The Wild Coast
Headed for the beach this summer? Escape the crowds at these five out-of-the-way places where the coast is always clear.
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Gallagher suddenly stopped the truck. “Horny toad!” he shouted. It was a sight I hadn’t seen since I was a boy. I picked it up and a childhood memory told me to turn it over on its back and tickle its belly. Sure enough, its eyes closed. A few hundred yards up the road we stopped at an elevated observation platform that provided a view of a marsh, where red-wing blackbirds chittered and chattered and a couple of black-headed coots loitered in the tall grass. An eastern meadowlark and two cedar waxwings glided by, and a whistling tree duck emerged from the water. Gallagher pointed to a shallow channel of water marking one of the trenches that were dug across the island during the Civil War. This one provided protection for Union soldiers from a Confederate garrison at Fort Esperanza, which the outnumbered rebels eventually abandoned. For such an isolated spot, Matagorda has a rich history. La Salle, Cabeza de Vaca, and Jean Lafitte passed this way. The antebellum lighthouse, now shuttered and lightless but majestic nonetheless, was originally located two and a half miles northeast of its present site, then moved in 1878. It marks the entrance to Matagorda Bay at Cavallo Pass.
Gallagher zipped past the old airbase runway, where the cracks between the slabs of concrete were filling in with native grasses, Mexican hat in bloom, and prickly pear. The runway has become a nesting area for the endangered least tern, just as the poles that once carried electricity to the island have been claimed by great blue herons. Mother Nature is slowly taking back the island. “See that post?” he said. “The military used to tether a jeep there and let it run in circles, then strafe it from the air.”
We got out of the truck again at the beach, which was wide, white, and pockmarked with trash. Gallagher examined a dug-up area around ghost crab holes, which he blamed on feral hogs. “They root the devil out of everything,” he snarled. The hogs are the scourge of the island, an invader whose presence threatens the balance of a fragile ecosystem that shelters 325 species of birds, 19 of them protected or endangered species, including whooping cranes and peregrine falcons, and a herd of around nine hundred white-tailed deer.
Currents bring the trash here—most of it dumped from ships and offshore platforms—and little can be done about it. The twice-a-year cleanups organized by the General Land Office keep the situation somewhat under control. “We don’t rake the beach or clean it,” Gallagher said. “Leaving it alone protects the salt cap on the sand, prevents wind erosion, and lets the beach grow.” But he still tries to do his part. “You know about the message in the bottle?” he asked me. “When I find one of them, I write a letter back to say, ‘You’re polluting my beach.’”
The Longest Drive
Padre Island National Seashore
THE ROAD FROM CORPUS CHRISTI TO PADRE Island National Seashore foretold what lay ahead: First the convenience stores disappeared from the roadside landscape, followed by subdivisions, motels, shell shops, and condos, leaving only telephone poles to mar the view. Then even the poles and the shoulders of the pavement vanished, leaving only a narrow ribbon of asphalt to split the dunes and tidal flats on the longest barrier island in the world. And we hadn’t even gotten to the park visitors center yet. It was the perfect introduction to driving to the Mansfield Cut, a 120-mile round trip on the longest undeveloped stretch of coastline in the U.S.
I had rented a Jeep Cherokee, summoned my buddy Red, and risen with the sun. The chalkboard at the entry gate to the park warned that beach driving conditions were poor. But the other statistics that are important to the down-island traveler—wind, weather, water temperature, beach debris, and presence of jellyfish—were agreeable for a full day’s adventure. A mile after the visitors center, the pavement veered straight for the beach. By a few minutes after eight we were rolling along the firm sand. Perhaps fifty vans and pickups were parked along the first five miles, most of them rigged for overnight camping. The next milepost warned that motor traffic for the next 55 miles was restricted to vehicles with four-wheel drive. Another sign raised the speed limit from 15 miles per hour to 25.
That was a joke. There was no way to maintain that speed, given the changing tides, the debris on the beach, and the shifting sands, which could range from hard-packed to powdery in a matter of a few feet. If we stayed on the harder, wetter sand at water’s edge, we had to worry about the incoming tide or a hard-to-see trench carved out of the sand by a receding wave. Above the swash, the highest point where water rose on the beach, the sand could become soft and deep in an instant. Trash was a constant hazard—huge ballast buoys, plastic milk crates, trash can lids, bottles and more bottles, telephone poles, a refrigerator, a dead dog, a card table emblazoned with a green spade. A wayward hippie staggered by, seemingly aimless of purpose. Where had he come from? Where was he going? Not a vehicle was in sight.
Around twenty miles into the four-wheel-drive zone, we passed what would be the last of the vehicles parked on the beach. We were alone except for the occasional all-terrain vehicle driven by a ranger or a volunteer looking out for the endangered Kemp’s ridley turtles, whose nesting season had just begun. Driving anywhere on this beach required nimble steering, quick reflexes, and constant vigilance—exactly what makes this one of the great driving experiences in Texas. If we got stuck, I reminded myself, we were supposed to find a couple of buckets among the debris and pour water around the tires to harden the sand.
