The pilgrimage to the island becomes the same for everyone as they are funneled through the Houston traffic. Then I-45 South subdivides, permitting remaining drivers to carry on to the epicenter of coastal Texas: Galveston Island. The fifty-mile drive from the southernmost tip of Houston to the Galveston causeway allows Texas to transform. Advertisements for Whataburger and 38-stall gas stations change into promotions: 2 for $10 Galveston Island T-shirts and All You Can Eat Shrimp.
Driving over the causeway’s crest, the Gulf of Mexico reveals itself. You can see the Galvestonian economy at work: commercial and local fishermen motor out of the marinas; tankers weighed down with oil and cargo, drained from international voyages, gather in throngs and wait at anchor to unload cargo; Carnival cruise ships bring Texans back home. If you listen closely, you can hear the shrimpers going out to sea: they pray for bountiful catches that will see them through the off season.
From the causeway, the drive to the oceanfront is short. The buildings on the island are battered. Most of their exteriors are scarred and weathered, like the callouses on a shrimper’s hands. After getting through the stop lights, you reach the ocean, where the Texan sky collapses into the Gulf of Mexico.
Galveston Island looks like the arm of Man of War jellyfish that frequently wash up on the beaches. Over two millennia, the constant churn of the ocean deposited sand in one spot, creating the barrier island. It’s seventeen miles long, and in some places three miles wide — populated with around fifty-thousand people. Transients come down with their kids for a cheap vacation, filling campgrounds and shabby hotels. Galveston is a haven for Texans of every class and creed.
The population is composed of whites, African Americans, Hispanics and the descendants of many Vietnamese immigrants who came in the aftermath of the war to work in the American fishing industry. All are represented in the shrimping business. The shrimpers in the Gulf of Mexico supply 9 million pounds of shrimp to the United States yearly, and the Galvestonian shrimpers represent nearly half this catch. The fleet, once numbering over a thousand vessels, has shrunk below 100 and struggles to meet market demand in the face of government regulations.
Many of the residents live behind a wall of concrete called the seawall: a coastal Alamo, fortifying the shore. However, it isn’t a wall dividing people from the ocean, but rather a platform on which the city is built to allow for peaceful coexistence with the strong-willed sea. For 122 years, the 17-foot-tall, three-mile-long wall has stood guard for the Galvestonians and transients alike. The top of the wall curves back towards the sea to keep the waves from overstepping their bounds. The beach sits at the base of the wall, where beachgoers can use stairs spaced to access the ocean. On top, a sidewalk runs parallel to the sea, with the main road nestled next to the sidewalk. On the other side of the road, opposite the ocean, businesses sit elevated out of the water’s reach, marked with stains of salty air. Many sport plywood bandages, which barricade windows and roofs broken in the last hurricane.
Each day, Galvestonians and visitors line the seawall. Crime and pleasure exist in pockets up and down the beach. Plumes of marijuana smoke curl up from the lips of a group of men in front of the Waffle House. Children giggle as they fly kites. A man rolls a bike from the public rack that he did not come with. A woman sanctifies herself among the seagulls as she throws them pieces of bread. A green flag, signifying a safe surf, waves the beachgoers into the water.
Among them are hundreds of ghosts of bodies burned on the beaches here. The effects of the hurricane of 1900, the Galveston Flood, sit in the bones of this town. The seawall reverberates with the echo of the wails of drowning bodies being washed out to sea. In the aftermath, survivors gathered remains of loved ones who hadn’t been taken onto funeral pyres, all trash and sargasso weed, and burned the corpses because the cemeteries had been washed away. Galveston hasn’t changed much since then. Its victims haunt the seawall, souls turned phantoms, living as they were before the disaster came.
Buildings on the seawall are marked with a red line showing how high the water breached in 1900. Extreme weather has long ravaged the city, looming over the town like a guillotine waiting to fall. Texans hold their breaths during hurricane season — June to November — praying saltwater won’t claim their livelihoods. If you ask the old women of the island, they’ll tell you to look in the windows of the once-illustrious Hotel Galvez in the light of the moon. You’ll see the ghost of Sister Katharine, a nun washed out to sea on the night of the storm. The story says she died with a group of orphans huddled around her, tied together with a clothesline in a vain attempt to survive.
More than a century after the hurricane, the night offers a peaceful version of Galveston, the dark providing cover from the glaring sun. Ghost Crabs scuttle across the sand, the moonlight turning them white as they arrive back at holes dug before the tide came in. A parent teaches a child to pick crabs up by the carapace to avoid being pinched, as the child’s finger bleeds from the pince of a claw. An old couple admires a Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle laying its eggs.
After dark is when the fishing pier comes alive: mosquitoes swarm the lights that reveal the brownish-green hues of the water below. Vietnamese mothers pass homemade bánh mì to their children, while their fathers fish for flounder. The surf fisherman cut up squid as an offering to the elusive sharks that police the end of the pier.
Bait, hook, reel it in. For a fleeting moment, the unspoken language of the 61st Street fishing pier acts as a lingua franca for Texans, uniting the rednecks, the rich Austinites, the immigrants, the pro fishermen and their children. One can always find people pridefully pulling in all the local catches. Those who fish to eat gently remove their prizes from the hooks to avoid mutilating their dinner. Those who fish for fun rip hooks straight out of creatures’ mouths, while scales fall like glitter back into the sea.
As people leave, they renounce the language of the pier; a community is divided again. Some put on their Sunday best to dine at Gaido’s, where they will have lobster bisque and bountiful plates of seafood. Others return to homes and tents to fillet their catch and say grace over what they feel their God so graciously provided them.
Early in the mornings, still under moonlight, the shrimp boats pour into the gulf, their hulls marked with names of shrimpers who survived hurricanes, oil spills, and the decline of the industry. The Rusted Pearl, Shrimp Kiss, Miss Lola. They purge the gulf of its shrimp to afford food for their families. They turn the bay into a sacrificial altar, performing the daily ritual of gather and slaughter. One must wonder if the shrimpers will rise before the sun to fill their nets until the gulf is empty of its shrimp and the town collapses into the sea. Gulf of Mexico, spare the seawall. Forever allow the ghosts, immigrants, shrimpers, rednecks and the haughty alike to find refuge on your shore.