We return our golf cart.
The cart jockey is a tiny man wearing shorts, tennis shoes with big socks, a blue faded ball cap. There are four carts ahead of ours that he has to clean, toss trash, wipe down seats, check gas, and inspect. We use golf carts because they speed up our play and that, in theory, helps us score better.
At my feet is a small key with a number 3 on it. Barely visible, I pick it up, bend it, watch it spring back to its original position. It isn’t a real golf cart key because they are metal and a different shape.
I ask the little Irishman with blond hair pushing out from under the sides of his ball cap what my found key goes to?
He looks a moment while he wipes down a cart seat.
” That’s the key to the box of Forgotten Dreams. ”
There are many keys in this world. Keys to lock boxes, keys to offices and homes, keys to cars, keys to your heart.
All the dreams in the world aren’t much good if you forget where you put them.
As we head back to the car, I hear him whistling ” Danny Boy. ”
I believe he has a box full of dreams under his bed that he opens frequently.
I-40 runs through Albuquerque’s midsection like a Mexican leather belt with a big rodeo buckle.
At I-40 and Carlisle in Albuquerque is a new ” Green Jeans” shopping center built using shipping containers, Albuquerque’s new building material craze. While the old woman who lives in a shoe is a theme of yesteryear, the Santa Fe Brewing Company, along with a local builder, Roy Solomon,have created a new urban retail center combining shipping containers and more traditional materials.
People are on the move in our 21st century and you can easily be asleep in Albuquerque tonight and wake up tomorrow in Singapore. Shipping containers are generic, sexless, and have no personality. They are big Lego’s; easy to move, stack, transform. They fit our generic drug, unisex bathrooms,one size fits all world.
Doing investigative research on shipping container building with Alex, the architect, we visit, see, and leave the new shopping and dining complex feeling the place is well done but not that exciting or cost effective.
Where I want is to live is in my own container mounted on the deck of a huge oil tanker sailing to the world’s ports, having scrambled eggs and bacon with green chili for breakfast, as we round the Cape of Good Hope.
Till that happens, Green Jeans, with its craft beer, home made tacos and stacked containers, will have to do.
Things get new names.
Route 66 becomes Interstate-40. Bruce Jenner becomes Caitlyn Jenner. British Honduras becomes Belize. Climate warming becomes a Religion. Kentucky Fried Chicken becomes KFC.
Before Truth or Consequences adopted its new name in the 1950’s, to promote a popular television show,this sleepy New Mexico burg was called Hot Springs.
For hundreds of years, Indians, cowboys and locals partook of mineral baths by the Rio Grande river. They put differences aside, slipped into above 100 degree waters, and looked out across the river towards the mountains where they hunted. In old times, before Elephant Butte Dam, the Rio Grande ran deeper and swifter. There are times of the year now when the river runs dry as southern New Mexico chili farmers scramble to pull allotted water and flood their fields.
While you soak you can watch ducks bob in the Rio Grande or follow the trend line of Turtle Back mountain from its tail to the tip of its nose. For fifteen dollars an hour you have your own personal retreat, cool the upper half of your body as your lower half cooks like a chicken in a crock pot.
Names change.
Conservative and liberal are not what their parents named them. Going to war to make peace is an old song. Spending your way to prosperity is preached from pulpit and podium. Voting for the least of two evils is how we participate in our Constitutional Republic.
When things get rough, soaking in hot mineral springs on a cool morning is a perfect tonic- no matter what they are named..
T or C is a place that sounds a whole lot more interesting than it will ever be and hot mineral baths take a little chill out of this winter that seems to drag on and on and on.
This sweet roll is pure Texas.
Tired of omelets, biscuits and gravy, toast, waffles, steaks with eggs over easy, diners can always opt for a non-politically correct sweet roll breakfast that Lyle Lovett would feature in his kind of songs.
