A few days ago I told our neighbor’s worker, Juan, that I would be going to town on the following Wednesday here in Bocas del Toro, Panama, where my wife Allene and I have resided for nearly 20 years. Juan is an indigenous member of the local Ngäbe tribe as is his wife Hilda. Hilda is related to our worker Pepito and we often give rides to town for Juan and Hilda to buy groceries as we are about an hour’s drive from civilization and they have no vehicle.

On Wednesday morning, January 25th, at around 8:30, Hilda showed up at our house with her 6-year-old granddaughter wanting a ride to town. I told her that I’d be ready to go in about 30 minutes. After taking a quick shower, I loaded the back of our truck with the recyclables and an empty propane tank and told Hilda and her daughter, “Vamanos, chicas!”

We left our driveway and hadn’t gotten far down the jungle road when all of a sudden a squirrel emerged out of the foliage on the right side, turned to face us and sat up with its front feet off the ground just staring at us. I came to a quick stop and said, “Ardilla,” which is squirrel in Spanish. The little girl popped her head over the seat and reacted with glee.

The local squirrels are smaller than the grey squirrels and fox squirrels we had in Texas and their coloration is very dark, nearly black. They are also very skittish and elusive and always flee rapidly when encountered. Normally, you only get a quick glimpse of them. So I was a bit taken aback as this was the first time in the 20 years we have lived here that I had seen a squirrel so close, and sitting as still as that. After a few more seconds, the squirrel turned around and started scampering down the road ahead of us. I followed at the same speed and right away the squirrel stopped again and turned to face us, flicking its tail up and down. Then it turned away once again and headed on down the road, but kept glancing back to make sure we were following. This sequence repeated itself a couple of more times before the squirrel stopped, gave us another glance, and then darted off the road into the jungle. I looked over at Hilda and her granddaughter and they had bewildered expressions with big smiles on their faces that looked, I’m sure, exactly like my own. I think we all realized we had witnessed something unique and special. But it was shortly forgotten as we conversed about other things on the long drive to town.

I dropped Hilda and the child off in the Las Cabañas beach area of town where one of Hilda’s daughters lived. I told her I had many things to do in town that day and that I would shop for our groceries last and then head home. She told me she would be buying all their groceries at the big market in Las Cabañas and asked what time I would pass by in the afternoon. I told her it would be fairly late, around 4:30 or 5:00. She said she would be done with her shopping by 4:00 and would be waiting just outside the market.

Sure enough, she was there waiting when I came by around 4:30 and we loaded up a couple of 25-pound sacks of rice and two cardboard boxes of canned goods, dry goods, bottled goods, and several bags of fresh chicken and meats into the back of the truck. The drive back to our side of the island seemed to pass quickly and uneventfully while we talked about our various tasks of the day. I took Hilda and her granddaughter to their house first where Juan helped us unload their groceries. I then drove home and Allene came out and helped unload our stuff. Afterwards, we had our usual glass of wine on the veranda, watching the sun go down to the west of the famous Panamanian landmark, Isla Pajaros (Bird Island), and then went inside for a nice dinner of coconut shrimp. It was a wonderful cap off to a long, hot, tiresome day in town.

The last two and a half years have been one of the worst periods of our lives. It started with the pandemic and brutal quarantine. Then right when the country opened back up, the very first group of clients came to stay at our neighbor Wiley’s rental property, which I manage. While showing them where to swim at the beach, I slipped and fell on some algae-covered rocks and broke my femur. After 10 months of recovery, I was finally able enough to go back to the hospital to get surgery for two inguinal hernias. That put me down for another three months and the day after I was cleared to start resuming activities, I blew out my knee on the leg opposite the one I had broken. I was laid back up in bed again, barely able to hobble to the bathroom.

While I was recuperating, I was still making weekly video calls with my Mom and Dad in Hawaii. My mother at 92, had started to decline in health recently and my two sisters said we should try to come to Maui. The trip to Maui is a long and grueling two days of travel and flying has always been uncomfortable for me because of my height and long legs. And every year it has gotten harder and harder as we have aged. So I told my sisters there was no way I could travel at the time because of the severity of my injury and that I was sure I would be well enough so we could come in January, the month of both Mom’s and Dad’s birthdays.

Well, that didn’t work out at all. My youngest sister Cindy called on November 14 and said Mom had just passed away. I was shocked to hear that. I had done a video call with my folks three days before and Mom was sitting up, smiling, and telling me she loved me. I thought at the time that she would be around quite a bit longer. It was a terrible loss for all our family but my mother had been suffering from severe pain for quite some time from a fractured pelvis and a fractured tailbone from two different falls. So in some ways, it was a blessing that she was no longer suffering.

But now it was my turn to suffer. Not from the knee injury. That was nothing compared to the suffering of guilt, remorse and anger at myself after Mom’s death. In hindsight, I wondered if I could have made the trip to Maui, using wheelchairs and carts to get me through all the airports and different gates that we have to go through to get there. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t have remorse over that. One thing that helped me was to channel my guilt and anger into working extremely hard on my rehabilitation. I made a promise to myself and to Mom that at the age of 72 I would get in the best shape of my life and spend the rest of my days on earth being a better human being to everyone I encountered from here on out.

In mid-December, the physical therapy, icing, elevating and rest had helped the knee improve enough so I could start my upper body exercises again, without causing pain. I increased the number of pull-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups gradually until I reached my current ability of doing more per day than I have done in my whole life. And three weeks ago, the knee was feeling good enough to slowly start adding some leg exercises to my routine. That went well so I started doing 20-minute walks, 15-minute sessions on the stationary bicycle, and going down and up the 63 stairs to our beach. After waking every morning, I follow a roughly two-hour exercise regimen before breakfast and have two more sessions of around 45 minutes during the day. In the last two months I went from feeling nearly defeated to reaching a level of strength that gives me hope of starting to surf again in two or three weeks.

Anyway, the day after I went to town, by the late afternoon I started my last session on the beach stairs. The sun had already started to set and on my last trip down, when I was four steps from the beach, a small, dark squirrel came out suddenly from the thick philodendrons and gingers on the left side of the stairs and stopped on the step below me. It looked up at me, with no sign of surprise or fear, and I thought, “What in hell is going on with these squirrels?”

It then started chattering softly while its tail moved rapidly from side to side and up and down. Then it cocked its head to the side while looking me straight in the eye. It almost felt as if it was trying to communicate with me. Then suddenly it disappeared into the underbrush on the right side of the stairs and was gone. I was flabbergasted to say the least. Two strange encounters with squirrels in two days. I don’t believe in coincidences but I couldn’t make a bit of sense out of it.

I went back up the stairs, walked to the house and was just sitting down at the outdoor patio set on our veranda when Allene walked out of the house with two glasses of wine, set them on the table and took a seat across from me. Before I could open my mouth and tell her about the squirrels, she looked right at me and said, “You do know that today is your mother’s birthday, right?”
I had to pause for a moment before answering. “No, I didn’t. I totally forgot.”

My whole life I’ve been bad at remembering dates of special events, birthdays, certain holidays, anniversaries and all other things of that nature. Allene always remembers everything and is forever reminding me of special dates.

Immediately after hearing it was Mom’s birthday, I had an epiphany. Instantly I tilted my head back and looked up towards the sky with my hands stretched out in front of me, palms up, and thought to myself, “I hear you loud and clear, Mom. Thanks for sending me the squirrels.”

Then I looked back at Allene and said, “I need to tell you a story.”

By the time I finished telling her about the two squirrels, I had tears running down my face. And I told her, “It was a message from Mom for sure, Allene. She was letting us know she is okay and she’s watching over us.”

Allene nodded her head in agreement and reached over and placed her hand on top of mine. It was a small gesture but it was perfect and was enough.

A big burden lifted off of me at that moment and I thought to myself, “I love you, Mom. Thanks for the message.”

The X-rays Dr. Barria wanted me to get in December had to be postponed until January 27 due to the resurgence of the Omicron variant. The Bocas hospital was full of COVID patients and half of the staff was out with the virus also. But with the patience I had already acquired in dealing with this injury, I kept my nose to the grindstone every day concentrating on my therapy exercises, eating well and getting plenty of rest. And I always had a good book going so the days passed rapidly. The wait was worth it as the news was good from Dr. Barria. He called me immediately after Jacy had once again sent him photos of the X-rays.

“Hello, Clay,” he said. “I’m glad to tell you that your fracture is healing very nicely and we’re at the point where I think you can start trying to walk unassisted. If the leg is too stiff and painful at first, use a cane for two or three weeks to make the transition. Keep doing the exercises and I want you to get X-rayed again the first week of April.”

This was exciting news and I was elated to get rid of the one crutch. That afternoon I tried walking on my own but it was a little too painful. Allene and I both have a set of adjustable trekking poles that we use when hiking in rough terrain so I adjusted my right-hand pole to the length of a cane and tried walking with it. I was pleasantly surprised. I had been skeptical that a cane would make much difference but I was wrong. With the cane, I could walk easily with no pain.

In about three weeks I was doing my laps around the porch and ramp without needing the cane. However, I did continue to hold it in my right hand without it touching the floor because my balance had not returned well enough yet and I wanted to plant the cane in case I stumbled or lost balance. I felt it prudent to err on the side of caution.

At that time I ventured out to our driveway to try walking on uneven terrain. I definitely used the cane for security. After a week or so, I was walking laps briskly back and forth on the part of our driveway that’s along the side of our house. I was still holding the cane but not touching it to the ground. In case I tripped or slipped I could easily plant the cane and catch myself. My balance, along with my confidence, was steadily improving.

On February 21, I took my first shower standing up and with no need of assistance from Allene. Yay! More freedom for her, and more independence for me.

In the second week of March, when I went out to do my morning walk, there was a good-sized tree branch that had fallen during the night and was blocking my way. I started to holler for Pepito who was working on the back side of the property but I changed my mind. I walked to the bodega to look for my machete. I hadn’t touched it in six months but there it was, right where I had left it. Oh man, I can’t tell you how great it felt chopping up that tree limb. To those reading this story, it might seem like such an insignificant event. But it wasn’t to me. To do something strenuous with some strength behind it was a major step forward. Later on when I was telling Allene the story, I broke down in tears. She gave me a big hug. (Side note: Don’t ever underestimate the power of a hug.)
One major side effect from using the walker for 5 ½ months was that I destroyed the use of my hands. Per instruction, I had to put 75% of my body weight on my hands and I’m a big guy. After a while, I could barely hold my eating utensils and couldn’t unscrew the top of a jar. So all during that time there was no way I could play my guitar. I couldn’t make a chord on the strings with my left hand or hold a pick with my right. I tried hard to not let it bother me by telling myself that everything I was currently doing was to help me recover as fast as possible and to be patient. Finally, after ditching the walker, my hands started healing and on March 17 I was able to play the guitar for the first time. My voice was ragged as hell, I could barely hold the pick, and the calluses were gone on the fingers of my left hand. So I couldn’t play very long as my fingers got sore quickly. It was probably the worst I’ve ever sounded but still, it was a glorious occasion. And Allene teared up on that one, so it was my turn to give her a hug.

On March 22, I did away with the chair that I had been sitting in to do the dumbbell exercises during the morning therapy sessions. Standing up for these upper body workouts seemed to benefit my overall physiology. After I finished that morning session, I felt so good that I texted Dr. Barria and told him of my improvements and asked him if I could get down on the floor and add my sit-ups and push-ups to the routine.

He wrote back immediately saying, “You’d better hold off on that a while longer, Clay. I want you to wait until we get the X-rays the first week of April before we make that decision. Keep doing everything else though.”

I wrote him back to thank him and assure him I would.

Two days later I was feeling confident enough to do my laps on the driveway without holding the cane. My balance seemed to be fine as I hadn’t had to plant the cane even one time for stumbling or slipping. The cane was put away for good that day.

For those of you reading this, you might be thinking, “Boy, ‘ol Clay must sure have a memory to be able to keep up with all these dates and details.” Well, you’d be wrong about that. Although I am a stickler for details and getting the facts straight, my memory is no better than anyone else’s and maybe even a lot worse than most. But being a songwriter and now also a prose writer, I always bring along a notebook or note pad everywhere I go. You just never know when a thought or idea may pop into your head so I want to be ready if and when it does. Allene and Jacy know that about me. So, on my second day in the hospital they returned after one of their shopping trips and presented me with a small red notebook and a new Bic pen. It was a very thoughtful gift and I have been using it daily since the day they gave it to me.

Anxious to get the next X-rays done, I made an appointment with the radiologist at the Bocas hospital pretty far in advance. I was counting the days to the April 6 date and after what I thought was forever, it finally arrived. Rolando picked me up in his taxi and drove me to the hospital where I was met inside by Jacy and the radiologist. There was no one else waiting for X-rays so we were able to get right to work. It went fast and Jacy once again had the radiologist put the images on the big monitor so she could photograph them and send them to Dr. Barria. Jacy said she would drive me home and before we could exit the hospital parking lot, her phone pinged and she had a texted message from Dr. Barria. Jacy pulled right over so we could read it together.

“I assume Clay is walking close to normal again as the fracture is healed completely. He is free to do whatever he wants.”

On hearing that news, you’d think I would have been overjoyed but in reality I was confused and kind of flabbergasted. Dr. Barria had told me the day after he did my surgery that the femur fracture I had was the most common one they see and that it would take ten to twelve months to completely heal. That was confirmed many times in all the research I’d read online about healing bone fractures. Also, my leg did not feel even close to being healed completely. On arrival at our house, Jacy and Allene visited on the veranda and started playing a game of cards. I went in the house and phoned Dr. Barria.

“Hello, Clay,” he said, upon answering. “How are you feeling?”

“Well, to be honest, you kind of caught me off guard by saying my femur is completely healed. You told me in the hospital that it takes ten to twelve months. And my leg definitely doesn’t feel like it’s healed. It’s still stiff and sore when I’m walking or exercising.”

“Well, normally it is ten to twelve months, Clay, but sometimes bones heal faster and sometimes it might take even longer than a year to heal. It depends on a lot of different factors. You obviously did everything right, plus you’re a fast healer.”

“Why doesn’t my leg feel like it then?” I asked.

“You probably still have some trauma in the muscles, tendons and nerves. That is normal too, so keep exercising and that will eventually go away. But the bone is healed and you can do whatever you want.”

“So I can do my push-ups and sit-ups now?”

“Yes you can do those.”

“What about walking up and down stairs and driving?” I asked, still a little skeptical.

“You can do all that and go surfing too if you want. But please take some photos when you surf the first time and send them to me.”

“I’ll do that, no problem!” I said with enthusiasm. Now that I was convinced I thanked him for all he had done for me and expressed my sincere gratitude for his and his staff’s excellent care.

“Thank you, Clay. Our patients’ well-being is by far our greatest reward.” With that, he bid me a warm “Good luck” and “Goodbye.”

After telling Allene and Jacy what all Dr. Barria had said, I told them I was going to walk down to the beach. They said to take it slow and easy and to be careful, and went back to their card game.
I walked across the veranda, down the front stairs and crossed the yard all the way to our beach stairs, like it was the most natural thing in the world. I was totally aware though, that the last time I had walked down any stairs was on the fateful day seven months before when I’d fallen onto that hard rock.

The stairs to our beach were more of a challenge than our house stairs, having 63 steps from the cliff to the beach. I made it down with no trouble and was happy to see Whitey and Junior coming down the stairs behind me. We spent a lovely half hour taking it all in, with Whitey chasing sand crabs and Junior fetching sticks.

Going back up the stairs was much harder of course, and on reaching the top I was out of breath. Even though I had been doing exercises nearly every day since the day after my surgery, it was all directed to rehabilitate the leg, with nothing being aerobic. I knew that I needed to start doing something to get my heart pumping, and I realized these beach stairs would be the perfect fit, with gradual increases in speed and in the number of round trips. That, and a daily walk on the jungle road which connects all the properties here at Drago would suffice for aerobic exercise.
When I got back to the house Jacy was ready to leave and I hugged her and thanked her for all her help. When she left, I sat down and told Allene of my new plan. My parents would be celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary on June 4 and it had been doubtful that I would be strong enough to make the trip. But now, with the new developments, things were looking much more promising. My new goal was to be able to navigate stairs and walk through all the airports we would have to go through to get to Maui, Hawaii, where my parents reside. I told Allene that starting the next day I would get out the exercise mat and start doing my push-ups and sit-ups with the morning routine. Then I would start doing reps going up and down the beach stairs and add distance and speed to my walks. It felt so good to have a goal and a plan to reach it.

I was doing 100 sit-ups and 25 push-ups every day before my accident. That first morning I could only do 30 sit-ups and no push-ups at all. It had me worried when I couldn’t even push myself an inch up off the floor. But the next morning I was able to do two and by the end of the week I could do eight. Also, by the end of the week I could do the full 100 sit-ups. I told Allene to go ahead and book the trip.

We got it booked with help from our good friend Traci, who is a wizard at finding the best deals and routes for the different airlines. Our departure date was set for May 14. I continued to exercise every day and soon was up to my regular 25 push-ups every morning.

A couple of weeks before our trip I felt I was able to do a little work so I drove our truck over to Traci’s property to see what needed to be done, as she would be coming to house-sit for us again while we were in Hawaii. I noticed right away that her gate needed repainting. I had Allene buy the paint on her next trip to town and then I spent a few hours getting the gate painted. The next day I drove over to Wiley’s place and did some carpentry work on the shutters. Boy, it sure felt good to get back to work after the long hiatus.

By the time Traci arrived, a couple of days before our departure for Hawaii, I felt I could make the trip with no problem. But I wanted to keep exercising and working on my music while we were at my folks’ house so I wrote my sister Annie and her husband Jim if they could loan me an exercise mat and a guitar for me to use at the family home. Jim is an entertainer and great musician and has a lot of nice guitars.

Finally the departure date arrived and Rolando came to pick us up in his taxi. After giving hugs and kisses to Traci, Whitey and Junior, we were “off on another adventure,” our signature quote every time we start out on a trip.

After two days of travel and going through 3 airports without a hitch, our plane touched down at the Maui airport at 8:30 p.m., Hawaii time, which was 1:30 a.m., Panama time. Traveling light as always, we had only carry-ons and were curbside quickly. Allene used her Uber app and we had a vehicle pick us up three minutes later. We made the drive up the slope of Mt. Haleakala to my parents’ home in less than 20 minutes, thanks to the lack of traffic and expert driving. The folks’ place is between the small towns of Makawao and Pukalani and we were full of anticipation as we approached the house. Pulling into the parking area we could see my parents through the window. We quickly got our bags, thanked the driver and walked up the stairs to the door where Mom and Dad were waiting just inside the open door.

After surviving a pandemic, a broken leg and a long, exhausting trip to Maui, being able to put my arms around my folks was a great emotional release. There were hugs, kisses, laughter, tears, some words, but mostly just a few minutes of pure joy. It gave me reassurance that everything was going to be okay. After staying up for a good while visiting and catching up, we all decided it was past our bedtime so we turned in.

Allene and I woke at 6:00 a.m. to help get the folks up and start the breakfast of a large fruit plate, scrambled eggs and buttered toast. (Actually, I’d awoken at 3:30 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. Damned jet leg.

After breakfast I checked out the guitar that Jim had left for me in the bedroom. It was a fairly old Martin D-28 and played and sounded like a dream. Thank you, Jim.

Then I noticed in one corner of the room were two exercise mats rolled up that my sister Annie had brought over. I took them out to the front porch and then went up the stairs to the apartment that used to be my old bedroom, found my 10-pound dumbbells and brought them downstairs. When I was up there I’d noticed some old bed boards with attached nylon straps that were stashed in the closet. That gave me an idea so I took the straps off the bed boards and hung them down through the slats in the upstairs porch. I went out to the old shed behind the house and rummaged around until I found a piece of one-inch galvanized pipe about 3-feet long. I found a stepladder behind the shed and brought it and the piece of pipe out to the front porch. I climbed the ladder and tied the nylon straps to the ends of the pipe and Voila! I had a chinning bar!

So everything was set for my morning workout right there on the front porch. I also continued with my walks twice a day. From the back fence of the property to the fence along the road is about the length of two football fields. I would do 6 round-trip laps in the morning at a brisk pace and do the same every evening.

With everything coming together nicely, I reflected for a moment on the fact that I had set a goal of recovering enough to make the trip to Hawaii for my parents’ 75th anniversary, and I’d achieved it. It was a very good feeling and I thought, “Man, I need another goal.”

And right then it came to me. My birthday is June 27 and every year on my birthday I do a “Skin the Cat” gymnastic maneuver that my Dad taught me when I was a kid. I do it to give myself an indication of where my fitness level is after another year has passed, but I never practice it during the year because I want it to be a true and honest test. Five years ago I started filming it and posting it on my YouTube channel and Facebook pages. So my new goal was to be recovered enough and strong enough to Skin the Cat on my upcoming 72nd birthday.

The weather was very nice the whole time we were in Hawaii and the days seemed to fly by. My Dad spent a lot of time every day working in his raised-bed gardens. Mom would come out and help him with the watering. We ate a lot of vegetables out of the garden while we were there, augmented by some avocados that I picked from their orchard on the property. It was off-season for avocados but I hunted around in the trees and found a few good ones left over from the last harvest.

June 4 was the big milestone 75th anniversary party. In the afternoon we hung lots of colorful decorations. Later on towards evening we had take-out delivered from our favorite local venue, Casanova’s Italian Restaurant in Makawao. Allene had also made a large decorated carrot cake. Someone opened a bottle of wine and even I decided to have a glass. It was the first time since my accident that I’d had any alcohol but it was the perfect occasion to imbibe.

After the meal was over we moved into the big front room and I grabbed the guitar and got the music started.

While we were singing songs, of course my Mom got up to dance because that is what she does. It’s in her blood and she can’t help herself. My sister Annie and her daughter Elaine quickly jumped up and danced with Mom, holding her hands to insure she would not fall. It was such a beautiful thing to witness. My 92-year-old mother, my oldest sister Annie and granddaughter Elaine with her extended belly from the great-grandbaby inside that is due in August. I glanced at my younger sister Cindy and our eyes connected as we both knew it was a poignant moment. I looked away quickly because it choked me up but I recovered enough to finish the song.

We kept the party going late into the night until we all realized we had celebrated enough. The event itself was so remarkable (How can people actually be married for 75 years?!) that we could add nothing more to the occasion than we had already given, which was just more family love.

Surprisingly, everyone was up fairly early the next morning. My two sisters came over after breakfast and we spent the morning taking down the decorations while laughing and talking about the night before. The music and dancing took precedence in the conversations.

That evening everyone came over again and we ordered take-out from Amigos, our favorite Mexican restaurant on Maui. It was a good meal but kind of a somber occasion because Allene and I would be flying out the next day to return to our home in Panama.

The next morning we were up at the crack of dawn. We had an early flight departure so right after breakfast, Allene and I got our showers, packed our gear and then tried to gather ourselves for the dreaded goodbyes. It’s always difficult to have to say goodbye to Mom and Dad when we leave Maui, and now their age has made it harder than ever. I always cry like a baby and even right now as I’m writing this my eyes are misting over just thinking about it. I guess I’ve become a sentimental old fool.

My brother-in-law Tim drove us to the Maui airport. The check-in went smoothly, as did the TSA precheck, and in a few minutes we walked on to our gate. As we sat there waiting to board, Allene and I reflected on how great a trip it had been. Everything had gone well, the anniversary party went off without a hitch and it was a phenomenal reunion with all the family. Mission accomplished.
When the announcement came that it was time to board, we stood up and high-fived, clasping hands at the end and saying, “Off on another adventure!”

After a grueling overnight flight we arrived in Panama City and our taxi driver there, Ruben, picked us up and drove us to the regional airport where we caught our flight to Bocas del Toro. Allene’s sister Lynn was there to greet us at the airport. After gathering our bags and giving hugs, we exited the airport where Rolando was waiting faithfully by his taxi.

We made the hour-long drive to the other side of the island and as we pulled up the driveway to our house, Traci, Whitey and Junior came out to greet us. After hugging them all, I paid and thanked Rolando and he headed back to town. Allene and I quickly unpacked our bags and after changing into more comfortable clothes we made our way out to the veranda where Traci had set out a freshly opened bottle of wine and wine glasses. Everyone settled in their regular places: Allene at the back center of the table, me on the left, Traci in her hammock and the dogs at my feet. I marveled again at that view that never gets old … the beautiful blue Caribbean with Isla Pajaros just offshore.

Allene poured the wine and we toasted to being home. At that perfect moment, the old cliché “There’s no place like home” couldn’t have been any truer or more profound. Traci was going to hang out with us for a couple more days to visit and play cards with Allene and our neighbor Roger. We were home, and life was good.

The day before Traci left, the surf started coming up in the morning but it was very windy. By the late afternoon the wind had died and there were consistent sets arriving in the waist- to chest-high range. I suddenly decided to go surfing for the first time since my accident. The waves were small, the conditions were nice and I thought it would be the perfect time to give it a go. I told Allene and Traci what I was going to do and they got really anxious and nervous but not nearly as much as I already was. I tried to hide my nerves as I asked Allene and Traci to come down to the cliff with their cameras and take some photos. I got my board out from under the house and headed down the trail to the beach stairs. About halfway there I glanced over to my right and burst out laughing. Allene and Traci were carrying lawn chairs, wine, plastic cups, camera gear, sun screen, their phones, sun hats, and who knows what else. These ladies never do anything halfway and I love that about them.
Trepidation returned as I was walking down the stairs to the beach but that dissipated as soon as I hit the water. The paddle out was fairly easy but when I reached the lineup and tried to sit up, it was extremely painful trying to spread my legs far enough to straddle the board. It took a few minutes to get used to the position and for the pain to subside.

Then a wave came and I went for it. I had no problem catching it but as I tried to pop to my feet I realized it wasn’t gonna happen. I fell right off, but I wasn’t too disturbed. Hey, I had caught a wave! I paddled back out and waited for a smaller and gentler wave thinking it would give me more time to get to my feet. The wave came and I caught it and sure enough I was able to struggle to my feet and make a small bottom turn and ride the wave out. Hallelujah! I did it. The girls up on the cliff gave me pumped fists in the air when I got back to the lineup. The third wave was bigger and it broke before I could stand up so I had to ride it on my stomach. The fourth wave was the best. I was able to get to my feet faster than on Wave 2 and made a fairly good bottom turn and a couple of pumps on the face before kicking out.

“Okay,” I told myself. “You can still surf.” That meant just about everything to me.

I went for a couple more waves but missed them because I was already pretty tired. I finally caught another wave and couldn’t get up before it broke so I ended up riding it to the shore on my knees. Getting back up the stairs was extremely hard due to exhaustion and pain but the girls were waiting at the top to greet me with hugs and high fives. They assured me that they both had good shots of me standing on the board. It was a happy walk back to the house.

Later that night I was sitting alone on the veranda with a glass of wine and reflecting on the irony of my surfing earlier in the day. On one hand, I thought that was probably the worst surf session of my life, and I’ve been surfing avidly since I was 12 years old. But on the other hand, due to the circumstances, it very well could have been the best surf session of my life. I was still on an incredible emotional high. At that moment I made the decision to get in better shape before I try it again, especially because I knew I’d be going out in bigger and more powerful waves.

The next day, Traci bid us adieu and caught her plane back to the States. Thank you, Traci. Once again you helped us out in a tremendous way. And we miss you terribly when you’re not here.
By the third day back I was finally getting over the jet lag and readjusting to Panama time. I continued with my morning workout routine and started taking a long walk in the evenings and then going up and down the beach stairs.

I drove our truck from our house down to a distant neighbors’ driveway and back and it was 1.3 miles. So that is my route and it has a lot of hills and valleys so walking it briskly does gets my blood pumping. It’s mostly all jungle and a great nature walk. The dogs usually tag along and we see parrots, toucans and lots of other birds, monkeys, sloths, agoutis and occasionally a big snake. After completing the walk I head straight to the beach stairs and go up and down four times. Whew. That really gets the heart rate up. And it’s definitely helping my leg get stronger. Actually, both legs need to be stronger after the long layoff. Leg strength is crucial in surfing.

On Sunday I called Ariel and asked him if he was ready to do some work. He said he was so I told him to take the 8:00 a.m. bus to Drago in the morning and I would pick him up at the bus stop. Wiley had written saying she had clients coming to stay at her place for the whole month of July. We had to do some small maintenance work and generally get everything shipshape for the renters. The next morning I met Ariel at the bus stop, got him and his tools loaded into the truck and we drove to Wiley’s. I showed Ariel a few things that needed to be done and I quietly slipped away to go down to the beach and face my nemesis.

When I had gone over to Wiley’s to work a couple of days before we left on our Maui trip I didn’t have the nerve to walk down to the beach. That sounds kind of funny saying it now but I admit it’s true. Now, enough water had passed under the bridge, so I needed to do this. I made my way to the bottom of the stairs and as I stepped out onto the beach I had a big surprise that made me laugh out loud. That big bad black slab of basalt was gone. All the sand had returned to the beach and the rock was buried several feet below it.

“Just as well,” I thought, but I could still feel its presence, even covered with all the sand. So we did make our peace. I felt it was an important part of the healing process.

But enough of that. I was ready to do some work.

Over the next couple of weeks we finished up the work at Wiley’s and then did a lot of work at our house. At the end of that week, when I paid Ariel, I told him I wanted to take a few days off until after my birthday on the following Monday. He said, “No problemo,” and I drove him to the bus stop. As always, I thanked him for the good work.

On Sunday, I was already getting apprehensive and tense about doing the Skin the Cat video the next day. I really had doubts that I could pull it off. After about the third time I’d asked Allene questions about her camera, its battery, lenses and other things, she finally got frustrated. “Clay, would you please stop worrying! The camera, battery, SD card, and everything else is ready to go. You just need to relax and chill out. The video will go fine.”

She was right of course, and I did take her advice. Thanks, Allene, for setting me straight.

The next morning we were up early and had a big meal of fresh fruit and breakfast tacos. A great way to start my birthday. Well … we did start my birthday off with something else before breakfast but that will have to remain private.

We prepared to do the video soon after breakfast as Jacy and the boys would be coming out later and we were going to grill burgers on the BBQ pit. Normally I just ad lib what I’m going to say during the video and usually end up doing several takes because I mess up. But today we did it in one take by default. After I spoke a while, I turned, went to the chinning bar and asked everyone to wish me luck. As I pulled my legs up to put them between the bar and my head I had a bit of a falter getting through the space but managed and then lowered them down behind me until they were perpendicular to the floor. Now the hard part. Could I get them back up and then back through the bar and back down to the floor? It took every bit of my strength but I did it. Afterwards, Allene took the SD card out of the camera and inserted into our laptop so we could watch the video on the large screen. I wasn’t happy with the talking part at all. Allene said, “Okay, let’s do it again.”
I looked at her like she was nuts and said, “As much as I’d like to redo the talking parts, there’s no way I can Skin the Cat again. We’re gonna have to go with it.”

It has to be obvious that it’s all done in one take. So I apologize for that. I’m not very good at public speaking and even though it’s just Allene and me in the room, I know in my mind a lot of people will see it. I promise to do better next year. Some idiot even wrote me and said, “Next year you should do it naked!” I told him I’d think it over.

So I am exceedingly happy about meeting my goal, but now, after accomplishing that one, it’s imperative to set another one. And I know exactly what it will be. Also, the one after that.
My new goal is to get my fitness level and my leg rehabilitated to what it was before the accident.

The next goal will be to get in the best shape of my life and start riding big powerful waves again. And … if the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise, I’ll see you again on June 27, 2023 with another Skin the Cat video.

Until then … Never Stop Surfing.

The new swell started arriving two days ago here in Bocas del Toro, Panama, where we have lived for the last eighteen years. I took my boat that I keep in town, a 24 ft. fiberglass panga, out to Carenero Island the first two days to surf. On the northeast side of Carenero there are six surf spots that are all world-class when the waves are pumping. Those two previous days I ended up surfing the right at Black Rock because the other five breaks had people at them and I prefer to surf alone. The waves were excellent both days with yesterday being much bigger than the first day. Both days I rode my 6’8” squashtail that Courtney Parks, who owns Tropix Surfboards here in Bocas, shaped for me as an all-around board that works well in all kinds of surf. It is my go-to board nearly always. This morning my wife Allene and I were awakened at 5:30 by a vicious storm with radical lightning and thunder, strong winds and torrential rains that lasted until about 1:30 in the afternoon. When it finally started letting up, the wind shifted out of the west which is straight offshore for Carenero and I told Allene I was gonna go surf. I drove to town and loaded my squashtail along with the other board that I always take out there as well. The first spot I came to was Black Rock, with the waves being way bigger than the day before, but because it faces more to the south, the wind was side-shore there and kind of blown out. I proceeded on to Old Man’s but it had ten or twelve people there. So I kept going up to the next spot called Big Rock, but it also was crowded. From there, I headed up towards the last three breaks which are the inside section called G-Land, the Point, and the Outside. I could see more than thirty people at the Point and quite a few at the Outside but lo and behold, there was no one at G-Land. That has been my favorite spot to surf in Bocas since I’ve lived here as the waves are very hollow and powerful, but it has gotten crowded in the last few years so lately I usually bypass it for Big Rock or Black Rock where I can often surf alone. Today I anchored just outside the break and paddled in on the board that Courtney shaped for me strictly for the wave at G-Land. It’s a 6’10” pintail thruster and I have to tell you … it’s a magical board for that wave. The waves were big and powerful today and just paddling in to the lineup from the boat got my adrenalin pumping. When the first good wave came I went on it without hesitation and got a screaming ride down the reef with a few pumps on the face in order to make the wave. When I paddled back out to the take-off spot, I saw my friend Michelle take off on a massive wave at the Point and rip the wave to shreds, doing several sharp bottom turns, going straight up and smashing top turns off of the lip until she kicked out close to where I was sitting. She came over and we visited awhile and then we saw our mutual friend Chapo take off on another good wave and really work it over. When he finished his ride he saw us and paddled over to say hello too. While we were talking and not paying much attention, all of a sudden a big wave was right on top of us and Chapo and Michelle both looked at me like, “It’s yours, Clay!” So I spun around and went. The takeoff was late and as I popped to my feet the fins came out and I freefell down the face. But that has happened to me lots of times over the years at that spot, on that board, so instinct took over and I knew just what to do. I stayed in a crouch and grabbed the outside rail and sure enough, the fins stuck three quarters of the way down. I was in the barrel for a few seconds and came flying out, making a few pumps down the wave before straightening out in the shorebreak. I shouted out a couple of yahoos on the paddle back to the lineup. With my confidence up (which can be a mistake if it’s overconfidence), another big wave appeared and even though I knew I was a little too far inside, instead of letting the wave pass, I went on it anyway. I went over the falls before I could get to my feet and was thoroughly thrashed, with my leash breaking before the beating was over. It was a long swim in through heavy waves and then a crawl over the reef where it gets very shallow before reaching the shore. I got my board, rested a moment while waiting for a lull and then started paddling back out. I got through the shorebreak fairly easily and thought I had it made (overconfidence again), then suddenly saw a huge cleanup set on the horizon. I sprint-paddled as hard as I could but to no avail. The first wave crushed me and then I took the next eight waves on the head which washed me back inside as the cross-current was pulling me towards the rocks at Big Rock. Upon getting dangerously close to the rocks, I made the decision to turn around and ride the whitewater to shore. From there I walked way down the beach towards the Point and when I finally saw another lull, I started to paddle out again. This time I got lucky and made it back outside almost without getting my hair wet. By this time I realized I was pretty spent and it was getting late so I paddled back to the boat, pulled myself and my board in and motored back to town. After parking the boat in our slip, I stashed my boards in the bodega, showered off with a gallon jug of water, got dressed and went to the truck. Before making the hour-long drive back to our side of the island I stopped at the gas station on the way out of town to pick up a couple of Heinekens to celebrate on the way home.
I was elated about my surf session. Big beautiful waves, two good rides, one short barrel, an epic wipeout. But I was still alive, with no injuries, no reef rash and grinning from ear to ear. I felt very blessed and was thankful for the day. And at the age of 71, I’m still just as stoked as I was on the day I caught my first wave in Galveston, Texas when I was twelve years old.
Never Stop Surfing.

I’ve always loved the song “New York Minute” by the Eagles. Even though it’s not one of their more popular or notable songs, in my opinion it’s one of their best. There’s a line in the third verse that goes, “If you find somebody to love in this world, you better hang on tooth and nail.” That line reaches out and grabs me by the heart every time I listen to the song. But there lies the whole crux of the matter, doesn’t it? I think most people would agree that from the beginning, as music evolved it was meant to evoke some kind of emotional response from your heart, your soul, or your mind.

But in my current situation, it’s the first line in the chorus that by far resonates the loudest and truest of any line in any song that I’ve ever heard: “In a New York minute, everything can change.”

Boy, can it ever!

I do property management for our friend and neighbor, Wiley Wakeman. She utilizes her place as a vacation rental for most of the year when she is not here in Bocas del Toro, Panama. It’s a beautiful property in the jungle with a lovely beach out front and lots of monkeys and sloths in the trees. Throughout the pandemic, the place sat forlorn and empty except for two months last summer when another soon-to-be neighbor, Traci Orr, along with her daughter Elly, came from Texas and rented Wiley’s place so she could begin plans for cacao farming on her property. Since then Panama has gradually reopened and lots of tourists have started coming back.

After putting her rental back on the market, Wiley got her first booking for September 17th through the 20th for four people. She has two cabins and a yoga pavilion and my job is to get it all cleaned up and ready and then meet the clients in town on the day they arrive. We shop for groceries in town before setting out on the hour-long drive to the other side of the island to Wiley’s place, which is only a few hundred yards past our own property. The first thing we do when we get there is unload all the luggage and groceries, put a few things away and then I give them a short orientation on the facilities and the property. The last thing I do before leaving them to settle in, is take them down the cliff stairs to the show them the beach. I have the routine down pat after having done this for Wiley for several years.

So on the afternoon of the 17th, I was waiting at the ferry landing when it arrived from Almirante. I had been in touch with Whitney, one member of the group, a couple of days in advance by email. She told me that the other girl was named Inga and the two guys were Dustin and Mulget. She said she had been doing research, studying frogs for one month at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Gamboa on the Panama Canal, and they would be driving a white Toyota pickup truck with the Smithsonian logo on the doors. They were easy to spot coming off the ferry and I flagged them down while standing in the street next to my truck. They pulled over and parked and after introductions, I told them to follow me to the grocery store. At the supermarket I noticed the bed of their truck was full of bags and boxes covered by a tarp. They said they had already stocked up on most everything they needed but they would grab a few extra things and then we’d head to Wiley’s.

After the long drive to the north side of the island and arriving at Wiley’s, the five of us unloaded their truck, carrying their luggage and groceries up the stairs to the house. As everyone does when they get to the veranda at the top of the stairs, they started “Ooohing” and “Aaahing.” The view is spectacular, looking out over the beautiful Caribbean with Isla de Los Pajaros (locally called Bird Island) just offshore.

They put their cold items in the fridge and after they stowed away a few other things, I filled them in about the electrical, water and septic systems, giving them a few pointers about living off the grid. By this time it was after 4:00 in the afternoon so I suggested we go down to the beach so I could show them where to swim. As we walked to the other side of the property I pointed out various fruit trees and herbs until we reached the stairs that led down to the beach. Down below, I could see that the high waves in the previous month had washed out most of the sand on the right (east) side of the beach, down to the bedrock. However, I could see a big build-up of sand on the western side of the beach. I pointed and said, “Hey let’s walk over there and I’ll show you a great place to swim.” I led the way across the rocks and on taking my third step, my whole world changed.

In that microsecond, my feet went airborne and I came crashing down on my left side. I immediately felt intense pain, more severe than anything I’ve ever experienced in my life. I was stunned and in so much pain that I couldn’t move or speak. I simply laid there for a moment replaying in my mind what had just happened. In my mind’s eye I saw it looking exactly like a classic pratfall in an old Three Stooges movie. At the same time, I realized everyone was gathered around me and asking in frantic voices if I was all right. I remember saying, “No, I don’t think so. I think I might have broken something.” It seemed like I felt something give when I impacted the rock, but I wasn’t sure. They asked if they could help me up and I said, “No, I think it would be better if I just lie still for a while to see how I feel.” Everyone was very quiet and after a few minutes the pain had subsided and I was feeling better. I started to think and hope that maybe it was only a bad bruise. I told them I was going to try to sit up and as I pushed up with my elbows the pain hit me again so I had to lie back down. At that point I asked Whitney and Inga if they would drive over to our house, tell my wife Allene what had happened and bring her over here. I had pointed out our gate and driveway on the way to Wiley’s so they knew where we lived.

After the girls left, Dustin volunteered to go up to Wiley’s and bring down a lawn chair. He said he and Mulget had worked in hospitals and knew how to lift an injured person without hurting them. I was skeptical at first and turned the offer down but after a few more minutes on the rock, I wanted off. I asked him to get the chair and when he returned with it they explained what they would do. I agreed and they lifted me quickly and painlessly and sat me upright in the chair. I was amazed and very grateful to be off that rock.

Dustin asked me how I had come to live in Bocas. I told him Allene and I had been in the music business, had toured with our band for 30 years and decided to retire from that and pursue our other passion, which was surfing. Dustin said that he was a musician based out of New Orleans, which is where Allene was born, and that his band had toured a lot in Texas. He knew a lot of the same venues where we used to play. I asked Mulget how he liked Panama and he said he liked it fine so far but had not seen much of it since he had just arrived recently from South America. He spoke very good English but with a foreign accent.

I asked, “What were you doing in South America?”

He gave me a big grin and said, “Running the Pan American Highway.”

Hmm, I thought, and asked, “Where are you from?”

“Ethiopia,” he said proudly, and then it clicked.

“That explains it,” I said. “Ethiopians are the best long-distance runners in the world.”

“That’s true,” he said, with a beaming smile.

Meanwhile, as I was told later, Allene was at home finishing the last two minutes of her stair-stepper exercise when she saw our truck come up the driveway. She noticed there were two ladies in the front seats which immediately made her stop, wipe off some sweat and walk outside. The women were masked and walking towards the house when Allene asked, “Are you fully vaccinated?” They both nodded so Allene said, “So am I, so you can take off your masks. I need to see your faces when you speak.”

They explained, “There has been an accident on the beach and Clay wants you to come there.”

