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.
It is Weston’s idea to go see the dunes.
Passing through Midland on my way to the beach at Padre Island,Texas, I pay a visit to a nephew living in what some call ” the armpit ” of Texas.
Saturday we drive to the sand hills, take off our shoes and climb dunes. Sunday will be devoted to watching the Denver Bronco’s try to reach another Super Bowl. Weston is from Colorado and I wouldn’t expect him to support anyone but John Elway’s team.
Midland is a big small town in the middle of the oil patch. Around, and in, it’s city limits, are drilling rigs, unused casing, semis for delivering pipe and oil machinery, thousands of mud splattered pickup trucks, and metal buildings filled with oil related businesses
Women are, I am told, scarce here.
Finding a man that has a paycheck is a woman’s prerequisite for a long term relationship, so, with the downturn in commodity prices, many of the fair sex have moved to better hunting grounds.
Trekking up and down these baby dunes makes me believe it must be humbling to have to cross the Sahara Desert with a caravan of camels and only the stars to guide you.
This is a hard land to live in.
To survive here, women have to be tougher than the men who love them.
Leaving Roswell for Midland, Texas you start seeing oilfield pump jacks right off the highway.
There are no trees or bushes to hide them so they can’t be missed, look like grasshoppers, and have been shot with twenty two’s more than once. Some of the pump jacks are alone by themselves while others cluster in a circle the wagons formation with big collection tanks nearby. These fields have been producing for decades providing oil, jobs, tax revenues to the state of New Mexico and at least once a week a scruffy man in oil stained levi’s pulls his tank truck up and drains them of all the oil that came out of the well casings that go down deep into the ground.
The United States burns up millions of barrels of oil per day and oil has been pumped for a hundred and fifty years in this country to supply a modern world. Roswell and Midland is oil country and roughnecks is a word that doesn’t just describe men crawling around drilling rigs in oil stained coveralls, work boots and hard hats.
In this landscape, pump jacks work mechanically, without complaint, twenty four hours a day. The well sites are clean and not near as dirty as people’s back yards in Roswell or any of the small towns dying along the highway.
Pulling the handle off a gas station pump and sticking it in your tank is the last small part of a long chain of effort. It takes millions of years to make oil, months to make it good for our uses, and minutes for us to burn up.
When oil stops flowing, we see how uncivilized people can be.
Clines Corners is a travel center on I- 40 east of Moriarty, New Mexico.
It opened in 1934 at the intersection of what was then Route 66 and highway 85 going north to Santa Fe or highway 85 south to Roswell.
1934 was long ago, at the end of the Great American Depression, written up in history books, documented in stark black and white photos of dust whipped people with belongings piled into pickup trucks heading for California’s Garden of Eden. Some say those days are coming again, with great billowing clouds of mid west dust and stockbrokers jumping off big city balconies.
As you draw closer to the Corners, their billboards promote cheap coffee, clean restrooms, authentic Indian moccasins, salt water taffy, cheaper gas. Inside the center are trinkets, enough to buy five Manhattan’s. The postcards are catchy, the candy tempting, the restrooms clean. I don’t buy anything but linger at a rack of postcards that reminds me of Scotttreks, my digital postcard rack.
1934 is an eternity ago in a century of exponential change.
How do young feel when confronted with a generation of elders who grew up with black and white tv, rotary phones, Phillip Morris cigarettes, Schlitz beer, the Little Rascals and Post Toasties cereal? How will the young be looked upon by their children who will ride in cars that are driver less, have their moves documented by security cameras and do school on computers with a virtual teacher who never gets mad, always is prepared, and doesn’t have to deal with bad behavior or inappropriate clothes?
Even though we look amused at the past, we too are going to be in someone else’s rear view mirror.
Yogi might not have said “, It’s deja vu all over, ” but, if he didn’t, he should have.
The day after my trip to warmer climates is in bed, Mother Nature spreads her winter blanket and dumps snow on Albuquerque.
In the foothills, east of Albuquerque, snowflakes nestle between cactus spines, but, before noon, the sun will start to erase the white. Footprints ahead of me point up the trail and my eye catches a rabbit cutting out of a ravine and darting under a scrubby bush by a granite boulder. He might worry but I couldn’t hit him with two shotguns.
I watch as he freezes in what he believes is safety.
He is still motionless as I move again up the trail. His territory is more limited than mine but we both deal with Mother Nature, he with fur and me with a coat.
