The Cut
One evening at the dinner table in the late spring of 1963, right out of the blue, my grandmother announced that she had rented a cabin down at Gilchrist, and we were going to spend the “summer” at the beach.
I remember thinking, “I sure hope she doesn’t mean the WHOLE summer.” Our Boy Scout Troop 61 was scheduled to go to Camp Bill Stark in late July, and Daddy had already taken me down to the G.I. Surplus to get a new cot and over to Sears & Roebuck to order my summer uniform. But, back then, kids were expected to be seen and not heard, and matriarchal decisions required no family consensus or feel-good negotiation. Although looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t whine a little about going by myself, with no friends or cousins, just Granny and me. I must have thought… “It’s the beach, how bad could it be?”
On the first Monday of summer vacation, we loaded her Ford Falcon, said our goodbyes at breakfast, and struck out for the beach. Rather than our usual route through Sabine Pass and down the Beach Road, we took the “long way” through Winnie and made a stop at Cammareri’s Store for last-minute groceries before heading south through rice field country on Highway 124. After I had fidgeted through a fifteen-minute delay for a barge to clear the Intracoastal swing bridge, we continued, up the hill, through High Island and down to the road's beachfront junction with Highway 87. There, we turned right toward Gilchrist, and the chenier oaks and clusters of oil derricks and horsehead pump jacks gave way to green cordgrass covered salt meadow that stretched to the horizon. To our left, each beach side turn-off offered a teasing glimpse of the sand and surf just beyond the dunes.
Ten minutes later, we passed our landmark, Faggard’s Store, and started watching for our turn. About three blocks before Rollover Pass, we took a right on Mae Street and found our cabin. I remember it as faded gray with asbestos siding, set on creosote pilings with clam shell underneath. There was a salt-burnt oleander bush at the base of a single set of weathered stairs that led up to a small covered porch. Through the screen door, we could see the interior, which would be described today as “open-concept,” a single room with honey-colored pine board walls and linoleum floor. The kitchen and dinette were along the back wall. Three double beds were positioned around the perimeter of the room by the windows, along with an easy chair, Naugahyde couch, and a side table with an oscillating fan and a reading lamp.
After unloading the car and helping Granny carry our groceries and suitcases up the stairs, I stowed the beach chairs, my fishing tackle and cast net underneath the house and set out to explore the neighborhood. Our cabin faced the highway. The vacant lot between us and the blacktop was overgrown with dense sea myrtle, high tide bushes, and matted berry vines and was moated by a snakey looking green scum bar ditch that discouraged further exploration and short-cuts. Our sparse Bermuda grass yard was splayed with clumps of flat-topped Johnson grass, dandelion, and pink powderpuff mimosa, and as I quickly discovered, was a minefield of sandburs and catchweed that stuck my ankles and caused mutinous tangles in the laces of my Keds.
On the far side of the highway, there was a row of cabins along the beachfront. Across the street, catty-cornered from us was a bright green cabin with a wide screened porch and a couple of houses down the street toward Rollover Bay. Behind our house, a salt cedar and windmill palm fringed finger canal ran straight back to the bay. Further west, down the Beach Road, was a shell and beach souvenir shop, a bait shack, and then Rollover Fish Pass. The possibilities were endless for a 12-year-old armed with a rod and reel and cast net.
Before our trip to Gilchrist, my beachgoing had been limited to family day outings and picnics at McFaddin Beach, just down Highway 87 from Sabine Pass. Still, I knew about Rollover from my 7th Grade Texas History class. The narrowest spot on the Bolivar Peninsula was used by Jean Lafite pirates and later Prohibition rum-runners who, to circumvent Galveston Custom House duties, packed their smuggled loot and liquor in barrels and rolled them over from ships on the Gulf side to waiting boats on the bay. The Pass was dredged by Texas Parks and Wildlife in 1955 to improve fishing and provide better seawater exchange between the Gulf and the upper reaches of East Galveston Bay. I remember articles by Ed Holder in his Port Arthur News Great Outdoors column describing the crowds drawn to the Pass by the fantastic fall golden croaker and flounder runs. One incredible photo showed fishermen shoulder to shoulder, three and four deep along the bank.
By the end of our first week, we had settled into a regular routine. Each morning, after breakfast, my first stop was the whitewashed clapboard bait stand on the bay side of the beach road, just a few steps east of the Pass. The concrete-floored shack was only about 10 x 10 but was clean, organized, and well-stocked, including a Coke box and a pegboard rack that held an assortment of terminal tackle, corks, stringers, crab twine, nets and bait buckets. A fine hand-made 6’ cast net hung from a hook on a ceiling joist. Frozen shrimp, squid, mullet, and crab bait were kept in a chest freezer just inside the screen door, and “fresh dead” shrimp were scooped from a red Coleman cooler behind the counter. In front of the cash register, there was a big jar of hot pickled sausage, a box of Slim-Jims, and a clip stand festooned with Tom's peanuts, chips, and pork skins.