I was beginning to wonder if I was seeing things. Someone had painted eyes and a smile on a buoy that had washed ashore. If enough artists could be rounded up to paint other large objects on the beach, Padre would be the world’s biggest and longest art park. That piece of driftwood could be a pelican, that glove a human hand.
At mile 27.6, we saw a white pickup doing a 180-degree turn. It was one of the turtle patrol vehicles, whose driver had spotted a giant Kemp’s ridley on the beach. We braked and followed him as he got out of his truck. The ridley was dead, the flesh around its neck partially eaten away. Its four-foot shell was covered with moss. “This one could have been chomped by a shark,” said Josh Mackey, a biological technician at the Seashore. “In most cases, though, man is the culprit.” Turtles get hung up and drown in nets used to haul shrimp, Mackey explained. He set about taking photographs of the dead ridley from every angle.
Mackey told us to look for another dead turtle, a leatherback, at mile marker 37, beyond an area of crushed seashells known as Big Shell. By the time we reached the mile marker, a volunteer had dragged the huge carcass into the dunes. The longer the drive went on, the more mesmerizing became the repeating rhythm: swerve, brake, accelerate, swerve, brake. It was hard to stay alert for boards with exposed nails or lightbulbs, which were sometimes hidden in the sea grape. At mile 50 we passed the last landmark, an exposed metal boiler in the surf beyond the second sandbar that marked the wreck of the Nicaragua, a large merchant steamship that sunk offshore in 1912. Shortly after noon, more than four hours after we had passed the visitors center, we reached the cut, which is kept open by two jetties jutting into the wind-whipped Gulf. There was no sign of life other than two fishermen in a johnboat moored at the jetty across the channel. But evidence of humanity was everywhere—almost every space between rocks on the jetty was crammed with some piece of plastic, Styrofoam, or metal.
The drive back was more challenging. The character of the beach had totally changed; what had been hard sand on the way down had become soft and spongy, grabbing the wheels unexpectedly. Worse, we unwisely had used the air conditioner and the four-wheel drive all the way down, and the gas gauge showed less than half a tank left. Now I shifted to two-wheel drive to conserve gas, and twice we almost bogged down before I could get the four-wheel drive engaged. At mile marker 20, the low-fuel light flashed on. It was still at least ten miles past the park to the nearest gasoline pump. Then the red needle descended below E. When we reached the visitors center, we decided to enjoy a swim and worry about the gas gauge later. We rinsed off in the freshwater showers, but we felt even better when we spotted a gas station at the turnoff to Port Aransas.
The Tip of Texas
Boca Chica
EASTER WEEKEND AT SOUTH PADRE: no-vacancy signs, long lines in the restaurants and stores, long lines on the road, the beach packed with people. Easter weekend on Boca Chica, a peninsula just across Brazos Santiago Pass from the towers of South Padre: around 75 cars cruising up and down the beach, with perhaps ten more vehicles clustered at the mouth of the Rio Grande.
Boca Chica is a narrow finger of land between the Rio Grande and South Bay, the bottom of the Laguna Madre. When it reaches the sea, the peninsula makes a sharp left turn to form an eight-mile-long beach. Behind it is a harsh landscape that, compared with the marshes of Sea Rim, is almost a desert—a desolate, yucca-spiked prairie studded with tall grasses, mangrove, mesquite, and big thickets of prickly pear. The drive out is a boulevard of broken dreams: a roadside marker commemorating the last battle of the Civil War, a scattering of homes in a failed subdivision (Kopernik Shores, marketed to Polish immigrants from Chicago), the crumbling gates of another development that never got under way, and the most recent failure, Playa Del Rio, envisioned as a mega-resort of hotels and golf courses when it was announced in 1986. Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service owns most of Boca Chica, as part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge.
In contrast to South Padre, the beach at Boca Chica is practically untamed. There are no shelters, no services, nothing but beach and sea and a few cars. I took my two sons there on a day trip from South Padre. It’s only a few hundred yards as the crow flies, but to get there you have to drive eighteen miles back to Brownsville, then toward Boca Chica on a shoulderless road. We turned right at the beach and followed it three miles to an impassable point where a lighthouse was positioned across an inlet. The lighthouse marked Playa Bagdad, the beach of Matamoros. The small inlet was the once-mighty Rio Grande, now less than 75 yards wide, a gentle stream running clear and cool enough to attract swimmers from both sides. The Spanish name Boca Chica was perfect; it means “little mouth.”
“That’s it?” the older boy asked incredulously. He’d expected a division more pronounced.
We found a spot at least a quarter of a mile from the nearest car. The beach was almost a hundred yards wide and bordered by a continuous row of dunes. The older boy went straight in with a Boogie Board in hand, while the younger boy squawked and hollered with pure joy, splashing around in the surf. I showed him how to bodysurf, diving with a breaking wave, arms extended forward, legs kicking. He picked it up right away.
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