On Saturday I sat on Bryan Beach a few miles north of the Brazos River with my family as we watched the slowest line of storms I’ve seen in a while make its way up the coast from Port Lavaca. We arrived on the beach around 9am or so and it wasn’t until 2pm that the storms threatened enough to run us into the truck for twenty minutes. Sadly, it was the first time I’d set foot on the Texas coast this summer.
Bryan Beach is on a section of land that was one connected to the mainland, now bisected by the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. Without digging up even older aerial imagery on TNRIS to verify an approximate date of when this land was separated, Google Earth tells me this not-an-island piece of land has been split from the mainland since before 1944. Nearby is the town and port of Freeport, a veritable smorgasbord of refineries and chemical plants, as well as docking places for large ships offloading their latest cargo from far-flung places across the seas. More people are probably familiar with the town of Surfside slightly to the north of Bryan Beach, a narrow strip of beach between the Gulf of Mexico, the GIWW, and smaller estuaries, where rows of beach houses lie. Beyond that to the northeast, San Luis Pass and Galveston Island.
I really wanted to go to Galveston but the crowds and pricing in Galveston have become atrocious in recent years. (There’s a Galveston essay brewing in me that will likely pair with this essay eventually.) So, we settled for slightly further south, a little bit cheaper because we stayed in Lake Jackson, and maybe not nearly as scenic because of *cough, refineries, cough*. Someone out there is asking, “Galveston? Scenic??” And to that I say, “Wait for my Galveston essay!”
Bryan Beach isn’t not scenic, but if you are incredulous about Galveston being scenic, I’m not sure you will be jumping with enthusiasm about this section of Texas most people give little thought to. That said, I think I may have a new fondness for this little strip of highly erodible sand and as usual, it’s all matter of perspective.
As I sat in my hot pink Magellan camp chair, one that has seen a few too many camping and beach trips and probably deserves to be put out with the trash this week, I watched my nine year old splash in the waves and roll around in the sand, thinking about my own childhood. I grew up visiting Rockport and Port Aransas and knew only those portions of the Texas coast until I was 17 and visited Galveston for the first time. My brother and I spent many vacation hours riding boogie boards on Gulf of Mexico waves, or body surfing and being pummeled to the ocean floor, sometimes spending brief seconds pinned to the ocean floor wondering if I was going to drown. We’d spend long afternoons jumping waves, ducking under before they would crest on top of us. Sometimes we’d pretend to be dolphins as we rode the waves, only to get a glimpse of real bottlenose dolphins a hundred yards away or less if we were lucky. Once a sea turtle surfaced mere feet in front of me, something I’m still astonished by to this day when I recall it. It happened so quickly, it’s head popping up to take in some air, spotting me, and then vanishing under the waves once again.
If we weren’t in the ocean we would be in the pool of whatever resort my parents had rented for the week in the summer. Sometimes it was a small beach house on Key Allegro in Rockport, and so we’d head down to the community pool to spend time swimming there, also pretending to be dolphins, or my other favorite alternative, synchronized swimmers in the Olympics. I loved that house in Rockport. I was under 5 when we first started going there and my tiny childhood goal was to own it one day. In the 80s there was a small beach across the street, really they were undeveloped lots but I didn’t know any better at the time. The beach consisted mostly of oyster shells in various states of wear, but it offered a place to swim without us having to trek all the way to Port A for the day. Those lots now have homes on them and Key Allegro was significantly damaged from Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
The allure of that beach house was this sunken living room with huge windows that looked out into Aransas Bay. We would watch shrimp boats slowly move across the bay, dragging nets behind them with gulls and other sea birds chasing behind, waiting for the remains of whatever had escaped the net. To me, that was something scenic, a core memory tied to those vacations. This area is the top of the Coastal Bend, where the Texas shoreline slowly morphs from an e-w orientation to n-s, and so we would watch these shrimp boats against the morning sunrises across Aransas Bay. My senior year of high school I wrote an essay about shrimp boats and dolphins in an attempt to get a scholarship, the amount of which I do not recall. I did not win the scholarship and once I got to college and learned how horrific shrimping was to the ocean ecosystems I realized just why I might not have won that scholarship! (And since learning about our shrimp fisheries, I haven’t knowingly eaten a wild caught shrimp since.)
I thought about all of this and more while sitting on the beach this weekend. I often think about this when I get down to the Texas coast. I think about all of the things from my childhood that made me want to pursue a marine biology degree, the things I thought I would be doing as an adult—making my living from working in the ocean. I was going to be living in a SCUBA suit or patrolling beaches, or going off on deep sea research trips and working in a Very Science-y Lab after. In my memories of what I dreamed of, there’s a heavy tinge of 50s-70s era science halls, an aroma of formaldehyde wafting about—yellowed scientific papers from yester-year.
The marine biology degree? I have it. Everything else—not so much. Yes, I got a PADI certification and even used it for a bit in Florida but I haven’t gone on a dive in probably 15 years. And now I wouldn’t even fathom trying because of a vestibular disorder I have. It didn’t take me long in college to realize that the lifestyle I was dreaming about as a kid was a lot harder to get and keep than I anticipated. It can be done but with the sacrifice of many other things I currently have.
So, when I sit on the beach I think about the what-ifs, the Sliding Doors moments. I wonder if 12 year old me would be disappointed adult me doesn’t go on deep sea diving ventures or isn’t tracking dolphins and whales for a living. Adult me is mostly fine with the trajectory of my life but I do wish I lived closer to the beach than I do now, so that I could inject some of this into my life via volunteer opportunities.
It was a low Sargassum weekend, which was disappointing for me. Most people are reviled by the macroalgae, but me? It provides for an interesting beach combing experience. There’s a whole ecosystem that uses Sargassum when it is floating in the ocean, and sometimes those ecosystems also wind up stranded on the beach when the waves wash it onshore. There was little along the intertidal zone this time around, though we did find more interesting items pushed up along the “dunes”—dunes that were clearly created by heavy machinery within recent years, and from what I can tell not even done by a renourishment project, just sand pushed 10-15’ high. Dune vegetation had already taken hold but the dune was basically functioning as an Anthropocene trash midden. Take your pick—water bottle, Gatorade bottle, lighter, broken Styrofoam, glass, tooth brush…it was there, and more. No amount of beach cleanup would make even the slightest dent.
My most interesting find was one I couldn’t identify immediately. I knew it was a seed but couldn’t figure it out on iNaturalist there at the beach and determined that I’d look closer when I got home. It didn’t take going home for me to find my answer, though. We stopped in the Brazosport Museum of Natural Science on our way home on Sunday and on display about local beachcombing finds was my seed! Only the family name was displayed, Family Humiriaceae, blister pod. I quickly searched iNaturalist for that to see what would come up along the coast and surprisingly the nearest finds were down on North Padre Island, near Corpus Christi. It appeared my seed pod was Sacoglottis amazonica, a tree that grows in the Amazon and Orinoco River basins in South America. The seeds flow out of those rivers, catch the south Atlantic ocean currents and are transported as far away as the Texas coast and I’m sure much further if people look close enough while combing their beaches.
I wish I’d kept this seedpod to take home but I took my photos and tossed it back onto the beach for some other beachcomber to find.
The Texas coast is much more interesting than most Texans give it credit for being. There’s more here in my brain to share with you, so stay tuned.
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.
Love your take on the Texas coastal experience. You sound a lot like my daughter who majored in marine biology at A&M Corpus but now works in the LED lighting business. I love coastal road trips and your article says it’s time to go again.
Such a nice break from TX politics for you and for followers. Ahhh. 🤗