ferrari or something, causing a wake of chaos behind him. I found myself hoping that my subtle demolition derby driving would cause one of his paper thin 12” trailer tires to burst, throwing the hulk and its tow driver over the rail of the causeway and into the whitecapped waters far below, where it would promptly sink to the bottom, alleviating us of another brainless fuck and his giant motorized nunchuck. But, he managed to sneak by, heading for some unknown destination.

We finally got over to the Anchor Marina around seven thirty or so, and were the last to load up. There was a temporary shortage of life jackets, so we dug around and got enough for us and the kids prior to taking off. We crossed the rail, and came aboard to a cockpit brimming with about 15 adults, some obviously "three sheets to the wind". Mark was behind the wheel, drinking a mountain dew, and his kid was below already attacking the food. Marks brother in law, Rick, a stereotype trailer trash ape, replete with sleeveless tshirt, redneck mullet haircut, ever present cigarette dangling from the corner of the mouth, and tall boy bud light in hand, was already belligerent and overconfident….a classic picture of white-trashism. He shouted to Mark that we had the proper number of PFD’s, and with no further hesitation, we untied the dock lines, and headed over to Thompkins channel.

Just outside of our channel, the port engine starts to run hot, Mark switchs it off, and we creep along about 10 knots or so heading towards the island, through a choppy brown bay as the sun makes its departure from the world. Disco music blaring from the radio, and the din of empty beer cans and bottles and loud laughing drunks make me think twice about my decision to go along. We make the turn east of the causeway and head up Thomkins. I turn around, and behind us is Sol Mate, all decked out for the fourth, banners and flags flying, a picture of class and civility.

We find a spot near the fireworks barge and ran the bow of the cruiser up on the spoil bank. Around nine fifteen the show begins, an awesome display lasting about a half hour or so. Big booming, thumping pyrotechnics, lighting sky, water and boat in a surreal kaleidoscopic glow. The drunks aboard grow dim and background, although at one point, Rick comes back from the front deck to get a bunch of Evian water bottles to clean up a spill of red wine on the white fibergalss foredeck.

I become temprarily lost, introspectively mulling over the idea of freedom, contemplating the meaning and implications of a word so broad in scope that I sometimes am unsure of what exactly it means.

The fireworks die out in the sky, and all that remains are the smoke trails. I am rousted from my musing by the shouts and screams of drunken revelers, most of them unfortunately, aboard our boat. Mark fires up the Chris-Craft, and grinds off of the shallow spoil bank, heading west towards Port Isabel. About midway to the causeway opening, I see the flashing red and blue lights reflected in the helm console, I tell Mark….”Hey, we’re gettin’ pulled over”.....

Next thing I know, a kid TPWD game warden climbs aboard, over the transom. The kid says “I’m making a courtesy check, could I see your lifejackets?” We oblige, but there’s only sixteen for the eighteen persons aboard. He writes a routine citation, worth about a hundred fifty dollars or so, pretty minor, and I figure we’re pretty lucky with all of these drunk people aboard, and god knows what other violations the boat holds, but apparently Rick doesn’t think so, and begins to lip off to the guy in true trailer trash style. Mark keeps his cool and as the Captain of this vessel, advises the officer to finish his job and once done, depart.

The warden eventually slides back to his boat, and we continue towards home, the mood a bit more somber, but I can sense hostility among the drunks on the fantail, hot like the overheated engine we shut down earlier . I hear various curses and taunts being directed loudly, hurled like empty beercans over the side toward the TPWD skiff, still on our stern. The all of the sudden, the lights come back on, and I glance over to starboard, and now there’s THREE MORE TPWD SKIFFS ALONGSIDE!

Lots of TPWD guys clad in bulbous orange life jackets, cowboy hats, gray cop suits, hands on holstered guns. "Pull over" one of them shouts authoritatively. Damn, Walker Texas Ranger couldn'tve made a better appearance. Now I'm thinking; "Shit, we're really in trouble.

I hear somebody sarcastically say to Rick; "well, if you hadn’t mooned the goddamn warden, we wouldn’t be getting pulled over again". Mooned the fucking warden? What did he expect to happen? Dumbass. Fuckstick.

Chaos, shouts of “pull over now!”, TPWD guys with hands on their guns, and I’m thinking, “jeez now we’re really in trouble”. Mark says; “nah….I’m heading back to the dock”…TPWD lets us go saying; "OK, let him go to the dock”…we creep toward the channel marker 17, flanked by four TPWD game warden skiffs, all with lights flashing. A bit much…but we haven’t even seen the best yet. As we turn into the fingers, overhead a helicopter hovers, turning on the midnight sun light, illuminating the entire harbor. I see three Port Isabel constabulary waiting on the dock too. All the while, Rick has sequestered himself in the head, not coming out at all, but I still hear muffled curses emanating from behind the closed door, just below my perch on the control deck.

We tie up, and Rick pops out of the head and oozes towards the starboard rail. It looks like for a moment, he's gonna bail, make a run for it, but TPW and the cops are too thick, so they sit him down on the bow, but he's still acting like a dick. Now TPW is riled up too, and an old fat possum cop gets in Marks face and accuses him of lipping off, cussing out his guys…he starts asking a lot of detailed personal questions, and Mark decides it’s time to call his lawyer.

The cops let us go, told us we obviously weren’t involved, but they handcuff three of the most noxious drunks, as well as Mark, hauling them all off to the PI jail. Dee, the girls and I go over there and meet with Marks lawyer, a true expatriate who lives on a 26 foot Hunter there at Anchor Marina, a refugee waiting the inevitable collapse of society. Society doesn't collapse this night though, and we finally leave around two AM, when it seems that there's nothing else we can do.

Fourth of July is always a busy time on the Bay. Every agency is out in force, and besides sunburns and hangovers, a lot of people go home with other souvenirs of the coast, a little mordida for the man, and maybe if they’re real ill-behaved a short visit to the graybar hotel courtesy of the local cops. By morning the next day, Mark and the drunks were free men again returning to the sanctity of the harbor. The game wardens had dispersed, the night cops had gone home to bed, and life had pretty much returned to normal.

Surf Stars

2005-07-05T14:18:00.000-07:00

Hunters gift means a fun time for all ages....

Hunters' Gift

2005-07-04T14:16:00.000-07:00

All kinds of people surf out here. They come from all over the valley, from as far away as the desert area of Rio Grande City to slide the waves that are best in the Gulf of Mexico. Waves that more resemble those of California than the typical mushburgers of the shallow Gulf.

But even then, we go through extended periods of flat, especially during the summetime, times when the waters go placid and blue, not even a hint of ripple over the expansive Gulf. Ironically, it's this time of the year that tropical weather moves through the broiling waters, stirring waves that sometimes get to be world class.

During this indecisive time of waves-no waves local surfers often travel south, to the west coast of Mexico. It was during one of my Southern sabbaticals that I first met Hunter. I was going through a pretty wicked divorce (who doesn't in this day and age, it's considered cliche not to now I think), I had just returned from Mexico, and was enjoying a late spring swell on the beach during spring break, when I ended up over at the Tequila Sunset having a few cuba libres with Hunter, talking waves, surf spots and of all things, farming.

Hunter is the son of a successful farmer over in Willacy county, and that's his life. Farming and surfing. He ended up getting married not long after we met, and we only saw one another on certain swells, and occasionally in other settings, like once when I was giving a rotary club presentation for the Watermasters office, who I was working for at the time. Among surfers though, there's always a bond that transcends friendship. It's the bond of the tribe, something that excludes non surfers, people of the land, and friendships just picks up again no matter the time passage.

