The Start of Hurricane Season and the End of Surfing
If surfing is a religion, then June 1 is for Texas surfers the beginning of one of their most important liturgical seasons. Each year during the month of May, the anticipation builds in the weeks leading up to the official start date for the Atlantic Hurricane Season. The moment is mixed with anxiety, excitement, and memories of previous storms that either brought much-dreaded destruction or much-desired surf. The storms will come. It’s just always a question of when and where. From a surfer’s perspective, there is no reason to not get stoked about a swell coming your way from somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, even though you know it is going to do damage in Florida or elsewhere, because the next storm is just as likely to hit you.
So, if a storm swell is on the way, then you show gratitude for it and do your duty to exploit and enjoy whatever silver linings may exist alongside Hurricane Season’s annually recurring wreckage. Hurricane Season can be horrifying and exhilarating. When I try to explain to friends what it’s like to be a Texas surfer during Hurricane Season, I typically reference the movie Twister. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character has the soul of a surfer. Like him and the other scientists in the film, we literally chase storms, and strategize a rendezvous with Nature at just the right moment to experience a unique combination of adrenaline, wonder, and Zen.
Storms are a curse, and a blessing, though I suppose mostly a curse. Ethically, one is probably obligated to adopt the position that they would rather there be no storms, and consequently, no storm swells. After all, Texas does not rely solely on tropical storms and hurricanes for surf, although each year some of the best swells are produced by them. Again, curse or not, the storms will come. Specific years loom large in a surfer’s memory, either because of the quantity of storms or their intense quality. Quality can be good (the surf produced) and bad (the destruction caused) at the same time. 2005, the year I graduated high school, was one of the most active hurricane seasons and possessed quantity and quality in the highest order. By August, I had left my hometown of Houston to start college at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. The two storms that defined 2005, for me, were Katrina and Rita.
While I was born in Houston, I spent the first 12 years of my childhood living outside New Orleans, before moving back to Houston. Katrina’s destruction of the places I had lived, visited, and played youth sports was devastating. Still, I surfed the swell that Katrina sent to Corpus Christi. I don’t remember the surf being particularly good, which can be the case if the storm is too big or too close. Hurricane Rita, which followed a few weeks after Katrina, looms especially large in my memory. The storm was initially forecast to hit Corpus Christi, so classes were cancelled early in the week and people were encouraged to evacuate. Most drove north to San Antonio or Austin, or even Houston. The storm, which briefly became a Category 5, took a significant northeast turn, and hit the Texas/Louisiana border as a Category 3 on September 26th. I had headed straight south to South Padre Island chasing what I hoped would be an epic swell. Indeed, it was the most epic storm swell I have experienced in over 20 years of surfing. I scored 5 consecutive days of surf on South Padre Island at Isla Blanca Beach, Dolphin Cove and Barracuda Cove (in the ship channel), and Boca Chica.
Another year that looms large, as a Houston surfer, is 2008. Hurricane Ike, a Category 2 storm, made landfall at Galveston Island on September 13th. Ike had an enormously negative impact on the surfing of Texas’s upper coast. Intense damage was done to the beaches, sandbars, and infrastructure from Surfside Beach (south of Galveston) to Bolivar Peninsula (north of Galveston). Having first learned to surf in Galveston, often at what was then the Flagship Hotel (now Pleasure Pier), I now considered my home break to be Surfside. Severe beach erosion took place at Surfside that messed up the sand bars (and surf) for years. Today, the effects are visible as you drive down Beach Dr. and observe how far up the water comes at high tide. For a long stretch of the beach, there is no “beach” anymore. On Bolivar Peninsula, the storm severely damaged Meacom’s Pier, the focal point of surfing on that part of the coast. The pier was so damaged that its remains were ultimately removed by the Texas General Land Office. It literally no longer exists.
Meacom’s Pier and South Padre Island represented the geographical borders of Texas surf. “Meac’s” being the northernmost surf spot and “SPI” the southernmost. Evidence of how large the Texas coastline is, you can think of Bolivar Peninsula, where Meacom’s Pier once stood, as practically Louisiana; while South Padre Island, over 400 miles to the south, is practically Mexico. The two spots couldn’t be more different too. With its closer proximity to the sediment that enters the Gulf from the Mississippi River, Meac’s arguably had the brownest water of any surf spot in Texas, while South Padre Island has blue-green water considered by many to be the most beautiful in the state. Meac’s was slower and weaker, while SPI attracts powerful surf from almost any direction.
