Day 1

With the barest sketch of a plan and the Jeep loaded with gear, off we went, Patricia, Otis, and I, toward the sleepy island of Galveston for a long weekend. “In February?” you would be right to ask. It’s certainly the off-season for tourists, but — in the words of a young woman we met in an abandoned brewery (more on that later) — “off season? every day is good beach weather.” As I write this a few days after returning home, I realize two things: (a) she was totally right, and (b) I would love for all the wonderful people we met on this trip to come together and take a bow. Ralph the historian, Nicole the urban explorer, the snowbird and the hotel clerk. How surreal that would be. Wherever they are, I salute them.

Highway I-10 carried us into the gridlock of Houston after sundown. We intended to leave early on Saturday, but the hours evaporated with rushed errands and last-minute additions to the supply list.

There is a charmed anticipation to setting up camp at night. We’ve been through this drill on a mountaintop in New Mexico, a hippie RV Park in Marfa, and coincidentally on our first trip to Galveston. With the new light of the following day, it is a revelation to see for the first time your temporary home in nature.

We crossed the long bridge into Galveston and proceeded toward the western tip of the island. At the end of Bluewater Highway, there is an off-ramp for an unmarked dirt frontage road. You have to creep up on it or you’ll shoot right by. As the paved road begins to rise off the land, the dirt road turns beneath the overpass and opens into tall dunes and wide beachfront. It is so dark one cannot separate land from water from sky. We see other travelers far ahead by the light of their fires, and further on, the lights of ships. Overhead there are so many stars. We see the beach only in the path of the headlights. We listen to the waves crash as we build our tent.

Day 2

We awoke in our yellow plastic cocoon, with a little body ache and a need for coffee. We stepped outside to realize that we are alone in a wide expanse of sand, with light blue skies and a spectrum of sunrise in the clouds above.

Th island’s west point is calm and undeveloped, spotted with a confetti of seashells, and textured with wild grass-capped dunes. The only sign of civilization is the silent cars moving on the freeway.

Sand is a nuisance. It gets into everything: your socks and your cup of coffee, your teeth and under your fingernails, and, God forbid, your eyes.  We bring it home by the teaspoon in our sneakers and hair, or by the truckload to make glass and concrete. If not for the construction industry, there would be no second act for sand. These grains that were formerly rocks, now spread like ashes along our coasts, are laid to rest beside the water that reduced them. Sand is part of no life cycle. It just is. From beneath a tree, one can imagine the dynamic time-lapse of branches bearing fruit, dropping leaves, falling to the earth, breaking apart and rotting, decomposing in the mouths of beetles, and enriching our soil, to nourish sprouting seeds. But sand is unsettling in its constancy. Every footprint and tire track on the beach is removed by the caress of a wave. It’s nature’s Etch-a-Sketch. How humbling to think that, in a million years, a beach might look exactly the same as it does today.

After coffee and a quick pack-up, we went into town to find something to eat. Sunday brunch was at Farley Girls, a packed Bistro on the north side of town. Otis got a lot of attention at our sidewalk table near the entrance.

I had a ridiculous and memorable breakfast of chicken fried steak, served on a pancake and topped with cream gravy. We drank tart mimosas and talked about how we would spend the day. The clouds moved in after breakfast and we pulled on our sweaters. We reclined on the beach, watching kids run in the surf while a motorized para-glider dipped and circled overhead. Oil tankers and cargo ships dotted the horizon, awaiting entrance to Galveston Bay and ultimately the port of Houston.

Feeling tired, cold, and a little homeless as the daylight waned, we searched online for a pet-friendly place to stay the night. We settled on a beachfront La Quinta with a badly cracking parking lot and a dormant swimming pool. Apparently there’s some truth in the old joke about the hotel’s name being Spanish for “next to Denny’s.” Although we planned to camp all three nights on the beach, the room was a welcome change of plan. It was nice to have a place to shower, nap, and watch a bit of television.

We ate dinner at a chic place called BLVD Seafood. We sat beneath a pendant light at the bar and shared a wedge salad, scallops, lamp chops with risotto, and banana pudding. The dishes were all pretty good, except the scallops, which were tragically overcooked and dry. We asked our server where she would go for a drink on Sunday night. She was happy to share some insight. We settled on a nifty art space near the university, the Proletariat Gallery. The interior is sparse and modern, with concrete floors, exposed air ducts, and beautiful blue Corinthian columns holding up the wooden ceiling beams. Cold crock pots and crumb-bottomed pie plates from a Valentine’s Day pot luck lingered on a table at the front of the bar. We had a second dessert of Italian cream cake with a pint of Texas micro-brew.  The television murmured with highlights from a basketball game as I fell asleep.

