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.
I was a lucky kid. I lived on Galveston Bay, where I could ride my horse in the surf and watch the moon pop out of the water from my bedroom window. But my luck didn’t last. The industrial pollution finally got so thick that my family fled, chased inland by waves of dead fish. I’ve held a bit of a grudge against the entire Texas coast ever since.
Three decades, however, is a long time to snub such a large swath of land, so a few months ago I went back to La Porte, my old stomping grounds. While in some respects the place remains a throwback to the old days, the only dead fish I saw were in the snapshots of proud fishermen at Linda’s Sylvan Beach Bait and Tackle, in Sylvan Beach Park. In fact, the bay water was so clear that it inspired me to prowl the rest of our vast coast, where I soon discovered that, while I had been off pouting, things had actually improved. Where once there were only dozens of brown pelicans, now there are a few thousand. Whooping cranes and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles are rebounding like NBA hotdoggers. Historic buildings, once razed for parking lots, are treasured. Wetlands, finally recognized as filters for the bays and nurseries for all manner of marine babies, are being protected and replanted. Every year coastal hatcheries are pouring 30 million red drum fingerlings into the bays to replenish the once dwindling population. And you can even eat Texas oysters without making sure your will is in order.
No, I’m not saying that everything is perfect. But this watery edge of Texas just keeps getting better.
The Lower Coast
The bad news was that the car rental company at the Harlingen airport was oversold and I’d have to wait for the tuna-can-on-wheels I’d reserved. The good news was that the manager took pity on me and handed me the keys to a swank Chevy convertible, no extra charge. It was as if the travel gods were daring me not to have a good time on South Padre Island, a place I had disparaged for years as, well, shallow—nothing but characterless high-rise condos, Jell-O shots, and sun-scorched parasailors. An hour later, as I crossed the soaring causeway from Port Isabel to South Padre, I decided it was high time I learned—literally—to have fun on this brash and flashy isle.
I started my education with lessons in sand-castle building, the best way to get attention on the beach without breaking the law. Forget the packed-and-upturned-Styrofoam-cup concept. Under the patient instruction of Lucinda Wierenga, a partner in Sons of the Beach, I learned to make a “batter” of sand and water, build stalagmite-like towers by piling up scoops of the stuff, and then, using modified pastry knives and other odd little tools, carve those rustic forms into windowed turrets with stairs snaking up the side. Strangers stopped and took pictures.
My inflated ego was promptly punctured during my next lesson—surfing. Gene and Rachel Gore, the owners of South Padre Surf Company, met me at Isla Blanca County Park and, after giving me a brief talk on safety—to avoid getting clobbered by my surfboard I should stay underwater for three seconds after I fall—they zipped me up in a wet suit and I paddled through the chilly water on my big foam longboard. This time no strangers stopped and took pictures, thank God, but with Gene’s help I actually caught a couple of waves before my feet were frozen solid.
After they thawed, I decided to stay on dry land and do some field research on birds, a fail-safe project considering that more avian species—some six hundred—can be spotted in Texas than in any other state, and 75 percent of them spend time on the coast. Armed with the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail map for the lower coast, one of three guides published by Texas Parks and Wildlife, I headed first to the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, a vast expanse of brush, grasslands, and tidal flats on the mainland about an hour north of South Padre. At the entrance, I was greeted by a phalanx of roadrunners and, eyeing me from his perch on a power line, an Aplomado falcon, an endangered raptor that is being reintroduced in the refuge. My convertible proved to be an ideal mobile blind on the refuge’s fifteen-mile Bayside Drive, where I saw scores of redhead ducks and a trio of white pelicans. (Birds are less startled by vehicles than they are by folks on foot.) On the way back to South Padre, I checked out Los Ebanos, an 82-acre private preserve too new to have made the map, with paths winding through forests of Texas ebony and alongside a small lake, a prime hangout for green kingfishers and black-bellied whistling ducks. But the most effortless birding was back on the island, at the Laguna Madre Nature Trail, where knowledgeable birders kindly tutored me on minutiae like the difference between a clapper rail and the smaller Virginia rail. Even if you don’t know a marbled godwit from a garbling nitwit, you can still enjoy the sunsets over the laguna.
Although dolphin-viewing cruises abound both on Padre and across the causeway in Port Isabel, the most instructive spying may be onboard the Laguna Skimmer, captained by George and Scarlet Colley. The couple, who own the tour company Colley’s Fins to Feathers, know most of the 150 or so bottlenose dolphins who live in Laguna Madre by name. They’ve just opened a new nature center, plastered with photos of frolicking dolphins, which boasts a touch tank full of sea critters, including a lightning whelk, the unofficial poster mollusk in the Colleys’ campaign to teach folks not to collect live shells (the ones someone still calls home).
