Coasting
Ride a wave, hunt for shells, build a sand castle, spy on wildlife, eat the catch of the day, watch the sun set: Now is the perfect time to rediscover the endlessly surprising swath of sand where Texas meets the Gulf.
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If cruising the beach isn’t your thing, you can try your hand at windsurfing on Laguna Madre, the shallow bay between the island and the mainland. At Bird Island Basin, considered one of the top spots for the sport in the country, Worldwinds has boards—and instructors—for rent. But whatever you do, don’t leave the park without popping into the Malaquite Visitor Center to view a 1947 home movie of some 40,000 Kemp’s ridley sea turtles coming ashore at Rancho Nuevo, Mexico, to lay their eggs. Because of habitat destruction, commercial fishing, and poaching (in Mexico, some consider the eggs an aphrodisiac), thirty years later a mere 1,100 adult Kemp’s ridleys remained in the wild.
And now? The endangered cuties number around 12,000 adults, thanks to a variety of factors, including mandatory turtle excluders on shrimp nets, increased public awareness, and North Padre’s head-start turtle program. Since 1978 scientists have collected tens of thousands of eggs—first from Rancho Nuevo, now from North Padre as well—hatched them in controlled conditions, and then released the babies just north of the visitors center. Patrolling for egg-laying females during nesting season, from April to July, gives you a righteous excuse to lollygag on North Padre’s shores all day long (don’t touch the old girls; just mark the location and report your discovery by calling 361-949-8173, extension 226). And the early-morning hatchling releases, from late May to mid-September (call the hotline: 361-949-7163), will motivate you to get up and catch the sunrise.
For those who prefer their sand and surf with more creature comforts, Mustang Island lies just north of the park, accessible on the south end via Texas Highway 361 or, on the north, via a free ferry from just south of Aransas Pass. The ferry drops you in the center of Port Aransas, a town laudable not so much for bouncing back as for holding on tightly to the Funky trophy. It’s no place to be during spring break, of course, but any other time of the year it’s ripe for quality loafing: cheering on surfers from the end of the Horace Caldwell Pier; scoping out waterfowl and alligators from the tower at the Port Aransas Birding Center; catching a local band at the Back Porch, an open-air bar on the harbor; or watching dolphins arch through the bow wake of big ships as they squeeze by Roberts Point Park, next to the ferry landing. And while it ain’t no Pacific tide pool, Port A’s granite riprap jetty, just northeast of town, harbors sea urchins and anemones, periwinkle snails, barnacles, an occasional octopus, and yes, even rock roaches, fourteen-legged crustaceans that can change color and drink saltwater from both ends.
Port A is also the gateway to San Jose Island, a case study of the egalitarian appeal of the Texas Open Beaches Act, which allows the public “free and unrestricted use” of all the state’s beaches. The Bass family, of Fort Worth, may own the 28-mile-long St. Jo (as it’s known locally), but they don’t own its beaches. So hop aboard the jetty boat that leaves from Fisherman’s Wharf for a ten-minute ride to some of the best shelling in the state. Bonus: You won’t have to dodge a single lead-footed off-roader, the sometimes-harrowing flip side of “unrestricted use.”
Half an hour north of Port Aransas are the sister cities of Rockport and Fulton, which have perfected the art of reinvention, flowing from meatpacking to fishing to shipbuilding to tourism with the changing economic tides. Despite some recent graceless developments, the quaintness quotient here remains high, from downtown Rockport, with its bookshops, galleries, cafes, and old-time barber shop that’s a direct portal to Mayberry, to the fabulous vertically challenged oak groves along Fulton Beach Road. Maybe the area’s burgeoning eco-businesses, like birding tours aboard The Skimmer and guided paddling trips through the Lighthouse Lakes kayak trail with Captain Sally’s Rockport Kayak Outfitters, will safeguard it against any further loss of character.
And whatever the future brings, there will always be the dazzling natural charms of the nearby 59,000-acre Aransas National Wildlife Refuge and its most famous winter residents, the whooping cranes. Although still the rarest animal in North America, whoopers now number an estimated 313 in the wild, up from a low of around 14 in the forties. Now that’s a comeback.
The Upper Coast
Galveston is the Rocky Balboa of comebacks, and for concrete proof you need look no farther than the seawall. Built to protect the city after the Great Storm of 1900 killed at least six thousand people and erased one third of its buildings, this ten-mile-long, seventeen-foot-tall bulkhead is a testament to the indomitable human spirit—and a great waterfront sidewalk for bike riding. (Rental shops abound along Seawall Boulevard.)
As you pedal along, don’t fixate on the beige water and gray sand. Instead, simply turn away from this lackluster seashore and head for what sets Galveston apart from any other place on the Texas coast: its astounding concentration of historic buildings between the seawall and the harbor. You can tour residential temples to the excesses of the Gilded Age, like the arched and turreted Moody Mansion, built in 1895, and Ashton Villa, an 1859 confection of brick and filigree ironwork. Or simply wander the fifty-square-block East End Historic District, whose streets are lined with more-anonymous dwellings.
