maggy and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
its always ourselves we find in the sea
I grew up and have spent most of my life 30 miles from the ocean – well, the Gulf of Mexico, strictly speaking. And though in the interim I have traveled far and wide, and at times oriented myself toward inland instead of offshore, the truth is the ocean has never been very far from my mind.
There is just something about it. I cannot really explain; though I have attempted to in writing, over and over, over the years. The feeling of the sun on my skin, the smell of coconut oil mixed with salt air, the partying, the camaraderie with other beach-goers. The relaxation. The inner peace.
I have tried earnestly, but I never have quite captured it. And I don’t suppose I ever will.
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SAY YOU WILL
As it happens, I found myself walking alone along Crystal Beach this past Tuesday night, around 10:30 or so.
The girlfriend and I and a few friends of both of ours had come down to the beach for a couple of days, to relax a little, and celebrate Independence Day. The rest of the crew had settled into the cabin we’d rented, and had begun listening to music and drinking cocktails. I intended to do very much the same. But one thing I always do when I first arrive at the beach – as soon as I can – is reconnect with the beach itself … re-introduce myself to the wind and the sand, the waves and the ocean. I told the others to go ahead and start mixing drinks (which, actually, they had already started doing), and that I’d be with them shortly. I just needed some fresh air.
My girlfriend is still fairly new to me, but she is going to be a good one, I think. She pretty much likes to do what I like to do. And she knows there are times here and there when it is better to let me be alone for a little while.
So, soon enough, there I was … walking barefoot along the edge of the water, in a pair of canvas shorts and a Bob Marley Legend T-shirt, flip-flops in hand. I was walking alone, but the beach was by no means empty. A lot of people had showed up for the Fourth, and there were people drinking, listening to music, and shooting fireworks. There were even a few bonfires.
Most people are laid back and friendly at the beach, probably more than in their everyday lives. Hell, I am pretty sure that is what draws many back down there, again and again. Anyway, a reasonable looking guy walking down the beach alone has zero chance of getting very far before being invited by one stranger or group of strangers or another to have a cold one, to stop and listen to some music, even to sit by the bonfire a bit, and join in the fun. I had several invitations on my walk that night, and I accepted every one. My intention was to go with the flow. Very much like body surfing … I intended to let the wave catch me and pick me up, to let the unique energy of the Bolivar Peninsula guide me and carry me along that night on my walk. I am sure most beaches have their energy, but Bolivar is special … to me partly because I have spent a large chunk of my childhood and adult life there, sure. But the place is special, anyway. It took a direct fucking hit from Hurricane Ike, and afterward the whole peninsula looked like a bombed out beach on some no-name WWII South Pacific atoll, left for deader than fucking dead. Lost forever. Gone.
And then, within two years, one would hardly have known there was any hurricane at all. The houses and businesses came back, the people came back, and the unique energy of the place came back, too. If you do not believe in miracles, neither did I. Until I witnessed this one, first hand.
Anyway, as I walked along, after having stopped to talk and drink with a couple of different groups partying down on the beach, it occurred to me I had been doing this very thing I was doing now – just drifting, waiting for the beach culture to pick me up and carry me along – for nearly 40 years. It is amazing. There have been so many good times, and an endless supply of stories and anecdotes and just slips of memories.
After an hour or so of doing my thing down on the beach, I headed back up to the cabin. By the time I arrived, it appeared several rounds of drinks had already been gone through. I poured myself some Early Times over ice, and dumped in a couple of ounces of water, just to smooth it out a little. Then I went and sat on a sofa next to my girlfriend, and began to ease my way into the ongoing revelry.
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I don’t want to feel this way another day, it’s killing me
I don’t want to be the one you try to mess around
I could never see the reason in the way you looked at me
Baby, you’re the one I want, so come on, ’cause I need you now
Say you will
Say you’ll stay with me tonight, girl
You won’t be sorry …
I was 22 or 23 years old, sitting out on the open part of the deck/veranda that wrapped around three sides of the beach cabin, with my girlfriend. We had been out there awhile. It was night time, maybe close to midnight, maybe after. Who knows? We’d been partying that day for hours and hours, since noon, at least. In fact, there was a party still going on at a beach house down the way – some friends of ours – and we had been there earlier. But an hour or so prior she and I had decided to come back to our cabin.
The deck on that cabin was excellent for stretching out on at night, and looking at the sky. We had dragged a couple of chaise-lounge lawn chairs out there, and had been lying back, watching intently for shooting stars. We’d only seen a couple. In late summer, August and September, one could see hundreds in just a couple of hours. But it was early July, and the action was slow.
