(Re)Mindfulness and the Wayback Machine

My dad got a new truck about a year ago. I don’t think I did more than admire the deep green metal flake exterior before last week, when he stopped by en route from my parents’ home in the Pineywoods of northeast Texas to an appointment with destiny at the very southern tip of the state.

My mom has long been encouraging a parental move back to the Coastal Bend, where they both grew up and where the majority of the extended family still (or again) lives.

Papa has been resistant, for reasons I’m not sure I entirely understand but have something to do with a love for tall, whispering pines that recall carefree college days and a deep-seated dissatisfaction with what his sleepy hometown on the coast has become (someone had the nerve to put in six – count ‘em SIX – traffic lights a few years back!).

The devious woman who gave birth to me has tried various strategies to get the move underway, including this rather blatant bribe: “Honey, don’t you think you should get a boat?”

He’s a guy who grew up in Rockport. A guy who worked on boats professionally for four years of his young adulthood. The idea took root, finally blossomed.

My brother and I went to work scouring YachtWorld and Craigslist for suitable vessels. There were several spirited debates about the type of boat that would be best, the price range, the power package.

In the end, we located an almost-new center console with a fuel-efficient outboard and high gunwales (for the grandkids, you know) and warranties on everything.

In San Benito, 546 miles from where the folks live now.

I already had a trip planned down that way with my oldest boy, to harass some snook and get a look at the USS Forrestal and USS Saratoga, currently being recycled in Brownsville. That trip fell through due to a couple of unmissable finals reviews for the teenager, so I shifted gears and planned the trip with my brother, who, fortuitously, was off work those couple of days.

That got nixed when his 5-year-old caught the flu.

Then Papa decided he wanted to make the drive and pick up the boat himself: “Can you go with me?” he asked.

Well, sure.

So it ended up being a father-and-son trip after all, with one of the same individuals but a different father and son. We shifted-up a generation.

My dad’s truck rides like a limousine and has so many bells and whistles that my father had to operate the electronics while I was driving.

Our route took us through the northeastern corner of the Eagle Ford Shale boom, through the King Ranch and deep into the Rio Grande Valley (yes, we know it’s really a delta, and it’s as flat as Ally McBeal, but we still call it “El Valle”).

Papa is halfway between 65 and 70, closing in on 70. In my own middle age now, I have more in common with him today than perhaps ever before. Or at least since I was his mini-me nearly half a century ago.

What surprised me, more than it should have perhaps, is what he has forgotten … his, well .. tentativeness, about things I figured he was comfortable with, because they are things he taught me 25 or 30 or 35 years ago.

Like how to back a boat trailer. Or how to throw abaitcaster.

For decades now he has deferred those simple pleasures in favor of work and more work … work that has financed kids’ educations and moves, financed kids’ boats and adventures … he’s still working, but he is finally getting to enjoy some of the fruits of his labor.

Like the spaceship truck, this week our wayback machine; like listening to Jimmy Buffet (something else he introduced me to, back when A1A was a recent release) with a fishing pole in his hand on his boat. And actually catching a fish.

It’s about damned time.

We even got to fish with my brother on the way home, all of us risking spousal disapproval by taking a little extra time to “try out the boat again” and also try out one of my brother’s top-secret winter fishing holes.

It was an excellent time, all around. 

It was time, life's greatest gift, and something I am more keenly aware of  every more rapidly passing year. Especially given my work schedule, which compresses the best part of my life into two-week vignettes.

That gift of time is enough, to be sure. And not everything in life has to be a teaching (or learning) moment or have some profound underlying meaning.

But our trip south last week also got me to thinking about the things I do with my own kids, the things I introduce them to or teach them as a matter of course that someday I won’t even remember. Things that may loom large in their eventual, complex understandings of how they came to be the people they will be.

No pressure, there.

Name that Boat

The recent change in management at the Vatican hasn’t slowed things down here in Port Fourchon.

It’s not unusual to hear Pope Benedict conversing with Infant Jesus of Prague (familiarly, they often just use the shorthand “Benedict” and “Jesus”) or Our Lady of La Salette.

Continuing in a religious vein, I remember my astonishment upon hearing a captain proclaiming the good news to a ghost ship: "CSS Texas, Jesus Saves!" (Two towboats making passing arrangements near the interesection of the Intracoastal Waterway and the Texas City Ship Channel.)

