Padre Island, resembling some giant pre-historic lizard, guards with its long slender body the jagged mainland coast of southern Texas. Usually this lizard sprawls and stretches serenely, basking in the sub-tropical sun that warms the Gulf of Mexico. But, it can be aroused from its calm; then it lashes about in a fury of blowing sand and crashing wave, ignoring all human efforts to subdue or even tame it.
Padre and its neighbor islands are a series of sand bars paralleling the Texas coast line. These bars are partly the relics of an ancient ice age and partly the sandy harvest of more recent milleniums of strong winds and heavy tides. Broken only at rare intervals by passes into the deep-set bays of the mainland, these sand bars form an almost continuous barrier from Louisiana to Mexico. Padre Island, the longest of these bars, stretches from Port Isabel, the southernmost tip of Texas, almost to Corpus Christi Bay, where it joins Mustang Island to make the longest island in the world.
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Mustang Island, to the north of Padre, is twenty miles long. Sometimes it is separated from Padre by a narrow strip of water, known as Corpus Christi Pass. Sometimes Mustang is joined to Padre after a high wind has closed the pass. So the two islands are usually thought of as one, and are called indiscriminately, "Padre Island." At no point more than four miles wide, the two measure in their combined length about a hundred and thirty miles from tip to tip.
The Gulf-side shore of Padre Island is continually changing. High winds and off-shore waves have moved the shore line westward in places some fifteen hundred feet in the hundred years that records have been kept.
Other bars, off-shore and unseen, have been built up by high winds and waves. The waves breaking over these off-shore bars are said to reach forty-five feet and more at times of storms. These off-shore bars have made history in early Texas. The impossibility of charting these shifting underwater sand banks, together with the imperfect navigation of early seamanship, brought shipwreck to many a vessel plying between the New World and the Spanish motherland. Old records state that as many as three ships in one day have been wrecked on this treacherous, unseen off-shore bar.
Geography, so the sociologists tell us, is the mold in which history has been shaped. This stretch of almost barren sand has given its cast to events and epochs in Texas history even to the present day. Along Padre's strands and dunes tribal Indians prowled, and smugglers found hiding places for them-selves and their treasure. Through the island passes into the deep mainland bays, guarded by long fingers of narrow peninsulas, adventurers and explorers sailed their schooners and found harbor. By the quiet reaches of the lagoons, which separate Padre from the mainland, settlers found fertile soil for their homesteading, cattle raising, and farming. And in the mouths of the mainland creeks and rivers emptying into the lagoons, industry has found water power for its wheels. So in Padre Island is traced the colorful saga of the South West.
Modern explorers-by-auto can reach Padre Island over a causeway and ferry to Port Aransas on the northern end of Mustang Island; or over the new hydraulic fill and swing barge causeway crossing from Flour Bluff near the Naval Air Base. A ferry shuttles passengers from mainland to the southern tip of the island. (Keep in mind that this story was written in 1950.)
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Passageway to the islands used to be a great concern to the inhabitants and mainlanders alike. When the Nueces County Court was first organized in January, 1846, one of its first enterprises was the establishment of ferry services to the island. The ferry to "Port Isabella" was authorized to charge a larger toll than the accustomed "twenty-five cents for each and every wheel to wagon, carriage, and buggy" because of the distance and danger of the trip.
If the present day explorers-by-car cross just before sundown on a summer afternoon, they feel that they are in the middle of a giant oyster shell, the opalescent water and sky joined at the horizon like the two halves of shimmering mother-of-pearl.
They notice, paralleling their course, a stripe of deep blue water, sharply marked from the iridescent ripples around it. This is a channel dredged for the small fishing boats that bring their day's catch to the dock at Aransas Pass. At sunset, the travelers meet the small fleet chugging its way to harbor. And they gauge each boat's cargo by the hosts of raucous gulls that circle and swoop over and around the little craft, the white spread of their glittering wings sharply drawn against the sunset sky.
On Mustang Island, at Port Aransas, the United States government maintains a coast guard station, giving twenty-four hour service in warning of squalls and hurricanes, and coming to the rescue of small craft in trouble. And there, too, is Tarpon Inn. These, with some tourist camps (some with modern air conditioning), a doctor's office or two, and a few residences, make up the village of Port Aransas, the only community on the northern end of Mustang Island.
As the explorers-by-car leave Port Aransas and head south, on the sandy beach of Mustang, they find themselves quickly in a world that has no ties with the civilized world of their work-a-day lives. Ahead of them stretches endlessly only grey sand with its flotsam and jetsam of the wash of the tides. To their left, they seem to be looking uphill to the horizon line of the Gulf of Mexico, sometimes grey-green, sometimes deep blue, as the sun rides high or low in the sky. And always roaring in their ears are long lines of white surf in paralleling ridges, sometimes gentle, sometimes tumultuous as they break over the far-out off-shore bars.
Once beyond the now closed Corpus Christi Pass, the travelers are on Padre. There at the north end of the island they find the three county parks with their concessions, filling stations, and camp sites. The Laguna Madre Causeway, opened in June of 1950, spills here its stream of traffic which flows up and down the asphalt road that runs south to the county line
Beyond the county line, competely cut off from the frets of civilization, visitors head their cars toward the dunes, and on hard sands, make camp with the driftwood that is always in abundance for a camp fire. They find in the deep recesses of the dunes ample and isolated space where they can get into their bathing suits for a swim in the surf. As long as they stay inside the off-shore bar, they find their battle with the mild current and breakers invigorating. But once on and beyond that unseen sand bar, they find the riptide more than their strength can manage, even as did the Spanish ocean-going sailing craft of a century ago.
