Ocean Vacation

  "The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever."

 ~Jacques Yves Cousteau

 I have not been on here in a long while and have a lot of catching up to do. The weekend after my youngest son and I had a booth at the Apple Festival it was time to head down to Texas for family vacation. Summer vacation for us is usually in the fall because that is when hubby's work slows. It is also a great time to vacation in the south because the weather has cooled and all the kids (except my own dear homeschoolers :) are in school. That makes visiting museums and aquariums much easier.
     So, where in Texas? My Great-Aunt Jane bought a lot on the ocean in Rockport back in the 50's. She built a house and a watch tower and a 200 foot long pier out into the bay. When my dad was young he would go and visit her there. He remembers going out in a tiny catamaran boat and spending most of his time capsizing it so that he and Aunt Jane had to right it every few moments. Aunt Jane never minded, that was the kind of person she was. 
    When I was old enough for my folks to think of a vacation it was Aunt Jane's that they decided on. I remember my first trip by my first view of the ocean. I had some very bad experiences with water when small and near-drowning had left a irrevocable fear in me. Seeing the great seething ocean filled me with both terror and a magnetic draw to its raw beauty. There is a rare picture of me in my daddy's arms, waves splashing up around us,  for I completely trusted him to hold me safe in the fearful unknown. Then he put me down, still holding tight, and I could feel the waters breathe sand up and under my bare feet and then exhale, drawing the pebbly grit with it. I was enraptured. And so, land-bound girl that I am, when I think of summer and going away it is always to the ocean and Aunt Jane's.

My first touch of the ocean in Pop's arms

  Aunt Jane was an amazing person. Born in 1920, she graduated at 16 and went on to college to study what she called "every 'ology that there was". She failed to mention also every math and engineering course. She tested at genius level and began work for the government- first in war time factories as a supervisor over men unused to following a woman's orders. Later she even worked on the moon launch. I have a newspaper clipping showing her standing with scientists from NASA in an article about the shuttle. And yet she was the most down-to-earth person you could hope to meet. And you would hope to. Aunt Jane never married or had children, but she never lost her child-like wonder of the world. She was an avid bird-watcher who knew the birds not just by form; she could never see the creature and yet identify it by song. She kept a microscope out at all times just in case something needed looking at (when I was there something always needed looking at!). She never differentiated between girls and boys and so I received animal tracking books and amphibious field guides along with the Narnia series and Nancy Drew. She is one of my earliest ideals of how a woman can be interested in science and all the working of the world and it be a wonderful and natural thing.

Cousin Reid, myself, and Aunt Jane on blow-up floaties

     When I married and had my three boys we were far too poor to think of vacations.....except that Aunt Jane would pack herself up in her little RV and drive herself to Alaska every summer for 5 months. During this time she told us we could use her house on the ocean. We scraped up gas money and went, and ever after that my boys thought of Texas as synonymous with vacation. There would be times in winter when they would say, "I'm feeling like Texas 
about now."

Pop introducing my boys to the ocean

 

Me with my three sweet baby boys- 1999

     We are a family of long held rituals, finding security in the familiar. Every year when we would pack up to go I would get the jar that held all the coins my hubby had emptied from pockets over the year. Each boy got his own bag with his name on it and the Game began. It was invented when I was small to keep me busy on a 12 hour trip and also for me to make a bit of "shell" money, for there were always wonders being sold in the shell shops. The idea was simple- there was a list of things to look for, a set amount of money for each, and the rule that another person had to see said object to verify it. The easiest was water towers for a penny. Some large towns have half a dozen and my arm was worked to rubber handing back pennies as there was a screech and an arm flung up with pointed finger. Windmills were also a penny, but became more scarce over the years. Nickels were for pink houses and white horses. Why? I love the idea of someone painting an entire house pink, and my Grandma Tommy always said to see an all-white horse was good luck.
      It was a quarter for the first sighting of prickly pear cactus, palm trees, longhorns, etc. And then there was Moma's Decision. This was in case of something super unusual, like the gorilla statue in Victoria that was dressed in a different costume each year. Then, when the waiting was almost unbearable we came to the final stretch. At last we would make the turn toward the Aransas Wildlife refuge and from there it was about 30 minutes till we viewed the ocean. Halfway there it was tradition to roll down the windows to smell "Texas air". At that point we were in saltwater marshland and there was a pervading odor of brackish water and the rot of vegetation. But it was an indication of how near we were. This is where the hunt was on for the first deer in the growing dusk. After this we came to where we could see the huge bridge that crosses the bay and would take us to our destination. Then everyone sniffed hard, smelling salt water and the strange under-hint of fish and hot sand.             
      (Does everyone have sensory memories of places that are dear to their childhood? Aunt Jane's cabin here in Arkansas always smelled of mellow old wood and crispy gingersnap cookies. All these many years later when I walk in it still smells that way, despite the absence of cookies for at least a decade. My Dearest Friend is originally from Michigan and to her childhood is the scent of lake water and evergreen trees and the feeling of sleeping on the screened porch of an old farmhouse, tucked safe into a wrought iron bed.)

