The week the schools let out in March the town leans south. You can feel it on Garth Road on the Friday afternoon: the trucks with the coolers in the bed, the kids already in the swimsuits, the one car with the kayak strapped on crooked. Some of them are going a long way, to the Hill Country or a theme park or a grandmother in the Valley. Most of them are going to the beach, because the beach is about fifty miles from here and it is free, and a family with a week off and a full tank can be standing in the surf by lunch.
There are two ways down. The front way is 146, south across the bridge and down through the ring of towns on the west side of the bay, an hour or so if the traffic behaves, until the causeway lifts you over the water and sets you down on the island. The back way is longer and better. East on the interstate, then down toward the coast, until the road runs out of mainland at a low round hill that is the only high ground for miles, and is high because there is a salt dome under it pushing up, the same kind of salt that is hollowed out for storage under Mont Belvieu. The road turns west there along the peninsula. Nearly thirty miles of sand and stilt houses on one side, marsh on the other, past the old iron lighthouse at the point, its black-and-white stripes weathered to black and unlit since 1933, and at the end a ferry that carries the truck across the mouth of the bay for nothing. If the water is calm you stand at the rail and watch the dolphins work the wake. Then Galveston.
It is a good drive for thinking about heat, because that is what the whole trip is about.
Stand on the sand at eleven in the morning and it burns your feet. Walk ten steps into the water and it is cool. Nobody thinks twice about this, but it is one of the most important facts on the coast. Sand heats quickly because there is nothing to it; the sun's energy goes into the top half-inch and stays there. Water heats slowly, for three reasons that stack. It takes four or five times as much energy to raise a pound of water one degree as it does a pound of dry sand. The water mixes, so the warmth is carried down and spread through a depth of it instead of sitting on top. And some of the sun's energy goes into evaporating the surface instead of warming it, carried off as vapor and never felt as heat at all. By noon the land is far hotter than the Gulf. The air over the land warms, and warm air rises. As it rises the air over the sea slides in underneath to take its place. That sliding is the sea breeze.
On the beach you feel it as a wind coming straight in off the water, starting mid-morning and building through the afternoon. Back home it arrives later, because it has to travel. The leading edge of the cooler air pushes inland at something like a bicycle's pace, and reaches Baytown by the middle of the afternoon on a good day, and it is the reason a July evening on the pier at Bayland Park is bearable and a July evening in a town a hundred miles inland is not. The bay helps. The bay is a small Gulf of its own, and it makes a small breeze of its own, and the two of them together are the town's air conditioning for the long half of the year when the real air conditioning is running anyway and could use the help.
The sea breeze is an engine. Not a figure of speech: an engine, in the exact sense a physicist means. An engine is anything that takes a difference in temperature and turns some of it into motion. A steam engine has a hot boiler and a cold condenser and a piston that moves between them. A car engine has the burning gas and the outside air. The coast has the hot sand and the cool Gulf, and the piston is the whole sky. The sun heats one side more than the other, the air moves, and the movement is work. It pushes the sailboats out of the marina. It bends the grass on the dunes. It carries the pelicans up without a wingbeat. It would drive a windmill, and along some parts of the coast it does.
An engine of that kind runs on the difference, not on the heat itself. If the land and the sea were the same temperature there would be no breeze, however hot they both were. A French engineer named Carnot worked that out two centuries ago, watching steam engines, and it is still the hardest rule in physics to get around: the work you can get out of heat depends on how far it has to fall, from hot to cold, and never on how hot the hot side is by itself. The sea breeze is a poor engine by that measure. The fall is small, a few degrees between the sand and the water, and most of the sun's energy goes into simply warming things and is never turned into wind at all. But the sun is very large, and it pays in every morning, and a poor engine with an inexhaustible boiler is still an engine that runs every day.
Every engine works this way, and so does the town. The plant on the channel is a set of very large machines for making and managing temperature differences. Furnaces at one end, cooling towers at the other, and everything useful happens in between, on the way from hot to cold. The sea breeze is the same idea with the sun for a furnace and the Gulf for a cooling tower and no fence around it.
And it is the same sun.
The sun that heats the sand at Galveston this afternoon is the sun that made the oil. Not a sun like it. The same one, older by a few hundred million years. Long before there was a beach here, there was a warm shallow sea across what is now the Gulf coast, and the sun fell on it, and small living things in the water took the light and turned it into themselves, and died, and sank, and were buried under mud, and were buried deeper. Down there the earth is warm, a little warmer with every foot, and somewhere between a mile and three miles down the buried remains reach the temperature of a slow oven, a hundred degrees or so above boiling, and over a great many years they break down into the light, oily molecules the wells pull up. Too shallow and nothing happens. Too deep and too hot and it all cooks down to gas. There is a band in between, and the geologists call it the window, and everything in the tankers came through it. Every barrel is that. It is sunlight that fell on water and was put away before it could be spent. The sea breeze is sunlight that fell this morning and is being spent right now. One is savings. The other is wages. The plant runs on the savings. The beach runs on the wages. They came from the same account.
So fifty miles to the sand is not really a trip away from the town's business. It is a trip to look at the business with the roof off. A kid on a boogie board is riding the sun; so is a tanker coming up the channel. The difference is only how long the light waited.
Galveston knows about engines. The island was nearly taken off the map by one, in September of 1900, when the Gulf, heated all summer, put its stored energy into a storm and the storm put it into the town. A hurricane is the sea breeze's big brother: the same warm water, the same rising air, but with the whole Gulf for a boiler and a spin put on it by the turning of the earth, so that instead of a breeze that dies at sundown you get a wheel of wind that feeds on the warm sea for days. Afterward they built a wall seventeen feet high along the beach and raised the whole city behind it, block by block, jacking up the houses and pumping sand underneath. The wall is still there. You walk on top of it to get to the water. It is the island's honest admission that the same sun that fills the beach in March can fill a hurricane in September, and that a place that lives on the coast lives on the engine's terms.
So does the peninsula. So does the bay. So does the town at the head of it, where the ground itself has moved because of what was pumped out from under it, and where the memory of the surge from Ike is still measured in the height of the houses built since, up on their pilings. The coast does not let you forget what it is. It only lets you enjoy it on the days it chooses.
Most of those days are in March. The water is still cold and the sand is already warm and the breeze comes in at the right hour and the crowds are mostly people you know. On the drive down the back way, on a clear day, you can make out the stacks of another refinery town far off across the water to the west, and then the beach houses on their stilts, and then the ferry, and it is all one landscape if you look at it right: the fire and the sand and the water, the same sun doing three jobs.
Coming home the light is behind you. The ferry deckhand waves the truck off, the peninsula road runs east into shadow, the marsh on the left going gold and then gray, and by the time the road turns north for the interstate the sea breeze has died, the way it does at sundown when the sand cools and the engine stops. Later, in the dark, it will turn over backward: the land, cooling faster than the water, becomes the cold side, and a thin breeze slides the other way, off the marsh and out over the Gulf, too weak to feel unless you are standing on the beach at midnight with your shoes in your hand. Tomorrow at ten the sun will start it again, the right way round, and the sand will be hot before the water knows the day has begun.
