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.
THE LONG, LANGUID COASTLINE OF TEXAS takes its own sweet time seducing the senses. It may lack the immediate drama of a first encounter with California’s Big Sur or the dazzling tropical allure of the Florida Keys. But if you let it work on you long enough, the fine line where Texas meets the sea will stir the soul. The Texas coast is the simple essence of the seashore experience: sun, sand, surf, breezes, dunes, wetlands, waterfowl, and vast, tranquil bays, along with its most compelling assets, the thin, elegant islands and peninsulas that barricade the Texas mainland from a stormy sea.
Discovering the Texas coast in its natural state is no easy task, obscured as it is by development, crowds, and trash that washes on the beach from the Gulf of Mexico. The resort destinations, with their swim-up bars, T-shirt shops, and fruity drinks embellished with tiny umbrellas, are bent on diverting our attention from the main reason that we go down to the sea—to engage in that universal experience of basking in the exact spot where sand, sky, and water converge, in search of peace, quiet, and solitude.
Fortunately, finding that wild coast is easier than you think. With a little bit of effort, you can discover hidden places as remote as far west Texas, but tempered by the constant, calming roar of the surf rolling over sandbars in harmony with the squawks of shorebirds, unspoiled by the buzz of Jet Skis and the beat of a boombox. You don’t have to be an athlete or an outdoorsman to get the most out of the adventure. These five easy places-the marshes of Sea Rim State Park, the bird sanctuaries of High Island, Matagorda Island State Park and Wildlife Area, lower Padre Island National Seashore, and Boca Chica beach-are there for anyone who wants to indulge in the primal urge to be at land’s end, where the wilderness overwhelms the civilized and the coast is always clear.
As Wild as Big Bend
Sea Rim State Park
“PEOPLE WHO’VE LIVED AROUND HERE for years and see it for the first time, they can’t believe it exists,” said Danny Magouirk, looking out over the tall grasses that rise out of the wetlands all the way to the horizon. “You can look for miles and miles and see nothing but marsh. No power lines, no poles, totally natural. It’s as wild as Big Bend.”
Magouirk is the assistant superintendent of Sea Rim State Park, which begins ten miles after the Texas coast emerges from the Louisiana muck at Sabine Pass. The park has five miles of beachfront, but the area of greatest interest is the wide swath of wetlands that incorporates two wildlife refuges, totaling almost 75,000 acres. Magouirk was about to fire up the automobile engine that powers his airboat to take me on a ride through the marsh unit of the park. I put on the earmuffs he’d given me, and we sped into the rich wetlands, winding along watery alleys through the cordgrass. The passages were so tight I felt as if I were in a tunnel. Occasionally the grasses would part and we would find ourselves crossing wide-open flats, placid lakes, or small ponds, and then we would plunge into the dense vegetation again. Less than a minute after departing the Myers Point dock one mile east of the park headquarters, we were being shadowed by an indigo bunting, an iridescent neotropical bird on its way north for the summer. Our boat flushed herons, egrets, and ducks out of the grasses, sent fish jumping, and forced alligators, sunk deep in the mud, to scurry for safety. It occurred to me that Sea Rim is an aquatic version of a drive-through wildlife park.
“Later in the season they get so used to us they don’t even move,” Magouirk said of the park’s residents, as a curious red-tailed hawk circled overhead. “In a canoe or a kayak, you can see a whole lot more—river otter, mink, muskrat, especially at sunup and sundown. It’s really an exceptional estuary. This is a nursery where much of the life on land and in the sea is born and raised.” A mosquito belonging to one of the sixty known species in Jefferson County reminded me that not all of the life is welcome.
This is one of the least-trafficked parts of the coastline, due in no small part to the impassable condition of Texas Highway 87, the storm-battered road that once hugged the beach from Sabine Pass to the Port Bolivar ferry landing on Galveston Bay. The highway was closed in 1989 when hurricanes Chantal and Jerry washed out the roadway. From a few miles east of High Island to a few miles west of Sea Rim, the road no longer exists in many places. Even four-wheel drive won’t help. Nature has reasserted its claim to the land, which is once again beach, low dunes, and tideland.