      Now we reached the ocean bridge and began to arch up above the rolling water. All eyes were peeled for the first pelican and dolphin. After leaving the bridge it was only a short way to our house. The first order was to run out onto the pier to make sure the ocean was still there. What relief, what joy... to be out of the car and in an exotic local! And there was Aunt Jane's house with it's green and blue wall sized maps of the islands and waterways where you could trace your way along bends and bays and out to open sea, just like they used to say would happen to a  me in the row boat as they tied it firmly to the pier. Huge glass fishing weights hung from the wooden beams and turned the light into colored smears across scores of paintings. 
    Aunt Jane was always an artist, it ran in the family, and in her older years she sold her paintings at the many art studios and fairs. The walls were covered in works of her own and that of her friends. I always admired the watercolor of the mother cat with nursing kittens. It was so soft and dreamy you could not quite count how many kittens there were and there was the distinct feeling the mother was purring and kneading softly.
     And then there were the shelves of shells. Aunt Jane had lived on that stretch of beach before anyone else had a house there and had combed the beach from a time when amazing treasures washed up- she even found the beautiful glass fishing weights washed up on her shore. In her shelves were hundreds of clear jars, each filled with different shells and marked with their Latin names. Between Aunt Jane's scientific labeling of specimens in that magical sounding language and my Grandma Tommy's insistence of using only the Latin names for her plethora of plants, is it any wonder that I love being able to use the true name for things? Latin sounds like it could be the creation language, something secret and magical. And God spoke and it WAS.........
     After the flurry of unpacking the boys would count up their Game money to see who had more, tending to believe this meant who had the most discerning eye. We would then traverse to the little shell shop by the boat basin. Thankfully I had known the owner my whole life and they for theirs, so she did not bat an eye to see bursting bags of pennies emptied out to pay for a handful of shells. She always wanted to know who won the Game, and looked for us each year. 
     When Aunt Jane grew old she could no longer keep up with the ocean home and she came up here, to Arkansas, to live out the end of her days. At 86 she was still bright and happy and loved life. She gave to me the green glass float I had always loved, the painting of the mother cat, her professional microscope- things that were indelibly  linked to her that she knew I would cherish. And then she passed and so too did the ocean home. 
 

    We mourned for both because they were forever intertwined. It was such a sad loss that my hubby said that next summer, "Find a house to rent near Aunt Jane's." What a healing gesture! I found a house on the bay that would hold us and my folks and had a pier out into the ocean. Rockport is so tiny that no matter where we stayed we would be near the same small shell shop, the same restaurants, the shrimp shacks......When we drove in that year we followed the directions on the paper and found ourselves driving right past Aunt Jane's house and to the end of the road! A new family was there and renovating it. Instead of sadness, there was the hope of continued happiness. We drove past it on every trip to town, and crept near when everyone was gone to sprinkle part of Aunt Jane's ashes into the ocean at the place she held so dear.

     Time changes things. Now I have two boys who have graduated and have jobs. Thank the heavens they still live at home! But now there is the coordinating of every one's work schedules to be able to go and I keep thinking, "This might be the last year we all get to go as a family." That makes it bittersweet. And this year Pop's back was so bad that my oldest drove the car for them. My middle son drove for us, hubby having decided that he didn't want to drive the way down. Since he drives from our home to Little Rock nearly every day on his route, it isn't surprising that he wanted a rare vacation from it. This made me antsy from the get-go. My babies are fabulous drivers and very safe, but this was 12 hours and through Dallas and Waco......and we were separated except for stops for meals. And this was the first year there was no Game. This year we even went to a new house, one my folks picked on four acres with a long pier. Change is hard for me.

