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 BOLIVAR PENINSULA, TEXAS Bolivar Diary
Time isn't kind to beach towns. It's inevitable, part of the natural cycle of things - the ocean creates the beach, waves bringing sand from the bottom and depositing it on the shore, but those same waves also wash away the shoreline, and eventually the towns built by the ocean erode away, as well. I've spent the last dozen years of my life near the Gulf of Mexico; the area around Galveston, southeast of Houston, is the only seacoast I've ever really known, and over the years I've watched it slowly creep up onto what I'd always thought of as dry land. When I first saw the Gulf, as a freshman in college, I wasn't impressed. The water's full of silt, dark and brown and green, a far cry from the clear purity of the Pacific or the east coast beaches in Florida, and on bad days it can even smell somewhat unpleasant, like a mix of sewage and raw fish. That first time, we camped illegally one night on one of the Galveston beaches and got eaten alive by mosquitoes. I kept coming back, though, and every time I did, the coastline seemed changed, somehow closer in than before. Houses on stilts that used to stand over sand would magically move thirty feet out into the water and become abandoned and weatherbeaten. For a while I wondered if maybe my memory was playing tricks on me, like it does when you remember the trees in the backyard being at least three hundred feet tall when you climbed them as a kid. But it's just the ocean, working away at the shore.
Galveston's an island. Coming from Houston, you drive southwest on I-45, through South Houston, past a good dozen strip clubs, NASA, and what seems like hundreds of billboards, and over a bridge big enough to sail a ship under. The highway finally dead-ends at the Galveston Seawall, a breakwater made of giant stones with the beach and the Gulf of Mexico right on the other side. It doesn't really feel like an island when you're there, but the huge bridge and the ferry from the northeastern edge of the island are the only ways back to the mainland. The city itself is much older than its big neighbor to the north, once a genteel, worldly port city sister to New Orleans (it even has its own Mardi Gras celebration, dating from 1867 or so). These days, thanks to the Big Storm of 1900 (which killed approximately 6000 people and reduced most of the city to kindling), the dredging of the Houston Ship Channel (which steered most of the port's business north), and the closing of most of the island's major businesses, Galveston is like a proud old woman living in the ruins of a grand mansion; there's beauty and history all around, but it's often obscured by the grime and the poverty. Once you get away from the beach, the bars of the Strand (Galveston's answer to the French Quarter, but considerably smaller and tamer), or the handful of restored mansions lining Broadway, Galveston becomes a dirt-poor, run-down, even dangerous place. Drive onto the ferry, though, and you're in for a very different trip. The ferry connects Galveston Island to a place called the Bolivar Peninsula (it's pronounced "Bolliver," like "Gulliver," not like Simon Bolivar, although I hear it's named for the guy; don't ask me why that is). It's a thin spit of land that extends southwest down the coast from Winnie, a sandy, sunburned strip of wooden homes up on rickety-looking stilts, weird mom-and-pop bait shops, and little towns full of beach bums, nudists, and snowbird absentee landlords. If driving through Galveston is like glimpsing the 1860s, a drive along the one main road on Bolivar feels like a glimpse back at the 1960s. The first time I went there was in college. My friend Ben grew up in Port Arthur, on up the coast and closer to Beaumont, and his parents had a beach house on Bolivar, so one holiday weekend in the spring he invited me and another friend, John, to come down with him. We weren't far from the city, not really - a twenty-minute slow ferry ride from Galveston or an hour's drive back to town - but Bolivar felt like another world. The house was relatively new, in much better shape than a lot of its neighbors, and situated on the inland side of the main road. A canal cut in behind the houses, and each home had its own boat slip, filled with murky brown water and trash. Our first day out there, Ben brought out two mid-size crab traps, strange metal baskets like upside-down bundt pans attached to mesh accordion bellows. We baited them and threw them into the canal, and lo and behold, by nightfall we'd snared four small crabs, each one about two inches from claw to claw. Being the squeamish one of the bunch, I lobbied to release them back into the wild, but Ben wanted them for gumbo. Later on that day, I came downstairs from a shower just in time to see Ben dump boiling water into a pot with our crabs trapped inside. The water hit their shells, and the escaping air sounded like high-pitched shrieks of agony. I have a hard time killing insects, so watching the little crustaceans steamed into the oceanic afterlife really shook me up. It was terrible. "Ah, shit," Ben said, turning shamefacedly to see me standing on the stairs. "I wanted to do it before you came back downstairs." I could pretend to be righteous and claim that I fasted that night, but I didn't - the damage was already done, so I just ate the gumbo. And yes, it was good.
