Nitewalk - Padre Island

I love night walks on tide swept sand. When the receding tide has swept a long, glimmering path of wet, hard packed sand, toss shoes aside, and head for the water.

From the Padre Island shoreline, running parallel to the waterline, are three sandbars. Each bar, and the guts between, get progressively deeper until, after the third bar, you are in the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. At night, when the tide is out, the water is only a foot deep to the first bar. So a night walk invariably includes a walk to the first bar, and once you're on the bar, the water is inches deep.

I promise. Anyone who doesn't feel more alive after walking a half mile on that first bar in the moonlight is someone you don't want to know.

When you get in the car and shut the doors, the silence is like a vacuum. The rolling breakers, the shifting wind... silenced.

Five miles up the road on Padre Island Drive, headed to town, go under the John F. Kennedy causeway bridge that spans the Intracoastal Waterway, and circle under it on the island side of the ICW, drive over pot-holed, semi-paved, oyster shell-filled roads to Snoopy's.

Snoopy's is a restaurant that sits on the ICW. Finish the evening standing in line at the order window, carrying a pile of U Peel Em shrimp to one of the tables outside by the dock and watching a Great Blue Heron fish the shallows between the dock and the channel. You don't have to wear shoes. You don't have to fix your "beach" hair. You can put your feet up on the empty chair next to you, lean back, sip your coffee, and feel the salt air.

Even better, go to Scoopy's, next door, and get a banana split served on a big, round flat plate. Ya gotta eat it fast before it melts.. out there, in the warm coastal air.
mday March '95

Taken at a stormy sunrise.
Summer, 2008 while I was in town working for a couple of weeks.