Bacon-wrapped shrimp and a causeway view at Pirate’s Landing in Port Isabel

PORT ISABEL — The cooler temperatures have ensured a quieter place and a calmer place where I can enjoy my dinner looking out the windows at the dark waters accented by shimmering light.

I’ve taken my seat in a booth where a shark moves through the water of my table at Pirate’s Landing, and my waitress in her black uniform brings me a menu and a glass of ice water and asks if I am ready. I am not ready, and I tell her I will be ready in a few minutes. She has a delightful spring in her step and a fresh smile, and I am glad she is my waitress because she is very pleasant.

The menu has a design charged with color and images of a seafaring tradition — a smiling woman in a pirate’s hat, a goofy and gawking pelican with a treasure map, a pirate holding up a fish — and marvelous listings which intensify my hunger.

Let’s see. Chargrilled tuna salad?

Maybe. How about the shrimp or crab “Louie”?

That sounds delicious too.

Or how about the jalapeno stuffed shrimp, the wild caught tropical mahi mahi, the flounder fillet, the wild-caught Atlantic tuna, the …

This is one of those quandaries in which I often say I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony, but I’ve already used that several times.

How about, I feel like a lottery winner having to choose between a trip to Fiji or the French Riviera or Acapulco or St. Thomas or …

OK, that works.

Well, I have to choose something. And somehow my eyes keep wandering back to the bacon-wrapped shrimp stuffed in grilled jalapenos in cream cheese and wrapped with smoked apple wood bacon.

Pirate’s Landing in Port Isabel serves great bacon-wrapped shrimp. (Travis M. Whitehead | Valley Morning Star)

That sounds especially good to me. I also see hush puppies listed as an appetizer. I do not recall having hush puppies in many years, and I think I would like to have hush puppies.

My waitress recommends the Louisiana-style crawfish for an appetizer, and also another Louisiana-style something. I say I appreciate that, but I would like the hush puppies. She smiles pleasantly and says OK.

Tonight I could have chosen many restaurants around Port Isabel. I usually prefer a place that is not so popular, a more obscure place, but tonight I choose Pirate’s Landing.

I choose Pirate’s Landing because I recall the last time I visited Pirate’s Landing about 15 years ago. I had only recently returned from Michoacan and taken the regional features reporter position at The Brownsville Herald.

I was out doing restaurant reviews again as well as other feature stories. At that time, I was over using an abundance of flowery adjectives and adverbs that were heavy handed, out of place, and empty.

This overuse was so garish and glaring I was being lampooned in the comments section. And when I used the word “hullabaloo” in my piece about Pirate’s Landing 15 years ago, the reaction was comically explosive.

Pirate’s Landing in Port Isabel serves great bacon-wrapped shrimp. (Travis M. Whitehead | Valley Morning Star)

“I didn’t know I needed a thesaurus to read a restaurant review,” someone wrote. “Travis Whitehead, we’re onto you!”

One person called me a pinhead, and a retired teacher said, “Travis is probably a nice guy, but if a student turned something like this in to me I would’ve thought it was a joke.”

And so, my endeavor at great and powerful writing had crashed. It had served no purpose except to perhaps tell me to stop trying too hard, stop taking myself so seriously, and rethink my writing and my creative voice.

I hope I have advanced beyond that now. Here at Pirate’s Landing 15 years later I relax and instead of forcing words with no substance I let them come to me.

My plate of shrimp glistens with flavor now. I take my time to savor every bite, every taste, every smell. I eat slowly and while I enjoy each moment of taste, I observe every minute of the husband and wife in the booth in front of me with the two small children fidgeting in their seats.

Pirate’s Landing in Port Isabel serves great bacon-wrapped shrimp. (Travis M. Whitehead | Valley Morning Star)

She has seafood, he has a hamburger, and she’s running her hand through his hair while they speak softly to one another.

Across the dining room a woman tilts her glass to drink the last of her red wine, and then a waitress brings her Styrofoam boxes.

Three men walk by me and their footsteps are like thunder on the wooden floor. I wonder if the floors were deliberately built to make that thunderous sound to make the Pirate’s Landing experience more authentic.

I look out the windows at the cars and their lights as they move slowly on the causeway and take another bite of shrimp with bacon and jalapeno and cream cheese.

But there is no hullaballoo tonight. That is far behind me now.

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