It’s winter, and, just back from a trip, I’m already packing my Toyota Sunrader again for a jaunt to Padre Island, Texas.
The last few years the only sign on my front door has been the one that says ” Gone Fishing. ”
It seems that I’m gone more than I am home and this, I figure, is as good a definition of deja vu as any.
When I get to the airport to fly back to the U.S., my plane home has already taken off without me.
The change of my flight times was buried and unread in an e mail from the airline so I am left grounded and have to purchase another ticket home. The airline assigns the blame on me and I’m not getting any sympathy.
I get online, book another flight to get home, sit around the Cuenca airport for half a day before boarding my new flight, left to try and get a refund through their Customer Service department.
In the sky, miles are chewed up quickly. This new plane flies at 35,000 feet and over six hundred miles per hour, standard for commercial flights but nothing near the speed of a fighter jet. It is dolled up on the inside like a modest economy car and is full of passengers who will make connections to reach multiple destinations.
Above the clouds, life is peaceful. The clouds have multiple designs and swirls, loop de loops and pilings on. Occasionally there are glimpses of terra firma, often vast reaches of brown or green broken by freeways, lakes, rivers, or mountain ranges.
When my third plane of this return trip reaches Albuquerque,home shakes my hand and asks , ” What took you so long to get back? ”
My ultimate satisfaction will be not using Travelocity or American Airlines on future trips.
I’m not going to blame myself for my screw up.
Finding everyone else accountable and responsible for making your life perfect is the new American way.
There are dining opportunities available this morning.
This girl is carrying, on her head, confections to sell in front of the New Cathedral to afternoon crowds the day after New Year.
The mounds of whipped cream with ice cream cones stuck in the top, look like curlers and wiggle as she walks.
This treat doesn’t melt, tastes good hours after it is made, and doesn’t cost much for consumers- little kids and old timers.
By the end of afternoon the mounds of treats will be more than half gone.
It will be as if a giant reaches down, with his right forefinger, and scoops up a sample, gives an appreciative nod, and rumbles off towards the mountains for an afternoon nap.
Walking in the Cuenca Historical District wears your standards down.
This is an old part of Cuenca and you gradually become accustomed to deteriorated appearances.
After a few weeks you don’t notice worn doorknobs, peeling paint, plaster coming off walls, windows with no curtains, roll down steel security doors with graffiti. You look instead at flower pots on balconies, colorful flags flying from hotel entries, mannikins in doorways wearing hip fashions.
You accept old and un-maintained as old and charming.
On a turn through town,sidewalk chalk paintings are beautiful in their delicacy, their colors almost camouflaging them against the brick sidewalks.
” Support art and culture, ” the words say.
The chalk is going to vanish in a matter of days, walked on, washed down and swept away by women cleaning sidewalks in front of their shops. The drawings are light and little can withstand the sledgehammer of a modern city on the move.
I am careful not to walk on the faces. They are cheerful, hopeful, and fresh.
Supporting art and culture are good goals, anywhere in the world, any time.
The 31st of December begins quietly.
As the day moves forwards it changes like your favorite radio station whose volume keeps increasing as the variety and quality of the songs gets better and talk gets more inflammatory.
As night falls there are effigies being burned, in front of a hotel, by the flower market, on your corner. There are satires performed, bands play, and revelers dance in the street. As dark comes, city folk in masks and costumes parade the streets in gangs looking like escapees from a Michael Jackson Thriller video.
New Year crawls in and the Old Year creeps out.
This year has not been bad so I don’t have joy in seeing it burned up.
The old year goes with a whimper and the New Year lies before us like a baby in a manger.
This affair starts early.
Usually, people wait till dark to do their exorcisms, but this bunch has already laid their body in the street in front of a business and are stuffing papers down its pants.
In a world of camera phones, nothing goes un-noticed and un-reported. These participants don’t care if people are watching. It is probable this is a replica of their boss and they are, as a group, telling him what they think of him. It takes a few matches before smoke comes with fire close behind.
There is something eerie about seeing a body set on fire, even if It is a make believe body.It calls up images from the Mid East where real people are set on fire, heads cut off, and people blow each other up with explosives..
This bloodletting will be over tonight and tomorrow shops will close, streets and sidewalks will be hosed down, and people will spend time with family.
Exorcisms are best finished quickly, and remembered for a long long time.
Recent Comments