Into the Wild 
A Charred Life 
Eerie Canal
The Texas portion of the Intracoastal Waterway is a boon to commerce and a bust to the environment: the cases for and against the four-hundred-mile canal.
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THE ONLY WAY TO TRULY APPRECIATE Laguna Madre is to travel it in the company of biologists like Mullins and Bill Grimes, who is also with the General Land Office. “Laguna Madre is as unique in its own way as the Grand Canyon,” Grimes tells me as we begin the journey. “It’s not an ecosystem that most people are familiar with, but its biomass is as rich and subtle as an old-growth forest.” The lagoon is one of only a few hypersaline bays in the world, which partly explains why it is also one of the most productive. Sheltered from the Gulf of Mexico by Padre Island and bounded on the mainland side by the Kenedy and the King ranches, Laguna Madre gets no significant inflow of fresh water and little rainfall. Water here can be two or three times more salty than in the Gulf.
Until the Corps finished dredging in 1949, Laguna Madre was actually two bays: The upper Laguna and the lower Laguna were separated by a 24-mile mud flat, apparently created by a hurricane in 1919. Wind-driven currents swept Gulf water up the lower Laguna until it piled up on the flats and eventually evaporated. At one time the lower Laguna was so salty that fish went blind. When the Corps dredged the so-called land cut, water was able to circulate from the lower to the upper part of the bay, which decreased the bay’s overall salinity.
Most biologists regard the land cut as a happy accident. While the change in structure and chemistry has come at the expense of some species that had adapted to the hypersalinity, the effect was to make the lagoon even more productive. The combination of the clear, shallow water (which permits maximum sunlight), the high salinity, and a predominate wind that blows strong and steady from southeast to northwest has produced vast sea grass prairies comparable with the tall grasslands of the Great Plains. Because of these meadows, Laguna Madre is an extraordinarily fertile nursery for juvenile shrimp, crab, and a number of sport and commercial fish such as sea trout and red drum. Eighty percent of all fish caught along the Texas coast come from Laguna Madre. Hundreds of microscopic organisms grow on the grasses’ soft, feathery blades. Sea turtles and most of North America’s population of redhead ducks feed on the shoal grass. More than three hundred species of birds live at least part of the year here, including the threatened piping plovers and peregrine falcons.
Grimes, who is a biologist with the coastal division of the General Land Office’s headquarters in Austin, and Mullins, who runs the field office in Aransas Pass and oversees the lower Texas coast, travel Laguna Madre several times a year to inspect sea grass beds and generally look out for the interest of the state. Texas owns Laguna Madre and everything in it, including the Intracoastal, but federal agencies are able to usurp the state’s authority through the use of catchall federal rules like “navigational servitude,” which the Corps interprets to mean its absolute right to do whatever necessary to keep the waterway open to traffic.
One of Mullins’ jobs is to keep watch over the islands and the squatters’ cabins. The islands have been a fact of life for nearly half a century, but the state Legislature didn’t get around to regulating the squatters until 1973. Since that time no permits for new construction have been allowed. Some of the cabins have been modernized or upgraded, however, and are fairly elaborate, with such creature comforts as satellite dishes, large generators, and hot tubs. The state issues five-year permits for the cabins on a first-come basis. “Originally the squatters were mostly commercial fishermen,” Mullins says. “Most of the lease holders now are clubs or groups. The culture has changed.” In the seventies evangelist Lester Roloff leased five cabins as homes for wayward boys. “They supported themselves by fishing at night,” Mullins says. “If they didn’t catch three hundred to four hundred pounds, they’d think they had a bad night.”
Moving along the Intracoastal, I get a sense of Laguna Madre’s splendid isolation and understated dawn-of-creation beauty. Colors are muted in winter. The only sound is the wind. A blue norther recently roared through, literally pushing most of the bay water into the Gulf: Except for the dredging, it would be impossible to navigate under such low-water conditions. There are few signs of vegetation, save the shimmering meadows of sea grass waving in the shallow water just outside the red and green buoys that mark the path of the Intracoastal. A white ibis doodles for bugs on the mud flats; a coyote prowls the mainland shoreline. Colonial water birds no longer nest on Bird Island, I learn, but have relocated to one of the spoil banks. “Some people want Laguna Madre like it used to be,” Mullins says softly, as though talking to himself. “Like when? In the time of the Karankawas?”
