Autumn in Port Aransas

Open for fishing and strolling 24 hours daily, the Horace Caldwell Pier juts a quarter-mile into the Gulf of Mexico.

Every fall for almost four decades, my grandfather and grandmother made the long trek from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Port Aransas, trailing their camper and flat-bottomed boat behind their truck. They’d settle at a palm-studded RV park, their spot surrounded by fishing gear and shiny Airstream trailers, with a fragrant fish house out back where the anglers could clean their catches.

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Everyone, it seemed, fished in Port Aransas. My grandfather, with a taste for flounder, would get gussied up in waders and head to the bays with a gig, like some character Hemingway might have dreamed up. Grandma approached the sport more casually; when she wasn’t casting a line off the jetties, she collected shells and puttered around. The two always drove back to Oklahoma in time to spend Christmas, when my brother and I would receive sea-themed dioramas fashioned from cockleshells, and my mom would restock her freezer with shrimp, flounder, and redfish.

In the 1980s, I moved to Texas myself, and I started visiting my grandparents on the coast during their annual three-month stay. In the decade that our autumns in Texas coincided, I trekked to the coast with whichever presence was most important to me each October—friends and brave boyfriends, who suffered certain grandparental scrutiny. And often, I went alone, save for my faithful dog Zach, who loved to frolic in the surf and chase sandpipers on the beach. When I visit the coast now, I think how the ocean so eloquently illustrates how time never stands still, and how perhaps nothing and nobody ever really disappears.

From the October 2003 issue.

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