Allene asked if one of their friends had been hurt, and they said, “No, Clay is the one that was hurt.”

Allene walked immediately down the stairs, saying, “Let’s go.”

Just about the time I felt I was getting to know these two interesting characters, Whitney and Inga showed up with Allene. As they reached the bottom of the stairs and saw me sitting in the chair laughing and talking with the boys, they all had quizzical looks on their faces. Allene came over to me and said, “The girls said you had a bad accident.”

“I did,” I said.

“Well, you don’t look like it.”

“I feel okay right now, but I’m pretty sure I broke my leg.” I explained how the guys had lifted me and set me in the chair. Allene asked if I had tried to stand since then and I said No. She asked me to try. I put my hands on the arms of the chair and barely shifted in an effort to stand but the intense pain shot through me like fire again.

“Okay,” Allene said. Then she turned to the girls and asked them if they would go up the beach stairs but instead of going left to Wiley’s, to take the path to the right which would lead to a fence.

“There’s no gate so just stay on the path and cross through the open fence. You’ll see a house there where our friend Roger lives and he should be home. Explain who you are, what happened, and ask him to call the firemen and have them send an ambulance. Make sure he tells them that they will need several big guys to haul Clay up the cliff.”

The girls left, and when they came back ten minutes later, they had Roger with them. He explained that instead of calling the fire department himself, he called our other neighbors, Courtney and Rosemary, who have lived here the longest of all of us, and gave them the message. They notified the firemen and made sure that Denis, a fireman and good friend of ours, knew it was me who was injured. Rosemary then called Tom (who lives closest to the main gate to our road), told him what had happened and asked him to let the ambulance in and out of the gate.

We knew the ambulance would not arrive within 45 minutes so everyone just hung out there on the beach with me for about a half hour, hearing each other’s stories. Then Roger and Allene went up to his house to meet the ambulance. Roger walked to the road and waited so the firemen would not go on to Wiley’s driveway but to his own, as it was closer to the beach stairs and easier for vehicles to navigate. Allene checked out Roger’s yard and found the quickest and safest path to the gap in the fence from the driveway and waited for the ambulance to tell the driver where to park.

About 15 more minutes passed with the four visitors and me learning more about each other and then I heard a booming voice at the top of the stairs that I immediately recognized.

“Hey Clay, we came to help you, mon!”

“All right, Denis! Come on down and get me out of here!”

To my relief, the cavalry had arrived. Allene and Denis (carrying a backboard) walked down the stairs, followed by Miguel, another fireman and good friend, and farther up the cliff behind them a paramedic named Joana, and Roger were making their way down. As Denis and Miguel stepped down onto the sand I said, “Be careful of those rocks. They’re really slippery.” At that exact moment, Miguel slipped and nearly went down but was able to catch himself.

On reaching me, Denis said, “Clay, Joana needs to check you out.”

“Okay,” I said. “But everyone needs to go around those rocks.” Allene, Whitney and Inga stood at the bottom of the stairs and helped Joana across the sand to where I was sitting.

Joana’s first question was, “Are you in any pain?”

“No. Not at the moment.”

“Did you hit your head when you fell?”

“No,”

She bent down and looked closely at both of my eyes. She straightened up and said, “Okay, I’m going to check your vital signs now,” as she slipped a blood pressure cuff on my arm. She pressurized the cuff and put her stethoscope below it to check my pulse. When she finished with that, she said, “Well, you’re in no pain, your eyes are not dilated, your blood pressure and pulse rate are normal. What exactly is your problem?”

Everyone laughed and I answered, “Well, I’m pretty sure my left leg or hip is broken.”

“Okay, then. I need to cut your jeans off so I can take a look at your leg.” She pulled some scissors from her bag, knelt down and zeroed in on the ankle area of my jeans.

“Whoa! Whoa!” I hollered. “You can’t do that. I’m not wearing any underwear. I’ve been going commando since 1968.”

Everyone laughed again, including Joana, this time much louder. Unfortunately, that was the last laugh I’d get out of this crowd.

Denis took charge and said, “Clay, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna stand you up, put the backboard behind you, lean you back slowly and lower you to the ground. Then we’ll strap you in, carry you up the stairs, put you in the ambulance and get you to the hospital.”

It sounded easy enough so I said, “Okay, let’s do this.”

Wrong!

Miguel got on one side of me, Denis on the other, and they started lifting me out of the chair. As my leg straightened out, the pain hit me so hard that I don’t have words to describe it. All I could do was just scream at the top of my lungs. Once they had me upright, the pain subsided somewhat but I realized I was starting to faint. Allene was directly in front of me and I screamed, “Allene! Hold on to me, I’m passing out, I’m passing out!”

She gently touched my arm and said, “I’m here, Clay, but Denis and Miguel have you and you’re not going to fall.” She told me later that my face had turned snow white and that Dustin had told her to squeeze his hand while I was screaming. She said she thought she might have broken his hand she was squeezing so hard. I never did pass out although I knew I was now going into shock.

Denis said, “Clay, we’re gonna have to lay you on this board to get you strapped down. I’m sorry it’s gonna hurt but we’ve got to get you out of here and to the hospital.” At that point Denis realized my wallet was still in my back pocket, slipped it out and handed it to Allene.

“Okay, I’m ready. You guys do what you need to do. I will scream when I need to but don’t stop. Just get me outta here.”

And did I scream! I screamed when they laid me down. When they put the straps over my legs. At every stair going up the cliff, and at every jostle getting to the ambulance which was in Roger’s driveway. I was so happy when I was secured in the ambulance because I was finally at rest and there was very little pain.

That was short-lived. The driver started the engine and slowly started driving but every bump had me screaming. Joana was riding next to me when we hit the first bump and I grabbed her hand and held on tightly. The touch of her hand somehow helped me manage the pain.

I had no idea who was driving the ambulance. Denis and Miguel had come from town following the ambulance in the Fire Department pickup truck. Denis said he would ride with Allene in our truck. Allene told Dennis she had to stop at our house first. Dustin and Inga followed them in their truck. Allene grabbed our passports, her purse, and then turned to Dustin and Inga who had said they would do whatever needed doing to help us out. Allene introduced them to our dogs, Whitey and Junior, showed them where the dog food was, gave them our house keys, told them to make themselves at home, thanked them gratefully and rushed out saying she would be in touch.

Allene and Denis caught up to the ambulance at the paved road to town. I say “paved” lightly, as the road is so bad there is hardly any pavement left. By this time it was starting to get dark and the ambulance was stopped with the back doors open. (Joana needed to start a drip in my arm and the road was too bumpy so she had asked them to stop.) Allene asked if she could ride in the ambulance too and Joana said, “Sure!” I imagine she was happy for the relief from my hand. Allene turned our truck keys over to Denis who said he would be following the ambulance in case of any trouble. Joana hung a bottle of solution on a hook from the ceiling of the ambulance as Allene climbed in.

“I hope that’s morphine,” I said.

“Nope,” Joana said. You won’t get pain medicine until you get to the hospital and the doctor questions you. This is just to keep you hydrated.”

That was extremely disappointing but at least now I had each of their hands to hold as I screamed through every hole we hit on the way to the hospital. To his credit, the driver went super slow and dodged the potholes as best he could, but that road is so bad it was still pure torture.

The 13-mile trip took close to an hour, because of the bad road. We reached the hospital with Denis parking in the lot beside the ER and he was at the back door of the ambulance as I was unloaded. I was wheeled into the ER where Dr. Ben Morales and a crew of orderlies and nurses were waiting for my arrival. They immediately began assessing my condition. Dr. Morales asked me and Allene how old I was (71), what medications I was taking (None), was I allergic to any medications (No), and did I have any health issues (No). After hearing the answers, one of the orderlies put a port in a vein on my arm and started a drip bag of medication. I didn’t bother to ask what it was because almost immediately my pain diminished substantially. Another orderly began cutting off my jeans. He had to destroy a fairly new pair of Wrangler 13 MWZs but there was no way around it. After he had them cut off, he handed over the contents of my front pockets (Swiss Army knife, loose change and a guitar pick) to Allene. A nurse inserted a catheter attached to a bag that would hold my urine and then draped a hospital gown over me. Dr. Morales said, “Clay, we’re going to take you to Radiology now to see what exactly is wrong. How are you feeling?”

“Much better. Thank you!”

As soon as I was wheeled out of sight, Allene got on her phone and texted her sister, Lynn. She wrote that she was in the ER with me and that I had slipped on a mossy rock at Wiley’s beach and might have a broken hip.

Lynn asked, “Are you are okay?”

Allene wrote, “Nervous.”

At that, Lynn called Jacy (her daughter and our niece), and told her what was going on. Jacy was at the Bocas Brewery where our friend Kurt Fargo was just walking up on the stage to play a good couple of hours of country music, when Jacy took the call. She discreetly stood up, left with no explanation and drove to Lynn’s house to get the latest information.

Meanwhile, Rosemary and Courtney arrived at the ER and Rosemary told Allene she was willing to go with us if I needed to take the water ambulance to Almirante. Allene told her she had texted Lynn and depending on the X-ray results we really needed Jacy with us because she was fluent in Spanish. Rosemary pulled out her phone and immediately dialed Jacy.

Jacy told her she had heard from Lynn already, that Lynn had bags packed for me (a sheet and blanket) and for Allene (a couple of changes of clothes), and they would be on their way to the hospital after stopping at her own house to pick up a few items. She told Rosemary she would be going with us anywhere we went for as long as she was needed. Rosemary told this to Allene who was totally relieved.

Uniformed attendants wheeled my gurney through the hospital to Radiology and parked me under a giant moveable metallic arm that hung just above me. The technician moved the arm so that it was facing over my left hip and then he disappeared from view. Lying on the gurney, I could only see straight up or a little to either side by turning my head. The arm was moved a couple of times more to the left and lower to get different angles on the injury. Then I was wheeled back to the emergency room to wait for the results.

Allene was waiting there, of course, and told me that Courtney and Rosemary were in the waiting room and would like to see me. I said, “For sure. Tell them to come on back.”

Courtney and Rosemary had brought bottles of water and Gatorade, and granola bars which would all come in handy as the night and days wore on. Soon Dr. Morales came in with the X-rays and everyone got quiet to listen to what he had to say. The news was not good. He said I had a complete fracture of the femur just below the hip joint. I immediately said, “I guess this means you’ll send me to Changuinola.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve already contacted an orthopedic surgeon at the Changuinola Hospital and told him what we found in the X-rays. He said you need to come right away so your leg can be put in traction overnight until surgery can be done tomorrow.” He left to go make arrangements for my transport via water ambulance from Isla Colon to the mainland town of Almirante.

I was being prepared by the Bocas hospital nurses for my journey to Changuinola, which would include being moved to a special gurney, when Jacy and Lynn arrived at the hospital. Courtney and Rosemary filled Jacy in on the doctor’s report and they all got on their phones and started calling friends in Panama City and David to get recommendations of hospitals and orthopedic surgeons. Some people who had been contacted started contacting others and soon they had a whole network of people gathering information for me. (This would go on for a few more hours during the night and then picked up again the next morning.)

Dr. Morales came back into the room and once again everyone quieted down.

“Okay,” he said. “All the arrangements are made. You will be taken by the ambulance to the hospital’s dock in town and then go by water ambulance to Almirante where another ambulance will meet you and drive you to the hospital in Changuinola.” He wished me luck and a speedy recovery and I thanked him and his staff for their excellent care.

Allene, who all this time, had been dressed in the same exercise clothes she was wearing while doing the stair-stepper when Whitney and Inga arrived, took out a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved shirt that Lynn had packed for her, quickly went to the ER bathroom, changed clothes and met us again in the ER.

We said our goodbyes to the ER doctor and attendants as they wheeled me out of the hospital and into the ambulance waiting at the emergency bay. Lynn stood at the ambulance door and wished me well. I told her, “I’m sorry to mess up your birthday plans!”

She seemed astonished that I had remembered her birthday was on the 18th, just a few hours away. She said, “Don’t worry about that, but thank you. We can celebrate when you get back. Love you!”

Allene and Jacy climbed in and sat on the bench beside my gurney and the doors were closed.

“Well,” Allene said, “Off we go on another adventure!”

That was the line we said to each other every time we strapped ourselves into a plane heading for anywhere. Or stood on a platform preparing to Zipline, or went whitewater rafting in flood-stage conditions, and so on. With this accident and all that was to come, we were definitely going off on another adventure.

It was a five-minute ride from the hospital to the dock on Saigon Bay. There was a small incident when they were loading my gurney onto the boat. For some reason the boat rocked right when they were lifting me over the gunnel and the gurney tilted over far enough that I had to grab the sides and hold on tightly to keep from rolling off into the drink. The attendants stepped back onto the dock and then on the second try they got me smoothly into position inside the boat. The boat driver fired up the big 4-stroke Suzuki motor and we eased out of the slip for the 30-minute ride to Almirante.

Although I couldn’t see anything while lying down in the boat, I could tell when we passed out of the small bay and into the open water because we immediately encountered waves due to the strong winds. The boat driver went as slowly as possible so as not to hurt me from the jarring. Even though I was medicated, I cried out in pain every time we hit a wave. After we got closer to the mainland, the ocean smoothed out and the driver opened it up and we made good time. The transfer from water ambulance to the dock was sketchy once again but once they had me secured in the waiting ambulance I thanked them all before they returned to the boat for their ride back to Bocas.

The road out of Almirante was bumpy and painful but as soon as we hit the highway, the 40-minute ride to Changuinola was smooth sailing. We were all happy when we finally arrived at the Emergency Room entrance of the Changuinola Hospital.

I was wheeled into ER and put in a curtained-off cubicle. There were no chairs so Allene and Jacy stood beside my bed. After a short wait, a well-dressed gentleman came in and introduced himself as the orthopedic surgeon. He explained that in a few minutes they would put my leg in traction to prevent the fracture from spreading apart during the night. He said the next morning they would prep me for surgery around 10 a.m. and then he would put a metal plate with five screws over the fracture and that I could go home the following day.

Something about that just didn’t sound right to me. Two orderlies then arrived with a cart full of the things they needed to put my leg in traction. The surgeon said a few words to the orderlies then bid us good night and said he would see us in the morning. The first thing the orderlies did was hook me up to a couple of drip bags of clear liquids which I assumed were to keep me hydrated and for pain. They finished securing my leg in about 20 minutes and then verified that I was okay before they left.

Finally having some privacy, Allene, Jacy and I started discussing my options. Jacy had already come up with a couple of names of surgeons from the networking that everyone was doing on my behalf. We realized how late it was and decided that Jacy and Allene should go get a hotel room and that we would take up the discussion in the morning.

After they left, I was alone with my thoughts and something again started nagging at my mind about what the surgeon had said but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I let it go for the moment and started thinking about the irony of the situation.

Back in February, my 93-year-old Dad was outside on the avocado farm (where he and Mom reside in Maui, Hawaii), chopping weeds with a pick-ax. He tripped and fell over a lava rock that was buried in the grass and broke his femur in the exact same place where I had just broken mine.

Allene and I had not been able to visit my folks for a year and a half because of the pandemic but were finally able to go this past August. Thankfully, my Dad was fully recovered from his broken leg and was working back out in his garden. Then, of all things, while we were there my mother tripped and fell on the corner of the stairs that led to the upstairs bedrooms while on her way to the laundry room. After a trip to the hospital it was discovered that she had fractured her pelvis in two places. Luckily she did not need surgery and was released from the hospital in three days, already able to walk with a walker. She is also fully recovered and back out helping my Dad in the garden.

So here I was in the Changuinola Hospital thinking, Good Lord, is this the year all the Blakers break their bones?

And right then it came to me. When we were at my folks’ place in August, I remember my Dad telling me his surgeon was one of the top orthopedic surgeons in Hawaii and that the guy had put two metal rods inside his femur. Recalling that, I realized it didn’t jibe with how the surgeon in Changuinola said he would fix my fracture. If nothing else, it made me want to investigate it further.

All things considered, I had a fairly restful night. I did remember being awakened a couple of times by nurses changing my drip bags and emptying my catheter bag but I went right back to sleep afterwards.

I was already awake when Allene and Jacy showed up around 8:30 the next morning, wearing the same clothes they had on yesterday. I made some kind of wisecrack like, “Morning, ladies! Y’all look very nice today.”

They didn’t bother to reply but they both did give me the stink-eye. Then they got down to business, checking all their messages from the night before and sending replies. While they were networking, a nurse brought me some scrambled eggs, toast and orange juice. I had very little appetite but I ate as much as I could. By then the activity started picking up in the emergency room and things were starting to get noisy. Jacy said she was going outside so she could hear better and Allene stayed with me. She informed me that from all the networking and research online from the night before and this morning they had come up with the names of supposedly the two best orthopedic surgeons in Panama. One of them worked exclusively at a big hospital in Panama City and the other split his time between Hospital Paitilla in PC and Hospital Chiriqui in David. When Jacy came back to the room, she said, “I’ve left messages at all the contact info for both of these surgeons so hopefully one or both will call us back.”

Shortly after, an orderly came in and said I could only have one visitor at a time, so Allene said she would go outside while Jacy filled me in.

“Jacy,” I said, “I’d prefer not to do the surgery here but I really don’t think I can handle another ride in an ambulance. The trip to David over the mountains is three or four hours and you know how bad that road is. If we have to go on to Panama City, that’s another six hours.”

“I know, Tio, but let’s not make a decision yet. Let’s wait and see if one of the surgeons gets back to us.”

“Okay, but remember the doctor here is coming at 10 a.m. to start prepping me for surgery, so if we’re not doing it here we have to let him know then. If we haven’t heard anything by then, I’m just gonna have it done here and get it over with.”

Ten minutes later, Allene came back in with a big smile on her face and said, “I got hold of Traci.” (I mentioned Traci earlier in this story as being a new neighbor from Texas who has already started a cacao farm at her nearby Drago property, though was still living in Dallas.) Allene continued, “We have some great news. I told her what happened and she immediately booked some flights and will be here to housesit and take care of the dogs for as long as we need her. She will arrive in Panama City tonight, stay at a hotel there and arrive in Bocas on the early Air Panama flight.”

Allene had to wipe the tears off of my face after telling us. In today’s world, it’s getting more and more difficult to find a friend whom you can depend on in any situation through thick or thin. Traci is one of those. Thank you, Traci!

Right then, Jacy’s phone pinged and she said one of the surgeons had just sent a message. She said she’d go outside so she could hear better and call him back. As Allene and I were making a list of things that needed immediate attention (notifying our medical insurance company, for one), the orthopedic surgeon from the night before came into the cubicle.

“Good morning!” he said. “How was your night and how are you feeling?”

“Good morning, to you, too. I’m feeling better today and actually got some sleep.”

He said, “I’m glad to hear that. I have scheduled the surgery for 1 p.m. so we have to start getting you prepared.”

“Well, we need to hang on a few minutes. I may not be having the surgery here,” I replied.

Instantaneously, his whole demeanor changed and I could easily see he was offended and disappointed. He told me his team was already preparing and that he had done hundreds of these surgeries and was a good surgeon. I felt bad and tried to backtrack a little by saying I wasn’t sure what we were doing until I heard back from my niece. He said he needed to know something soon and then abruptly left.

Jacy returned and said she had spoken to Dr. Heraclio Barria who was head of orthopedics and also president of Hospital Chiriqui in David. Of course, he wanted us to come to David to do the surgery with him. Jacy explained to him that I did not want to ride in another ambulance over the mountains. He told her to tell me that he would call an air ambulance in Panama City and tell them to pick him up in David and fly to Changuinola. Then he would come to the hospital, supervise the administration of pain medication, so I would be pain-free for the trip, and fly 25 minutes to David to a waiting ambulance for the 15-minute ride to the hospital.

“Wow,” I said to Jacy. “This guy’s really going all out. Did he say how much this is all going to cost?”

“No,” she replied. “But we need to make a decision now. It’s either do the surgery here, take an ambulance ride over the mountains, or fly on a plane.”

I thought it over for about two seconds and said, “Let’s take the plane. We’ll worry about the bills later.”

“Okay,” Jacy said. “I’m calling him now.”

She did, and from listening to her end of the conversation I understood what the plan would be, but she explained it all to me anyway after ending the call.

“Dr. Barria is making all the arrangements with the air ambulance company and also with the hospital here. He said they will be arriving at the Changuinola Airport around 1 p.m. He said for us all to relax and he would see us at the hospital.”

So that’s what we did. As we were passing the time with small talk, I asked Allene if she knew what happened to my phone. She said, “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you. I found it in the truck when I left with Denis to go to the house. And I brought your charger, too.”

“Alright, Allene! You are amazing! I knew there was some reason I married you!”

She whacked me on the arm before handing me the phone and then smiled as she gave me a kiss. I was so happy to be reconnected to the world. The first thing I did was send Whitney a message to see how the dogs were doing, how their stay at Wiley’s was going and also to let them know I was doing fine and getting ready to be airlifted to David for surgery on my femur. I also told her that Traci would be there the next day to watch our place and that she would come and get the dogs. I received a reply almost immediately saying that the dogs were happy and that she and the others were very much enjoying their stay at Wiley’s. She was ecstatic to have encountered lots of frogs. She wished me well and said she would stay in touch now that I was back online.

Around 1 p.m. Jacy received a message from Dr. Barria saying that they would not arrive in Changuinola until around 3 p.m. because of a weather delay. Shortly thereafter, the local surgeon came back to my cubicle and to my surprise was very cordial and had a whole new attitude. He said he had heard from Dr. Barria and was happy to accommodate us to get me ready for the airlift and to check me out of the hospital. He said in an hour or so, orderlies would come and take me to Anesthesiology to sedate me for the plane ride. In the meantime he would prepare the paperwork to check us out.

It felt good to know things were moving forward to a resolution and it made the minutes flow by faster. In no time, it seemed, the orderlies arrived and wheeled me a long way through the hospital. They put me in a fairly large room with a team of one female and three guys. The female introduced herself and said she was the anesthesiologist and the other guys were her assistants. She explained that they were going to make it where I would not feel one bit of pain on the trip to David. I thanked her and said I was very glad to hear that. They started a new drip bag of clear liquid in the port in my arm. Then one of the guys approached with a long syringe with a very long needle, lifted my hospital gown and started injecting medication directly into my thigh at the location of the fracture. Again and again, in the whole area. When he finished, I assumed they were done but I was wrong. Two of the guys helped me to a sitting position and the anesthesiologist inserted a needle into my lower spine and gave me an epidural. They let me lie still for what seemed like 20 minutes or so, I guess to make sure I had no bad reaction. Then they wheeled me back to my cubicle in the emergency room.

Soon some orderlies came and took my leg out of traction and the surgeon came with release forms that I had to sign. Allene went with him to the cashier’s office and paid our bill. He and Allene reappeared in my cubicle in a while and the surgeon informed the three of us that the plane was en route and would land shortly. I was wheeled outside and loaded into an ambulance with Jacy and Allene climbing in beside me. It was only a five-minute ride to the airport and as we were nearing the entrance, Jacy and Allene could see the hired plane landing. After it taxied to the small terminal, the ambulance drove out onto the tarmac and parked beside the plane. When they unloaded me from the ambulance I was surprised to see the Changuinola surgeon had also come to the airport in another vehicle. I guess he wanted to hand me off to Dr. Barria in person.

Dr. Barria and the pilot came over and introductions were made all around. Then the two doctors stepped aside and spoke to each other for a few minutes. I could see the two of them shaking hands and patting each other on their shoulders, and although I could not actually hear what they were saying, it seemed very amiable and respectful. Then the Changuinola surgeon walked over to me and wished me well and said goodbye. I thanked him for all he and his team had done. The ambulance driver and attendant helped Dr. Barria and the pilot transfer me from the gurney to a stretcher. It appeared to me that Dr. Barria was in his early 60s, very fit and strong. He also spoke good English.

The ambulance crew bid us goodbye and good luck and Dr. Barria and the pilot wrestled me into position inside the plane. It was a small, twin engine, six-seater with the rear two seats on the passenger side removed to accommodate my stretcher. Once they had me all strapped in, Dr. Barria hooked up a drip bag to the port in my arm and then everyone else started to board.

Jacy climbed up on a wing and sat in the copilot seat; Allene sat behind the pilot, in a seat facing toward the rear of the plane and was pretty much hemmed in by our carry-ons and the doctor’s emergency bag; Dr. Barria sat in the seat farther back, facing Allene and right beside me. We were ready to go.

Right then the pilot got a message over his headset saying the David Airport had just shut down because of a big thunderstorm in their area. There was nothing we could do but wait. The late afternoon sun was beaming down on us and there was very little breeze so even though the pilot opened all the doors again, the interior of the plane got quite warm. He then went into the terminal to watch the radar and get updates. Jacy exited her seat, too, and came to stand on the tarmac at the open passenger door. And then all of a sudden a wave of nausea hit me. I let Dr. Barria know and he said it was a common side effect of all the medication I was given earlier and probably brought on by the stuffiness inside the plane. He said he would go to the terminal to look for a bucket or some kind of container in case I needed it.

Before he returned, I hollered out, “I think I’m gonna puke!” Allene started scrambling around her seat and found a small blanket underneath it while Jacy jumped into the plane behind Dr. Barria’s seat, knelt on it and lifted my head while Allene thrust the blanket back to her. Jacy held my head upright with one arm and the blanket with the other and I let it rip. After I was done, I felt a little better and Jacy wadded up that blanket and dumped it into a trash can by the terminal. Dr. Barria came back in a few minutes with a plastic container. I told him he was too late but to keep it around in case I would need it later. (Fortunately, I wouldn’t.)

After spending an hour on the tarmac, we got word that the David airport had reopened and we all got seated and belted up again. The pilot went through his checklist, started the engines and we taxied out to the runway entrance. The Changuinola airport, not ever being very busy, gave us clearance right away for the takeoff and soon we were airborne.

As we climbed over the mountains of the continental divide, the pilot had to take a circuitous route to dodge all the big, black thunderheads that seemed to be everywhere. I had a nice view out my window and could see occasional flashes of lightning in the dark clouds. But the pilot knew what he was doing and soon we came out of the clouds into a clear sky just as the sun was setting and we descended into the beautiful Pacific coastal plains and landed smoothly at the David airport. The pilot taxied to a private terminal and pulled up beside a waiting ambulance.

I was unloaded from the plane and loaded into the ambulance, giving a quick “Goodbye and huge thanks!” to the pilot as Dr. Barria, Jacy and Allene climbed in with me for the ride to Chiriqui Hospital.

At the emergency entrance, I was wheeled in and taken to a room where they would prepare me for surgery. I had not felt one bit of pain since we left Changuinola Hospital. So, after two days of riding in seven ambulances, including one by water and one by air, I felt as if I had finally made it home. It was a great feeling of relief.

A nurse entered my room and gave me a COVID test. She said the results would be ready in about a half hour and if it was negative, they would begin the prep for my surgery. I was resting comfortably when several people entered the room and began a flurry of activity. The nurse who had administered the COVID test said it was negative and it was a “Go” for the surgery. Other attendants were attaching things left and right, up and down, and checking my vital signs.

Dr. Barria came in and said that he was getting his team and equipment organized and that he would begin the surgery around 9:30 p.m.

I asked, “About how long will the surgery take, Dr. Barria?”

“Between an hour and a half and two hours,” was his reply.

Because of the late hour, Allene and Jacy would not be allowed to visit me after the surgery so they decided to go look for a hotel. But Dr. Barria told them that if they wanted to see me in the morning they would have to show a negative COVID test result. He said there was a lab directly across the street from the hospital’s north entrance and the test results would be ready within 20 minutes. They kissed me good night and thanked the doctor once again. They told me the next day that after getting their tests done, with negative results, they flagged down a taxi and asked to be taken to the Gran Hotel Nacional, a very nice hotel only five blocks from the hospital. After checking in they immediately went to the hotel restaurant, ordered a bottle of wine which they split while sharing a large salad and huge serving of lasagna, and retired to their room, but wouldn’t sleep until Dr. Barria let them know how the surgery had gone.

Dr. Barria introduced me to the members of his team and although I can’t recall any of their names, they all were friendly and personable and reassured me that they would do their best and take good care of me during the surgery. I appreciated that very much. It gave me comfort and the confidence that this would go well. Apparently everyone was ready to begin when the anesthesiologist came to my side and said, “I’m going to give you the medication now to make you sleep and have nice dreams. I’ll see you when you wake up.”

I smiled and said, “Okay. I’m ready,” and rapidly drifted off to sleep. Then later, something really strange happened.

I woke up and quickly realized I was still in surgery. There was a big X-ray monitor to the left of my bed and I was able to see the main part of the operation in real time. I was totally clear-headed and mesmerized by what was happening. I could feel everything they were doing besides seeing it on the screen but I never felt one bit of pain. I watched them ream out the main shaft of the femur and also the short part of the bone that goes into the hole of the hip joint.

Then they inserted a rod that was threaded into the part of the bone going into the hip socket and screwed it in tight. Then a longer rod was inserted into the shaft which was not quite perpendicular to the short rod. The rods were then connected at the intersection point by a small screw, or bolt. A long screw was then inserted through a hole drilled through the bone shaft and rod at the midpoint of the rod.

Wow, fascinating stuff but I decided I had seen enough and let myself drift off back to sleep. When I awakened again, I was all tucked into a comfortable bed in a good-sized private room. The anesthesiologist and Dr. Barria were there. The anesthesiologist asked, “Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, and I had a lot of good dreams,” but chose not to mention that I had been awake during a good portion of the surgery. Dr. Barria said, “The surgery went very well, Clay. Sleep well and I’ll see you in the morning.”

They showed me the call button at the head of my bed and said if I needed anything during the night to just press the button. They bid me good night and waved as they walked out the door.

The next morning I felt something tugging on my foot. As I roused myself from a deep sleep and slowly opened my eyes, I was surprised to see a very attractive young woman with long, dark hair and big brown eyes, dressed entirely in white, standing at the foot of my bed. For a moment I thought I must still be asleep and having a wonderful dream.

“Good morning, Randall,” the vision said. I opened my eyes again, and the woman in white was still there.

“I’m Tamara,” she said and added a bright smile. “I’m a physical therapist and I’m here to help you start on your daily exercises.”

“Good morning,” I said politely. Then added, “Are you serious? I just had surgery last night.”

“Oh yes, I’m serious. This is how we do it now. We don’t let the patient lie around anymore. We’ve found that it’s much easier for the patient to recover faster if we get them up and moving right away.”

Well, I had heard that before, but Jeez, I didn’t think it would be this quick.

For the record, my full name is Randall Clay Blaker but I’ve always gone by my middle name. When Dr. Barria came to Changuinola I was introduced to him as Clay. When Allene checked me into the Chiriqui Hospital she gave them my passport so they could take down my information. So the whole time I was in the hospital, Dr. Barria, Allene and Jacy were the only ones who called me Clay. Everyone else called me Randall.

Tamara explained the exercises she would be helping me with. They were mainly leg lifts and knee presses. She put her hand under the heel of the foot on my bad leg and lifted it straight up about ten inches and back down for repetitions. Then we did ten more, with her raising my leg and then moving it sideways about a foot to the right, back to the center and down. Next, ten more of the same exercise but moving the raised leg to the left, back to the center and down. For the following exercise, she put a small rubber ball under my knee and made me press down as hard as I could for three seconds. She had me do ten of those. Even though she was doing most of the work, she could easily tell that I was already spent.

“Excellent work, Randall. It’s been a pleasure to assist you today,”

“Oh no, the pleasure is all mine,” I assured her.

“After lunch there will be another therapist coming to see you with Dr. Barria,” she informed me, “and they will bring you a walker and show you how to use it.”

“Well, I hope the other therapist is as lovely as you,” I said, giving her my best smile.

“Oh, he is!” she said, and was laughing as she left the room.

Shortly afterwards, another woman in hospital scrubs came in with a clipboard, introduced herself as a dietary aide and said she would take my order for breakfast and lunch. I was taken aback. My limited experience in hospitals was that you ate whatever they brought you. I asked for the menu and saw it was fairly diverse with many choices. I didn’t have much of an appetite but I ordered scrambled eggs, a mixed fruit plate and orange juice. For lunch I picked a bowl of chicken sancocho. It’s a special soup that is officially known as the National Dish of Panama. No matter where you are in Panama, whether at a street cart, a sidewalk café, or a fancy restaurant, it’s always good and wonderfully filling. And the one I was served for lunch that day did not let me down.

It was still very early in the morning but there was a knock on the door and Allene and Jacy rushed in. I was so happy to see them but figured they would be sleeping in on account of the long two days they had just been through. We gave hugs all around and they showed me their negative COVID tests but said not a single person asked to see them from the time they entered the hospital until they reached my room. I guess the staff just knew we would do the right thing.

I told them about my surgery, and how I even watched it on the big monitor and they were horrified. I also told them about the physical therapist who had come in earlier, like an angel visiting from heaven until she started making me do exercises, and Allene made a point that she would arrive earlier from then on.

They told me about their night, and about how wonderful it was to get showers but they had changed into their same traveling clothes so needed to spend the morning doing some shopping. They made a list of things I needed for the hospital room. A box of Kleenex, a roll of paper towels, etc.

My breakfast arrived and Allene and Jacy said they were going on a quick shopping trip, would change clothes and should be back before Dr. Barria and the other physical therapist showed up.

A little later, Dr. Barria came into my room with a young Latino whom I knew my wife would consider quite handsome. He was carrying a walker and introduced himself as Tomas, adding, “I’ll be the main therapist working with you from now on, Randall.”

“What happened to Tamara?” I asked, and he laughed. “She’s around but working with some other patients. You’ll see her again, don’t worry.”

Dr. Barria asked me how I was doing.

“Fine,” I said, “May I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” he said, “ask me anything you want.”

“Did you know I was awake during the surgery?”

“Yes, I knew you were awake.”

He said nothing more about it, so I left it at that.

Then he said, “I want you to do something for me. Lift your good leg as high as you can.”

I lifted my right leg up until it was perpendicular to my body.

He nodded, and said, “Now lift your other leg as high as you can.”

I tried to lift it but the leg would not budge. I strained as hard as I could for several seconds but it would not move even a millimeter off the bed.

What the hell? I was stunned. I’d broken my femur but it had been repaired. I wasn’t wearing a cast to weigh it down, so I figured I should be able to lift my leg at least a little bit. I tried again but my leg did not respond.

Dr. Barria could tell I was disheartened and upset. With a reassuring manner, he said, “Clay, don’t be alarmed. This is totally normal for an injury such as yours. The bad news is, that when you fell on the rock, not only did you break your bone, but the blow also traumatized the muscle tissue, tendons, ligaments and nerves.” (This was verified two days later when the whole back of my thigh turned dark purple and black.)

He continued, “You will have to teach all of those body parts to work together again in order to get your leg to do what you need or want it to do. The good news is that Tomas will show you exactly what to do to make that happen. If you do what he says, you will surf again. So here’s some incentive. When you can lift your leg a foot off the bed, I’ll discharge you from the hospital. Okay, I’m going to leave you two. Good luck, Clay, and I’ll see you soon.”

Allene and Jacy knocked on the door and entered the room while Tomas was showing me how to use the walker. I told them they looked very nice in their new clothes and introduced them to Tomas. Tomas had me walk around the room a bit until he was sure I was doing it right and then we did a short walk in the hospital hallway. I couldn’t believe how tired I was when I got back to the room.

I was in really good shape before the accident, doing my daily morning workout, surfing almost every day and taking long walks with the dogs in the evenings. It was hard for me to believe that the injury had knocked me back so far. Tomas encouraged me though, and said I did great. He said he’d see me in the morning and left the room.

A nurse came in and re-hooked me up to the drip bags of medication. I asked her what was in the various drips. She said one was for pain, one was an anti-inflammatory, one an antibiotic and another to prevent blood clots. During my whole hospital stay, my meds were only stopped when I was walking with the walker.

Allene and Jacy hung out with me for a while but soon said they were very tired and wanted to get back to the hotel. They had stayed up waiting for word from Dr. Barria as to how the surgery had gone. He texted a report after midnight that all was well and I was in my private room. Knowing that, they had fallen almost instantly asleep. But they had awoken early in order to get to the hospital even before visitors were allowed. The events from the previous 50-something hours had taken a toll, and it was obvious they needed about as much rest as I did. They kissed me goodbye and said they would be back in the early evening.

This was my first extended period of being alone in the room. Unfortunately, I got a bad case of the blues. Loneliness and despair set in. I started to feel like a down-and-out character in an old Lightnin’ Hopkins song as I was slowly sinking into the rabbit hole. Anger came next. Why did this have to happen to me? Is God punishing me for my transgressions? Is this some kind of karmic payback for a wrongdoing? 

All these thoughts were going around and around in my brain like a broken record. Then doubt came waltzing in. At my age will I be able to fully recover from this? Will I be able to walk normally again? Will I be able to surf?

When Allene and Jacy came back in the evening, I tried my best to conceal my feelings from them. They could sense that something was wrong but I think they thought I was just fatigued. They left fairly early so I could get some sleep. That didn’t help. I still had a rough night. Bad dreams and malignant thoughts.

I didn’t feel like eating much at breakfast. Allene and Jacy showed up right about the same time Tomas did. Everyone was in a good mood except me. Tomas brought a small black box with him that he said was an electric stimulator to treat the nerves in my upper leg. He pasted some electrodes to my skin and turned a dial until my leg muscles started twitching and jumping. He kept it on there for about 15 minutes and it did make my leg feel better. Then we began the exercises with his hand under my heel doing the lifting, like Tamara had done the day before. I didn’t show a lot of enthusiasm and mainly was just going through the motions. But Tomas the whole time did his work with confidence and encouragement and I could easily tell he enjoyed his job. As we went through each exercise he was also teaching Allene and Jacy how to do the therapy so they could take turns doing it with me at various times during the day. The rest of the day was uneventful and like yesterday, everyone just thought I was tired out. When Jacy and Allene tried to get me to walk with the walker I told them I just didn’t have the energy.

That night as I was lying in the bed, wallowing in self-pity and misery, I realized in a moment of clarity that I needed to pull my head out of my ass. It was suddenly obvious that if I was gonna get through this and make it back to being the ol’ Clay, I had to get back in the game. At that moment I felt a big weight lift off my shoulders and a pleasant feeling of contentment come over me. It was like having the warm sun breaking through the clouds after a long, cold rain. And right then I knew I was going to be okay. I drifted off into a night of peaceful sleep and sweet dreams.

The next morning I was like a new man. When the two nurses came in early to give me a sponge bath and change the linens, they could tell right off that I had a different attitude and they engaged me in conversation. The day before I was so quiet and subdued that they hardly spoke to me at all. Today, I could tell that they were pleasantly surprised when I spoke to them in Spanish. (Tomas and Dr. Barria both spoke good English so that’s what we mainly used in conversation. But with Tamara, the nurses, orderlies and other hospital personnel I spoke only Spanish.) As we were talking, the younger nurse said, “You have a good body for someone as old as you.” I laughed at the back-handed compliment but I knew she meant well so I thanked her.

A couple of other morning tasks the nurses did was change my diaper and empty the catheter bag. I was going to omit these embarrassing details but for the sake of honesty, I decided to disclose it all. I was self-conscious wearing the diaper but I guess it was good preparation for if I live long enough to make it to a nursing home. I came to love these two nurses. Their tender care every morning was so considerate and compassionate that it not only lifted my spirits for the day but also helped this old cynic to restore some faith in the true goodness of people. That, in itself, made the whole hospital stay worth it.

Allene and Jacy showed up while I was having breakfast and Tomas came shortly thereafter.

“Good morning, Randall,” he said. “How are you today?”

“Actually, I’m much better, Tomas. From now on I want you to push me as hard as you can. I want to do whatever it takes to get better faster.”

“Those are the words I’ve been waiting to hear, Randall. Let’s get to work.”

From that day forward, I improved a little every day, with the exercises getting easier and my being able to walk with the walker a little further.

That afternoon, Jacy received a message from our mutual friends Wade and Margaux who also live in Bocas del Toro. They said they had to come to David the next day with their son Louie and did we need them to bring anything to us. Jacy responded with YES, we did need a few things and would get back to them with more information later in the day.

This was great news. Allene contacted Traci, who was watching our house and dogs, and gave her a list of things to gather up and put in a small carry-on. The list included our laptop, U.S. and Panama checkbooks, Kindles, chargers, and a few clothing items. Our neighbor Roger, who had been planning to go to town the next day anyway (or so he said) picked up the bag from Traci and met Wade, Margaux and Louie at Taxi 25, the water taxi station that they would be departing from on the first leg of their trip to David. Lynn had also connected with them and handed over a few items to bring to Jacy. That night Allene and Jacy met Wade, Margaux and Louie at a nice Italian restaurant, enjoyed a good meal and visit and received our care packages. Thank you, Traci, Roger, Wade, Margaux and Louie!

I was excited to get the laptop. Now I could get on YouTube and watch Naked Yoga videos on the big screen. The cell phone just doesn’t cut it.

Just kidding. Actually, I wanted the laptop because it was so much easier to delve into all the research I wanted to do about healing broken bones. I did find out a few important things.

One was diet. Every single article and piece of research I read pretty much said the same thing about what you should eat: fresh fruits and vegetables, lean meat, beans and lentils, dairy (especially whole milk, yogurt and good cheese), fish, eggs, whole grain rice, cereals, breads and pastas, and lots and lots of water. Fortunately, this is very close to the way we eat already.

Another thing that every article was emphatic about was to quit drinking alcohol and to stop smoking while the bone is healing. So I decided right away to give up cigarettes and booze. Just kidding again, about the cigarettes. I’ve never smoked them in my whole life. Well … there was that one time when my cousin Bubba and I stole a pack of cigarettes from our grandmother, Granny Blaker, went out behind her garage and started chain-smoking them. After about the third one, I suddenly got sick as a dog and puked my guts out. I’ve never touched a cigarette since.

The alcohol is another story.  Allene and I love to have a nice wine with our evening meal and every Sunday at 5 p.m., Allene fixes herself a margarita and I make a Bloody Mary or have a single malt Scotch. I also enjoy a cold beer sometimes after surfing. But I haven’t had a drop of alcohol since the day before I broke my leg. And I’m not going to have any until my leg totally heals up. After that, who knows? I’ll make that decision when the time comes.

On my fifth day in the hospital I had two milestones. One was that I had my first bowel movement since the accident. (Honesty again.) And not in the diaper either. (Thank God!) From doing the exercises and walking with the walker I could move my leg just enough to be able to sit on the raised chair that was placed over the toilet. What a relief!