In 2001 after September 11th Hunter put together the first Kids Fourth of July Surf Challange in order to give local children the opportunity to focus on something healthy, something other than the turmoil of that terrible day. The contest was free entry, with prizes donated by local businesses, and trophies were given to all kids who participated. Hunter and his wife gave freely of themselves, attacking the event with a passion, and the event has flourished. Donations are accepted, and they are given to needy local causes. Last year, a family who was devistated by an auto accident, this year a local spinal chord injury victim.

About 150 kids participated in the event on Saturday, including the twins. More than a story of success, more than just an event this is about one mans vision and persistence, and the desire to provide something for the kids and community that Hunter loves. He doesn't ask for anything, doesn't look for any kind of recognition for himself. In his low key get-it-done way, he simply does something....something good.

As I write this there's a tropical storm in the Gulf, and more on the way from deep down south. We'll soon have waves, hopefully big clean sets, peeling far offshore, crashing on the beach, ending their long journey from exotic places. I'll more than likely see friends from long ago, people I rarely get to see this time of year. I hope Hunter will be able to take a break from plowing and cultivating cotton and join us. He deserves it.

2005-07-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

Mack...he's back in town!

Mack the Knife

2005-07-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

About a month ago there was a derelict houseboat at the marina over by the buccaneer. Big old flat-bottomed nasty thing, corroded outdrive units encrusted in a six inch thick layer of barnacles and oysters, sitting forlornly against the dock. I had a brief wondering from sanity, probably driven by the heat and humidity and thought about offering a few bucks for it and starting a restoration job, maybe turning it into a bit of rental property, or better yet a poor mans getaway condo, anchored out in the bay, up by Three Islands or somewhere. Sanity soon returned though, and I decided against it. It’s hard enough maintaining any vessel, let alone another project.

Someone else bought it, but it turns out the guy was a major con artist who mostly paid his way with hot checks, including one for the houseboat. By the time the local authorities caught on to him, he had convinced a property owner to let him tie up the scow over in the shallow water area of the Port Isabel fingers. This area is notoriously shallow, and even skinny draft bay boats can hardly access it except on big high tides. It’s been a constant battle with the City, the Corps of Engineers and the owners to try and get this spot dredged deeper, but to no avail.

That’s because the local dredger is a pirate too. The problem is, no one around here ever wants to do things according to the regulations. And in my experience, almost all coastal communities are like that, so it’s not just Port Isabel. BK the local dredger was just shut down over on the Island for dumping dredge material into an area of sensitive dune vegetation where he promised he wouldn’t. Sea oats, sea purslane and beach croton, with its pretty yellow flowers all now under a blanket of sand, mud and rubble. Now BK has to obtain a five hundred dollar permit so that he can legally bury sensitive beach vegetation. BK moans the fact that the Army Corps of Engineers makes it so hard for him to obtain permits to do anything. “They’re picking on me” he says.

All coastal communities are a tidal gathering of pirates, bandits and thieves – individuals on the endangered species list. I finally got the complete story of the guy who bought the boat, told to me by my friend Mark who owns the Marina. Mark is the quintessential optimist ready to help out anybody in need. So he gave a job to someone he met in church, in Sunday school who wanted to learn to be a draftsman, but who really wanted a construction company of his own. But what he really wanted was a derelict houseboat that he could make payments on, using hot checks. When they closed down CRC marine across the harbor, the boat showed up, and Mark warned him about it, but he made an outside deal with the owner, paying in rubber checks. When his rubber check writing extended to almost all facets of the community, he fled town and the houseboat sunk at the dock over on the shallow side, creating an oil slick and alerting the Coast Guard, Texas General Land Office and others dedicated to preserving the quality of the coastal waters. They were all waiting ready to pounce, collect some revenue to line their own pockets with, but there was nobody to pay the bill.

So the owner of the condo commissions the infamous Yamaha John, better know as “Mack the knife” to handle the problem. He figures, “hey, out of sight…out of mind, at least the fucker ain’t in my backyard anymore”.

Dirty deeds…done dirt cheap. You only hire Mack the knife if you need to creatively take care of a problem without an obvious legal solution. Like right now, the City of South Padre Island is in a quandary about what to do for an upcoming event where they need the use of a boat ramp that’s currently silted in. This event involves the media, local and national, ESPN and lots of potential revenue. But first, the ramp needs to be dredged, the whole thing depends on that. The organizers have been screwing around, figuring ways to make money off of the thing, so now, there’s insufficient time to obtain the necessary legal permits. They’ll probably hire Mack the knife to do a bit of midnight dredging. Most likely, he’ll drive an old boat on a trailer with a big old powerful hulk of an outboard engine down to the ramp in the middle of the night, back the whole thing down into the water and begin work, shoving and revving the motor in and out of gear, while still attached to the trailer, progressively backing deeper and deeper as the prop wash cut gets deeper and wider, throwing a churning, boiling plume of sediment visible all the way across the bay, extending to the shores of Port Isabel, slick in the moonlight, scouring out the shallow area so that the boats can get in and out. Problem solved.

Mack the knife decides to take the old girl out into the Laguna Madre somewhere and just let nature take its course. Maybe up around Three Islands, an area that’s becoming a repository of homeless boats, in fact, I’ll bet Mack the knifes handiwork is already part of this area, which reminds me of a marine-mafia graveyard. Anyway, he has some of his cronies pump the boat out, getting it to finally float again, and starts to pull it out of the fingers, edging towards the open shallow lagoon, when to nobodies surprise, out pop the agencies like a bunch of flies on cowshit. Swarming all over Mack the knife, they demand to know where he’s taking the boat. Mack thinks fast, and tells them he’s just towing it over to Southpoint Marina.

The constabulary calls Southpoint, who of course doesn’t know anything at all about it. Out come the handcuffs, and they take old Mackie off to the graybar hotel, leaving the boat on a sandbar just outside the channel entrance where we always bring Le Menagerie in and out of the Bay to our slip in the deepwater part of the fingers. A mute testament to how things are done in coastal communities. An effigy to the individuals, pirates, thieves and scoundrels, who I would much rather see inherit the coast, rather than regulators, bureaucrats and politicians, who are the true pirates, thieves and scoundrels. I hope the houseboat gets left there as a monument to this dying breed, till it eventually falls apart, claimed by the tides, wind and salt, but I know it won’t.

Jerry Garcia Lives

2005-06-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

My friend Bob is Jerry Garcia. He looks exactly like the departed leader of the Grateful Dead, and has the same laid back mannerisms. He’s a good musician as well, which leads me to think that maybe Garcia, like Jim Morrison and Elvis faked his death too, and is living in relative anonymity on South Padre Island.

Bob’s the only person I’ve ever known who has run with the Bulls in Spain, and I have a great amount of admiration, and derive a certain sense of inspiration from him. Retrospective vicarious living can be a good thing. He was the quintessential world traveler gypsy vagabond who would probably still be studying flamenco guitar or folkloreco dance in Guadalajara Mexico…except that he inherited beau coup from his late father. His late father was a doctor, who married many wealthy women and subsequently purchased some prime real estate here on the island, and in other places, including a three room condo on the bayside and a fourplex over by Boomerang Billy’s club on the beach. Bob and his wife Stell own and manage these properties, dividing their time between Edinburg and here. His fathers ashes, and those of his final wife reside on Bobs piano at his house in Edinburg, one in a cardboard box, and the other in a four hundred dollar plastic urn that the funeral home soaked him for.