While I do hope to drive down to South Padre for a storm swell sometime this summer, it is Meacom’s Pier that is on my mind as the start of Hurricane Season approaches. I have a sentimental curiosity about Meac’s because it was my dad’s home break in the 1970s. He grew up in Port Arthur and his family had a beach cabin at Crystal Beach. When I started surfing, I would ask him questions about Meac’s and enjoyed hearing surf stories about his youth, but we never made a trip there together. Anyone who surfs the upper Texas coast understands why. For us to have surfed Meacom’s Pier would have required willingly choosing to drive further for less quality waves. Both Galveston and Surfside are closer to Houston, and each have better surf. So, it makes sense that we never chose to go surf Meacom’s Pier, but in retrospect it seems unfortunate. It certainly feels like a loss now, to know that I can never surf where my dad surfed. Or could I?
I started reading some articles about the pier, its history, and its ultimate removal. I decided to drive down there and see whatever there was to see. I even brought my 8’0 single fin with the expectation of paddling out just to “get wet” as surfers say. Why not? Then, I reasoned, I could say that I had, in a way, sort of surfed Meac’s. It would be a symbolic action. An honorary session. I texted my dad, who now lives in southern California 30 minutes east of Oceanside, about my plans. We exchanged Google map and satellite images to locate where the pier was. He said, “look for the oil derrick.” As it turns out, there would be many oil derricks dotting the landscape as I drove south from I-10 toward High Island and Texas State Highway 87, which runs along the coast on Bolivar Peninsula south toward Galveston Island.
It was my first time driving through that part of the state and I was reminded that in Texas every surf spot exists on the other side of a bridge. The Texas coast is a series of barrier islands, so whether it’s South Padre, Matagorda, or Galveston there is a bridge to cross that may or may not reveal whether the surf conditions are what you had hoped. Sometimes crossing that bridge, wherever it is, symbolizes crossing over into a new head space. When you cross that bridge you are literally, physically, leaving behind whatever else is going on in your life.
When I arrived at the coast things were way worse than I expected or understood. It wasn’t just the pier that was, by now, long gone. The beach was basically gone too. The water from the Gulf, in most places, came all the way up to the rocks and concrete barrier that separated the “beach” from Highway 87. Far from being able to paddle out where the pier used to be, I literally couldn’t even take a stroll on the beach because it was gone. I found the oil derrick, which was across the road from a very small area of sand and rock where maybe three cars could pull into.
I had arrived. This must be the spot where the pier once stood. I got out and looked around. I thought to myself, how quickly had this erosion taken place? Where I was standing, there was technically some “beach” but less than a quarter mile away there was none. Some of the waves were even lapping saltwater onto the road at certain points. I don’t know why, but I was stunned by the fact that there was so little sand. A huge cross mounted in the water a half mile down the road captured what I was feeling. This place wasn’t really a beach anymore. It was a cemetery.
Beach erosion, and the storms that supercharge the effects of erosion, are not new to the Texas coast. The complete loss of a surf spot and beach is new. I had never been to the site of Meacom’s Pier before. Now, I wondered if it was the canary in the coastal coalmine. Is this the future of Galveston too? Water that comes all the way up to Seawall Boulevard? What of Surfside? The sand along Beach Drive is already gone at high tide. How many years before the beach is completely gone? As I drove south on Highway 87 toward Galveston, I stopped at the site of the family beach cabin I would visit as a kid in the 90s. Ike had washed it away too. An identifiable trace of the surf culture that used to exist on Bolivar was the Latitude 29.2 Surf Shop. I pulled over and looked around for a bit. It was a nice shop with some “soft top” boards available if people wanted to try catching waves at Crystal Beach.
Beach erosion, and storms, are guaranteed to continue, but another variable that will be added to the equation over the coming decades is sea level rise from climate change. A Wired Magazine article titled “Sea Level Rise Will Be Catastrophic — And Unequal” from 2022 that summarizes a report produced by NASA, states that, “The Gulf Coast is getting hit with a one-two punch: The land is sinking at the same time that the water is rising…Galveston, Texas, where the land is slumping, could see almost 2 feet of rise by the year 2050.” The article links to NASA’s “Interagency Sea Level Rise Scenario Tool,” which allows the user to look at ranges of projected sea level rise all over the world. According to a study from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “researchers noted that the accelerating rate of sea level rise detected in satellite measurements from 1993 to 2020 — and the direction of those trends — suggest future sea level rise will be in the higher range of estimates for all regions.”