The second thing was that I was able to lift my leg up unassisted about a foot up off the bed. Tomas was in the room with me and he was just as excited as I was. He said, “Let me get a photo with my phone and send it to Dr. Barria. I succeeded in lifting it one more time and he took a photo and immediately forwarded it Dr. Barria who wrote right back and said, “That’s great but I’m in Panama City. I had to come here to do an emergency surgery and won’t be back for two days. Tell Clay I’ll check him out of the hospital then.”

It was disappointing, but no worries. At this point I felt I could deal with just about anything.

Later on, Allene, Jacy and I decided we should celebrate the milestones with some take-out food. They let me choose and I said I wanted barbecued baby back ribs, French fries and cole slaw from TGIF. Jacy placed orders for the three of us through her cell phone and she and Allene went to the restaurant to have one margarita before bringing our dinners back to my room. They showed back up with the food and had snuck in a bottle of wine. They offered me some but my will was strong and I turned it down. But I sure tore into those ribs. They weren’t quite as good as how I make them but after getting a little burnt out on the menu at the hospital, they tasted pretty durn good.

I thought the next two days would go by slowly but it was just the opposite. Tomas came and we did a full session of therapy and later I did two more sessions with Jacy and Allene taking turns helping me. We decided that we should celebrate again that night in honor of my being released from the hospital the next day. As you can tell, in our family we don’t really need much of an excuse to have a celebration. We’ve always been able to throw down on a party at a moment’s notice. I guess that was from being in the music business for thirty years. We all agreed that tonight we should include the nurses. Jacy got on her phone to Domino’s Pizza and ordered four large combinations and several liters of Coca-Cola. She asked them to deliver it to the front of the hospital and when she went down to wait for it, Allene went to a nearby store and bought some wine. When Jacy returned with the food and drinks, she left one pizza in my room and took the other boxes and all the soda bottles down the hall to the nurses’ station. She came back with tears in her eyes and said the nurses were blown away by our generosity. One or two at a time, they came to my room and thanked us and visited for a few minutes. We thanked them for taking such good care of me and when the last nurse had left, we three felt that we were leaving the hospital on a really good note.

The next day my two adorable nurses did their morning routine with me for the last time and then we sadly said our goodbyes. They already knew that I would be leaving that day and they wished me all the best. I would be so fortunate to have a duo such as them to attend to me if I’m ever hospitalized again.

After breakfast, Tomas came in and did an hour’s worth of therapy with me. He gave me directions to the therapy center in the new wing of the hospital and congratulated me for my release from the hospital. As he was leaving he said, “Okay, Randall, I’ll see you tomorrow at 8 o’clock sharp. Be ready for some hard work.” I gave him a thumbs up.

Another nurse came in after that and told me, “They’re checking you out of the hospital today, Randall, so I will take your catheter out now. However, they will not let you leave until you are able to urinate on your own.”

She left the room for a minute and came back with a small plastic urinal and set it on my bedside table. She said, “You have to go in this so I can see it, so don’t use the toilet. When you are able to go, push the call button and I will return.”

“Okay, no problem,” I replied, hesitantly. I wasn’t too confident that I could pee on demand after having the catheter in for so long. I admit it gave me some anxiety as I sure didn’t want to screw up my discharge from the hospital.

When Allene and Jacy showed up, I asked Allene to go to the cafeteria and get me at least three bottles of water. I was determined not to let this matter get the best of me. When she returned I started guzzling. Sure enough, in about 45 minutes I started feeling an urge.

I asked Jacy to step out of the room for a minute and then I grabbed the urinal and peed into it. I hit the call button and told Allene to tell Jacy she could come back in. The nurse arrived shortly afterwards and I handed her the urinal with a big smile.

“Very good, Randall. I’ll let Dr. Barria know so he can start processing you out.”

The day before, Allene had reserved the handicapped room that they had at the Gran Hotel Nacional. She said it was a nice, large room with a queen-sized bed, raised toilet seat, shower chair, and easy access. The hotel had a very good restaurant specializing in Italian cuisine so we decided to skip lunch at the hospital and wait until we got to the hotel so we could eat something from the restaurant.

Well … lunchtime came and went, and still no Dr. Barria. Finally a lady came in and explained that she was an anesthesiologist and would disconnect me from the medications and remove the three ports from my body. That didn’t take long and she assured us that Dr. Barria would be along soon. He came to my room around 2 p.m. and asked, “Who will be responsible for paying the bills and signing all the discharge papers?”

“That would be me,” Allene said, “but I need to bring Jacy with me because I can’t hear that well and practically can’t hear at all with everyone wearing masks.”

“Okay, no problem. Let’s get started.”

Allene and I have medical insurance coverage here in Panama and fortunately our provider has an office in the Chiriqui Hospital. That was a big factor in making the discharge process go fairly quickly.

Dr. Barria took Allene and Jacy, along with all the hospital invoices, to the insurance office and found out exactly what all was covered. That took about 20 minutes and then it was deducted from the invoices.

While they were waiting on the paperwork, Jacy called a taxi company to find a 4-door pickup to take us from the hospital to the hotel. Dr. Barria recommended that we use one of these because the truck cabs were high and roomy and would make it easier for me to get in and out.

After finishing with the insurance, Dr. Barria led them to the cashier’s office where Allene paid the balance of our bill. After giving them all our cash, a bank check, maxing out two credit cards and handing over our first born child, the cashier gave Allene a receipt that said, “Paid In Full.”

They all came back to the room and Dr. Barria told me we were free to go. He then handed over a bag containing the medications I would need to take for a few more days, with all the instructions included.

Allene and Jacy gathered up all our things and I stood up and took hold of the walker.

“Wait, Clay,” Dr. Barria said. “They are bringing you a wheelchair. Sorry, but it is hospital policy.”

An orderly came with the chair and as he wheeled me into the hall, several nurses and a couple of orderlies walked down from the nurse’s station to tell me goodbye and wish me well. We thanked them all profusely and waved our own goodbyes as I was wheeled down the hall.

The taxi was in front of the hospital when we exited and I had no problem transitioning from the wheelchair to the front passenger seat. Dr. Barria told us goodbye and said he would see us tomorrow at the therapy center.

Jacy called the hotel to let them know we were on the way. The taxi pulled into the circular drive and parked directly in front of the hotel lobby entrance. An attendant came out carrying a small wooden ramp and placed it over the curb, pulled a wheelchair out from behind the lobby door and wheeled it down to the taxi’s passenger door. I was able to slide right out of the seat and into the wheelchair. The attendant rolled me up the ramp into the lobby and then down the hall to our room. Jacy paid the driver and made arrangements for him to pick me up at 7:45 the next morning to take me to the therapy center.

She and Allene followed us to the room with my walker and our other gear. Then Jacy said she wanted to go to her room and rest for a while.

I loved the spaciousness of the room but in looking around I saw a way to move some things to make it easier for me to maneuver the walker and to make it more accommodating for both of us. Allene went to the front desk and asked them if this could be arranged and a desk person said, “Sure, no problem.” They sent a houseman and a maid to our room immediately.

The two were friendly and nice as could be. They moved the bed and two end tables to a different configuration and it made a big difference. Then they brought us more pillows and said if we needed anything else to just let them know. Allene and I thanked them and of course tipped them well. Throughout our stay there, all the hotel personnel were super amiable and went out of their way to see that we had everything we needed or wanted.

In spite of the wonderful care I received at the hospital, it was a nice change to be at Gran Hotel Nacional. It’s one of the finer hotels in David and also one of the oldest, built in a neo-colonial style. As I mentioned before, it has a great restaurant and in the center of the property is a large courtyard with a good-sized pool. The courtyard is surrounded by tropical foliage and flowers and a huge old mango tree providing shade. There are picnic tables and chairs under the shade and lawn chairs around the pool. For the next week, after returning from therapy, Allene and I would walk out to the pool area and hang out for a while. She would get in the pool to swim and exercise and I would lie back in a lawn chair and soak up some rays. I wanted to maintain as much of my surfer tan as possible so I wouldn’t get fried whenever I was able to get back out in the waves. I was trying to be as optimistic as possible.

We had a menu from the restaurant in our room so we would order all our meals and have them delivered. COVID was still very much alive and well in Panama so we were practicing all the safety protocols. But before we ordered dinner that evening I told Allene I desperately wanted to take a shower.

The sponge baths with the nurses had been fun but I was ready for a real shower. In the bathroom I discovered that the mirror over the sink hung low enough that I could sit on the shower chair in front of the sink and shave properly. I had started shaving in the hospital after my third day there. I asked Allene to buy a hand mirror, small can of shaving cream, a disposable razor and a plastic bowl when she and Jacy went shopping. While shaving, I would have to raise the head of the bed to the most vertical position, move the tray table over the bed, then Allene would get a bowl of hot water from the bathroom sink and set it on the tray table. She would hold the hand mirror for me while I shaved. It wasn’t ideal but it was doable and more importantly, any return to normal activity was a big boost to my morale.

So, after a proper shave in the hotel, Allene moved the high shower seat into the shower stall and I sat down under the running water. It was glorious. I sat there for at least 20 minutes, reveling in the warm water cascading over my body before finally reaching for the bottle of shampoo. Oh man, I can’t explain how great that shower felt, and another morale boost for sure!

That night for dinner we each ordered a different Italian entrée, a large mixed salad and garlic bread. We all three shared the food and of course the ladies had wine. I drank milk. Gotta have that calcium.

After we finished the wonderful meal, Jacy told us that she needed to get back to Bocas the next day and get caught up on all the work she had missed and to see her two sons who had been alternately staying with their dad or Grandmom (Lynn) the whole week. Allene and I were sad to hear this news but all of us knew it was the right decision. It had been a long day and we had to get up early to get ready for my first session at the therapy center, so we all hugged, said our good nights and Jacy went to her room.

We woke at 6:00 and began our morning rituals. At 7:00, the restaurant opened so Allene ordered our breakfast. We both kept it simple so we would get it quickly. Each of us ordered yogurt and a mixed fruit plate but I added two boiled eggs and a glass of milk to mine. By the time we finished eating and brushed our teeth, Jacy called and said the taxi would be there in five minutes. We met in the hallway and walked to the lobby to find one of the housemen waiting with a wheelchair by the entrance, with the ramp already in place. I sat in the wheelchair, was rolled down the ramp to the taxi’s front passenger door, stood up and sat in the truck seat as Jacy put my walker into the truck bed. We made it to the therapy center about five minutes before 8:00 and sat down in some chairs in the reception area. A door opened to our left and Tomas came out and greeted us. He asked me to come on back to the workout area, telling Allene and Jacy we would be finished in about an hour. Upon entering the large modern facility I was impressed at all the exercise machines and other equipment that was on hand. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that Tamara was there.

“Good morning, Randall,” she said. “Nice to see you again.”

“Well, the pleasure is all mine, Tamara. How are you?”

“Fine, thank you. How has Tomas been doing with your therapy?”

“Not nearly as good as you,” I said, with a straight face. Then we all burst out laughing.

“Okay,” Tomas said. “Enough of this. Let’s get down to business, Randall.”

He took me over to a therapy bed and asked me to lie down. He wheeled a space-aged looking machine over and told me it was the Pro version of the small battery operated electric stimulator that he had used on me in my hospital room. He said I needed to take my shorts off. I had anticipated this happening so I’d told Allene when she and Jacy were going shopping a couple of days ago to buy me a few pair of underwear. What she bought were not boxers, nor were they briefs. They were tight but had legs that went down to mid-thigh. Jacy said they were the modern style and I took her word for it. So for the first time in 53 years I was wearing underwear and had no problem whatsoever dropping my shorts in front of God and everybody. Tomas did have to push the leg of them up to my hip in order to attach the electrodes to bare skin but all of my vital parts remained covered.

After the electroshock therapy, Tomas put a heat pack on the area and after that an ice pack. Then he had me sit on a chair and pedal a small stationary bike. It was extremely painful at first but after a while it felt good. I had to pedal in reverse for a while also. Then he had me hold a parallel bar that was waist-high and do several sets of leg lifts to the front, back and side. Tomas said we were done for the day.

This workout doesn’t sound like much as I’m describing it here, but I can tell you for sure that it kicked my ass. I loved every minute of it though, and was happy that Tomas was pushing me. We walked back out to the waiting room and the receptionist gave us the invoice. Tomas said, “Your appointment tomorrow is at 9 a.m. Is that okay?”

“Yes, that’s better for me.”

“Okay, good, see you tomorrow,” and Tomas walked back through the therapy door. Jacy called the taxi while Allene paid the bill. Our driver arrived promptly and we went back to the hotel.

Jacy had packed most of her things that morning so she didn’t have much more to do before hitting the road. After getting everything together and leaving her room, she came to ours and said she had plenty of room in her suitcase for anything we needed taken back to Bocas. She packed in the blankets that our neighbor Roger had given us, which had been very much needed on the many ambulance rides and at the Changuinola hospital.

She had called a taxi and arranged a driver to take her back over the mountains to Chiriqui Grande, the first town you come to when you get to the Caribbean. One of the water taxi companies in Bocas town has a direct service now between Bocas town and Chiriqui Grande. It saves a lot of time, not having to go on to Almirante sitting in a vehicle going up and down the hills, with high vehicular traffic and the entire passage only being two-lane. Plus, in my opinion, it’s always nicer being on the water. Her phone beeped to announce her taxi’s arrival so she gave me a hug and kissed me goodbye. Allene walked her to the hotel foyer to see her off.

Jacy was indispensable throughout the first week of my ordeal and there is no contemplating how things could or would have turned out had she not had been there with us. Our debt to her is far-reaching and our gratitude can’t be measured. Thank you, Jacy! We love you so much.

Allene returned to the room and we decided to go to the pool where she swam and I soaked in the warmth of the sun. Getting back to the room, we ordered lunch and rested a bit before Allene helped me with a session of therapy exercises. She also had to keep me straight on all the medications I had to take at all three mealtimes. I still had to take antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, anti-blood clot and pain meds, but now everything was in the form of pills.

For dinner that night, I ordered grilled filet of beef, sautéed mix vegetables and a salad, and Allene got lasagna. This would pretty much be our daily routine until Dr. Barria gave us the okay to return to our home in Bocas del Toro.

The next day at the therapy center I asked Tomas to lay out a plan for me to follow while we were staying at the hotel and also for when I got back home. So, after we finished that day’s session we sat down and he explained what I needed to do. He said I should do a minimum of two sessions of exercises a day, the one at the therapy center and at least one more in the hotel. He said if I felt like doing 3 or 4 sessions a day, that would be even better. He also said to take rest periods between sessions, emphasizing that the rest periods were equally as important as the exercise sessions. Also, he said to stay mobile, walk with the walker as much as I could, try to stick to a healthy diet and drink lots and lots of water. I thanked him and he walked me out to the receptionist and set up my appointment for 10:00 the next morning.

The following days seemed to fly by, with mornings at the therapy center, and my afternoon routine sessions at the hotel, with Allene helping me with all the exercises.

There were three therapists working at the therapy center when I was there: Tomas, Tamara, and another guy whom I met but whose name I can’t recall. Tomas and Tamara seemed to be close friends and several times she would come and talk to Tomas and me if she wasn’t with a patient. I found out that she did speak a little English when Tomas coaxed it out of her one day. She said she was learning the language but was shy because she thought she spoke it so poorly. Tomas and I both encouraged her and told her she should practice whenever she had the chance. After that, I mostly spoke to her in English but she mostly answered in Spanish while smiling or laughing at her shyness.

Dr. Barria would make an appearance now and then to check on my progress. He said that when he and Tomas could affirm I had gotten strong enough, he would recommend that I go home. I was working hard and was hopeful it would be soon.

After my fifth day at the center, Tomas, Tamara and I were talking about my progress after the session was over. They both thought I was doing very well. Then Tomas told us that he would be busy the next morning and could Tamara do my session with me tomorrow. She said she would be glad to and Tomas said there was one requirement. We had to speak only English the whole time.

“No problem,” I said. “Is that okay with you, Tamara?”

“Si,” she answered, and Tomas and I both laughed and shook our heads.

The next day, when she came to greet me in the reception area, she told me to come on back but she said it in Spanish. As we entered the therapy room I said to her, “We are supposed to be speaking in English, Tamara.”

“I know, Randall,” she said in Spanish. “But I am so embarrassed at making mistakes.”

After saying this demurely with those big brown eyes I quickly acquiesced. “Okay, we can speak Spanish.”

She was a good therapist regardless of her English skills and pushed me as hard as, or harder than, Tomas did. It was a fun session and passed very quickly while we talked about music, surfing, her family (she was married and had one child), and my family. When Allene and I got back to the hotel we headed for the pool. That evening we had a savory Italian meal. Another good day.

The next day was my seventh in the therapy center. At one point during the workout, Tomas pulled out his phone and asked me to lift my leg up as high as I could so he could take a photo. I was able to get it up almost three feet off of the bed. He sent the photo to Dr. Barria and in a few minutes the good doctor came to the therapy center. He and Tomas conferred for a few minutes and then Dr. Barria said, “Clay, we both agree that you have progressed far enough with your therapy that you are able to go home. You can continue with your therapy there and when I need to see new X-rays of the healing process, you can get those done at the Bocas hospital and send me the X-rays.”

“That sounds great to me. However, I have a lot of trepidation about how to get back to Bocas. I sure don’t want to ride in a bus or taxi for four hours to Almirante and there’s no way I can get in and out of the water taxis to Bocas. And of course there is no direct flight to Bocas from here either.”

Dr. Barria said, “That’s no problem, Clay. I can fly you back to Bocas tomorrow in my private plane, I’ll message you later and tell you when we will pick you up at your hotel in the morning.”

“Well, thank you, Dr. Barria! I think that definitely solves the problem,” and we laughed. That evening at the hotel I received a message from Dr. Barria saying that something had come up and he would not be able to come with us tomorrow. He said his pilot, Captain Aparicio would pick us up at the hotel at 8:45 in the morning in a black Jeep SUV. I thanked him and told Allene the plan.

We awoke early the next morning, ordered and ate breakfast in our room and then Allene went to the front desk to pay our bill. She earlier had contacted our beautiful friend Lola Braxton, the sister of Toby Braxton, of Servicios Toby, the two of whom are the excellent personal shoppers who manage somehow to make all things possible with their delivery service to Bocas. Allene met Lola at the hotel entrance and gave her a large bag of things that would not fit on the small plane and yet needed to get back to Bocas.  Thank you, Lola and Toby for always being there!

Allene returned to the room with the hotel bellman who got all our gear together (we had been told to limit our gear to about 50 pounds for the private plane and we kept it to closer to 25). When we got to the hotel entrance, the pilot was waiting for us. We could tell it must be him because he was young and wearing a dark-blue uniform. I thought the uniform was a good sign that he was serious about being a pilot.

After introductions and loading our gear, we made the short drive to the airport and a guard unlocked the gate which led us into the area of private hangars. We had to wait just inside the entrance until an official aviation vehicle arrived a few minutes later. A uniformed woman stepped out of the vehicle and our driver/pilot stepped out of his own car, greeted the officer by name, stood with his arms out to his sides and his legs spread while she waved an instrument over him, front and back. She then asked him to take his carry-on out of the vehicle and she checked it over with the wand and passed us on through. We were impressed with the security.

We parked in front of Dr. Barria’s personal hangar and Captain Aparicio told us to wait while he unlocked the door and turned off the security system. When he returned to his car, Allene had my walker ready and the two of them assisted me into the building where he had placed a comfortable office chair near the plane that I could sit in while waiting to board.

I was alarmed when I saw the small size of the single-engine plane. I looked over at Allene and said, “How in hell am I going to get in that plane? There’s no possible way!”

Captain Aparicio heard me and calmly walked back to my chair and said, “Clay, we do this all the time. When I tell you how to get in the plane you will be able to do it easily. Don’t worry.”

His easy-going manner and self-assuredness made me believe him and I relaxed and went with the flow.

He removed the chocks from the wheels and attached a yoke to the front of the plane. He asked Allene if she could help push the plane out of the hangar while he pulled from the front. She got behind the right wing and when he gave the word, she started pushing and the two of them got the plane out of the hangar and onto the dirt driveway that led to the runway.

For some reason this struck me as being funny and I started laughing my head off. And then I frowned as I realized what an idiot I was to not get a photo of that. It would’ve been classic.

The captain removed the yoke and set it in the hangar, then opened the doors to the plane.

“Okay, Clay, come over here and let me show you how to get inside.”

I walked over with my walker to the left side of the plane and he told me to turn around and sit on the back of the left wing. He pointed out a strut and said that was a step.

“Put your arms behind you on the wing, put your good leg on the step and push your way up onto the wing. Then keep pushing backwards until your butt is even with the door.”

I did as he said and when I was sitting beside the pilot’s door, he told me to rotate my body, put my arms on the seat and lift my body through the door and into the back seat. I got that part done and as he was telling me to slide my legs in and lower them to the floor I was already doing it. It actually turned out to be a piece of cake.

I thought the plane was very impressive. It was sleek and modern-looking, the exterior having a metallic oceanic blue color with a metallic gray racing stipe down the side. The interior was basic black with four very comfortable upholstered seats and the console was totally digitalized and state-of-the-art.

Captain Aparicio went through his preflight checks, then started the engine and did more checks. He gave a headset with a mic on it to Allene who was in the copilot seat, and passed one back to me. He said we would be able to listen to him talking to the air traffic controllers in the David tower and later in the Bocas tower. We could also converse amongst ourselves once we were airborne.

David airport is an international airport with flights to and from the U.S. and other countries. While we were taxiing out on the dirt driveway to the tarmac, a large COPA Airlines jet landed and we had to hold while it taxied to the terminal. I must say we looked mighty small as the big airliner passed by.

Within minutes we were given clearance for take-off and we taxied to the head of the runway where Captain Aparicio gave it full throttle. The little plane responded like a thoroughbred race-horse to an opened gate and it seemed like we were airborne in less than 200 yards. It was really cool listening to Captain Aparicio and the controller talking.

The takeoff took us out over the Pacific and then we made a big loop around the city of David. As we got on the heading to Bocas we could see the summit of Volcan Baru peeking through the clouds. It is a dormant volcano and at 11,398 feet, it is the tallest mountain in Panama. Even though we are only ten degrees north of the equator, the summit is high enough for there to be light freezes and frosts and occasional dustings of snow.

Captain Aparicio didn’t hesitate to alter course so we could get a bird’s eye view of the breathtaking summit. From there we could also already see the Caribbean and the archipelago of Bocas del Toro. As we got closer and could see more detail I was once again awestruck by how stunningly beautiful the archipelago is from the air. That view will never ever get old.

Aparicio was now talking with the Bocas control tower and they gave us clearance to land. Coming in low over the ocean I could tell there was very little wind by the glassy surface of the water and our pilot made a silky smooth landing. We taxied to the terminal where a marshaller signaled where we should park. Captain Aparicio opened his door and stepped out first and went around to open Allene’s door. He got my walker out and brought it around to the lower edge of the left wing. He told me to come out backwards like I went in, turn around on the wing so my legs were facing towards the tail of the plane, slide down and step off the same way I had stepped up. Again, it was very easy. I grabbed my walker and the three of us walked toward the terminal.

Jacy had been waiting inside but was allowed to come out to greet us and help us with our bags. We introduced her to Captain Aparicio, told him how grateful we were for all he’d done and said our goodbyes.

Jacy escorted us to the parking area where a friend of ours named Rolando was waiting for us with his pickup truck taxi. We all climbed in and set and off on the long drive across the island to our home in Boca del Drago. Rolando did a superb job of driving slowly, dodging potholes, and making the trip as easy as possible for me. His truck had good suspension as well, which was why Jacy had asked for him in the first place.

The whole way to our house I was wracking my brain as to how I was going to get from the driveway down the grassy slope to our house and then up the stairs to the veranda. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

When Rolando drove up our driveway and approached our house, I was immediately surprised when I noticed a new wooden ramp that hugged the house on the side closest to the driveway and led up to the veranda. I could see that the length of it negated the amount of the rise and made it navigable with my walker. Rolando stopped on a level spot where it appeared I could exit the taxi and walk down to the ramp entrance. Our worker Pepito and my friend Ariel Vergara, who had been co-owner of our construction company he and I started shortly after we moved here, were walking towards the taxi from the tool shed. Then our two dogs Whitey and Junior came bounding down the ramp closely followed by Traci. After greetings and hugs all around, including the dogs, I asked Ariel to get on one side of me and Pepito on the other for the walk down to the ramp. Our yard slopes downhill from the driveway so I knew it would be difficult with the walker. Sure enough, on my second step the walker tipped to the right and I started to fall but Ariel and Pepito grabbed me at the same time and held on for the rest of the walk to the ramp. The ramp was perfect.

Unbeknownst to me, after Jacy returned to Bocas, she, Allene, Traci and Ariel conspired to make things much easier and safer for me, knowing I would be confined to the house for a good while. Besides the ramp, Ariel had built an extension to the veranda on the opposite side from the ramp to make an outdoor shower. When building our house many years ago, I had installed a large bathtub for Allene in our bathroom because she likes soaking in the warm water. I have always liked showers so I made an outdoor open-air shower beside the house for me where only God and the monkeys can see you. It’s also convenient when we or visitors come back up from the beach after surfing or diving. Because of the slope I mentioned earlier, the back-side of the house is ten feet off the ground on 6’ X 6’ hardwood posts. From the veranda it’s a double stairway down to the shower and right now, I can’t do stairs.

Allene and Traci led me into the house to show me another surprise. Our old tropical-style rattan furniture was gone, replaced by a double recliner couch, two mahogany end tables with new lamps and two large soft matching end chairs. Allene had bought the furniture in David when she and Jacy were shopping and she had our friends Toby and Lola Braxton, of Servicios Toby, pick up the furniture and deliver it to Bocas. Our neighbor Christophe, who has a big Ford Raptor truck, volunteered to pick up our furniture in town and bring it out to our house. Thanks, Chris! You’re a great friend and neighbor.

I was also told that the day after that, our neighbor Roger, whom I mentioned earlier in this story, came over with his truck and he and Traci loaded up our old furniture which was still in good shape and delivered it to Pepito’s house near the Drago village on the road to Bocas town. Pepito has worked for us on our property since we moved here. He’s from the Ngöbe (Guaymi) indigenous tribe and like family to us so we always pass everything down to him. He said he loves the furniture. Thank you, Traci and Roger!

After checking out the furniture we all sat down on the veranda and Allene opened a bottle of wine and poured everyone a glass. Well, everyone but me. She brought me a glass of ice water. We clinked glasses and Allene made a toast to our homecoming. The dogs were lying at my feet and the view of the blue Caribbean and Isla de Los Pajaros offshore put a lump in my throat while my eyes misted up. Coming home had never felt so good. I was glad to be alive.

Rolando and Jacy left to get back to town and we thanked them both again for their time and trouble. When the rest of us sat back down, Ariel explained that he and Pepito were going to start working on a sidewalk for me that would go from the end of the ramp up to the driveway where we park the truck. That way I could safely walk on a level surface with the walker up to the truck if I needed to be taken to town for something. So, after finishing the wine they got started on the excavation with picks and shovels. Ariel said that he also had ordered many bags of cement and several yards of sand and gravel and it was stacked by the tool shed covered with a tarp. Jacy had also arranged for Rolando to bring Ariel out from town every morning and pick him up at 5 p.m. for the trip back to town.

They finished the excavation that day and the next morning they started laying the forms. Before noon they started mixing and pouring concrete. By the end of the following day, the sidewalk was completely poured. They waited a couple of days to let it cure a little and then Ariel came back out with Rolando and removed the forms. The sidewalk was done. Thank you, Ariel and Pepito for the good construction work. Thank you Allene, Jacy and Traci for making my life easier and safer during this difficult time.

That evening, Traci went online booked and her flight back to Texas. The next morning, after hugs and goodbyes, Allene took her to the airport. Allene and I and Junior and Whitey can’t thank you enough, Traci.

When Allene returned from town it was time for me to once again get serious about my rehabilitation.  My plan was to do four or five exercise sessions a day, depending on my energy level and pain. Because I still needed to be assisted by Allene, it was time-consuming for her as well. My immediate goal was to get to the point where I could do the exercises by myself in order to free up time for her. Right now, besides caring for me, she had to take over my share of the household duties and tasks that are necessary on a daily basis. I came to realize that breaking my leg had changed Allene’s life almost as much as it had mine. So, the faster I could get well meant things would get back to normal for the both of us.

Two items we brought with us on Dr. Barria’s plane were a raised toilet seat with handles, which doubled as a shower seat; and a small stationary bicycle like the one I had used in the therapy center. I think these two items are self-explanatory as to their value in my recuperation. When Allene and I started the home therapy, I told her I would try to do the first few reps on my own. Each day I got a little stronger and could do more and more reps without assistance. After one week, my leg was strong enough for me to want to try something new. I walked with the walker to my chinning bar and held on with both hands. Sure enough, I could lift my bad leg high enough and hold it up long enough to do five pullups. I was ecstatic.

That success gave me another idea. I asked Allene to move one of the dining room chairs out to the middle of the living room floor. I was able to sit comfortably and then I asked her to bring me our dumbbells. I had no problem doing several sets of different exercises while sitting in the chair. Being able to add the upper body workout meant a lot. The more areas you can work is good for your overall physiology. Not to mention what it does for your mental state.

After another week I hit two more milestones. The first was that my balance had returned enough that I could stand with most of my weight on my good leg to do stretches to warm up and cool down at exercise times. The second was that I was finally able to do 100% of the leg exercises without assistance. Allene was free. Well, free from the exercises. She still had to help me with everything else, bless her heart.

So now, with the pullups, dumbbells, stretching, leg exercises, walking laps on the ramp and veranda with the walker and riding the stationary bike, the sessions were so long and tiring I had to reduce it to two sessions a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The rest of the day was filled with eating healthy meals, getting plenty of rest and also writing this story. Plus a good night’s sleep.

As things progressed, I was definitely improving little by little, however there were a few setbacks. There were days when I woke up with leg pain that was stronger than usual and I also had no energy. I was in constant touch with Tomas. I sent him videos of my workouts and he would continue to give advice. On the bad days he told me to take a day off and just rest. It always helped and I would be fresh and able to start back up the next day. Thank you, Tomas!

Dr. Barria asked me to get my leg X-rayed the last week of November. Rolando drove his taxi out to pick me up and took me to the hospital where Jacy met us to help me get it done. I got the X-rays taken and the radiologist put them up on a big monitor so Jacy could photograph them with her phone and then sent them to Dr. Barria in David. With me being the most technologically challenged person on the planet, this modern technology never ceases to amaze me. Dr. Barria wrote back within five minutes and said, “The pictures came through perfectly and I will look them over in the next hour.”

Jacy and I walked to the cashier’s office where I paid the bill and then Jacy said she would drive me back home so she could hang out with Allene and me for a while. We exited the hospital, thanked Rolando and paid him for the drive and for waiting. Then Jacy drove us back to the house in her SUV.

When we got home, Allene and Jacy hung out on the veranda while I went inside and texted Dr. Barria asking him to elaborate a little about the X-rays. He replied, “The healing process has gone as expected and there is a good callus formation at the site of the break. I’d like for you to start walking with one crutch on the side opposite of your broken leg. Then in the last week of December, I want you to get X-rayed again and if all goes well, I think you can then start walking unassisted.”

I went outside and told Allene and Jacy the good news and they were as happy as I was to know that maybe in a month I might start to walk on my own again.

I kept working hard for the next few weeks anticipating getting the new X-rays but the Omicron variant had something to say about that. Man plans, God laughs.

The town of Bocas was packed with people starting around December 8, which is Mother’s Day in Panama, and the biggest holiday of the year. It is a national holiday, with banks and government businesses shut down. As had happened the previous year, the spike in COVID infections went vertically upward over the next few days after Mother’s Day. And then Christmas sent the spike even higher. At the end of December, Omicron had crept into just about every New Year’s Eve gathering and our archipelago had the highest number of active cases recorded since COVID first arrived here almost two years previously. Many sick people were swamping the hospital and a lot of the hospital staff were out sick as well. I conferred with Dr. Barria and he agreed that it would be a wise move to wait until this wave passed before getting the X-rays. So, another setback … but no worries. I will keep on doing what I’m doing and try to be patient. So for now, that is where things stand.

I have to admit that this has been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to face. When I think back about all the foolish and dangerous things I’ve done, the ridiculous chances I’ve taken, the bad situations I put myself in, it’s truly a miracle that I’m still alive. I’ve surfed almost my whole life and have ridden many big waves in various parts of the world. I can recall so many times in heavy conditions when I took off on waves that were hopeless, getting slammed on the reef, drug across the bottom and held down for what seemed like an eternity and survived it all with only reef rash and a few stitches. And even as I’ve gotten older and realized that discretion is the better part of valor, to this day I still sometimes go on waves that I know I should let pass me by. Then of all things, I fell and broke my femur walking on my neighbor’s beach. In the whole scope of everything I’ve been through, this seems almost comical and so ironic. But such is life. Right now I’m not even thinking about surfing. I’ll surf again even if I have to do it lying down. At the moment, I just want to concentrate on being able to walk normally.

But on a positive note, this has been a big lesson in humility for me. No matter how much you think you’ve got life dialed in, it can all come crashing down in a New York minute.

Being raised and taught by my Dad to be self-sufficient has been invaluable throughout my life and especially so after moving to Panama and carving out a niche out here, living off the grid in the jungle. But now it’s so humbling for me to be totally helpless and have to depend on others for everything. I certainly won’t take anything for granted ever again. And I don’t have words to adequately convey the gratitude I feel for all those who helped me after my accident. I’ve tried to thank everyone who was involved as I wrote this story but I want to do it again here at the end. Sincere gratitude to all of the following.

Those who were there at the beginning: Whitney, Inga, Dustin and Mulget … who witnessed my fall, notified my wife and brought her to the scene, then notified our neighbor. The four of them also took care of our dogs and secured our house until our housesitter/dear friend/upcoming neighbor arrived two days later.

Our neighbors: Roger Durbin, Courtney and Rosemary Parks, Tom Brewer, Christophe Ronne, who each played a part (or many parts) in getting me through this ordeal.

First responders: Denis, Miguel, Joana, the ambulance driver and others who were there to assist.

My sister-in-law: Lynn Hefner, the first person Allene contacted personally to explain the situation, and she came through in so many ways.

Hospital personnel: Dr. Ben Morales and the staff of Bocas Hospital; the doctors and staff at Changuinola Hospital; Dr. Heraclio Barria and the staff of Hospital Chiriqui; my two morning nurses; my physical therapists, Tomas and Tamara.

Lifesavers: Wade, Margaux and Louie for bringing essentials to David; Toby and Lola Braxton of Servicios Toby; the entire staff at Gran Hotel Nacional; Eddie, our taxi driver in David; Captain Aparicio, who flew us home; and Rolando, our dependable Bocas taxi driver.

Construction crew: Ariel Vergara and Pepito Martinez. Thanks for the good work, boys.

Homies: Our good friend Traci Orr, who came down from Texas on a moment’s notice to watch our house and dogs. Our incredible niece, Jacy Hefner, whose help was immeasurable. We couldn’t have survived this without ya, Jace. And last, but certainly not least, my beautiful wife Allene who has stayed right by my side throughout this whole ordeal as she has throughout our life together. She has been my caregiver, therapy assistant, comforter, cook, waitress, masseuse, editor, psychologist and numerous other roles I can’t even remember. You are my everything, Allene, and my love for you is endless.

After my accident I decided it would be best if we kept all this quiet. I know it has leaked out to a few people but for the most part we’ve been able to keep a loose lid on it. The main reason was I knew if we posted the news on social media I would get bombarded with messages and well-wishes from family, friends and my music fans. I always try to respond to everyone who contacts me regarding my music or whatever else is going on in my life and that by staying focused on my rehabilitation I would not be able to have the time or energy to do that.

This recovery has been a hard, intense experience, very painful and exhausting, and still is, but not nearly to the degree it was in the beginning. To give you an analogy, the day after my surgery, when Dr. Barria asked me to raise my bad leg and I couldn’t lift it even a quarter of an inch, my leg felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. At the time I added my pull-ups and dumbbells to my routine, my bad leg felt like it weighed maybe seventy pounds. When I went to get the X-rays in November, that leg felt like it had gone down to around forty pounds. Right now it feels like it weighs only fifteen or twenty pounds. I’ll know I’ve reached the sweet spot when my bad leg feels weightless like my good leg. I feel like I’m getting closer every day.

So right now, I’d like to apologize for keeping everyone in the dark and ask for your forgiveness and understanding of my reasons for doing so. However, since I have finished with this damn story and my recovery has progressed well enough, please feel free to bombard me now. I’m looking forward to hearing from you and more than ready to rejoin the world.

Who woulda thunk it? After a successful career in the music business as a singer and songwriter, and touring with my band for close to 30 years, Allene and I decided to cash it all in and move to a remote island in Panama to become farmers. It might seem like I’m being facetious here but it’s the truth. Few people know this about me, but I’ve been a farmer my whole life. And I’m still being drawn to it.

The small community of Almeda, Texas where I grew up, was about 20 miles south of Houston, and 45 miles from the Gulf Coast. The flat coastal plain that surrounded the town consisted mainly of rich, dark loam that was excellent for growing just about anything. For that reason, although there were a few small businesses in Almeda at that time, the economy of the area was pretty much based on agriculture. There were three Japanese families in Almeda: the Onishis, the Nagais and the Andos. They were all vegetable farmers and grew the most beautiful produce you could imagine. There were other farmers who grew soybeans, peanuts or corn and there were also a couple of dairies in the area that were owned and run by the Keyworth family. But my family and some of our friends and relatives were all rice farmers. It turned out that the climate, soil conditions and the proximity of a couple of rivers nearby which could divert water for irrigation, made this area known as the Texas Rice Belt.

Some of my earliest memories are about the rice fields, which my father Mack, his brother Uncle Jack, and my grandfather Jake, whom I called PawPaw, farmed. Otis and Andrew were a couple of black field hands who worked for us and sometimes they’d bring their sons with them. While the men worked, we kids would run wild in the surrounding countryside, sometimes swimming in the irrigation canal or shooting at birds and rabbits with our slingshots, although I’m pretty sure we never actually hit anything. Fond memories of a time that no longer exists. It never registered to me that they were black and I was white. We were just kids having fun.

Uncle Jack and my dad became rice farmers because that’s what their dad did and I guess it was just in their blood. But after a few successful years, disaster struck. Right when everyone’s rice crops were just about ready to harvest that year, a hurricane brewed up in the Bay of Campeche, near Yucatan. On the Texas Gulf Coast, that’s a rice farmer’s, or any other kind of farmer’s, worst nightmare. PawPaw, Uncle Jack and my dad shared equipment and started harvesting the rice as fast as they could, working sunup to sundown. PawPaw and Uncle Jack had gotten both of their crops in when they ran out of time and the hurricane struck, wiping out my dad’s entire crop. Getting your crop in was everything. It was your money for the whole year.

That did it for my dad. He said he would never farm rice again, borrowed money on the G.I. Bill and enrolled in mechanic school. When he finished, he opened his new business, the Almeda Garage. That went well for a few years until we discovered diving and shortly thereafter, surfing. My dad sold the Almeda Garage and started a new business called Blaker’s Water Sports, selling diving and fishing gear and later manufacturing custom surfboards.

Although my dad had stopped growing rice a few years before, we were still very much involved with farming. On the property where we lived in Almeda, we always had a vegetable garden and even had a little success growing oranges, limes and bananas before a hard freeze finally wiped them out. We had a pig pen way out in the back away from the house, and an area that was fenced where we raised a few calves. We had a pigeon coop, a chicken coop, beehives, and pear and mulberry trees. Looking back on it now, all that seems really remarkable. But it wasn’t to us. It was just the way a lot of people lived back then.

In the late 1960s, surfing had pretty much taken over our lives and our family decided to sell everything in Texas and move to Hawaii. We bought a piece of land about 1800 feet up the slopes of Mount Haleakala on Maui. The property had rich, volcanic soil and an old avocado orchard on it. It was badly overgrown so we had to clear out all the underbrush and excavate the house site. We did it all by hand so it was seriously hard work. And then the real work began. We couldn’t afford a builder so we built our own house. And it was a big house: two-story A-frame, with a two-bedroom, two-bathroom extension on the first floor. My mom and dad are still living there, fifty years later.

After finishing the house, we got the avocado orchard in good shape. We built a pig pen in the back corner of the property and bought a couple of pigs. Then we fenced another area in back for a calf. We planted a garden, put in some lime trees and cherimoyas, bought a couple of beehives from a local beekeeper and got some geese, turkeys and chickens. We were back in business. Just like old times.

About three years after moving to Maui, I got a wild hair that would eventually change the whole course of my life. I was given my first guitar when I was 5 or 6 years old and took many lessons so I always had a guitar around all through growing up. I started writing my own songs when I was 14 or 15 and by the time we moved to Maui I was pretty serious about music. A surfer named Jim McLemore, who worked at our surf shop years ago in Texas, came over to visit us in Hawaii and ended up staying. In fact, he’s now my brother-in-law, married to my sister Annie. Jim brought his guitar with him and we played music together every day and then auditioned at local venues trying to land a paying gig. We actually got a couple.

At the same time, I heard about some musician friends from Texas who had moved to Southern California, started a band and were beginning to have some success there. I contacted them and they told me to come while the time was right. They said where they lived there was a vibrant music scene with lots of clubs and music venues, and they lived right on the Pacific coastline. What more could I want? I packed my bags, surfboard and guitar and flew to California.

Shortly after arriving in Encinitas, in North San Diego County, I met a beautiful girl named Allene Mershon, who had recently moved there from Texas. A surfer and high school buddy of mine from Texas, Rick Law, introduced me to her at the Neighbor Saver, a local convenience store where she worked afternoons and evenings after working as a teacher’s aide all day. It was pretty much love at first sight. Or maybe it was because she was born in New Orleans and cooked me some great spicy creole and Cajun foods. Maybe the sunrise walks on the sand, watching the waves. Whatever it was, we somehow had been looking for each other for years, found each other, and two weeks later we rented a house a block from the beach and moved in together.