I’ve known Bob about ten years or so, ever since we met at a TPWD safe boating instructors course. We’ve conspired on about a dozen or so projects which have never taken off, but remain the best of friends. Projects ranging from offshore funerals involving mixing the ashes of the dearly departed with cement, then depositing them over the same location to eventually create an artificial reef to eco tourism adventures and the latest, bally-hooing. Ballyhoo are a prime bait species that are best collected at night using a small skiff, nets and a powerful spotlight. The bait shops pay about a buck and a quarter apiece for them. We’re supposed to go out for them over at Thompkins Channel this evening. We’ll see, Stell keeps a pretty tight grip on Bob, and he isn’t often allowed to play with folks like me.

Bob’s a sailor too. He’s sailed everything from windboards to pretty large craft, and tells a story of sailing a Sunfish out on the bay one afternoon, when he was struck by the divine notion to do a bit of tacking to windward au natural. So he tied the mainsheet off, and kicked back, sans speedo. As luck would have it, a side chop knocked him off of the boat, which kept sailing along. Trying to be helpful, a head boat pulled up alongside Bob who was frantically swimming towards the rapidly departing Sunfish. Assessing his condition, the captain swung to starboard and kept going with the fishermen now pointing and laughing on the stern. He said that hurt more than trying to catch up with the pilotless boat. The Sunfish eventually struck a shallow bar, and turned over on its side, Bob finally reaching it, naked, gasping and out of breath. I didn’t ask the final outcome.

But I did ask Bob what he was going to do with the ashes on his piano. He told me he was going to take Dorothy (His fathers’ final spouse) up to Kentucky where she has family. I suggested that we make a pilgrimage via motorcycle, just put the urn in a saddlebag and go, a la the great European motorcycle trip that he once took, but he said nah, he’d probably just go in a Winnebago. Then he briefly mused about going on a moped, for the sheer artistic bent of it, a trip that would be akin to sailing, but the Winnebago thing just finally won out. Creature comforts become important when we get old.

His fathers ashes were a different story. Bob said he once asked his father what he wanted done with his final remains, and he told him; “just do whatever you want”. So, Bob thinks that maybe he wants to spread part of him in the Pacific Ocean, out near Point Loma California where his Dad practiced medicine for many years as a hotel doctor, swimming in the ocean every night, and spread the rest of them at the top of a mountain peak in Montana where his father once stole a poem which resided at the summit, later lamenting the fact, and admonishing Bob to replace it. Bob says his father loved those places and deserves to be there, but Stell nixes the idea, concerned that if the ashes aren't in the same geographic location, then the eventual resurrection of the body might be a bit, problematic. She says it's unethical.

Hell, I’m too dumb to know anything about that, but judging from the stories that Bob tells, I’ll bet his dad wouldn’t mind his legs and arms stroking out in the night, in the cold Pacific water, and his heart and eyes looking down from a high vantage point in the northern Rocky Mountains, giving his blessing to all of this madness.

The Elusive Cussing Man

2005-06-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

Drifting in the summer tide

The Cussing Man Strikes Again

2005-06-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

We had dinner with George and Scarlet the other night. They invited us over because they had a woman there from the Audubon Society who has done three years worth of Plover studies here, collecting data on nesting and distribution. They wanted us to meet her, and maybe share some professional insight.

Turns out this woman was the archetypical tree hugger type. She tried to deny it, but I knew different. First of all, she was wearing Birkenstocks. Then, although she professed a love of meats (beef in particular…but maybe it was just the beefstick that she was into….ah, but I digress), I noticed that she carefully picked out all of the scallops from the linguine, and openly left the mushrooms, so I figured, yea…it’s another damn vegetarian.

There were a number of conversational thrusts and parries, back and forth concerning philosophy of preservation, something only mildly challenging to me as a scientist. Judicious development of resources, and the idea that being a responsible shepherd to our environment entitles one to the privilege of living well. It’s just my position, but one I defend vehemently.

Besides, we make a living assisting clients interested in the prudent development of coastal areas, and I certainly won’t bite the hand that feeds me. This woman was bound and determined to speak with a realtor who is developing a large tract of land north of town here on the Island. The tract lies within federally declared critical habitat for Piping Plover, so at some point they will have difficulty with the project, but this particular realtor is well connected politically, and has pockets that are deep. Not the kind of person that I would want to challenge. So in the course of our conversation, I was asked; “How does Mr. F. feel about eco-tourism?” I snickered and replied; “He could probably sell one condominium unit and make more money than a bunch of bird watchers would bring him in ten years”. Well, this didn’t sit too well, and she told me rather belligerently that she would fight this guy tooth and nail to protect her little birdies (which aren’t even protected here at all). Fine. I asked her for her shoe size, because probably sooner or later with an attitude like that they might just be outfitting her with cement booties.

Now I’m as much of a conservationist as the next guy, and I’ve studied this place long and hard. My own reasoning is that, hey, it’s a sandbar. Sooner or later all of this shit will get blown off of it and they’ll have to start over again. Meanwhile, the species that can compete- will, new areas will be utilized and things will carry on.

So anyway, eventually the topic finally turned from the ethereal, from the controversial to the current and concrete.

The cussing man is at it again.

George told me that last weekend the cussing man was occupying the nice shady breezeway between the Laundromat and Jakes. He was trying to sleep, but the door to Jakes was squeaking. George said that the cussing man asked the management of Jakes to please fix the squeak, but they shined him on, so he got sort of loud with them. I guess the management called the police, and when they showed up, the cussing man cussed them out too. He’s had to find new accommodations now, but at least it wasn’t a hotel with steel bars. The cussing man told George that he “just hated it when things were left unfixed, like that door”…he also lamented having cussed out the cops, said he probably shouldnt’ve done that.

It’s the wrong time of the year to get evicted from anywhere shady. The daily temperatures hover in the mid 90’s, and the beachwater is as warm as soup, not even a chance to cool off here. The entire coast is holding its collective breath. Hurricane season is on us, full swing.

Al Qaeda T Shirt Shops

2005-06-08T09:53:00.000-07:00

Like most Gulf Coast resort towns, the main street of South Padre Island is crammed with businesses and vendors lining the boulevard in a seemingly never-ending mass of gaudy Day-Glo facades. There’s the requisite head shop, surf shop, sandwich shop, shell shop and countless T shirt shops lining both sides of Padre Boulevard, separated by the black searing strip of asphalt that ushers the pasty white tourists in from their inland lives to frenetically spend their hard earned vacations in overpriced condominiums and hotels. They come from places like Dallas and Houston, San Antonio and Waco, leaving in a few days with souvenirs and sunburns.

T Shirt shops advertise things like “Going out for Business Sale”, “ 4- T shirts for $20”, and “Free decal with purchase”. Giant football field size edifices, they rarely have more than one or two customers at a time, you can’t help but wonder how they can afford to stay in business, how the hell can they even afford to pay the air conditioning bill?. All the same, exactly the same, only the names change, names like “Wings”, “Surf Stop” and “Jaws”

And business on the island comes in pulses. There’s the big two; Spring Break and Semana Santa, and then the weekend holidays; Forth of July, Labor day, Memorial day and a few others. Between the tourist invasions, the island is a quiescent place, lying in wait like some giant Venus flytrap until the next meal of fresh meat, borne in on Padre Boulevard on the petroleum tide.

The owner of On the Beach was wondering why his dumpster was always full, especially during that time in 2001 when the causeway was down, and there wasn’t hardly any business anywhere on the island. Curious, he checked the contents one day and found sacks and sacks of cash receipts from an adjacent T Shirt shop.

My friend George told me about fires set way out in the empty dune fields, fires set to bales and bales of T Shirts.

You see, the T shirt shops are all owned by middle eastern characters. Characters right out of a bad Hollywood conspiracy movie. Paranoid characters, speaking in hushed tones, eyes furtively plotting….plotting. Turns out these T Shirt shops are nothing more than money Laundromats. It’s common knowledge here. I have a friend who got into trouble punching out a banker during the bridge-out for putting up with this bullshit. I’m certain the government knows about this, and sometimes I wonder about how much they’re actually a part of it.

