Derelict Boats, Derelict Hearts

 

As Galveston dons the purple, green and gold of Mardi Gras and South Padre Island waits for the youthful, languorous stretch of Spring Break, Port O’Connor cleans its rods, repairs its reels and waits for the spring flounder run to begin.  Port O’Connor knows how to party, but in Port O’Connor, Texas, fishing comes first.  A little sleepy, slower in pace and rhythm than the cities to her north, Port O’Connor lies at the end of the coastal road, clinging to the edge of Matagorda Bay like a derelict boat that refuses to die.  Salted with spray, rusted and grayed, weathered from decades of storms, she looks at first glance to be a sullen and unpromising destination, but beneath the surface of her bays redfish and speckled trout school and scatter.  Beyond the intracoastal waterway, across the barrier island and over the dunes, surfcasters work the waves while, offshore, dorado and marlin, snapper, grouper and ling lure the adventurous and competitive with their promise of exhilarating combat. 

Years ago, I traveled to Port O’Connor to varnish a beautiful, classic sailboat owned by partners who didn’t fish but believed boats were meant to leave the dock from time to time.  Solitary as a tern, sun-lit and warm as a basking turtle, I labored through the days happy in the knowledge that evening would bring me the twin luxuries of simplicity and solitude.   After shrimp or salad on the dock, a lamp-lit cabin and uninterrupted time for reading or sleep were there for the taking.  If I happened back into the night to gaze at stars or passing tows, an old fellow who lived down the dock would stop and visit, glad to discover a few minutes of companionship.

He loved to talk. However truthful or tall, his tales were wonderful.  He meandered through long, intricate stories about  weekend fights outside local bars, harmless confrontations fueled by drink and boredom. He shared his astonishment at the woman who brought her easel and paints to capture the shifting seaside light and then, unused to nights filled with such deep, pervasive darkness, fled back to the city in terror.  More delicious still was his account of the novice  who went out to fish in a rubber dingy. Hooking the “big one” he’d always dreamed of, he couldn’t land it and ended by being towed all over the flats until his line broke.  Between snorts and guffaws, the old man gasped, “Damn fool never thought to cut his line, but even if he’d had the thought, t’weren’t gonna happen ’cause he didn’t have a knife. No knife!  Who goes fishing without a knife?” 

And so it went. After a few stories, he’d share his recipe for ceviche or brag on the boys who  fish the Poco Bueno and hang trophy marlins, or reminisce about the old days, when life was simpler, and good.  Always, he’d end with The Storm.   The Storm was Carla, Port O’Connor’s personal hurricane.  Long before Katrina, Rita and Ike showed up to monopolize the news cycle like meteorological stars with peeps and press agents, she was the one who scrawled her story across the pages of people’s lives.  

The Haves, and the Have-Nots

 

Most people who live near the Gulf of Mexico, or in Florida, or along the coast of the Southeastern US understand they’re at risk for hurricanes.   When one finally appears that’s big enough or damaging enough, it imprints itself on the collective memory for generations.  I’ve listened to people talk about Carla, Camille, Alicia and Hugo as though they rolled through yesterday, and I’ve heard young people who weren’t alive for some of those storms tell stories as though they were the ones boarding up the house.  Years from now, Ivan, Katrina, Rita, and Ike will continue to be remembered and rehearsed as living events by people who experienced them, or heard the tales so many times they slowly became their own.

One mark of these powerful storms is how quickly they turn the “haves” of the world into “have-nots”.  It doesn’t matter whether your home is a two-room beach shack or an expensive bayfront beauty.  It doesn’t matter whether the vehicle parked out front is a gorgeous Mercedes, a trusty old truck or a rusted-out Chevy.  The storm doesn’t care.  The storm is a magician, with cheap tricks up his sleeve: ”Now you have it – and now you don’t.”  The storm can dump a car into a marina or bury it in the sand as easily as it can wash away an entire community.  The storm can make your second story disappear and leave your neighbor’s pearl necklace hanging on a tree.  The storm doesn’t care.

In Vino, Communitas

 

I’ve been drinking Red Cloud’s Finest, an organic Antigua Guatemalan coffee distributed by EL LAGO Coffee Company, since a friend gave me a pound of beans as a gift.  It tastes as good as any I’ve found, and the story behind the company is unusual, to say the least.

Joe and Terry Butcher dream of importing coffee the old-fashioned way – by sailing ship.  Their first voyage ended disastrously, on New Year’s Day of 2008, with their ship and its entire cargo of coffee beans going to the bottom of Sigsbee Deep, a place in the Gulf of Mexico where recovery is simply impossible.  They were missing a few things on that voyage – including insurance and a rudder stop – but the dream lives on.  Not only will they be carrying a back cargo of humanitarian and school supplies on their way to pick up their next shipment of beans, the movement back to wind-powered transport is one they’re convinced makes environmental sense.

I had read and heard of Terry and Joe, but never had the pleasure of meeting them until yesterday, when they appeared in a mostly-vacant lot in Clear Lake Shores, Texas, that used to hold boats.  They’d been joined by the Sea Scouts, a few flea-marketeers and a fellow selling a rather nice life raft (to provide that added margin of safety and security during the rest of hurricane season).

Their place of business had been destoyed by hurricane Ike, but they had their sign, and were handing out free cups of coffee while promoting their product.  I stopped and chatted, had a cup of coffee, and then noticed a cooler full of wine bottles.  Terry saw me looking, and pointed out a bottle sitting on the table next to the coffee pots.  It was from the Frascone Winery of Oak Island, Texas, another place almost literally wiped off the map by Hurricane Ike. 

While she and Joe hadn’t been able to salvage their hold full of coffee, they had helped to salvage some of the Frascone wine.  Now, they were selling it, with half of the proceeds going back to Jim and Glenda Frascone, who produced the wine in the first place.

The Frascone Winery in Oak Island certainly wasn’t the first Frascone attempt at wine-making.  In a web page devoted to his rather unusually-named Biker’s Blood  “outlaw” wine, Jim Frascone says,

“My wine-making started with my family back in the 1950s and 60s, when we were a close-knit Italian family living on the upper east side of St. Paul, Minnesota. I grew up across the street from my grandparents, aunts and uncles.  The entire neighborhood was Italian, and each family created its own speciality wines.  Some made dry dago red wines like my family, and others made sweet white wines like our friends.”