The beach at Sea Rim is practically an afterthought. Its hard-packed sand, made bronze by silt from the Mississippi River, slopes gradually into tepid water. The minimal wave action discourages surfing but is close to ideal for casting for redfish, speckled trout, flounder, and sand sharks and launching sailboards, sailboats, and catamarans. The dunes are lower and flatter than those you find farther down the coast; there isn’t a lot of loose sand for the wind to blow. This beach draws a more sedate crowd than the rowdier bunch that frequents the county’s McFaddin Beach, about two miles to the west.
But at Sea Rim, the other side of the dunes is where the action is. If a boat trip into the marsh sounds too adventurous, take a stroll along the three-quarter-mile Gambusia Trail, an elevated boardwalk that begins just east of the visitors center. Who needs a zoo amid ducks splashing, birds perching, and alligators marinading themselves, all within an arm’s reach, seemingly oblivious to human presence? They were all so close I had to remind myself of the sign that addressed my erroneous impression: “This park is not a zoo. The animals here are wild.” I kept my hands inside the railing. A twelve-foot reptile with a mouthful of teeth was not something I wanted to tempt.
For the Birds
High Island
EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK IN GLENDAweena’s, a little shop tucked away on Winnie Street in High Island, you see birds: T-shirts on the wall with warblers and buntings silk-screened on the front, bird maps, bird books about the upper Texas Coast, cassettes of bird calls, bird videos, bird gimme caps, “I Brake for Birds” bumper stickers, and all sorts of avian accessories, from jewelry to binocular straps. It was the perfect nesting spot for a party of four Californians who had just wandered in, sweating, clothing disheveled, heads covered with eccentric hats and caps. Each neck had a pair of binoculars hanging from it.
“This is probably the best in the world,” Pat Fleischer gushed. “Next year we’re coming back. We’re going home and telling L.A. Audubon what we saw.”
“We’ve seen twelve species of warblers,” added Ginny Chin. “This is better than Costa Rica.”
“This is like Christmas,” Fleischer said, showing off her binocular earrings.
High Island is for the birds. The small town of fewer than five hundred residents, named for an unusual coastal hill (which turned out to be an oil-rich salt dome), has become one of the great birdwatching centers of North America. This is largely due to its strategic place in the annual trans-Gulf migration of birds moving north in the spring. When a cold front blows in from the north, birds fall out of the sky into trees. Seven years ago Jon and Glendaweena Llast, two avid birdwatchers from Dallas, opened a one-stop bed and breakfast, birder’s shop, and gateway to Smith Oaks, a sanctuary owned by the Houston Audubon Society. Glendaweena died last year, but Jon continues to lead tours on the weekends and by appointment, while Kenneth Ferguson operates the store and Birder’s Haven B&B in the house across the courtyard.
Testifying to High Island’s world renown was a group from Thunder Bay, Ontario, who occupied the sitting area underneath the spreading shade of thirty-foot oaks, cottonwoods, and fig trees. Feeders hung from the branches, which seemed to be a Grand Central Station of the avian world. Gurgling fountains served as birdbaths. “Last year we went to Arizona and wound up here,” one woman told me. “This year we’d planned a trip to Florida, but here we are.”
Leaving the World Behind
Matagorda Island State Park And Wildlife Area
THE MAINLAND GRADUALLY DISAPPEARED in the humid haze as the ferry headed south on the eleven-mile trip across Espiritu Santo Bay toward Matagorda Island. First the 110-foot cast-iron lighthouse came into view, then several outbuildings on the bay side of the island near the ferry landing, remnants of an abandoned Air Force base. After a trip of almost an hour, we arrived at the 38-mile-long barrier island, which was inaccessible except by private boat until ferry service began four years ago. Today Matagorda remains as close to a wilderness as you can get on the Texas coast—a 58,000-acre park and preserve that is off-limits to private motor vehicles. Only bicycles and park vehicles (including two open-bed shuttle trucks and an old school bus that carry visitors around the island) are allowed on the roads left behind by the Air Force.
“People call this place pristine,” Ronny Gallagher, the park superintendent, told me shortly after we got into his pickup for a tour of the park, which is surrounded by a much larger national wildlife refuge. “This is nowhere close to pristine. Cattle ranching went on here for more than one hundred and fifty years, and the Air Force tried to bomb it back into the ocean. But take off over there”—he nodded toward the bluestem and sharp-edged saw grass flourishing in the interior of island—“and see if it’s wild. Just don’t step on a water moccasin doing it. The snakes, the mosquitoes, the deerflies, the stickers, they’ll stop you real quick.”
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