Call me paranoid.

And we’re not all Islamophobic. Far from it. But there’s too much conincidence, and too many stories

Yesterday a lawyer friend of mine (yes, I actually have a few friends who happen to be lawyers) told me a story about an incident that happened a couple of years ago. A friend of his, a federal agent about to retire was assigned Port Isabel as his final station. One dark evening, a boat came charging into the Pass between the Jetties, only to be intercepted by Customs. The boat was full of cases of automatic weapons, machine guns. The crew and cargo were transported to the Coast Guard base here on the Island until charges could be filed in Brownsville. When the agent returned to the base with the appropriate paperwork, the weapons were gone, and the crew had been released. He was told not to ask any questions.

On the evening of September 10th, 2001 my oldest daughter and I went up to the Circle Jerk to get a couple of items. While we were there, we both noticed a small compact car. Three mid eastern men got out of that car and entered the store. We both noticed their moods, moods so nervous that we were afraid that they might be thinking about jacking the place. We got out of there in a hurry.

We thought about that curious incident a lot over the course of the next few days when paranoina and speculation ran rampant. Coincidence or contrivance? You decide.

The Fish of a Lifetime

2005-06-02T12:22:00.000-07:00

400 pounds of pure energy

The Fighting Chair

2005-06-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

Locked in the struggle...

Sol Mate

2005-06-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

My friend Gary called and invited us to go fishing on his new boat, Sol Mate. Gary was my first client with our bidness, and we became friends in the course of a three month long environmental study of his property. During that time he replaced his older version of Sol Mate with a brand new Australian custom offshore sportfisherman to the tune of about a million point two dollars. Nice boat. So when he called Monday afternoon and invited us to go fishing for yellowfin tuna, we didn’t hesitate to accept the offer.

Gary also owns the Blue Marlin, an IGA grocery store here on the Island. In fact it’s the Islands only grocery, and in my way of thinking, the only grocery store period. It’s an institution. Over in Port Isabel there’s a new Wal-Mart super center, and an HEB, both large impersonal conglomerates, both threats to the neighborhood grocery, and consequently the community way of life. That’s why we patronize the Blue. It’s the least that I can do to try and stem the tide of faceless big business, hell bent on slaughtering the American dream. And beside, the food at the Blue is better quality and a whole lot more interesting. The store is like the neighborhood bar, everybody who works there and a lot of the patrons know who you are. So that’s where we mostly shop for groceries, it’s a comfort zone for us.

We took off about seven AM in a glassy calm morning, heading east, offshore to the continental shelf break, an area called “the canyon”, about forty miles out. Sol Mate is the perfect vessel, powered by two giant Caterpillar diesels, she makes about 30 miles per hour over the sea. D and I sat up on the flying bridge with Gary and the two other fishermen that Gray had invited to go along.

Outside the Brazos pass, the morning dawns bright, cloudless and calm, the seas placid and blue, with no hint of whitecap. We talk a little and sip hot coffee, although like any fishing trip, pleasure or commercial, there’s always a sense of anticipation and uncertainty, and maybe even a bit of anxiety. Before long we are all lost to our own wonderings, lulled into a semi hypnotic trance by the throb of the big diesels, the slicing of the boat through the gentle groundswell and the warmth of the morning sun straining to climb the blue sky. We’re on our way out, out to the kingdom of turquoise water and the giants who dwell there. There’s no telling what might happen.

I think about the different stages of this disease we call fishing. In its initial stage, you want to catch every fish in the sea. As it progresses, you just want to catch the biggest fish. In stage three, one wants to catch the most special fish, species like sailfish and marlin, tarpon, snook, bonefish, permit and peacock bass. At this point, size is pretty irrelevant. Finally there’s the last stage of the illness, where it’s simply the experience that counts, and it’s not necessary to catch anything at all. Its fishing that’s important, catching is secondary. By this time someone else catching fish, someone in a lower stage of the disease, is as satisfying as actually catching fish, because we know that this creates the collective memories we share. That’s where I am, and so I feel blessed just to be out here, a player in this collage of memories.

….Still somewhere inside each of us lurks the predatory instinct that causes us to become fishermen in the first place. It’s man against the ultimate aquatic species, and I think we hold on to the idea of catching the fish of the lifetime somewhere within the course of this lifelong disease. We hold on to the idea of the zenith of the experience. Some try and force this with expensive adventures and trips, but I think it comes without warning, striking as suddenly as the fish of a lifetime, and the odds always remain the same.

At about eight thirty we’re in deep water adjacent to the canyon. Whenever I hear that sound, the sound of big engines slowing down, an instinct takes over from past days in the Alaskan seas. I instantly jerk awake, eyes wide open, body in high speed mode, ready to put out the gear. Today is no exception. Garys’ crew, Roach and Marcos are already rigging the outriggers and the five big game rods for trolling as I descend the ladder to the fantail deck.

We choose rods, and the baits are strung out with teasers and flashing lures in between, forming the spread. I tell D, “You never know what might come up and take a hold of one of those baits, so just keep an eye on the spread. Billfish slash at the lure with their bill, they’re real easy to recognize”. Inside though, I figured we’d be real lucky to hook into some tuna or maybe a Wahoo. It’s still early for billfish, and they’re certainly not a common critter anywhere on the planet. Some people chase them for years before even getting a flash at the bait.

The other two fishermen go topside to chat with Gary on the flying bridge, D and I stay below with the deckhands watching the baits skip along just below the azure surface of the water as we troll toward the canyon, still several miles to the east. My lure, trailing along on the port side in the middle of the spread, a big pumpkin colored skirted jig snags a small floating pile of Sargassum, and Roach unclips it from the outrigger, quickly reeling the thing in, shaking off the clump of golden weed, and then lets the bait drift out behind the boat again, to its designated spot. Just as he’s doing this, I hear D shout. “Billfish”….”There’s a fish on”. A moment of immediate confusion ensues.

And then…..

An eternal moment before I realize, Holy shit.... It’s MY rod sitting in the holder on the port rail, the same lure that Roach is putting back in the spread that this fish has decided to strike. The pool cue thick rod points in an arch toward the fish, as line tears off the reel at lightening speed. We all began to bring in the other baits and teasers. I flop down in the fighting chair and Roach hands me the rod like a priest passing a sacred torch. I place the butt end into the gimbel and I hear the snap, snap of the harness securing me to the whole setup, I have become a biomechanical extension of the gear, but still a very necessary part of the equation. Now glancing down at the reel, I see that it has been heavily hit. More than three quarters of the five hundred yards of one hundred thirty pound test has been stripped, the fish a long way off and heading rapidly, south. Gary works to slow the boats forward progress as the fish continues to tear line from the reel, then Sol Mate begins to back down and I reel the line in, gaining a foot at a time, sometimes less. The morning is already becoming hot, and I have gone from zero to ninety in a heartbeat. I lift the rod slowly up and down, pumping and gaining more line, but it’s like those dreams where you’re trying to run away from something, running in slow motion, feeling like you’re encased in gelatin. Only this is real, and it hurts. Every muscle straining, aching against a mass that feels like a runaway freight train, I hang on, throat dry, clothes soaked.

About thirty minutes into the fight, the fish wallows for just a split second on the surface and dives deep again, stripping precious line from the reel. My arms ache, hands almost losing grip, I cradle the rod, hugging it close, just trying to hold on as the fish throbs and strains, seemingly oblivious to the hook, moving away from the boat in a lumbering lurching dive as Gary keeps backing down. I hear people debating the fish. “Didja see it?”, “What was it?”.. “tuna?”….”No Marlin”….”I think it might be a shark”. No, it’s a fucking MONSTER.