This roll fills a plate instead of a saucer. It would go well on Caesar’s table at a fine Roman buffet where elites dine with the Emperor served by slaves and entertained by musicians and dancing girls.
This morning Dave and the Russian Vera join forces, one with a fork and the other a knife. The roll is carefully, surgically divided into smaller bites and by the end of breakfast they have finished half and put the other half in a takeout box.
I look for togas here but people in Pier 19 are wearing windbreakers and baseball caps and look middle class. We sometimes think we have a Caesar in the White House,but, so far, American Caesar’s don’t have a professional food taster, don’t get killed too often, and are kicked out of office after eight years if they can fool the voters two elections in a row.
Vera will have to walk miles to recover from this decadence.
Dave never gains weight but he will need a smoke before breakfast is done.
E-Harmony, from what I have learned about it, is doing as much for foreign relations as all our American Ambassadors put together.
At seven in the morning, you show yourself down several hallways into the restaurant.
Giovanni or one of the girls gets a pot of coffee and a full cup to me when they see me. When the wind blows I can feel the entire pier swing its hips like a drunk hula girl. It is five o’ clock somewhere and Jimmie Buffet Drive runs right through our dining area to the bar where Happy Hour begins when someone starts a fish story and the bar girl pours her first round.
At seven in the morning, this restaurant has an odd feel. Everything slants to the left and the guys who built the place must have had their heads in Margaritaville when they picked up their hammers and screw guns and measured their cuts.
By seven thirty, my order is on the wheel and cooks are scrambling eggs, frying bacon, making biscuits and gravy.
Sitting near the kitchen I listen to them talking about parties and during Spring Break plates will fly through their serving window as fast as they can fix them as they break their necks looking at girls in bikini’s, or less.
By eight, the sun is warming me through single pane windows and a pelican on top of a close by pier post in my line of sight is grooming.
Deckhands on the Osprey are out swabbing decks, loading poles and ice coolers filled with drinks, sandwiches and bait shrimp. In the gift shop, a clerk runs credit cards for men and women going out to fish this morning on the Osprey.
At seven, the world looks screwy. By nine, kinks are worked out.
South Padre Island, when you look at its aerial photograph on the wall, looks like a shark’s tooth.
I keep a sharp eye out for one legged sailors.
They are my canary in the mine shaft.
The sky is burning and, if it wasn’t, there would be no reason to snap this photo.
Joan, Neal’s wife, and the rest of us, all stare as we all walk towards the Shrimp Haus, a South Padre Island restaurant that features shrimp, shrimp, and more shrimp – boiled, breaded, fried, cooked or uncooked with salad bar and side orders of fries, potato salad or cole slaw.
The sky’s colors look like Matzatlan sunsets, sunrise in Ambergris Caye, the sun sinking in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas.
For a moment it seems the clouds are waves and the entire world has turned upside down with the top becoming the bottom and the bottom becoming the top. Palm trees, that the wind shakes, are cheerleader’s pom poms at this heavenly football game..
Mother Nature waves her flag and is impossible to ignore, diminish, or trump.
Tomorrow morning, we will be presented a different light show.
Sunrise and sunset are bookmarks in nature’s novel.
Being together is a good thing.
Isla Blanca Park is owned and operated by Cameron County, Texas.
It is at the southern tip of South Padre Island and has hundreds of full service sites for snowbirds, overnight visitors, campers. It is a destination for most, a stop on the road for some, and it is a good place to enjoy sun and surf. This year has been one of good weather, locals say, but the Gulf is still too cold to swim in, wind gusts, fog rolls in at night and sleeps late into the morning.
Snowbirds who come for the winter make improvements to their spaces, bring out decorations and sports equipment, set up whirly gigs and windsocks, and meet their neighbors. Some have been coming here thirty years for bingo in the recreation building on Tuesday, and Thursday night yoga, or pot lucks. There is an abundance of friendliness. People wave and say hi, stop to chat, help hold a line or hook up someone else’s rv, ride bikes in twos and threes.