Laguna Madre narrows as we approach Baffin Bay. Near a unique geological formation called Point of Rocks, we see another expression of the squatters’ cult: floating cabins, anchored at the edges of the Intracoastal. A new generation of squatters has circumvented the law by constructing these flimsy pontoon-mounted hovels and registering them with the Coast Guard as navigational vessels. “As it stands now,” says Grimes, “we don’t have the authority to do anything about the floaters. They move a few feet every twenty-one days—or they’re supposed to—to support their claims as navigation vessels.” Most of the floaters look as though they haven’t moved for years. Many have partially sunk. The Texas Parks and Wildlife department dredged a canal connecting a shallow area called Graveyard Hole to the Intracoastal so that fish could escape in freezing weather to deeper, warmer water, but for years now the channel has been blocked by a two-story floater that collapsed and sank. The sunken cabin is now the problem of the General Land Office. “This is a circulation channel, not a navigational channel, so the Corps won’t help,” Mullins says.
We’ll cover about one hundred miles today and encounter one tow moving a barge of gravel, another pulling a load of dredge pipe, one motorized sailboat, and one deep-sea fishing boat. This link of the Intracoastal averages less than one tow a day, a good argument for suspending the maintenance dredging that has caused so much damage and shutting it down to barge traffic.
ALL THE PLAYERS ON THE INTRACOASTAL have a vested interest and all of them play the spin. Barge operators, who argue that commercial fishing boats and pleasure craft cause the most shoreline erosion, commissioned a study by Texas A&M that concluded that closing the Laguna Madre link would have a disastrous effect on business in the Rio Grande Valley. Environmentalists countered with a study showing just the opposite—that the bulk of cargo moving through Laguna Madre is fuel, which could be transported as cheaply by pipeline, truck, or deep-draft vessel, with far less damage to such vital sectors of the local economy as fishing, recreation, and tourism.
Blight is in the eyes of the beholder. The Corps sees the spoil islands as bird sanctuaries. Canal dredger King Fisher once described them as beaches, claiming to have “created more beaches south of Corpus than God ever dreamed of.” None of the players wants to accept blame or surrender turf. Two years ago the Texas Department of Transportation attempted to purchase land from the King Ranch for upland disposal sites. No sale. Suddenly the ranch sided with environmentalists, published its own white paper, and portrayed itself as another besieged landowner victimized by powerful bureaucracy. When the Audubon Society and a coalition of environmental groups sued the Corps over open bay disposal, the Texas Department of Transportation sided with the Corps and Parks and Wildlife sided with the environmentalists. The General Land Office, which is obligated to protect oil and gas operations in Laguna Madre that benefit public schools, has waged war with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which shut down a seismographic operation because of a possible sighting of one piping plover near the site.
The Corps has the ultimate special interest. It’s a hidebound bureaucracy whose ultimate fallback is, We’re just doing what Congress says. “The problem is,” says Walt Kittelberger, a Port Mansfield fishing guide and the founder of the Lower Laguna Madre Foundation, “they go before Congress and argue against the public interest. They argue for those who benefit from the Intracoastal—the barge industry, the port authorities, the petrochemical industry.”
In an interview with three Corps executives, I asked why the Corps had continued to ignore the scientific evidence that its dredging practices were destroying Laguna Madre. Neil McLellan, the Corps’ representative to the Intracoastal Waterway advisory committee, rolled his eyes as if the question were too simpleminded to answer. He informed me that the Corps believed that the scientific studies “exaggerated” the problems and cited a study that concluded that shrimp boats cause “thirteen to one hundred and fifty times” more turbidity than dredging.
There are some hopeful signs that the Corps is coming to terms with the problems of Laguna Madre. As old-line engineers retire, each generation is a little more aware of environmental problems. After more than ten years of stalling and rationalizing—and in response to the Audubon Society’s lawsuit—the Corps finally agreed in February to conduct a new environmental-impact study.
In the meantime, another specter menaces Laguna Madre and the Texas coast—a 260-mile extension of the waterway into Mexico. Until recently, politicians in our country believed that plans for a Mexican Canal Intracostera were wildly unrealistic, another economic and environmental disaster like the ill-fated Mexquital Port, south of Matamoros, which cost millions, never operated, and sits today like a rusting graveyard. Despite delays, it appears that dredging is imminent. The Mexican intracoastal could increase traffic through Laguna Madre five to ten times, exacerbating an already serious problem.
The troubled history of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway says as much about the futility of man’s battle with the ocean as it does about our blind trust in technology. Viewed one section at a time, the Texas coast is remarkably resilient. Yet, in less than a century, the Intracoastal has wrought tremendous changes and posed problems nobody anticipated. Each piece of the coast is protected at the cost of another piece. But a daily parade of Mexican barges loaded with Pemex fuel may be more than the Laguna Madre can bear. The Corps’ answer will be what it has always been—a bigger, grander engineering project. There is almost no chance that the Laguna Madre segment will be shut down. “The bottom line,” said land commissioner Garry Mauro, “is we’ve made this big investment in the Intracoastal and a large segment of the lower coast economy depends on it. What are we going to do, fill it in?”
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