Day 3

We woke up too late for the hotel’s continental breakfast, which was just as well. I can think of better reasons to end a snooze than unripe bananas and greasy muffins. I used my camp stove to prepare a pot of French press coffee on the little desk of our room. We unzipped the windows of the Jeep and drove down the Seawall road, looking at landmarks and people. Out of curiosity, I began to follow the signs for the ferry service. On a map, Highway 87 ends at the northeastern tip of Galveston island, and a dotted gray line spans the channel to a point where the road resumes on Bolivar peninsula. A quick Google search confirmed that the ferry service was part of the Texas Highway department and most importantly, free.  The young man in the booth laughed at my enthusiasm, and told me plainly that the ride across was “pretty chill.”

We parked the Jeep on board, and from the top deck we watched the seagulls fight for bread scraps thrown overboard by passengers. The sight of a decaying old ship, half submerged along the coast, made me a little nervous about the integrity of the ferry. Patricia read aloud its history from Wikipedia; the S.S. Selma was one of twelve experimental concrete ships commissioned by Eisenhower during the steel shortages of WWI. It was intentionally laid to rest, or “scuttled” in a sandbar after a collision with a coral reef damaged its hull beyond repair. It’s been the subject of many re-envisionings over the decades – pleasure resorts, fishing piers, museums – but nothing has stuck. For now it is just an awkward scar in the water.

We disembarked the ferry and drove inland. We are greeted by a massive and curiously ugly hill, grassy and fortified with concrete. There were covered picnic tables and walking paths on the surrounding grounds, and we decided to stop and look around. The hill is actually an artillery battery of Fort Travis, which was established in the late 19th century, and has been reconfigured many times by hurricanes and war. Its three bunkers feature gun batteries and subterranean corridors and chambers. Although the main doors were locked, we came across one that was open, with a truck parked nearby. We ventured in and met a very accommodating man charged with its refurbishment, Ralph. Happily, he took a break from his work to show us around.

Inside the bunker, newspaper insulation hung in strips from the ceiling, and there were enough industrial hooded light fixtures to animate a Pinterest user for hours. It smelled of paint, and the doors and machinery were freshly coated with a spartan black. We walked through the generator room, the store rooms, war room, even the latrines. In one large room off the main corridor, Ralph pointed to stenciled numbers on the wall, 8 through 15, and explained that these were artillery shell gauges. If an enemy ship was, say, two miles away, the operator would retrieve the appropriate artillery shell from this room that corresponded to that distance. He informed us that the bunker he was working on was to be reopened in the fall for a heritage festival. As we parted ways, he recommended that we visit the Galveston Railroad Museum, and informed us with some pride that he was its former Director.

I tried to fix a breakfast of grits, but the wind knocked apart my cooking set-up and the food went into the grass, to Otis’s pleasure. Instead, we had a good lunch of fried seafood at a local spot. It was a junky place in a state of seemingly constant renovation. There were a few locals in bistro chairs and barstools, a shuffleboard table, casino games on digital consoles, stacks of tiles, buckets of paint, all lit with Christmas lights and foregrounded by aluminum siding and bamboo trim. The bartender pressed us to try the bread pudding, a dish with a suspicious pedigree: “we make it in-house!” I had to wonder about the rest of our lunch.

The beach of the Bolivar peninsula is 20 miles long and much less crowded than that of Galveston. The Jeep handled the loose sand easily, and we found a good place to pitch our tent, with a high dune to shield the wind. There was time for a few games of bocce ball and a long relaxing session of wave-watching. Otis made a regal sentry, and broke his watch only to chase birds and investigate driftwood.

Eventually I drove back into town to purchase firewood. The mark-up at the gas station was offensive, so instead I went foraging through the dormant neighborhood of vacation homes with battened windows and tarp-covered cars in driveways. The mission was a success; I found a shipping pallet and some brush on the side of the road, which I stuffed it into the back of the Jeep. I ain’t no sucker. Back at our campsite, Patty had a laugh watching me drive in circles, trying to break apart the pallet beneath the wheels of the Jeep.

After the sun set, we made a grand fire and ate hot chili with tortilla chips. We enjoyed a cosmic moment under all those stars, listening to the folksy croon of White Magic on the car stereo, and meditatively stoking the fire with a splintered board. In the darkness, the waiting ships blinked on their red nautical lights. Downtown Galveston was bright in the distance.