I don’t give a damn. By this time, I’m hurting and tired, gaining little ground. I think about quitting, just handing the rod off to someone else. The hell with it, this fish will never break the water. It’s going to be a long time till I see the swivel that marks the leader. This is stupid. I’m already scheduled for elbow surgery at the end of the week, why hurt it any worse?

But, I dig down deep and find resolve. No fish has beaten me yet, and this one ain’t gonna be the first. And I’ve caught some big ones too, fish well over two hundred pounds. But this monster is like nothing I’ve ever hooked. So I fight grimly on, sometimes only gaining six inches. I rest, the fish rests. I press on, and so does he. It’s a stubborn battle. After almost an hour, the leader comes close, and Roach grabs it. They can see the fish below, but can’t quite make out what it is., but it’s big. I kick back in the chair, taking out the slack, anticipating….anticipating, ready in case the fish decides that this really isn’t the end.

And it isn’t.

The big fish dives again, and Roach lets go of the leader. More line peels off. Determined, I fight him slowly towards the surface. I can sense his fatigue too, hanging on the end of the line. There’s no manhandling this fish. It comes when it wants to. The leader breaks the surface again, it’s too far away, so I strain to gain a little more line…..just a little more and that’s it….and the fish sounds again, but less deeply this time. The leader breaks the surface one final time, and Roach has a hold of it.

It’s a Blue Marlin. All I can see the tail and about three feet of the creature behind the boat, iridescent blue, the most beautiful blue I’ve every seen, like an electric sky, almost neon, glinting in the sun. It’s about six or seven feet long, and the crew estimates its weight at around four hundred pounds.

I hold the rod ready again, but this time Roach and Marcos have a firm grip on the bill and pinning the fish alongside the boat, they quickly dislodge the hook just as several photos are hurriedly taken. The fish lies on its side, shimmering, stunned, finning in the Caribbean blue water for a moment then suddenly it turns upright, regaining enough energy to swim slowly off, back into the blackness of the deep.

I sit there also stunned for a moment, like the fish. Shaking, soaked in sweat, muscles crying in unison, in pain, hands stiffening like two claws at the end of my spaghetti like arms, I have become a sea monster without gills, attached to the element by monofilament line, connected forever to that Marlin, the memory of the struggle indelibly etched, tattooed in my temporal lobe. Finally, I ascend the ladder to the flying bridge to thank Gary for the experience of catching the fish of my lifetime, but words could never mean enough, never be enough, never even come close, though I try. Gary understands. He too is in the final stages of the disease we call fishing.

Coming back down the ladder I thank the fish swimming somewhere down there, far below us. I glance out at the spread, once again dancing along on the waves, pulsing in the sun.

Running Lights Required

2005-05-28T12:18:00.000-07:00

Le Menagerie sails off of the anchor

Le Menagerie Logbook: 05/21/2005: Island Times

2005-05-23T12:44:00.000-07:00

Wind: 12-22 SSE, higher gusts / Air Temp: 85 / Water Temp: 83 / Tide: Falling / Skies: Clear / Water: Off Color, Whitecapped /Seas: 2-3'/ Depart: 1300 Arrive: 1900.

Been promising the twins all weekend that we would take them fishing on Menagerie. Of course, that’s an excuse to get in a good sail trip too. Packed an icechest full of supplies and another full of ice for the fish and headed out to the Marina around noon. Winds were picking up. I shortened the tiller about 8” and took care of the crack at the rudder attachment, and moved the camcleat over about 3”, and redrilled it into the cabin top the previous night so the boat was ready to go.

At the marina talked briefly with our friends Jim and Janice who own Island Times, a new 37 Island Packet. Beautiful boat. Yankee cutter rigged with two headstays and in mast furling, all of the bells and whistles. Jim is taking off next Monday for Rio Dulce Belize for the hurricane season, then points south and west, through the big ditch and then up to the Sea of Cortez. He’s not coming back. Jim said his son called last week and told him “you should’ve done this 20 years ago”, he told him “the hell with it….I’m doing it NOW”. He’s 62. Former Huey pilot in Viet Nam, then with the US Geodetic Survey in Central America, he owned land in Panama and just sold it to down pay the Island Times. Said he’ll be making payments until he’s 82, but what the hell, they’re only 70 dollars a month more than his social security check, and it’s all done direct withdrawal. No insurance..... no guts, no glory. I wish him well, and can’t help but let my envy show.

Underway it was a circus just backing out with all of the public boat ramp jokers jockeying to and from the ramp, and after banging Menagerie around somewhat rudely in her slip, I finally got her spun around and headed out of the harbor.

On the outside, we reefed the main, and put out about 35% of the big genny, and were cutting quite a rug; three or four tacks and we were at the Pirates Landing pier, Kelani balled up in a lump on the cockpit seats, screaming and carrying on, a real drama queen, back to the old song and dance about not heeling…..

I missed the line under the causeway, and relined up, drew out a little more genny (the winds are blocked off and light near the bridge), and shot the gap, about halfway through, when all of the sudden, the starboard sheet tore out of the jamb cleat and we had to wrestle canvas for a second to get it back under control. It was a bad time too, because the gap is so narrow, and the tack so tight, and we ended up almost next to the western concrete pilings on the way out to the southern part of the bay. Just a few long tacks on the choppy south side, and we were in the shallow water near the remnants of the old causeway. We dropped the canvas, and I put the hook over, and the girls got ready to fish.

Kelani had quit her histrionics now, and she and Savannah grew intent on fishing. I rigged their rods, and immediately they had bait in the water, eyes glued to their rod tips.

We ate a bit of lunch, and I went below in the shade and passed out on the port settee in the heat, only stirring when I heard the lid of the ice-chest open and a fish flop inside. And then another, and another.

The wind had picked up to about 20 or so, and long fetch whitecaps rolled by. Every now and then big boats plowed close by, and we rolled violently on the anchor. Around 1830 we decided to pick up the hook and head back. I lit only the genny about 65% on a dead downhill run, and we sped toward the causeway channel. We made a single jibe, lined up and cruised through, never missing a beat. On the other side, we jibed again and took it all the way back to marker 17, dolphins accompanying us off the starboard bow. The tide was so low that a large trawler style sportsfisherman was aground on the right side of the channel as we passed the green entrance buoy and stowed the canvas for good. We made the slip about 1900, weaving our way through the dayboaters again. Washed Menagerie down as the girls fished in the marina. They’re a couple of fishing fools those twins.

The Aplysia Scam

2005-05-18T15:36:00.000-07:00

May is rapidly drawing to an end.

The uncertain winds of the early month have switched to the summer pattern, and soon the jenn-aire effect will be upon the island and its eclectic residents. There is a certain resolve to survive another tourist season, another hurricane season, to slay the torpid days of summer by immersing ones body in the equally torpid waters of the Gulf, cool drink in hand.

It’s the time of the season when a mans fancy turns to….Aplysia.

Aplysia brasiliana, commonly called sea-hare are a critter that shows up right about now, and hangs around till fall, disappearing before the winter temperatures cool the Bay and Gulf. Where they go, nobody knows, and fewer care. Locals call them inkfish, though they are anything but fish. They’re really a snail without a shell, a true sea slug, a gastropod. The brown gelatinous creatures are all over the place this time of year, slowly flapping modified appendages that look like wings, undulating and gliding on top of the water, in a blind and mindless search for seaweed. Poor swimmers, some get caught in the surf, and eventually end up on the beach where they lay in puddles of purple ink, to decay in the hot sun. The ink they produce is harmless to humans, though irritating to other marine life, this substance seems to be their primary defense mechanism. When disturbed or threatened they exude ink profusely, turning the surrounding water, clothes and hands a beautiful, deep purple.

