|
I had the good misfortune to ride out Hurricane Celia when it made landfall north of Corpus Christi in 1970
The city harbor in Rockport was filled mostly with shrimp boats, big and small with an occasional yacht. I was care-taking a sailboat, the Mariposa; a 65-foot Alden Schooner built in 1932. The boat though old, was a class act. You may have seen film footage of Franklin Roosevelt sitting at the wheel of a large sailboat- that was an Alden Schooner. The last time I was at the Mystic Seaport museum in Connecticut there was an Alden docked there almost identical to the one I served on.
I mention what a classic craft it was because it’s the only explanation I have for the stupidity I demonstrated as the storm rolled ashore. I was young too, and therefore bulletproof.
There can be a fine line between having a sense of adventure and being dumb. I was driving recently in Austin, late on a Saturday night, when a beat up car weaved past me on the Interstate with one taillight out and a bumper sticker that said, “Police suck”. I would describe that young man as having an overly developed sense of adventure. My behavior in Celia was dumb.
The owners of the Mariposa were summering in New England, and had left me with the simple instructions “Don’t let the boat sink.”
On the end of one of the docks there was a funky little cafe/bar. The night before the storm the shrimpers and I had kept it open long past closing, knocking back Lone Star long necks, Wild Turkey straight from the bottle, and discussing strategies. The eventual consensus was that the only thing a man could do was rig extra spring lines and “ride her out ”, so as to be able to ease the lines as the tide rose.
The next morning I discovered the storm had intensified considerably, it was headed right for us, I had a headache, and I was alone in the harbor. After an hour or so of rigging extra mooring lines, which was something they had neglected to instruct me in at university, I saw a shrimper coming down the dock to chat.
I recognized him. Everyone referred to him as Crazy Al and he owned a rust stained Louisiana Lugger a few boats over.
“Well Walter it looks like just you and me.” Al comforted.
He then persuaded me to move my Corvair up to high ground a few miles away. As we rode back in his pickup I realized that this pretty much put my life completely in Al’s hands. And they called Al crazy.
In the afternoon Celia came in with sustained winds well over 135 mph. We found out days later that no one knows how windy it got because all the wind gages in the area failed, most between 165 and 185 mph. Those were probably just gusts though. Just gusts!
I didn’t get to see too much from the boat as I was crawling around on my belly on deck trying to stay below the gunnels as pieces of boats and buildings went by overhead. I did look up when I heard the Rockport Shrimp Co -Op explode a couple hundreds of yards to windward. It was an old Quonset hut and a few sections of it’s corrugated metal roof wrapped and tangled up in the rigging of the schooner above me.
The water had risen to just over the dock and it was clearly time for a change in strategy. If one can call alternating between crawling around on your belly, and just laying face down on the deck with your hands over your ears, a strategy. It was then that I saw Al in his truck waving to me.
On hands and knees I made it down the dock to the pickup. When I opened the passenger door, which was very difficult, I immediately noticed there wasn’t room for me. The entire cab of the truck was filled with guns. Shotguns, pistols in both revolving and automatic flavors, military and hunting rifles etc. We also had boxes of ammo, spare clips, bandoliers, as well as an assortment of axes, machetes, knives and bayonets, should we become forced or inclined to fight the tempest hand to hand.
Squeezing in amongst the weaponry, my ears popped when I closed the door. “ What the **** are all the guns for Al?”
“Well Walter, I’m not much worried about the boats anymore.”
As if to punctuate his sentence a piece of flying debris hit the side of the truck and cracked the window next to my head.
“That’s funny Al,” I said, “I’m not worried about the boats anymore either.”
(To be continued)
|