After learning she came from a family that liked to garden, the first thing we did was dig up nearly the whole back yard and plant a huge vegetable garden. The second thing we did was start a band. We’d found a group of guys who were like-minded musically so we started rehearsing and soon landed our first gigs, with me being the rhythm guitarist and front man, and Allene on bass. For the next three years our music career progressed and we moved several times in the area but every time, we got a backyard garden going right away, planting lots of vegetables and always hot peppers, as we both love to cook with lots of spice.

In the mid-1970s, we got wind of a new scene that was gathering momentum in Texas, led by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and others, and we knew that’s where we needed to be. We finished out the gigs we had on the books, packed our things and the whole band moved to Texas. We settled in the Houston area where Allene and I, and our lead guitar player Donnis Hammond, all grew up and each of us still had lots of friends and family there. We figured if we could land the first gig, we could pack the place just by letting everyone know. And that’s exactly what happened.

Another Texan, Mike Lawrence, lived in Encinitas for a while before moving back to Texas a few years earlier and became the manager of the popular music venue Steamboat Springs in the Galleria area of Houston. Somehow we talked him into booking us for a three-night, Thursday-through-Saturday, run. He refused to give us a guarantee but said he would set a cover charge and we could have everything we made at the door. Well, he ended up regretting that decision. We all got on the horn, called everyone we knew and packed that place shoulder-to-shoulder all three nights. We ended up making more money from those three nights than we could make in a whole month of playing weekends in California. Our notoriety spread from that weekend and soon our calendar was filled with gigs for the next three months.

Allene and I had gotten legally married the year before in California and when we first arrived in Houston her dad and mom, Allen and Charlene, put us up at their home in the Westbury area. I soon learned where Allene acquired her culinary skills as Charlene put some meals on the table that were out of this world. And her backyard garden was incredible. She grew corn, black-eyed peas, potatoes, tomatoes and peppers of every size and variety, along with beautiful flowers and her specialty: elephant ears. Just for those reasons alone, I would have loved to stay at their place forever, but we knew we had to find our own place.

Allen, whom everyone called Doc because he was a pediatrician, suggested we go take a look at a place he and a friend had gone in on together as an investment property. He said it was a 140-acre wooded parcel on Oyster Creek way out south of Houston between Arcola and Rosharon. He said it had a two-bedroom house on it and we could rent it for $300 a month. He also said it was probably too far away from everything so we probably wouldn’t be interested but we could check it out if we wanted.

I told him immediately that we’d take it, and he looked a little surprised. I said, “Doc, that’s my old stomping grounds. I grew up in that area and roamed all over that country when my dad, uncle and grandfather farmed rice. In fact, I’ve frog-gigged many nights on Oyster Creek with my dad and fished on it many times with my uncle and granddad.”

I couldn’t believe our good fortune. The place would be perfect. The band could rehearse there and we wouldn’t disturb anyone. We could hunt and fish and had plenty of land to have as big of a garden as we wanted. Our good friend and fellow musician Steve Watson named it the “Arcola Nightlife and Wildlife Refuge” and we thought it was a perfect fit.

That place was a little piece of heaven for us for five years and then as the band’s popularity grew and our gigs expanded outward, we decided that, yes, it WAS a little too far from everything. We were getting bookings in Corpus Christi, Laredo, Lubbock, San Antonio, El Paso, Austin, Houston, Beaumont, Dallas/Ft. Worth area and even gigs in Louisiana, Oklahoma and New Mexico. We knew it would be easier and more convenient on the band members if we were more centrally located.

So in 1981, we moved to the old German-settlement town of New Braunfels in central Texas and rented a home in a quiet neighborhood. It had a big back yard and a large greenhouse with a heating system. Once again I couldn’t believe our good fortune. The winters can be cold in the Hill Country with a lot of freezes and snow occasionally. With the greenhouse, we could grow plants all year long.

The property also had some large pecan trees in the back yard. In the fall we would gather the pecans, shell them and freeze the nuts in plastic bags to use later. Most years we had so many pecans, we would bag up the surplus and take them to Pape’s Pecans in Seguin and sell them. One other thing I remember about that place was that in the spring every year, when we would turn the soil to start a new garden, we always uncovered a few Indian arrowheads. I think it was probably an old campsite as there was a small creek nearby.

Over the next few years, the band stayed booked up and my songwriting career took off. George Strait was the first major artist to record some of my songs and that opened the gate to several other country stars of that time to also record some tunes of mine. During that period, they were recorded by Tim McGraw, Mark Chesnutt, Clay Walker, LeAnn Rimes, and then later, Barbra Streisand and Johnny Mathis in the Pop field. With royalty income now coming in, we were able to buy a large ranch-style home on 7 acres of beautiful Hill Country land outside of New Braunfels. Gardening ended up being difficult on that property because it was rocky, but we didn’t let that stop us. The back part of the property was wooded, with mostly oak trees, but the front part was cleared. So I went to a nursery and bought several mature pecan trees and peach trees and planted them across the front.

We had a big wooden deck behind the house and unknown to me at the time, Allene came up with a great idea. She took our pickup to Bussey’s Flea Market on IH-10 one Sunday, and bought a lot of giant Mexican-made clay pots. Stopping at Lowe’s on the way home, she filled the rest of the pickup’s bed with what looked like a ton of bags of potting soil. When she got home, she told me to come see what she got at the flea market. Gazing at the back of our truck, I got her idea immediately. She said it though: “We’re going to have a great garden on our deck!”

And we did. We grew bell peppers, tomatoes, basil and other herbs, green onions and, of course, jalapenos and other peppers. Year after year.

In 1998, Allene and I took a surfing vacation to Costa Rica and Panama and fell so in love with the Bocas del Toro archipelago in Panama that we ended up making a down payment on a small piece of land on Isla Colon. On returning home, at one point we looked at each other and asked, “What did we just do?” We borrowed some money to pay off the note and decided to just hold on to the property and see what would happen. In a few years, something did happen.

In 2001, Allene had to have major surgery … a total hip replacement. It was a wake-up call about our aging, and caused us to rethink everything and to rearrange our priorities in life. After a lot of gut-wrenching soul-searching, we decided to quit touring with the band, sell everything we owned and move down to our property in Panama where we would … we would do … what? That question was enough for us at the time so we left the answer open and moved on.

And this is where we are, more than 17 years later. Our property is on the North Shore of Isla Colon in the Bocas del Toro archipelago on the Caribbean side of Panama. We are pretty much isolated ‒ an hour’s drive from the town of Bocas, which is only about 18 miles away, through jungle roads and a poorly kept paved road.

This northern area of the island is all jungle, with the foliage being typical tropical rainforest. Carving out our niche out here was difficult, to say the least, but having done it before with my family in Hawaii, I was somewhat prepared. We cleared the land, cut a driveway and then built our house. Our veranda looks out to a beautiful surf break right out front and it only gets crowded when Allene comes out, or another surfer is visiting.

Properties such as ours are called “fincas,” which translates as “farms.” Our place is definitely a farm. We have lots of coconut trees on the beach and we planted a lot more around the property, including the variety of small, drinking nuts called pipas. Palm trees in the tropics to me are kind of like guitars and surfboards: You can never have too many.

The coconut is so versatile. We use the water, the milk and the meat in many things. Coconut water is like nature’s own Gatorade. It’s full of nutrients, as is the meat. When I come in from surfing I like to grab a pipa off a tree close to the house and chop off the top with my machete and drink the refreshing water. They stay cool in the shade of the palm fronds and there’s nothing like it after a vigorous surf session.  Hmm … except maybe an ice-cold beer. I also like to put a pipa in the fridge now and then and when it’s cold, chop off the top and pour a shot of Panamanian rum inside. Add a straw and it makes a nice Sunday afternoon cocktail. Allene likes to scoop out the coconut meat, grind it in the blender with hot water and after squeezing all the moisture out, roasts the fluff in the oven. Among other recipes, she uses the dried coconut flakes to coat shrimp or fish and bake in the oven. If you are ever ship-wrecked on a deserted island and it has coconut trees, you could live a long time. You might get awfully tired of them if you weren’t rescued in a few years but you would survive.

The second thing we planted most on the property was bananas. We have seven or eight varieties of bananas, including plantains. I never realized how many uses there were for bananas. Of course we like our ripened ones sliced on our cereal in the morning but the green ones can be used in soups and curries. It’s similar by texture to potato but with a slight banana taste. Banana pancakes for breakfast? Nothing better. And sliced ripe plantains, sautéed in butter, then flambéed with a little rum, served with a piece of our homemade chocolate is pretty much our go-to dessert after dinner.
Which brings up the third thing we planted on our property. Cacao. The beans from the cacao fruit are what chocolate is made of. We met Dave and Linda Cerutti right after we arrived here. They owned and operated the Green Acres Chocolate Farm in Buena Esperanza on the mainland of Bocas del Toro and sold chocolate commercially. They were kind enough to gift us some pods from their farm so we could use the beans to grow our own trees. Their trees have been known to produce some of the highest quality beans in this area so we were excited to start our own trees from their beans.

My sister Annie and her daughter Elaine came to visit us shortly after we finished building our house. One day we all took a boat over to Green Acres and Dave showed us the whole process of making chocolate, start to finish. Afterwards they gave us some samples of their various chocolates and Annie bought a lot to take back to Maui.

It took a few years for our trees to mature and produce fruit but now we are in full production. The process is similar to how coffee is produced. First the beans are fermented, then dried in the sun for a few days, roasted in the oven and the husks removed. At that point we just put them in bags and put them in the freezer until we’re ready to make some chocolate. Or we might even make some right then.

It’s a lot of fun but also a lot of work. We keep it on a small scale, making just enough to always have chocolate on hand and give some away, but we don’t sell it. The squirrels, white-faced monkeys and birds eat most of our fruit anyway but it works out fine. They leave us just enough.

As time has passed, we’ve planted pineapples, papayas, limes, avocados, mangoes, breadfruit, bay laurels, and various local root crops such as yuca, otoe and dasheen. We saved a flat, sunny area behind our house to make two good-sized vegetable gardens, with a couple of raised beds for growing herbs. The vegetables that we mainly grow are ones that we love to eat but can’t find here in the stores or the fruit and vegetable stands. We grow okra, black-eyed peas, turnip greens, mustard greens, collards, spinach, arugula, radishes and I finally found a variety of lettuce that grows well in the tropics, Thai green lettuce. Now we can have all the fresh lettuce we want. And of course, we always have lots of varieties of hot peppers. The herbs we keep on hand in the herb garden are ginger, turmeric, dill, chives, flat-leaf parsley, oregano, mint, the local variety of cilantro which is called culantro, and plenty of basil.

We make our own compost and everything is grown totally organic. We always have way more than we can eat so we started a little business selling our surplus produce every Monday to stores, restaurants and a few individual customers. That way, nothing goes to waste and the profit helps to cover our wine bill. That business has been put on hold due to the pandemic and quarantines but we’ll be ready when things resume.

Our niece Jacy Hefner came to visit us for a month in 2007 … and never left. She still keeps the other half of her airline ticket as a souvenir. Jacy was a finicky eater as a child and when her parents, John and Lynn Hefner, would bring her down to spend time with us in New Braunfels, they would warn her, “Be careful what Uncle Clay and Aunt Allene try to feed you. You know the Blakers … they’ll eat anything.” And we would. It might be snails, frog legs, conch meat, octopus, squid, or crawfish but we’d always make her try a little bit of whatever it was. Sometimes she would like it but most times, not. She mainly was a macaroni-and-cheese and canned green beans girl. But after hanging out with us over the years, her horizons broadened.

By the time she arrived here, she was open-minded about cuisine and fell right into the culture of Panama. After about a week of watching us working in the garden she came up to me and asked, “Uncle Clay, can you teach me how to garden? I want to be a farmer.”

“No problem,” I said. “Let’s go to town tomorrow and get you some rubber boots and work gloves.”

We did, and she proceeded to immerse herself into how we turned the soil, made compost, mixed the compost with the soil, arranged the rows, and so on. She took to it like a natural. After staying a few weeks with us, she felt it was time to go find her own way. She found a job at a restaurant in town and moved in to a place with a couple of the girls she worked with. Since that first job as a waitress, Jacy has made a good life for herself, marrying a Panamanian local, having two beautiful sons, Dylan and Diego, now aged 10 and 9, and is now a co-owner of one of the most successful real estate companies in Bocas del Toro. Many of you have probably seen her on the Caribbean Life TV show on the Home and Garden network.

And guess what else? She has dug up a good portion of her backyard at her house in town and grows herbs and vegetables. It definitely is in her blood. Last week I took her some basil starters in cups to plant in her herb garden and she picked me several nice cucumbers to return the favor. It was a sweet deal any way you look at it.

Jacy’s boys were just like she was as a kid, preferring macaroni and cheese and canned green beans over fresh vegetables. But from Jacy’s and our influence over the years, the boys eat pretty much anything now. What’s really cool is that whenever they have dinner with us now, the first thing they do is reach for the hot sauce bottle. These boys are going to be all right after all. And now they love helping Farmer Jacy in the garden. It’s in their blood.

Allene and I have received a lot of pleasure and joy from gardening over the 47 years we’ve been together. I don’t mean just from getting to eat all the good stuff we grow. There’s something therapeutic about working with your hands in the dirt and, later, so gratifying watching things grow from your efforts. It’s hard to explain but to us it’s some kind of spiritual connection to the earth, and nature, and to each other. And the activity helps keep you young and fit.

My 90-year-old mom and 92-year-old dad are perfect examples of that, as they still work hard every day on their property and avocado farm in Maui. Thinking of my dad and how he started out farming rice gave me an idea a while back.

On the back side of our property there are two areas that are low-lying and stay kind of swampy a good part of the year. I’ve never really figured out how to utilize those areas for growing anything. Then one day it hit me. That section might be perfect for growing rice.

I’ve thought about it a lot since then and have researched it some on the internet. It’s gotten to the point of thinking about it so much that it’s almost become an obsession. They grow a lot of rice here in Panama. In fact, there’s a Panamanian family that we know who have a small rice farm on the west side of our island. And writing this story about farming has inspired me even more. I’ve decided I have to do this. Tomorrow I will get on the phone and call Toby and Lola Braxton, the two beautiful sisters who own a big truck and run a delivery service from the city of David, where they live, to Bocas once a week. They provide a valuable service to those of us who live here in the archipelago and they also were born in Texas so we’re kindred spirits. I’ll ask them to go to the Melo garden supply store and buy me a 100-pound sack of rice seed and send it over on their truck next week.

I know for sure my dad is going to get a big laugh out of reading this part of the story about me starting to farm rice. But I also know that deep down he’ll feel very proud.

After all, I am his son, and it’s in my blood.

Part 1

The question I’m most frequently asked by my music fans, friends or family members, is “Clay, what in the world made you want to move to Panama?” My wife Allene and I have been living on Isla Colón, in the Bocas del Toro archipelago in Panama for more than 16 years, and people still ask me that. All the time. I gladly answer with the simplified short version, “Well, I’ve always dreamed of living on a tropical island that has good surf.” This answer is the truth, but in reality, I don’t give the long version because the story is complex and convoluted and would take hours to tell. But I think it’s a story worth telling and one that interested people deserve to hear.

Logically, I should start at the beginning, but first I need to make a small confession and explain something that’s an important part of this whole saga. I didn’t come up with the title for this story by myself. I borrowed it from a television show that ran from 1959 through 1962 called “Adventures in Paradise.” The series was created by famed author James Michener, and starred Gardner McKay as Adam Troy, the captain of a large schooner which he sailed throughout the South Pacific in search of adventure. (As a strange side note, the show also had a character named Clay Baker, played by James Holden.) Our whole family watched this show every week religiously, as well as Sea Hunt, Hawaiian Eye, 77 Sunset Strip and any other show that featured Hawaii, California, the ocean, sailing, diving and surfing. The seeds were being planted early on.

My grandparents on my dad’s side, whom we called Granny and PawPaw, had a house on Carancahua Bay, near the town of Palacios, Texas. Our family ─ my parents Mack and Rose, me, and my two younger sisters Annie and Cindy ─ spent a lot of time at the bay house while we kids were growing up. My dad’s brother Jack, his wife Fannie Ella, and their three kids Ruth Anne, Bubba and Debby, were often there as well. The house itself was an old Victorian-style home with a three-sided wraparound screened porch, with enough beds and bunk beds to sleep a whole lot of people.

Our main activities there were catching fish, and eating fish. We caught redfish, speckled trout, sand trout, flounders, croakers, whitings, gafftops, drums and sheepsheads that we ate; and stingrays, hardheads, gars and piggy perch (piggies) that we threw back. We ate grilled fish, broiled fish, fried fish and baked fish and never got tired of it.

Bay shrimp were always plentiful in the summertime and we could catch them sometimes right off the pier with a cast net or we would go drag a seine down the shoreline, or go out in the small skiff with a trawling net to catch plenty of those tasty crustaceans, not only to eat but to use for bait. Blue crabs were also thick in the summer. The adults taught us kids how to tie a chicken wing or neck on a string and set out lines all along the pier. Even though it was a conspiracy to keep us occupied all day, it worked because we found out right away that we loved to crab. And we quickly became proficient at it, because the more we caught the more we got to eat. I love to eat pretty much everything that comes from the sea, but boiled blue crabs are my all-time favorites. Any time we had a feast of boiled crabs, once the carnage was over, we’d all sit back and look around to see who had the biggest pile of crab shells in front of them. Usually PawPaw, Uncle Jack or my dad had the biggest pile, though Bubba and I did some serious damage too. But nobody could come close to my dad’s buddy Gilbert Schoppa if he happened to be visiting. I’ve never come across anyone else in my entire life that could eat as many crabs in one sitting as Gilbert. I’ve witnessed pancake-eating contests, oyster-eating contests, jalapeno-eating contests, hot dog-eating contests but I’ve never heard of a crab-eating contest. If there ever is one, I know without a doubt who’d win.

In the wintertime, it was oyster season. I can remember when PawPaw or my dad wanted to eat a few raw oysters, they would take their oyster knives and the oyster tongs, walk out on the pier, reach down and pull up a cluster of oysters with the tongs and start cracking them open right there with the knives and start eating them. PawPaw gave me my first raw oyster when I was about 4 years old and it was slimy and ugly looking so I swallowed it whole. It got stuck about halfway down making me gag, and when it came back up I spit it into the water.

He said, “No, you’ve gotta chew it up, Clay, so you get the full flavor. Here, try another one.”

I had already turned away and was headed down the pier towards the house when I looked back over my shoulder and hollered, “No thanks!”

Then a couple of days later, we were back out on the pier, the men cracking oysters, and my taste buds started reminiscing over the taste of that first oyster, how although it was salty, it had a sweetness to it as well. Suddenly I said, “PawPaw, can I try one of those oysters again?”

He said, “Sure,” and cracked one open for me.

This time I chewed it up before swallowing and that made all the difference. I liked it a lot. I said, “PawPaw, can you crack me another one, please?” He just grinned and started opening one ‘cause he knew I was hooked.

No one could ever forget the flavor of Granny’s oyster stew. It was rich and creamy, full of plump oysters, and served regularly all winter. And of course, there were platters of fried oysters, some battered in corn meal, some in cracker meal, but always served hot from the kitchen, accompanied by bowls of homemade tartar sauce and red cocktail sauce. Just thinking about it always puts my mouth into a Pavlov’s Dog moment, salivating profusely while craving those oysters. What memories … and still so vivid after all these years.

Those early halcyon days we spent at Granny and PawPaw’s bay house were the beginnings of my love affair with the ocean and everything about it. That love intensified over the years, right up to the present, where it’s stronger than ever. However, the real beginning of the whole saga started way back before I was born, with the origin and development of my dad’s own relationship with the sea.

I have an early memory of arriving at the bay house, after driving down from our home in Almeda, Texas, a small community south of Houston. The big field behind the bay house, which always had prairie grass and brush that was at least 6-feet tall, had been recently mown, probably by the neighbor who had an old Fordson tractor. All of a sudden my dad pointed at the field and said, “Hey look, kids, there’s the old sailboat your mother and I sailed all over the bay before y’all were born.” Sure enough, there was an old sailboat leaning over on its side, the blue paint all faded and weather-beaten, that had been hidden for years back there in the weeds.

That night after dinner we were all sitting on the porch and during a break in the conversation I said, “Daddy, what’s the story about that old sailboat?”

My dad’s always been a great storyteller and with a little prompting he’ll usually launch into one, which is just what he did. “Well, when I was around 13 or 14, I had another little sailboat before the one that’s sitting out there in the field. I traded this ol’ boy I knew in El Campo an old shotgun for it. It was an 8-foot sailing skiff with one small sail and, man, I had some fun sailing that thing around the bay. That’s how I learned the basics of sailing and that led me to wanting to get a bigger boat.”

He paused for a moment to collect his thoughts and to take a swig of the Pearl beer sitting next to him. (Or it might have been a Grand Prize beer. Some of you might be old enough to remember that old brewery in Houston that was owned by Howard Hughes.) “After your mother and I started going out together, we started coming down to the bay a lot and the little sailboat just wasn’t really big enough for two people. So I started looking around and found a guy that had this 24-footer for sale. He lived by the Intracoastal Waterway down at Sargent Beach. It had one mast, with a front and back sail. It didn’t have a real cabin but it had a hatch in the deck with a ladder that went down below where there were a couple of bunks. Billy Keyworth, my old schoolmate from Almeda, helped your mother and I sail it down here from Sargent and we anchored it at the end of the pier. Rose and I would spend many days sailing around the bay, looking for old Indian mounds made by the Karankawa Indians. When we saw one, we’d pull the boat up on the shore, hop out and look for arrowheads. Of all those arrowheads we have back at home, we found most of them here. We had a lot of fun on that boat, up to the point I decided to join the Navy to go fight in the war. So we pulled it out of the water, towed it to the field across the road and that’s where it’s been all this time.”

My dad’s decision to join the Navy towards the end of WWII had the most significant impact on his life (and consequently on my own) than anything that happened later, except for his marriage to my mom, which took place on one of his leaves. Dad’s first stop for training was San Diego, California. While stationed there he was exposed to scuba diving and surfing for the first time, two endeavors that helped set the course of his future.

When it came time to ship out for the Pacific front, the commander asked for volunteers. In spite of the old military adage “Never volunteer for anything!” my dad and his friend who’d enlisted with him stepped up and said they wanted to go. The commander pointed to my dad and his buddy and said, “Okay you two smart-asses, get your butts to the bus station. Y’all are going to spend the remainder of your service time at the Naval Air Station in Fallon, Nevada. The rest of you guys get packed up. You’re shipping out for Guam at 1100 hours.” My dad, of course, was extremely disappointed not to see any action but from my perspective, after hearing this story, it was a blessing in disguise. Thankfully, he was out of danger and also was able to take up snow skiing at nearby Mount Rose, which turned out to be the third sport that would later affect our lives.

After his honorable discharge from the Navy, my dad returned to Almeda and started farming rice with his father and brother Jack, who were also rice farmers. Shortly after I was born, a hurricane wiped out his whole crop for the year just two weeks before it was ready to harvest. He threw in the towel and left for Kansas City, Missouri, where he spent a year attending auto mechanic school on the G.I. Bill. On returning to Almeda, he opened his own auto repair business which he named the Almeda Garage. Shortly thereafter, my two sisters, Annie, and later, Cindy were born.

In the late ‘50s, my dad discovered there was a new store in Houston that sold diving gear. It was in the area called “The Village” and was owned by a guy named Jack Rich. His store was Village Sporting Goods and as far as I know it was the first shop to bring professional diving equipment to the upper Texas Coast. My dad jumped on it right away, buying masks, snorkels and fins for our whole family.

We would take weekend trips to the coast to snorkel, mainly in the surf at Galveston. The water there most of the year was so brown and muddy you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, but we were enjoying it just the same. And then we had one of those “accidental” moments that changed everything.
We set out on one of our trips to the beach, exiting IH-45 at the outskirts of Galveston, onto 61st Street to head to the Gulf, when on a whim my dad decided to pull off at the little roadside park at Offatts Bayou. That part of Offatts Bayou was a fairly wide body of water where the road crossed it. The Army Corps of Engineers had constructed the roadbed of quarried rocks that extended from both shores of the bayou towards the center. A road was then laid over the rocks and a bridge was built in the middle to connect the two sides together. The bridge allowed small boats to pass under along with the currents and tidal surges. Dad got out of the car, walked over to the rocks and gazed into the water. He turned and walked briskly back to us, grinning from ear to ear. He said, “You won’t believe this. This water’s actually got some visibility. I can see down about 8 or 10 feet right there along the rocks. Let’s do some diving here.”

We all changed into our swimsuits, donned masks, snorkels and fins and hit the water pretty fast. On my first glimpse of the seabed, I was totally overwhelmed with the realization of there being a whole other wondrous world existing below the surface of the ocean. It was such a sensory overload that my mind could not put it into words. There were sea anemones, coral and shells on the rocks, colorful fish swimming in and out of the crevices, crabs crawling on the bottom, and a ray fish gliding gracefully right beside us in underwater flight. To this day, every time I go diving, the undersea world continues to amaze me with its extraordinary beauty.

That first day we dove at Offatts Bayou we also discovered it was a bountiful larder of edible sea life. On our numerous subsequent trips there we would harvest rock crabs, blue crabs, various whelks and conchs, oysters, quahog clams, an occasional scallop, and of course, lots of fish.

Sometimes when I had friends over to spend the night, they couldn’t believe all the things that we would eat. I can still remember a conversation I overheard on the playground at Almeda Elementary School between Willie Keyworth and Darrell Mayfield, two of my best friends. Darrell told Willie, “Hey, I heard you spent the night at Clay’s over the weekend.”

“Yeah, I did,” Willie replied.

“What’d y’all have to eat?”

“Aw, man … conch meat and fried clams.”

“Yeah, I know, man. You never know what you’re gonna get over there. You know those Blakers … they’ll eat anything.”

I walked away chuckling, feeling a bit proud.

During this time, my cousin Jack “Bubba” Blaker started tagging along with us to Offatts Bayou and my dad taught him how to snorkel. Bubba took to it quickly and loved it as much as we did. One Friday afternoon, Bubba and I were hanging around the Almeda Garage and when it was almost time to close the shop my dad called out to us, “Hey guys, go pack some clothes for the weekend, along with your swimsuits and diving gear. I’m gonna take y’all on a survival trip tomorrow.”

That evening, he hooked his small yellow boat (nicknamed the Banana Boat) and trailer up to the pickup and we helped him load up the gear. This included a large ice chest, wire grill, wash tub, some pots and pans, cast net, 100-foot seine, crab net, big roll of string, large army surplus tent, sleeping bags, our diving equipment, and my dad’s speargun.

The next morning we left early for Galveston, stopping first at Pyburn’s grocery store to buy several blocks of ice, 5 or 6 boxes of Zatarain’s Crab Boil, salt and pepper, several gallons of drinking water, a bag of potatoes, aluminum foil and a big box of matches. On arriving in Galveston, my dad drove along the seawall all the way to the south jetty at the entrance to the Houston Ship Channel. We drove down the ramp at the end of the seawall onto the beach, and found a good spot in the lee of the jetty and made camp. We set up the tent, put some of the gear inside and my dad said, “Let’s put the boat in the water and go dive.”

Luckily, the surf was flat, as it is quite frequently on the Gulf, so we were able to back the trailer into the water and launch the boat easily. Dad parked the pickup by the tent and we all hopped into the boat, drove to the cut halfway down the jetty and crossed over into the ship channel. We drove a short way to the “Cement Ship,” an old hull of a ship made of cement that had run aground many years before. We anchored the Banana Boat right next to the hull and then my dad said, “Hey boys, I’ve got a surprise for you.” He reached up under the bow and pulled out two stainless steel shafts with spear points on one end and wooden handles on the other. They had no rubber slings or anything to propel them and Bubba and I looked at each other all puzzled, simultaneously thinking to ourselves, What? How are we going to spear anything with these? Dad said, “Alright, boys, let’s go get dinner!” We all jumped out of the boat.

The water had 5- or 6-foot visibility and there were tons of sheepshead swimming close to the hull. Bubba and I started jabbing at the sheepshead while my dad, with his regular speargun, was making dives below us in the murk. After he had put two or three nice speckled trout in the boat I grabbed his arm and said, “Hey, these spears are no good. There’s no way to spear a fish with just a bare shaft.”

He said, “Really? Give me your spear.”

I did, and he dove back down, returning shortly with a large sheepshead on the end of the spear. Bubba and I stared at each other again, thinking, How did he do that?

At that point my dad said, “OK, I’ll take care of the fish. I’ve got another job for you guys.”

He got back in the boat and told us to give him our spears. He reached back up under the bow and pulled out two small pry-bars and handed them to us. He jumped back into the water and said, “There are big oysters growing all over the side of this ship so y’all’s job is to start prying them off and putting them in the boat.”

Our enthusiasm renewed, Bubba and I started collecting oysters. After 15 or 20 minutes, Dad said, “Okay, boys, I think we’ve got enough to eat for tonight, so let’s head on in.”

Back at camp, we first pulled the boat way up on shore, then scaled and cleaned all the fish. My dad told us to save all the fish heads in a bag and put them in the cooler for use the next day. Then we all scouted around the area for driftwood, carried it back and piled it near the tent. After we had plenty we broke up some of the smaller pieces for tinder and then stacked some slightly bigger pieces on top. Soon we had a roaring fire which we let die down until there were just coals. We wrapped three potatoes in foil and tossed them into the coals. We put two driftwood logs on either side of the coals and placed the grill on top of the logs. After letting the potatoes cook a while, we salted and peppered the fish and laid them on the grill. After they were done on one side, we flipped them over and then Dad said it was time to put the oysters on. We laid all the oysters on the perimeter of the grill around the fish. Just about the time we thought the fish and potatoes should be done, all the oyster shells had popped open and steam was coming out. What a feast. We ate the grilled fish, accompanied by baked potatoes and oysters steamed in their own juice. Needless to say, we all slept well that night.

The next morning when we awoke, dad said we had to go find breakfast. We walked up into the sand dunes and looked around until we found some seagull eggs hidden in the salt grass. We went back to camp, stirred up the embers in the fire pit and got a good fire going again. My dad scrambled the eggs and flaked the leftover fish from the night before into them. With a little salt and pepper added, they turned out excellent. Everything always tastes better anyway when you’re cooking outdoors over a campfire.

After relaxing a while after breakfast, my dad got a knife, the roll of string, the crab net and the fish heads and brought it all to me and Bubba. He said, “Okay, boys, here’s everything you need to start gathering today’s meals. You know what to do.”

Bubba and I took all that stuff over to the jetty, cut the twine into long pieces, tied the fish heads on one end and set them out along the jetty to catch crabs. Bubba went to the truck and got the wash tub to put them in. A while later, my dad walked out on the jetty passing by with a bucket and the cast net. He went further out and made casts on both sides of the jetty. We could see him putting things into the bucket after some of the casts. When he stopped casting, he walked back and showed us a lot of shrimp in the bucket.

“Yum,” I said. “I’m sure glad that wasn’t mullet you were catching.”

He laughed and asked, “How many crabs have y’all caught?”

“Oh, I think about two dozen.”

“Great! Why don’t y’all carry them back to camp and put them in the ice chest and then we’ll go seining out in the surf and see what else we can come up with.”

We ended up dragging the seine about 200 yards parallel to the shore, with Bubba and me pulling the shallow end and my dad on the other end in deeper water. At one point my dad hollered at us to stop moving and to just try to keep the net on the bottom. He, meanwhile, kept pulling his end in a big semicircle toward the beach and when he was even with us he said, “Alright, boys, let’s get it up on the beach.”

When we dragged the net onto the sand, we could see a lot of things thrashing around inside.

Dad hollered, “Run and get the washtub, boys! And hurry!”

We ran all the way there and back, set the tub down and unfurled the net. There were lots of shrimp that were big enough to eat. The smaller ones we threw back in the water. There were a few small whitings and sand trout that we kept and a few more keeper blue crabs. We carried everything back to camp, put the catch in the cooler and got another fire going. My dad suggested we eat a light lunch to save plenty of room for the feast that evening. We cleaned three of the fish and threw them on the grill along with around 20 of the biggest shrimp. It was just what the doctor ordered. Afterwards, the breeze off the Gulf lulled us all into naps under the big canopy on the front of the tent. When we awoke, my father told us some funny stories about when he was young and went on survival trips with the Boy Scouts. He said several times they nearly starved to death and one time they had to raid a farmer’s watermelon patch in the middle of the night just to get something in their bellies. Bubba laughed and said, “Well, Uncle Mack, tonight’s not gonna be the night we starve!”

He was right about that. Just about the time the sun was going down, we got the fire roaring, set the grill over it and put a big pot of water on. We salted the water well, added all the Zatarain’s seasoning and waited for it to start boiling. It didn’t take long so the first thing we did was dump in all the rest of the potatoes. After the water came back to a boil, we waited 20 minutes or so before dropping the crabs in, one at a time. We let them boil for another 15 minutes and then threw the shrimp in, too.

Fifteen minutes later, everything was done to perfection and to call it a feast would be an understatement. When eating fresh Gulf seafood, it just doesn’t get any better than that, folks.

The next morning we rose with the dawn, stoked the fire, cooked up the last of the fish and ate that for breakfast along with some cold boiled shrimp left over from the night before. After cleaning the breakfast dishes, we broke down the camp, packed everything up, hitched up the boat and trailer, drove back up on the seawall and headed for Almeda.

When we got back to the house, Bubba said, “That was really fun, Uncle Mack. Thanks for taking us.” “Yeah Dad, when can we go again? Survival trips are awesome!”

Smiling, as he looked at us, my dad said, “It just goes to show, boys, you don’t have to be a millionaire to live like one. You just have to know how to live.”

Later that night before I drifted off to sleep, I lay there thinking about what my father had said. Even though I knew he was joking, his words had hit me hard. “You just have to know how to live.” Wow. Simple, yet profound. I wonder if my father realizes the effect those words have had on my life.

Yeah … I think he probably does.

In the late ‘50s several of my dad’s Almeda cohorts, following his example, decided to take up diving. The group included Durwood Watson, Jimmy Buchanek, Junior Keyworth, H.B. “Burl” Bailey, Ronnie Caffey and brothers Floyd and Charles Parker. Before long, they decided to start the Almeda Divers Association and set up a legal charter that all local divers could join, paying membership dues. The ADA supported diver certification, organized sanctioned spearfishing tournaments, worked with Texas Parks and Wildlife to recognize diving as a legitimate sport in Texas, and promoted the sport of scuba diving to the general public.

Some of the wives, including my mother, became good divers as well and were welcomed into the ADA. Other clubs were forming in Houston and Corpus Christi at this time and the popularity of the sport was growing rapidly. An event was organized at the Convention Center in Houston to further promote the sport of diving, at which all the diving gear manufacturers from around the country attended to show off their latest merchandise. Jacques Cousteau, the inventor of the scuba tank, which at the time was called an aqualung, was invited to speak. There were many people who thought he wouldn’t show, but he proved them wrong. After he spoke, my dad was introduced to him and they got to visit a while. My dad told me the next day that Jacques Cousteau was very friendly, polite and soft-spoken and seemed to be a genuinely good guy and it had been an honor to meet him. I thought then, and still do, that was pretty darn cool!

In 1960, my dad received an offer to run a dive shop in a new resort that was under construction on the island of Puerto Rico in the eastern Caribbean. My parents discussed the idea and with little deliberation said, “Let’s do this.” We all were so excited to be moving to a tropical island. So excited, in fact, that my dad decided we should get an early start, even though the resort was not supposed to be open for another six months. He talked his brother Jack into buying the Almeda Garage, found a renter for our house, and we set out for Florida ─ all five of us and our belongings ─ in our old Ford pickup. My dad said we’d find a place to live for a few months somewhere in south Florida and when the resort was about ready, we’d sell the truck and hop on a plane in Miami to fly to Puerto Rico.

I don’t know if IH-10 was even built yet but we wouldn’t have taken it anyway. Everywhere we went, my folks always took what they called “the scenic route.” So we stayed on secondary roads, mainly along the coast, stopping each night at a tourist court to sleep. They didn’t call them motels in those days, and the ones we stayed in were cheap but clean and secure. It took us four days to get to south Florida. My parents didn’t want to live in Miami so we looked around the surrounding countryside and really liked the Homestead area. It was a small community, with lots of orange groves and avocado orchards. The place we ended up renting was on a farm that had avocados, oranges and grapefruit. Our landlord said to help ourselves to any fruit that was on the ground but not to pick any from the trees. We were totally happy with that arrangement as there was always more fruit on the ground than we could possibly eat. So we were off to a good start with the fruit, we just had to augment it. For us, that meant heading for the water.

Our place was not far from Biscayne Bay, so the next day we drove there with our diving gear. It was unlike anything we’d ever seen before: coconut palms, mangroves, and beautiful clear water. While my father was spearing mangrove snappers, the rest of us were finding horse conchs and channel whelks. My sisters and I also gathered up a few coconuts to take home. We ate well that night.

The next day, my mom took the three of us kids to Homestead Elementary School and we were enrolled. From that point on, our sojourns were limited to the weekends. In ‘60 the South Florida boom had not really happened yet, so it was still very much wild and undeveloped. During the week, we stayed pretty close to home, and, being on a very tight budget, we ate a lot of beanie weenies and bologna sandwiches along with truckloads of oranges, grapefruit and avocados. Every Saturday, we’d get an early start in the old Ford and usually head to Biscayne Bay or to the Keys. On those excursions, we nearly always came back with something good to eat. But we didn’t always go to the ocean. Sometimes we explored the Everglades, or went to Seminole Indian villages and watched them wrestle alligators.

All in all, our time in South Florida was a remarkable experience, which included being directly in the path of Hurricane Donna, which caused much devastation in the area. Luckily our house was built of limestone rocks, the walls being a foot thick, so we weathered the storm with no problem.

For the next few weeks, we helped our landlord’s family by replanting the uprooted trees in the orchard, cutting up broken limbs, and hauling debris to the dump. We also gave a hand to many of our other neighbors. When things were beginning to return to a sense of normalcy, one night after supper my dad said to the rest of us, “Guys, I think it’s time we say goodbye to Florida. Are y’all ready to get on down to Puerto Rico?”

We all screamed in unison, “Yesssss!”

Our landlord had told us previously that he wanted to buy our old Ford pickup when we moved. So the next day he and my dad went to change the title over while my mom called the airport and made our reservations. Bright and early the next day we loaded everything up in our landlord’s van and he took us to the Miami airport. We said our goodbyes and just like that, we were off on the next leg of the adventure.

When we arrived in San Juan, we were met by some former friends from Texas, Walter and Mary Sisson, who worked for one of the oil companies based in Houston and had been transferred to Puerto Rico a couple of years earlier. They were kind enough to pick us up and offer us a place to stay until we got our feet under us. As we were driving from the airport into the heart of the city, it didn’t take us long to realize we weren’t in Kansas anymore. The Spanish Colonial architecture of the old buildings was so different from what we were used to seeing back home. Puerto Rico was technically a U.S. Territory but in reality it was a foreign country: different language, different culture, different customs, different food, different everything. I know at that point I felt some trepidation creeping in, thinking, What did we get ourselves into? But before we even reached the outskirts of San Juan, as we turned south to traverse the island, the excitement of the adventure that lay ahead erased those thoughts from my mind.

It was a little more than a three-hour drive, up and over the hills and mountains of the Cordillera Central, down to the verdant coastal forests on the southern side of the island, and westward to the town of Yauco, where Walter and Mary resided with their two children, Renee and Alan. Coincidentally, Yauco was not far from Punta Guayanilla, where my father would be working at the new resort.

When we arrived at their home, Alan and Renee came running outside to greet us. I almost didn’t recognize Renee, as she had grown very tall and had filled out her clothing very nicely. She had been my girlfriend back in Texas back when we were both short, skinny adolescents and I could tell by her reaction when she saw me, as I was still a short, skinny adolescent, that she was not interested in picking up where we had left off. I was down in the dumps the rest of that day and night. However, my spirits were lifted the next day when the two Puerto Rican kids who lived across the street came over. They were friends with Renee and Alan and were introduced to us as Bernice and Anibo. Bernice was my height and filled out her clothing nicely as well, maybe even more so than Renee. She was beautiful, with long black hair, big brown eyes and full Latina lips. And I could tell right off that she was definitely interested in this new gringo boy.

It was also apparent that Anibo had taken a shine to my sister Annie. From that day forward, Bernice and Anibo took it upon themselves to indoctrinate us into the Puerto Rican culture. They spoke no English and we spoke very little Spanish but we had absolutely no problem communicating. The first thing they did was show us around the town of Yauco, pointing out certain landmarks and points of interest and occasionally stopping to sample local culinary treats from the street vendors. Sometimes they would take us on excursions up into the hills and surrounding countryside. Now and then my parents would make us take our little sister Cindy. I think they wanted us to have a chaperone. When she tagged along, Annie and I threatened her with bodily harm if she ever tattled on us for doing things we shouldn’t. To her credit, she never snitched.

My mother found out that the only school in Yauco that had any classes in English was the private Catholic school. She got us enrolled and we started a day or so later. All the teachers were nuns and there was also a priest and a mother superior. On the first day, we had to go to Mass and it was nothing like the service Brother Roberts preached at our old Almeda Baptist Church. The next day my mom went with us to the school and asked that we be excused from attending Mass because we weren’t Catholic. From then on we spent that time of the day in study hall. I’d kind of liked Mass though, because they burned incense and had some interesting rituals. And the exercise was good, too. Stand up, sit down, kneel down, sit down, stand up. Got your heart pumping for sure. Maybe that’s why you rarely see Catholics who are overweight. That right there is a good enough reason to be one. That and the fact that unlike us Southern Baptists, they’re allowed to drink.

The following Saturday, the Sissons drove us, with all our diving gear, the short distance to the coast at Punta Guayanilla. Once there, we made a horrible discovery. We located the site of the resort where my dad supposedly had a job waiting and saw that very little construction had been done. Actually, the whole place looked abandoned. We saw some locals down the beach and walked over to see if they knew what had happened. They told us the rumor was that the owners had raised a lot of capital from various investors, started construction, declared bankruptcy and fled with all the funds.

We all stood there for a minute in shock, totally dismayed. My dad gathered us around him and said, “Alright, everyone, I know this is a big setback but don’t worry. We’re going to get through this. Right now, we’re going diving, so let’s go get our gear.”

