In the evenings I stop writing for a bit and walk the short distance down to the little park at the end of TX 172, and I sit and contemplate the bay.
This is not a pristine natural area. Formosa Plastics, Alcoa, and Union Carbide all have big operations in this county, along this coast. The next bay over is a superfund site: Alcoa dumped tons of mercury into the bay over the span of a couple decades.
So the bay is not pristine, but it is what it is. The wind off the water is always cool, and I sit on a picnic table and feel the cool, look out at the hard-seeming gray-brown water. A solitary gull swoops by on the wind. A mockingbird settles briefly in a bent tree, then flies on. Sometimes there are people fishing. Pickup trucks will come down the road and circle through the park, their drivers looking at the bay. Clouds scoot by. Everything moves.
Then after a while the sun goes down beyond the Alcoa plant, and I walk back up to the house to work some more.
This is not a pristine natural area. Formosa Plastics, Alcoa, and Union Carbide all have big operations in this county, along this coast. The next bay over is a superfund site: Alcoa dumped tons of mercury into the bay over the span of a couple decades.
So the bay is not pristine, but it is what it is. The wind off the water is always cool, and I sit on a picnic table and feel the cool, look out at the hard-seeming gray-brown water. A solitary gull swoops by on the wind. A mockingbird settles briefly in a bent tree, then flies on. Sometimes there are people fishing. Pickup trucks will come down the road and circle through the park, their drivers looking at the bay. Clouds scoot by. Everything moves.
Then after a while the sun goes down beyond the Alcoa plant, and I walk back up to the house to work some more.
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