Our new spot on the bay

     Time changes some things, but then we got to the house, and before anything else, everyone rushed to the ocean to be certain it was still there! We all went to HEB (The most fabulous grocery store ever.  Wish we had one.) and bought groceries, everyone putting way too many frivolities in the cart that we simply had to sample. Goose pate or espresso crusted Parmesan, anyone? Why, yes! And suddenly it was like time had not passed, that things had not changed. We went all the old familiar places and they were still there. Ate at all the places we simply have to when we are there.

Hubby with a mess of ocean trout

Night fishing

     The fishing was great and the guys caught spotted trout enough to freeze and bring home, and two beautiful flounder. There were lots of unusual fish also that brought everyone running down the wooden slats in late evening to see what new thing had surfaced. And then there is the shell beach. The public beach has always been swept of shells and and debris. Instead, we go to a small boat inlet that still has the natural sand beach, but instead of sand it is really just shells. In fact, Aunt Jane once showed me sand under the microscope. Most of it is not rounded bits of stone at all, but the most minute, invisible-to-the-eye shells!

The search is on!

More shells than sand

"I wiped away the weeds and foam, and fetched my sea-born treasure home...." ~Emerson

     When we arrive at the shell beach we get out of the car quite nicely. But then there is the inevitable, undignified mad dash to get to the sand before anyone else and thus perhaps grab the largest piece of coral before anyone else sees it. This is one of the few places that coral washes up, sea glass also. I once read an article on sea glass that said it takes at least 20 years for glass to polish in the waves. It also said there are only a handful of places in the US where you can find it. Just turns out that our little spot is one of them. So, biggest coral is always a contest, but also the neatest item found. It can be anything that is amazing, even a life-sized plastic statue of Mother Mary. We found one once on St. Joesph Island.
     St Joe is a place we never fail to visit. You must take a ferry boat over to Mustang Island, and then catch a charter boat out to St. Joe's. It is a nature reserve, and breathtakingly gorgeous. Even though you will see other people, perhaps ahead of you or coming up behind on the beach, most of the time you can look both ways and not see anyone but your family on this shining stretch of beach with fiddle crabs scuttling and sand pipers galloping along in their stiff-legged gait. And you never know what you will find. 
   In years past massive hurricanes have left the detritus of civilization on shore. One year there was a boat, Mother Mary, hard hats marked with names of shipping lines, fishing floats, and a plastic chair at frequent enough intervals that there was one whenever Pop got tired. There was a huge effort to clean it all up and now it is only covered in what the tide draws in. Every year a different item is most prevalent. This year it was brilliant yellow and hot pink whip coral. One year it was clumps of barnacles the size of your head. Another it was starfish and sand dollars.

St Joseph Island

No one in sight but my gang.....

     St. Joe is also the only place I have ever seen sea turtles in the wild. They swim off the giant rocks of the jetty like big green saucers. There were at least five bobbing up and down at different spots this year, going back under just as my camera rose. I took some pictures with them under the water, the waves making the images curve and blur. The turtle were hunting big, trailing jellyfish. They would seize on them like floating blobs of spaghetti and they ate them with just as much relish as a good Italian.

     One year I was out in the water wave-jumping with the boys. I decided to get out and look along the rocks for the turtles. Only moments after I emerged the boys' yelling drew me back. They had drifted out on a wave and suddenly been surrounded by cow nose rays swimming in unison, out to sea. A sea turtle paddled at my oldest son's right. Now he will often pop up out of the blue with, "Hey, moma, ever swim with cow nose rays? How 'bout sea turtles?" His ornery grin says that he knows it would be my heart's desire to be able to say that. I keep telling him that I DID. If the rays were swimming away from the beach and out to sea then they were there when I was in the water. The sea turtle, too.........only, I didn't SEE them so I guess it doesn't count. Suffice to say that the island is a magical place.
     Every year when we go beach combing I say I will be much more selective; I will only take the best, the most unusual. This is because shelf and closet and well house are filled with coral and shells and treasure. And how could one ever get rid of them? And in actuality every year we see certain things become harder and harder to find. Some day, I think to myself, these things may be extinct, but I have boxes of them in the well house to admire. And so I fill Ziplocks, and Pringles cans and bring home things too stinky to ever come inside. And we walk the sand and laugh and compare treasures and it feels like it will be this way forever.
     Time changes things and keeps on changing, but some things remain the same. Aunt Jane would be proud.

The car dash on my side...I gather "treasures" everywhere we go

 "I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can

 talk together freely and build our castles in the air."

 ~ Bram Stoker