The white-sand beach at Guayanilla was fringed with coconut palms, fronting a large, protected bay having lots of small islets not far from shore. We put on our gear and Dad said, “Let’s swim out to those little islands.” The water was shallow as we swam towards them, no more than 8 or 10-feet deep, and was bathtub-warm and crystal clear. The reef was dazzling with fauna and flora displayed in every color of the spectrum.

When we reached the islets we were astounded to discover that they weren’t islands at all but huge piles of queen conch shells that had been discarded by the locals over the course of many years. We were further astonished to see there were plenty of live conchs scattered around the seabed. I dove down to get one that was next to a giant head of brain coral and as I was picking up the conch I glanced under the coral head and was surprised to see several pairs of lobster antennas sticking out. I called my dad over and noticed he already had conch and lobster in his dive bag. I said, “Dad, there’s a bunch of lobsters under this coral head.”

He answered, “I know, man! They’re everywhere! Let’s go get ‘em!”

After a while, my dive bag was so heavy with conch and lobster that it kept pulling me underwater so I headed for the beach. My mom, Annie and Cindy came back in with conchs in their bags as well. That night we cooked up the conch and lobsters, made a big pot of rice to go with it and enjoyed a fabulous meal with the Sissons, Bernice and Anibo.

That night after dinner, I asked my dad what we were going to do. He said, “Well, while y’all are in school, I’m gonna start looking for a job, and on the weekends we’ll go explore the country around here or go look for more dive spots. Don’t worry. I’ll find something.”

Dad hit the pavement hard searching for work. Being an auto mechanic he made the rounds of all the garages in the area but to no avail. He located a couple more resorts on beaches nearby and inquired about being a diving instructor. No luck there either. He went to the refinery where Walter worked and Walter introduced him to the head of the employment office. He was a nicely dressed Puerto Rican, mid-forties, who was kind enough to sit down with my dad and explain the employment situation in Puerto Rico. He said the labor laws in the country were very pro-worker and that the labor unions were extremely powerful. When a job opened up, the law stated that an exhaustive search must be made to fill the position with a qualified Puerto Rican national. If the countrywide search turned up no one qualified, then and only then could they hire a foreigner for the job. The man also said that it was a given that you had to speak Spanish as well. That pretty much ended my dad’s search for a job.

From that point on, we relaxed and just enjoyed the lifestyle and beauty of that tropical island, partaking in all it had to offer. Our parents had talked it over and decided when our savings got to the point of no return, we’d buy airline tickets, fly back to Houston and start over.

The day finally arrived and early that morning we loaded all our belongings into Walter’s car. As we said our goodbyes to Bernice, Anibo and the Sissons, there was a lot of laughter mixed with quite a few tears. And then we were on our way to the San Juan airport. Nine hours later, we landed in Houston where Uncle Jack’s wife Fannie Ella picked us up at Hobby Airport and drove us back to Almeda.

Unbeknownst to the rest of us, my father had formed an idea after the job fell through in Puerto Rico and for weeks he had been turning it over in his mind until we returned to Texas. He sprung it on us a day or so after we returned.

“You know what?” he started out. “I don’t really want to go back to working on cars. We went all the way to Puerto Rico to run a dive shop. Why can’t we open up our own dive shop right here? Y’all wanna do that?”

Of course we were all immediately gung-ho. He talked to his mom and dad about an old small building they owned next to the Almeda Garage, on the corner of Gumas Street and Almeda Road, also called the old State Highway 288 that connected Houston and Freeport. The building had originally been a flower shop and later a beer joint but a fire had gutted it one night after the bar closed. It had been sitting there in that state for a few years, so my dad’s folks readily agreed to let him remodel it and if the business was successful he could start paying rent or buy it outright. First, we had to find a place to live. There were renters in our old house, which was badly needed income, and anyway they were nice people and we wouldn’t think of moving them out. We’d been staying at Granny and PawPaw’s since our return but it was pretty cramped there, so our folks looked around a bit and found a used trailer home for sale. They made a down payment and had it towed to the back of the lot behind the burned-out building. We moved in immediately and all of us pitched in to help Dad with the remodeling of the soon-to-be dive shop.

With all of us helping, it didn’t take long to get the place ready to open for business. Blaker’s Water Sports (BWS) opened its doors in 1961, fully stocked with fishing gear, water skis and accessories, diving equipment and before long … surfboards.

Yep, you read that right. No one thought you could surf in Texas, that is, except for a handful of hardcore Galveston locals who took up the sport around 1960. A few Houstonians joined them the following year, with some of that group preferring the waves of Surfside Beach at Freeport. After the Beach Boys released their hit “Surfin’ USA” in early 1963, the surf scene in Texas went ballistic. It changed everything. Surf shops started springing up everywhere, including many in the metropolitan areas of Houston and Corpus Christi, and all points along the coast.

After my dad heard about the group of guys who were surfing in Galveston, he got on the horn and found a company in California that made surfboards in a mold; these were called pop-outs. He ordered a half dozen of the boards for the shop and when they arrived, he and a couple of his diving buddies took them to Surfside and caught their first waves, pushing off in the whitewater. A couple of months later, at a spearfishing tournament in Galveston, one of my dad’s friends pushed me into my first wave. Dad and I realized right away that we were totally hooked on surfing and it became the main focus in our lives.
BWS soon acquired the dealership rights to sell Hansen and Greg Noll surfboards from California in the Houston area.  We also ordered surfboard blanks, resin and cloth to sell to surfers who wanted to make their own boards.

Enter the Bishops: three brothers from Bellaire, Texas, who were all good divers and traded at our shop. Mickey, the oldest, Dickens and Steve were all talented artists as well. They were interested in learning how to surf and, being artists, each wanted to make his own board. They purchased kits from us, took them home and created their individualized surfboards. The three of them stopped at BWS on their way to Surfside Beach a couple of weeks later. They lined their new boards up across the front of the shop and took photos. We were impressed, to say the least. The boards each had unique artwork designs and I thought they should be hanging in a gallery, not headed for the sand and salt. These three guys were the catalyst for the decision that BWS would make its own surfboards and all three Bishops ended up working at the shop. Mickey designed the Blaker Surfboards logo and became our first shaper. Steve and Dickens later shaped boards and Dickens also worked in the showroom.

The business soon outgrew the little building that we’d remodeled so my dad bought the Almeda Garage building next door back from his brother Jack and converted it into a large, modern, air-conditioned showroom for the surfboards and diving gear. We kept the front part of the old building stocked with fishing equipment, gear and bait, renaming it the Almeda Bait and Tackle Shop. My mother’s brother, Forrest Cloyd, along with his wife Evelyn, took over the running of that business.

Not long after surfing exploded on the Texas coast, an organization was formed called the Gulf Coast Surfing Association. Its purpose was to promote surfing as a legitimate sport in Texas, to sanction surfing contests, establish criteria for judging the contests, and a rating system for the competitors.  All the surf shops and local board manufacturers started putting teams together and the competition was fierce as each tried to snag the top surfers to represent one’s shop or logo. A yearly circuit of contests along the coast was established by the GCSA, culminating in the last event of the year … the Texas State Surfing Championships, held at the Flagship Hotel pier in Galveston.

The contests were a lot of fun, and the Blaker team always did well, but we soon got more interested in surf exploration. A few grainy photos in the early surf magazines of perfect waves in Baja and mainland Mexico set us off in search of virgin surf.

The first couple of trips were all-guy trips to the Mazatlán area on the Pacific side of Mexico. We traveled in cars and vans and stayed in motels and found a lot of good surf. But my dad wanted to include the whole family on the trips plus save on motel rooms, so he decided we needed a bus of some sort. Being the do-it-yourself guy that he was, he found an old Rainbow Bread delivery truck that was for sale pretty cheap, so he bought it and turned it into a motorhome.

From his prior experience as a mechanic, the first thing he did was get the old diesel engine in top shape. Then he stripped out the inside and installed beds, a bathroom, a kitchen, dining table that folded down to make another bed, and a buddy seat. He gave the outside a new paint job and the Bishop brothers volunteered to put on the finishing touches of the Blaker Surfboards logo and some surf art on both sides.

Oh, man … we made some memorable journeys in that camper. At first it was just our family, but soon members of the Blaker surf team came along with us. We went to California, Baja and all up and down the Pacific mainland coast of Mexico. In those days there were still a lot of undiscovered surf spots and after turning off the main roads onto narrow dirt roads that pointed towards the coast, we sometimes were rewarded at the end of them by epic surf. More often than not, that didn’t happen. But to us it didn’t matter. It was all about the journey, being in a different country, experiencing another culture, and making new friends along the way, all the while reveling in the constant change of scenery and the excitement of just being out there on the road. It was quite an education, to say the least. And we always had our diving gear with us, along with a couple of fishing rods, so we ate well.

Which brings up another recollection: One time, just as we were backing out of our driveway, all packed up for a Mexico run, my Uncle Jack walked over from his house carrying a big cardboard box. My dad opened the door of the camper and Uncle Jack handed up the box, saying, “Thought y’all might like this for your trip. Be safe and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” As he walked away, we opened the box and inside were about 50 links of his homemade smoked venison sausage. It was an incredible gift that we rationed out to last almost the whole trip. A piece from one of these links wrapped in a tortilla, with a hunk of sharp Mexican cheddar and a slice of white onion on the side … “Yep, you can make a meal out of that, son!”

That same trip stands out in my memory for other events. It was the first time we went to Matanchén Bay, near San Blas. We were lucky enough to score a good south swell and all of us got rides that were nearly a mile long, starting at the first point, rounding the second and third points and surfing almost all the way to Pepe’s Hotel Colón. After surfing on the rights there for two or three days, we decided to go look for a left on the other side of Matanchén Bay, near the village of Santa Cruz. We followed the old dirt road that wound along the bay, at one point passing a rocky shoreline for about a half-mile stretch. The tide was low and there were several local women bent down in the rocks, tooling at things they found there. Out of curiosity, we stopped to have a look. As we approached, we noticed there were big oysters growing on the rocks below the tide line and the women were harvesting them with simple prying tools. When they saw us, they stopped what they were doing and asked if we wanted to buy some. We were already salivating so of course we bought several dozen and ate half of them raw and fried the rest of them for dinner that night. So good. We did end up finding a good left in Santa Cruz. The waves were only about waist high but perfect and really fun.

We continued on further south a day or two later to look for the Mexican Malibu right point-break at Punta de Mita near Puerto Vallarta. It was a bad road out to the end of Punta de Mita in those days and we got stuck in the mud a few times but eventually reached a perfect camping spot where the waves were breaking. The beach fronting the surf break was incredibly beautiful, with lots of coconut palms and a fresh-water stream nearby. Best of all, we had it all to ourselves.

After setting up the campsite, we hit the waves: shoulder high, the wind offshore, clear blue water. It was a good session, although a couple of small sharks cruised through the lineup causing us to paddle in sooner than we wanted to. We rinsed off and started preparations for the evening meal.

Earlier we’d noticed giant limpet shells scattered on the beach. Limpets are delicious to eat but are usually small. The shells we saw were 6 or 7 inches in diameter, almost as big as abalone. As the tide was going out that evening I walked down to the rocks, which were now exposed, and sure enough, there were large limpets clinging to the rocks everywhere. I walked back up to camp to let everyone know and a few of us went back and pried off a dozen or so. We cleaned and washed them, cut them into steaks and cooked them for dinner. To me it tasted just like the abalone we had found the year before on a trip to Baja California.
The next day while we were surfing, two or three sharks came around. This time they were a bit more aggressive, circling closer than they had the day before, so again we paddled in. On the third day, there were several sharks swimming around us and acting erratically. We decided to paddle in and they followed us all the way to the shore. My dad said, “Okay, we’re outta here.” So we packed up and that was the last time we ever went to Punta de Mita.

Well, now I have to mention something about that trip the year before, where we encountered abalone for the first time. On that excursion, some of the surf team members went along also. The Blaker motorhome made the long haul to San Diego, California, turned south, crossed the border at Tijuana and entered Baja.

Baja! The word itself seemed magical. It wasn’t tropical; in fact, the water could be quite cold along the northern Baja coast because of the influence of the cold California Current that runs offshore from Canada to the southern tip of Baja. The terrain was rugged and arid with lots of desert-type vegetation. And there were many excellent surf spots.

The first place we camped was at a right point break called K-38, so named because it was right by the highway marker for being 38 kilometers from the US─Mexico border. Oh man, this place had probably the best waves we’d ever ridden.  We had to wear full wetsuits though. Like I said … cold water.

The reef there held an abundance of sea life. After surfing our brains out for a couple of days on nice overhead waves, the swell dropped to a still fun but only waist- to shoulder-high level, so my dad decided to go diving. He was out about an hour and came back in with his dive bag filled with several abalones, four or five nice-sized lobsters and a Pacific sheepshead that was close to ten pounds.

Woo-hoo! We scrounged up a bunch of driftwood and scrub brush to make a campfire. We set a grill above the fire and boiled the lobsters in a big pot, grilling the fish at the same time. My mom was cooking the abalone steaks on the stove inside the camper. There were a couple of other groups of surfers camping nearby and they were warming up cans of pork and beans and Hormel’s beef stew on their campfires, all the while eyeballing what we were cooking at ours. Gradually they all gravitated over to our campsite and of course we showed them some Texas hospitality by sharing everything we had with those guys. Not only did we make some new friends, but we ended up sitting around the campfire half the night sharing surf stories.

The next morning a few of us were out surfing. The waves were really good … head-high, light offshore wind. While sitting in the lineup, alternating our gazes from searching for waves to checking out the beach scene, we saw a car with boards on top pulling off the highway and entering the gate to our camping area. I remember thinking, Bummer … more surfers.

Two guys got of the car, put on wetsuits, unloaded their boards and walked down the trail from the cliff to the water and started paddling out. When they got closer we could see that one of the guys was Miki Dora. We didn’t recognize his friend.

Whoa! Miki “Da Cat” Dora! Some called him the “Black Knight of Malibu,” and others called him the greatest living surfer in the world. Definitely not a bummer now.  We were totally stoked.

Miki and his friend soon got in a rotation with us and we all surfed together for a couple of hours with no one hogging waves, just taking turns as the sets rolled in. They were super friendly to us and very polite.

At one point Miki lost his board in the whitewater (this was before the surf leash was invented) and one of the girls on our surf team, Gloria Dunn, who was also the number one female surfer in Texas at the time, had caught the wave before Miki’s. She was way inside and saw the board heading for the cliff and was able to paddle over and grab it before it smashed into the rocks. She held onto both boards until Miki swam up and climbed on his then they paddled back out together. Sitting in the lineup I heard him tell her, “Thanks again for saving my board. “

We Texans all caught our last waves of the day over the next twenty minutes or so, leaving Miki and his friend out there for another hour or so. When they eventually came in, they milled around their car for a while and then Miki walked over to our campsite. I was sitting in a plastic chair in front of the camper and he asked, “Hey, where’s that girl who saved my board?”

“She’s taking a nap inside,” I told him.

“Okay, I don’t want to wake her but can you give her this gift and tell her again I said thanks?”

“Sure thing,” I said. He handed me what appeared to be a huge wad of carefully wrapped toilet paper.

He said, “You guys take it easy. We enjoyed surfing with you. We’re going back to California.” He walked off and he and his friend drove away.

Later, when Gloria awoke and stepped outside, everyone gathered around as I told her what had happened and handed her Miki’s gift. We were as curious as she was and stood there watching as she unwrapped all that toilet paper. It took a couple of minutes but she pulled the last of the paper off and burst out laughing. She held up a small pin button like the ones campaigners might give away to attract votes. This one was white with bold red letters with the word … BULLSHIT. We must have all laughed for an hour. Classic Miki Dora. But all in fun. It’s a story I’ll never forget.

We left K-38 the next day and headed south. We found good waves and camped at Cuatro Casas, Punta Colnett, and a long beach break called Johnson’s Ranch. Surfing the waves at Johnson’s Ranch was kind of spooky because when we were sitting in the lineup waiting for a wave, every once in a while a big sea lion would suddenly surface right beside one of us, scaring the crap out of that surfer, then dive back down only to reappear next to someone else, with the same results.

There were a few Mexican families living in small dwellings above the beach and there were several tables set up in front of their houses with a strange device having a big lever arm. At one point we were talking with some of the locals on the beach and asked what those tables were for. One of them said, “Para abrir almejas.” (To open clams.)

“Hay almejas aqui?”(Are there clams here?)

“Si, muchos.” (Yes, many.)

“Donde?” (Where?)

“Venga.” (Come.)

They took us down by the tideline, bringing along a digging implement that had 4 tines. When a wave would come in and wash back out, they showed us places in the sand where air bubbled up. They handed the trowel to my dad and made the gesture to dig. My dad dug down about 8 inches into the sand and pulled up a huge Pismo clam. Our local friends laughed, went back to their homes and brought back more digging tools. They handed them to us and set us loose. After we dug up a couple dozen or more they showed us how to use the levers on the tables to open the shells. After cleaning the clams, one guy asked my father, “Te gustas langostas?” (Do you like lobsters?)

My dad nodded vigorously and the man said, “Vengas a mi casa.” (Come to my house.)

He invited my mom and dad inside while the rest of us watched through the front door as he pulled a big burlap sack out from under his bed. He dumped the contents onto the floor and huge lobsters started crawling everywhere. My mom was screaming while dodging lobsters, which caused the Mexican guy to double over with laughter. He and my dad gathered the lobsters and put them all back in the bag. He sold the lot to us for a few pesos, but we tipped him about twice that much for having provided the entertainment. That night we dined on fried clams and boiled lobsters.

I realize it would be difficult to top a meal like that but it was on that trip that my dad came up with a new dish. My mom usually did most of the cooking and she was excellent at it but every now and then my dad would get an idea and take over. He called his new concoction “Slup Gullion,” and I’m not sure what all it had in it. It wasn’t chili, it wasn’t beef stew, but something in between. All I know is, when we came back freezing from surfing in that cold Northern Baja water, a hot bowl of it sure hit the spot. He made it a lot on future trips and always had a pot of it going on the stove in the motorhome at the surf contests. To this day, he won’t give up the recipe for Slup Gullion but that may be for the better. No telling what all he put in it. You know those Blakers … they’ll eat anything.

Two significant events happened in 1965. Number one was the birth of my brother Bruce. We thought our parents were done with kids after sister Cindy came along but as it turned out, they weren’t.  Number two was a roll of 8-millimeter film that arrived in the mail. The box it came in was labeled, “Surfing in Hawaii.” My dad had seen a small advertisement in the back of Surfer magazine of surf movies for sale and sent off for one. That night we set up the projector and screen and as soon as the film was rolling we knew everything had changed. The waves were several notches up the scale from anything we’d seen and had been riding in California and Mexico, and the lush beauty of Hawaii overwhelmed our senses. We pretty much wore that little film out, watching it over and over and over. But from the first viewing, we realized that Hawaii was the Mecca of surfing and knew we would eventually have to make the pilgrimage.

We continued on with our forays into Mexico, with little brother Bruce now joining us on our adventures. Barely past the toddling stage, he was an excellent swimmer and could already use a mask and snorkel, holding his breath underwater for long time. Being a Blaker, he would eat anything, so he fit right in from the get-go.

In 1967, my Dad couldn’t stand it any longer, so he put together an all-guy trip to Hawaii to check it out. He and I, along with four or five other Texas surfers, flew to Oahu and spent a couple of weeks surfing, diving and exploring. We returned home knowing that everything we had learned about Hawaii had far exceeded our expectations while totally fulfilling our dreams. We never went back to Mexico after that. From that point on it was all about Hawaii. My dad decided after that first trip he wanted to move to Hawaii for good, and he discussed it with the whole family, laying out a long-range plan.

The plan was to sell everything we owned in Texas and in 1970 it came to fruition. We had discovered Maui on a later trip to Hawaii and loved it even more than Oahu. Maui was much more our style, being more rural and laid-back, so that’s where we ended up. I went over a few months earlier than the rest of the family so I could enroll at Maui Community College for the spring semester. The rest of the family came over after school was out at the end of May.

We found a beautiful piece of land for sale in what they call the “Upcountry” of Maui. The site’s elevation is about 1800 feet, situated between the small towns of Makawao and Pukalani on the slope of the 10,000-foot Mount Haleakala. The property had many large avocado and other fruit trees but was extremely overgrown with thick brush. Just behind and further up the crater from our property were eucalyptus and hardwood forests, and below us were pineapple fields and a spectacular view of the central valley, the West Maui mountains, and the north shore of the island. At that time, land was cheap so my parents paid cash for the property and then the real work began.

We rented a small apartment in the town of Wailuku which was the county seat. The next necessity was a vehicle and we found a ’55 International pickup that was in really good shape at a fair selling price. It was perfect for our needs and after purchasing it we got a local welder to make and install a pipe rack on top so we could haul lumber and other materials ourselves. Next, we went to a hardware store and bought picks, shovels, hoes, a wheelbarrow, axe, machetes, cross-cut saws and gloves and straight from there we made the 25-minute drive to our land upcountry to begin clearing, which turned out to be some seriously hard work.

Most of the brush consisted of white cane and a plant called haole koa that had to be chopped first and then dug out by the roots or it would grow right back. But the whole family pitched in, even 5-year-old Bruce, and working all day, every day, we got it done pretty quickly.

Our closest neighbors were Portuguese, with the elderly Mrs. Amaral, her son Jimmy and his wife Toni. They turned out to be a godsend by voluntarily running a long water hose and an electrical extension cord from their house over to our property to use during the construction. Of course, we offered to pay their electric and water bill during that period but they absolutely refused to take any payment. Nearly every day while we were working, Mrs. Amaral would walk over with lemongrass tea and homemade Portuguese sausage, or other snacks. We lucked out having the Amarals as neighbors, that’s for sure. It would have been hard to do everything we did without their help.

After the land was cleared, we immediately started construction of the house. None of us knew what we were doing except for my dad, but under his tutelage, we all fairly quickly became competent enough carpenters to get the job done. Every day after breakfast, we packed a lunch, drove to the Alexander & Baldwin hardware store in Kahului to buy lumber and other materials, and headed up the mountain. My dad told us we couldn’t take a day off to go surfing or diving until the house was finished enough to move in, and then we could relax a little, enjoy the amenities that Maui had to offer, and take our time finishing out the house while we were living in it. That was a good incentive and made us want to keep our noses to the grindstone.

The main part of the house was a two-story A-frame with a single-story, 2-bedroom extension on the north side. The pitch of the A-frame roof was super steep and two-stories high. My mother and I put our fears aside, got up there and nailed on a good majority of the cedar shingles. I figured if I fell, it would prepare me for wiping out on a 20-foot wave and getting slammed on the reef. Thank God that didn’t happen.

After the roof, the rest was fairly simple and the house was soon finished enough for us to move in.  We had brought practically nothing with us on our move from Texas so we were able to bring everything in one load to the new house. As promised, the next day was spent at Ho’okipa Beach, where my dad and I caught some good waves while Bruce and the girls snorkeled around in the shallows and later went beachcombing. Afterwards, we all walked out on the rocks and gathered a bunch of opihis (limpets) to eat for dinner. On the way home, we stopped at the Bersamin Fish Market in Paia and bought some fresh ahi tuna (yellowfin) and some of their famous marinated octopus. That evening we celebrated spending the first night in our new home in Maui by having a seafood cookout in the backyard. Mrs. Amaral, Jimmy and Toni joined us and my dad proposed a toast, thanking everyone for their help and hard work. We all hollered “Cheers!” and proceeded to chow down. What a perfect end to a glorious day. And before long, we had settled into the Maui lifestyle and spent many wonderful days exploring, hiking, camping, surfing, diving and simply reveling in Mother Nature at her finest.

In the summer of ’71, a bunch of us went to the premier of a new surf movie by MacGillivray and Freeman, called “Waves of Change,” that was showing at the Iao Theater in downtown Wailuku. It was an excellent film that we all enjoyed, featuring wave-riding in California, Hawaii, France and Portugal. The quality of the surf in France and Portugal really blew me away, but what really captured my imagination was one scene where Mark Martinson and Keith Paull were sitting at a table at a sidewalk café overlooking the sea in Biarritz, France, while drinking wine with two beautiful French girls. I could barely concentrate on the rest of the movie because from that point on, my mind was spinning as I concocted a new plan.

The next day I went to the post office in Wailuku and picked up a passport application. I had some passport photos made at a local shop and made a copy of my birth certificate. I filled out the application and mailed everything to the U.S. Passport office in Honolulu. That afternoon I told the whole family what I’d done and what my plans were and they were all excited for me. While I was waiting for my passport to arrive, I began making my preparations.

I sent money off for a Eurail Pass that would allow me to board any train at any time at any place in Europe for a one-month period that would begin when the card was first activated. A Eurail Pass was cheap back then, almost too good to be true. I purchased my airline tickets as well, finding a fare with Pan Am Airways from L.A. to Paris for only $200.

I went to a book store in Kahului to search for a good guide book of Europe and right off the bat found one that suited my needs. The paperback was the newest version of “Europe on $5 a Day,” by Arthur Frommer.  I was a bit skeptical that I could subsist on merely five bucks a day in Europe but that book ended up being invaluable in my travels.

On the day my passport arrived, I packed a board bag with my surfboard and my Hawaiian-sling spear which I duct-taped to the board. I had a duffle bag for my mask, snorkel, fins and clothes. I even packed two sets of dress shirts and slacks because I wanted to be ready for whatever might come along. My guitar went with me as well. I didn’t go anywhere without my guitar (and it sure came in handy a few times on the trip). The next day my parents took me to the airport. I hugged them goodbye and was off on my new adventure.

My buddy Jim Marmack, a former glasser at our surf shop in Texas who now lived in Encinitas, California, was kind enough to pick me up at the L.A. airport and drive me to his house. I needed to hang out there for a few days to buy a good wetsuit and convert most of my money into traveler’s checks. I checked those two things off my list the first morning there, and on a whim, I phoned my friend Pam Gold, whom I’d recently palled around with on Maui until she moved back to California. She was happy I’d called and agreed to drive to Encinitas and spend some time with Jim and me. We hung out at the beach the next two days and went out each evening to enjoy live music. We said goodbye to Jim and she drove me back to her apartment in L.A. where I spent the night, with her taking me to the airport the following day.

I checked my surfboard and carried my bag and guitar onto the plane. The flight from LAX in the Pan Am Clipper took me north, over the North Pole, then south to the Orly airport in Paris. In those days, flying was a privilege and everyone dressed nicely for the trip. It seemed very luxurious to me. The meals were excellent, all served on china and eaten with real silver utensils, and the drinks were free. Sadly, that era of flight travel is long gone.

Upon disembarking from the plane in Paris and entering the airport, I found myself in the midst of total chaos. Tons of people were going everywhere and all were speaking in foreign languages. I made my way to the correct baggage carousel, collected my surfboard and joined the throng heading toward the airport exit. I stopped at the info booth before leaving the terminal and said I wanted to take a train to Biarritz. The counter girl showed me a map of Paris and pointed at four major train stations. She said I needed to leave from the one named Gare du Nord. There was a metro station outside the airport where I caught a train to Gare du Nord. I paid for a second-class ticket to Biarritz because I wasn’t planning to activate my Eurail Pass for a couple of months. When the train boarded, I found an empty compartment, wrangled my surfboard so that it rested across the two luggage racks up above, with my guitar and bag fitting snugly on top of the board. Then I settled down into one of the window seats.

While still getting comfortable, a beautiful blonde girl, who appeared to be about my age poked her head in the door and asked in accented English, “Is this compartment taken?”

“No,” I replied. “Come on in.”

I jumped up, took her bag and placed it in the overhead rack across from mine and she took the window seat facing me. Luckily, no one else entered our compartment. We introduced ourselves, shaking hands, as the train pulled out of the station. She said her name was Elisabet Tornberg, that she was a student at the University of Stockholm in Sweden, and was taking a one-month vacation in Biarritz.

As our conversation progressed, we became more and more comfortable with each other. At lunchtime, the porter came around with a food cart and we each bought sandwiches and shared a bottle of wine. Of course, that loosened the conversation even more and by the time we arrived in Biarritz in the late afternoon, we felt like we had already passed the “good-friend” stage into something a little more profound.

As we toted our gear off the train, she asked, “Do you have a hotel?”

I laughed. “No, I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

She suggested we take a cab together to her hotel and see if they had something available for me. We hailed a taxi which took us to the Port Vieux (Old Port) Hotel, which was on the promenade overlooking the Port Vieux beach. Luckily, they had a room and we agreed to meet at 7:00 on the hotel terrace for a welcoming cocktail and then go find a place to have dinner. This would give us plenty of time to rest a bit, shower and don fresh clothes.

At 7:00, we met, had a drink on the terrace and afterwards walked along the promenade to an open-air restaurant called Sel et Poivre (Salt and Pepper). As soon as we were seated, the waiter brought us a carafe of the house red wine and poured us each a glass. The sun was setting over the ocean and I was dizzily struck with a sense of déjà vu. After a few seconds, it hit me … I seemed to be re-enacting the scene in the surf movie where Mark and Keith were drinking wine with the beautiful French girls at the sidewalk café overlooking the Atlantic as the sun was setting. I had it almost exactly the same, and although the girl with me was not French, she was European … and very beautiful.

We had an exceptional meal of mussels steamed in white wine, along with boiled shrimp with risotto on the side. As we walked back to the hotel hand in hand, I was feeling thankful for all the incredible good fortune I’d had so far on this trip. Unfortunately, my mind had spoken too soon.

In the middle of the night, I awoke with chills and a high fever and could feel chest congestion coming on. I guessed I had picked up a bug on the plane. Elisabet and I were supposed to meet for breakfast but in the morning, I was too sick to even get out of bed. Around 10:00 a.m. there was a knock at my door and I dragged myself across the room to open it. Elisabet was standing there and could immediately tell I was in a bad way. I told her I felt like I had the flu and I needed to get back in the bed. Aside from being so ill, despondency had crept in as well, I guess as a result of being in such a helpless situation in a foreign country, and not being able to speak the language, and not knowing anyone who could help. But Elisabet turned out to be my Florence Nightingale. She showed back up at my room shortly and said she had been to a pharmacy. She made me take some pills and also gave me some cough syrup. She returned later with some soup and said I should try to eat something. I was feeling a little better later after taking the medicine so I was able to get some of the soup down which was delicious and lifted my spirits. For the next few days, Elisabet’s kind-hearted, tender care made me feel like I had my own private nurse. I’ve often thought about what might have happened if she hadn’t been there. She was a godsend, for sure.

On the sixth day I awoke feeling much better though still very weak. I was able to shower, get dressed and meet Elisabet on the terrace for a late breakfast. As we were finishing our meal, I noticed a car coming around the curve of the promenade with two surfboards on top. As the vehicle approached I could see the faces of the driver and passenger, and they were looking at me as well. Immediately, the driver slammed on the brakes as we realized we knew each other. It was Tom Adams and Ronny Ray, two Texas surfers and good friends of mine. They jumped out, leaving the car in the middle of the street with the doors open and ran over to our table. We exchanged handshakes and hugs and I introduced them to Elisabet, who received handshakes and hugs also. The guys said they’d be right back after finding a parking place.

I couldn’t believe it. What great timing, right when my spirits needed lifting after being bedridden for five days. My friends returned and ordered coffee and we caught up on each other’s travels. They had arrived a couple of weeks earlier and scored a beautiful old chateau right on the bluff overlooking the surf break in Hossegor, a small village just a 40-minute drive north of Biarritz. They said the chateau had an extra bedroom and I should come live with them, adding that the rent was super cheap and with three people splitting it, it would be even cheaper. The Port Vieux Hotel was way out of my budget and I definitely would have looked for a cheaper place if I hadn’t gotten sick. Elisabet had prepaid a month’s stay for her own room and had gotten a great rate. She could tell by looking at my face that I was torn between staying with her or going with my friends. After a few seconds, she touched my arm, looked into my eyes and said, “Clay, go stay with your friends. You can come visit me whenever you want and I can also come to Hossegor to visit you. It’s no problem.”

I asked, “Are you sure it’s okay?”

She said, “Of course. I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other.”

Tom and Ronny left to go surfing at Côte de Basques saying they would be back in two or three hours to pick me up. I had everything packed when they returned so I loaded up my gear, gave Elisabet a big hug and a long kiss, bidding a temporary adieu to her and Biarritz.

The road north to Hossegor, after leaving the suburbs of Biarritz, was rural, consisting mainly of pine forest and an occasional old farmhouse. Turning left at the sign for Hossegor, we soon passed through the tiny village and drove down to a smaller one-lane road that ran along the bluff overlooking sand dunes, the beach and the ocean. There were four chateaus on the beach side of the road and we drove up to the last one. The boys said, “Home sweet home.” I brought all my stuff in and they showed me to my room.

As I was unpacking, Tom hollered, “Clay, come check out the balcony!”

“Give me a minute,” I yelled back.

“No, man,” he said, “come right now!”

That aroused my curiosity so I went out to the balcony and stood beside him, looking down onto the beach as he was, and there were three girls lying there, topless. I thought to myself, Hmm … this is gonna be interesting!

I looked at Tom and asked, “Does this happen very often?”

He said, “Yeah, pretty much every day.”

“Oh really?  I think I could learn to like this place.”

He just laughed and I went back to settling in.

That night they took me out to the local restaurant- watering hole called the Bar Basque. Hossegor was just a small village at that time, but upon entering the Bar Basque and seeing it was wall-to-wall people, I figured it must either be the happening place in town, or was the only place in town. The atmosphere was good, the food and wine were excellent, and cheap. The people were friendly, the women were all beautiful and none of the three of us could speak French. Well, I did know one phrase: Voulez vous se coucher avec moi, c’est soir? Which means, for those who don’t know, Would you like to sleep with me tonight? I figured that line was not going to work until I came up with enough French to at least get me to that point. We ended up having a large time, celebrating my first night in Hossegor with beaucoup de vin rouge (a lot of red wine), and the good thing was our chateau was within crawling distance, which was probably how we got home. If we could just remember.

Wouldn’t you know it? The next morning, after waking late with severe hangovers, the surf was going off. From our balcony, the waves looked about 5- or 6-foot, the wind was blowing offshore, so we grabbed our boards and made our way down to the beach. On entering the shore break we realized it was way bigger than we’d estimated, maybe about 8-foot with some spitting barrels. We all took a few beatings until our hangovers wore off and then we started getting it wired. Whoa … super fun session.

That afternoon, the landlady came over to visit. She was elderly, petite, with short grey hair, green eyes and a warm smile. Ronny introduced her as Madame Granell, told her I was Clay, and went to the kitchen to make tea for all of us. We sat at the dining table in front of the French doors that opened onto the balcony, drank our tea and visited for 20 minutes or so. Mme Granell spoke to us in French the whole time as we nodded our heads and replied to her in English. She never understood a word we were saying, and vice versa. It was a little strange, but all in all, a nice visit.

After she left, Tom said, “If you want to write a letter to your folks, put the return address in care of Mme Granell, Hossegor, France. If you get a letter, she’ll bring it here.”

“That doesn’t sound like much of an address,” I told him.

“Yeah I know, but it works. We’ve been doing it and have received several letters from home.”

So the next day I walked up to the small post office in the village and mailed a letter. Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, Mme Granell came over with a letter from my mom. (Thanks, Mom. I can’t tell you how much that meant receiving a letter from home, being that far away and in a foreign country.)

A couple of days after our hangover session we headed back to Biarritz to surf some of the breaks around there. That time of year, September through November, is prime surf season on the Basque coast. The waves during this period are pumping and you can surf nearly every day. The two main breaks in Biarritz proper were the Grand Plage ─ in the center of town in front of the Grand Promenade and the casino ─ and the Côte des Basques. On this day, we headed for the Côte des Basques, which is a little further south of the Grand Plage. First, we stopped by the Port Vieux Hotel, found Elisabet and asked her to come with us. She was excited, quickly gathered her beach apparel and hopped in the car with us. We hung out on the Côte des Basques all day, surfing and relaxing on the beach. I even pushed Elisabet into a couple of waves and she stood up and surfed for her first time. In the late afternoon we walked to the public showers above the beach, rinsed off and changed into our street clothes. Tom and Ronny said they wanted to take us to a cool place to watch the sunset and later have dinner.

We drove along the winding road that took us to the top of the cliff which overlooks the whole Côte des Basques beach and the famous castle on the rocky promontory, Villa Belza (Black Villa, in the Basque language). We reached a restaurant called Le Steak House which turned out to be a favorite hangout for the surfing crowd. We ordered the house red wine to watch the sunset by and afterwards ate a seafood dinner. We met some local French surfers who spoke English and hung out with them drinking more red wine. (More red wine, you say? Hey, that’s what they do in France!)

We were all pretty tired from the long day so we dropped Elisabet off at her hotel, telling her we’d be back in two or three days and that we would like it if she would come back to Hossegor with us and spend a couple of days. She agreed. I kissed her goodnight and we made the drive back to Hossegor.

The next two and a half weeks seemed to go by quickly. You know how it is when you’re having fun. The days and nights were a blur: checking out a lot of surf breaks, exploring the surrounding countryside, hanging out at Bar Basque, Le Steak House, and various other venues, eating raw oysters at the central market in Biarritz and of course I was spending as much time as I could with Elisabet.

Her vacation was drawing to a close. She had said beforehand she wanted to spend her last night with me in Hossegor so the day before she was due to leave, she checked out of the Port Vieux Hotel and went with us back to Hossegor. We had a wonderful evening sharing a bottle of wine on our balcony as the sun set over the Atlantic. We all had a nice dinner at the Bar Basque but we didn’t stay long because she had an early train to catch the next morning. We said tearful goodbyes at the station and she gave me a piece of paper with her phone number on it, saying, “When you are doing your one-month tour of Europe with your Eurail Pass, please come see me in Stockholm.” I promised I would and she boarded the train. And just like that, she was gone.

That night, my friends thought they would cheer me up so they took me to the Rue Sainte-Catherine, which was a red-light district in the nearby town of Bayonne. We bar-hopped along the street until we found a place that we liked, and settled in for a while. The wine was cheap, the girls were beautiful and at one point Tom said, “Hey Clay, that girl over there keeps giving you the eye.”

I woefully replied, “Aw, you guys go have some fun and I’ll stay here and hold the table.” I did, however, drown my sorrows to the extent of their having to help me to the car at the end of the night.

My spirits finally lifted a couple of days later when we discovered the right point break at Lafitenia, about 8 miles south of Biarritz. Wow, what a wave.  It was far from where we lived in Hossegor but well worth the drive. There were rocks along the shore and point, and the bottom was all reef, so I also figured it would be a good dive spot when the surf went down, which it hadn’t the whole time I’d been there. The diving gear and spear I’d brought had been sitting in the closet of my bedroom since I’d arrived.

The surf finally did go way down. Tom and Ronny wanted to relax at the house but said I could take their car to go diving. As I was leaving, one of them said, “Don’t come home without dinner.”

I drove all the way to Lafitenia and found the water was clear and fairly calm. I donned my wetsuit, put on my mask and snorkel and waded into the water carrying my fins and spear. After getting my fins on, I swam out a ways and immediately spotted a school of silver fish that looked similar to sand trout swimming along the rocks. They were fast and skittish, however, and I was having trouble getting a bead on them. But the admonishment I had gotten from my housemates earlier motivated me into chasing those fish around for about three hours until I finally had three of them of fairly good size in my dive bag.

I was dog-tired but I wanted to reward myself for my perseverance so I made a pit stop at the central market in Biarritz for a dozen raw oysters and a glass of white wine. When I got home I walked in and threw the bag of fish into the kitchen sink, saying, “Here’s dinner, guys. Y’all clean ‘em and I’ll cook ‘em.”
Naturally, they razzed me and said, “Yeah, right … you bought these at the fish market.”

“Yeah, and then I poked those holes in them, too,” I replied.

It was all in good fun though, and they were full of compliments when I served up the fish broiled in a white-wine-and-butter sauce with sautéed veggies on the side.

A couple of days later, we were awakened in the night by the sound of the surf coming back up. By morning we could tell it was really big from the roar coming off the water. Some of the locals had told us of this mystical big wave spot at the end of the breakwater that was the entrance to the port of Capbreton, just south of our beach.

The break was called L’Epi Nord and the locals said it didn’t start breaking until the swell was 15-foot or bigger.  As the light of dawn got brighter we could see the waves breaking from our balcony. My heart was beating fast and my stomach was full of butterflies. All three of us sat there on the balcony without speaking as we watched these massive, perfect rights peeling off into the deep channel near the breakwater. There was no question that we were gonna go out. Of course we were. We were from Texas.

We got our boards and walked down to the beach. The shore break was about 8- to 10-foot high and we knew we had to time it perfectly if we had any chance of getting through it. We watched for a long time until there was sort of a lull and we made our move. Miraculously, all three of us got through the shore break and the rest of the paddle was long but easy in the channel near the breakwater. Passing the end of the breakwater, we all paddled over to the peak. I didn’t want to give myself time to let my nerves get the best of me so when a set came, I turned and paddled to catch the first wave. I made the wave all the way to the channel and as I was paddling back out I saw both Ronny and Tom each get a wave, but after they dropped in I couldn’t see them anymore. In fact, after that we were so spread out and there was so much spray in the air that we never saw each other again for the rest of the session.

After riding my first wave, I had an adrenaline high and my confidence had risen. So I decided to wait for one that was bigger. There was a lot of current and the break was so far out to sea that it was extremely difficult to get lined up right and stay at the peak. When the conditions are like that, you end up burning a lot of energy paddling around trying to stay in position while at the same time keeping an eye on the horizon so you don’t get caught in a clean-up set. After lengthy maneuvering, I caught a wave that was a few feet bigger than my first one and I made that one, too. As I was paddling back out, I was feeling a little cocky, thinking I was getting this break wired. Big mistake. Any time you start to think like that, it never fails. Mother Ocean will immediately show you that no matter how skilled you are or how confident you are, She is still the boss.

As soon as I got to my feet on my third and biggest wave, I realized I was definitely not gonna make it. I got totally crushed by the lip and once underwater I was thrashed like a rag doll in a pit bull’s mouth. I had taken a good breath though so I just took my beating for what seemed like ages and waited until I popped up to the surface. The surf leash hadn’t been invented yet so my board was long gone. It was a tedious swim through the heavy surf and when I got to the shore break I had to make a huge effort to arrive at the beach without getting body slammed. Somehow, I got there safely but realized the current had pulled me about a mile and a half north of our house. So on top of everything else, I still had a long walk back. I found my board on the beach though, and luckily it was still in one piece.

