collecting sea life found in galveston beach tidal pools

It all amounts to six hundred square miles of water sitting in a shallow basin of mud. Trailing the butterfly is a long, narrow tendril-called West Bay-that makes up the inward shore of Galveston Island. The other wing, flattened and truncated, is known as East Bay and runs east behind the Bolivar Peninsula. One wing is made up of a gracefully curving shoreline that includes the entrance to the Houston Ship Channel on the west and the Trinity River delta on the east. On maps, the bay has the shape of a mashed butterfly. At a time in which the salvation of the oceans has suddenly appeared as one of the planet’s highest priorities, Texas still thinks of its poisoned waters with a sense of dollars lost instead of a sense of shame. Even the people most concerned about preserving the bay have grown accustomed to speaking of it in terms of its productivity, as a resource, as if in order to justify its existence, it must compete with the commerce surrounding it. It is the largest estuary on the Texas coast, the seventh largest in the United States, a vast nursery and feedlot where all manner of marine larvae, spats, and fingerlings pass their perilous youths. The bay is a mighty thing, a self-adjusting biological engine that runs day and night, season after season, constantly generating and absorbing life. Take away the shipping, the refining, the whole thrumming human presence, and there is still a feel of industry about it. The view he most admired from the roof terrace of his dream home was the lights of the refineries on the opposite shore. Ross Sterling, the governor of Texas from 1931 to 1933, once built a scaled-down replica of the White House for himself near La Porte.

The bay has been despoiled for so long, has been used so hard, that it has developed a perverse allure.

Nowhere else is there such a concentrated display of the raw wealth that built Texas or of the price the natural environment has paid for that wealth. Much of the western margin of the bay is dominated by a petrochemical skyline, a hazy gridwork of twisting pipelines and flaming towers. Its waters are shallow and murky, an opaque green marbled with currents of resuspended mud left behind by the passage of boats and pipeline dredges. Galveston Bay can sometimes appear picturesque it could not be truthfully described as beautiful. The gulls are in their breeding colors, their bright red beaks shining like enamel in the clear air. On the edge of the Ship Channel a shrimp boat, winching in its nets, is almost obscured by a cloud of laughing gulls. There is a vague, watermelonlike scent in the air-the smell of fish oil and fish blood released from the bodies of shad or mullet as they are torn apart by predators that have herded them into a roiling, panicky mass.

Its wake loses definition among the unruly wave patterns and ends up as a tired riffle that washes against the eroded shoreline-against piers and bulkheads and stretches of protective riprap formed from old car bodies and pieces of concrete culvert. A short distance from shore, an unladen tanker coasts through the chop, heading up past Morgan’s Point to Buffalo Bayou and the Port of Houston. The wind is light, an idle spring breeze, but it gusts forcefully across the bay, turning the water’s surface into a field of percolating whitecaps. We have left it as it was originally published, without updating, to maintain a clear historical record. This story is from Texas Monthly ’s archives.

Collecting sea life found in galveston beach tidal pools