Brownsville and Back: Dad Rides Shotgun

“Let’s put the pedal to the medal with these dudes. “ With that nonsensical line, we left Brownsville behind. Dad had heard Michael Vick spout that wisdom on an NFL pre-game show, and since incorporated into our repertoire of lines from Rocky, Rambo, Die Hard and The Great Escape.

Our tasks for the day started early. Rising around dawn, Dad insisted on a drive to South Padre Island. The sky threatened to unload upon us the whole industrial way to the barrier island. The causeway had blinkers for heightened pelican activity, but we only saw lone pelicans drifting over the water. 

At first glance, the island felt much like Myrtle Beach and the rest of the Carolina coast. Just miles from Mexico, we could not escape high-rise hotels, chain restaurants and scores of T-shirt shops. But a few miles later, most of those distractions faded into rustic, barren beach.

Wind whipped the red flags signaling rough surf and in five minutes on the beach, it was hard to argue. Fog enveloped the beach after about 1,000 feet in either direction. Jellyfish littered the sand above the tideline. I didn’t necessarily need to see South Padre Island, but no one can predict if I’ll ever pass this far south again.

After a quick breakfast, we packed up Dad’s brief life in Brownsville. The furnished apartment He travels light, but his wares would have been shipped otherwise. Changing his planet ticket would have cost a fortune, even though he would have been home in about five hours versus the 18 our trip would take. 

Dad's Brownsville rental goes back to the airport.

He cleaned out his rental car as I loaded mine. Everything fit nicely and after a few runs to the dumpster, we left the apartment ready for its next guests (mostly).

We took the scenic route to the airport,  traversing some of the bumpiest paved roads I ever saw. Finally we reached Brownsville-South Padre Island International, where the entire rental car facility consisted of a 50-car lot. For all its development, the airport felt like a throwback, a little airstrip with one gate in a tropical locale. 

With that, we bid goodbye to Brownsville and started the palm-lined journey away from the Rio Grande Valley .Clicking off the other cities of the valley, we were back in the wilds of the Coastal Bend in minutes.

The empty road through Kenedy County had a little more life. A border inspection station sprung up. Little more than a metal shell and a small law-enforcement office, it triggered a little rush of adrenaline. The number of German shepherds knocked it up another notch.

The customs agents just chatted about where we had been until their drug-sniffing dogs took a good pass. Once the lead agent asked if we were related, quietly confirming how closely they looked at our IDs, they waved us through.

We kept the radio off and talked or observed the road. This was strange country, far from anything we knew well. Dad took quickly to the hawk game. Rural highways are great places for amateur birders, and the Coastal Bend provides wintering grounds for many American raptors. From Refugio to El Campo, we spotted more than 30 red-tailed hawks and 50 smaller raptors, mostly American kestrels plus a falcon and some Cooper's hawks. In some fields, the raptors seemed evenly parsed out.

We could not avoid Houston at Friday rush hour. Traffic crawled toward the outerbelt, then  moved in fits and starts for the next 20 miles. The pattern emerged – congestion, free flow, multi-car accident, free flow, congestion, free flow congestion. Sunset caught the skyline at some pretty angles. Petrol clung to the air above the mighty Houston Ship Channel, the artificial river carved from Buffalo Bayou.

Craving a distraction, I remembered the mariachi station that shepherded me through Houston on Thursday. Tuning to 98.5 FM proved pointless; a pickup stuck in nearby traffic blared mariachi loud enough for anyone on that hunk of I-110 to hear. Linking to I-10 as the daylight disappeared, we encountered more of the same traffic with less mariachi.

A wise traveler advised me to avoid Beaumont, for its refineries smelled worse than cat gas. The east suburbs of Houston faded into rural exits rapidly and gave us no option but to press onward to Beaumont. We found a chain and hustled our bags into the inn. A day of talking and new scenery had worn us down. Dad turned flipped from Gold Rush to Blue Bloods and in minutes, flipped his own switch to “off”. Soon I did the same, not ready to feel relief about our last leg to Atlanta.

At night, Beaumont smelled fine. In the morning, the wind had taken an odious shift. We gassed up early so Dad could redeem some scratch-off tickets he bought in El Campo. I-10 traffic moved at an aggressive pace, even on Saturday morning. We had about 12 hours of driving till Atlanta and no easy way to shave off minutes. We just clicked off the miles, talking the whole way.

Achtafalaya

Louisiana unleashed a few surprises, the best being the 18 miles of elevated highway above the immense bayou in the Achtafalaya Basin. It was a little disconcerting to drive so far on a series of pillars embedded in the swamp. In winter the nation’s largest swamp was strictly shades of brown and gray. Among the islands in the maze of rivers, lakes and swamps, I spotted a few immense flocks of large white waterfowl, possibly cranes.

At Baton Rouge, I could point Dad to the highlights of the afternoon Nancy and I watched the Mississippi River traffic from the Louisiana State Capitol.  With Mardi Gras raging in New Orleans, we left I-10 for I-12 and rejoined the former just prior to the Mississippi border.

A nearly endless row of casino billboards lined the Mississippi coast. American’s most religious state had no problem touting the payouts available on its coast. Some charms emerged. Closer to Alabama, the interstate meandered throw a great expanse of marsh, with more soaring bridges and a shipyards in the distance.

At Mobile, we crested a final series of bridges above swampy rivers before the scenery solidified into pine forest for the rest of drive. Incidents were few until we reached Atlanta’s outerbelt, which once again managed to turn a quiet drive into crushing congestion. So close to my parents' house, we just weathered the grind. As dreamlike as it seemed, we arrived shortly after 9, raw and relieved.

A brief but essential Saturday night rest preceded one last turn for me, a relatively quiet journey back to Nashville. Almost 2,600 miles from where I started on Wednesday the 6th, Nancy's lunch menu had grilled cheese and soup, just the right comfort lunch after long days of highway miles and open vistas.