| [{"text": "'The croaker's done gone from the hook -- damn! My language sure goes to pot down here on the coast.' The husky blond guide with the Aggie cap twists his face in mock fury. 'I got to get back to school and straighten out my English.'"}, {"text": "He has two more years at Texas A&M."}, {"text": "Right now he takes people out to fish in the bays behind the barrier islands that curve for hundreds of miles along the eastern coast of Texas, enclosing milky green lagoons behind ridges of sand and grassy scrub that rim the deep blue of the Gulf beyond."}, {"text": "There have been three days of hot, wind-swept rain, and now with the first sun we are after speckled seatrout, which with redfish provides most of the game fishing hereabouts."}, {"text": "The little radio fizzes as other boats want to see if we have found any fish -- spotting location is everything in this sport."}, {"text": "Negative answers crackle back."}, {"text": "The fish often are plentiful around the pilings of the old gas wells that dot the flat surface like the remains of sunken ships."}, {"text": "We go from one to the other."}, {"text": "The sun is hot now though it's only 8 in the morning."}, {"text": "The great silver clouds on the horizon build themselves on the pale water."}, {"text": "We cruise toward another set of pilings."}, {"text": "The guide scoops into a pail and puts a frantically wiggling croaker on the hook."}, {"text": "Then he casts out. 'Just wait for that tap-tap, that thump-thump."}, {"text": "It comes real gentle before it pulls."}, {"text": "Don't forget, trout have very soft mouths.'"}, {"text": "The radio queries again. 'Pickin' one or two,' says the guide, chuckling. 'You can tell they've got nothin'.' A pair of black skimmers zig-zag past close to the surface."}, {"text": "Soon we have our limit of the shimmering fish stippled in rose-gold and black."}, {"text": "And we are the first back at the dock, where the great blue herons stand waiting by the cleaning benches."}, {"text": "The guide is young and he knows this business but he wants a different life after college, such as working for IBM and wearing a necktie."}, {"text": "This must be the last big stretch of the American seacoast that is 'undeveloped.' There are a few ramshackle fishing towns with quiet atolls of resort houses nearby."}, {"text": "People are not apt to be self-conscious about the place or themselves."}, {"text": "Texas is big and beautiful and they live here, that's all."}, {"text": "Jutting out just to the north of us is the Blackjack Peninsula (after the oak, not the game) which forms the core of the Aransas Wildlife Refuge."}, {"text": "It is famous as the winter home of the whooping crane, that symbol of the destruction of wild America."}, {"text": "Last year a gunner shot a whooper by mistake thinking that it was a snow goose."}, {"text": "He paid an immense fine and was lucky, according to a local wag, to escape the gas chamber."}, {"text": "The peninsula comes off the vast southeastern alluvial plain with fields of rice and cotton and sorghum as far as the eye can see."}, {"text": "Near the coast there are dense coverts of live oak interspersed with marshes and prairies."}, {"text": "Deer, wild hog, armadillos and alligators are the glamour quadrupeds and the birds are innumerable, especially the herons and the spoonbills."}, {"text": "Above the blossoms of lantana and scarlet pea the inky-brown and golden palamedes butterfly floats on its lazy wingbeat."}, {"text": "Inland a few miles from the refuge there is a place called Tivoli, with a white church, a gas station and a grocery, the houses relatively close together for such a settlement in these parts. 'Tivoli Motel,' I read a sign in the usual pronunciation of the name as we whoosh through. 'Here in south Texas we say Tie-vole-ee,' my host gently corrects."}, {"text": "Mr. King is the director of the Foreign Press Center in New York."}] |