Ronny and Tom were waiting back at the house and as we compared notes, we found our sessions were similar, each of us catching two or three waves and then having a long swim in. As it turned out, no one else went out that day so we privately prided ourselves on our efforts. Unbeknownst to us, some of the locals had been watching us from the bluff and that night at the Bar Basque, as soon as our wine glasses were empty, someone paid for our refills. (If it seems like we are drinking a lot of wine in this part of the story, it is because we were. The French drink wine, folks. It’s just what they do. And when in Rome … !)

A couple of days later we were surfing out behind the chateau and ran into our good friend Mike Tabeling, one of the more well-known East Coast surfers from Florida. We’d all met him a few years back when the East Coast guys would come to Texas for the surf contests.

Twice we invited him over for dinner and both times he brought contributions for the meal. The first time he brought two bottles of wine and the second time he showed up with a bag of artichokes. The three of us had never eaten an artichoke before but Mike assured us they were delicious and we would love them. He trimmed the leaves, steamed the artichokes until they were tender, made a simple dipping sauce of butter and freshly squeezed lime juice and proved himself right. I’ve been hooked on artichokes ever since.

One day after surfing all morning and finishing a big lunch, I plopped down on the couch with a book and soon drifted off to sleep. I’m not sure how much later it was when voices in the room woke me up. I slowly pulled myself out of a dream and could see Tom and Ronny talking with Mike Tabeling and another guy. Opening my eyes wider I realized the other guy was Miki Dora. I sat up and Tom said, “Sorry if we woke you. Go get a glass and join us.”

They had a bottle of wine on the table and when I returned from the kitchen they filled my glass. Mike said, “Hey, Miki, this is Clay Blaker.” Miki stuck out his hand and said, “Nice to meet you.” I gave him mine and said, “It’s a pleasure, but we’ve met before.”

After a firm handshake, Miki looked surprised and asked, “When was it? I don’t remember meeting you.”

So I told everyone of the day at K-38 in Baja a few years ago. We all had a good laugh at the part where Gloria pulled out the button with BULLSHIT on it, including Miki, who said, “I remember that day well.”

We talked and drank wine the rest of the afternoon, hearing many great Miki Dora stories until Mike and Miki said their goodbyes and left. Tom, Ronny and I were in such a great mood we went out for an evening session and all caught some nice waves, to cap off a memorable day. We did get to hang out and surf a few more times with Mike Tabeling before he split for Morocco.

The weeks passed and soon we were into late-November. The air and water temperatures were getting too cold for me so I decided it was time to get on the road or rather, the rails.  It was time to activate my Eurail Pass and go see some more of Europe.

The next day I sold my board to a Hossegor local for 600 francs (about $120 back then). I also gave him my Hawaiian sling spear and he was stoked. I was glad to get the money although I still had a few traveler’s checks to get me around.

The next morning, Tom and Ronny took me to the train station in Biarritz. The three of us had become close in the last two months we’d lived together at the chateau. They had been about the best housemates and traveling companions anyone could ever hope for: decent guys, salt-of-the-earth Texans, and having that special relationship real surfers share with each other in regards to respect and love of the ocean.

I’ve always hated goodbyes, and I think they felt the same. So we quickly gave each other bear hugs, said a few words … they got back in the car and drove off.

I activated my Eurail Pass at the ticket counter and for the next month, Europe was open to me. I could hop on any train without having to go to a ticket window, find myself a good seat and show my pass to a conductor when one came around. This was going to be fun.

I caught the next train heading for San Sebastian, a coastal town just across the French border. Tom, Ronny and I had visited there a couple of times to surf the nearby beach breaks and to sample the Spanish cuisine. I changed some francs into pesetas at the money exchange counter in the station, then set off to find the arrivals/departures board. I’d decided that my first destination would be Lisbon, Portugal. There was a fold-out map in my “Europe on $5 a Day” guide and I had tentatively planned a loose, circuitous route around the continent, knowing that at any given time, circumstances could lead me to change directions. That’s the way my family had always traveled in Mexico and it was fully ingrained in me.

I saw there was a direct train leaving for Lisbon in an hour and another one leaving that evening at 7, which would arrive in Lisbon early the next morning. Hmm, I thought, if I take the overnight train, I can save on a hotel room tonight and just sleep on the train. It would be a trade-off though. Traveling this way would mean missing a lot of scenery. Being on a very tight budget, I traded the scenery for the cash and as it turned out, I would use this strategy often.

Deciding on the night train meant I had a bit of time to kill, so I decided to go sightseeing, which for me always meant checking out the surf if I was anywhere near the ocean. I checked my bag and guitar at the baggage window and set off on the mile-or-so walk through the city to the waterfront at Concha Bay. The huge bay was protected at each end by headlands so there were no waves. Too bad. I love to watch waves. I can sit and watch waves for hours. To me, it’s mesmerizing and has a calming effect on my disposition. (I get nearly the same feeling when staring into a campfire.)

Tourist season was over but I found a café on the water that was open, so I sat in there a while nursing a couple of beers. I could see some old ruins on top of the headland on the west side of the bay so I decided to hike up there and check it out. It turned out to be an old fort from the 1500s that still had a few cannons lining the parapets.

I went back to the café, had one more beer, and then meandered through the streets looking for a market. I found a quaint one and bought a fresh loaf of bread, a big hunk of cheese and a sausage that was about a foot long. I had my Swiss army knife in my pocket that had a bottle opener, a corkscrew, a knife for slicing anything, and a toothpick. What else would I need? Oh, my leather bota bag, or wineskin, which I’d bought in Hossegor and had filled with wine this morning. It was in my bag at the train station. I figured I was all set so I headed for the train station.

I retrieved my guitar and bag from the guy at the baggage window and checked the departures board to see which platform my train would be leaving from. The trains all had a small sign next to the door of each car with the name of its final destination, so nobody would be getting on the wrong train (unless they couldn’t read). The train cars had an aisle that ran the entire length of the car on the side where the entry doors were. Individual compartments ran the length of the car on the opposite side. The compartments were roomy, with six seats, three on each side facing each other. Each seat had a small tray table like on airplanes, only smaller. Also, each seat could be pulled out and laid flat so two seats would make into one bed that you could stretch out on across the compartment. You could only use that feature if there were three or less people in the compartment. Above the seats were luggage racks. If the racks were full, you’d have to check your bags in the luggage car. I always tried to board a train early in order to have space for my bag and guitar and also to get a window seat. I would soon find that at that time of year, riding on the night trains, I could almost always find an empty compartment so I could lay the seats down and go to sleep.

I boarded the train to Lisbon, found an empty compartment and settled in for the first leg of a long journey. As it turned out, nobody entered my compartment. Once the train started moving, I closed the door, pulled out my guitar and played for a while. Later I broke out the bread, sausage, cheese and wineskin and had my dinner. I played my guitar a bit more until I could hardly keep my eyes open. I stashed the guitar back up top, pulled the two window seats out flat and sacked out. The next thing I remember was the conductor opening the door and announcing, “Lisbon.” I also realized it was daylight.

On exiting the train station, I was immediately stunned by the beauty of the old city spread out before me. I know almost nothing about architecture so I don’t know how to describe it in those terms. The sun was up and hitting the buildings at a sharp angle, giving texture and shading that made me feel like I was standing in the middle of an old Renaissance painting. I could see the ocean in the distance so I headed in that direction. At a small store, I bought a bottle of water and continued on until I reached the street that ran along the waterfront. I found an empty bench facing the sea and made myself a breakfast of bread, cheese, sausage and water. There was no surf there as it was a protected harbor, so I just sat and watched the fishing boats come and go as I further planned my strategy for the trip.

My guidebook listed hotels, restaurants, points of interest, landmarks, museums and other sites worth seeing in every major city in Europe as well as notable smaller towns. The cheapest places to stay were usually the pensions and youth hostels. All the ones in the book had been checked out personally and recommended as being safe and clean. Also, back in those days, the dollar was very high and the cost of living in Europe was very low. So you really could live on five dollars a day. You sure can’t do that now … not even close. In looking back, I feel very fortunate to have experienced Europe during that time frame.

Having satisfied my hunger, I struck out to search for a room. As I would soon find out, the cheaper places were usually located in areas surrounding the train stations. That helped with my plan of getting a room as quickly as possible after arriving in a new place, stashing my stuff and hitting the pavement. I would spend the night in that particular town and sightsee again the next day before hopping on the night train to my next destination. That way I’d have only to pay one night in a hotel, have two days of exploring and then sleep on the train the next night for free. My plan was coming together nicely but I decided early on to be flexible. If I liked a certain area a lot or hadn’t had the time to see everything I wanted to see, I would stay another night, or maybe longer if I had fallen into something really good.

I found a room in one of the pensions that was in the guide book and the rate was two bucks a night. That left me with three bucks to spend on food and drinks on my five-dollar-a-day budget. And I still had some bread, cheese, sausage and wine left so I was starting to feel like a king. The room was small with a single bed, a small table and chair, and a sink. In most all the old hotels in Europe (I soon discovered) the bathrooms and showers were at the end of the hallway to be used by everyone on that floor. It took some getting used to, but after a while I was comfortable with it. In some of the youth hostels I stayed at later, they had a large communal shower with maybe 8 or 10 shower heads and sometimes there were girls and guys showering together. I was comfortable with that right off the bat.

The port of Lisbon is one of the oldest in Europe as it was the city the Portuguese galleons set sail from in the Middle Ages to go out and conquer the world. There were lots of things I wanted to see so I set out on foot from the hotel. It didn’t take me long to discover that unlike the cities in the U.S., Lisbon was compact and you could easily get around by walking. I would come to find out that most European cities were the same, which ended up saving me a lot of money by not having to use taxis, buses or subways. In places where I did use public transportation, it also turned out to be cheap, but I figured that by walking everywhere I’d save enough money to afford a second glass of wine with my evening meal.

Every city and town has its own unique things to see and you can cover a lot of ground in two days. But I did have a couple of prerequisites for every stop of my journey. First, a castle or a good museum in the area was a guaranteed must-see. The second thing was that after every evening meal, I had to go find a venue that had live, local music.

So that day, I hiked up to Sao Jorge Castle, which was built by the Moors during the medieval period. It was situated on a high hilltop overlooking the whole city, the harbor and the bay beyond. The view itself was nothing short of breathtaking but being inside the castle was like going back in a time machine. Seeing all the medieval furnishings, suits of armor, swords, spears, artwork and everything else from that historical period was an eye-opener as to how advanced a civilization they were. And that experience was further reinforced later in the afternoon when I toured the National Museum of Ancient Art. Their collections included paintings, sculptures, metalwork, textiles, furniture, drawings, and other art forms from the middle ages to the early 19th century. On leaving the museum, I realized that this journey I had just embarked on a day earlier was turning out to be way more educational and exciting than I imagined or hoped it would be.

That evening, after resting a while in my room, I wound up again on the waterfront, meandering along, looking for an interesting place to eat dinner. After passing several restaurants, bars and bistros, I happened upon a place with a big plate-glass window where many passersby stood to watch a chef inside using a huge paddle to stir what looked to be like a ton of food in a giant pan set over gas burners. I could see rice, shrimp, mussels, and identified a few of the vegetables as onions and peppers. Whatever it was, it looked delicious and sniffing it from the street was all I needed to enter the restaurant. I walked over to the chef, and while keeping a respectful distance, watched as he added chopped garlic, various fresh herbs and spices from jars. I didn’t know a word of Portuguese but on getting the chef’s attention, I pointed at the big pan and held my palms up as I shrugged, in the universal gesture, “What is that?”

He answered, “Paella.”

I’d heard of the dish but had never tried it, so I found a small table in the corner and sat down. A waiter immediately appeared, placing a bowl of olives, a half-carafe of house wine and a wine glass on my table. I hadn’t even said anything. (As my journey progressed I found this to be a common practice in many restaurants in Portugal, Spain, France and Italy.) The waiter returned shortly with a menu, but I shook my head, “No,” and pointed to the pan by the window and said, “Paella.” The waiter gave me a big grin and a thumbs-up. I was served such a huge portion I almost couldn’t finish it all. But I did, and it was delicious. Cheap, too … only a few escudos, wine included. Fully satisfied, I set off looking for some live music.

I had read in the Frommers guidebook on the way to Lisbon that the most important thing to do in Portugal is to go out and hear live Fado music, which is considered a window into the soul of the Portuguese. It is renowned for its haunting and profoundly melancholy melodies, sung with so much passion that you can understand the message without knowing the words’ meanings. I wandered around the streets until I found a group of people around my own age and asked them where there was a good place to hear live Fado music. They spoke no English but recognized the word Fado and motioned for me to come with them. We walked a couple of blocks and turned up a side street, then went a couple of more blocks before entering a small smoke-filled club that was packed. I thanked the group for bringing me there and they went back out in the night to pursue their own adventures.

I found some standing room at the bar, ordered a glass of wine and checked out the place. The stage was empty but everyone seemed to be anticipating some action. After about 15 minutes a female singer accompanied by a male guitarist and another guy playing a stringed instrument (which I had never seen before) took the stage and the room got quiet. When they started their show, the music was so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes. Feeling slightly embarrassed, I glanced around and saw tears running down the faces of many others, so I knew it was okay to let my emotions run free. This Fado music touched me so deeply that by the end of the show I changed my plan of leaving the next day for Madrid and ended up staying there two more days just to hear more Fado singers perform. I could have stayed longer just for the music, but after three days in Lisbon without meeting a single person who spoke English, coupled with my still not understanding a word of Portuguese (except Fado), I decided it was time to move on. (For some reason, Portuguese is a very difficult language for me. I’m fairly good at picking up the basics of a few languages. Spanish, German, French and Italian are not too hard to learn or at least understand. But Portuguese …! It looks similar to Spanish in print, but when I hear it, it sounds like Chinese.) Oh well. It was time for me to go to Madrid.

Sticking with my money-saving plan, I caught the night train to Spain’s capital city. I found a compartment all to myself, closed the door and sacked out. I slept like a log until the conductor woke me the next morning as we entered the central station. I gathered my things, exited the train and station, and set out to look for some of the hotels recommended in the guidebook. Most of them were near the station, as usual, so I settled on one called Pension Central.

One very cool thing about Europe is that breakfast is included with the price of the room in pretty much every hotel. Breakfast is usually served from 7:00 until 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning, buffet-style, and was similar all over Europe: Soft-boiled eggs, various types of bread, sliced ham and other cold cuts, cheeses, jams and marmalades, fresh fruit, cereals and milk, orange juice, hot tea and coffee. I fell in love with the “Continental Breakfast” menu back then, and many mornings, even today, that’s pretty much my fare.

After breakfast, I showered, changed clothes and set off on foot to explore the city. Being that Madrid is not close to the ocean I couldn’t go check the surf, so I followed the guidebook’s map of the city to the Prado Museum. The book noted that the Prado was one of the top museums in the world, rivaled only by the Louvre in Paris. After spending the whole day there, I would have to agree. The paintings by Francisco Goya and El Greco were my favorites but after a few hours of viewing artworks in one of the greatest collections in the world, I realized I had sensory overload. It was just too much to absorb in one afternoon.

I also realized I was extremely hungry and thirsty so I went off in search of a store. After a short walk, I found a small market that was loaded with all my preferred meal items: bread, cheese and sausage. While these items varied from city or province or country in size, color, taste and texture, I never got tired of eating this basic meal. I bought enough for a simple meal and carried my purchase down the street until I found a neighborhood park. I looked for a shady spot, sat down and feasted. After a short rest, I strolled around downtown to check out the old buildings and the architecture. On one street corner, I noticed a poster advertising a bullfight scheduled for the following day. I had never been to a bullfight before but I had read Hemingway’s novels “The Sun Also Rises” and “Death in the Afternoon,” which painted bullfighting as a romantic, though dangerous, sport. The poster said that El Cordobes would be the featured matador, and though I didn’t know much about bullfighting, I knew he was recognized as the most famous matador in the world at that time. Obviously, this was fate, and I realized this was something I could not miss.

The next day I walked to the Plaza del Toros in downtown Madrid and asked for a ticket for the bullfight. I was asked if I wanted Sol or Sombra (Sun or Shade section … and of course, Sombra would be much more costly). Being a surfer with a dark tan and traveling on a tight budget, I was happy with a seat in the Sol. I also had filled my wineskin with the house red wine at the hotel earlier and had brought it along on the advice of the hotel manager.

The bullfights started with a parade around the bullring led by the banderilleros, the picadors on their horses, and grandly followed by the brave matadors, while the band played loud, majestic bullfighting songs. I was immediately caught up in the emotions of the crowd and was soon carried away by the whole spectacle.

The first couple of bulls were fought by the young undercard matadors and it was easy to tell they were inexperienced. El Cordobes would fight three bulls that day and from his first moment in the ring, I knew he was on a different level than the earlier matadors. His artistry, finesse and courage brought the crowd to their feet, never to sit down again during his performances. (It reminded me of the time I got to see Sandy Koufax pitch for the Dodgers at the old Colts’ stadium in Houston, being apparent that I was witnessing something extraordinary.)

Bullfighting is definitely not for the faint-of-heart. It’s bloody, and not just on the bulls’ part. One of the early matadors was gored in a leg and was carried out with his white pants having turned crimson. To his credit, El Cordobes let one of his bulls live at the end of the fight.

Although I did enjoy the pageantry, the music, the courage and artistry of the matadors, and understood the historical and cultural significance of bullfighting to Spain, I’ve never had the desire to attend another such event. I was secretly rooting for the bulls the whole time.

I returned to the Pension Central, checked out, walked to the train station and hopped on the night train to Barcelona.

(Side note: After writing this passage I googled Manuel Benitez “El Cordobes,”and was pleasantly surprised to read  that although it was 48 years ago when I saw him fighting those bulls, he is alive and well, residing in Palma del Rio, Spain, at the age of 83.)

After a good night’s sleep I awoke at daylight as the train was approaching Barcelona. From the plateau above the city I could see the Mediterranean Sea off in the distance and noticed a lot of whitewater along the shore. Not expecting to see surf on the Mediterranean, I was excited and quickly found a hostel within a couple of blocks from the station, stashed my gear in the room and walked to the beach.

Approaching the waterfront, I realized the wind was howling onshore around 20 to 30 knots. As I emerged onto the boulevard that ran along the shore I could see waves breaking about three-fourths of a mile offshore. It was all beach-break and looked very similar to a huge day on the Texas coast. I would say the waves that were breaking way outside had to have been 8- to 10-feet on the face. Although it would have been brutal paddling out, if I had my board (that I’d sold in France before starting out on this Eurail adventure), I would have loved giving it a go. Oh well. It was thrilling in itself to see waves that size on the Mediterranean. I walked back to the hostel. I ate some bread, cheese and sausage then set out to explore Barcelona.

The shoes that I’d been wearing since I left Maui were falling apart. I read in my guidebook that Barcelona was famous for its leather goods so I followed the map in the book to an area that had stores selling everything leather. I walked into one shop that advertised “Custom-Made Boots and Shoes” and said I wanted some boots. The shoemaker measured my feet, showed me some different styles and I chose a suede boot that was similar to chukka boots. He said to come back the next day and the boots would be ready.

That night I ate some good seafood near my hotel and then went looking for some live music. I didn’t have to go far. In the first block I heard some incredible guitar music coming out of a club’s window. It turned out to be a private flamenco club that was only open to members. I explained to the guy at the door that I was a guitar player visiting Barcelona for the first time from the U.S. and he let me in. I entered a smoky, dimly lit venue with an old wooden bar taking up the whole length of one side of the club. Onstage were two guitarists playing gut-string guitars and a woman dancing with castanets taking care of the percussion. Some members of the club invited me to share their table and from that moment on treated me like I was a long-lost friend. I never had to buy a drink the whole night and later on, when platters of shrimp and squid were served, they told me to dig in. It was a fabulous night of music, dance, wine, cuisine and fellowship. After many hugs and long goodbyes, I stumbled back to the hostel and zonked out … one happy man.

The next morning I scarfed down a big breakfast then walked back down to look at the surf. It was still big, though not quite as big as the day before, and the wind was still onshore but not as strong.

I headed for the leather shop to see if my boots were ready, and they were. They looked great and I tried them on, finding they fit perfectly. The suede leather was soft, the tops came up just over my ankles and the shoes had tough rubber walking soles. Those boots ended up lasting me many years. If I ever make it back to Barcelona, I’ll definitely get another pair made.

I spent the rest of the afternoon at a maritime museum that was, as they all are, informative and interesting. Walking back to the hostel, I stopped at a market and bought some fresh bread, a big hunk of goat cheese and another spicy smoked sausage. I took a shower, changed shirts, checked out of the hostel and headed for the train station. On the departure board, I saw a train leaving soon for Nice, France, and I went to that platform to wait. On boarding, I found a compartment to myself, stowed my gear, and as soon as the train left the station, I shut the door. I got my guitar out of the case and started playing some songs. A while later an attractive blonde about my age slid my door open and said, “Hi, I’m in the next compartment and could hear you playing. You sound really good. Can I join you?”

I said, “Of course. Come on in.”

She came in, closed the door and sat down on the seat facing mine, saying, “I’m sorry I interrupted you. Please keep playing.”

I played a few more songs and was just finishing one when a porter with the food cart came by asking if we wanted sandwiches or beverages. I set my guitar down and told the girl I had plenty of food for both of us but we should get some wine from the cart. She said she would buy us a bottle and I gave her a few pesetas saying, “Get two.”

After the porter left, she said, “I guess we should introduce ourselves. I’m Dolly de Leuwe.”

“Clay Blaker,” I said, shaking her hand. “Are you hungry?”

She said she was, so I drew the bread, cheese and sausage out of my bag, pulled my Swiss army knife out of the front pocket of my jeans and using the corkscrew, opened a bottle of wine. I opened the large blade of the knife and sliced the bread, cheese and meat and made us a couple of sandwiches. As we ate and sipped our wine, we continued to get acquainted.

She lived in New York City, her family having emigrated to the U.S. from Holland. She was on the last leg of a month-long trip around Europe, pretty much traveling like I was. She said she would be flying back to New York from Paris in two days but wanted to spend a day in Nice before taking the night train to Paris.

When our dinner was over, she asked if I would play some more songs, so I did. At some point, we realized the night was so bright outside there must be a full moon. I put away my guitar and we stepped into the corridor to gaze out the window. We were traveling along the coast and with the moonlight reflecting off the water, it seemed bright as day. We were passing rocky coves and points and the surf was going off. I could tell by the spray showering from the breaking waves that the wind was now blowing offshore. I can’t tell you how many places we passed where the waves were reeling around a point that looked as good as Rincon or Malibu. We both were mesmerized.

We opened the second bottle of wine and then opened the window we’d been standing by. It was cold outside, but not as cold as most of the continent was at this time of year, thanks to the warmth of the Mediterranean.

What a beautiful evening. It was one of those “two ships passing in the night” moments. The full moon, the waves, the cold salty air, the wine, the conversation … all conspired to make us feel connected at the heart. As the train rolled on towards Nice we leaned against the windowsill, my arms wrapped around her as we watched the scenery in the moonlight, occasionally engaging in nonverbal communication. We stayed awake the whole night, noticing that the waves were diminishing the closer we got to Nice, but our spirits were still high.

Arriving in Nice, we found a hotel near the station and only one block from the sea. We checked in, stowed our bags and went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. Afterwards, we took showers, changed clothes and left to go exploring. Still on a high from the night on the train, we didn’t need to rest at all. We just wanted to experience Nice.

We walked hand in hand down the Promenade des Anglais , the popular 7-km walkway along Nice’s waterfront, passing many 17th- and 18th-century buildings as we went. At some point we decided to head inland to find the Matisse Museum. We got lost in the maze of narrow streets but didn’t care as we were just enjoying being with each other. Eventually though, we hailed a cab and had the driver take us to the museum. It was housed in an old and beautiful 17th-century villa and featured the works of Henri Matisse, who lived and created his masterpieces in Nice for the greater part of his life. It was an extensive collection, mostly donated by Matisse himself. After wandering around in there for two or three hours, admiring all the artwork, we realized it was getting late so headed back to the hotel.

By this time we were starting to feel the effects of an extreme lack of sleep so we asked the hotel clerk to tap on our door at 6 p.m. to wake us up. (Back in those days there were no phones in the rooms unless you were staying at the Palais Royal, which our hotel definitely was not.) After being woken, we got Dolly’s bags together and carried them to the train station. We found her platform to Paris and waited a short time for the bell to ring announcing her train’s departure. We didn’t speak much, but were both sad about the imminent separation. When the signal came, we embraced once more, gazed in each other’s eyes briefly, then she turned and boarded the train. She stood in the corridor waving at me as the train pulled away, and as it turned out, I never saw her again. We stayed in touch for a couple of years by mail but gradually our letters tapered off until we lost touch. I had a sad, melancholy walk back to the hotel and didn’t even want to eat or go listen to music. So I crashed and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

The next day was beautiful and sunny so immediately after breakfast I walked to the Promenade des Anglais, crossed it and took a flight of stairs down to the beach. I was so lonely that I just needed to get in the water. Mother Ocean has always had a way to lift my spirits and right then I needed her. I took off my boots and socks, rolled my pants legs up and waded out into the water. People up on the Promenade were staring at me as it was early December and there was nobody else on the beach. Whew, the water was cold at first, but I soon got used to it and enjoyed walking around on the gravel bottom with water so crystal clear you could see every pebble. Sure enough, after a while I was feeling much better and walked back to the beach and up the stairs to a bench where I put my socks and boots back on. While sitting on the bench looking out to sea and contemplating what the day would bring, I made the decision to check out of the hotel and take a day train to Rome. Rome … the Eternal City.

I hadn’t taken a day train yet on my trip so I was looking forward to seeing the scenery.  I wasn’t disappointed. The train pretty much followed the coastline from Nice to Rome and the vistas were spectacular. I arrived in Rome in the early evening and once again found a clean but cheap pension near the train station. My room was small but very nice, and not really sure what my next move was, I got out my guitar and started playing some songs. At one point I heard the door open and close to the room next to mine, and heard footsteps as someone was walking around in there. There was an air vent high up on the wall between our two rooms. I kept playing a few more songs and then decided to go look for some food. Right then, a female voice with accented English came through the vent, “Please don’t stop. I love your singing.” I was a bit taken aback but said, “Okay,” and played another song. The voice said “That was lovely.” And we started conversing through the vent. I realized how ridiculous that was and said, “Hey, why don’t you come over here so we can look at each other while we talk.” I heard her walk to her door and open it and I got up and opened mine.

She was exactly how I had pictured an Italian girl in my mind. She was wearing a black dress, had long black hair and either very dark brown or black eyes, a long beautiful face with very full lips and long eyelashes. She spoke perfect English and we introduced ourselves.

(I have to interrupt this story to make a confession. For the life of me I can’t remember her name.  I can picture her perfectly and recall all the details of our encounter and adventures but her name is just gone. For this story’s sake, I am going to call her Gina.)

After some light conversation, Gina asked if I had eaten dinner yet. I confessed I’d just been about to leave my room and go to dinner when she had asked me not to stop playing.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” she said. “Then this should be my treat!” She told me she knew of a place nearby that was cheap but had excellent food. She had just come back to her room from her day job and needed 15 minutes to change into something more leisurely and freshen up. I showered and changed clothes also and we met in the hall to set out for the restaurant a few blocks away. It was a typical trattoria, and as soon as we were seated, a waiter came to our table placing a bowl of olives, two glasses and a carafe of red wine between us.

“I come here quite often,” Gina said. “Would you like for me to order for us both? Trattorias usually do not have menus but I know the dishes and can order several for us.”

I told her that would be fine with me. After she gave an order to the waiter, we filled our wine glasses from the carafe and toasted each other. The wine was dry and much different from the house wines I had been drinking in France.

“This wine is really good,” I remarked.  “What kind is it?”

“Chianti, of course,” she replied.

And, of course, we ended up drinking copious amounts of Chianti the next three days. When in Rome …(I really was in Rome!)

While we were enjoying antipasti, bruschetta, and several other tasty dishes, we became more acquainted. She told me she had a good job working in the garment industry and had a monthly, long-term rate at the hotel. At one point in the conversation, she paused and said, “I must tell you … I am a Communist.”

I kind of chortled, thinking she was joking.

Frowning slightly, she said, “No, I am serious. I’m a member of the Italian Communist Party.” She started to tell me her political philosophy, but with the U.S. having gone through the Cuban Missile Crisis and still going through the cold war with Russia, I interrupted politely and said, “You know, Gina, it might be better if we keep our politics to ourselves.”

She agreed and we started talking about more important things. Like, what were we going to do next?

“Since you are a singer,” she suggested, “we should go to a place that features Italian folk singers.”

I told her that sounded perfect to me.

When the waiter brought the check, she insisted on paying … and since my funds were starting to run low, I let her. As it turned out, she ended up paying for everything during my stay in Rome, except for my hotel room. There were several times that I argued with her, insisting that I pay but she absolutely refused. I think she was trying hard to show me that Communists are not bad people. Well, she succeeded, at least in regards to herself. She ended up being a fascinating companion and guide while I was in Rome. Ah, but I am getting ahead of myself.

The music club we went to was intimate, with a funky down-home feel. The acoustic music was very good, even though I couldn’t understand a word they were singing. And the Chianti flowed freely. When the musicians played their last song, I suddenly realized I was exhausted so I suggested we get back to the hotel.

When we arrived at the doors to our rooms, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. There was an awkward moment, and then she said, “I can take off from work as long as I want and I’d love to show you Rome.”

I couldn’t turn down an offer like that so I said, “That would be incredible.”

“Okay, meet me downstairs for breakfast at 9:00 and we’ll take it from there.” She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, said, “Goodnight, sleep well,” and entered her room. Back in my own room, I think I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

The next morning we met for our free buffet breakfast and after stuffing ourselves I told her I needed to do some laundry.

She said, “No problem. Set your laundry out in front of your door, notify them at the front desk and when we come back later it will be in your room, clean and neatly folded.” So I did as she said and we left the hotel. In the street, she asked, “What would you like to go see first?”

I said, “Hey, I’m following you. Just surprise me.”

“Okay then, I’ll take you to see my absolute favorite thing in all of Rome.” We walked to the nearest bus stop, waited a couple of minutes, and boarded a bus for an unknown destination. After a few bus changes, we disembarked outside a big wall with a sign at the entrance to the enclave inside that said “Vatican City.” Come to find out, the Vatican City is actually the world’s smallest country, co-existing with Italy by way of a treaty that was signed in the 1800s. I thought that was pretty cool. It made me want to start my own country. I still might someday.

She led me to the Sistine Chapel where we viewed the famous painting on the ceiling by Michelangelo. It was breathtakingly beautiful and I immediately knew why it was her favorite thing to see in Rome. It was hard to put into words so we just stood hand in hand, gazing upward for an interminable period, trying to take it all in. That is, until my neck got tired. We left and wandered through St. Peter’s Basilica and then out with the throngs of people gathered in the Vatican courtyard, hoping the Pope would make an appearance on his balcony. He didn’t.

We walked out and hopped on another bus heading back in the direction of the hotel. When asked what I would like to do next I told her I would like to check out the closest beach. We switched from the bus to a tram which took us to the coast, about 30 minutes away. The beach was called Coccia di Morto and there was no surf. I remember it as a sandy beach with lots of trash and the water was off-color. It was not very appealing, but I was still happy to see the ocean. We decided to walk down the street and look for a place to eat and soon came across a small cozy restaurant that we hoped had some good seafood.

As usual, as soon as we sat down a waiter appeared with a bowl of olives and a decanter of Chianti. I love this custom and wish it would happen everywhere. She ordered fish and I asked for octopus. It was my first time to eat Italian-style octopus and it was out of this world.

The afternoon was late when we arrived back at the hotel so we both decided to rest a while and then freshen up to go out later. It was after 10:00 when we left the hotel, but due to our late lunch neither of us was starving yet. She said she knew of a great jazz club that also had pretty good food. At the time I wasn’t that much of a jazz fan but I can appreciate any style of music if it is played well. The small combo was hot, playing a mixture of Django Reinhardt-style swing, and the food turned out to be excellent.

When the band quit we headed back to the hotel and once again at our doors we had that awkward pause until she said, “Would you like for me to take you to more places tomorrow?”

I said, “Of course.” Once again she kissed me politely on the cheek and said, “See you at breakfast.”

A short while later I heard her voice coming through the vent. “Clay, would you mind singing me to sleep?”

I said, “No, not at all.” I got my guitar out and played a few slow, softly sung ballads. I was starting to drift off myself, so after whispering “Good night,” and receiving no answer, I put my guitar away and fell fast asleep .

We had another great (free) breakfast the next morning and the day, night and following day were pretty much a jumble of sightseeing, eating, drinking and listening to live music. We saw everything one needs to see in Rome, including the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain. And yes, like the old song, I did throw three coins in the fountain and made my wishes. I‘m pretty sure one was that I would get more than a kiss on the cheek when we got back to the hotel, but that didn’t happen. Our relationship remained platonic the whole time I was in Rome. No complaints though, as I couldn’t have asked for a better companion and guide, even if she was a Communist.  It was a fabulous time and she even asked me to sing her to sleep again those last two nights.

We met again at breakfast and I told her it was time for me to be moving on. After dining I went to my room, packed and took the stairs back down to the lobby to check out. She was waiting there and said she’d like to accompany me to the train station. I told her that would be wonderful.

The departures board at the station showed a train would be leaving for Venice in ten minutes. Good timing, as that was where I wanted to go. We found my platform and made some small talk while waiting for the call to board. I thanked her profusely for being so nice to me and we swore we’d stay in touch. We hugged and then she gave me a last kiss on the cheek and I stepped onto the train. I turned and watched her walk away but she never looked back. And that was the last time I ever saw her. Sadly, we did not stay in touch.

I found an empty compartment, stashed my gear up in the rack and settled into a window seat, looking forward to the scenery on the way to Venice. Again, I was not disappointed. The countryside was absolutely stunning, especially the Province of Tuscany. I probably should have gotten off the train there but I was starting to think about Elisabet a lot. I was running out of time and money, and I needed to be home in Maui by Christmas. Tuscany would have to wait.

The train reached Venice in the late afternoon. I hopped on a vaporetto (a water taxi) leaving for St. Mark’s Square.  My trusty guidebook recommended that tourists start from there to look for a hotel. I found a small but charming place not far from the square, checked in and stowed my gear.

Venice is built on little islets in a big lagoon that is connected to the Adriatic Sea. All the streets are canals so you have to take a gondola or a vaporetto to get around. Or you can walk. Venice is small and most of the canals have sidewalks alongside so you can also travel easily on foot. But of course, you can’t go to Venice without riding in a gondola so that was the first thing I did. I asked the gondolier to take me to a good restaurant. He looked at me quizzically and I realized he did not understand English. I made gestures as if I was holding a plate with one hand and eating off it with a fork in my other hand and said the word “trattoria.” He smiled and gave me a thumbs-up. We soon came to nice one; I handed over a few lire and stepped out. I entered the restaurant and, spotting an empty table, headed for it. Also headed for the same table was a waiter with a carafe of red wine and a bowl of olives. We arrived at the same time. Thinking about it now makes me laugh. You gotta love it.

As I mentioned earlier, trattorias normally have no printed menus so the waiter started explaining what dishes they were serving until I held my hands out, palms up, and shrugged my shoulders, letting him know I did not understand. He nodded and held up a finger, as in “Wait a minute.” He went through a door into what obviously was the kitchen and then returned, gesturing for me to follow him. I went with him into the kitchen where an elderly lady was busy with several steaming pots at the huge stove. She waved us over and pointed out what was in all the pots. It all looked delicious and smelled great. Me being me, I pointed at the steamed mussels, the octopus in a marinara sauce, and a pot full of fettuccine. I gave two thumbs up and the waiter and chef both understood.

I know I’ve used every cliché possible trying to describe how good the meals were on this trip, but I truly enjoyed my meal in that small trattoria. In later years, after traveling many times around Italy, I came to realize that it’s totally impossible to ever get a bad meal anywhere in that country. Man, those Italians can cook!

Since trips in gondolas were costly, I caught a vaporetto back to my hotel. The guy at the desk spoke a little English so I asked him if there was any music happening in the area. He said no, not on a weeknight. Venice back then was a sleepy, quaint little town especially in the winter, which was when I was there. It was nothing like the very crowded tourist attraction it is today. So, with nothing going on, l had another glass of wine in the bar, went to my room, played a few songs on my guitar and turned in early.

I awoke at sunrise after a deep and restful night’s sleep and quickly showered. I was on a mission to get to the open Adriatic to see if there might be any surf. Even though I had no board, I was (and still am) always curious as to whether there might be surf spots in the coastal areas I visit. Don’t laugh. People surf on every one of the Great Lakes now.

I wolfed down the sumptuous breakfast and left the hotel. I walked to the canal on the corner and flagged down a vaporetto, asking the driver if he could take me to Lido Beach. He nodded and I hopped in. We passed from the Grand Canal into the lagoon and from there it was a 20-minute ride to a small dock on a barrier island. There was nothing on that islet except sand dunes, salt grass and fog. I asked the vaporetto driver to wait, saying I would pay him for his time and he agreed. I walked up the sand dune and down the other side to the open water. The area reminded me of Matagorda Island or St. Joseph’s Island in Texas. To my surprise, I could hear waves breaking but couldn’t see anything because of the fog. I strolled down the beach a ways, looking for shells, and to my good fortune a small offshore breeze came up, the fog lifted and the sun came out. The waves were very clean, appearing to be knee- to waist-high. And not another person in sight.

My mission complete, after discovering there was surf on the Adriatic Sea, I walked back over the dune and was happy to see the vaporetto still waiting for me. I climbed aboard and we went back to Venice. I spent the rest of the day wandering alongside the maze of canals: highlights being the Rialto Bridge, Doge’s Palace, St. Mark’s Basilica and many other points of interest.

In the early evening, I filled my wineskin from a wooden wine cask at a small market near the hotel. At markets all across Europe it is possible to bring your own bottles or containers and fill them with very good and very cheap table wine from these wooden casks. It’s a great idea and also good for the environment by reusing the same bottes over and over.

I walked back to my room, packed and checked out of the hotel, and took a vaporetto to the train station.  My idea was to go to Milan for a couple of days but on seeing the departures board realized that I had just missed the early evening train to Milan. But I noticed a train would be leaving in 20 minutes for Munich. I had never been to Germany so decided to check it out. Granny and PawPaw Blaker had a ranch near the town of Fredericksburg, Texas, which had been founded by German settlers in the 1840s. We spent a lot of time at the ranch when we were young and we often went into town to eat at many of the local German restaurants. So wanting to eat some good German food and try the renowned German beers, I found the right platform and shortly boarded the train.

With the familiar routine of finding an empty compartment, stashing my stuff, and settling into a window seat completed, I sat back and watched the countryside while there was still some light. When it was too dark to see anything, I closed the window shade and waited for the food cart to come around. When it appeared I purchased a sandwich and a bottle of water. I broke out the wineskin to have a little wine with my meal. After eating, I played a few songs on my guitar while still sipping on wine. The rhythm of the train soon made me sleepy so I laid the window seats down and sacked out. The next thing I remember was the conductor opening the compartment door and loudly saying, “München!”

I found a nice, very old hotel near the station and paid for a room. The desk clerk was a distinguished, elderly gentleman who was kind enough to tell me I could help myself to breakfast if I was hungry, though I wasn’t really entitled to a free breakfast until the next day. I took my things up to the room, stored my gear in a small closet and went back down to the breakfast room. I loaded up on good German bread, various types of cheeses and sausages, eggs, and pitchers of pasteurized milk with the cream still floating at the top.

After breakfast, I showered, changed shirts and struck out to explore the city. The guidebook recommended the Bavarian National Museum so that was my first stop. The museum has art collections from several different periods of history that ranks up there with all the other major museums in Europe. Fascinating stuff, but I think my favorite was the collection of sculptures from the Medieval Age and also the collection of medieval armor. The museum took up most of my day but it was well worth it. Heading back to the hotel, I realized I had not taken the time to eat lunch. That was partly because I didn’t want to break away from the museum but also because in reading the guide book about how good the food was at the Hofbräuhaus, where I planned to go that evening, I wanted to hold off.

Munich is one of the larger and more spread-out cities in Europe but it has an excellent public transportation system in place, consisting of subways (U-bahns), rapid transit trains (S-bahns), trams and buses: all dirt-cheap at that time. After resting a while in my hotel room, I asked the hotel desk clerk to give me directions to the Hofbräuhaus via the U-bahn. After exiting the station and climbing the stairs to street level, I was struck by the music and revelry emanating from the old, classic beer hall. Upon entering, it was like being in a time warp … with the men in lederhosen, the women in dirndls, and buxom, red-cheeked beer-maids carrying three one-liter beer mugs in each hand from the bar to customers at the tables. Man, this was like Fredericksburg on steroids. The place was huge so I strolled around checking it all out. There was a large bandstand with a typical German band with a tuba and lots of other horns, an accordion and drums. There were several bands rotating sets throughout the night and I even recognized some of the songs from my Fredericksburg days. As I walked around I noticed several of the patrons staring at me because it was obvious I was a newcomer tourist. I’m sure they could easily tell I was from the U.S. As I was passing one of the tables, a gentleman stopped me and gestured for me to join him and several other men and women at their table. I thought to myself, This will be really fun, hangin’ with the locals, so I shook hands all around and sat where they had made room for me.

Those folks ended up treating me like I was their long-lost son. They wouldn’t let me pay for anything the whole night. They were all speaking to me in rapid German, which I neither spoke nor understood, and I spoke to them in drawling English which they neither spoke nor understood, but after a few of those one-liter beers it seemed we were all communicating just fine. I ordered some bratwurst for an appetizer and then sauerbraten served with flour dumplings. Luckily I did, because later on they started ordering rounds of schnapps and it paid to have something in my stomach.

A couple of the ladies at our table took turns later trying to teach me how to dance a polka. Not sure if I got it right or not but by that time I don’t think it really mattered. I eventually reached the point where I’d had enough and after thanking them each individually I bid Auf Wiedersehen and wobbled off towards the U-bahn station. I gave one final glance back at them before I was out of sight and they were still roaring and having a great time. I shook my head and laughed, admiring them for their stamina.

