The Manual 2.0 
A Charred Life 
A Shrimp Tale
Vernon Bates and Weecho Salinas have been dragging their nets in Matagorda Bay for decades. But these days they’re tangling with state regulators and watching profits plunge, which is why their way of life could soon be dead in the water.
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Things look bleak indeed for the bay shrimpers, though the state’s concern for the juvenile shrimp lacks any empirical weight and whatever environmental intrusions the shrimpers commit seem far less alarming than the fragile economic conditions of our state’s shrimping communities. (Matagorda County regularly suffers one of the ten highest unemployment rates of the state’s 254 counties.) It would be nice if the state spent less time regulating shrimpers and more time addressing the American market’s growing reliance on imported aquaculture shrimp from Thailand, Ecuador, and China, which has driven down the price of Texas shrimp and forced the shrimpers to work harder for lower wages. And, of course, it would be nice if the Gulf shrimpers—who, as the moniker indicates, do their fishing several miles farther out in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico—joined lobbying forces with the bay shrimpers. But pigs will fly before this happens, according to Willie Younger, a marine-education specialist with the Texas A&M extension service: “The Gulf shrimpers say the bay shrimpers catch all the babies, and the bay shrimpers say the Gulf shrimpers catch all the mamas before they can spawn. They’re at each other’s throats all the time.”
Besides, the Gulf shrimpers constitute a different breed. Their boats are much bigger, their expenses and their grosses are higher, their crews are larger, and they stay on the water for days or weeks rather than hours. The state, by voicing its disapproval of the overharvesting of juvenile shrimp in the bay, has implicitly encouraged shrimpers to do their work in the less-restricted Gulf. Several years ago, Vernon considered running a Gulf boat. But he was dissuaded by the prospect of bossing people around and fretting over how much of the catch the deckhands stole (a chronic problem on Gulf boats). He’s a fisherman, not a foreman. So Vernon Bates has stuck with his 38-foot bay trawler, from which he will fish until the state banishes him from the bay for good.
His is a rustic trade, marked by primitive tools and a reliance on inarticulable hunches. The trawler he calls the Faye B. (after his wife) was built in 1979; it is cramped and does not offer a smooth ride. The wheelhouse is outfitted with a radar unit, a depth finder, a loran navigational aid, and other such gadgets, but Vernon seldom uses them, says he doesn’t altogether trust them. Like Weecho and the CB radio, they are there to keep him company as much as anything else. Vernon doesn’t pretend to have it all down to a science. He knows that today’s wind will adversely affect the presence of shrimp, but he can’t explain why. Similarly, he knows that shrimp are more abundant when the moon is waxing; that’s just the way it is. When I ask him why we’re dropping the net at a particular spot, Vernon’s answer is, “’Cause that’s where I last found some shrimp and I ain’t found any anywhere else since then.”
What he knows is what he senses. He can hold a string tied to his try net (a small net that is lifted every few minutes to get an idea of the bigger net’s yield) and through his fingertips distinguish between the sliding movement of a fish entering the net and the kicking of a shrimp’s tail. As a quarterback envisions his pass falling into a receiver’s hands before it’s actually thrown, Vernon casts his net where he envisions shrimp tumbling into its womb of mesh. It is all a shrimper can do, since it’s folly to try to think like a shrimp, one of God’s dumbest creatures—and folly as well, paradoxically, to predict its elusive migratory habits. To succeed as Vernon does, one must know the feel of the bay itself.
This season has been a dreadful one for bay shrimpers. A late-winter freeze probably delayed the mating season, and the damnable drought has meant too much salt in the bay water for the young shrimp to abide. For once, state fishery officials aren’t blaming the bay shrimpers for the depleted stock, but that is small comfort. Nearly all of the Anglo shrimpers sat out the first couple of weeks of the season in May, asserting that there weren’t enough shrimp of appreciable size to break even against gasoline costs. Vernon didn’t look at it that way. You might have a few money-losing days, but as he puts it, “How much money can you make sitting at home and crying in your beer?”