My friend Sara, who has devoted a good deal of her academic career to trying to understand these animals (and again, I’m not sure why) says they aren’t worth a shit to eat. No matter how you fix them. Personally, I couldn’t bring myself to try a mouthful of this gooey, nauseating critter, and I’ve eaten just about everything that swims or grows in the sea. Along that line of thinking, I’d probably never consider eating a jellyfish either, common sense just sometimes prevails.

They do make nice aerial fodder though, especially when lobbed or launched from water ballon slingshots at unsuspecting victims, either in the water or on the beach. They hit with a most satisfying wet splat, exploding in a fine mist of ink that’s pretty awe inspiring. An unprovoked, unexpected Aplysia bomb attack truly strikes terror, and sometimes anger in the uninitiated. Fortunately, the stain is not permanent.

Neurobiologists love Aplysia, because the animal has a giant nerve axon, one easily studied. I imagine that a great deal of our collective understanding of nerve function and disorders has come from studying this lowly organisms responses to the variety of tortures that this branch of biology conjures up, but like the tunicate, it isn’t nearly as glamorous, or controversial as stem cell research, so you’ll probably never see anything about it on CNN or Fox news. Dr. Mengele I presume?

For us, Aplysia have always been a windfall. In a former time, we’d load the old four wheel drive with an ice chest of beer, an empty ice chest, and our surfboards, and head down to the condos on the bay. In the course of a drunken evening, we’d paddle around in the Thompkins channel, collecting Aplysia on the nose of our longboards, periodically transferring them to the empty icechest (now with seawater in it) waiting on the lighted docks. The beer chest would get progressively lighter, and the Aplysia ice chest heavier, till the beer finally ran out and we had a few dozen Aplysia which we’d hurry back to the lab and put on life support, the aerator. The next day we’d call UTMB in Galveston, and they’d immediately send a little white haired faggot down to take our icechest of Aplysia back up to Galveston, and pretty soon, in a week or two, we’d receive a check for a hundred dollars or so. I think we were getting something like two fifty each for the little buggers. Our dedicated field collecting allowed the Dr. Frankenstein types a perpetual fresh stock of innocent critters to run their experiments on. This worked out pretty good for us, and it kept us in beer for a few days, whenever they needed the critters anyway. I never thought much about the Aplysia scam after I left the lab that time though.

Today, I collect Aplysia with nets on the jetties, risking jetty rash from falls on the slippery algae covered granite. I’m a salaried employee now…I make the big money so I’m informed that I can’t make that extra check anymore. This benevolent entity wants to keep me fully locked in indentured servitude. We keep the Aplysia alive here, feed them the amazing Gracilaria that I culture, clean out the tanks whenever too much shit accumulates, and ultimately cull them out and package them up, each individually weighed, bagged with seawater and oxygen and carefully packed in a Styrofoam shipping container, taken to FedEx and given a first class ride to Houston.

Aplysias are big business too, there’s even a place in Florida growing them in vitro just to provide enough for the researchers. There was a scare a couple of years ago when many researchers switched to using laboratory rats, but apparently, they just couldn’t get enough of the ol' Aplysia, and switched back again to their tried and trusty brand. And, the scam has been elevated to a quasi-legitimate bureaucratic undertaking, complete with invoices, requests and accounting sheets, there’s gold in them hills!

But, now someone else makes ten bucks apiece for the bastards, this place makes a cut, and yours truly, the humble narrator of the Eye of the Hurricane gets the big weenie. I guess that’s Karma or some shit. Ah, for the good old days….

And if that isn’t bad enough, the neurobiologists want these animals in a certain size range, and not kept at the lab for anything more than a few days. I’m wondering if maybe they want them with cute little nametags too, maybe tags that say things like “Hi, my name is Admiral Alfred the Aplysia, won’t you be kind to me and feed me just 6.5 grams of either Gracilaria or Ulva a day, keep my quarters clean and free of shit, and promise to pay attention to me?” Just wait till the fucking things start getting scarce. I bet they won’t sing that song then.

Three Hundred and Fifty Miles of Line

2005-05-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

Pot hauler visible on the right, mid-upper corner behind the "seven by" crab pot. This monster is why I now have to have another joint surgery.

Those Who Came Back, and Those Who Never Did

2005-05-12T07:26:00.000-07:00

The winds are blowing out of the southeast today about 25 knots. No sailboats are out, and most of the swell is blown flat. It’s not the day to surf or sail. It’s hot. About 90 degrees hot. I’m trying to tie up a lot of loose ends, so it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m a slave to this fucking computer because in about two weeks I have to go in for a surgery on my left arm, which will leave me more useless than usual, being as I’m left handed. I’ll probably be on sabbatical for the whole month of June.

The knife count to date is two knee surgeries, a surgery to the right elbow, and now one on the left. And probably both wrists before it’s over. In another life, in another line of work we used to joke about this, saying; "right now, somebody is paying me for this, but someday I’m gonna pay for this”.

It appears that someday has come.

Last night I watched “ Deadliest Catch” or some such shit on the Discovery Channel. It’s another reality series, this one about crab fishing in Alaska.

Years ago, after I got out of the Coast Guard I stayed on in Kodiak Alaska, and like many 22 year old kids then I didn’t have a clue about what I wanted to do. In order to make ends meet and bankroll my bad habits I had to make money, and some of my bad habits took lots of money. Since Kodiak is a fishing town, the easiest way to make money is doing something in the industry. Kodiak touts itself as "the town where crab is king".

So first I started working in the canneries during crab season, unloading crab from the holds of the boats that were coming in. Burrowing down through mountains of live King and Tanner (“Snow”) crab, loading them into a never-ending string of two thousand pound buckets to be hauled up into the busy, steaming processing plant where they are summarily killed, gilled, cooked, frozen, boxed and shipped out to eventually find their way south, to grace the tables of consumers rich enough to pay for the delicacy. Boat after boat, day after day was backbreaking and boring work that paid about minimum wage, but that was the place to be in order to get hired on to a crabber. You just had to wait until somebody got killed, hurt, quit or fired.

Crabbing is what most guys wanted to do at the time. It was an opportunity to make real money in short order, hopefully enough to live on for the rest of the year without having to do any real work. Besides, crabbers were cool, they held the top of the dockside food chain, the macho order of the northern lights.

Eventually I got hired on. No, I actually lied my way onboard a big crabber, the Express, a 135 foot vessel skippered by an old ex-coalminer with blacklung named Sam Jackson. Years later after I left the industry I heard that the Express sunk in the Gulf of Alaska just south of Kodiak. So I lied my way into a job, told them I could coil.

Crab pots are big square cages made of welded steel rebar, usually three feet deep and seven feet by seven feet square, covered with netting and weighing seven hundred pounds, unloaded. They rest on the seafloor in about six hundred feet of water waiting for crabs to crawl in for the bait. Hauling the pots off of the bottom is done by passing the poly line through a big round hydraulically powered sheave ( a roller device that funnels, or jambs the line) called a powerblock. The uphauling line then gets coiled on the deck until the pot is landed on the pot launcher, picked, rebaited and ready to launch again. Before the advent of the mechanical coiler (“Kinghauler”) the job was done by a crewman, and it was an artform. The line exits the powerblock at around a fathom (6 feet) per second, and in a smooth rhythmic hand-over-hand motion the coiler lays it into a nice neat pile as the other crew stands by ready to land the pot. It was an artform that some could and some couldn't do, deckhands who could coil were always in demand, and the attrition rate was high. So I lied my way onboard by saying I was proficient at the art. Thankfully, one of the other crewman was a friend of mine, and miraculously, the deck boss was patient once he learned the truth, and amazingly enough, after just a few turns at a half speed block, I had it down. I could coil, and before the trip was over I was as good as any.