I took it as a sign of good luck if I arrived before they sold out of “fresh dead.” For a dollar with change back, you could get a white butcher paper wrapped pound of shrimp and a Slim Jim. To my mind, Slim Jims were the perfect fisherman’s snack, providing sustenance during slack tides and biteless mid-day doldrums. They were highly portable, slipping easily into your back pocket. They could be eaten "one-handed" while holding your rod in the other by tearing the plastic wrapper with your teeth, and the cellophane casing protected your beef stick from fishy fingers to boot.
After my bait run and provisioning, if the tide and crowd allowed, I’d set up at my “spot” on the west bank of the bay side near the base of the bridge. From that vantage, a quartering cast to the right would place my bait at the edge of the eddy created by the bridge’s rock abutment. The strategy held a high risk of a hang-up but avoided the ripping incoming tide that could sweep my light Dipsey sinker rig sideways, causing dreaded crossed-line tie-ups with the fishermen to the left of me. At 12, patience wasn't my strong suit, but owing to Grandad's credo, "You can’t catch anything if you don’t keep your bait in the water,” I held my post as long as I could before moving or calling it quits for the morning.
About noon, I'd head back to the cabin where Granny would have Cotto salami or ham and pickled onion sandwiches waiting for me, and we’d eat our lunch at the yellow Formica table in the kitchen. If I’d had some luck that day and had a mess of fish in my bucket, Granny would help me scale and head them, and while she gave them a final rinse with the hose, I’d lug the bucket of guts and heads down to the canal. There was a burn drum on the back edge of our lot, but I theorized that the remains of my catch, deposited in the canal, would attract crabs and baitfish, which I would later target on my cast netting and crabbing jaunts.
My grandmother wasn’t a believer in outdoor activity in the “heat of the day.” After cleaning up, I had to rest for a while before I could take off for my afternoon rambles up and down the canal or down along the bayfront. Later in the afternoons, she would join me on the beach to look for shells or walk down and watch the seiners pull their net.
The commercial seiners were local celebrities of sorts and drew a crowd of gawkers wherever they set up their drag. In my memory, they were big, rough-and-tumble men with immense beer bellies, straw hats, and suntans as dark as gumbo roux. They lit filterless Camel and Lucky Strike cigarettes with shiny silver lighters and drank canned Pearl beer. I kept a respectful distance. Their rusted-out stake bed truck had a full-size box freezer in the back and no rear gate to ease the laborious unfurling and gathering of the 200-foot net. Each sweeping drag would deposit a smorgasbord of squirming and flopping marine life on the wet sand along the tide line. Their prize, the big silvery iridescent-green speckled trout and copper penny “bull” redfish, were likely bound for Captain’s Platters at The Schooner and Leo and Willie’s in Port Arthur.
Just before sunset, the steady onshore sea breeze would begin to lay down, our cue to start heading back up to the cabin before the mosquitoes came out. We didn't have a TV, so after supper, our evenings were quiet. Granny reading or sewing while I cleaned my reel, rigged leaders, and organized my tackle box for the next day's adventure. Each night, before bedtime, I pored over the back pages of an old dog-eared Outdoor Life, I found in a wicker basket next to my bed. Reading and then re-reading the ads for raising nightcrawlers, Wham-O blowguns, boomerangs, and “throwin” knives.
After the cabin was dark, I propped my chin on my pillow and through the screen window watched the winking and bobbing lights of shrimp boats as they worked the high tide up close to the beach and, far out on the salt, tanker lights as they lined up to enter Bolivar Roads. Then, I’d drift off to the rhythmic “whirr” and cooling sweep of the table fan and the sound of the distant surf.
