Boca Chica Sunset
BROWNSVILLE, TEXAS
HOPE NAVIGATED US TO THE BOCA CHICA HIGHWAY, BUT THE traffic was thick and the stoplights frequent. As soon as we found an opening I sped up, running yellow lights and a few red ones to get out of Harlingen. At first we were on a highway crowded with businesses and fast-food places, followed by a two-lane stretch with scattered houses and mailboxes, then ranches, then nothing but marsh and sand and no people at all. The sky turned a brilliant pink and the witching hour arrived. I pushed the gas pedal harder.
We were doing eighty miles per hour down the spit of land toward Boca when the red ball of the sun left us. Though now filled with color, the sky was darkening by the minute. When you get to the sand, the agent had said, go right. I repeated the simple directions aloud as we neared the south of Brazos Island, the last barrier island in Texas. We were in a small car, a Chevrolet Cruze, not advertised as an all-terrain vehicle.
When we hit sand, I braked, but we were still doing fifty when the pavement ended. Before we had a chance to think we were bumping over the uneven terrain of the beach, and I started turning right almost by instinct, heading south. When the car began to bog down, I knew I had turned south way too soon. The Chevy’s tires sank deep into the sand; the car lurched and lost speed fast. Luckily I hadn’t braked too hard and momentum kept us plowing ahead. Fishtailing and dodging around two trucks backed up toward the water, I steered the car to the hard sand near the breakers. Fishermen in the surf and others sitting on their tailgates looked up, and a few waved just as the tires gripped the smoother track and we forged ahead. We waved back, wishing we could have stopped. Half a minute later we were doing forty miles per hour and bouncing along on tracks of shells and hard sand. The sky was graying.
The Boca Chica beach at the Rio Grande and the rented Chevy Cruze at sunset.
“Slow down,” Hope shouted as we bottomed out a few times on rough spots. I was still a little crazed from navigating all the traffic and the impossible challenge of beating the setting sun. “I’ve been planning this trip for months and I’ve got to get some pictures while we still have light,” I answered. My old digital Olympus camera wasn’t great at nighttime shooting. “Besides,” I said, “There are two types of vehicles that can go anywhere: a tank and a rental car!” She held on. I gripped the steering wheel and gave the shocks a workout.
At the most intense moment of driving, when the wheels seemed to leave the sand at one point, I got a cellphone call, and seeing the number I felt I had to answer. Hearing Spanish on the other end, I shouted back a line or two about being at Boca Chica. Then the call went dead. Though we had never met, I knew the voice had to belong to Santiago, the ranch hand we were supposed to meet by 8:00. It was 7:30 already and all we had time to say was “hasta pronto!”
The Boca Chica of the Rio Grande as it is called on the U.S. side, or Rio Bravo as it is known in Mexico, was some two miles away, but as we barreled down the beach we began to see a lighthouse whirling its beacon over the little river in the distance. Rushing toward it, we came to a stop in the corner formed by the Gulf and the Rio. “Little mouth” is exactly right; there is nothing grande at all about it. I jumped out of the car and went for my camera in the back seat. There was just enough light left to get a few shots. Having missed the last good light by some twenty minutes, the dusky colors post-sunset would have to do.
Only after I’d taken some pictures did I start to breathe deeply and take in the scene. The gentle rhythm of the Gulf waves and the mild ocean breeze, along with the view in front of us of three Mexican fishermen, likely a father and two sons, casting a net, calmed my nerves almost instantly. I let my shoulders drop and took off my shoes, as if to let my stress run out of my legs and into the sand. The sand was cool and soft, the waves gentle, the water inviting.
While planning the trip, I’d imagined confrontations in a no-man’s-land with border guards in black uniforms, fences, spotlights, motion detectors, and signs warning of dire consequences: violators will be prosecuted, no photographs! Instead, we found only hand-net fishermen casting in the surf, a pickup with its doors open, a family gathered around a fire, the simple lighthouse whirling its modest light, and our rental car—the only vehicle visible anywhere in sight on the U.S. side. We stood taking pictures in the last of red sky at night, gentle waves washing ashore, the color and the gentle sounds all making me want to sit down and rest.
The tide was at its lowest at 7:30—I had known that from reading online charts, so that part of our timing was perfect. This made the channel seem so shallow that I likely could have waded into Mexico without getting my underwear wet. Somewhere out in front of me in the water was the international line, but there were no markers. I cooled my feet in the gentle surf. “Perfect for swimming,” I said to Hope. The fishermen seemed oblivious to us as they continued casting in our direction, now only fifty yards away, not looking even when I attempted to call out to them. They kept coming up empty, reaching back, and casting the twirling net again. A motorboat passed near them, heading from river to Gulf, and turned toward the north. Either nationality could take a boat into the channel. The turn at the end, either north or south at Boca Chica into national waters, was the restricted part. No one was there to check anyway. We were the only Americans present, with our Chevrolet on a deserted beach. We could have been in a car commercial. For those few moments all seemed right with the world.
Except that it wasn’t. Just a few hundred miles to our east lay the damaged Deepwater Horizon oil rig that had exploded one month before, killing eleven, injuring seventeen. It was still pumping at least fifty thousand barrels of oil per day into the same body of water my feet were in. And at points westward on the borderline there was untold turmoil. But at that moment none of it seemed real.
I could have stayed for hours, building a fire and watching the darkening waves and the fishermen until they quit. For a few moments I breathed in the salt air and did nothing. The rise and fall of my body kept time with the waves. Then one last shot with my camera: pink one direction, fishermen another, lighthouse beam passing across breakers, dark.