I had turned on the stereo, and a song my girlfriend really liked came on (“Say You Will”, by Blanket of Secrecy). She reached over and put her arms around my neck. Just then, something really bright flashed by in the sky. We both turned in time to see something large and bright and moving at a very high rate of speed streak low across the shoreline and go several miles out over the ocean, before crashing into the water with a splash, leaving a brief afterglow.
“What was that?!” my girlfriend asked.
“I don’t know, Jesus! But hey, can you hand me another beer?”
So she reached over and unhesitatingly plunged her hand into the ice and melted ice water in the cooler on the other side of her chair, and pulled out a cold Miller Lite, and handed it across to me. I loved that girl passionately, for a lot of reasons. Just one of them was the way she handed me a cold beer.
Her song had ended, but then she pushed the volume even higher when the next song came on, some dweeb Englishman singing about being blinded by science. But it had a good beat, I guess. It got my girlfriend worked up, that’s for sure; which, in turn, began to get me worked up.
We quickly forgot about the celestial anomaly we’d just seen. A UFO crashing spectacularly into the Gulf of Mexico just off the coast of Galveston/Crystal Beach was one thing. My baby getting herself all worked up over some Thomas Dolby song was something else entirely. We quickly retired to the privacy of the beach cabin to enjoy each other in the way people have been enjoying each other since all the way back in the olden days, back to when Adam and Eve and Tarzan and Jane used to get it on, in that sub-Saharan savanna in Africa. Back where we all come from.
***************
My girlfriend looked at me and laughed. She has the most beautiful smile, and I spend a lot of my time trying, in various ways, to elicit it. It is usually not that hard for me to do – she thinks I’m funny, most of the time. This time, I reached out to the coffee table in front of us and picked up my drink, and took a sizable sip of sweet Kentucky bourbon mixed with a little Ozarka water, and some ice. It felt so good going down, it gave me a bit of a shiver. Just then my girl kissed me in the ear, and when I smiled, our friends laughed.
It was nothing, really. Just a random moment, in a random cabin, on a random road, on a random night. Down at Crystal Beach.
Crystal Beach – the magical place where both kids and grownups come to play, and laugh, and feel good, and just let the beach culture wash them over, and – at least for a little while – carry them away. One day, when I grow up, if I ever do … I want to move down there.
And then stay.
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SHRIMP BOAT BLUES
My friend David and I were riding down the beach highway one spring evening, in his 1970-something Toyota Celica. We had the windows down and the stereo turned up, but we were pretty quiet, otherwise. Pensive. We were headed southwest down the Bolivar Peninsula from Crystal Beach proper, in the general direction of Port Bolivar and the ferry landing. But we were really only headed to a bar about halfway between the two beach towns; and as we rode along, taking in the atmosphere all around us, we felt happy and at peace. It was April or early May and it hadn’t got hot yet, so the night air was pleasant and breezy. We were headed to a beach dive where some other friends were already getting started on that night’s partying. And we were both 21 years old or so, and didn’t yet give much of a fuck about anything. Carefree.
Anyway, we were going along like that when we saw this guy walking down the side of the highway, headed in the same direction we were. He had his thumb out, and was trying – unsuccessfully – to get someone to stop and give him a ride. For whatever reason, Dave pulled over to the side of the road and motioned to the guy, indicating he should hop in the car with us.
So I opened my door and the dude slid into the back seat, what there was of one in that Celica. He was a young guy, probably only a few years older than us, short and kind of stocky, but muscular. His name was Herve or Jorge or something like that. He said he was from Guatemala, I think, and he was working on a big shrimp boat/trawler that was docked in a small cove across from Bailey’s Fish Camp in Port Bolivar … and could we take him there?
Port Bolivar was beyond our intended destination, but it wasn’t that far out of our way; so we told him yes, we would take him to his boat. It was a ten minute drive, and along the way Dave and I peppered our passenger with questions about shrimping, what it was like to go out into the Gulf every day, and like that. Herve seemed pleased we were so interested in the fine details of his occupation, and the trip passed quickly, while he filled us in on what went on in a shrimper’s life.
