The Spanish Station

In the (highly inaccurate, btw) movie retelling of The Right Stuff, a beach scene opens with the playing of "La Bamba." It is the late 1950's, and we are in Cocoa Beach. It is the first time I will lay eyes on the place.

My love of the space program, partially fueled by the book version of The Right Stuff, would eventually lead me to live there for a year while I worked in education at the Kennedy Space Center. When I flew to Orlando for my interview, I rented a tiny little car and drove fifty miles down the Bee Line to Cocoa Beach, where I made my first major cash withdrawal from an ATM for a deposit on my first apartment. Four hundred bucks a month, right on the beach. I still have the business card in my wallet--my ticket to big-girldom. Hurricane Francis made short work of the place, and the last time I drove past, it was gone, sand. A construction company with a big misty sign of a condo complex had taken its place.

I knew where to go first: The Cocoa Beach Pier, where my friends and I had first visited on our senior spring break. I walked the boards, stared at the news articles detailed the hundreds of space flights which had started over these waters, and made like Moses: "I will dwell in this land," I promised the breeze. I pulled out of my parking space at the EconoLodge--so booked because it was supposedly originally owned by the Mercury astronauts, and also was $59 a night--and drove down the beach, parallel to the ocean, the
windows open, the March night air warm. Two days ago, in Cincinnati, I had scraped frost from the windshield on my way to my office job.

When I punched the radio's power button, Latin music poured out of the speakers. The song ended, and immediately blended into another song with Spanish lyrics. I was startled. Was there an entire station of this? I cranked the volume. There was not, suffice to say, such a thing in Ohio.

At the Pier, I walked the beach, where two college students on surfboards hollered at me. I waved and kept walking. They found me again in the bar at the front end of the pier, and I dodged one after he bought me a drink, excusing myself to the bathroom and making for the parking lot, waving at his buddy as he walked in the opposite direction.

"He's still in there?" he said.

"Yeah," I called over my shoulder, not adding that I would be back. When I put the key in the ignition, the Spanish station was still on, the lyrics incomprehensible but the music new and free.