We meandered across the road from the houses and down to the ocean a few times, just laying out on the sand or trying to wade in the water. It was March, and still cold, at least to me. We mostly had the beach to ourselves, even though houses lined the dunes that separated the beach from the road. It wasn't yet season, so most of the houses were boarded up and empty, awaiting their summertime inhabitants. Our only companions were the anglers and the handful of big pickup trucks that fishtailed up and down the shoreline, staying just out of the water. Picking our way across the sand, Ben pointed to lonely-looking wooden posts and beams out beyond the waterline - "I used to play near there when I was a kid," he said, pointing to one and shaking his head. That night the three of us piled into my beaten-up old Tercel. Ben wanted to set off some fireworks he'd found in the house's attic, leftovers from a Fourth of July long past, so we headed out, up the peninsula from the ferry. We passed through a half-dozen little communities - Crystal Beach, Port Bolivar, Gilchrist - and then ambled on to the Highway 124 interchange, where roadblocks sat across the old Bolivar road, forcing people inland to High Island, Winnie, and eventually I-10. "Go on around," Ben directed. "We can keep going for a while yet, depending on how the road is." The road continued on past the roadblock, sand up to its edge and the surf only about fifty feet to our right. I drove with the highbeams on, wincing as the potholes became more frequent and wondering how in the hell we would ever make it back if the car died. The tarmac became rippled, so cracked and broken that driving across it felt like running your fingers down the teeth of a comb. John claimed that if we could speed up and hit the right frequency, we'd be able to glide smoothly over the bumps, but I wasn't willing to risk our one means of getting back to civilization by going faster. Junk littered the beach side of the road: a shattered television set; mangled knots of rebar; big chunks of concrete; even a full-sized refrigerator, its door swinging forlornly in the wind. The sand crept closer as we drove, covering first a few feet and then the entire right lane. We dodged around a downed telephone pole toppled across the road (its lines gone long ago), bumping up onto the grass between the lane and the marshy field that ran alongside. Finally, after an hour or so of driving, we decided we'd gone far enough. The beach was working its way across the left lane, and debris was everywhere, so we pulled off to the side and stopped. At least we could be sure that nobody would come barreling down the road and hit our car. The road used to go further, Ben explained as we worked to light a campfire in the wind. It had once run all the way from the southwestern tip of Bolivar to Sabine Pass off to the northeast, he said, but I had a hard time imagining the sand-covered stretch of crumbling asphalt going anywhere but straight into the sea. We got the fire going and sat in our folding chairs, drinking Shiner and watching the stars wheel by overhead. "Look," Ben said, "see that light?" He pointed out to sea, where a white light blinked steadily in the darkness. "It's a platform, a drilling rig. Where we are right now, it's probably the closest human habitation." His guess was a bit of an exaggeration, maybe, but at that moment, it seemed as if he must've been right. We three felt like castaways on some deserted island, sitting in the sand at the edge of the world. Things got somewhat more complicated when Ben decided that it was time to break out the fireworks. He hauled out the long wooden box, which looked like something G.I.s might've stored ammo in back in World War II, and proceeded to set off everything he could find. The bottle rockets went first, a whole slew of them, mostly because they were easy - all we had to do was stick the wooden base into the sand, light the fuse, and back away. A few fizzled miserably and hit the surf, but most spiraled high into the moonless sky. Less successful were these odd Chinese-made fireworks called something like "fiery birds" (that was what the package said, at least). We lit most of the box and watched in awe as they whirled up into the air, spitting flames in all directions like fiery, angry frisbees. Impressed, Ben thought it would be even more impressive to line three up in a row, and started setting up an impromptu pyrotechnic experiment. John just laughed and downed another Shiner from the cooler, but I was wary and backed to what I thought was a safe distance. I never was much good at physics in high school, so the probable effect of Ben's little airshow didn't hit me until it was too late. The first fiery bird went off beautifully, spinning up and out over the water; the second took off at a 90-degree angle, shooting horizontally down the beach; and the third fired straight back, directly at where I stood. I looked up to see a blazing fireball screaming at my head and dove face-first into the sand, yelling for my