As for our memories,
The Sea takes from us and gives to us,
And Love, also, sharpens our focus.
What remains, though, that is from the poet.
-Holderlin
Boatmen and waterbirds dream the same dream
-Su Tung p'o, tr. by Burton Watson
When I was very young, my family and I visited my grandmother
in what has since become the St. Mark's Wildlife Refuge along the northern
Gulf Coast of Florida each summer. Every day when we were there, I would
walk down a sandy path from her house to the beach and stare out across
Wakulla Bay at a tiny island we all called Patty's Island. One day when
my father took me fishing way out past the island into the deeper waters
of Appalachicola Bay, a sudden storm blew up, dark gray clouds, repeated
jagged bolts of lightning, wind that whipped the normally smooth surface
of the bay into large swells with foaming white caps. The outboard motor
on the small boat wouldn't start and we drifted in towards land several
miles from my grandmother's house.
I was not frightened. "Don't worry," my father said. "We
don't have to do a damned thing except ride it out. If necessary we can
put ashore on Patty's Island." I remember enjoying the storm. Out
on the water, tossing up and down in that little twelve-foot boat, I yelled
and laughed. The whole time we drifted, rain stinging my bare back and
chest, my father disassembled the motor, greased all the parts, and put
it back together. When he pulled on the rope, the engine coughed back to
life and he told me to take us back home.
This morning I have driven to a different coast with a different kind
of vessel, a 17 ½ foot Mohawk canoe, tied to the top of my Jeep.
I am going to Matagorda Island in the Coastal Bend of Texas to remember,
to build links between the me who is well into middle age and the me who,
at nine years old, took the handle of the outboard motor and steered between
Patty's Island and the East Goose Creek oyster bars to bring a small boat
through driving rain and beach it on the sand of the tidal flats at Wakulla
Beach.
I am, once again, worrying about the weather. The wind is picking
up and, if it strengthens, I will be unable to put my canoe into Espiritu
Santo Bay and paddle the four miles out to Matagorda Island. I can drift
back, the wind always blows to shore along the Gulf Coast of Texas midway
through the Coastal Bend, but fighting strong headwinds in a small canoe
is rarely worth the effort. What I want to do is get the canoe into the
water and paddle out before the heat builds and the wind picks up.
I stop first at the Coast Guard Station at Port O'Connor and look out
at the bay. I cannot see Matagorda Island because of an intervening island
made when the Intracoastal Canal was cut through the coast line. Barges
move from Florida through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas on that
canal and, along the way, pass the habitat of the Whooping Cranes at the
Aransas Wildlife Refuge across Espiritu Santo from Matagorda Island.
I am relieved to find the winds mild, after all, and only a few fishing
boats on the bay. I am able to paddle away from shore without too much
worry about being run over by power boats and shrimpers, a constant problem
for people who put out from shore in quiet transports, without motors, without
sails. No thick layer of clouds covers the sky, only the normal bank of
cumulus clouds out over the Gulf and it has grown hot. By the time I have
paddled across the bay and approached the tidal flats of Matagorda Island
I am sticky with the salty air and sweat. Moving slowly along the western
shore of the barrier island, the lee side, I can hear, only a mile to the
west across the narrow sandy island, the Gulf of Mexico send waves crashing
onto the beaches, waves that would easily flip my canoe.
The water here in the bay is shallow, only about two to five feet deep
for miles and miles though it is broken into deeper channels from time
to time. I stop paddling and drift over sea weeds. What wind there is
pushes the canoe to the north, away from shore a little, but tracking the
coast. After a short rest, I tie the ends of my small seining net, the
bottom lined with small weights, to the last strut at the stern of the canoe
and feel the whole thing shudder to a stop as I throw the net behind me.
The canoe lurches as if I had dropped a heavy sea anchor overboard to drag
it along the bottom.
If I were a shrimper, I would rev up the two diesel engines in my boat
and try to make two to three knots in the bay waters. Behind me, my net
would stretch back 78 feet with two wooden "doors" keeping the
front open, and, flying above the scoop, dozens of sea gulls and other
water birds would dive down to capture the small fish and shrimp that escape
through the opening, frequently wounded, unable to swim easily. The gulls
would wait as I culled the "trash" fish, fingerling speckled trout
and red fish, jelly fish, sting rays, crabs, trash, all but the shrimp,
from the net and threw it overboard. Then they would shriek and dive into
the water.
My father had always wanted that life, the life of a professional shrimper,
but it is not a life that appeals to me. I have met shrimpers, have been
out as a volunteer deckhand on a shrimp boat that lumbered along the beaches
of the Gulf of Mexico, sometimes ten or twelve miles out from shore, and
it is hot, sweaty, debilitating work. The men and, now, women who trawl
for shrimp in Gulf waters have a difficult life. They labor at a business
with low profits and one that is absolutely dependant, as is the life of
a farmer, on the whims of nature and upon man's apparent desire to ruin
the environment that provides the crop. Shrimpers, though, are like so
many of the rest of us. When they finish a beer they heave it over the
side with the rest of their trash and help foul the waters even more.
The canoe moves erratically, if at all, as I paddle with the wind and
manage to drag the very small net forward only about thirty feet before
throwing the paddle down and pulling the net back into the canoe. The brown
mesh of strings is a muddy mess, coated with seaweed, its basket brimming
with the same kind of trash the shrimpers haul in. I separate a dozen or
so white shrimp (penaeus setiferus) and a half dozen brown shrimp (penaeus
aztecas) and put them quickly into the bucket that I had earlier filled
with seawater and drape the net over the prow of the canoe to dry.