Night closes in quickly on Padre, with its diamond-like stars and perhaps its mellow silver moon. A camp fire stirs old memories, or inspires new tall tales, as the campers watch the moon's path on the waves and listen to the night sounds of Padre's magic. The wind is always high, so that blankets, needed even in midsummer, must have anchorage. Then the sunrise arouses the refreshed visitors to another swim, a hearty breakfast around the camp fire, and a regret-ful departure from the camp site.
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Each winter, the sudden high freezing winds out of the north, the Texas "northers" of history and legend, change the face and shape of Padre's shore and put to rout man's best effort at keeping the passes and harbors open. On one night in March, l938, a sudden norther entirely choked up Corpus Christi Pass, a watenvay then six feet deep and a hundred feet across.
If the northers are the villains that close the passes, the hurricanes are the good angels that open them. But only in this one way are they good angels. Padre's history has been broken into eras and epochs by the hurricanes that lash its coast line.
The word "hurricane," of West Indian origin, originally meant "big wind." In modern speaking it has two connotations - any wind that measures seventy-five miles an hour or over, and more specifically, in Padre's terminology, a cyclonic wind system of the tropics.
The hurricanes that harass Padre and her neighbor islands have their origin in the so-called "doldrums" in the southern North Atlantic Ocean or in the Caribbean Sea, an area of sultry air and calms, broken by frequent rains, thunderstorms, and squalls. Called "typhoons" in the East Indies, these hurricanes develop a circular or cyclonic pattern as they gather force on their curving path. Currents of air from the north or west may meet and deflect the course of the moving hurricane, at any point on its way. For this reason any hurricane warning on any point of the Gulf Coast is heeded along its entire length.
These hurricanes themselves have well-defined areas, roughly circular in shape, the barometric pressure diminishing rapidly from the edge toward the center. Moderate gusty winds blow fitfully in the outer fringe of the cyclone. These winds increase in intensity toward the center until there at times, they may blow at a rate of one hundred and fifty miles an hour. The distance from this outer fringe to the center varies from five to fifteen miles or more.
At the center of these hurricanes is the "eye," a small area of little or no wind, varying from a fraction of a mile to twenty miles in width. Visitors and newcomers, unacaquainted with this phenomenon, are lulled into a false sense of security, thinking the storm is spent when this eye passes over them. But the veteran of the hurricane seasons battens down more strongly and waits, for he knows that the wind, as high as ever, will start up again very soon from the opposite direction. During the passage of the storm, both preceding and following the calm eye, there is a driving deluge of rain, the "horizontal rain" of the old-timers' tales, accompanied by terrifying noises. These hurricanes blow themselves out once they start inland. The end of a hurricane is indicated by a rising barometer which brings with it a rise in spirits.
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The weather-wise do not heed the modern devices to recognize the near approach of a hurricane. These storms are usually preceded by a day of unusual clearness wherein distant objects stand out in sharp relief. The atmosphere becomes very oppressive, making breathing seem an effort. The sky grows overcast with cirrus haze which does not clear away even at the fiery, brassy sunset. The clouds grow more dense until the dark mass of the true hurricane clouds appears on the horizon, the center of the storm showing an arc of dense greyish clouds darkening eventually to a deep copperish black.
The tides and swells, too, give notice to the weather-wise. The tides are abnormally high, even at their ebb. Great swells form, rushing in to shore with increasing rapidity. To those who can interpret their significance, the time between swells and the angle of the swell with the shore tell how distant is the storm and what its course. At times these tidal waves rushing across Padre to the main shoreline rise so high that they are more destructive than the storm itself. In 1919, tidal waves at Corpus Christi reached sixteen feet in height, the greatest ever recorded, and accounted for more damage than the wind and rain.
The first fitful rains and squally winds may last for several hours. Then the storm is on in dead earnest. Meteorologists figure that a devastating hurricane hits any one point on an average of once every twenty-five years. The storm season usually begins about mid-July and lasts until October, with September having the doubtful honor of being the stormiest month. Storms in the Caribbean were reported as early as 1494, two years after Columbus' first voyage. Recorded storms hit lower Texas in 1840, destroying villages at the mouth of the Rio Grande, and again in 1844, leaving not a single house standing at Brazos Santiago at Padre's southern tip. In 1885 again at Brownsville and in 1886 when Sabine was inundated, storms lashed the lower coast.
The storms that Padre remembers most vividly today are the two hurricanes that hit and devastated beyond resurrection the little coast town of Indianola in 1875 and 1886, the Galveston storm of 1900, the Corpus Christi storm of 1919, and the lower coast storm of 1933, the worst hurricane year on record.
All the aid of modern science is called on in the hurricane season. About mid-June, the United States Weather Bureau sends ships to the latitudes which originate the storms, and from there by wireless, radio, and teletype these ships send warning to all vessels and shorelines in any possible danger. Other ships, following their usual lanes, send in reports of squalls and clouds so that man with his property can take refuge.
After the storm blows itself out, Padre, the pre-historic lizard, somewhat changed in shape, with new passes cut and old ones reopened, sprawls again in the smiling sunshine. And again the sportsmen, vacationers, scientists, and fishermen return, taking, as they must, this sandy lizard on its own terms.