Being in a hurry is counterproductive and, for all you care, the rest of the world beyond this little spit of land can sink into the ocean like the Titanic.
You can rent a space up to six months at a time if you decide there is no point going home.
I am not to that point, yet.
” Some days you do better in the boat and some days better on the beach, ” the fisherman in coveralls tells us as he opens his cooler and shows us his Pompanos and Whiteys, game fish in this part of the Gulf of Mexico.
The bottom of his cooler has five or six small fish and a small plastic container filled with fresh cut shrimp that baits his hooks.
He and his wife have been here since before sunset.
When surf fishing, you cast your weighted and baited hooks out as far as you can, plant the handle of your pole into the sand and watch till its tip starts to bend like a scoliosis patient. When you see that peculiar bend, you reach for your pole, set your hook, and fight your catch out of the sea.
This fishing spot is towards the north end of South Padre, past tall condos and hotels. The angler’s big white pickup is pulled off the beach thoroughfare made by tire tracks. Its tailgate is down and a tackle box is close at hand.
” How much is a daily license? ”
” Fifteen bucks…. ”
” What’s the limit? ”
” No limit…. ”
We don’t have fishing poles but next time they will be stowed in RV cargo holds with golf clubs, lawn chairs, firewood, and tarps.
Next year, seeing how things are going, we will probably have to have a license to pick up shells. For governments, every day is tax day. I’m having trouble this morning seeing why we need a license to fish in the first place? Last time I looked, the government didn’t stock the ocean. we already paid a fee to drive onto this county property and are renting rv spots for our rigs?
We are, bottom line, squatters on this planet.
If we aren’t fishing, we are biting, and there are costs to do everything, or nothing.
Prospecting is in your blood, or it isn’t.
On a weekday, at the beach, Neal prospects, Joan knits, Scott pulls his hat down and lays back against a dune and watches kite surfers move across the water. The wind is blowing, but it is better here than in a frigid north where a cold front moves down and throws a wet blanket over the Northeast, Midwest, and South.
At the tip of Texas, almost as far south as Florida, we are not immune from restless weather. Palm trees rustle, clouds hang like a boxer’s black eye, fog lounges on street corners like a thug.
Prospecting takes patience.
It isn’t long till our prospector comes back with his find.
He pulls out scrap, beer cans, foil, pop tops and wire. Then, out of his front shirt pocket, he brings the coup de gras – a corroded copper penny.
You know there are gold doubloons and pieces of eight not far from where this penny was found. Newspaper reports of gold doubloons found by farmers from Ohio walking on the beach surface every so many years.
Hope supported by facts is more than enough reason to prospect here.
Sea turtles can grow to five hundred pounds and range widely over the world’s oceans.
They mysteriously return to lay eggs on the same beach where they were born and man has been one of their biggest enemies since their meat is tasty, their shells can be fashioned into ornaments, their body parts dried and ground into Oriental medicine.
A sea turtle rescue center operates on South Padre Island’s Gulf Shores Drive. Volunteers staff it, donations keep it alive, and injured or sick turtles inhabit a series of lined swimming pool tanks inside the rehabilitation center.
Some turtles have been victims of boat propellers, some were injured in fishing nets, some lost a limb to sharks. Life as a turtle has dangers but when the turtles are recovered from their setbacks, they are released back into the Gulf, tagged, monitored, and celebrated.
Allison is a current resident turtle with a prothesis. Losing her tail, she has been fitted with a new rubber one that lets her glide in her small tank like a Gulf War veteran with new robotic legs. Victims of carelessness, malice, chance, turtles are easy to love and people support the turtle cause by buying turtle memorabilia in the gift shop.
Man too has his own tragedies to overcome.
Our safety tanks take the form of halfway houses, hospitals, psych wards, jails, and churches.
There are plenty of days we aren’t ready to be released into the world again, either.
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