Later, I wrote a story about this incident, which got published in the Alaska magazine, my first attempt at writing a short story, my first submission for publication. They paid me something like 350 dollars, and I think it was as ecstatic a moment as when I coiled my first pot at full speed block.

My crab fishing days lasted for three long seasons, seasons that stretched from November through March from Cape Chiniak to far out the Aleutian chain. We worked what seemed like twentyfour-seven days, the only rest to and from the gear, catnaps between endless strings of crab pots. I figure that I coiled something like 350 miles of line all told. It was brutal work, and I think most of us were scared shitless a lot of the time, but we never really knew it because we were always too busy or bone weary to feel it. Even the biggest boats are mere specks in the jaws of the bitter Alaskan waters. One season, eight people I knew never returned from the sea to drink with the rest of us in the bars.

I ended up falling in love with fishing. The sea, the fish and the crustaceans became a powerful drug in my bloodstream. So I fished more than just crab, I fished for shrimp and halibut, become a bonafide floating predator, and eventually skippered my own small halibut boat.

Eventually I left Alaska, bound for my first attempt at college when commercial fishing took a big downturn because of resource depletion, and season wages fell to poverty levels. It was a doldrums that lasted a good many years for the crabbers of Alaska. I eventually got my education, but my heart always remained on the fishing boat deck.

Ultimately, the repetitive motion of coiling, handling pots and fighting a bucking deck probably KO'd the majority of my joints, cartilage and bone. And, this has made several orthopedic surgeons a few dollars off of my insurance, but I can still coil a line and you should see me tackle a mighty garden hose or the anchor line to Le Menagerie.

Three years ago, I had the opportunity to subcontract on a sixty five foot double-rigged shrimper up at Aransas Pass. The boat was specifically rigged to catch and relocate sea turtles as part of a US Army Corps of Engineers dredging project requirement. I accepted the job, though it was difficult to go offshore now that I had a family.

The captain and crew were Hispanic and it didn’t take long for Spanish to become my own dominant language, and I found myself comfortable speaking no English. Besides taking my turn on the deck, I took my turn in the galley cooking breakfasts of migas con huevo and making ceviche from freshly caught cobia. I developed an immediate friendship with all on board. Cliché, but true, there is kinship and commonality among all who go to sea, regardless of where you’re from, where you’ve sailed or fished.

As the on board biologist I quantified and identified bycatch- everything from sharks to starfish, and of course any seaturtles that might get hauled aboard in the specially modified shrimp nets. I worked in twelve hour shifts along with another biologist, which was reminiscent of other commercial fishing I had done, things like shrimp and halibut. I worked the night shift, which was even more reminiscent of my commercial fishing days, working under the glow of the sick yellow halogen deck lights. The only thing missing was the freezing spray and the pitching twenty foot seas. I didn’t miss that part. I even enjoyed handling the nets, pulling the lazy line and shooting the big trawls back into the inky depths. The job evoked a world of emotions and sensations long buried. Sleep was deep and restful against the hum of the diesel engine, the sound of deck machinery and the smell of the salt air. I remembered, for a vague instant another scene, passing through the Shelikof Straights as the sun sank over the western horizon, mountains turning from brown to gold in the last dying remnants of the day and asking the question among ourselves, as we lined the rail watching this passion play unfold, “Why would anyone want to work on the land?”.

The job though was prematurely cut short when the dredge sucked in a Kemps Ridely turtle, and was shut down. I returned home on a bus.

Today, I get my fix of the sea as often as possible aboard Le Menagerie, the drone of deck machinery and diesel replaced by the song of the wind in the sails and rigging, and the sound of the water slipping by the hull. Each time, my soul reaches back from the present and reconnects to something, probably much older than I am. And sometimes when we're out there, and the sun is setting, lighting up the water in the same way, I say a prayer for my friends from the sea, those who came back, and those who never did.

Who Polices the Police?

2005-05-11T08:26:00.000-07:00

I hope you will take the time to read this carefully before dismissing it as another one of my rants. Since you will not listen to me, let me try and enlighten you to a few things in writing. First, the police are not your friend. By the very nature of the word, "police" indicates a condition where one loses freedom to authority. It is quite easy for that authority to become corrupt and self serving. When the police want your "consent" to search you, it is usually due to the fact that they have no probable cause to do so. It is an open door to government mischief. Whether you have anything to hide or not, giving them consent to "search" you, or your property is a basic violation of the 4th amendment of the US Constitution, which states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Probable cause has a narrow definition, and MUST be legally supported, it is seldom a judgement call on the part of the street police, but rather one decided higher up, by a judge. That's how our system works. By giving them permission without strict adherence to the constitution, we basically give authorization for our constitutional right to be violated. A right that many have fought and died for. This is not cooperation. This is abdication. It has been my long standing belief that this country is heading in two directions, both with the same result, both for the same reason; corruption of the constitution. By not making the constabulary accountable to the constitution, we enable them to set precedent which will eventually come back and haunt us. Remember, we are only a few steps from a gestapo state, and things like 9-11 have hastened that condition. I get outraged when people are ambivalent or mypoic to this. It is up to us as citizens to police the police, police the government, and this is our sacred responsibility it is not an option. By allowing them to corrupt the constitution, your rights and my rights, we pound another nail into the coffin of freedom.

The Back Roads

2005-05-09T15:56:00.000-07:00

I rolled out west on my scooter Friday to visit my dad. He's 86 years old and a source of inspiration to all of us aging pirates. He lives alone, has a girfriend ( he can't get her to play strip cribbage though), and still drives ( but I don't know for how much longer) his big old white caddilac all over McAllen and the surrounding towns.

I got a notion to take the day off, the winds were pretty light, and skies blue and I had the option to sail, but it'd been about a couple of months since I've seen the old man. D was substituting over at the elementary school, and called just as I was getting ready to take off so we met at Manuels for a quick breakfast of chorizo con huevos before I rode, and with a fueled body, I fueled the iron pony, cranked the power on, heading west out the back roads.

The back roads run through towns that pretty much resemble the Rio Grande Valley the way it was when I was a kid. Back in the 1960's there was little urban development, the area was mostly agriculture, and going to the island was an all day experience, once here there was little to do except play in the Gulf of Mexico or fish. Miles of farm fields, brushland and small towns, untouched by progress separated our family home in Mission from the coast. It was an endless expanse of flat two-lane blacktop running east to west, north to south. It's as if the original designers had no concept of anything but the cardinal compass points.

I turn north on Farm Road 1847 just past Bayview, gunning the two wheeler about sixty five, just humming along, all systems go. At FM 106, I turn left (west), and roll along past some of the remaining orchards, some still in blossom, the early morning air heavy with the scent of orange. When I was a kid, learning to drive, it seemed like most of the Valley was orchard, and it was easy to get lost. It was like driving in a maze, and since many of the roads were poorly marked, there were times when I actually was lost, which was OK in those days because gas only cost something like thirty five cents a gallon, and besides, it gave me an excuse to push my grandmothers bald-tired Buick Skylark at insane and unsafe high speeds along the lonely, neverending straight road, always searching for that one different road, the road that led home.

The air begins to turn hot, and then hotter, the farther from the coast I ride. I find myself slowing down for the towns of Rio Hondo on the Arroyo Colorado, Combes and Santa Rosa, all puctuation marks in an otherwise open throttle ride. At the town of Santa Rosa, there's a north joggle where 106 turns into 107. I always wondered what the reason was for this apparent right angle joggle in an otherwise seamless highway. I found out many years ago when taking the first of many geology classes, the professor explained that the surveyors, coming from Cameron County had surveyed FM 107 on magnetic north and the surveyors coming from the opposite direction (Hidalgo County) had surveyed FM 106 on true north, and where they met (Santa Rosa), well....there had to be a compensation for magnetic deviation. I think I would've joggled the roads in less than a ninety degree angle of meeting if I had been the planner. Just a perverse sense of doing something different, maybe show my prodgeny that I really do know more than just the cardinal compass points.