Day 4

The two of us piled into the tent with Otis for one final night, and when I had my first cup of coffee the next morning, it was as a newly 29 year old man. Birthdays always make me reflective. I tried not to think about everything too much.

We stopped at the North jetty before returning on the ferry to Galveston Island. It’s one of two slender guards that gently curve into the gulf like the eyelashes of Galveston Bay. The jetty protects a wide marshy shallow with patches of straw colored grass. White egrets and flocks of smaller birds picked for food in the water. Oysters grew on the blocks of granite that fortified the jetty. The thing continued out for what seemed like forever into the gulf. Many people used it for fishing.

Patricia treated me to a birthday lunch at a nice cafe called Mosquito. The inside was contemporary and homey; there were chalkboards with hand-written specials, and a notice that the bread was sourced from a bakery across the street. A wooden sign with a plain blue horizontal line hung by the restroom door at eye level: the high water line of Hurricane Ike in 2008. We sat outside,  and shared a divine slice of lemonade pie before our food arrived. We split the leftovers of our lunch between Otis and some impatient birds. A sophisticated older woman with dark clothes and beige ombre glasses came to our table to gush about Otis. I owe the guy a steak dinner for all the great conversations that he’s brought our way. She confessed that she was a snowbird preparing for the journey back to New York City at the end of the week. We talked a little longer, before she left the table in a rush at the sight of her granddaughter coming into the restaurant. Her lifestyle prompted a long and pleasant fantasy of bicoastal living that Patricia and I entertained during our lunch. With full stomachs, we walked a few blocks past pastel-colored houses with stairway walk-ups, inventing stories about the occupants and marveling at the architectural details.

The sun was high overhead as we cruised through town for the last time with no particular plans. Throughout the weekend, we had noticed a towering and clearly abandoned old building on the north side of town with some curiosity, and decided to get a better look at it before driving back to Austin. As we slowly rolled around its perimeter, we were surprised to see that the makeshift doors of plywood and barbed wire were hanging open. Without deliberation, we parked the Jeep in the grass behind the building and headed inside.

The footprint of the building was C-shaped, with a large atrium in the middle. Its walls were decorated with broken windows and exposed rebar. At the rear of the atrium was a loading dock, covered by an arch and with a mess of silver pipes like a gothic scene out of a comic book. Soon after we entered the first arm of the facility – a warehouse-like room with a metal scaffolding wrapping the upper level – we froze at the sound of footsteps. Anxiously we prepared our excuses and smiles for a certain encounter with the police, but were pleasantly surprised again at the sight of a fellow urban explorer equipped with a camera bag and tripod. Nicole was a regular there, and was delighted at our questions about its history. According to her, the place was an ancient pre-Prohibition brewery that was closed for good in the 1980’s after Pabst Blue Ribbon bought it out. Excitedly, she described the spectacular view from the top of building and shared recent redevelopment gossip.

We parted ways, and Patricia and I began up the main concrete staircase at the back of the building. We had to use our iPhone flashlights in the darkness of the lower landings. We stopped on each level to inspect the rusted vats, bottling equipment, and control panels with long-dead lighted buttons and cryptic labels.

Decades of urban decay affect a space in much the same way as the horror vacui that compelled the designers of Venetian palaces. Every surface was inscribed with doodles and subversive wisdom, sprouting with wires, crumbling apart, reclaimed by weeds and birds, or brittle with rust. Dust coated the walls and broken glass crunched underfoot. The two of us wandered on a long rush of adrenaline through its beautiful chambers, musing aloud about their functions and snapping photos.

The view from the top did not disappoint. Of our few forays into abandoned spaces, this was by the far the best.

Final Thoughts

When we are children, we have long unstructured days to play and learn about the world. I love traveling because it feels like an opportunity to return to that. I am not an itinerary person. The pace of this trip, like many others before it, was set by suggestions from locals, conversations, impulses, and chasing what relaxes us or brings us energy. We drove into the city of Galveston with no places to stay, no tickets, no schedules, and no idea what the day would bring. Everything we discovered was coincidental. Even our stay in the hotel felt especially refreshing because it was unexpected. The total cost of this trip was less than $200 per person. Without an expensive Valentine’s Day dinner, an extra cocktail or two, and the hotel stay, we could have easily done the whole thing for less than $100 each. Traveling can be stressful and expensive, but it can also be easy, relaxing, and cheap if you want it to be. You have to find the things you are willing to trade on. There is no greater pleasure than unplugging from the world, from social media, from time and from routine for a few days. I hope to see you out there.