Shrimping, says Vernon, is “all I ever knew, and I never really wanted to do anything else.” His father, Fred, began shrimping in Alabama at the close of World War I. In 1931 the Bates family moved by boat from the Alabama coastal town of Bayou La Batre to Palacios. Vernon was two years old then, and he picked up on the trade well before he was a teenager—as would Vernon Junior, who as a five-year-old would jump out of bed at three in the morning, when his daddy’s alarm clock would go off, and beg Vernon to take him along. Both Vernon Junior and Vernon’s younger son, Mark, are now veterans of the Palacios shrimping business, along with Vernon’s uncles Ted and Bob, his cousins Ted Junior and Cooter, and Cooter’s son Bud. In all likelihood, the Bates family’s newest shrimper will be Vernon’s eighteen-year-old grandson, Keith, who repairs his grandfather’s nets and is a shy but lingering presence at the fish house. Vernon personally hopes Keith will reconsider: “He’s got real pale skin,” says the grandfather, “and I just know he’s gonna have trouble with melanoma.” But as Vernon’s wife, Faye, says, somewhat wearily, “Once shrimping’s in their blood, you just can’t get it out.”
Other Palacios families share the Bateses’ passion. The Wallaces, the Kunefkes, and the Seamans have been shrimpers for generations, as have the two dominant Hispanic shrimping families, the Garcias and the Aparicios. Nowadays, names like Nguyen and Vu and Tran are frequently heard at dockside. Of course, less-tradition-bound free agents swarm the bay waters as well, and they are the ones most apt to contribute to the unfortunate stereotype of the shrimper as an uneducated, antisocial Gulf Coast drifter, wild-eyed and grimy in appearance, uncouth in speech, and usually reeking of sea rot and alcohol. The transient shrimpers are the quickest to brag, the first to complain, the most likely to be lurching about the dockside bait camps in the deckhand’s trademark white rubber boots with beer can in hand while the Vernon Bateses of Matagorda Bay are out dragging their nets. They belong to Vernon’s world only in the way that a playground basketball hack inhabits the world of Michael Jordan.
Vernon’s world, and that of the other Palacios shrimpers, changed almost overnight in 1976, when the first six Vietnamese families moved to Palacios. “Before they came,” he says, “as many shrimpers were getting out as were getting in, and things were pretty stable. Most of us could make an okay living.” But in short order, the six families were followed by dozens more, until more than six hundred refugees occupied the northeastern outskirts of town. They aimed to do in America what they had done back home, which was to shrimp. So they began to build boats, some as big as seventy feet, and they dragged double nets across the bay seemingly nonstop. “Usually you work an area in the daytime, then pick up your nets and give it a rest till tomorrow,” says Vernon. “But they’d stay out there for days, even weeks at a time.”
Coinciding with the arrival of the Vietnamese shrimpers, the number of shrimping licenses would nearly double between 1976 and 1983. The slices of the pie were getting smaller and smaller, and though it was not the refugees’ intent to drive the Anglo shrimpers out of the bay, the possibility that this might occur seemed of little concern to them. Instead, they kept to their own airtight community, objects first of suspicion, then of seething resentment tinged with racism.
Twenty years later, everything has changed while staying the same. The Vietnamese have stuck it out in Palacios, a fact that the Anglo shrimpers have learned to live with. The refugees for the most part remain in their enclave northeast of town. But their culture has added a welcome color to the coast, and their industriousness has earned the admiration of old-schoolers like Vernon, who decries “the Bill Clinton generation—spoiled, lazy, and no morals.” The Vietnamese shrimpers have raised a generation of children who, to no great surprise, dominate the honor rolls in the Palacios school district. Some of the Vietnamese kids will become like 28-year-old Thuy Vu, who was 8 when her family abandoned the Vietnamese village of Sao Mai and relocated to Palacios in 1976, cramming twenty refugees into a single mobile home. Thuy graduated from Palacios High School and thereafter became the business manager of her family’s shrimping business, headed by her father, Tu “Captain Tom” Viet Vu—though in Vernon’s assessment, “That girl’s the brains behind Captain Tom’s operation.” On the other hand, some of the Palacios-born Vietnamese will join gangs or hang out at the shabby bait camps, just like their non-Asian peers. Thuy herself says with a nervous laugh, “We worry that they’re becoming too Americanized.”
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