When we got to Port Bolivar, our hitchhiker directed us down a shell road off of the highway, on the Galveston Bay side. The road wound around for a bit, between some decrepit-looking trailer homes, past a rusted out boat or two up on racks, with high sea grass and shell and sand all around. Finally, we emerged into a small cleared area paved with seashells, and before us was a small, man-made inlet off of the Intracoastal Canal, with a few docks lining it here and there. There was a shrimp boat at one of the docks, a big boat, and Herve told us that one was his.
I had been a habitué of that area for most of my life, and was familiar with most everything in the vicinity of Bailey’s, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen or been aware of that little inlet before. In the evening light it was rather beautiful. It was protected from the bay and there wasn’t much wind, so the water was as smooth as glass. There was high grass on the levee on the far side, and beyond that the Intracoastal, and beyond that Galveston Bay. One would occasionally hear a tugboat pushing barges going down the canal, and be able to just see the top of the boat’s stacks, over the grass on top of the levee. The evening light played off of the smooth surface of the water, and like everywhere else in Port Bolivar, one heard seagulls all around.
Herve walked us over to his boat. We could tell he was proud of it. The captain and the rest of the crew were staying somewhere on dry land while they were in port, but Herve lived right there in his workplace. He was insistent about showing us his quarters, too; so what could we do? We climbed aboard and then walked around the front of the wheelhouse on the main deck and came to a stairwell which went down into the darkness, into the hold of the ship. Herve told us his crib was down there somewhere, and Dave and I looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders.
Dave started down the stairwell with me right behind, and our new friend followed behind me. I had the briefest thought flash across my mind – that maybe we were too gullible, and maybe this guy Herve was really luring us into his killing chamber, where he had chainsaws and axes and shit, where he could do his grisly work in private, down in the hold of this boat. Later on, David told me he had almost exactly the same thought, that Herve might be hiding an axe behind his back as he headed down the stairs behind us, just waiting for the right moment. I asked why he didn’t mention it at the time, and Dave said, “Well, you were between him and me. I figured once he started chopping on you, I’d have time to run and try to find a way out of there.”
Turns out our concerns were baseless. Herve showed us his small berth below the wheelhouse, then he went into the captain’s cabin and came back out with a cold six-pack of Molson’s, in cans. We headed back up to the deck, and Dave and I sat down on a gunwale and started popping open the beer, while Herve ran up a small set of stairs into the wheelhouse. I don’t know if anything could have seemed more incongruous at the time, but the next thing I knew, we were hearing Transformer-era Lou Reed – in all his androgynous, junkie, glam rock glory – boom out across this peaceful cove, while meanwhile a flock of herons took off in the opposite direction from the levee on the other side of the inlet.
Herve came back down the stairs and grabbed a beer. He told us they had a kick-ass stereo system on the boat; which by then we could hear for ourselves. I saw two huge weatherproof speakers mounted up on the sides of the wheelhouse, which I had missed before.
It was so weird and cool at the same time. Here we were, down at Bolivar, in some cove I’d never known about before, sitting on the deck of a shrimp boat, drinking Canadian beer with a Guatemalan fellow we’d just met about 30 minutes before. And all the while, Rock And Roll Animal was playing at top volume, rolling out across the natural landscape and displacing the placid quiet of the inlet with what I consider to be Lou Reed’s finest solo work.
I am tempted to say it was bizarre, but what it was, was fucking awesome.
I loved my life so much back then. And I loved the way I lived it … just drifting through it, really … going with the flow. Because of that, things like the shrimp boat thing would happen from time to time, with no warning, just out of the blue.
That evening was just a minor, forgettable experience along the way, of no consequence whatsoever. But it made a lasting impression on me. As I sat there on that boat, cracking open my second Molson’s and just beginning to feel the faintest hint of the start of the beginning of a nice buzz, the song “Rock And Roll” was playing, and Steve Hunter’s (or was it Dick Wagner’s?) epic guitar solo in the middle of the song was reverberating off of the water and all around the darkening cove. Jesus, I thought. Does it get any better than this?
The answer is, no, it doesn’t. And, it’s funny. I was as happy there in that spot at that moment as I would have been doing anything else, anywhere else in the world.
Some men are born to greatness, to achieve great things, to garner great wealth, to ascend to great fame. These things are held out as ideals of accomplishment, and who am I to ever question it? But the thing is, I only know what I know.
Somewhere along the way my DNA got crossed up, and as I grew to manhood I realized I really wasn’t all that interested in achieving great things, or earning great wealth or fame. Some men are born to greatness; some are born to admire great men.
Me, I don’t care much about either. I‘m just out looking for great times. The rest of it, you can keep.
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