Then there’s the Strand, a historic district on the bay side of the Island. Known in the 1870’s as the Wall Street of the Southwest, when it was home to the state’s five largest banks, this hotbed of commerce, with its wealth of Gothic buildings, had seriously hit the skids less than a century later. Fortunately, restoration mania swept the Island in the seventies, and once again, Galveston’s downtown became a showplace. Although the ornate storefronts and imposing former banks now harbor their fair share of T-shirt and flip-flop shops (so that’s what all those freighters are hauling in), they’re also home to the likes of the Galveston County Historical Museum, where you can see film footage of the 1900 storm, and at least one gloriously oddball store: Col. Bubbie’s, a warren of military surplus, from gas masks to German army sweatpants.
Along nearby Ship’s Mechanic Row and Postoffice Street, you’ll find galleries, restaurants, bars, and more shops. It’s not difficult to wangle last-minute tickets to a show—maybe a concert by the Oak Ridge Boys, where you might bump into Bush the elder and his entourage—at the lovingly restored Grand 1894 Opera House. You can linger over tomes on local lore at Midsummer Books or simply stand on a street corner admiring the Strand’s abundance of architectural flourishes.
When you tire of city sightseeing, head for the north end of the Island and take the car ferry—a free fifteen-minute ride through dolphin-infested waters—to the Bolivar Peninsula, where you’ll find 27 miles of beach lined with vacation houses for rent. There are also lots of birds: Bolivar Flats Shorebird Sanctuary, at first glance an unremarkable expanse of sand and mud, is the winter gathering spot for as many as 100,000 of our feathered friends at a time—gulls, terns, avocets, plovers, and falcons.
At the northern end of the peninsula, where it hooks up with the mainland, sits the community of High Island, so named because it’s perched on a salt dome that rises 32 feet above the surrounding marshes. Not exactly nosebleed territory, but it’s elevated enough and forested enough to catch the fancy of migrating birds, which in turn catch the fancy of birders hoping to cross a couple more warblers off their life lists and pick up one of Paul Foreman’s colorful “beach houses” for martins at the High Island Craft Shop. What the birders are most hoping for, however, is a springtime phenomenon known as a “fallout,” when exhausted northbound birds—who’ve been flapping nonstop since they left the Yucatán six hundred miles ago—collide with a southbound cold front. The subsequent en masse landing of thousands of birds in the oak groves of the island’s Houston Audubon Society sanctuaries has been called one of the most remarkable wildlife spectacles in the world.
The Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, a few miles north, can claim some spectacles of its own, like when 80,000-plus snow geese congregate in the marshes to discuss the winter weather or when spring sunshine lures dozens of alligators onto the banks of Shoveler Pond. On the bragging board at the refuge’s information station, one fortunate visitor last February listed seeing, in addition to a slew of birds, both a river otter and a bobcat. But even if you’re not so lucky, experiencing these 34,000 acres of raw, marshy wilderness is well worth the visit.
While it’s not surprising to find such an unspoiled tract on the relatively unpopulated east side of Galveston Bay, the existence of the Armand Bayou Nature Center, smack-dab in the midst of the NASA suburbs on the west side of the bay, is nothing short of miraculous. The 2,500-acre spread is loaded with 370 species of wildlife and crisscrossed with trails snaking through wetlands, woodlands, and tall-grass prairie. The center also hosts canoe and pontoon boat excursions up the bayou, a brackish estuary where ospreys dive for fish, alligators slip from shore, and pileated woodpeckers drum on utility poles.
After all this communing with nature, a visit to the nearby Kemah Boardwalk—a strip of theme restaurants, midway-style arcade games, carnival rides, and gewgaw shops—is jarring. Still, even this eater-tainment complex can be seen as a positive sign; after all, the Landry’s corporation wouldn’t have considered the place a potential playground if fun-seekers would have had to wade through dead fish to ride the miniature choo-choo. Besides, you can take it—or leave it, simply by crossing Clear Creek Channel into Seabrook, a sort of anti-Kemah, with scruffy shrimp boats and no-nonsense seafood markets.
Seabrook is also the starting point for a drive up Todville Road, built along the route of a rail line that, from 1915 to 1932, carried five trains a day between Houston and Galveston, taking passengers to their seaside vacation homes; many of them are still in great shape, peeking out from thick vegetation. Near the end of this short but atmospheric drive is Pine Gully Park, a little gem on the bay with a fishing pier, picnic tables tucked under leaning oaks, and a six-mile-round-trip hike-and-bike trail that links several delightful small parks. And you might want to take in the Todville nostalgia sooner rather than later: Bayport, a planned one-thousand-acre commercial shipping port, whose ultimate fate is currently tied up in court, looms large in the area’s future.
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