life. Afterwards, Ben was apologetic and embarrassed, but I was furious. I could have been killed, I yelled, and what the fuck was he thinking? I was still shouting when I realized that Ben and John weren't looking at me but past me, staring up towards the road with horrified looks on their faces. The car was intact, thankfully, but an evil yellow glow came from the other side of the roadside dunes. We'd managed to light the marsh on fire. I don't entirely know that we had a plan or anything, but we all three charged up and over the dune, running full-out towards the fire. It was small, maybe five feet in diameter, but spreading fast in the high grass. I reached the wire cow fence first, and got three painful jolts of electricity before I realized what was going on - the marsh was somebody's pasture, and they'd electrified the fence to keep the cows in. Apparently the cows were smarter than I was, because there were none in sight. We gingerly ducked between the wires and jumped feet-first onto the fire, terrified it would engulf the whole peninsula if we didn't put it out. John dumped the rest of his beer on the flames while Ben and I stomped the burning grass like crazed winemakers, yelping when we got singed. After several frantic minutes, it was out. Exhausted, bruised, and shaking, we gathered up our little camp, buried our campfire in the sand, and left. Nobody said a word until we got back to the beach house.
Later trips to the Peninsula weren't as traumatic, thankfully. Every few months during my last year or two in college (and even for a few years after), a group of us would drive down and catch the ferry over from too-crowded Galveston, trading the Seawall tourists and Strand hustlers for mostly empty beaches and starry nights. We played on the beach, sang songs around the campfire while somebody played guitar, or just walked and listened to the wind and the water. Sometimes the waves would deposit little flecks of phosphorescent algae on the sand, tiny blue sparkles that would crackle and spark in the waves like underwater fireflies or trace your steps in moonlit fairy dust as you walked. On some nights we'd be all alone, but on others we'd see far-off bonfires and half-naked people dancing; unsociable though it might've been, we kept our distance, figuring that they probably wanted their privacy, too. During the days we'd hang out at Ben's house, if his parents would let us (they claimed that we'd forgotten to turn off the power one time when we left, although I'd swear we did, and held it against us), or wander through the little beach-front communities along the road. We ate pizza at the only Italian joint on the Bolivar side of the ferry, bought hot dogs and burgers from a bizarre little roadside stand run by an elderly couple, and even tried to get some down-home cooking in a little bar on the main road - we lost our nerve, however, when we realized everybody else in the place had stopped what they were doing to stare at us (we were never really sure why, but it was damn uncomfortable, so we just backed out slowly and had pizza instead). I bought my first "real" record player on Bolivar, an "all-automatic" piece of junk from the 1970s that only worked about half the time. Being automatic, you couldn't just drop on a record and put the needle on, naturally, but instead had to punch several buttons and watch that your fingers didn't get caught in the automatically-closing door. I bought it for $10 at a junk shop on the Peninsula (which also doubled as the local newspaper office), mostly because the owner wouldn't sell me a slightly-used copy of Freda Payne's "Band of Gold" on 45 otherwise. Either way, I figured, it was a bargain. Sadly, the junk store/newspaper no longer exists, and neither do a lot of the other places I remember. I've been back across the ferry in recent years with my wife, trying to show her where I bought the damn record player, but the store's gone, the building boarded-up and weathered, as is the old locals-only (apparently) bar and the hot dog/burger stand. There're still plenty of beach houses for rent, but the sand has moved closer to them - in some places, it's almost to the road, while the beach itself has shrunk, barely wide enough to accommodate a small car in spots, even at low tide. The road still goes on towards Sabine Pass, but it quickly becomes impassable to anybody not driving a 4x4 after only a few minutes. Chunks of concrete and driftwood block the road, and even the driveable stretches are mostly sand now, not asphalt. I guess that's the way things are when you live by the sea. The water draws closer and closer, year after year, covering up old buildings and landmarks just as surely as the tide comes in every evening. All that's left, eventually, are people's fond memories and the weathered remains of long-gone houses standing in hip-deep water, like remnants of a vanished civilization. Over time, even the memories erode - everything gets taken away by the sand and the sea, in the end. 
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