Seagull Charley doesn’t come when you call his name.
Without a fish for Charley, he ain’t going anywhere and he won’t push tennis balls with his beak or do circus tricks.
This morning Charley strolls the beach watching for opportunities. What he catches is his and he will share only if he has a mind too.
There are dining opportunities on this beach all the way north to Corpus Christi and south to Mexico and when waves go out Charley quickly covers his little piece of real estate. He doesn’t own anything but his feathers but his basic rules are self preservation, having a full stomach, and taking care of Mama Charley and the kids.
When Charley leaves the beach and takes flight, this Padre Island strip of sand seems more isolated and less friendly.
In air, between sand and sea, Charley is free,and,oddly enough, it makes me feel free too as I watch him glide in the wind above me.
Wanting to fly has been a long time dream of our human species.
South Padre Island is accessible from Texas highway 100 via the Queen Isabella Bridge that connects Port Isabel, Texas on one end and South Padre Island on the other.
When you hit the beaches here you have miles and miles to walk and on most mornings men and women carry Wal- Mart plastic bags to hold their seashells. South Padre is a favorite haunt for Spring Break revelers as well as us retired folks.
Pier 19 is a local restaurant and tourist center where you can have breakfast, schedule fishing or dolphin tours, buy in the gift shop, fish off the pier, look at photos and memorabilia from past decades.
Out front of this eatery is a huge shark caught by Captain Phil Cano on February 30, 2004. Its mouth is open, blood drips down the sides of its jaws, teeth are pointed and ready to bite again. You can see the monster from blocks away.
The problem is February 30.
Once the date is suspect it is easy to start questioning the rest of thIs fish story.
Truth doesn’t matter much in a place where weather changes often, time stretches, and you only need shorts, a T shirt, a ball cap and sneakers to be part of the gang.
In April, college kids arrive, prices escalate, parties go late into the night. Pier 19 will be booked solid and some libertine will hang a bra on the shark’s front tooth.
That will make a Texas size story, but, for now, this post is all imagination waiting for reality to catch up.
Our dad liked fishing. His dad liked fishing. So, sons and grandsons like fishing too.
The Rio Tomebamba bubbles up memories of trout streams in New Mexico, the Pecos and Jemez in particular. It also reminds me of the Conejos River in southern Colorado, or the Gila River near Silver City, New Mexico.
We have caught trout out of smaller streams than this. There are rocks behind which the trout can rest and deeper pools where they congregate. Running water keeps nutrients flowing on the surface for them to strike as they pick and choose when and what to eat.
This river remains an anchor in a big city, a place to relax and stroll, a jazz song out of nature’s music book. One of the better things about the city of Cuenca is that it hasn’t crowded out the nature that is inside it.
If I were to move here, I would look for a small apartment by this river so I could walk along its side every morning just like this.
Rivers are bright murmuring bow’s to life’s presents.
This pier is at the end of the Perla Escondita Condos. With tomorrows departure looming, I find my Yo Yo, a bag of frozen shrimp, hooks and swivels and weights and try my hands at some hand fishing in Belize.
It takes a minute to figure out how to cast with this rig. You unravel your line in little loops on the pier deck, gently pick up the weights in your right hand while holding the Yo Yo in your left. Then, you cast the weights as far as you can and move the Yo Yo in the direction of your cast so the line doesn’t snap and whip the hook and bait off. that are connected to the weights.The heavy sinkers take the bait and hooks to the bottom where the big ones are.
I am not having luck today but one of the ladies picked up by a tour boat, on this pier, snaps my picture for me so I can show people I was really here.
Posts are like dipping a spoon into the sea and scooping up teardrops of wiggling, squiggling, quivering life out of a very big bowl.
When and where you decide to dip your spoon is up too you, but you are tucking memories away safely like squirrels saving their nuts.
Later, with a post and a few pictures, I can revisit this moment and relish it like the pearl that it is.
We start on a clear day, end in a driving rain, complete a two hour guided tour of the Hol Chan Marine Reserve,
The fish are many, the coral reef is intact, and there have to be more snorkelers in this reserve than fish. I start my snorkel with ten fingers and still have them when I climb the ladder back into the boat after I’m done for the afternoon.
Underwater, a manta ray glided past me, like an alien space ship with a long tail, passing me like I was a slow farm machine in the right hand lane on a busy highway.
Hol Chan is the most frequented reef locale on Ambergris Caye and it saves lives that tourists meet nature in this safe place with guides. On the other side of the reef, sea currents can sweep you out and turn you into shark bait. This trip, including park fee and a guide who swims you through the reef ecosystem, is fifty dollars U.S. a person.
Ambergris Caye would be nothing but a bald head on the ocean without this reef. A visit to Belize without getting wet is a sacrilege and coming here is almost a rite of passage.
I didn’t see sharks down there but know they are close and pray, for those still in the water, that the predators haven’t been drinking.
I don’t want anyone to be their bar snack.
The ocean is a grocery store.
At the end of piers, the tips of jutting land, on bridges or banks, in small boats and large, men shop for dinner.
Early today three men are casting from the end of a pier at sunrise. They have been up all night and one lifts the top off a five gallon paint bucket and shows me his catch – six red snapper.
” You take them to a restaurant, ” he says, ” and they will cook them up for you. “.
They cast their lines out thirty feet and weights carry the baited hooks to the bottom. When the line pulls taut they wait. Sometimes you have a bucket of fish in half an hour; other times it takes all night and a pack of cigarettes to fill your cart.
” Captain Shark’s is the place to get a pole, ” the talkative one tells me.