The white shrimp I will have for lunch later, boiled over an open fire
on the island or back on the mainland if I can find enough driftwood to
make a fire. The brown shrimp are for bait. The drought in South Texas
has affected the shrimp breeding grounds of Espiritu Santo Bay and the other
bays that depend on fresh water runoff from the rivers to reduce salinity.
The shrimp I catch are much smaller than the shrimp I would have caught
only a few years ago. It is a delicate balance, this relationship between
the rivers, the bays and the ocean. The largest shrimp swim in the Gulf
of Mexico, and breed there, but the bays and estuaries are the major hatcheries
and the shrimp that start life there swim in the bays until they are large
and ready to breed. Then they migrate through the openings in the islands
to get to deeper water.
When I have the better shrimp culled, enough to eat enough to use for
bait, I paddle the canoe to shore and take a quick swim to get the slime
from the net off my hands and arms and let the net finish drying in the
hot sun before folding it and heading back out into the bay.
High tide today is at 11 a.m. and I am back on the bay as the water
begins to race out through the cuts in Pass Cavallo or around the southwest
end of the island at Cedar Bayou. It's a hot, lazy day and I let the eight
pound test line drift out behind me as the canoe moves on its own above
the weedy bottom of the bay. What I hope to catch today are two or three
speckled trout, enough for dinner, before I load the canoe back onto the
Jeep and drive back home. It is lovely lying down in a canoe and drifting,
a line strung out behind you, baited with a live shrimp, not paying attention
to much of anything, just drifting and thinking, falling half asleep.
The last time I came here, I had taken the ferry from Port O'Connor.
It is restricted to pedestrians only. The only motorized traffic on the
island is used by the U.S. Park and Wildlife Service. I walked through
the state park and along old roads that took me to the Matagorda Lighthouse
and across the eroding runways placed there in the 1940s when the Army Air
Corps used the island for bombing practice. Matagorda Island, though owned
mostly by the Texas Conservancy, is not a "pure" wilderness area.
The scars that we put on it in the past will remain for years to come,
probably even surviving a storm surge from all but the most powerful hurricane.
When shrimpers gather, they talk about shrimp and shrimping, just as the
rest of us talk about our own work when we get together. At Port O'Connor,
the shrimpers complain much as the farmers to the north complain, about
the drought, about the need for long, soaking rains, perhaps even wish for
one of the tropical storms now brewing on the east coast of South America
and heading for landfall in Central America to make the cut past Yucatan
and enter the Gulf, blowing westerly, miles out from Galveston Island and
then turn north across Matagorda Island and Espiritu Santo Bay and on up
to San Antonio and the Hill Country to wash back down through flooding rivers
until the water sucked up from the oceans pours back down into the bays
to bolster the next crop of shrimp.
In the 1970s, the average shrimp boat caught 600 700 pounds of shrimp
each day, by the late 1980s that average catch had dropped to 400 500 pounds
per day. In the 1990s, though there are fewer shrimpers, the per boat catch
has dropped even more. The shrimpers blame the weather more than anything
else, this current cycle of drought, though there is a healthy share of
blame dumped upon foreign, meaning Mexican, shrimpers fishing in U.S. coastal
waters and there remains an uneasy state of peaceful coexistence between
the Vietnamese and "American" shrimpers. That state of grudging
truce is far preferable to the armed warfare of the late 70s and early 80s
when several Vietnamese boats were shot at and burned.
My father wanted to live the kind of life these men and women live.
He was brought up on coastal waters and fished almost every summer day
of his life when he was a young boy. Each year of his life was, somehow,
measured by the sea: WWII in the Merchant Marine, pleasure fishing even
when he was at home in Florida and in Texas, and afterwards as a member
of the Masters, Mates and Pilots Union, until that life ended when his ship
vanished at sea. His dream was natural, the dream of an entrepreneur who
knows his field and wants independence from the bosses. Still, it would
have been a hard life.
I am awakened when a sharp strike moves the rod in my hand and, for
a few minutes play at fisherman with what turns out to be a twelve-inch
speckled trout, much too small to keep. Over the next half hour, I pull
in six more, letting all of them off the hook without taking them out of
the water. I have caught enough-enough fish, enough shrimp, enough sun-though
I have caught no fish to keep. It's three o'clock and I paddle back to
shore, pushed by the now strong wind from the Gulf. When I reach shore,
I walk along the tide line pulling the canoe to get the kinks out of my
shoulders and back. I do not feel like fighting the wind with paddles.
By five o'clock I am back where I had parked the Jeep.
I start a small fire on the beach and boil the remaining white shrimp
in fresh water with a shrimp broil mix of spices before throwing them into
a small baggie and placing them in the cooler. I let them grow cold as
I pull the canoe out of the water and tie it down again on top of the Jeep
and stow the other gear in the back.
With two more hours of daylight, I sit down in shallow salt water
and eat the cold shrimp and drink a Lone Star beer. I watch a small shrimp
boat out in the bay, trundling through the water, and drink to the captain
and the deckhands. From a distance, watching the boat plow through the
water, almost seeming not to move, dozens of sea gulls following behind,
I can almost buy into my father's and the captain's dream. But it is only
the long day, the feeling of contentment in eating the shrimp I have caught,
drinking an ice cold beer. These are boatmen's dreams and dreams almost
reinforced by the cries of waterbirds. They are not for me.