As you can see, Galveston and Corpus Christi (and the entire Texas coast) will experience significant sea level rise by the end of the century. If you’re my dad’s age (over 65), then these projections won’t impact you. When I am my dad’s age, it will be 2052 and projected sea level rise for Galveston will be 1.5–2 feet. When my son is my dad’s age, it will be 2089 and projected sea level rise will be 3–4 feet. I can only speak for myself, but I care deeply about future generations being able to surf natural waves in the ocean. Surfrider Foundation states that, “just three-feet of sea level rise will render most breaks unsurfable.”
While the West Coast will experience less sea level rise than the Gulf Coast and East Coast, many of the most iconic surf spots in California are threatened by an “endless high tide” as a result of beach erosion and sea level rise. Towns like Oceanside and San Clemente are leveraging political energy and scientific expertise to address the problem. Organizations like Save the Waves Coalition are working to “protect surf ecosystems across the world.”
Sea level rise forces us to contemplate and confront deep existential scenarios. As humans, it is difficult (or impossible) for us to contemplate nothingness or infinity, but when I begin to imagine a world were natural, surfable waves no longer break it fills me with panic and despair. When Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962 it asked readers to ponder a future where harmful chemicals silenced the natural world. What sea level rise forces us to ponder today is a future of “silent swells.” Yes, surfing will “live on” at surf parks with artificial waves, but as impressive as these waves are becoming, they cannot replace the predictable unpredictability and subtle wonder of natural waves.
Surfing is somewhat like dancing, and the wave is your dance partner. The movement follows a rhythm but must be anticipated and reacted to with instinct, creativity, and skill. As William Finnegan describes in Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, waves are “quick, violent events at the end of a long chain of storm action and ocean reaction. Even the most symmetrical breaks have quirks and a totally specific, local character, changing with every shift in tide and wind and swell. The best days at the best breaks have a Platonic aspect — they begin to embody a model of what surfers want waves to be.”
Artificial waves are a marvel, and serve a useful purpose, but they are not an acceptable replacement for natural waves. They also are not an affordable replacement. The average one-hour surf session at a surf park is $100. In Houston, where HTX surf park is currently being built on the northeast side of town, membership requires a $6,500 initiation fee and $250 monthly dues, which only includes 2 free sessions per month. If the future of surfing is surf parks, then it will be an enormous cultural and economic shift away from equal access to free public spaces toward privileged access to privatized “country club” atmospheres. Again, artificial waves are a nice option to have and can be quite useful for practicing purposes, but the interaction and communion with Nature cannot be replicated. Finnegan writes, “Getting a spot wired — truly understanding it — can take years. At very complex breaks, it’s a lifetime’s work, never completed…before we can ride them [waves], we have to read them, or at least make a credible start on the job.”
If future generations are to have the same opportunity to get a spot wired, then we must make a credible start on protecting our coastlines and surf breaks. It would be an outrageous betrayal to simply ignore the dire predictions for the future and resign ourselves to scoring as many waves as we can today. As Hurricane Season begins, let us experience more than individual anxiety and excitement about what will happen in 2024. Yes, the storms will come. Yes, we will gladly surf whatever swell they send our way. Let us also choose to cultivate the collective hope and determination needed to preserve surfing for future generations across the globe. And, let me be clear: I am preaching to myself too. I need to do more.
Fortunately, here in Texas we have organizations that are working to preserve surfing culture and history and organizing to conserve coastlines and surf breaks. The Texas Surfing Museum will soon open in Galveston, and Texas chapters of Surfrider Foundation in Galveston, Corpus Christi, and South Texas are doing important work. If Texas policymakers should copy anything that California does, it ought to be coastal conservation. At the federal level, legislation is needed to establish a long-term commitment to the protection of coastlines and surf breaks nationwide. This is already happening in other countries.
While it can be an overwhelming bummer to contemplate the possible “end” of surfing, it is more helpful and healthy to focus on the end of surfing. The goal or purpose of surfing is to experience joy. We are fortunate to be alive at a point in history where mathematics has enabled us to engineer surfboards that make it possible to dance with “a column of orbiting energy, most of it below the [ocean’s] surface” and experience brief moments of transcendence. We have been given this gift, and we must do what we can, as stewards of this artform, this way of life, to conserve it for those who come after us. As Hurricane Season gets started, let’s reflect on what we can do to conserve natural waves for future generations. And, if the surf goes flat for much of June while we await the first storms, then maybe we can catch some waves in Waco.
Note from the author: Most of my writing has been about politics, but this is the beginning of a series of essays about surfing in Texas. I plan to write about each major spot and would enjoy speaking with some people who have knowledge and memories of specific breaks. Feel free to contact me. bryanjameshenry@gmail.com. See y’all in the water!