A full double rigged shrimper, the Gloria Cruz rests at anchor some 35 miles offshore....

We are in a pattern of disorganized tropical weather. It’s a whole lot better than organized tropical weather, just a lot of rainstorms and generally big puffy cumulonimbus clouds drifting through an endless odd colored, almost windless, hot and humid sky. The seas have calmed to glassy flat and blue the way they always do after a hurricane has entered the Gulf and left it cleansed. The violence of last weeks swell and surge has been replaced by small regular wavelets gently lapping the swash zone. The shoreline is now covered with sargassum and miles of forgotten orts and leavings from distant locations, gifts from Hurricane Dean. Scattered along the sand, the occasional tropical tree, cut for exotic lumber, lost to the ceaseless north pull of the longshore current, hard hats and lifejackets blown from offshore oilrigs, fluorescent light tubes transported like long white fishing bobbers from garbage dumps far south in Mexico. They litter the beach in mute testimony to natures dynamic forces, each item with it’s own history, its own story. Collectively they form a cornucopia of flotsam and jetsam that defines, yet neither confirms nor denies the presence of cohesive life.

Yesterday I was over in Dolphin Cove (again) talking to some other phony- baloney administrators regarding much needed repairs to the dilapidated buildings that are there on the very tip of the Island, right next to Brazos Santiago Pass, the channel that leads to the open Gulf of Mexico. While I was there, a big white shrimp boat, about 75 feet long steamed slowly inbound and gently nudged the hook down opposite the ‘Cove over in Barracuda Bay. The lower end of the starboard trawl gear, the money bag and the doors were tied off on the rail and in the water.

Pretty soon, the Park Chief of Police and one of our rangers drove up and parked near the picnic shelters, near the shoreline. Not long afterward a channel 5 news van pulled up and parked behind them. Out popped what I assume was the camera-guy with his long range telephoto video camera mounted on a tripod which he set up in the sand under one of the picnic shelters. With a deft touch, honed to sharpness after years of getting the correct exposure and angle on other tragic, gory events, he trained the lens on the gently rocking shrimper which now had a big orange Coast Guard rigid inflatable tied alongside, on the starboard side. The female reporterette, the news puta remained inside the running vehicle in the air conditioning.

I finished my meeting with Marcelino and got in my phony-baloney administrators truck and drove over to where the Chief, the ranger and the channel 5 news van were parked. Glancing inside the van I noticed that the news puta was staring off to the north, a disinterested look on her well made up face. The Chief walked over and I asked him what was going on.

He told me that there had been an accident aboard the shrimper, and that one of the crewman had fallen overboard and was caught in the rigging, in the net. He was still inside, and the Coast Guard was trying to extract the body. He gestured with his eyes to the channel 5 news crew and said “Man, they sure got here in a hurry.”

I nodded in agreement. “Yep” I said. “If it bleeds it leads….”

And then I told him the skeleton of something that happened to us several years ago, a tragedy of sorts (although Gracias a Dios , there was no loss of life), when these same vultures, the channel 5 news crew, along with the news puta showed up and were reporting before we even knew what had happened to us.

I didn’t wait around for them to bring the body over to Dolphin Cove. The police and the channel 5 news crew and the news puta had it under control. The Chief would close the park during that time, and the channel 5 news crew and the news puta would get the exclusive story so that they could air it on the next news broadcast along with the other various and sundry stories of extortions, robberies, killings and mayhem that define the flotsam and jetsam that we call, the media.

All the while, purple green clouds raced across the sky from the north towards the south, gathering just offshore of Boca Chica, till they threw long cool shadows over Barracuda Bay and Dolphin cove, over the big white shrimper and the man in the net in the water, towering up in great dark thunderheads pregnant with rain.

Later, I went to lunch at Mexiquito, a little old joint near the swing bridge in Port Isabel where the people involved with the waning commercial fishing industry here on the third coast eat. It is not a tourist joint, but one that makes comfort style Mexican food, things like carne guisada and envueltos. The dominant language spoken there is Spanish, and I am comfortable with both fishing and Mexicans. As I ate, thunder crashed across the bay, over on the Island, and a hard cleansing rain fell everywhere, pounding the ground and the water.

I thought about the fisherman a lot yesterday.

Who was he? Did he have a family? Was there any premonition when he awoke that final day that he would end his journey in the money bag of a net in the Gulf of Mexico? I thought about my own tenure as a fisherman far from here, but still somehow connected by a life at sea and the ultimate freedom that I found there. I thought about the loss of old friends in fishing accidents when we were young. And I thought about the channel 5 news crew and the news puta, so callous and undignified that this culmination and last event of one mariners life would just be another meaningless blurb on the evening news.

I grieved for the man in the net, and the fishermans kind, for all who have been lost at sea, they are all endangered species, destined for extinction, some before others. And I grieved for a nation, for a culture of people rendered so heartless and unfeeling by the continuous assault of, and conditioning by popular media that it now has an insatiable, unquenchable lust for the tragic and macabre. It is a putrid self perpetuating machine, feeding off of, and collaterally nourishing a perverted blood lust that will one day prove to be it’s ultimate downfall.

I watched the news last night, for information that I did not have. I did not particularly care that the accident had occurred 12 miles offshore and that they had to drag the man in the net all the way into the pass to extract him. That only made me sadder as I considered the crew and the captain who undoubtedly were in pain and grieving over the loss of their shipmate, to be faced with such a horrendous and difficult chore.

The man in the net was from Veracruz Mexico and he was 55 years old. The channel 5 news crew and the news puta didn't give any more attention to him than that, perhaps it just wasn't important enough, or pertinent to their story. I suspect however, that for him, home was the ocean. He lived there and he died there.

Late last night I toasted him with a shot of fiery sotol, and than another and another……

When the rain came I think it was no accident. God loves those who go to sea.