Last week our little family group traveled to South Padre Island to celebrate my wife’s birthday, and to expose my grandson to southmost Texas. On the 25th we joined Scarlet Colley (Fin to Feathers Tours) for a morning boat ride around the Laguna Madre. We met in Port Isabel, the seaside community where I stayed with my father in the early 1960s to hunt and fish. We always lodged at Harvey Courts, a thread-bare conglomeration of cabins that nestled up to one of the boat canals. Back then to reach Padre Island you drove across the original causeway and were met by three or four weather-beaten buildings and endless undeveloped barrier island. Thanks to Ralph Yarborough and other Texas leaders, the Padre Island National Seashore preserves much of this wild region. Between the south end of Padre and the National Seashore, though, what I remember as a child has been transformed into Miami Beach.

Within minutes of our leaving the dock with Scarlet we had seen our first dolphins, and at times during the trip they ventured so close that we could hear them breathe. Of course my grandson could not believe that these “people of the sea” were so confiding, so engaging. But, in truth, Scarlet is the one who made the trip so memorable.

I have been in the nature interpretation business for over two decades. What I have come to believe is that great interpretors are born, not taught. This is not to say that training is not important at the entry level, such as certification through the National Association for Interpretation (NAI). But being a great interpretor is like being a great writer or great artist. The world is full of learned journeymen, while greatness is bestowed on a very few.

Scarlet is one of those who has been blessed. First, she knows her subject (the Laguna Madre and southmost Texas). Second, she has been years on, in, and around the water, and her complete mastery of the element is comforting. Third, she is, by nature, a wonderfully engaging human being, and does not seem to ever tire of showing the same old stuff over and over again.

More importantly, Scarlet is passionate. Scarlet’s love of the Gulf is palpable, and her stories are not intended to be “fair and balanced.” Of course, in some interpretive circles such a bias is forbidden. There are those who say that the interpretor should be dispassionate, leaving opinions to be expressed over a beer after work. Perhaps this is why so may interpretors are little more than “books on a stick,” reciting the script that has been approved by a bureaucratic management deathly afraid of any political faux paux. Scarlet also talks to the dolphins, calls them by name, whistles to the mangrove warblers, and whoops and hollers when one of them returns the favor. All wrong, no doubt, but endearingly effective.

Scarlet reminds me of my dear friend Karla Klay. Karla’s nonprofit, Artist Boat, works with many underprivileged kids from the Houston/Galveston area. Karla and her staff load the kids into kayaks, and take them on discovery tours around Galveston Bay. After the boat trip each kid makes a model, a tile, of something they noticed in the Bay. Eventually all of these tiles are melded into a mosaic at the respective schools. Click here to watch a video about the development of one of these mosaics.

Karla grew up in the Florida Keys, and shares Scarlet’s unbridled passion for the Gulf. They are both children of the ocean, and my impression is that each feels most comfortable when out at sea and away from land. But they both are forceful in speaking about their concerns for the Gulf, and have no time to be impartial. Oscar Wilde said that “most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” With Scarlet and Karla, their lives are as true as their passions, and their opinions shape those of others. In this age of junior-league environmentalism, I am thankful that there are still a few like Scarlet and Karla to fight the good fight, even when the passion of the moment may water their eyes.

Please support Scarlet and Karla and their efforts!

Artist Boat
Colley’s Fins to Feathers
Port Isabel Sea Life Center