Reflections on the Mound that was Caplen, TX

Yesterday, I returned from a four day hiatus from being a full time hands on Mom.  So what did I do on my vacation?  I went to visit my parents, my brother and my sister and her family.  It was weird to be just an aunt.   I loved it. My niece is adorable.  But I felt smaller.

What did I learn?  That I need my nine children to mask my personal character flaws or rather to reveal how they aren't actually flaws but necessary traits. 

For example, I'm hyper.  I talk loud.  I laugh loud.  If I've had even a smidgeon of something to drink, I tend to slap down on the table like my dad does, as a means of added emphasis if I find something funny.  With nine children, all that energy and brightness and bluster gets filtered into a proper context.  No one notices how loud I am as a strange thing, they view it as a survival skill.  I'd tell you this was a calculated evolution born of practical maternal need, but that would be lying.  

I don't sleep much.  Absent a reason to stay up to get things done, I still stay up.  Absent a reason to get up at six, I still wake.  My bio rhythms are set to engage in an aircraft carrier type full scale launch every morning and so I rise fully ready to take on the day sans any coffee by seven.  If there's nothing to do, I start almost bouncing on my feet ready to go go go.  Where? I don't know but I'm ready.  All that energy gets harnessed in the course of any given school day that otherwise idles waiting for something to do. 

On Saturday, we went to the beach where the beach house once stood and I walked over the mound, all that remains of what was a house that stood for almost 85 years.  There was rope and debris imbeded in the sand.  There were shards of what was tile in the bathroom with its distinctive honeycomb pattern. 

Mound to the right is where our beach house was.  Gully where another beach house used to be. 

Two summers ago our beach neighbor and his wife taught my children how to crab and now opened their new house by the shore to us on this windy afternoon. They had rebuilt and collected "storm wear," things that survived Hurricane Ike intact. 

We took a bowl that I remembered.  It had once held gumbo cooked all day, or home made fudge sauce over bluebell cookies and cream or jalepeno cheese grits.  Now it held sand.  I decided it would be cruel for a bowl to survive a category 4 hurricane and get crushed en route in the cargo hold of a plane so I would give it to my sister to keep.   Then I collected some shells for my children, avoided the washed up man-o-wars and filled a water bottle with some of the Gulf of Mexico.

I stepped into the water. 

It was about 25 degrees below what I expect when I see the beach, as was the air.  My life memories of the Gulf almost never included April.  But the beach is still the beach and even though the beach house is gone, the essence of what I loved remained with all its wild growth glory.  The gnarled trees that seem to scratch the air as they carve and twist their way up out of the ground still scattered about the landscape.  Wild flowers with their garrish deep orange, bright yellow and blood red petals and politically incorrect names dotted the grass.  There were stickaburrs and driftwood and people walking with old dogs.   They didn't know us but still stopped to say hi and begin sharing stories.  The neighbors who had saved the crockery invited everyone in including the blind 17 year old dog. 

What did we talk about?  A 4 thousand dollar broken part of a plane that became a clock, the way things looked at the first flyover, about selling a business and finishing a deck, about back surgery and the reality that everyone suffers, rich, poor, everyone, but how you respond is what matters.   We talked about what they remembered, what they saved, why they were staying and what they hoped. "I wish you could stay longer."  the former King of Mardi Gras and neighbor said.  They offered drinks, even dinner.  That' is the essence of the beach, you always welcome everyone and you always wish everyone could stay longer.  It's my vision of what being Catholic really is. 

Looking at the ocean and the sun and feeling the wind even as I was told it was time to go, I wanted to walk the shore for hours like I used to, and like then, if time had allowed I know I would have not felt tired until I was dehydrated and sunburned or stung in a careless moment.  Most likely, all three. Only then would I have felt I'd gone far enough to turn back.  Most of the time, my life, my home, my mind and my body are busy. The beach, that beach, was and remains a place where my life, home, mind and body would quiet even as they kept doing. So I miss more than the home that celebrated most of my birthdays, I miss the opportunity for those seemingly timeless walks to nowhere that weren't for fitness and weren't to get to a destination.

(Yes, that's what it looks like but this was a pre Ike photo posted on the Facebook Bolivar You Have to Love it to Like it page).

On the way back to Pearland, I bought a pint of Pralines and Cream (my favorite) and ate more than most of it. (I shared a little with Mom.  Dad had fried chicken).  When I got back to Maryland, I took my husband outside and rolled up his jeans.  I poured the Gulf on his feet and he smiled.  If we could not get to the ocean, the ocean would come to us.  

"Did you have a good trip?" He asked.
"Yes. I did."

But I found I'm more myself here than anywhere else.  Everywhere else, who I am doesn't make as much sense, nor does all of me fit.

Hurricane Ike Destroys Bolivar

The Bolivar Peninsula is no more. A family friend flew over the land and saw that virtually none of what was, even remains in piles. Most people never heard of it, so they won’t miss it. But for me, Caplen, Gillcrist, Crystal Beach and Galveston, they represent not just whole summers but three to four generations of memories that have just now literally been washed out to sea.

 The whole peninsula had a way about it that differed from the flashier Galveston that always got everyone's attention. No one traveled to the Bolivar Peninsula that did not already know of its hidden charms. It was drive thru land, as the lure of the ferry and the Strand and Guido's and the bungee jump, bumper cars and rent-a bikes along the seawall kept people from stopping along the way except perhaps for gas or a loaf of bread to feed the seagulls.

