The Road to Sargent
It’s Sunday morning and Michael suggests a drive down the coast. “We need to get out of the house for a while,” he explains.
That sounds wonderful to me. The less-than-perfect weather of snow and wind and rain has kept us from our exploratory adventures for way too long. “Give me thirty minutes,” I respond.
Soon, we are driving down Seawall Boulevard in Galveston, heading west toward the Bluewater Highway while a thin veil of fog blankets the low-lying areas surrounding us. Looking up, I notice a small patch of blue struggling to be seen. If it counts, I’m rooting for you, blue sky.
The sky and I both lose.
However, the day’s haze creates a soft, friendly, pastel world. Turning north, away from the Gulf, we are surrounded by acres of golden marsh grass while cloud-laden blue-gray skies float over faded white shrimp boats and gleaming silver chemical and petroleum plants. Billowing white clouds of steam rise high above them.
I tell Michael it all seems otherworldly. It reminds me of images I conjured reading sections of the novel Dune Messiah, the second book of a science fiction series written over half a century ago and still read by my college-age grandchildren today.
This landscape is definitely not the scenery of the Texas Hills where we live.
The Sargent Bridge
Michael knows where he wants to go, but he doesn’t tell me, and on these back roads that are new to both of us, he begins the dance of more than a few turns. He doesn’t ask Google for directions – this is all part of the adventure. Our stumbling has always led us to serendipitous discoveries.
Driving down another road – Michael points to a large bridge in the distance and says, “That’s why we’re here.” I look at it and think – a bridge to nowhere? It just ends. Abruptly. Seemingly, at the end of the earth. It looks wrong. The whole thing looks wrong.
What is this massive structure doing in the middle of nowhere, on the flattest terrain in Texas – this bridge belongs in the city over a wide river or a tangle of roads on a freeway – not here. It ends in a soaring curve – a giant U-turn. But why? And where are we?
“It’s like half of a cloverleaf,” Michael explains, “it crosses the Intracoastal, but I can’t figure out what is out there that is so important that they needed a bridge this big.” Apparently we’re not here for the bridge, but the unseen land beyond.
We drive on, finally reaching the high circle of the cloverleaf, and are dropped onto Sargent Beach. Michael stops the car, and I quickly open the passenger door to explore my surroundings and to get a better look at the bridge towering above us!
Sargent Beach
On this gray and windy day of winter, Sargent Beach seems sad and depressed. A few brightly colored buildings let us know where we are at the beach. However, the beach is torn and tortured, and I wonder which hurricane passed this way and wreaked such havoc. The picnic pavilions, gray weathered wood skeletons, stand defiantly against the elements. The bridge – more than ever – looks wrong.
Because of the imposing bridge, Michael is still determined there must be something – some reason – that it exists. I return to the car, and we drive east – searching for the answer which continually eludes us. The dwellings that line both sides of the road are on high stilts – most are shuttered for the season. I feel like we have reached the edge of beyond.
The End of the Road
Michael drives until we run out of pavement. He then continues until the road seems impassable in our vehicle, definitely not designed to go adventuring beyond this point. Stopping on a portion of hard-packed sand, Michael walks to the beach – the mariner in him finally giving in to the call of the ocean.
I walk further down the road. Google Maps makes it look like you can drive all the way to Freeport. I have to check. A sign says – PRIVATE.
Lashed by torrential rains and raging surf, this strip of sand is bruised and beaten – littered with massive sun-bleached tree trunks torn by their roots during storms too powerful for me to imagine.
I stand in the middle of the road and can see both the Intracoastal and the Gulf at the same time. This island is so narrow that from the water’s edge by the Intracoastal to the surf kissed beach, it seems hardly as wide as a major freeway in Houston.
Looking west, I see wide swaths of fog cling to the earth and sky. Turning east, the sky is clearing and the promise of blue is in our future. It is so strange to be in one place and feel hope looking one way and gloom and depression looking the other. Glancing over my shoulder, I think of the bridge a few miles behind us, and realize – it really is a bridge to nowhere.
A few shells collected and many pictures taken, we return to the car and travel west toward the imposing span of concrete; our questions are the same. Why? Who? When? But most of all, WHY? The answers, if I can find them, will have to wait until tomorrow, when my assistant Google can help me search.
Sargent Bridge – The Rest of the Story
All I have to do is sit at my computer and type a question and I am assailed with a mountain of answers. I ask another question, and another mountain of information appears.
Sargent has a full-time population of 500 people that swells to 5,000 during high season. A decrepit swing bridge built in the 1970s – the last swing bridge in Texas – was falling apart and needed to be replaced. The lack of land on the island required a creative solution. There were bids for designs. There were town meetings, and there were yeas and nays. Everything was documented and is available online in lengthy PDF files. Completed only a few years ago, the new bridge is called a corkscrew bridge and cost more than a few dinero to build.
Michael says, “There must be a reason for a bridge that big – maybe it’s the barge traffic.”
The barge on the bottom right is a few feet shy of the playing length of a football field!
So, I keep reading and searching. The partial answer came from an article in the Longview News-Journal, dated September 12, 2015.
From Aug. 15-24, the operators opened the bridge for 233 barges and 66 pleasure boats, in addition to seven shrimp and four work boats…
Boats and barges traveling the Intracoastal Waterway radio an operator in the bridge tower, who then stops traffic and slowly swings the bridge open to the east. Five full-time operators staff the tower around the clock. It typically takes 15 minutes to open the bridge and allow barges to pass through, sometimes longer, bridge operator Steve Gartman said…
…”The barge hit the bridge on the south side and just crumpled it (the bridge). They couldn’t fix it until that Sunday.” It’s rare to see a barge collide with the bridge, Gartman said, although he has seen plenty in his 17 years as an operator.”
The second part of the answer, and probably the main reason comes from knowing why we even have an Intracoastal waterway in the US. It was built to help transport goods. The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway is considered extremely important to the modern economy. In 2022, 80 million tons of goods were moved on the Gulf portion of the Waterway, supporting $77 billion in economic activity.
Public Meeting Summary Report 2014
https://ftp.txdot.gov/pub/txdot-info/ykm/projects/fm457-bridge/030614-summary.pdf
A final note – Sargent Beach was closed indefinitely in November 2024 due to excessive erosion from summer storms, aka hurricanes.
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