But shells aren’t the only things to gather on these shores, and just across the street from the center, in one of the island’s oldest buildings, the Beachcomber’s Museum whetted my appetite for man-made booty. This combination coffee shop, ice-cream-and-chili parlor, and bookstore is also the repository of Spanish coins, Civil War buttons, stone points, and old bottles uncovered on Padre. One of its owners, Steve Hathcock, has been so kind as to draw up a treasure map of the area, noting the locations of shipwrecks and where doubloons, mastodon teeth, and the like have been found. The tale about one site, at the Port Mansfield Channel, on the northern end of the island, was enough to make me want to swashbuckle up there and start sifting through the sands. It seems that, during construction of the channel in the fifties, the dredgers sliced right through one of three Spanish galleons that sank there in 1554, showering the banks with muck, bits of ship, and heaps o’ silver coins.
Artifacts from those three ships are on display, no digging required, at the Treasures of the Gulf Museum in Port Isabel. The adjacent Port Isabel Historical Museum, housed in the two-story, 1899 Champion dry goods store, accomplishes what none of my high school history teachers ever did: infusing dry factoids with drama and even humor. In one interactive display where you try to identify mysterious-looking old stuff, the multiple-choice answers for what turns out to be a chunk of whale blubber used as lantern fuel include “early margarine found on Boca Chica beach.”
The historic heart of this picturesque little town is the Port Isabel Lighthouse, built in 1852. Since it’s the only lighthouse on the Texas coast that’s open to visitors, the 74-step spiral climb to the top is practically mandatory—and well worth the effort just to be nose-to-beak with the seagulls gliding past.
Back on the island, I rounded out my education with a guided tour of Sea Turtle Inc., a nonprofit rescue center founded in 1977 by the late Ila Loetscher, the Turtle Lady of South Padre. The motley crew of resident turtles included Merry Christmas, who has a deformed shell, and Fred, a three-flippered loggerhead who swims poorly but will eat anything, including a pair of sunglasses that accidentally toppled into his tank and had to be surgically removed.
And then there’s Lefty, a Kemp’s ridley who, despite having lost both right flippers and a chunk of his shell in a boating accident, is still going strong. I think a turtle that resilient deserves to be the official mascot of our comeback coast.
The Central Coast
Spend fifteen minutes staring at the jellyfish pulsing in their tanks at the Texas State Aquarium, in Corpus Christi, and you’ll be ready to deep-six your Xanax. Not that you’d need it in Corpus, a city seemingly hell-bent on stress reduction. There is no downtown traffic to speak of, and the tourist attractions, refreshingly geared more toward edu-tainment than eater-tainment, are conveniently clustered on the waterfront: the aquarium, focused on protecting the Gulf’s marine life rather than simply accumulating lots of weird-looking creatures from around the world; the USS Lexington Museum on the Bay, a retired World War II battleship that survived a kamikaze attack in the Pacific; the light-filled Art Museum of South Texas, designed by Philip Johnson; and the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History, notable for its extensive shipwrecks exhibit and seashell collection. The harbor-hugging downtown also boasts a cozy entertainment district that has sprung up around Water Street Market, a colorful family of locally grown restaurants and shops surrounding a bougainvillea-filled courtyard.
But the best thing the city has going for it is its bay, whose curving coastline is as pleasing as Mona Lisa’s smile. Pop in a geo-appropriate CD (say, King of the Surf Guitar: The Best of Dick Dale and His Del-Tones, available at Surf Club Records, in Water Street Market), roll down the windows, and cruise Shoreline Boulevard (which becomes Ocean Drive south of downtown), with its wide seawall promenade, tidy marina, grassy parks, stretch of swanky residences, and smattering of sculptures. It’s the kind of setting that sparks creativity, and you’ll find evidence galore at the Art Center of Corpus Christi. The gift shop here sells works by local artists, ranging from classic watercolor seascapes to more eclectic pieces, like violins and bugles made from gourds by Mary Nighthawk.
What Corpus doesn’t have are expansive beaches, but there are miles and miles of them just minutes away. To the southeast is North Padre Island (not to be confused with South Padre Island, created in 1962 when the Port Mansfield Channel cut the 130-mile-long Padre
Island in two). Padre Island National Seashore encompasses the lion’s share of this windswept spit and—with its 60-mile stretch of four-wheel-drive-friendly beach—is the ultimate location to finally put that disgusting Hummer of yours to the test. (Outside of a few islands and a handful of small vehicle-free zones, our beaches are official Texas roadways.)