The next morning, I awoke early and was surprised I had no hangover whatsoever. I discovered later that the beer and schnapps in Germany are so pure and clean that they do not cause hangovers. Of course, you also have to pace yourself somewhat and also eat something. I had so much fun that first night and was so glad to change from wine to beer for a while, that I ended up staying two more days in Munich. I had a fabulous time riding the U-bahn and trams and seeing more of the city. I ate tons of sausages, many varieties of bread (mostly dark), giant pretzels, sauerkraut, schnitzel, and many other German specialties. I made it back to the Hofbräuhaus the next two nights and it was sensational. It’s easy to lose track of time in Munich so after breakfast on the fourth day I checked the calendar behind the front desk and quickly realized that I couldn’t fool around anymore. I needed to get to Stockholm. I packed up, checked out, and headed for the train station.

Once there, it took me a while to figure out the best route from Munich to Stockholm but soon realized my best bet was to first go to Copenhagen, Denmark. There was a train leaving in less than a half hour for Copenhagen so I went to a kiosk and stocked up on my usual bread, cheese and sausage. There was no wine barrel, unfortunately, but I knew there would be good German beer available on the train.

The ride was uneventful, but long. It seemed to have taken a couple of days, and at one point the train itself was loaded onto a ship to cross the sea to the island where Copenhagen is located. I had to change trains there but instead of spending the night in a hotel, decided to wait out the three hours until the next train left for Stockholm. I was more than ready to see Elisabet again.

I left my gear with the baggage porter and set out to see a bit of the city. Of course, I headed for the waterfront. It wasn’t open ocean so I knew there would be no waves but still it was saltwater. Two things that stand out in my memory were the lovely, brightly colored 17th-century townhouses along the waterfront of the Nyhavn district, and the famous statue of the Little Mermaid inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. There was also a fairly good sized red-light district with many sailors’ bars near the train station. Overall, I remember Copenhagen as being a very clean and beautiful city. Kind of a shame not to spend more time there but I figured one day I would return.

The train left in the early evening and arrived in Stockholm at daybreak. I walked into the station and bought some Swedish kronor at the currency exchange booth, found a public phone booth and dialed Elisabet’s number. She and her sister lived with their parents so I wasn’t sure who would be answering the phone. Happily, it was her voice I heard when the phone was picked up.

“Elisabet,” I said, my heart racing.

“Clay?” she replied, “Where are you?”

“I’m at the train station in Stockholm.”

“Oh, my God! I can’t believe it! Hold on a second!” She came back on and gave me directions on how to take the subway (called the Tunnelbana) to the suburb of Solna, where her parents lived. It was less than a 15-minute ride and when I stepped out of the car at the Solna station, she was standing on the platform looking as beautiful as ever. She came running and I set my bag and guitar down before she rushed into my arms. We embraced and kissed for at least a full minute, when suddenly I realized I had not taken a shower for three days and had been wearing the same shirt for two days. I stepped away from her and said, “Sorry, Elisabet. I need a shower really bad.”

“I don’t care about that,” she replied, and kissed me again.

“Elisabet!”

“Okay, okay. It’s not far to my parents’ house. Let’s go.”

As we were walking I was surprised that although it was December it wasn’t very cold. Maybe in the low 40s, and no snow on the ground. Being from Texas and Hawaii where snow is rare, I was hoping to see lots of it and maybe go ice skating on a lake or something. Oh well. No such luck.

Her parents lived in a nice 3-bedroom, modern home in an upper-middle class neighborhood. I can’t possibly figure out why but I still know the address. (That’s great, I tell myself. So why can’t you also remember the name of that Communist girl in Rome?)

Elisabet showed me to her bedroom and she had cleared some space in her closet so I could put my belongings. She gave me a towel and pointed me toward the bathroom. After showering and brushing my teeth, I felt like a new man. I was down to my cleanest dirty shirt so I asked Elisabet if they had a washer and dryer. She told me to unpack all my dirty laundry and she would take care of it. I did, and she did. She asked if I had eaten breakfast on the train and since I hadn’t, she took me to the kitchen to fix breakfast for both of us: Swedish flat bread, sliced cheese and ham, yogurt and soft boiled eggs. While we ate, I filled her in on my whole trip. She got a big kick out of my platonic relationship with the Communist girl in Rome but was not too thrilled about my short time with Dolly de Leuwe, even though I told her we had not slept together.

I asked where the rest of her family was and she said her mom was out shopping, her dad was at the lab where he worked as a cancer researcher, and her sister was in school at the university. She said no one would be home until later in the afternoon so would I like to go explore Stockholm? I said I would, and she asked what I would like to see first.

“The beach,” I said, with no hesitation.

She laughed and just shook her head. I asked her to take me to the closest beach on the open ocean, which in Stockholm was the Baltic Sea. She said there was a nice beach at a place called Toro, about 20 kilometers south of Stockholm. When my laundry was done and put away, we took a bus to a small hamlet near the beach and walked the rest of the way.

It was a sand-and-gravel beach; the wind was blowing strongly onshore and the waves were about waist high. It was sloppy, short-fetched wind swell but definitely surfable, reminding me of an average day in Texas. You’d need a 5/4 wetsuit with booties and hood though. Whew it was cold with the wind blowing off the water. We didn’t stay long and walked back to the bus stop.

On re-entering the city, Elisabet thought of something that I’d probably like to see. She was right. It was the Vasa Museum and the main attraction was the 17th-century 64-gun warship Vasa, which is the only almost fully intact ship of its kind that has ever been salvaged. The museum had many other interesting exhibits pertaining to the seafaring lives of the ancient Norsemen. It was an extremely fascinating afternoon.

On returning to Solna, Elisabet said we needed to stop at a store to pick up a few things. We bought bread, cheese, eggs, a few other staples and some wine. Walking back to her home, we kept passing these small vending machines along the sidewalk. I asked her what was in those machines. I figured they must hold candy, cigarettes, chewing gum or postage stamps, but she casually replied, “Condoms.”

I thought she was kidding, but when I saw the next one I took a closer look and sure enough that’s what was for sale. I’d heard that Sweden was liberal and open and after seeing those condom machines, plentiful and right out there in the open, I figured it must be true.

Elisabet’s folks and her sister were all in the kitchen when we arrived with our arms full of grocery sacks. We set them down on the counters and the kitchen table and Elisabet made the introductions. (In Sweden almost everyone speaks English as a second language so the whole time I was there, the family spoke English as a courtesy … and to my relief). I just kind of fumbled through the meet-and-greet, always being a little shy and awkward when around new people, and especially when they are the family of a new girlfriend. But they were all warm and friendly so it didn’t take long for me to feel at home. Elisabet’s features favored her father, who was blond, blue-eyed and fair-skinned. Surprisingly, her sister and mother were brunettes, brown-eyed, with olive skin. As the girls began helping their mom prepare dinner, Elisabet’s father and I sat in the living room getting to know each other. I filled him in a little about my life and my travels around Europe and he told me about his career in cancer research.

The dinner was pretty much a standard fare of meat, potatoes and salad but was delicious and filling. Later, when the leftovers were put away and the dishes done, Elisabet’s mom said, “Clay, my daughter tells me that you are a fine singer. Could you get your guitar and play us a few songs?”

I said I’d be happy to so I fetched my guitar from Elisabet’s closet. We all moved to the living room and after playing a few songs there was a knock at the door. Elisabet’s sister jumped up and ran to the door greeting the tall blond Swede who entered. He was introduced to me as her boyfriend and after shaking hands, he asked if I would continue playing. I did, for three or four more songs before setting my guitar down, thinking we should make more conversation. After about twenty minutes of that, Elisabet’s dad announced that a great Clint Eastwood western movie would be on the TV in a few minutes. So we all refreshed our drinks while he searched for the right channel. The four of us young folks sat on the sofa while the parents settled into recliners at each end. The movie was “A Fistful of Dollars,” one of my all-time favorites. The sound was English and subtitles were Swedish. We were all enjoying the film but about halfway through, Elisabet’s sister and her boyfriend excused themselves , went off to her bedroom to the right of the living room and closed the door. It wasn’t long before we could hear the mattress springs in there squeaking, followed by Elisabet’s sister moaning and making other audible expressions of ecstasy. I looked around at everyone like, “What the hell?”

The only one who reacted was their dad, who looked back at me, raised his eyebrows slightly with a small grin, and then turned up the sound on the TV to drown them out. I thought to myself, This country is liberal, all right. No doubt about it now.

After the movie ended, we said a few more pleasantries then we all called it a night with the parents going to the bedroom on the far left and Elisabet and I to the bedroom in the middle. I have to admit, this felt very weird to me to be in a girl’s bedroom on the first day I’d met her parents. I had to keep telling myself, Clay, you’re in Sweden and this is a liberal country. You know … once again, “When in Rome … “

As we lay in her bed quietly talking, we soon heard faint sounds of stressed mattress springs  from the walls on both sides of us. We both burst out laughing and quickly covered each other’s mouth with our hands. After listening and giggling for a while, we decided to join in the fray.

The next morning at breakfast, everyone was in a bright, cheerful mood and acted like everything was completely normal. And to them, I guess, it was. I was still taken aback by it all but I thought I could probably get used to it. Elisabet’s sister and her boyfriend were the first to leave the house as they set off for the university. Her dad said his good-byes and left for the clinic. Elisabet and I hung around a while visiting with her mom before we set out for some more sightseeing.

The next three days flew by as we spent hours on the subways, trams, buses and sidewalks traveling to and from what I figured was every possible sight that needed seeing in Stockholm. What lingers most in my mind are: the Gamla Stan (“Old Town”), which is famous for being one of the largest and most well preserved medieval city areas in Europe, with its cobbled streets and colorful 17th– and 18th– century buildings such as the Storkyrkan Cathedral and the Royal Palace; and Skansen, a huge park that has an open-air museum featuring a full-sized replica of a 15th-century town, a zoo and in the center of the park, only in early December, the Bolinäs Square, a Christmas market that has been popular since 1903. I happened to be there while the market was open so I bought several small gifts to take home to my family for Christmas presents. Thinking on the gifts, and my family, and Christmas, I was suddenly aware that Christmas was not that far away, but I was geographically way too far away from my departure point for home. I needed to get to the Orly airport in Paris with plenty of time to spare, since I only had a standby ticket and the holidays were already upon us. That thought hit like a sledgehammer.  I held it all inside me through the rest of the afternoon until we were back at Elisabet’s home, alone in her room.

“Elisabet, I hate to say this but I have to cut my stay short here in Stockholm and get to Paris. I need to give myself some cushion to get a flight out in case they are mostly booked up. I promised to be home with my family at Christmas.”

Although I could see the disappointment in her eyes, as I’m sure she could see it in mine, she said she understood. When we broke the news in the morning to the family it seemed to put a damper on everything and the breakfast was very quiet and subdued. I said my goodbyes to Elisabet’s dad and sister as they left the house and then went to pack my things. When I said I was ready to go, Elisabet said she wanted to accompany me to the train station. I told her I had a hard time with goodbyes and maybe it would be better if she only went with me to the Tunnelbana.

I hugged her mom and thanked her for everything, picked up my guitar and bag and we left the house. Elisabet was carrying a big sack and I asked her, “What’s in the bag?”

“I raided the refrigerator,” she said. “I put a bunch of good stuff in there for you to eat on the train.”

“Wow, girl, I ought to marry you!”

She laughed and said, “Yeah, right.”

When we reached the Tunnelbana station, she walked down the stairs to the platform and waited with me. I set my bags down and turned to face her and said, “Elisabet, when you left Biarritz, I made a promise to come see you in Stockholm and I did. I’m making another promise right now that I’m coming back to Europe next year and I will meet you again. Maybe you can come again to Biarritz, but if not, I’ll come back here. You can count on it. In the meantime we’ll stay in touch by phone and mail.”

By this time she was crying which made me start up, too. Right then we heard the rumble of the subway coming. When the train pulled up I knew I had to board quickly. I pulled her close in a tight hug and said,

“I love you, Elisabet.”

“I love you too, Clay.” She stepped back then turned and ran up the stairs. I grabbed my bag and guitar and just made it into the car before the doors closed. Wiping my eyes I tried to compose myself by thinking good thoughts about going home.

I remember the train ride to Paris being very long and tiring. I was unable to stretch out because the compartments were all filled with people traveling for the holidays. I ran out of the food Elisabet had packed for me somewhere along the way, and ran out of the rest of my money shortly after that … but I wasn’t worried. I knew as soon as I got on a flight my meals were included all the way to Maui.

When I arrived at Orly airport in Paris, I was shocked to see the volume of people at the main terminal, coming and going. My heart sank as I realized I might have a problem. And I did. When I worked my way up to the Pan Am counter, the attendant looked at my ticket and told me that all the flights were full and that I had to sign in on the standby list and be present at the gates for the two L.A. daily flights, one in the late morning and the other in the early evening. Names would be called in the order they appeared on the standby list, if it turned out there was any room.

The Pan Am Clippers which flew from Paris to L.A. were all Boeing 747s which were quite large and held a whole lot of people, so I was fairly confident that I’d get on one of those that day. Of course, I was wrong.

I hurried to the gate of the morning flight and listened to the names that were called, but mine wasn’t one of them. I tried to stay positive about the evening flight. I found an out-of-the-way spot behind a row of seats at one of the gates and stretched out, hoping to get some sleep. When I awoke, I realized I had slept around three hours and although hungry, I felt somewhat rejuvenated.

I decided to just go to the gate of the evening flight and hang out there. When I arrived, there were a couple of guys about my age playing guitars and singing. They had their guitar cases sitting open on the floor in front of them and there were a few people stopping to listen, though the majority just walked on by. I also noticed that of the people who stopped to listen, quite a few tossed money into the guitar cases. After a while, the guys took a break, counted out the money and divided it between them. They packed up their guitars and took their belongings over to some vacant seats in the waiting area. I followed them with my own bag and guitar and sat down, saying, “Hey, you guys sounded really good. I enjoyed your music.”

One of the guys replied, “Thanks. What kind of guitar do you have there?”

“A Yamaha FG 180,” I said, as I opened the case and pulled it out.

“Oh man,” he said, looking it over. “This is one of the early ones, from when they were handmade, and has a real spruce top too … not plywood.”

“Yep, you’re right. Where are you guys from?”

“California,” they both said.  One added, “We’re hoping to get back to L.A. before Christmas.”

“Are you flying Pan Am?”

“Yes, hopefully.”

“Standby?”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

“When did you guys get here to the airport?”

“Early yesterday morning, and signed the list.”

“Oh man, and you still haven’t gotten out!”

“Nope, we’ve missed three flights so far.”

Well, that took a toll on my spirits. I’d just put my name on the list and now realized there were probably a lot of people on it ahead of me. What a bummer. I told them I hadn’t eaten since yesterday and had run completely out of money and they said, “Come with us. We ran out, too, but we’re making pretty decent money by playing and we’re gonna go eat. We have enough to buy your lunch, too. When we play again, we’ll be a trio.”

Having had lunch, along with having a plan, brightened things considerably and I was back to thinking positively about my situation. We hung out at the gate the rest of the afternoon until the evening flight started boarding. Eventually they got to the standby list but none of our names were called. As soon as the jetway entry door closed, the Pan Am counter folks shut the desk down, gathered their personal things and left. One of the California guys said, “OK, then. Let go make some dinner money.”

We walked back to the main terminal and found a good spot to set up. (Remember, that was back before 9/11 and all the security checkpoints and regulations. Passengers in those days often had their whole family come to the gate to see them off, or the whole family would be there for someone’s arrival.)

We set our guitar cases in front of us, opened, quickly tuned up and commenced playing. We took turns choosing what to play and the three of us all knew the current standards and played them well. We did songs by the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Crosby Stills and Nash, James Taylor, Neil Young, John Prine and I’d throw in a Hank Williams or Johnny Cash song now and then, just to make it interesting.

I’m not sure if it was just the abundance of people, the holiday spirit, or the fact that we actually sounded pretty good, but we collected a lot of money in only about an hour and a half. There were a couple of upscale French restaurants in the airport so we chose one and had a magnificent meal along with some very good wine. (I ordered the escargot, otherwise known as snails. You know those Blakers … they’ll eat anything!) Sitting there in that fancy restaurant, knowing that I would have to rely on tips from singing in order to have my next meal, I recalled what my dad had said to Bubba and me after the survival trip: “You don’t have to be a millionaire to live like one. You just have to know how to live.”

After dinner, my new California friends led me to a quieter area in the airport where they had slept the night before, undisturbed. They pointed out some restrooms nearby and said that later, when hardly anyone was around, you could go in there, take off your shirt and take a sponge bath in the sink. They said there were liquid soap dispensers and you could even wash your hair with it.

A few hours later, I did exactly that. I used probably a half roll of paper towels but isn’t that what they’re there for? We slept that night on the carpet behind a row of seats with our guitars between us and the wall. I made a pillow by stuffing a lot of laundry into one of my t-shirts and used my jacket as a cover. It was quite comfortable and we all slept like logs.

We rose early, got a quick bite for breakfast and went to the gate for the first L.A. flight of the day. Once again, it seemed like an eternity until the standby list was called. None of us made it. This was starting to get old, but it wouldn’t be fair to complain in front of the California guys because they had been there a whole day before me. So we sucked it up and went back to the main terminal and sang for our lunch.

After our second performance together we were starting to jell and it was super fun earning our way there in the Orly airport. Lunch over, we stopped at a newsstand and bought an International Herald Tribune newspaper, a couple of magazines that we could all peruse, and I bought a Louis L’Amour paperback so I’d have some reading material if I ever got on a plane. We meandered over to the gate for the later flight and waited once again. It was another letdown but we made the best of it. Our performance that night in the main terminal was our best yet as we were now throwing in harmony parts and getting tighter on the chord changes. We went to the other upscale restaurant that night and it also had extraordinary cuisine. It was our saving grace for the night, after not making the flight. Another repeat of the late-night sponge bath ritual and then off to bed behind the seats.

We awoke the next morning with renewed vigor and after freshening up in the facilities, we headed for the gate, getting a bite to eat on the way. As it turned out, luck was with the California guys that morning. When their names were called, they jumped up and hollered as if they had won the lottery. In a way, I guess they had. I was happy for them but sad for me. We shook hands, said goodbye and they sauntered to the jetway door. As they disappeared into the tunnel, I felt a sense of loneliness starting to creep in but just as quickly shrugged it off. I told myself to stay focused so I could go play some songs for my lunch money. I set up, leaving my guitar case open, tuned up and took a few deep breaths. As soon as I started playing, I got caught up in the sheer joy of performing and was amazed that I could feel this way simply because of guitar chords and my own vocal chords. It took me to another zone where I was not conscious of my surroundings but totally lost in the spirit of the music. When I heard a few people applauding, it brought me back to reality. Then I looked down at my guitar case and saw I’d made a good haul. I thought to myself that this could actually be a calling. I stored that seed of a thought in a corner of my mind and left it there, wondering if it might germinate sometime.

Another nice lunch down, I bought that day’s Herald Tribune and went to the gate to wait for the evening flight. I guess my anticipation once again made the time go by so agonizingly slow it seemed to drag on forever.

An eternity passed and the plane’s boarding ritual began. After most of the passengers had disappeared into the jetway, the attendant started calling out standby names. Mine was fourth! I pumped my fist and hollered “YES!” as I reached for my guitar and bag. I’d never been happier handing over my ticket and walking through the doors to a plane.  I felt like I was walking on air in the jetway and the aisle to my seat. I stashed my gear overhead and settled in for the long flight.

In L.A., I had a one-hour layover before my plane left for Honolulu so I was able to call my folks and tell them when I would arrive in Maui. Back then, there were no direct flights to Maui as the runway there was too small for anything other than island-hoppers. So after the five-hour flight to Honolulu, I had another one-hour layover to wait through before the 30-minute flight to Maui.

I got to Maui two days before Christmas. My dad, mom and my brother Bruce met me in the terminal and after greetings and hugs I turned to my dad and asked, “What’s the surf like?”

“It’s good, man,” he replied. “You wanna go in the morning?”

“Absolutely! Let’s hit it early.”

I hugged my dad and mom each again, and rubbed the top of my brother’s head with the knuckles of one hand while hugging him close with the other.

I picked up my travel-weary guitar and bag. We walked out to the car, stashed my things, settled in, and headed home.

One night in February 2003, three months before my wife Allene and I moved to Bocas del Toro, Panama, a severe cold front passed through New Braunfels, Texas, where we lived at the time. The next morning, I saw snow covering our yard, and it turned out the front had deposited a lot of snow and ice in its wake as it rolled on through the state. Snow is rare in south Texas. In fact, in the twenty years I spent growing up in Houston, I only recall it snowing twice. Both times it happened, everyone ─ kids and adults alike ─ went outside and played in it. We were building snowmen, having snowball fights, making snow angels, and desperately trying to find any kind of slope that we could use to slide down. The terrain around Houston is very flat, but fortunately in the field behind our house there was a big mound of dirt that my Dad had piled up with his tractor from excavating a big hole that was later supposed to become a swimming pool. So of course, all of us kids, including our cousins the Cloyds and the Blakers, gathered up garbage-can lids, cardboard boxes, pieces of plywood, and anything else we could use as a sled. Then we proceeded to make mincemeat of that tiny snow-covered hill, until we were all totally exhausted, with our clothes soaked, our feet and hands frozen and our lips turned blue. I know for sure that night we all slept well after experiencing such a joyous day.

Now flash forward to that day in February 2003 in New Braunfels. New Braunfels is in an area of Texas called the Hill Country, meaning there are plenty of slopes and hills around. We lived on seven acres of land and our property had a nice gentle slope to it from the far back corner, down past our house all the way to the street. I was 52 years old at the time but still a kid at heart, so I hurriedly ate my breakfast so I could get out there in that snow. Because Allene and I are both avid surfers, we also had taken up snow-skiing because of its similarities to surfing. We tried to take one or two ski trips every winter to New Mexico, Colorado or elsewhere and a few years earlier had purchased our own ski equipment. So right after breakfast I grabbed my skis, boots and poles and headed out the back door. Unfortunately, Allene had had hip replacement surgery the year before and was not cleared yet for skiing or surfing so she could not risk partaking in all the fun.
I put on my ski boots, hiked up to the far edge of our property, stepped into the ski bindings and made my first run all the way down to the street. Looking down the road after sliding to a stop, I was a little surprised not to see any of the neighbors’ kids out playing in the snow. I thought, “Well, maybe it’s just early and they’ll be out later.”

After making several more runs down the slope of our property, I decided I needed a bigger challenge. I walked back in the house and said, “Allene, will you drive me up to Canyon Lake? I want to ski Canyon Dam.”

She gave me one of those looks that meant “You’re nuts,” but she said, “Sure I will.”

We loaded my gear into her car and drove to Canyon Lake, twelve miles away. A short while into the trip, after passing many homes that had beautiful hills right nearby with untracked snow on them, I turned to Allene and said, “What’s going on here?”

She replied, “Yeah, I know, I was wondering the same thing. Where are all the kids?”

In fact, all the way to the dam we saw absolutely no one out playing in the snow. I was shocked to say the least. But it didn’t stop me. I ended up making two good runs down the dam before a park ranger came and ran us off saying the park was closed. I was tired anyway. No ski lifts at the dam and a very long hike back up in the snow.

On the drive home, Allene and I had a somber conversation about how we were living in a whole new world. We’d come to the realization that the kids nowadays would much rather prefer to stay indoors and be on their Gameboys and other personal devices than venture out into the snow. That was hard for me to grasp. But then again, it has always been hard for me to embrace change, especially technological ones.

I can remember when 4-track tape players first came out and I actually jumped on that pretty quickly because I loved music and it made it possible to buy all my favorite bands’ releases in a format that would play in my car. Oh man, was that great or what!?

But shortly afterwards, they came out with the 8-track player. I saw no need to go that format as I was totally happy with my 4-tracks. That is, until they quit making 4-track tapes, which basically forced everyone to buy an 8-track player if you wanted to listen to your bands’ new recordings in your car. For the first time, I smelled a rat. This was the beginning of the mass consumerism that would soon come to rule the world. But grudgingly, I went along with buying an 8-track player. Especially when I realized how much it helped to put on some cool music when I went parking with my girlfriend.

From there it progressed to cassettes, CDs, and now you can plug your personal device with all your music downloaded on it, directly into your car stereo system with a USB cable. But not me. I don’t have a personal device. I still listen to CDs or tune into this excellent Jazz radio station out of Costa Rica in our truck here in Panama. And I’ve never downloaded a song in my life. Not sayin’ I’m proud of that, it’s just not my thing yet.

A lot of people who used to come over to our house before we moved to Panama were amused or surprised when they saw me playing my collection of 78 records on an antique wind-up Victrola record player with a cone speaker. Even though I had a state-of-the-art big stereo system that would also play 78s, to me the records sounded better and more authentic on the old Victrola. I had a marvelous collection of 78 recordings, which included old Western Swing, Big Band Jazz, Frank Sinatra, Elvis and many country recordings including almost the complete set of Hank Williams. But reluctantly, with the drastic downsizing we had to do in order to move to Panama, I had to let all that go.

I have no idea why I’m so resistant to change. I’ve thought about it and thought about it but I just can’t come up with a rational explanation. Eventually, when I do embrace some new advancement in technology, I realize how stupid I was after I find how much better this particular product is compared to the old model.

Take surfboards, for example. When we moved to Panama in 2003, I was still surfing on my old 7-foot short board with a single fin. The 3-fin thruster set-up had been invented several years earlier and by this time pretty much every short-boarder had converted to this system. I think it was in 2005 when we went to Maui to visit family, the airline destroyed my board even though I had packed it very well. My parents said, “No worries, we’ll go look for a new board for you tomorrow and it’ll be your Christmas present from us.”

The next day was very frustrating as we hit all the surf shops looking for a single fin board like mine and couldn’t find one. Every single short board had three fins. Even most of the long boards had gone to three fins. So reluctantly, I finally picked out a board that had a shape I liked even though it had three fins. The next day I paddled it out into some beautiful 6-foot Ho’okipa waves. On the first wave I caught, immediately on making the first bottom turn, I realized how big of a mistake I’d made by not converting to the new design sooner. I can still remember clearly, me yelling out loud to myself, “You dumbass!” That board felt like a rocketship compared to my old one … so much faster and more maneuverable.

The surf leash had also been invented in this same time frame. It consisted of a hard rubber cord, six- or seven-feet long, which was tied to a leash plug that anchored it to the tail of the board and had a Velcro loop on the other end that wrapped around your ankle so you wouldn’t lose your board during a wipeout. Before leashes, you spent a lot of time swimming in after your board but that resulted in your becoming a good oceanic swimmer and learning how to survive in all kinds of conditions. To all of us who surfed pre-leash, we thought it was just part of the deal and that it made us better watermen. I, and all my surfing buddies, turned our noses down at leashes and derided anyone we saw using one, with comments like, “Hey man, why are you wearing that kook strap?”

In the ensuing years, I noticed most of my buddies had converted to wearing a kook strap themselves so I had to just shut my mouth and surf, still holding out on not using one. Then, on another trip to Maui, just off the plane, my brother-in-law and I paddled out into a solid 8- to 10-foot northwest swell at Ho’okipa. The wind was light offshore and the waves were reeling perfectly down the reef. I paddled into a bomb a little late on my very first wave and proceeded to get crushed. My board washed in along the cliff where it got caught in the rip and got carried around the point into the next bay over. It was a long swim through heavy waves and currents but finally I retrieved my board from the rocks and had to call it a day because my board was dinged up pretty bad and I was totally exhausted. The next day I went to a surf shop to buy resin and cloth to repair the dings. I also grabbed a leash and leash plug to install on my board while I was at it.

You’d think I would have learned a lesson from these two incidents. Nope. To this day, I still don’t own a smart phone. My phone is a dumb phone that I bought at a store here in Bocas del Toro for 28 bucks. It only sends or receives calls or texts. Maybe it can do more than that but if so, I don’t want to know anything about it. My friends always tell me, “Get a smart phone … it’ll change your life. “ I’m positive they are right, but for me, I’m not sure if that change would be for the better.

Allene and I have a game we like to play when we are out and about. When we are in a restaurant, sitting in an airport or even driving down Main Street here in Bocas, we like to watch how many people are on their phones. Try it sometime. You’ll be amazed. We’ve seen many times in a crowded restaurant where at every single table except ours, everyone is gazing at their phones, their fingers in a blur, dancing over their touch screens. We always get a kick out of this spectacle. Sad to see though, from my perspective.

We have a rule in our family. When we all go out to eat together, all devices have to be turned off before we enter the restaurant. We like to practice the ancient lost art of conversation. We actually enjoy interacting with one another, sharing laughs and a few new stories, which are always enhanced by a good meal and a few glasses of wine. I may be old-fashioned but I think it’s one of the great pleasures in life.

Allene finally made me learn how to use the computer about three years ago. I guess she got fed up with having to do all my internet stuff because I was totally computer illiterate. If I needed to send an email, I would write it up longhand and she would type it up for me and send it. She sat me down one day and showed me how to go to Yahoo to check our email, how to google something, how to go to Google News and how to check the surf report. (The first thing I have to check every morning is the surf report, which really makes no sense at all. The ocean is less than 200 feet from our front steps and I can look right out the windows and see the waves breaking and what the conditions are like. Duh!) She said these are the basics and turned me loose.

Man, I was like a kid in a candy store. That first night, after Allene went to bed, I went to Google and typed in “Celebrity Sex Videos” and hit the enter key. Sure enough, it brought up a site that had sex videos of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and others. When clicking on a specific video, a new site would pop up and say Click Here, and before I knew it, I had several tabs open and some of the stuff was things even I didn’t want to see. I got scared and tried to exit the sites but didn’t know what I was doing, and more things kept popping up so I panicked and hit the OFF button on the computer.

The next morning Allene tried to turn the computer on but couldn’t get it to do anything. She said, “Clay, what did you do to the computer?” I sheepishly confessed to everything and unfortunately we had to take it to a specialist in town who found the computer infected with eight viruses.

Needless to say, from that point on I was banned from going to any porn sites and if I did, I would be banned from using the computer at all. I did learn my lesson, especially after having to fork over $150 to the guy who fixed the computer. To this day I have respected Allene’s ban, but one day I might get my own laptop and I’m not making any promises on what might happen.

In 2015 I released a Texas Trilogy of EPs called “Still Rockin’,” “Still Swingin’,” and “Still Country.” The compilation consisted of all never-before-released studio and live tracks. My agent in Nashville did a fine job of promoting the releases of each of the three EPs, actually getting iTunes to post the release of each one on their feature page, right up there alongside Willie Nelson’s, Merle Haggard’s and other major artists’ new releases. At some point later, he approached me and said, “Clay, I’m working really hard promoting your releases because I believe in them and think they are very good. But you’re not giving me any help. I think you need to get on social media and start re-connecting with your friends and fans if you want these to succeed, since you’re not performing anymore.”

I thought it over and realized he was right. Allene suggested I get with Angie Whittemore Brutto, who was one of Allene’s advertising managers back when Allene owned and edited the local newspaper here in Bocas del Toro, called the Bocas Breeze. Angie now has a company called PanamaInDesign that specializes in building websites for businesses, how to promote your business on social media, and designing ads and logos and flyers. I thought that consulting with Angie was an excellent idea not only because I respect her knowledge and business acumen, but also she’s one of the best surfers here in Bocas. Whenever we are surfing at the same spot, I’m always thrilled to see Angie not only taking off on some of the heaviest waves that come through, but surfing them better than even a lot of the guys.

The first thing Angie did was create a brand new website for me and secondly, build my official Clay Blaker music page on facebook. Knowing me, she didn’t tell me at the time that I also had to have a personal page as well. She broke that news to me a few weeks later and I was upset because no way would I have time to manage two pages. She patiently explained that the facebook rules don’t allow you to have one without the other, so I had to learn how to make do. Now, after getting the routine down, I absolutely love facebook.

Long ago, I admit I was really bad about staying in touch with friends and family. I just never could seem to find the time to sit down and write a letter or call someone. And I rationalized that it didn’t matter; that whenever I got together with someone again, we would just pick up where we left off. To me, facebook is a great tool that was invented to eliminate the aforementioned problem.

I like to go on facebook in the morning when I eat breakfast, check in to see what my friends or family are up to (and vice versa, they get to see what I’m doing). And I’m off of there in 15 or 20 minutes and go on about my day. Sometimes in the evenings after dinner, I’ll get on for a while and make a post, answer messages, comment on posts, or chat with someone. I think if you use it in this manner, facebook can enhance your life. The problem is that so many people fall into the black hole and it takes over their existence. I can tell by looking at the times of the posts by many of my facebook friends that they are on there day and night, and mostly posting boring, trivial and uninteresting stuff that I just blow past without reading. By all means, if you do experience something cool or interesting, write it up and post some photos. I definitely want to hear about that.

I doubt if the inventors of facebook realized as they were coming up with this thing, how big it would be and how much money it would make them. They’ve definitely created a monster, but it’s not gonna get me.

Last week, I was driving home from town, which is on the other side of the island from where we live in Boca del Drago. I was passing through the indigenous village at Drago, a community of 800 or so people of the Gnöbe tribe, which has a school, recreation center, baseball/soccer field, a couple of small stores, six churches and many small dwellings scattered along the road and back into the fields and jungle. When we first moved here nearly 15 years ago, if we were driving home at night after a dinner in town, when we passed through the village it was pitch black, only occasionally seeing the flicker of a candle or a kerosene lamp in a few of the houses. Nowadays, when we come through the village at night, almost all the houses have electric lights from solar panels or small generators. But the difference when you see something flickering now is that it’s a television screen in nearly every house. And the paradox is that most of these houses still don’t have indoor plumbing. Not only are they seeing all the same stupid shows and commercials that everyone else in the world watches, but they even have the Panamanian version of MTV. When you see young people walking around the village these days, many of the guys are dressed like black hip-hop artists with the baggy pants, Nike shoes, and baseball caps turned sideways on their heads. And some of the girls are out and about in short, tight skirts with sexy blouses. Ah well, they probably don’t realize that by acquiring television, it has permanently changed their culture. And I’m the last person anyone should ever ask to know whether that change is good or bad. Time will tell.

But getting back to that day last week as I was driving through the village, what happened next, really put the icing on the cake. I was nearing the end of the village and I happened upon one of the buses that run from town to Drago and back, that was unloading passengers. I came to a stop and realized that it was our friends Balbino, his wife Dora, and their children. They are a very nice Gnöbe family who were returning home from a hard day’s work from the small restaurant they own at Starfish Beach. After visiting a moment with Dora and her daughter Paola (in Spanish, as Balbino and his family do not speak English), Balbino stuck his head in the passenger window of my truck and said, “Hey Clay, I’ve got some music here on my iPhone that I really like and I want you to listen to.” I replied curiously (thinking, “Wow, Balbino has an iPhone!”), “Okay, let’s hear it.” He scrolled around on his iPhone then touched a place on the screen and I heard the opening strains of “I Want to Hear it From You,” which is from a video of me performing with my band on YouTube. We listened a while and then we both got a good laugh as he clicked it off. He said he had no idea that I used to be an entertainer, and I have absolutely no idea how he came across that video. We said our goodbyes and as I drove away shaking my head in disbelief, chuckling to myself, for some reason the thought popped into my head about the day I skied Canyon Dam and how on the way home Allene and I agreed that we were living in a whole new world. At the time, we had absolutely no idea how prophetic that statement was.

In 1969, as I was entering my freshman year at the University of Houston, I didn’t have a clue as to what I wanted to study. My two loves in life were surfing and music but everyone around me always said, “Oh, you can’t make a living doing either of those.” So it had me convinced that I needed to find something else to do with the rest of my life. I made an appointment with one of the freshman counselors and this guy persuaded me to enroll in the computer science program. He said, “Clay, this is going to be the coming thing and will be huge. You need to get in on the ground floor.”

So I took the bait and decided to major in Computer Programming. On the first day of class, the professor said that the university had recently gotten their first computer and that we were going to follow him to go look at it. We all walked a short ways across campus and entered a good-sized building. He said, “There it is!” We all stood there with our mouths agape, gawking at this monstrous machine that took up the whole building. This was before the microchip of course, and before computers became small. So, all the classes had to use this one computer and there was no keyboard. Everything was done with these cardboard data cards that you punched holes in and fed into the computer. After the first week of class, or maybe even sooner, I realized I hated this stuff.

Shortly thereafter, I discovered the music library on the third floor of the Cougar Den, where I could check out all the latest records, take them into a private booth, stack them on the turntable, lie down on a comfy couch, put the headphones on and drift away. And from that moment on, that’s where I would be during Computer Class, unless there were waves, and then I and my cohorts would skip school altogether and head for the beach.

When I look back to the day when one giant computer served a whole university and think forward to where we’ve arrived at today, it is just totally mind-boggling. I think this is either the end or the beginning of everything. And right now as I’m sitting here on our front porch gazing out at Bird Island, wracking my brain trying to come up with an intelligent ending for this story, something to tie it all together, my wife Allene just came out and saved the day. She sat down here at the table beside me and said, “Hey, Clay … check out this new thing I just got on the Kindle.”

She held the Kindle in front of us and spoke to it. “Alexa, can you play some Clay Blaker music?” This very polite female voice came on and said, “Hold on while I look.” A moment later, the voice came back with, “Here is some Clay Blaker music.” And one of my songs started playing.

I looked at Allene and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

At that point it occurred to me that this is way, way, WAY more of a new world that I ever imagined in my wildest dreams, and that wanting to or not, Ol’ Clay is being dragged into the twenty-first century, slowly but surely, kicking and screaming all the way, while at the same time trying to avoid falling into that big black hole that’s out there waiting to suck him in. Don’t hold your breath. It’s not gonna happen to me!

Recently, some good friends from Texas, Al and Rhonda Brown, came down to visit us here in Bocas del Toro, Panama. Like they always do, they showed up with some nice gifts for my wife Allene and me and one was a t-shirt for me that said on the back “I Surfed in the ‘60s … Still Surfing in My 60’s.” My first reaction was a hearty laugh along with high five hand slaps with Al and Rhonda. My second reaction was more introspective as I thought, “Wow, have I really been surfing that long? Yep, it’s true.

On July 4th weekend of 1962, the Almeda Divers Association, of which my father Mack Blaker was a founding member, sponsored a spearfishing tournament that took place in Galveston. The staging and weigh-in area was right next to the south jetty, where the Houston Ship Channel enters from the Gulf. Several canopies and tarps were staked out in the sand for shade, and under the biggest tarp a P.A. system had been set up and was crankin’ out the tunes, while right next to that sat a huge barbecue pit on a trailer, where some folks were getting serious, smoking a bunch of briskets, ribs, chicken and sausage. Texas style!

There were a lot of spectators and family members of the divers hanging out, waiting for the boats to come in for the big weigh-in. I was hoping my dad would come in with a big fish. All of the kids, including me, were running wild, like we always did at the beach, our skin already a pale shade of pink that would look more like the color of a well-done lobster by the end of the day. This was before sunscreen was invented.

At one point, a friend of my dad’s, named Randy Woodum, grabbed me and said, “Hey, Clay, you want to go out and try my new surfboard?” Surfing was in its infancy on the coast at that time and my dad and a few others had recently taken it up. I was eager to give it a go. It just so happened the waves that day, although not very big, were absolutely perfect. The wind was non-existent and swells were coming in, in long beautiful glassy lines. It couldn’t have been any better for my first day.

We waded out to the third sandbar and Randy instructed me to lie down on the board and he would push me into the wave. He said when I felt the momentum, I should pop up on the board and ride it. By some miracle, that’s exactly what happened. When I felt the board glide into the wave, I jumped straight to my feet and with me being right-handed, my dominant leg naturally put me in a regular-footed stance. I rode that wave all the way until the fin started dragging in the sand. I still to this day can’t logically explain it, but immediately I knew while riding that first wave that I was hopelessly hooked and for the rest of my time on this earth, I would be a surfer. That day totally changed my life.

On the drive home that night, I was telling my dad about the waves I had ridden and I could tell by his reaction that he was as excited for me as I was. The next words that came out of his mouth were the magical words I was hoping to hear, “Alright, boy, the next time we go surfing, you’re going with us.”

That night, when my head hit the pillow, I drifted off into the deepest, most peaceful and sound sleep I think I’d ever had, all the while having sweet dreams of sliding across those endless blue-green swells. It wasn’t long after having those dreams though that I had a real nightmare.

Two or three days after my first day of surfing, while we were closing up our family business called “Blaker’s Water Sports,” my dad looked around at me and a couple of the guys who worked at the shop and said, “Hey, y’all want to go surfing?”

In my mind, I was thinking, “What? It’s gonna be dark in an hour and it’s a long drive to the beach.” But I didn’t care. I was too excited to even think about backing out.
So we loaded up four boards and headed down to Surfside Beach. After crossing the big bridge over the intercoastal canal, my dad turned left on the beach and drove down to the Surfside pier. The pier had lights for night fishing and my dad said, “Okay boys, we should be able to see good enough to catch a few waves.”

As we were hitting the water, my dad hollered at us over the sound of the waves, “Hey, you guys, shuffle your feet when you’re walking out. There are a lot stingrays around these piers. And there’ll probably be some current so don’t let it take you into the pilings. The barnacles’ll cut you up like razor blades.”

“Oh great,” I was thinking, “and besides that, those lights on the pier are there to attract bait and the fish that eat them, so there have to be a few sharks hanging around as well. But hey, let’s do this!”

We waded out with our boards to the third sandbar and turned them around to face the shore, then waited for a big breaker. When one would break behind us, we’d push off in the whitewater, jump on the board on our stomachs and try to stand up. Of course, we were going straight off, because none of us knew how to turn yet. Also, at that time we didn’t know that it’s way more difficult to surf in the whitewater. If you take off on a wave and get to your feet on the smooth water before it breaks, then you have more control over the board to be able to ride in the whitewater after the wave breaks. Basically, we were all getting knocked around pretty good. Especially me, being only 12 years old and small for my age, I felt like I was taking a total beating. At one point, when I was walking my board through the cut between the second and third sandbars, I stepped on a blue crab and it pinched the hell out of my little toe. I was screaming and everyone thought a shark had bitten me but at that moment the crab let go and I hollered, “It was a crab and I’m okay!” I did reach down and make sure I still had that toe.

