Great Outdoors
Swamped!
Port Arthur has more to offer than refineries, oil rigs, and that awful smell. It's the gateway to boundless boggy adventures.
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From Anahuac, we doubled back to the coast to visit another birding paradise with excellent walks, an elevated cluster of wooded uplands in the otherwise pancake-flat marsh known as High Island. High Island isn't an island at all; it is actually a tiny town on a raised part of the marsh. High Island boasts four bird sanctuaries, all owned by the Houston Audubon Society, where you can witness one of the more unusual natural phenomena in the area, called a "fallout." This happens from mid-March to mid-May, when millions of birds are making the six-hundred-mile, eighteen-hour crossing of the Gulf of Mexico from the Yucatán. If the weather is not good, or if the winds are adverse, the exhausted birds literally "fall out" of the sky as soon as they reach land. Tens of thousands of perching birds are likely to end up in the trees around High Island. (Dry, wooded sites in this area, such as the Sabine Woods sanctuary near Sabine Pass and the Willows at Anahuac, are usually good places to view a fallout.)
If you want to get out into the marsh, the best place to go is Sea Rim State Park, about 22 miles south of Port Arthur. This is one of the most pleasant places on this stretch of coast. There is an immaculate section of beach where four-wheel-drive vehicles are prohibited, the campsites are clean and grassy, and a nifty marsh walk takes you on a twenty-minute stroll through marsh grasses and bayous. But the real attraction here for the casual tourist is the boating. From March through November, you can take a heart-stopping, 35-mile-per-hour airboat ride deep into the heart of the coastal wilderness where, miles away from anything, you can watch ibis and great white egrets fishing and three-foot-long redfish thrashing in the shallows. You can also rent a canoe and head into the marsh yourself. If you do, there is the added thrill of knowing that occasionally tourists are dragged shrieking to their death from such canoes by the park's hungry alligators. Okay, I made that up. But there is a real, visceral charge in seeing a seven-foot gator at close range on the bank of a marsh.
If you decide you like the coastal plains, you can cross over into the Louisiana outback, where the huge Sabine National Wildlife Refuge spreads over 124,511 acres and offers a 1.5-mile marsh walk. There is also a 26-mile-long chain of beaches that runs along the south side of Louisiana Highway 82—the so-called Coonass Riviera ("coonass" refers to the Cajun residents). Of these, Holly Beach is the most famous, mostly as a place where local young people go in their pickup trucks to consume vast quantities of beer. Be forewarned, too, that there is an extremely low cuteness quotient here. Though there are few oil-related industries in southwestern Louisiana, you would still not confuse this stretch of coast with Cape Cod. Nor do the locals want to make it look like Cape Cod, the theory being that if they gussied it up, then they'd get a lot of plush-bottomed personal-injury lawyers from Houston driving late model Teutonic sedans and pushing land prices up and installing Starbucks and Jamba Juices and, presto, no more Coonasses. And who wants that? But the beaches are wide and long and empty, with good fishing, shelling, and swimming.
I recommend staying in Port Arthur, partly because there is nowhere down on the coastal marsh to stay (unless you camp at Sea Rim) and partly because it is a friendly, eager-to-please sort of place with a bunch of comfortable, newish hotels. There is another reason too. The city is just a few miles from a different kind of wetland: a cypress swamp of the sort that pervades much of East Texas. The Blue Elbow Swamp, as it is known, is a wild area of the Sabine River Basin on the north side of Sabine Lake. We took a tour out of Orange with a colorful guide named Eli Tate who runs an outfit called Adventures 2000+. Tate is a biologist, and he is also a clever man. He painted his boats white to distinguish them from the boats on the swamp that are likely to be hunting alligators so the creatures would not disappear as soon as he came around the bend. It worked. The alligators now recognize the boats and can be bribed with marshmallows (also white, in keeping with the theme) to come right up to their gunwales. After two days of hanging out in close proximity to gators, this was the closest we got.
The final reason to visit this part of the country—and this has nothing to do with being outdoors—is the barbecued crabs, which become more plentiful with the warmer weather. As far as I know, this is a regional cuisine whose range extends no more than 75 miles from Port Arthur. You can get them at three good Cajun restaurants: Esther's in Port Arthur, Al-T's in Winnie, and the Shrimp Dock in Sabine Pass. They are not really barbecued: They are cleaned, gilled, loaded up with spices, and then deep-fried. Like the rest of this oddball part of Texas, they are like nothing else I have ever experienced.
Parks and refuges:
Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, 409-267-3337; friendsofanahuacnwr.org.
High Island, 713-932-1639; houstonaudubon.org.
Sabine National Wildlife Refuge, 337-762-3816;creolenaturetrail.org.
Sea Rim State Park, 409-971-2559 (park office) or 512-389-8900 (camping); www.tpwd.state.tx.us.Accommodations: Holiday Inn Park Central, Port Arthur, 409-724-5000.
Hotel Galvez, Galveston, 281-480-2640. Restaurants: Al-T's, Winnie, 409-296-9818.
Dutch Kettle, Galveston, 409-765-6761.
Esther's Cajun Seafood and Oyster Bar, Port Arthur, 409-962-6268.
Gaido's, Galveston, 409-762-9625.
Shrimp Dock, Sabine Pass, 409-971-0014. Swamp Tours: Adventures 2000+, Orange, 409-988-9342.
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