Who Is Chuck?

South Padre Island, Texas

Chuck Costanza is my grandfather.

For most of my life he and my grandmother, Maren, lived in a house on South Padre Island in Texas, and going down to see them was the most fun we would have all summer. We drove down there for a week most summers, maybe more if we could get away with it. Honestly, I could not tell you how many trips that adds up to. Ten summers? Maybe fifteen? Who knows. All I know is that I'm 22 and can't remember the first time we went.

Their house was awesome. It had a billiards table on the first floor next to the high top bar, and when my dad came down with his buddies for fishing tournaments they would stay up all night around it with my grandfather telling stories and laughing into the late hours of the night. Upstairs on the second floor was the kitchen and the living room where all of us piled in to watch movies, play games, and share the best meals prepared by the family as a whole. Out back there was a pool in a yard that was most definitely not built to hold one, but it was the best. When my grandparents first moved in, they had these oleander plants around it that were like shrubs, but by the time they sold the place, those same oleanders had grown into something closer to tamed jungle, leaning all the way over the water, almost touching the side of the house, so the sun never actually touched it and kept the water freezing all by itself. It is still the best pool I have ever swum in and it is not even close. I hope to recreate it in my own home one day.

While we were down there, we always had to take a trip on Papa's boat, where we fished the Laguna side with him and would reel in the best kind of dinner, the kind that was alive and swimming hours before eating it. Redfish and speckled trout, mostly. There was always a competition running and it had three parts: first fish, most fish, biggest fish. If you were the only one who caught anything that day, then of course you took all three and you were the big winner, and everybody heard about it... for days... especially if your name was Bill.

The beach was about a five minute walk from the front door, which meant my brothers and I were on it the rest of the time. David is the oldest, then Mark, then me, three years apart the whole way down. We buried each other in the sand. We surfed and boogie boarded. Tackled and jumped into the water until we were sore, and threw the football until somebody got hurt or somebody got hungry for a sand-covered sandwich, a bag of potato chips, and an ice cold gatorade, which is what we ate for lunch while there roughly every single day.

When I got bored of all that I would drag armfuls of sargassum up out of the wrack line, or out of the water itself, and shake them into clear tubs we had hauled down from the house just to see what was living in it. Crab larvae. Shrimp larvae. Jellyfish larvae. Little fish that came tumbling out with everything else. I found a pipefish in there one time, which I thought was the greatest thing that had ever happened to anyone. Never did find a seahorse though, maybe one day.

We played on that beach for years and it was the most fun I have ever had growing up. The island holds a deep meaning in my heart.

The Walk

The thing I actually remember, though, the thing that turned into all of this, happened before any of us were awake.

My grandfather, Chuck, got up early every single morning and would take a walk up the beach. Out the door, down to the sand, then north up the Gulf side toward a tall building about a mile off. That building was where the island stopped. People had built and built up that stretch and then just quit, and past it there was nothing at all. As an eight-year-old I was fully convinced that if you kept walking you would dehydrate out there and nobody would ever hear from you again. It looked like a wasteland. He would reach it, turn around, and walk back.

I'm sure this started partially for health reasons, but it seemed to have led to more of a mission. He would pick up trash the whole way. He also picked up whatever else the tide had left behind that was worth keeping, which was mostly sunglasses and shells and other treasures. One time even a GoPro Hero4.

He would ask me to come along sometimes. Not every morning, but often enough that I knew the offer was real. Mostly, though, it was simpler than an invitation. If you wanted to go, you got up and you went. I was not much of an early riser as a kid, but once I understood that was the whole arrangement I started setting an alarm for it. Not every day but enough of them, and I'm beyond glad I did.

What Was Out There

For context, Sea Turtle Inc. is a turtle rehabilitation center that started in 1977 by Ila Fox Loetscher, known around the island as the Turtle Lady of South Padre. The center was a shack back then, not the marine hospital they have now, which is genuinely incredible to see how much it has grown and I'm beyond glad exists. Back then it was a small rough building with open walls and salt struck wood everywhere you looked, but I do think I liked it better that way.

The whole place got started for one species. The Kemp's ridley is the smallest sea turtle in the world and the most endangered, and the Texas coast is where it comes to nest. That is the entire reason Sea Turtle Inc. exists, and those were the nests we were checking on.

Partway up the beach from where the beach access for Granna and Papa's house was, Sea Turtle Inc. kept an enclosure. Wooden posts about ten feet tall set in a rough circle maybe twenty feet across, chicken wire running all the way around, metal sheeting at the base so nothing could crawl in (or out accidentally), and netting stretched over the top so the birds couldn't get in. Inside were nests they had carefully moved up and out of the dunes, because predators were getting to the eggs before they ever got a chance. Loggerheads, greens, and Kemp's ridleys. South Padre sits far enough south that the turtles come to it in real numbers.

We checked on that pen every time we walked past it. Every time we went on a walk, every trip, it was the best. When we were kids we went to as many hatchling releases as the center would publicly hold.

The rest of the walk was whatever else the Gulf decided to send up that particular morning. Crabs. Portuguese man o' war, sometimes dozens of them strung out along the tide line. Spanish dancers. Sea nettles and moon jellies. Sand dollars. A starfish if we got lucky. And sargassum, always, in piles.

I was already a kid who was obsessed with animals but I never quite knew how good I had it.

The Rule

He never explained the trash part. He just picked it up, every morning, in front of me, for years.

An unspoken rule that was so loud.

I did it because he did it. That was the whole reason and it was enough for a long time. Eventually I asked him why, and he told me, and that was when I understood that it actually mattered. After that we were both doing it for the same reason.

That is the part I keep coming back to. He never sat me down. He went and did it where I could see him doing it, left the door open in case I wanted to come along, and answered the question honestly when I finally got around to asking it. I'd like to think it was all a part of this master plan he had, and when I finally asked, it made him light up inside.

The best part about it all though is that it stuck. Anytime I'm out in nature, whether it's on the coast, in a stream, or in the mountains, I still try to go out of my way to pick up after others and leave it better than I found it. And I can't wait to keep passing that lesson along the way my grandfather did with me.

The Shells

He kept the good ones. Years of them. Decades, even. A collection that just kept growing in a house on a beach, because there was always another morning with the tide having something to gift him. She seems to reward the people who take care of her.

When they sold the place around 2020, before they left, he carried most of that collection down to the sand and gave it away. He handed the shells out to kids holding their mom's hand, and to anybody else down there hunting for shells of their own, which is exactly what he had been doing every morning for as long as I could remember.

Unfortunately, I wasn't there, but he told me about it afterward, and now that is the last picture I keep in my mind of my grandfather along that beach. I don't think there's a better possible one.

Now

These days they live in Tyler, closer to family, which is where I grew up and where my parents still are, so it's nice to get to see them more than just one week of the summer and holidays.

Sure enough, he still gets after it. He and my dad go out to a family friend's ranch pretty frequently and he'll stand there casting for dinker bass all afternoon, perfectly content. He has never really needed the fish, he just wants to be on the water.

Chuck is one of the finest men I know. He takes care of the people he loves, intentionally and without ever making a thing of it. Just about everything I understand about looking after what you have been handed, I learned from watching a man who'd walk a beach at six in the morning picking up other people's garbage before they were even up for the day.

The company is named after him.

Ten percent of everything Chuck's makes goes back to the coast that raised us and to the work of spreading the Gospel. Here is where it goes.