This morning I find bait and tackle at Captain Shark’s across from Maya Air next to the Hyperbaric Chamber. The store has fishing gear but also boating and diving items. It costs fifty Belizian to walk out with twenty pound test line, extra weights and hooks, a bag of frozen sardines for bait, and a Yo-Yo, a gadget used to hand cast and retrieve your line without tangles.
It will be a sad day when they ask for a license to fish from the pier.
It is a crime to lock the grocery when you have hungry men.
If it crawls, slides, slips, flips,slithers, climbs, it is not safe.
At “99”, in Albuquerque, there are selections to fit Chinese tastes.
Today, Ruby has a taste for seafood, and, lifting up a black cloth, she goes after blue and white colored crabs that try to escape the small plastic tub that holds them for display. The crabs that run from her the fastest are the ones she grabs in her prongs and puts, with help, into her open plastic bag.
For meat and poultry she likes Sprouts. The meats at “99”, she says in basic English, are old and not good.
I don’t care for tree fungus, but find noodles tolerable. Worms are offensive. The most difficult skill is to eat soup with chopsticks.
Americans eat meat, potatoes, bread, hamburgers, french fries, sugar, salt. Chinese eat seafood, vegetables, fruits, nuts and rice.
The crabs try to hurt us with their scissor hands but they are no match for Ruby’s prongs.
The Albuquerque Bio park is an oasis of water in the desert.
There is an aquarium, rose gardens, a gift shop and museum, a restaurant, and a little train that blows its whistle as it takes kids on a sedate ride through the grounds. The Park has been here over thirty years and is a result of private and public money pooled.
In the aquarium, Alma and I are below ground level, separated from fish by large glass panels that are the edge of their world and the beginning of ours.
In one tank, jelly fish float, almost transparent aliens with internal power plants lit up like Christmas ornaments.
Taking pictures for her Facebook pages, Alma returns to Marinduque in December. With family, a coconut farm, and the beginnings of a pig farm, she has reasons to be there. We humans have roots that keep us grounded. Jellyfish hold to nothing.
Recently an uncle who raised her and her brothers and sisters, after they were abandoned, passed. Working in Chicago, all she could do was wire money back to the Philippines and say a prayer for the man who took her in when no one else wanted her.
To have a hard life and still be enchanted speaks volumes about the human spirit.
Palo Duro Canyon cuts through Texas like a big spoon in a tub of ice cream at a church social.
We load three poles, a tackle box, frozen corn, rubber worms and salmon eggs, and navigate three locked gates to get down to the prime fishing holes. There are some good spots below Lake Tanglewood in the canyon bottom that have catfish, perch, stocked trout, and even bass.
It is too early in the year for fish to be biting but we pull in three and throw them back after gently lifting them onto the bank at our feet, carefully removing the hook from their mouths, careful not to get our hands on their bodies, holding them with two fingers slipped under the gills.
Catch and release is a new fishing tenet in human history.
In the old days you fished and what you caught ended up in a frying pan with batter and went on your plate with the head on one end and the tail on the other. Now, we throw them back and eat fish sold at the grocery that were raised in fish farms in Vietnam.
We fish an hour then track down one of our cousins.
H.B. is working in his garden, in the bottom of the canyon.
Questioned, I maintain that Uruguay is a good place to visit, but living there will be worse than where we are when trouble hits the fan.
Palo Duro Canyon is one hell of a secure foxhole in a world turning dangerous.
In another month it will be warmer and fish in this canyon will be biting better. You can bet we won’t throw them all back.
That wouldn’t be natural.
As our tour boat moves slowly through the water, paralleling Stone Island, we see mangroves form a wall to our east. We leave the marina and head north past large shrimp boats, tuna ships with miles of net piled on their decks, one of the largest fish canneries in Mexico, the Pacifico beer bottling plant, some ship repair yards and ocean going vessels in various shades of rust.
Rounding the northern tip of the island, we head now, towards the south, on the opposite side of the island from where we began. You can look further south and see breaking waves as waters of the Pacific meet waters of this estuary fed by rivers. Mangroves grow where salt water and fresh water meet and they are crucial for this aquatic environment.
While we chug along, a pelican flies down to the deck at the bow of our boat and looks at Polo, our guide.
Pelicans are odd looking birds with huge beaks, beaded eyes and bald heads, huge jointed wings. This visitor’s webbed feet splay out on the deck and he isn’t going anywhere.
Polo reaches for his microphone and tells us a story.
“This is my friend Juanito,” he begins. “He comes and joins us on most of our trips. I will give him fish later for a reward …”
“Some years back,” Polo continues, “we found this pelican who was covered with oil and couldn’t fly. So we wrapped him in a coat and took him home and my family cleaned him up and fed him till he could fly again. We had him at home a year before we brought him back here and let him go. His home is over there …”
Polo gestures at the mangroves.
“He joined us on a tour one day and now he always comes to see us. He is a very smart bird. When I feed him he knows which fish to eat and which fish to leave alone.”
After telling us about the value of mangroves to the ecosystem, and stressing the importance of fishing to the local economy, Polo feeds Juanito his first treat.
For a bunch of tourists, on vacation, Juanito is a high point.
It isn’t every day you are visited by a Pelican and get to watch him grab a fish in his beak, wiggle his long neck to get the fish down to his stomach, then look back at you with contentment and anticipation, as his friend, Polo, reaches into a white five gallon paint bucket for yet another snack.
Juanito takes this fish gently from Polo’s hand, and swallows.
He has become, and he knows it too, our official trip mascot.
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