 People who lived at the beach year round were easy to spot. They wore clothing that had been line dried to the point of fading and most of them smoked. Most of them had tattoos that were politically incorrect, and had them long before they were trendy. The women wore nail polish but no makeup. They had leathery tan skin that if you touched felt unspeakably soft. Men wore jeans and t-shirts 99.9% of the time and baseball caps. They were lean but not thin, strong but not muscular and frequently unshaven. These were people who lived by their hands, via carpentry, painting, sewing, baking, fishing and selling all they made. They cleaned whatever they caught and ate it. They invoked Jesus’ name and cursed with equal ease and didn’t think much of people who came to the beach but didn’t want to get sandy or know how to handle tar (baby oil works great), or who wanted to know where the nearest “Wi-fi” connection might be found. (Try Houston).

 Their homes were often pink and grey and they would own at least one boat, one dog, one trailer and a pickup truck. They could fix air conditioners but most didn’t bother to own one, as fans worked best year round. Phones came to the peninsula grudgingly, (1984) and few bothered with TV or cable, much less computers. All that salt air and moisture made electronics beyond a good stereo a real waste of time.

That none of the businesses or homes still exist, even as piles of debris require that I remember them as they were. There was the obligatory shell shop for souvenirs, Milt’s Fish Market for bait and fresh caught goodness, and Claud’s, a store which sold everything one could possibly need at the beach except food. These stores had been here since my Grandmother was young. There were even hand written notes mentioning them as places to go for goods posted in the beach house that served as a summer place to survive with 9 kids before air conditioning for my family’s family since the 1920’s.

It's hard to imagine the Bolivar penisula without these places where a man with Harvard law degree and a man who didn't finish high school would be indiscernible from one another as they swapped fishing tips and discussed lures and baitwells and the best "spec" they ever caught. Looking at the pictures, there is mud and devestation, and I remember the “newcomers” like Mama Theresa’s Flying Pizza, which quickly became mine and my brothers and eventually our children’s favorite spot on Fridays. There wasn't a chain on the entire path, in fact it was a big deal when in the late 90's, a McDonald's opened in Winnie (15 miles away), and a grocery store (The Gulf Mart) opened so that going to the beach no longer meant packing food for a week or driving to Winnie, Houston or Beaumont for more.

These places always seemed new because I could remember a time when they weren't there. I searched for the waterslide, surely it remained. That contraption was something of a controversy to my elders. "Why should we pay to go on a waterslide when you have the entire ocean here?" It was not an easy arguement to combat. Still, eventually, a trip to the slide became part of the beach regimen, just as surely as crabbing with turkey necks, smores and a night of competitive poker, hearts and speed solitare. A second waterslide tried to muscle in on the territory (2004), but beach goers of the Bolivar Peninsula were terribly loyal and annoyed whenever anyone tried to one up anyone else, so the second place struggled along until the first place announced that it was okay and that they were actually friends.

 Dannae’s Donut Shoppe kept fighting to survive, selling Kolaches which the few in the know people swooped in on Sunday after mass at Our Mother of Mercy to purchase. It went out of business at least three times a summer. Maybe the guy was out fishing, but at least three trips out of five, the shop was closed during hours it was supposed to be open. The beach was like that.

Maybe we should have known that the peninsula’s days were numbered, that everything at the beach gets worn down and eventually destroyed but there was a permanent feeling to that thin stretch of Texas Coast. Whenever someone sold their beach house to someone not family, there was a feeling of shock and concern…that the next people would not be beach people. Most people who came to the beach, became beach people or sold. One could spot the early sellers. They'd try to give their beach houses fancy names and "modernize." It became quickly apparent they didn’t like the fact that there were only three radio stations one could get in clearly, one Christian rock, one talk and one country.

 Cell phones were essentially useless and they'd be shocked to discover people didn’t have answering machines. As far as I knew, there were only three atms along the entire strip and most places didn't take credit cards. When people opened new businesses, everyone would look on with amazement to see if they could stick. Some did, like the Sand Piper (on the bay side, great fish), and some didn’t, like the Pier, which when Hurricane Rita hit in 2006, left the large stumps of the pier itself, standing in the surf.

What I will miss though, are those experiences that were uniquely East Texas Coast Beach. I’ll miss hearing the old church lady imitating Kate Smith at the end of mass on 4th of July, singing God Bless America and beach combing while remembering which house was the one where we saw an alligator that had swum down into the gulf, sunning itself. I’ll miss the neighbors that would walk up to introduce themselves because your bonfire looked fun and the beer was cold. I know I could go riding in the back of a pickup truck along the shore to gather driftwood for a bonfire almost anywhere, but there was something to it here. I'll even miss the crazy beach lady on her tractor mower who would get grouchy if your flipflop touched her property line when walking back to the house.

But mostly, I’ll miss the memories of bringing new people to the beach house and watching them discover that despite the seaweed and jellyfish in the brown warm surf, the tar on the beach, the stickaburrs in the grass and the fire ants and mosquitoes, that standing out on the wooden deck, staring at the ocean, sipping a freshly made drink of something, they would breathe in the salt air and marvel at how much they loved this place.

 Now I know places can be rebuilt but here, we just don’t know if there is anything to build on yet, or even how to begin. It’s too soon to know if any of what we knew could be restored. By all accounts, there's just nothing there of those 85 years of memories but memories. For now, I just miss that place that described my childhood summers and almost every birthday until I was 24 and hope that in Heaven, I get to drive down highway 87 and turn onto Martha's Vineyard and find a strong southeast wind and a grey house up on 18 foot piers with family inside it sitting at my grandfather's butcher table, chopping up the ingredients for Gumbo.

 Arial View before Ike... http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Green+beach+house,+TX&ie=UTF8&ll=29.495683,-94.531804&spn=0.001735,0.003259&t=h&z=19 For more information/pictures of what was and what is... www.bolivarchamber.org/Portals/0/CaplenShores.jpg www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/us/16bolivar.html?hp