I have always loved the ocean, how powerful it is and how small it makes me feel. I love lying in the sun and listening to the waves rush to shore. I love thinking about how it’s responsible for everything we see and experience. Surfside Beach on the Gulf of Mexico south of Houston served as a reminder that not everyone sees the ocean this way.
Last year, we camped on Mustang Island State Park, which was beautiful. The sand was trash-free, the water was warm and shallow, and the sea bird watching was fantastic. The small town of Port Aransas, where we went for our daily coffee, was a cute little beachside community, and downtown (the old part of) Corpus Christi wasn’t so bad either. The beautiful beach made it easy to forget about the oil rigs and refineries that made up the skyline at night.
I expected Surfside Beach, which liberally advertises that Gulfscape Magazine’s readers named it "Best Gulf Beach Community," to be something similar to Port Aransas and Mustang Island, being just a short way north of that area. I was wrong.
We opted to stay in a motel in Surfside and found one for $85 a night for a single room in a place called the Surfside Motel. I’m okay with an older room, but this one was pretty bad. The pillows were lumps, the towels were sandpaper, there was a dead crab at the side of the bed, and the room was chock full of mosquitos and spiders, probably due to the lack of a sweep plate on the door that left a 2-inch gap between it and the floor. To off cap the experience, the woman at the front desk was rude, which turned out to be a common theme I found throughout the town.
We got in late Thursday and went for dinner at the Red Snapper Inn, the most upscale restaurant in town which featured, for reasons beyond my understanding, a stuffed wildcat in the waiting area. I had the crab-stuffed flounder, which was enjoyable, although slightly overcooked. Overall, the food was good, although the service was brusque. The only other place we ate in town was Kitty’s Purple Cow, where the food was just okay - the low point being some of the soggiest French fries I’ve ever had - but our server was actually friendly.
The best thing about the motel was that it was a short five minute walk to the beach. However, the beach itself was extremely disappointing. We crossed over the dune and the highly-trafficked beach driving road to find a sea of dead fish washed up on the shore. A local told us that it’d been reported as red tide earlier in the week. My question was: why wasn’t the shore combed if it had been reported several days prior? The thousands of dead fish in varying states of decomposition – and the accompanying smell – made it hard to enjoy the beach. Red tide or not, all I could think about was how we were swimming in a strip of water between the massive Dow Chemical Plant on one side and oil rigs on the other. The culmination of factors was so depressing that I cried.
The Bearded One, determined to make the best of the situation, suggested we go check out the jetties that jutted out into the ocean, demarking the end of the Brazos River. With the chemical plant behind us, we set out on the half-mile or so walk to the end of the jetty. The amount of trash that was discarded or washed up on the sides of the jetties was, again, depressing. However, we were able to see some great wildlife: a sea turtle and at least half a dozen dolphins. That was certainly a highlight.
The pleasure we got from seeing the dolphins swimming, sometimes in pairs, quickly subsided on the walk back down the jetty, when we saw that some people had caught a medium-sized shark, maybe 3 feet long, pulled it to shore and then sawed its tail off, right there on the walkway. The rest of the shark’s body was intact, lying in a pool of blood that we walked around. I felt like crying again.
The thing that struck me most about Surfside was what seemed like an attitude of complete apathy toward other people and surroundings. The others around town were mostly vacationing families who reminded me of the humans in Wall-E. People were rude, and they drove everywhere in the small 2-mile-long town. In fact, one rude set of people drove by us and actually barked at us out the window. I overheard the daughter of one vacationing family say, as she was being hurried out of the way of cars trying to get by, “Since when should I care about other people?” That seemed to be the theme of the area. I won’t be back.
If you do find yourself in this area, though, one redeeming site is Sea Center Texas: a small, free aquarium operated by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. The friendly volunteer-run park features exhibits on fish local to the area as well as a lovely exhibit on the Texas wetlands.
