Postcards from the end of America

No. 137

When you drive over the causeway that connects South Padre Island with the mainland, you might notice the little white blimp floating above the beachfront high-rises. It’s higher than any of the kites the vacationers put up into the coastal breeze, and more still. Graceful and minimalist, like an art installation, the only highly visible non-natural object on the island that is not plastered with advertising urging your attention. That is because it is not there for you to look at. It is there to silently watch what’s going on within its view.

The Tethered Aerostat Radar System (TARS) is a 420,000-cubic-foot avionics platform that floats on twin Tedlar® gasbags of helium and air, anchored to its base by a 10,000-foot nylon and polyethylene cable. Loaded with advanced surveillance technologies, it is especially well-suited to monitoring airspace at levels below what most military and civilian radar can see, and to tracking movement on the ground, even in rough topography, or across the surface of the sea. I first saw one in West Texas a decade ago, floating above the Prada Marfa installation along Highway 90. The South Padre blimp is newer, authorized by the 2023 Coast Guard budget bill, watching for unauthorized movement into U.S. airspace along one of the hemisphere’s major bird migration routes.

At the very moment we had finally loaded up baby, grandma and a week’s worth of groceries for the six-hour trek from Austin to the very tip of South Texas, a man walked up to us carrying a box full of baby birds. It was the facilities manager of the door factory next door to us, anxiously seeking access through our property. When I looked in the box, I saw seventeen ducklings, colored like bumblebees. Then I heard calls from above, and looked up to see a mature pair of black-bellied whistling ducks, trying to rescue their brood. The man explained the ducklings had walked into the factory’s drive-through that morning, and he was trying to save them. I told him they are tree ducks that nest in hollow arbors all over town and come to the river in the daytime to feed. I encouraged him to let them loose in our yard, there with the parents ready to fix the situation, but he was determined to go down to the water. My own experiences trying to act as good samaritan with urban animals in distress have taught me that most of the ideas that come into our heads in such situations are like those other ways in which men think we know how we can help you.

I thought about the ducklings as we made our way on our overland migration, wondering if any of them would make it to the border when the summer ends, if that ever happens.

The mapbot sent us straight south on the route of the Chisholm Trail, on two-lane highways that passed through a greener landscape than I expected, past majestic old oaks under whose rare shade clustered more cows than you would think could fit in such a space. We drove an hour through a zone without a single town, which I later realized was the famed expanse of the King Ranch. At a roadside stand, a produce vendor advertised YELLOW MEAT as an enticement to eat his watermelons. The only stretch of four-lane freeway was between Raymondsville and Los Fresnos, landmarked by the smiling face of Freddy Fender looking down over the traffic from the water tower in San Benito. Then the bridge, and the blimp, and the beach.

In the morning, on the Saturday that begins a five-day weekend, the sunrise people come out. Yoginis doing their salutations for real, couples posing for each other, seacombers out for their forages before the tide comes in. I ran, north to the county park marked on the map as the sea turtle hatchery. A conservation volunteer rode past me on an ATV, looking for babies on the beach, but the signs of life were few, in weather so hot that, once the sun was really up, the only tolerable way to be out in it was in the water or in the shade.

The water was cool and clean-feeling, nicer than other Texas beaches, full of fish, with strong breakers and a stronger undercurrent. And the social energy was diverse and inclusive. The perfect place to wear out your kids with healthy athletic play. At least until the moment late on the first morning when the color of the water lapping on the sand suddenly changed, acquiring a blue-gray dishwater haze, making us wonder what exactly was going on at the construction site you could see down the beach, where bulldozers were pushing sand and every now and then you could see big volumes of water being pumped out of pipes, perhaps in collaboration with the industrial ship lurking out there on the near horizon.

The next morning I jogged down to investigate, finding a giant steel pipe emerging from the water and blocking access for a couple of blocks of beachfront. A flagger explained they were pumping more sand to expand the beach. Sand dredged from the bottom of the ship channel. Here on a barrier island projected to experience as much as two feet of sea level rise before the century’s end.

In the fishing village where the causeway originates next to an 1850s lighthouse, the visitors bureau hands out a brochure that lists, in very tiny print, 101 Things To Do in Port Isabel.

“Number 28: Check out the wetland behind the H.E.B.”

We needed to replenish our supplies, so I made a grocery run and checked it out. But there was no wetland. More like a desert, an expansive empty lot of cactus, low brush, and wide channels of bone-dry brown dust.

I realized I had driven along that wetland earlier in the trip, there where the two main highways of the area intersect. I had taken the road south of the H.E.B. Sunday afternoon to pick up my son from the Brownsville airport. The signs marked a national wildlife refuge, and I saw a few wild birds, but mostly what I saw were dudes out tearing it up on ATVs. Warriors of the wasteland. I wondered if they’ll settle for pedal power, when the gas runs out.

