The third coast and its inhabitants gauge their mutual and symbiotic existence by hurricane season, by isothermal heat, by the tides rising and falling around oyster encrusted pilings capped by forlorn and ancient docks reticent with neglect, against which rusting shrimp boats lay, relics of a forgotten and once prosperous existence.

They lay against derelict docks, secured with long neglected and tenuous umbilical cords of bleached and frayed three strand line wound in neglected figure eights around cleats thick with powdery corrosion.  Life no longer pulses through the processing plants or the umbilical cords connected to boats. Life no longer pulses through formerly sacrosanct docks. They have all become muted and silent in omnipotent testimony to the reclamation of salt and sea, a pantheon without headstone.

The people of the third coast hurry and scurry like the fluorescent Sally Lightfoot crabs that live under the ancient monoliths, hurrying and scurrying to the shade, from piling to piling.

The people and the tourists on the third coast seek refuge from the relentless sun, taking sanctuary in ancient seafood and ancient Mexican food restaurants where humid air conditioning belches out of veiled vents, condensing the insipid and lifeless air on windowpanes and the sunglasses of the tourists who scurry back outside to another destination of artificial shade and comfort, to palapa bars or bayside bars where they drink Corona beers and squander precious time on the third coast. They go down to the white sand beach where Gulf waters lap the shoreline and mullet swim in great schools between the legs of surf fishermen and children playing with bright plastic toys in the calm of the first sandbar.

There are no trees on the third coast capable of providing any respite from the relentless sun except for a few scraggly mesquite and tepegujues, and the omnipresent nopal that provide only enough shade for the rattlesnakes and tarantulas to escape the inexorable heat, concealed in near lifeless torpor, until the relentless sun finally gives up her stranglehold on the third coasts’ lugubrious latitude and the night wind begins to pick up, signaling the time to slither and crawl from ectothermic reptile and insect siestas in search of a midnight snack before the relentless sun makes its appearance again in a fluorescent Sally Lightfoot hurrying and scurrying few hours, in a unisonous and endless cycle like the tides, isothermal heat, like the annual ebb and flow of hurricane season.

The omniscient national weather service calls it tropical cyclone development and they send in airplanes and instruments to measure, predict and verify, but the people of the third coast know it in their bones, in their psyches, in circadian rhythm and they suffer from June through October when the Gulf heats up like a bowl of fetid Caldo Mariscos, and swirling bands of clouds converge to rotate in a counterclockwise dervish of convection, traveling over open ocean till for reasons that may never be understood by mere mortal, they join the shoreline in a rush of energy that the Mexicans call Chubaso, La tormenta, Ciclon pounding la tierra with commanding winds and hammering rain, in the end exhausting its Herculean effort over perennial coastal desert and monte ruled by the relentless sun, leaving behind a wake of carnage and cleansing.