Riding a motorcycle is a sensory experience, as addictive as cocaine or heroin, but driving a car is a mindless job, something best done on internal autopilot. Driving (as opposed to riding) is a brain numbing experience that isolates you from the world, with life as a surreal movie played out in fast forward just on the other side of the windshield. No matter what the commercials try to tell you, the average person usually looks for ways to escape the task at hand when driving in a car, especially in the city. Too often I find myself locked into the jeep, air conditioning on, talk radio jabbering incessantly, the rest of the world blowing by, pretty much unaware that I'm stuck in a steel shell rocketing through an unfelt, unexperienced world with the only sense of travel being the motion of things going by, lost forever just outside the windows.

On the steel horse, experiencing the outside is manditory and without question, you're an integral part of it. Every buffet of the bike in the wind, each gust on your chest, the noise of it in your ears along with the drone of the engine lets you know that you are alive, bound to this world, you are a player in this world, not just traveling through it. At low speeds, the smells and sounds of the world filter through, untouched by glass and air conditioning, some sucked in to the carburetor destined to become the explosion of fuel and air that produces the power that propels you down the road, others sucked into your brain in the explosion of senses that evoke distant or maybe new memories, energy that propels you through life . Just past Santa Rosa, the sugar mill is operating, and I can pretty much taste the sweet odor of sugarcane being processed in the morning air already hot and redolent with the smell of tar and asphalt, blooming wildflowers and native brush which line the searing road, all flashing by in a kaleidoscope of bright color.

I slow down for the towns of Edcouch and Elsa. These towns date back to the early 20th century, when a local gringo developer, Ed Couch named the two nascent cities after he and his wife, Elsa Couch. For many years they were small farm communities north of Weslaco, roughshod composites of little tacquerias and cantinas lining the dusty street, with maybe an auto parts store or a llantaria (tire repair) breaking the monotony of the otherwise unremarkable, flat landscape. From here, the world is truly flat. Today I notice a Pizza Hut, a Stars, a Jack in the Box and a Whataburger all lining the main street of Edcouch. And of course there's the requisite Circle K (Circle Jerk) Wells Fart-go Bank and Auto Zone. Progress marches on.

Nearing McAllen, the traffic begans to mimic any other big town I have ever been in, ever had the misfortune to live in. Consturction, filth and inconsiderate driving, buildings jammed up against buildings, apartments, houses and businesses all within whisper of each other. People living an arms distance from one another, never knowing one another, doors locked, hearts locked. I am claustraphobic, agorophobic, wanting to flee before I finish the task at hand. Why would anyone want to live there? Almost immediately I begin to long for my island, for my stretch of the coast, the endless expanse of wind and wave. I think about just turning the bike around and pointing it east towards the water, where I know we both want to return to, but I complete the journey at my fathers doorstep.

An eternal afternoon spent with the old man, saying adios in the late afternoon heat, sinking into the saddle of my iron pony, once again rolling the throttle on, and with the sun on my back, head east, thankful to be going home.

The New Sheriff in Town

2005-05-08T08:21:00.000-07:00

My friend Ken stopped by this morning to visit. I noticed his white 4WD truck parked at the lab when I got back from turning on the baypump. Ken works for the National Marine Fisheries Service as an agent, and he's the new sheriff in town. We became friends last winter during the Christmas freeze when green sea turtles stranded on the shoreline like so many lawn ornaments, and we ended up having to babysit about 18 of them.

The Corps of Engineers in its infinite wisdom was opearting a dredge at the time in Brazos Santiago Pass, under the rationale that they would do less damage to emergent seagrass beds during the winter. Never mind the fact that our reptile friends are lethargic and much more prone to being sucked up in the dredge intake, to be belched out on the beach along with tons of muddy dredge spoil in a process called "beach replinishment".

Beach replenishment is a scam that the city of South Padre Island came up with along with the Corps of Engineers to deal with the tons of unwanted dredge disposal material, mostly bottom muck and mud. This spoil is always a problem whenever a dredging project is undertaken, and our one pass between the Port and the open Gulf, the Brazos Santiago Pass is no exception. Although the Brazos Santiago is a natural pass, or cut in the island, it requires periodic dredging to maintain an average depth of around 35 feet which allows large vessels access to the Port of Brownsville. So every two years a massive project is undertaken to accomplish this. The City contracts the Corps of Engineers to pump the freshly excavated mud on the beaches in the hope that this will slow the erosion caused by natural and man made process, things like knocking down the primary dune field in order to build condominiums and hotels. They pay the Corps something like a million dollars each time they pump their otherwise unwanted spoil on the beach. I suspect somebody, or a group of somebodies much higher up is profiting from this exercise in futility, but I'll refrain from speculating, or the Eye of the Hurricane and its author could very well disappear from the planet.

For a little while though, the beach appears wider, although much muddier, and I guess the throngs of vacationing winter Texan tourists thoroughly appreciate this effort to save our beach. Because the dredge spoil consists of mostly mud sediments, natural erosion in the form of the longshore current quickly picks it up and carries it northbound to be eventually deposited along the coastal eolian sandplain, replenishing miles and miles of deserted and unspoiled beach, shoreline and inland potrero in a process thoroughly appreciated by vacationing whitetailed deer, coyote, rattlesnake and Santa Gertrudis cattle.

So I met Ken when the dredge rudely deposited a turtle on the beach during that cold period, and he caught wind of it. Of course the dredge operator denied that this happened, but was more than a little embarassed when Ken went to talk with them on the beach, and right then as they were talking, the dredge outlet spewed another fricasseed tortuga verde on the beach. Although caught apparently red handed, the upper echelon of the NMFS failed to successfully prosecute the dredge operator. That's the way it is, one arm of the government rarely polices another. It's all on the wink and nod system.

I know that frustrates the hell out of Ken. Of all of the feds that I've known, he seems to be one of the rare ones who understand the long term consequences of greed. Whether it's overfishing or consumer fraud, Ken goes after them like a bulldog. He's the new sheriff in town.

One of the new sheriffs latest frustrations is with wholesalers who are dumping a species of Atlantic fish that are commonly called redfish. Completely unrelated to our own redfish (red drum), this species of ocean perch is inferior in quality and size to our own native fish, but since one of the vernacular names is redfish, these unscrupulous marketers are selling it under that moniker, at a substantially lower price than true redfish. The restaurants buy it at a lower cost, and sell it to the consumer in the form of "blackened redfish", charging the same price they would if they sold the real thing. The irony is that just about anything tastes good blackened. You could blacken the sole of an old shoe and it'd probably be allright, maybe a little tough though. So although not illegal, it is nevertheless, unscrupulous, and I'm sure if the consumer knew what was going on he'd be pretty pissed. Of course to do anything about it would take a hefty effort on the part of the NMFS legal staff, and they're unwilling to make that effort as long as thing remain status quo. They told him though, if it generated a lot of publicity (the squeeky wheel kind of thing), they might be more inclined to react.

I just talked to the new Sheriff on the phone, and we're going to get together and sit on the back deck of Le Menagerie, drink a few beers, eat some fried chicken and watch people try and trailer their boats after a long day of drinking and fishing on the Laguna Madre. Should be fun. Last time I enjoyed that form of entertainment, somebody ripped the axle off of their trailer when they backed too far down into the water.