aj_journal0505.htm

LOOK AT US, WE'RE BEAUTIFUL
by Alex Jones
Staff Photographer
The Monitor (McAllen, TX)

Synchronicity can be a funny thing. I can remember the feeling perfectly – it was the end of a weekend filled with sand, wet t-shirt contests, and more bare skin than I’d seen since graduating college, and I was editing furiously in my car to meet deadline (and keep the salt spray away from my Powerbook) when the perfect song found its way into my radio.

“ Look at us, we’re beautiful,
All the people push and pull but
Let’s just go out and ride,
Talk about the things we tried.
Look at us, we’re beautiful,
All the people push and pull but
They’ll never get inside,
We’ve got too much to hide.”

“ Look at us, we’re beautiful.
Look at us, we’re beautiful.
Look at us, we’re beautiful.”

As the refrain from Moby’s latest song hummed on, I couldn’t help but think back over everything I’d seen since Friday, and what a privilege it is to have my job.

South Padre Island is a sleepy little barrier island, inhabited by about 1,500 people year-round, and about 150,000 during Spring Break. Its location on the Southern tip of the Texas coast puts it in the readership area of my paper, so I proposed to my editor sometime around February that we should free up some time from the daily schedule to cover the start of Texas Week, when all the colleges in the state conveniently have their spring breaks at the same time. The demands of putting out a daily metro paper on a tight budget took their toll on my request, and by the time everything was finalized, I was granted the time, but no travel budget, and it was clear that there would be no reporter joining me. None of the business owners on the island would return my calls. The only permission I had, ironically, was from the Dept. of Customs and Border Protection to shoot at the Matamoros border crossing one night as Spring Breakers trickled back out of the nearby border town and back into Brownsville. I was annoyed for about 5 minutes, until I realized what this meant:

I had complete and total freedom.

Things started looking up quickly. I called up Jeff Raymond, the Island reporter for the Valley Morning Star, which happens to be one of our sister papers, and got permission to sleep on his couch. With that problem solved, I showed up on Friday afternoon and tried to take it all in. The sleepy little island I had come to know during the off-season was filled with tourists – the hotels were packed, the one road through town was packed bumper-to-bumper, and the racket from hundreds of car stereos blasting different songs with the windows down as they sat in traffic was almost deafening. Having been out of college for just over a year, I felt right at home.

I had been a bit worried earlier in the week – wondering what would fall through, and where I would get some pictures that accurately portrayed Spring Break without being the same thing everyone had seen a million times already. I was starting to get a little pissed that no one would return my calls seeking access, and I kept blaming myself for getting such a late start. As luck would have it, things were much easier in person. I stopped by the Bahia Mar resort/bar/club and was instantly granted a hotel press credential that would keep security off my back, and then managed to convince the owner of Louie’s Backyard, probably the biggest club on the Island, that he should let me in for a night. After some initial hesitation, everything was alright when I explained that I just wanted to be a fly on the wall for the evening, and that I wasn’t coming out with an agenda and trying to nail him, which has evidently been a problem in the past.

Watching the drunken hordes go by is an amusing experience when you’re stone-cold sober and have a camera in your hand. I kept finding myself just standing there, transfixed, watching the looks, embraces, gestures, and dismissals (and the bumping and grinding) that goes on in a club when everyone there has abandoned all ties to reality for a week. They had come from across the country to have a good time, consequences be damned, and they did. The drinks flowed, the music pounded, some exchanged phone numbers, some struck out, and when the clock struck 2:00 am, they parted ways. I left with my pictures, happy to be back in the middle of everything. I spent the rest of the weekend in much of the same way, wandering around the Island aimlessly until I found what I was looking for in my mind. The beautiful people were people packed from one end to the other, from across the country and around the world, and they all welcomed me into their world for the brief period of time that our paths crossed.