GULF COAST BOY

Some time back my father wrote a series of short autobiographical pieces, and I'm going to post them here once in a while. I've done almost no editing on them.

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Freeport, Texas, 1953…. That’s about the time I became aware of where I lived…. I was 5 years old.
A coastal town, with a harbor and lots of shrimp boats…
We lived in a 2 bedroom rent house… we were poor, I guess, but hell, everyone was poor and it was a good life for a kid.
I grew up in a time when boys played marbles and spun tops for “keeps” … ‘cowboys and Indians’ and ‘hide and go seek’ kept us busy all day…if we had a ball, we might play ‘Annie-Over’ on someone’s house till his mom ran us off for hitting the roof so much…
Not much TV to watch….but none of us had a TV anyway….
No one had air conditioning, except Mr. Johnson across the street who had a heart problem…he had the first home air conditioner I had ever seen…. We all liked to visit Mr. Johnson…
For spending money, we would collect soda pop bottles and cash them in at the Piggley-Wiggley…enough For a candy bar and a soda pop…the movies were .15 cents to .25 cents…and air conditioned…
It was a great way to grow up…
But my best memories were of the water…I always loved the water….
My Dad worked hard like all dads did and still do….he was an electrician and a lineman for a sulfur company….
But almost every Saturday we would go out to “Blue Lake” to catch some red fish to eat for the next week…
Blue Lake was actually a sunken sulfur drilling site….story was that a big drilling rig actually sunk with men on the tower and they all went down with it….but the fishing was good and we always came home with food.
As I grew older, we would travel down to the coastal bays…a long way from nowhere…my dad would catch mullet in his cast net and we would fish all night…he’d set me up with a big home-made calcutta bamboo rod that I couldn’t even cast out….then he’d move about a hundred yards away to fish….
All I could see of him was the occasional glow from his pipe as he re-lit his Sir Walter Raleigh…we had no lanterns or lights…
The mosquitoes were as thick as the air…..the only time I could call for him was if I had a big fish or needed him to re-cast that big rod with a fresh mullet…we would go home after daylight the next morning….that’s how I learned to fish… I was 8 years old…
As I got older, my buddies and I would ride our bikes all day long….
From the beach to the Old Brazos river. One of our favorite places was the shrimp boat docks. My mother always told us not to go near them, so we spent a lot of time there. During shrimping season we got a lot of boats from Florida and Louisiana. The shrimpers would come in and sell their catch, refuel, get new ice and be off again. But before they left, they would go buy a new set of clothes and spend about 3 days drinking their paychecks and never change their clothes. They would go out and shrimp till they got a full load or needed ice or diesel…then they would come back, still in the same clothes.
Several times a season a body would be found floating around the docked boats. Either a drunk fell in the river or an old grudge was settled…the police would fish the body out and make a report...but no one spent much time worrying about it.
Like all boys, we loved to explore. Once we found the entrance to a storm sewer pipe at the edge of town. We went home and got whatever flashlights we could round up along with some sticks and a knife or two. Three of us went into the dark pipe to see what was there. What was there was snakes… damn big and lots of them…there was several inches of water in the pipe, which was about 4 feet in diameter. We were bent over as rats ran past us and snakes were all in the water and up on the walls. We jumped and dodged them as best we could. It was probably good we didn’t have better lights. It smelled like a sewer pipe, too. We decided to go as far as we could. Every few hundred feet a smaller pipe connected at an angle and went to the street above.
When we got tired of exploring, I crawled up one of the smaller pipes and put a stick out of the storm drain entrance. We back tracked, still avoiding the snakes, to the entrance and then walked up the street to the marker I had left. It was almost a mile from where we had gone in. That was neat! I was 10.
One very hot summer a friend and I found an isolated pocket of water near the hurricane levy that was cut off from the channel. It was only inches deep and most fish had died from the heat. But it was absolutely full of big red fish and huge blue crabs. The fish were almost out of the water and swimming mostly in mud. The crabs all had their claws raised out of the hot water. My friend and I went home and got gigs and came back to reap the bounty. Except the water was really just thin mud and you had to lay in it and semi-swim thru it. The crabs were everywhere and we knocked them out of our way with the gigs. We could stick a big red and fling it to the bank. Those crabs must have been pretty hungry cause they came at us from all angles. In the end we got 27 big red fish before we gave out. We were so proud of ourselves. We rode our bikes to the Phillips Petroleum terminal and washed off the mud in the river. They let me use their phone and I called my mom to come with several wash tubs to get the fish.
But in the end, the fish were not good to eat…they tasted like the mud they were dying in…but it was a great way to spend a hot summer day. I was 11 years old….
Most of us boys loved to swim. We would swim in a ditch or anyplace that had water. More often than not, it would be full of water snakes and cottonmouths.
“Seat Hunt” was on TV and I really wanted to skin dive. I had a good mask and fins. I had made a dive belt out of old cast net weights. One day we heard the water was really good at the jetties. One of my friends was 14 and could drive, so we loaded up and went to see.
The water around our part of the Gulf is rarely green, much less clear…but this one magic day it was absolutely as clear as drinking water. Never before or since has the water looked like that. At the end of the jetties you could see the sand bottom in 30 feet of water. We had our chance to dive off of the jetties. Our plan was to recover all the lead weights and leaders and lures people had been losing for years and years and maybe – sell them or something. Mostly just have some fun. It was incredible to see what was down there. I remember thousands of sheephead fish and millions of crabs among the rocks. And the lost tackles everywhere. I would dive down and grab a handful of leaders and lines and cut them loose with my knife. A couple of times I got hung up and had to work fast not to become crab food. But we got all the tackle and lures we wanted. A few cuts and scrapes from being washed against the rocks was a small price for the best day of diving I have ever had. I was 12 years old.
Later that summer we moved about 25 miles away and lived in the deep woods. I missed the water and the shrimp boats and all the things I had grown up with.
But life had more adventures in store for me.

End of part 1