Of Shells and Shells
As I walked up to the surf, the mist was enough to feel like something … little stingers. But after being hunkered down for days on end, and with the winds subsiding somewhat, I decided it was time to head up 100 and see if what I had heard was true.
Shells can be an interesting past time when one has a goal in mind. Some great shell hunting comes after big storms and hurricanes. It was the tail end of eight days of gale force wind, rip tides and ten-foot waves along the shores of South Padre Island. It was an old fashion beat down. The erosion of the beach and dunes are still not a story on the local news, and it is as if the newsrooms are so small now – that they can’t spare the one employee to step away from the studio and GOD FORBID drive sixty miles to cover a real story. That’s just not going to happen. And maybe that makes sense?
The Valley is really not known to include the Port Isabel – South Padre – Boca Chica area. And the feeling is and always was mutual. When you get here, you understand. It really is two separate worlds that don’t collide.
As I got closer to the surf, I heard a sound. It sounded like dominoes getting shuffled on a padded folding table, thousands of dominoes. The rumor was true. Mounds of shells were getting churned on the shore, ground down a little finer, given up to the shore as an offering, like a rainbow after the storm. And as I looked north and south, the mounds were on every high spot the shore had to offer. It reminded me of shell hunting on these same shores with my Grandma fifty-plus years ago. I guess for me, memory lane is mostly a memory beach.
My goal was simple: Continue working to gather enough of the same color shell fragments to form a mosaic for a small wall in Los Pescadores. That “big reveal” will come, with a lot of luck, in the near future, perhaps before the sun supernovas even.
The Other Shell Game
We finally crossed into something that feels like progress last Friday, in Downtown Port Isabel, at the future site of Los Pescadores Coffee & Outfitters. To define the progress would be to try and play a shell game though. Under which shell lies the truth, the right thing to do, the solution to the situation? Odds are? Watch the video, and be sure to subscribe to the new channel for content made for the Los Pescadores YouTube Channel. It isn’t the most chipper and happy of videos, and with good cause. It is the first PUBLIC raw look at the inside of the building at 419 Maxan Street, and I hope the search engines take ahold of that address so that it provides fair notice for the future. Much, so very much about this experience remains left unsaid, but then that is what books are for, right?
You can probably tell by the last two Monday Morning Sidewalk columns – things are happening in a different light this late fall and early winter. That doesn’t mean my car doesn’t run though, and run it will. In fact, I am on the run as this true story hits the digital world – running back to North Texas to get a family fix, make sure all is well and touch base. Funny, the road from here to there runs both directions, but the people I know, well … they just don’t.
I heard Bruce Springsteen talking about the human struggle to want to be independent, a “wayfarer,” and the need to belong to the collective … family, community. Listen to “The Wayfarer” and if you get the chance, watch the “Western Stars” concert movie. It was done in 2019, but Bruce is still as great as ever.
“Tonight the western stars are shining bright again …”
Category: Adventure
