Somewhere, I still have a small mustard jar containing a sample of the gooey sludge that I collected that year. I recall the oily globs that inundated the beach after the Ixtoc I well blew out fifty miles off the Gulf coast of Mexico in the summer of 1979 and quickly spread massive quantities of oil to U.S. For me, North Padre was a place of perpetual swimsuits, bare feet, and days on end with not a care in the world. Even today it has escaped large-scale commercial development and seems happy to be overshadowed by the more famous-and more raucous-South Padre Island, which is favored by college students on spring break. Back then, North Padre was a sleepy little seaside spot that didn’t qualify as a proper town. As the location’s name suggests, it sits at the northern end of Padre Island, which, at 113 miles from tip to tip, is the longest barrier island in the world. In 1970, my dad, a hardworking Temple attorney active in civic affairs who had earned an occasional respite, purchased a small beachside unit in North Padre Island’s brand-new Gulfstream Condominiums.
That seashoreless existence came to an end when I was about four years old. But there was, of course, neither a sandy beach nor a Gulf of Mexico in sight. We didn’t lack for watery recreation in Central Texas, where there are plentiful creeks, rivers, and lakes, all of which we regularly availed ourselves of. I come from Temple originally, landlocked deep in the state’s interior. I wasn’t born on the Texas coast, but as the old saying goes, I got there as fast as I could.
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