A little later I was getting pretty tired when a wave smacked me and I lost my board. As the waves were pushing it towards shore, the current was pulling it towards the pier. By the time I got to it, it was inside the pilings so I carefully went in after it and somehow barely brushed one of the pilings with my right leg. I didn’t feel any pain so I just forgot about it and headed back out. Finally, a while later, my dad hollered, “Alright boys, let’s get one more and go in. We’ve got to head on back.”

When we were putting the boards in the back of the van, the interior light was on and my dad said, “Hey, Slick, what happened to your leg?”

I looked down and I was bleeding like a stuck hog. I said, “I guess you were right about those barnacles.”

On the drive home, I was trying to make some sense of it all. My session had been a total nightmare. My toe was purple and swollen, my lower leg looked like raw hamburger, I was sore all over, totally exhausted, and on top of all that, I never stood up on one wave. But at the same time, I also had a grin from ear to ear, my spirit was soaring, and I felt like the king of the world.

That’s the irony in surfing. After having what I know now as the worst surfing session of my life, I thought it was the most glorious day ever. Or should I say night. Nowadays, the saying goes, “Any day that includes a go-out is a great day.”

In learning any new endeavor, no matter what it is, you will always reach a few game changing moments, or turning points. After night-surfing two or three nights a week for a couple of months, we got word from some other surfers that the waves were better the farther south you headed down the coast. One of the main reasons for that is the further away you get from the Mississippi River basin and all the big rivers on the upper Texas coast, the continental shelf is much narrower and drops off into deeper water much faster. So when the waves come out of deep water and don’t have the drag of a slow-sloping large continental shelf, by the time they hit shallow enough water to break, they are bigger, steeper and better formed than their upper coastal counterparts.

So we decided to head for Port Isabel at South Padre Island. In those days South Padre Island was barely populated. Next to the jetties were campgrounds, a big pavilion, and the Jetties Restaurant. On the road that went north for a short ways up the island, there were a few small beach homes, a couple of bait stands, a grocery and tackle shop, some small motels, and the Palmetto Inn. You wouldn’t recognize the place now. The skyline of South Padre Island now resembles Miami Beach, with condos and high-rises everywhere.

But when we arrived there on our first surfing trip, to us it was a pristine paradise, very tropical and different from the upper Texas coast. Of course the first thing we did was drive straight to the beach by the jetty to check the surf. To our utter dismay, it was totally flat. So, being tired from the seven-hour-long drive, and being bummed about no surf, we set forth up the island searching for a clean, cheap motel. After driving a mile or so and checking out a few places, we found one that suited our needs and after putting our stuff in the room, we walked across the dunes to get a look at the beach.

To our shock, there were 4-foot beautiful waves breaking on the third sandbar. We ran back to the room, put on our trunks, grabbed the boards out of the back of the van and hit the water. We walked the boards out and as soon as we passed the first sandbar, the water was over my head and the current was pulling strongly to the north. My dad said we had to get on the boards and paddle. But we’d never hardly paddled before because up until then we’d just been pushing ourselves off in the whitewater. We finally got out to the third bar where we could stand up and we started pushing off again in the whitewater but it was a complete failure. When the wave would break behind us, we would push the board ahead of the foam, hop on to our bellies, but before we even tried to stand up, we’d be in the deep water between the bars. The waves at that point would totally flatten out and we would stall out and lose all momentum.

After 45 minutes or so of frustration, my dad hollered, “Hey Slick, let’s go in. I’ve noticed something about these waves and we need to sit and watch them for a while.”

After watching the waves for a few minutes in silence, my dad finally spoke. “I’ve figured out why there weren’t any waves at the jetty. Look at the angle the waves are hitting the sandbar. The swell is coming from an extremely southern direction so it’s being blocked right there by the jetty but the swells that are passing the end of the jetty are hitting way north up the beach. Now watch what the wave does when it breaks. See how the curl is peeling off to the right all the way down the sandbar? What we should do is paddle the boards out past where the waves are breaking and try to paddle into them before they break. Then if we catch one, stay on your stomach and lean on the board to the right and it should turn and stay ahead of the curl as it peels down the sandbar.”

Well, it sounded like a plan to me. So we did paddle out past the break. Needless to say, our paddling strength was pretty weak, but finally my dad was into one and rode it pretty far down the bar. The first couple I caught, the nose of the board pearl-dived, and I was flipped right off. But I finally caught a good one and leaned over on that right rail and sure enough, the board swung around and I was flying down the sandbar just ahead of the curl. After I paddled back out, my dad said, “Okay, now we just have to stand up and do the same thing.”

After several failed attempts, both of us finally did it. And there it was. Our first eureka moment. That big turning point. Once again, I had felt that same sensation of flying as I did that first day I was pushed into those waves at Galveston. From here it was all uphill and every game-changing moment that happened later was another step towards becoming a better surfer.

It didn’t take us long after that trip to figure out that the first thing that had to happen to be a better surfer is that you had to become a good paddler. Surfing’s not like snow-skiing where the lift takes you up the mountain and gravity takes you back down. No, in surfing you have to paddle out to the break and in Texas, if the surf has any size, that can be brutal. Because of that slow-sloping continental shelf I mentioned earlier, on a big day the waves will be breaking a half mile out or even further during hurricane surf. Then once you get outside you have to be able to paddle fast enough to catch a wave to get back in.

To become a good paddler and to keep your paddling muscles in shape, you have to paddle on a regular basis. Swimming helps, push-ups and pull-ups help. But there are muscles you use in paddling that don’t come into play with those other exercises. So there’s no getting around it. You have to paddle. But that’s great because if you’re paddling, you’re surfing.
For anyone who is just learning how to surf, once you become a good paddler your surfing will improve by leaps and bounds. Immediately. Trust me on that. It’s the key to the highway.

Back in those days, there weren’t many surfers. There were only a few places in the world where people surfed. The boards were long, average length 9’6”. There were no leashes … they hadn’t been invented yet. Some people say leashes ruined surfing. That they gave people of limited swimming and surfing ability false confidence to venture out into the waves with a board strapped to their leg. That statement is true but leashes didn’t ruin surfing. Personally, I love leashes: more time spent riding waves instead of time lost swimming in after your board after wipeouts. Leashes do break on a regular basis though, so you absolutely still need to be a good oceanic swimmer.

To me, the major problem affecting surfing is the same one causing many other problems in the world. Overpopulation. I won’t get into that because that’s a whole other story, so I’ll just speak here of how it applies to surfing. But just to give you a clue, in 1960, there were 3 billion people in the world and now there are 7.6 billion. As you can see, the population has more than doubled in that timespan. To put it plain and simple, there are just too many surfers for the amount of surf spots there are. Yeah, for sure you can still find out-of-the-way places to surf if you have the time and money to travel and search for them. But it’s getting harder and harder.

In 1968, six of us from Texas took a trip to Hawaii and on Maui we camped out for a week at Honolua Bay (ranked by Surfer Magazine as one of the five best waves in the world) and had it all to ourselves.  Man, that was a dream come true for us.  But when my whole family moved to Maui two years later, Honolua by then had a core group of 15 to 25 regulars who surfed it on every swell. At that time, we already thought it was too crowded because those guys hogged almost every wave. I surfed it about 6 or 7 years ago when Allene and I were visiting our family and I counted over 300 people in the water. I was out for three hours and only got two waves and had people riding in front of me and behind me on both waves. I drove out to Honolua last year when we were there and from the cliff overlooking the break I estimated there were around 700 surfers in the water. And no, I did not go out.

But Honolua Bay is not the exception. Crowded conditions have become the norm almost everywhere people surf. People now surf in virtually every country on earth that has a coastline and believe it or not, that includes the Great Lakes in the U.S. The modern wetsuit is so state-of-the-art that it’s allowed large surfing communities to develop in places like Canada, Alaska, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Scotland and there are even some Russians starting to surf in Siberia.

To the young surfers of today, crowded conditions are all they’ve ever known and they seem to deal with it fine. When I watch young surfers at a crowded break, I can’t seem to tell if it’s a free-for-all or some kind of organized chaos. Either way, it ain’t my thing.

I’ll admit I was struggling with this situation before we found Bocas del Toro. When we moved here in 2003, there were maybe 15 locals who surfed and also a handful of expats. For the first few years, none of the spots were ever crowded. At that time, this place had never been featured in any surf magazines and nothing had gotten out on the internet. But sadly, at least from my point of view, that has all changed. It’s definitely on the map now. Several of the known spots have gotten very crowded. However, there are so many nooks and crannies here in the archipelago that you can always find a place to surf alone if you have a boat and know your way around. Hell, I’ve been here going on 15 years and there are still spots I know of that I haven’t surfed yet. Plus, as a backup, we have our little spot right out in front of our house.

I prefer to surf alone, but don’t mind surfing with a friend or two. Surfing alone is really not recommended but I do it anyway. Like scuba diving you should use the buddy system and watch out for each other. Surfing does have risks, especially when the waves are large. The waves here in Bocas are very powerful and mostly break over shallow reefs. Leaving hide on the reef is a common occurrence, especially if you’re taking off on the heavier waves. I’ve made a few visits to the local hospital myself to get stitched up. The first time it happened, I was surfing alone at a spot I won’t name here. It was a couple of feet overhead and the conditions were perfect. The wave at this spot is a right-hander that has a hollow section right on the takeoff and then a steep wall that lines up all the way down the reef. To me, it’s very similar to a spot on Maui called Little Makaha, or Laniakea, on the north shore of Oahu. This is a high-performance wave that will make you think you’re Kelly Slater if your game is on. Anyway, early in the session, I had a pretty gnarly wipeout and my board banged my elbow as I was tumbling underwater. I thought nothing of it and it didn’t hurt at all, and anyway getting hit by your board is a normal occurrence in a wipeout. I paddled back out and caught a few more good waves and then there was a lull in the action as I sat waiting for a set. At some point I glanced down and my trunks and the water around me was full of blood. It scared the crap out of me as I started frantically searching my body for an injury. Then I remembered the elbow bang and pulled my arm up to look and I had a gash all the way across the point of the elbow, with the white tip of the bone exposed. Right then a nice wave came and I spun around and went on it. I ended up surfing another 45 minutes because the waves were just too good to stop. The whole time though, I was thinking about sharks and finally my imagination got the best of me. I headed for the boat.  When I got back to the dock, I showered with my gallon jug of water, got dressed and drove to the hospital.

Now here’s the coolest part of the whole story. The doctor who attended me in the emergency room was a very nice-looking young female Panamanian who told me she had gone to medical school in Cuba. Allene and I had recently been to Cuba ourselves so the whole time the doctor was treating me, we talked of our experiences in that wonderful country.

First she scrubbed the wound thoroughly with betadine, then with a syringe deadened around the whole area. Next she told me to lay my arm out straight so she could stitch it up and I bent my arm instead and asked if she would stitch it in that position. She looked at me funny and asked, “Why?”

I told her it was because I didn’t want to pop the stitches when I was paddling the next day.

She said, “Oh no, you can’t surf for at least a week.”

I just smiled and said, “Stitch it the way I want it, please.”

So she did, and then cleaned the area again, put antiseptic cream on it bandaged it up nicely, put an elastic bandage over that and asked if I’d had a tetanus shot recently. I said no so she left the room for a few minutes and returned with another syringe and gave me a tetanus shot. She also handed me a package of antibiotic pills that I had to take three times a day for five days and also a couple of pain pills. I thanked her and she shook my hand and told me to go to the cashier to pay.

The cashier was an elderly lady who totaled everything up and said that I owed $9.00. I was a little shocked so I said, “What? That can’t be right.”

She looked confused, added everything up again and said “Yes, that is correct. If you think it’s too much, tell me your age and maybe I can give you the senior discount.”

I replied, “No, no, no! It’s not too much … I was thinking it was way too little.”

She smiled and said, “Well, that’s what we charge.”

I paid her the $9.00, thanked her and told her to have a nice day.

I walked out feeling like I’d won the lottery. (Oh, and I did go surfing the next day and the rest of the week. The waves were just too good.) A few months later I was back in there getting stitched up again and they only charged me $6.00 because I didn’t need the tetanus shot. You gotta love this place.

My wife Allene loves to surf. We both also loved to snow ski so a couple of times a season we would go to New Mexico or Colorado to look for fresh powder. One year when Allene was 25 or 26 we were skiing at Ski Apache in Ruidoso, New Mexico, when a big wet warm front hit during our morning session and of all things it started raining at the top of the mountain. We skied down to the lodge to wait it out and finally after lunch it stopped and we headed back up the mountain. When we got off the lift at the top and started back down, we soon realized that we’d made a big mistake. The rain had turned the runs into solid sheets of ice. We should have quit immediately and walked down but of course, we didn’t. We were both taking some bad spills and on one fall, Allene hit the ice hard on her left hip. I could tell she was in serious pain and I took off my skis and walked over to see if she was okay. She finally was able to get up and we made the call to quit for the day. She was in more pain that night so I went to a convenience store and got her some ibuprofen. The next morning was our last day of the trip and she said she wanted to ski so she took some more ibuprofen and we headed up the mountain. The snow had been groomed overnight so was no longer icy. Allene had a hard time but skied very gingerly and toughed it out the whole day. When we returned home she nursed it along for three or four weeks and it seemingly got well. We thought.

A few years later she started having some pain in that same hip that gradually got worse and worse so she finally went to get an x-ray.  The doctor found a scar from a hairline fracture on her femoral head, which was almost twice its normal size and covered with bone spurs. He said sometimes a fracture like that can cause arthritis to settle in the joint and that was what was causing her pain. He also said a hip replacement was inevitable in her future but to hold off as long as possible as new and improved prostheses were being invented all the time. He gave her a prescription for inflammation and pain and told her just to take it easy but keep exercising.

She held off for fifteen more years but finally the arthritis was eating away her hip joint so she had the operation in 2001, receiving a new femoral head made of titanium. For her surgeon, Allene chose Dr. Jon Manjarris, who was a good surfer and good friend we knew when we were growing up in Texas. John went to medical school and became a top-notch orthopedic surgeon and by the way, still surfs to this day. Because he was a surfer himself, it gave us confidence that he would do what was needed so that Allene would be able to surf again. The day after the surgery, a nurse came into the hospital room with a walker and had Allene walking up and down the corridor. That afternoon, when Jon was finished with his rounds, he came up to the room with some surf videos and a bottle wine and oh, boy,  I was happy about that, although Allene was still on a morphine drip and couldn’t have any. We watched movies and spent some time reminiscing about old surfing days. He hung out with us the next night as well and the next morning checked her out of the hospital. If you ever need a good orthopedic surgeon in Texas, look this guy up. Jon Manjarris … a helluva good guy, a helluva good surgeon and a helluva good surfer.

Jon told Allene right as we were wheeling her out the door that if she followed his instructions to the letter, she could be back surfing in three years, but not earlier. So she did. And now she’s back and she’s ripping. She surfs an 8’6” soft-top that goes easier on the new hip and also rides waves on her 12-foot stand-up paddleboard, which is also a soft-top.

Another thing Jon told Allene, once he found out she was a regular-foot, was that she would have to switch to being a goofy-foot. Going from a prone position to a regular stance would put too much of an angle on her left hip. So she was going to have to learn to put her right leg forward instead and keep her left foot on the back. “And one other thing,” he said, “you will have to keep your leash on that forward right ankle, not your left. It’s going to look funny but you don’t want that leash pulling your femur out of the hip socket in a wipeout.” Changing your stance is not an easy thing to do but once she was able to get back in the water, she practiced and practiced and now is a seasoned goofy-footer.

Not long after we arrived in Bocas we realized that the town beach had a perfect longboard wave that was very similar to San Onofre in California or Waikiki in Hawaii. The locals call that stretch of sand Las Cabanas beach, but we renamed it Waikiki. Whenever Waikiki is breaking, Allene is on it. They say the best surfer in the water is the one having the most fun and no one has more fun than Allene. Except maybe our good friend Kurt Fargo, AKA Cortez. We were surfing with Cortez over 40 years ago in southern California and he moved here to Bocas a few months after we did. He is Allene’s surfing and paddleboarding partner and boy do they have some serious adventures together. If they aren’t surfing on their longboards or paddleboards, they might take their snorkeling or fishing gear with them on the paddleboards and spend hours on and in the water. Kurtis is like a brother to us and we are so thankful to have him here.

Bocas del Toro has been a dream come true for Allene and me. In our wildest imagination we never thought how incredible it would turn out to be. And we owe it all to surfing. If we hadn’t come here on that first surfing trip in 1998, I shudder to think of what our life might be like now. Probably still slugging it out in the honky-tonks trying to fan the dying embers of a fading music career. I won’t try to speak for Allene, but from my perspective, surfing has always been just as important in my life as music. I guess at this point it’s taken on even more importance.

There’s no doubt that surfing has made me a better human being over the years. Traveling to exotic locations to surf has exposed me to many different cultures, which in turn led me to experience different customs, foods, languages, religions and ideas. While our differences make us unique, I’ve found that deep down inside, were basically all the same. We are all from the same tribe.
The things I’ve learned from surfing and the ocean are things that I apply to my life on a daily basis when I’m on dry land. Things like patience. You have to be patient in surfing because you‘re always waiting on something. Waiting for the surf to come up, waiting for the tide to change, waiting for the wind to turn offshore, waiting for the next good wave.

You also learn to be a good listener. You always have to pay attention to what the ocean is telling you at all times or you can get in a bind quickly. And you need to listen to what your brain is telling you and what your instincts are telling you, especially in large surf, because it could save your life.

Surfing has taught me to be kinder to other people. When I was younger and surfing in crowds I would be hassling with the others for waves and if someone cut me off I would get really pissed. I gradually learned that’s not the right way to be. Nowadays, when I surf with others, I show respect to everyone and give waves to them. Almost always they give it right back. In surfing, you are always interacting with nature and through nature you begin to see how everything on earth is connected. And that we all live here together on this big beautiful planet and we need to take care of it and each other. Surfing to me is not a sport. It’s a way of life. Sure, it’s big fun, but it has a spiritual side to it as well. When I’m sitting out in the water waiting for a wave and looking at all the beautiful scenery and ocean surrounding me there’s no doubt in my mind that there is a power greater than me. In these special moments, I feel a deep sense of holiness come over me. It brings me much peace and happiness.

There have been times in my life when I talked about these things in front of people who have never surfed and I could tell by the looks on their faces that they felt what I was saying was a bunch of B.S. That, maybe in their minds, surfing was a frivolous endeavor, a big waste of time and that people who surfed were lazy beach bums and not productive members of society. I’ll be the first to admit that there is an element of truth in that stereotype. But for me, when I come out of the water after a good session I feel like I’m in love with the world and being in that frame of mind makes me want to do better in living my life in a more positive manner for everyone around me. Maybe that’s not being productive in a material way, but still, it’s powerful. Think what the world could be like if everyone lived that way. There’s always hope.

So now, at 67 years of age, I find myself in the best physical shape of my life. These beautiful waves of consequence here have forced me into that, albeit willingly. I still ride a short board and on most days still surf better than I have in my whole life. There are a couple of reasons for that. One, the equipment we surf on these days is far superior to what we rode in the old days and you can do so much more on a wave. Two, I get to surf every day on world-class waves. Of course, I don’t mean every, every day. Some days you might just have too many other things to do and sometimes, like everywhere else, the surf does go flat. Luckily, here near the equator, all year long we have pretty close to 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. So theoretically, you could work a full time job of 8 hours a day and still get out there and get in a 2- or 3-hour surf session before dark. My record here for most days surfing in a row is 58. During that period, the surf was never below head-high, with most days being overhead, some days double-overhead, and a couple of days pushing triple-overhead. I had to finally take a day off, not because the surf went flat but because I was too beat up and needed a day of rest. I got back out there the next day and started another streak.

And I still have those game-changing moments occasionally. A few months ago I was surfing at that same unnamed spot where I lacerated my elbow and I accidentally did something I’d never done before in my life. Sometimes at that spot, when the tide is low, there’s a shallow spot in the reef that makes the tail-end section throw over right in front of you. If I see it’s gonna happen, I like to crank a huge bottom turn and go straight up and hit that section of the lip and snap a big turn back down with the whitewater and hopefully land it and shoot out into the flats of the small channel.

The day I’m speaking of, I was flying down the wall of one of the bigger waves that came through, linking my turns together and saw that the tail-end section was gonna throw over, so I dropped to the bottom to crank my big turn up into the lip and I bobbled it. That threw my timing off so instead of snapping a turn back down off of the lip, I ejected right off of the wave and was airborne. Miraculously, the board stuck to my feet and I landed on top of the whitewater, did a floater down to the bottom, turned out into the flats and kicked out.  Paddling back out I thought to myself, “Did that really happen?” I’d just done my first aerial ever. I had to laugh, because of course I was surfing alone so there were no witnesses. About two or three weeks later there I was again. Same spot, no one else out. Again that same situation presented itself and this time I knew just what to do. When that last section came over I hit it like a skateboard ramp and launched air. I landed it perfectly. Even though it is the simplest aerial maneuver there is, and I probably didn’t come but a foot or so out of the water, I can say I’ve now done one. Twice. But aerials aren’t really my thing because I’m old-school (and old) plus it’s easy to get hurt trying them. I’ve found at my age it takes longer and longer to recover from injuries and I just don’t want to miss any surfing time. For now, my goal is simply to keep surfing at a good level for as long as possible. Most days I can do that, but I have noticed more frequently that I have days where I feel like the biggest kook in the water. I know for sure that it’s downhill from here, but I’ll try to stave it off as long as I can. I know one day there’ll come a time when I’m back on a longboard surfing at Waikiki with Allene and Kurtis and I guarantee I’ll still be enjoying it as much as ever. In fact, the three of us have a new mantra: Never stop surfing. I even got it tattooed on my arm recently.

Sometimes when Allene and I are surfing out in front of our house and the waves are good, we can see our beach, and up on the hill, our beautiful home and property, and we’ll turn and look at each other and just burst out laughing, thinking,” Can you believe this?” Other times we’ll look at each other and tears of joy will roll out of our eyes because we are so thankful for all we have and for this amazing life.  We feel very blessed and never for one minute do we take any of it for granted.

For as long we’ve been together, Allene and I have always lived exactly right in the moment. We’ve always believed that all we have is the present and that we need to make every second count. We don’t dwell much on the past because it’s already gone. We have, however, tried to learn from our mistakes. And we don’t worry much about the future either, because we’ve always thought if we take care of the here and now, the future will take care of itself.

So that’s how we’ll keep living our life, with the understanding that at our age it could all come crashing down in a moment’s notice. If not in a moment, it will someday. We’ll just let our new mantra guide us until it’s time to catch that biggest of all waves… the one that walls up all the way down the line, forever and ever.

There you have it.

Never stop surfing.

Holy Cow!!!! I can’t believe they actually did it! They pulled it off! After 55 years of futility, on a beautiful, balmy evening in Los Angeles, California, the Houston Astros won the World Series. I’d have to say the stars and the planets were perfectly aligned, because at that moment, everything seemed right with the universe. The last few years I was wondering if I would ever see this in my lifetime. But I never gave up hope. And now, here we are, and I’m gonna tell you something: it feels incredible.

This whole deal started for me way back in the mid-‘50s when I was 5 or 6 years old. My grandparents on my dad’s side, Granny and PawPaw Blaker, had one of the first television sets in Almeda, the little town south of Houston where we grew up. Everyone in our family and my dad’s brother Jack’s family, who lived next door, would all go to Granny and PawPaw’s to watch TV. PawPaw was full-blooded Bohemian, Bohemia being an area in the western part of what was then known as Czechoslovakia. PawPaw loved to watch the Yankees on TV mainly because of their shortstop at the time, Tony Kubek. PawPaw told us that Tony was also Czech and that he was our third cousin on his mother’s side. I thought, Wow, that’s pretty cool having a cousin on the Yankees team, so I would always go to PawPaw’s to watch the games with him whenever the Yankees were playing. I can still remember the pungent smell of the Garrett snuff he liked to dip as he watched the game while spitting in his spittoon. Tony Kubek became my first hero in baseball and I still loved him as a broadcaster on NBC’s Game of the Week when his playing days were over.

The transistor radio was developed and came out on the market in 1954. It was a small battery-powered radio and I got one for Christmas in 1956. At the time, Houston only had a minor league baseball team called the Buffs. But I found out what station they broadcasted the games on and I was excited to listen to them on my little radio under the covers at night after we’d all gone to bed. Also in this era, baseball trading cards were the rage as companies such as Topps and Fleer sold cards in packages with bubblegum. My cousins Bubba Blaker and Butch Cloyd and I would walk along Highway 288 in Almeda picking up discarded soda bottles so we could sell them to buy baseball cards. Anything that had to do with baseball … we were on it. We couldn’t wait for school to be out for the summer so we could mow the field beside our house and start playing the game itself.

In ’58, I would be old enough to try out for the Fondren PeeWee League and I was beside myself waiting for summer. My mother, Rose, who had been a softball player in high school, started working with me every day after school, throwing me grounders, playing catch, and pitching to me while I batted. My dad, Mack, who at that time had a car-repair business, the Almeda Garage, had to put in long hours every day at the shop. So that left it up to my mom to bring my baseball skills up to snuff. No problem for her. She had played catcher in high school and had a good arm. Pretty tough as well. She got her nose broken in a game by a girl who slung the bat after getting a hit, but mom finished the game in spite of blood running down her face and all over her jersey.

I went to the tryouts when summer started and got picked by a team called the Gulls, as in seagulls. At the time, I thought that was a pretty lame name for a baseball team and was proven right at our first game when all the older kids sitting in the stands started calling us the Gurls. They were merciless to us that season and the next one as well. I was extremely glad to be moving up to the majors and a new team the following year. My older cousins Butch and Bubba had both played for the Phillies so I don’t know if they’d put in a good word for me but at the tryouts that year the manager for the Phillies picked me for the team. I was stoked. For two years I pitched and played shortstop, and then I was out of that age group.

The next group up was Pony League and the closest league to where we lived was the Windsor Pony League, the field being in Windsor Village. I got picked to be on the Tigers. In this league, no one was a little kid anymore. Everyone could hit and throw the ball hard by this time so it was definitely a step up. I remember one night game I was batting against Nick Ortiz, who was one of the top pitchers in the league. He drilled me right in the center of my left thigh. It dropped me like a sack of potatoes. I had a huge charley horse and could barely walk so I had to come out of the game. I guess I wasn’t as tough as my mom.

Towards the end of each season, the managers of all the teams start looking at the players who are doing well so they can make their picks for the All-Stars team when the season is over. Then the regional playoffs would start and it was single-elimination all the way to the state finals. Everyone wants to make All-Stars so you can keep playing but they only took the two or three best players from each team. About this time, we started hearing rumors of this lanky kid from Alvin who could already throw an 80-mph fastball. They also said he was wild a lot of times so although very few could hit his fast ball, because of his wildness most hitters were afraid to stand in the batter’s box. Needless to say, he was almost unhittable and got a lot of strikeouts. Found out later, his name was Nolan Ryan.

I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t make the All-Stars because the town of Alvin was nearby and it would probably be one of the first teams we played. After being plugged by Nick Ortiz, I wasn’t too keen on stepping into the box with this Ryan kid pitching. (I found out later that I wouldn’t have had to play against him after all. He was three years older and on to the next level.) It was a moot point anyway. By the end of the season I’d thrown my arm out. Too many curve balls at too young of an age. I think they call it tennis elbow nowadays. Also, by this time I had started surfing and that was it for my ever playing team sports again.

I still followed baseball religiously though … a huge fan then and still one to this day.

While I was still in Little League, a major event happened that would change the face of the city of Houston forever. It was announced that a major league team would begin playing in 1962 in the National League. They were to be called the Colt 45s and a stadium was quickly built southwest of downtown in a soggy, mosquito-infested cow pasture. The opening-day game of the first season was April 10, 1962 with a three-game homestand against the Chicago Cubs. One of my best friends while growing up in Almeda was Willie Keyworth, whose family owned a dairy farm way out at the end of Fellows Road. Willie’s dad, Billy, who was good friends with my dad from grade school on, took Willie and me to that first game. Walking into that stadium to me felt like walking through the gates of heaven. I was in awe. And yeah, it was Houston in April so it was already hot and muggy but since it was a day game, at least there weren’t any mosquitos. But nobody cared anyway. It was a glorious day. The crowd was electrified and the atmosphere super-charged. And the team didn’t let us down. Roman Mejias smacked two homeruns and the Colts beat the Cubs 11 – 2. In fact, the Colts ended up sweeping those first three games with the Cubs and people were already talking about pennants and the World Series. Little did we know how long we’d wait for that World Series title.

As the season progressed, I decided my favorite player on the team was third baseman Bob Aspromonte. A good friend of my dad’s, Jack Hunsicker, heard I liked Aspromonte and told us that he knew him and could get tickets from him to go to a game. So he did, and it was a day game so my dad didn’t go because he had to work. (Also, my dad was more into football and not so much of a baseball fan.) At the game, our seats were right on the field by third base. During warm-ups, Jack hollered at Bob and he came right over to the rail. He introduced me to Bob and we shook hands and I was so starstruck I became totally mute. Jack, after a few seconds when I didn’t say anything, nudged me and said, “Bob got us the tickets, Clay.” I came out of my stupor and said, “Thank you, Mr. Aspromonte.” He replied, “Hang on, I have something for you.” He went into the dugout and came back with a photo of himself that he autographed for me. Then he said, “Y’all enjoy the game,” and went back to warming up. The game was against the Mets and the Colts won 3 – 2.

About a month or so later, my dad came home from work and asked, “Hey Slick, you want to go see the Colts game tonight? Sandy Koufax is pitching.” I was surprised, because as I mentioned before, my dad wasn’t much into baseball, but I quickly said, “Yes!” It ended up being a great game, especially getting to watch Koufax painting a masterpiece from the mound. In the 6th inning, with the Dodgers leading 2 – 1, Koufax was taken out due to a muscle strain. The Colts scored two runs off the relief pitcher to take a 3 – 2 lead. The Dodgers hit a solo homerun in the 8th to tie it 3 – 3. And that’s where it stayed until the 13th inning. In the top of the 13th, the Dodger’s Maury Wills, who was one of the best base stealers of all time, walked, stole second, stole third, and came home on a sacrifice fly. When the side was out, the Colts came to the plate, couldn’t score. Game over, Dodgers winning 4 – 3. What a heartbreak. Plus, we didn’t get home until around 1:00 in the morning and my mother was still up, worried sick, and wondering where we were. That ended up being the last pro baseball game my dad ever attended. But not me. I loved every minute of it and went to many, many more Colt and Astro games over the years.

In 1965, the Astrodome, called the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” opened and the Colt 45s had a new home. Due to copyright/patent infringement flak from the Colt Firearms Company and Colt 45 Malt Liquor, the team got a new name as well. Because of the heavy presence of NASA in the Houston area and the name of the new stadium, the team settled on the name Astros. I’ve always liked the name, with its connotation of rocketships and the space age. There have been a lot of years however when the team did not live up to the image of its name. There were times when the team stunk up the season so badly they should have been named the Covered Wagons. Instead of spaceships, think of circling the wagons. Regardless, if you’re a real true fan, you stick with your team through thick and thin, good or bad, loving them always and savoring all the great moments: walk-off homeruns, a leaping catch up over the wall that thwarts a homerun, or someone pitching a no-hitter.

Mention of a no-hitter always makes me think one thing. Nolan Ryan. I’ve followed Ryan’s whole career because first of all, he’s a Texan; secondly, I’ve known of him since I was 12 or 13 years old; and third, he was just so damn good. When he finally came home to the Astros after spending several years with the Angels and Mets, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Allene and I went to a lot of games at the ‘Dome when we had time off from the music business. After the team acquired Ryan, we made it a point to see as many games as we could that he pitched. We’d usually try to go in a group, as it was more fun. Some of the folks who went with us were Hal and Sharon Anderson, Greg and Donna Anderson, Glenn and Melinda Hammond, Donnis and Pam Hammond, Ansgar and Gaby Reuter, Hermann Lammers-Meyer and his Emsland Hillbillies band members, when they came to Texas from Germany most summers, Lisa Morales (from the famous music duo Sisters Morales), … and Tommy Foote.

Tommy was the drummer with the Ace in the Hole band when we first met them in 1976. He was from Houston, like me, and when I found out he was a big Astros fan, we hit it off immediately. Ace in the Hole had a pretty good vocalist at the time, who broke out with a single on MCA Records in 1981. He consequently went on to be one of the biggest stars in the history of country music. Yep … King George Strait. A few years after making it big, George needed someone to be his tour manager and handle everything that happens while on the road. Thinking Tommy was the right man for the job, George promoted Tommy from drummer to official tour manager and that’s what Tommy still does to this day. Thank God, because Tommy’s job would come into play for him and me one memorable night years later at Arlington Stadium. More on that shortly. Meanwhile, back to the ‘Dome.

As elated as I was when Nolan Ryan came to the Astros, I was equally devastated when the team decided not to renew his contract in 1988 and the Texas Rangers snatched him up. That was a move that I think the Astros will always regret. In a perfect world, Nolan Ryan should have finished his career with the Houston Astros. Nolan went on to have some good seasons with the Rangers, adding to his strikeout total, his games won, and even threw his 6th and 7th no-hitters with them. He was still throwing pitches clocked in the upper 90s, with an occasional one that went over 100 mph until the day he retired. In his later years, he also developed a wicked change-up slider that was damn near unhittable. But the real coup for the Rangers was Ryan’s public relations value. As the saying goes, he “put fannies in the seats.” Not only was he setting records that will probably never be broken because of pitch counts and the new relief-pitching system, he was such a gentleman and so well-liked that people would fill the stadium for a chance to see him pitch.

Allene, Tommy and I continued to attend an Astros game every now and then. As I stated before, you always stick with your team, but without Ryan, somehow it just wasn’t the same. Around this time, George Strait began doing a concert once a year in Arlington Stadium after a Rangers game. In his job as tour manager, Tommy got to know a lot of the personnel in the Rangers organization from coordinating all the details with them for the concerts. Tommy knew a lot of these people on a first-name basis, including the clubhouse manager and many of the players. So anytime he wanted to attend a game, he could call someone in the front office and get tickets.

Late in the season of the year Nolan Ryan said would be his last, Tommy called me up and said, “Hey, Clay, Nolan Ryan is pitching tonight. You want to go to the game? This might be the last time we get to see him pitch.” I answered with no hesitation, “Hell yes! Let’s do it!” He said, “Okay, meet me at my house in one hour.” It took me twenty minutes to get from our house in New Braunfels to Tommy’s place in San Marcos, where we got in Tommy’s car, hit the IH-35 onramp heading north to Ft. Worth. We made it to the stadium, went to the will-call window and picked up our tickets, walked in and found our seats. They were good seats, right down on the field between home plate and first base … a bird’s eye view to see Ryan. The players were warming up as it was still early. A vendor came by and we both got a hot dog and right about then, the announcer came on the P.A. system and said that Nolan Ryan had been scratched from the line-up due to a muscle strain he got in the warm-ups. We both looked at each other and at the same time screamed, “NO WAY!” Boy, were we bummed out. When the next vendor came by I bought the biggest beer he had to drown my sorrow. Well, we were there, so we decided to just enjoy it. The Rangers did end up winning the game and all’s well that ends well, so Tommy said, “Hey Slick, you wanna go down to the clubhouse? Maybe we can talk to some of the players …” I said, “Sure, let’s go.” We made our way down below the stadium and the security guard at the clubhouse door recognized Tommy right off and said, “Howdy, Mr. Foote. Good to see you again, y’all go right on in.” Upon entering, it was like old home week. Everyone was glad to see Tommy and after handshakes, back slaps and introductions of me all around, someone stuck a couple of beers in our hands. Ryan wasn’t there with all the guys so I was thinking since he didn’t pitch, maybe he already went home. But lo and behold, a few minutes later, some guy walked out of the showers buck naked, drying himself off with a big fluffy white towel and all at once I realized it was Nolan Ryan. At the same time he glanced at us and seeing Tommy, wrapped the towel around his waist and walked over. He gave Tommy a hug and said, “Great to see you, manI I didn’t know you were here tonight.” Tommy said, “This is my friend Clay Blaker.” And Ryan said, “Clay Blaker! I’ve got one of your cassettes and we play your music all the time in the clubhouse. My favorite is ‘Green Snakes on the Ceiling.’ It’s really good to meet you.” I was flabbergasted but managed to say, “Nice to meet you too and thanks for the kind words.” We visited a while longer until Tommy finally said, “Slick we got a long drive, we’d better hit the road.” On the drive back to San Marcos, we were both on Cloud 9, and I couldn’t thank Tommy enough for giving me the opportunity to meet my all-time favorite player in baseball. And we did get a good laugh when I reminded him that no one would ever believe me in a million years that on the night I got to meet my hero Nolan Ryan, at my first glimpse of him he was stark naked. Man, what a night!

After Ryan retired as a player he continued to stay involved with baseball in various capacities. All the while, Allene and I and Tommy Foote continued to support the Astros. In late ’96, I got a call from Tommy, telling me that Ryan’s business manager had called him saying they wanted to book our band for Ryan’s 50th birthday party. The deal went down and on January 31, 1997, Tracy Byrd, Neil McCoy and I, with our bands, played a private party at Gruene Hall, Texas’s oldest dancehall.

Nolan and his wife Ruth (by the way, on June 25th of this year, 2017, they celebrated their 50th anniversary) were on the dancefloor most of the night, along with everybody else. Needless to say, a good time was had by all.

After the show, Ryan gave Neil, Tracy and me Rangers jerseys with our last names on the back and also photos and baseball cards that he had autographed. Once again, I can’t thank Tommy Foote enough for being instrumental in having us be a part of that incredible night.

Around this time, Nolan Ryan and his son Reid bought a minor league team in Mississippi and brought it to Round Rock, outside of Austin. The team was called the Round Rock Express. This team played in the AAA Pacific Coast League and was affiliated with the Astros. They would have live concerts at the park after games a couple of times a month to go along with the theme of Austin’s being the “Live Music Capital of the World.” Our band got booked for one and upon arrival at the stadium, Reid came out in a golf cart to meet our bus and led us to the loading ramp at the back of the stadium. When we stepped off the bus, Reid introduced himself, and said that his dad couldn’t be there that day but said to tell us hello. There were a couple of stage hands to help us get the gear up the ramp and to help us set up. On the first load-up when we came out into the view of the field, I was immediately impressed. “Wow!” I thought. “What a beautiful stadium!” They had built a good-sized pavilion just outside the left field foul line, which took up the space where the seats ended and went to where it was even with the outfield wall. The stage faced towards home plate. In front of the stage was a dance floor area and behind that were tables and chairs and a bar and grill area in the back. Super nice! Reid was a gracious host, telling us to order anything we wanted to eat and drink after soundcheck, then to enjoy the game and kick off the music immediately afterwards, encouraging everyone to stay. That’s exactly what we did and at the end of the event we all agreed it had been a fabulous experience and that the Round Rock Express was a first-class operation.

In the next few years, big changes happened in Houston. The Oilers NFL team moved to Tennessee and became the Titans. The Astros moved into a brand new stadium downtown called Enron Field, now called Minute Maid Park. In order to get another NFL team, the league required the city of Houston to build a new football stadium with more seating capacity than the Astrodome. Sadly, the Eighth Wonder of the World, closed its doors. And the new NFL franchise the Houston Texans, moved into their new facility which is now called NRG Stadium. Big changes happened as well for Allene and me. In 2003 we sold everything we owned and moved to a small island in a small archipelago in the Caribbean Sea, off the coast of the Republic of Panama.

Then, would you believe, in 2005, the Astros were in the World Series for the first time, against the Chicago White Sox. Allene and I were beside ourselves and watched every game at the Big Bamboo, a restaurant and sports bar run by our friends Steve and Vickie Hubbard. On the night of Game 4, Bocas was in the midst of a torrential tropical downpour, which mirrored our demeanor, as the White Sox completed a sweep of all four games. Once again we said, “Well … maybe next year!”

But that didn’t happen. Year after year, it didn’t happen.

And then, in 2013, the Astros announced they would be moving to the American League. Good God Almighty. I was horrified. I’m a purist and I detest the designated hitter role. To me, it ain’t baseball if everyone doesn’t have to bat. Well, it is what it is. I had to get used to it.

Anyway, who cares now? It’s all water under the bridge. (No pun intended, Houston.) The Astros are the new World Champions. After they defeated the Yankees in the ALCS, somehow I knew in my heart that this year they would win it all. Week before last, I told my buddy Kurt Fargo as we were going to grab some lunch, that the Series would go seven games, because the teams were so evenly matched, but the Astros would prevail. I mean, it just had to be. Think about it: Both the Cubs and the Red Sox had gotten the monkeys off their backs, but that little monkey in Houston over the course of 55 years had grown into a 600-pound gorilla and he was ready to jump off. Plus, the Dodgers have won the Series several times. When you add all that to what Texas and Houston went through from Hurricane Harvey—and are still going through—there’s no way the Astros could have been denied.

I know how disappointed the Dodgers fans must be. But if they would just get hold of a dictionary and look up the word disappointed, in the parentheses they would see “Astros fans.” Just kidding, but it could be. The Dodgers have a great team and they fought hard until the end. They will be back.

While Allene and I were watching game seven, at one point, around the 6th inning, she turned to me and said, “Are you nervous?” I told her, “No I’m really not. They’ve got this.” She said, “Don’t say that, you’re gonna jinx ‘em.” I replied, “No it won’t. Really, they’ve got this.”

Thankfully, we were watching the game alone in our jungle home, which has no close neighbors, when Charlie Morton got the final batter to ground out in the bottom of the 9th.
We jumped up, embraced, twirling around, and screaming at the top of our lungs “WE WON, WE WON! THEY DID IT!!! The Astros are the World Series champions!” We looked into each other’s eyes, held on tightly and broke into tears. It’s hard to put into words the emotions we were feeling in our hearts and minds at that moment, so I won’t even try. If you have always been an Astros fan … you know.

So, call it destiny, fate, karma, divine intervention, or whatever you want. The Houston Astros are the 2017 World Series Champions. In the aftermath of everything we’ve all been through as Astros fans for the last 55 years, including the recent devastating floods, I’m reminded of an old famous poem that took place in a town called Mudville. Except this time, there is much joy in Mudville because the Mighty Casey finally came up to the plate again and this time he didn’t strike out. He knocked it out of the park.

A Grand Slam!