I surmise, with little direct evidence, that Jesus Saves, Hallelujah and Resurrection may all belong to the same company.

More mundane names float across the airwaves, too: Will Bordelon chatting with Dino Chouest, Kevin Gros courting Chantise G.

Among the boat companies serving the oil patch, family feeling runs strong. At the company I work for, the boats are named for family members spanning four generations.

Key employees and long-time captains sometimes are honored with a boat name: take, for instance, Chouest’s Gary Rook, named for that company’s design chief.

Among my favorite boat names are the melodic Santee, Congaree and Wateree, Starfleet crewboats named for South Carolina rivers (or perhaps the native peoples that preceded them).

Other boat names are more practical or thematic: for instance, the cohort of platform supply vessels beginning with “C” (again, for Chouest) – C-Performer, C-Fighter, etc. Likewise, Hornbeck Offshore Services includes “HOS” in many – maybe all – of its boat names: HOS Innovator, HOS Strongline, HOS Centerline, and so on.

To some online hilarity, Hornbeck has recently announced a class of Louisiana food-themed boats: HOS Beignet, HOS Boudin, HOS Frog Legs … okay, I kid about the frog legs. But the others are real. In fact, I just heard the sausage boat leaving the dock.

Some companies leave even less doubt about whose boat you’re dealing with. Odyssea Marine has the Odyssea Explorer, Odyssea Titan, Odyssea Ranger and so-on. Or the prosaic Harvey Carrier or Harvey Supplier.

This can be carried a bit too far, as with the unimaginative K-Marine VII, K-Marine VIII, BoTruc 39, BoTruc-41, etc. On the radio, the captains of these vessels often come back with a simple “Thirty-nine,” or “Eight,” leading me to picture a Galactica- or Star Trek-type cyborg.

“BoTruc” itself, though, is evocative of the very early days of specialized oilfied service vessels. The first boat-trucks represented the marriage of a Cajun mariner’s desires and a Rhode Island naval architect’s drafting skill.

Other boat names bring to mind other things. Damon P. Bankston, for instance, a hero of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Or Warrior, high and dry at the north end of the Eugene Island Channel.

Boat names are, widely, shrouded in superstition and  tradition. Successfully changing a boat's name requires some metaphysical gymnastics to placate the gods of the sea, as well as a heap of paperwork to soothe regulatory authorities.

I always wondered about the wisdom naming one's Gulf shrimp trawler Stormy Waters (still afloat in Port Isabel, so far as I know).

A recurring fantasy is that someday I’ll have my own boat company. I ponder color schemes and boat names. A Texas rivers series would be fun: Bravo, Nueces, Aransas, Brazos, Neches, Sabine ….

Or maybe shorebirds and seabirds? Heron, Egret, Kingfisher, Sanderling, Skimmer, Avocet, Bittern, Skua, Gannet, Gallinule … nah, not Gallinule. No Spoonbill, either.

No matter what fantasy names I come up with, or what whimsy or foolishness I hear on the radio, it will be pretty hard to top my favorite shrimp boat from back home: Ol' Dead Possum.

Other Boats

I'm no ship spotter, but I do sometime snap pics of other boats whose paths we cross. Here are a few:

Ms Anna Mae, a C&G crewboat.

Wateree, a crewboat owned by South Carolina-based Starfleet.

 Beauregard.
















American Constitution, a dive boat.

Ricky P. Cavalier, a 148-foot utility boat leased to Gulf Logistics.

Candy Counter, outbound in the Atchafalya (and in the rain).

Spud barge and pushboat westbound below Bayou Boeuf Lock.

 Miss Peggy Ann.

Take a Break, a pretty cool floating camp.

Emily G., out of the  Bayou Bouef Lock.

Luke Thomas, a pretty cool little DP dive boat.

 Blue Bill, a little break bulk freighter that's been on the dock forever.

 Utility boats stacked in the yard in Larose.

 Mr. Colby, a Gulf Logistics utility boat.






















Betty G., a 110' utility boat. Typical of the "G Boats" once ubiquitous in the GoM. We're about to stern up to her to pass a package.

Mr. Blake, an Iberia Marine Services crewboat.

Lady Eve, another IMS boat.