When we arrived at Gilchrist that summer, I was already a pretty seasoned angler. I had fished down at Sabine with Grandad, at the Pleasure Pier, and up in Woodville at my Uncle Lester's farm pond. But, nothing could compare to the incredible bounty and opportunity I found at Rollover. I caught croakers, hardhead catfish, piggy perch, yellowtails, whiting, sand trout, drum, a flounder, a big sheepshead, an eel, and a pufferfish, mullet, and crabs. Every spot I fished and every cast I made was a fishing lesson. I learned how to tell the difference between the quick tapping bites of piggies and hardheads, the thump of a big croaker, and the quick jerk and run of a sand trout. I discovered that an incoming tide was better fished on the bay side of the bridge, and the outgoing tide was better on the beach side. I honed my casting skills, switching from flat sidearm to overhand when the bank was crowded. Knots were tied, leaders were chosen and rigged, and swivels, hooks, and sinkers tested. Fresh dead and frozen shrimp, live and cut mullet, mud minnows, and squid were all tried as bait. I watched porpoises in the surf and gulls, terns, pelicans, sandpipers, skimmers, herons, and egrets along the beach and bay. I got finned, cut, scraped, pinched, bitten, stuck, stung, and sunburned. I learned to be careful around the water, keep a sharp eye out for stray hooks, “fins up” hardheads and sinister man o’ war, be respectful of others' space, and enjoy the camaraderie with other fishermen. We were bonded by our common purpose.
By the end of June, Rollover felt like home. I had the run of the Pass. When I made my regular morning stop at the bait stand, my jovial lady friend at the counter always said, “Hun, you be careful down at the cut," and then she’d slip a few extra shrimp in my sack. When I was out back stalking mullet along the canal, our neighbors would give me a big wave and sometimes come down to watch me throw my cast net or see the catch of the day. The folks at Faggard's knew us by name, and even the seiners would let me help cull their catch.
I fished hard and played hard, and by the end of most days, I was tired and worn out, but it was a good tired, the kind you get from a day well spent. But one evening, after my canal patrol, I came back to the cabin with a bad headache and felt achy all over. Granny felt my brow and said she thought I had a fever, so she walked across the street to see if our neighbors, the Pampolinas, had a thermometer. It turned out that Mrs. Pampolina was a nurse, by sheer coincidence, and she offered to come over and check on me. She looked me over and took my temperature. It was 103.5, and she proclaimed…”Looks like you’ve got the mumps.” The first night was misery. I sweated down the sheets and had “sick dreams” while the room swam around me, the knots in the pine board ceiling turning to scary faces. Granny worked to get my fever down by soaking towels in cold water and putting them under my arms and on my chest. By the next morning, my throat was so swollen I could barely speak, and the lumps under my chin felt as large as baseballs. When Mrs. Pampolina returned to check on me, she warned my grandmother to keep me quiet or “they’ll go down on him.” I didn't know what that meant, but it sounded real bad. My high fever broke on the third day, but I stayed in bed for a week. Life at Rollover was passing me by.
Toward the end of my convalescence, my grandmother sat in the chair next to my bed and said that, besides getting the mumps, it had been a great trip, but she thought it was about time for us to go home. She reasoned that I needed to rest up and get ready for Scout Camp, Mother and Daddy were surely missing us, and they would be disappointed if we didn’t get back before my birthday. My reluctance was no match for her resolve.
That Sunday, I woke up early, just as the sunrise's first rays washed the cabin in a soft green-gold. Granny must have gotten up during the night and turned the fan off as the cabin was cool and quiet, with only the beach breeze lightly bumping the window shade against the wooden sill. I parachuted the sandy sheets and let them settle down softly around me and lay still until I heard the low whistle of the tea kettle and hollow clinking of her cup and saucer. Then she sat at the table, drank her tea, and read her daily devotional from The Upper Room. Later, while I lolled in my pajamas, she fried the last of the bacon and made her special French toast with powdered sugar and syrup and, in a rare deviation from her usual formality, let me eat with my plate in my lap as I sat cross-legged on the bed. After breakfast, we swept up the cabin, packed our suitcases, and loaded the Falcon.
While Granny walked over to thank the neighbors and tell them goodbye, I carried the trash down to the burn drum and then made one last pass down the canal. The low tide had exposed clumps of oysters, a mud stuck tire, and old Hurricane Carla strewn timbers. As I approached, summer grasshoppers clicked in the salt scrub bushes, a redwing blackbird called from the Roseau cane, fiddler crabs waved fat orange fingers and scuttled for cover under the cut bank, and a big bull mullet spooked from the shallows, threw up a V-wake and then, as if to celebrate his escape, jumped twice when he hit the deep water. In the distance, through the shimmer and glint of the bright mid-day sun, I could see a group of “pluggers” wading the bay flats behind the Pass, and beyond them, out on the Intracoastal, seagulls wheeled and dove behind a towboat pushing a string of barges eastward toward Port Arthur. Granny’s honking horn broke my gaze, I paused for a moment and blinked away the welling in my eyes and then turned around and headed back up to the car.
When we made it home that afternoon, Mother greeted us on the driveway, gave me a big hug, and said she thought I had really grown since we’d been gone. Looking back today, I think she was right.