Wetlands Center Baytown
Fritzi Vanderweel
This interpretive center is located on over 450 acres of peninsula surrounded by three bays, and the wetlands serve as home to over 300 species of birds and include a nursery area for various aquatic species. The nature center also includes a butterfly garden and a children's nature discovery center.
Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and author. Her books include The Reckonings, one of the best books of 2018 by Boston Globe; The Other Side; and Trespasses: A Memoir. She is co-editor, with Cheryl Beckett, of More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Paris Review, Orion, and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the Founding Director of the Houston Flood Museum.
Feeling for the edge of change, Lacy M. Johnson walks through a wetland nature center near Houston that has reclaimed the land where a neighborhood, sunken by oil extraction and subsumed by floodwater, once stood.
Twenty miles east of downtown Houston, where Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto River meet, the Baytown Nature Center sits on a shifting landscape of wetlands and marshes surrounded on three sides by Burnet, Crystal, and Scott Bays. Men toss fishing nets into shallow channels while herons and egrets rummage among the grasses for crawfish. Concrete rubble forms the shoreline; beyond it, flare towers and storage tanks and distillation columns of oil refineries line the horizon as far as the eye can see.
It was around this time that a friend told me about the Baytown Nature Center, and I dragged my family there one weekend afternoon. It took about an hour to drive there from our home on the west side of the city, and we argued the entire way. The children were upset that I was making them spend time outdoors when they would rather stay home and play video games. I was upset that all they wanted to do was stay home and play video games. When we arrived, it was cold and windy, but we rode bikes along the trails and walked out to the ends of the peninsula, choosing our way along chunks of partially submerged concrete. We looked at birds through binoculars and noticed the green shoots of plants, just beginning to return after the freeze. We watched a barge bring a load of shipping containers up the channel, trucks crossing the Fred Hartman Bridge. We watched fishermen cast their lines from the piers. We had a snack, took some photos, and drove back home.
Since that first visit two years ago, I have learned that this peninsula was once home to a luxury housing development for oil executives and their families, where stately houses lined the shorefront offering dramatic views of the San Jacinto Monument in the distance. Now the old streets of that neighborhood have become biking trails where an occasional manhole cover marks a long-filled sewer. Trees grow in a thicket around an old fire hydrant. Back in the bramble, between wetland and shore, the empty husks of abandoned underground pools fill with layers of leaves, water, dirt. Twice a day, the tide peels back to reveal concrete foundations skidding into the bay. Just enough of the past survives to show us a place that is no longer here.
I found one map from the late nineteenth century that shows this peninsula was once perhaps twice the size it is today, a long finger of solid land curling around what is now called Scott Bay. A second, larger peninsula of marshland curls around the first, and the tips of the two peninsulas almost touch Goat Island, which has long since disappeared.
Around the time that map was made, the inner peninsula, the one on which I am now standing, was acquired by a man named Edwin Rice Brown, Sr., a rancher who used the land for grazing cattle after he had failed to find oil like his neighbor, John G. Gaillard, had on his property at nearby Goose Creek in 1903. The Goose Creek discovery brought a refinery owned by Humble Oil, and that refinery eventually brought workers and their families, a post office, a railroad, a school, and a new name for the place: Baytown.
A NASA satellite image from 1944 shows a handful of homes along the southern edge of the peninsula, along Crystal Bay in particular, and the clear evidence of residents compelling the land toward separate purposes: the lines of pastures becoming mowed lawns and tilled gardens, the long driveways leading to homes on one-acre lots that graze the shore.
A second satellite image from 1953 shows the pace and nature of change: more homes, more roads, the land divided into smaller and smaller parcels. The second, outer peninsula is thinner, more like a series of knuckles than an entire hooked finger. Trees that appeared in backyards in the 1944 image are now submerged. Baywater approaches the homes, laps right at the back doors.
Humble Oil offered a few of its employees assistance following that storm, though many residents insisted they wanted to let their houses dry out a bit before deciding on their next move. Those who stayed rebuilt their homes. A number of them proposed that the Army Corps of Engineers build a thirty-foot-high levee to deter flooding; the city of Baytown responded by instead raising one of the main roads five feet.
By this time, the peninsula had subsided nine feet, going from eleven feet above sea level to two. Businesses had sprung up inside the subdivision: a beauty shop, a print shop, a plant nursery. Many of the original residents had sold or rented their homes to teachers, firefighters, barbers, mechanics. When Tropical Storm Delia hit the Texas coast in 1973, the storm sent water over the bulkheads and into the neighborhood.
The same year Delia struck the Brownwood subdivision, Humble Oil merged with its partner company, Standard Oil. Beginning on January 1, 1973, the two companies would share petroleum products and a name: Exxon Company, USA.
For a decade, houses collapsed and decayed. People used the yards and streets as a dumping ground. It continued that way until 1994, when the federal government ordered the principal polluting parties responsible for a nearby superfund site to restore a wetland area as reparation for their environmental crimes. After an extensive survey of possible sites, they chose this peninsula and over years this place began to change. Engineers bulldozed the few structures left standing and buried the rubble in trenches next to the foundations. They created freshwater ponds and dug three sixty-foot-wide channels to supply marshes with water; they established wooded areas on the new islands and brought in native plants. Over the years, other companies who have been ordered to mitigate their environmental harms have created additional marshes, installed a pavilion and a pier. Now, there is even a butterfly garden.
After the Freeze, we drove to the nature center and let the children climb out onto the rubble at the end of the peninsula at low tide. I sat under a pavilion on the shore, noticing the towers flaring at a refinery in the distance, how the concrete under me had holes for drainpipes, how stairs led to a threshold that no longer existed; realizing that the place I stood had once been the foundation of a home. Off to one corner, I found a bathroom-sized patch of pink floor tile.
We stop in a grove of giant palm trees along the waterfront, named after the man who planted them in what was then his front yard. We park our bikes and walk to the end of the pier. A brown pelican floats on the same wind that blows goldenrod and milkweed back on the shore. Out beyond the edge of all that is no longer there, I can almost see the ghost of this moment in the future, and feel that haunted future, looking back.
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