Further inland, you could see the monolithic industrial infrastructure of the last port before the border. The Ballardian yards of the shipbreakers, where the remains of old tankers and destroyers were being slowly broken down to scrap. The big tanks of petrochemical terminals, machine estuaries of the big shrimping operations, massive storage yards, a little clinic for the victims of industrial accidents and chronic workplace pathologies. The neighborhood around the airport is one of windowless old warehouses and pockets of eclectic neighborhood, sometimes with remnants of resacas, the oxbow fragments of old courses of the Rio Grande, reminding you in a different way how ephemeral the border is.

The Brownsville airport terminal, geocode BRO, is nicer. Brand new, completed during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a glistening computer-designed metal roofline that mimics a wing, or a wave, or both. The parking lot was full of Audis, Mercedeses and Teslas, presumably of SpaceX personnel flown to their real homes for the holiday.

You can see the launchpad and the factory from almost any vantage in the area, looming like a mirage on the horizon. The corporate Starbase is located at Boca Chica, the beach where the river that marks our southern border empties into the Gulf. For someone old enough to have grown up on Ray Bradbury and grainy Apollo moonwalk footage, it really is a hallucinatory thing to witness with your own eyes. Especially during what turned out, if you can believe the papers, to be the hottest week on Earth in recorded history. Rich guys hurrying to find a way to get off the planet and colonize new ones, now that we trashed this one.

Back on the island, there’s a bird sanctuary on the bayside, in the spot where the municipal water treatment plant pumps cleaned effluent out into the shallows, and the mix of freshwater and saltwater environments creates uniquely diverse habitat in an area of just a few acres, mangrove swamp and grassy wetlands. The birds are pretty amazing—all manner of herons and egrets, nighthawks out in the daytime, black skimmers cruising past your head before they aerofoil over the water, catching what they can with beaks dropped to dip and dredge at full speed. But their presence there reminds you how sparse their habitat is elsewhere.

The conflation of the coastal edgeland sanctuaries with the 21st century corporate spaceport got me thinking about one of the science fictions of my youth, Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running, in which crazy Bruce Dern plays the gardener tending the the last remnants of Earth’s green wilderness, now contained in botanical pods attached to ships cruising past the rings of Saturn. When the order comes to blow up the pods, due to budget cuts or something, Dern goes postal, and kills his shipmates to save the trees and the bunnies. He dies, too, but one of his droids makes it, and seems likely to keep the remnant alive to outlive all of us.

Toward the end of the boardwalk, there was a little plaque recognizing the work of a local Eagle Scout who built boxes designed to house breeding pairs of black-bellied whistling ducks, the same species whose ducklings we had seen when we set out on our holiday. And there the ducks were, successfully drawn by the simple gesture of making a tiny slice of our habitat into theirs. Even closer, I heard a cheep and saw a juvenile moorhen emerge from the reeds, its head a strange combination of reds, yellows and blacks, begging food from its red-beaked parent, there in the shadow of the water treatment plant and the electrical substation, and the launchpad to Mars.

The scene was a reminder of how much easier it would be to heal our own planet than try to terraform another one. Even as the weather, and the capitalist hellscape that surrounded us, affirmed the likelihood that nature will have to do the fixing in the end, at our expense. The spring break parties, one imagines, are going to get a little wilder, as the idea of the future melts before our eyes. Some of those kids, at least, are fighting for a different future, even if they do so charged with anticipatory grief, and a realization that the hope they can still hang onto is a compromised one.

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Beach reads

The paperback I ended up pulling from the bag to enjoy in the sand was John Williams’ 1960 novel Butcher’s Crossing, about a young guy from Boston who gets evangelized by Emerson, drops out of Harvard, and heads west to the Kansas frontier in 1870, seeking an original connection to nature by hooking up with buffalo hunters. He succeeds, finding a last paradise in the Rocky Mountain wilderness, and aiding in its destruction. Powerful work, carried by Williams’ intensely lucid prose and spartan characterization, and freshly germane to our current moment.

In the news, I read with astonishment the reports of a new study by geophysicists at Seoul National University who provide compelling evidence that the relentless pumping of groundwater to sustain human consumption and agricultural production has reached levels so extreme—about 75 trillion gallons a year—that its rebalancing of geological weight has caused the Earth’s axis to tilt.

And in this weekend’s NYT, a powerful column by Rolling Stone reporter and fellow Austinite Jeff Goodell about what’s really going on with this summer’s heat, and how we Texans are reaping what we sowed—building on the research he did for his new book The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

It’s not all bad news. The massive, Blade Runner 2049-grade wind farms we drove through along the coast were a reminder that the energy grid in Texas has stayed up (so far) this summer because a third of our production here in the oil patch now comes from wind and solar.

And from Ireland, an upbeat story about large-scale efforts at rewilding, complete with a vegan death metal Lord Dunsany returning from New York to restore his ancestral lands to a natural state.

R.I.P. Julian Sands.

For more on the weird wonders of tethered aerostats and virtual border walls, if you can get through the paywall you might enjoy my 2015 piece, “Borrowed Palantirs,” which appeared in the Review of the Americas Society,

Next weekend I’ll be at Readercon in Boston, participating in some panels, catching up with friends and colleagues, and presenting a talk on “Depictions of Nature in Dystopian Fiction.” Please come by and say hi if you are there.

Field Notes will be back in late July. In the meantime, stay cool.