Just a few miles into a daunting attempt to hike the full length of the Texas coastline, Chrissy and Jay Kleberg are ruffled. It dawns on the couple that when they hatched their plan to hike all 370 miles of the state’s barrier islands, they had no idea what they were in for. As the afternoon sun beats down, Jay swats away bugs swarming his face. The couple had expected to make good time marching over flat sands, but, peering into a camera he’s holding out before him, Jay explains that since leaving the Louisiana border, where they were dropped off, they’ve been trudging slowly through a salt marsh along a ridgeline composed of crushed shells. “Not much to speak of in terms of sandy beaches,” he says with a wry smile, Chrissy peering warily over his shoulder in the background. A few miles later, they hit a roadblock—an unexpected beach and dune reconstruction project—that limits them to just half the distance they intended to make on their first day.
In Chasing the Tide, a new documentary series that tracks the couple’s journey, the Klebergs regularly demonstrate the thru-hiker’s instinct to “make miles.” But it’s not so easy on a route that wasn’t designed for hiking and has been reshaped by a potent cocktail of beach-degrading forces: rising sea levels, increasingly destructive storms exacerbated by a changing climate, and a depleting supply of replenishing sediment from dammed and drying rivers. The series, which is out this month on local PBS stations, delves into each of these topics, and many more, while the Klebergs’ hike provide the narrative through line.
The six-part series joins a well-worn tradition of nature stories that ostensibly follow epic adventures but act on a deeper level as love letters to ecosystems. When Texas literary legend John Graves wanted to call attention to the environmental devastation that could follow the construction of several proposed dams on the Brazos River, which he’d explored since he was a child, he packed up his canoe and set forth down the stream. The result was his 1959 book Goodbye to a River, which set the high-water mark for Texas nature writing. It was in the same spirit that the Klebergs rustled up a film crew, donned their backpacks, and set out on their three-week trek last fall.
The couple was well credentialed for the journey. Chrissy is a former wildlife biologist who has conducted field research throughout the country. Jay has helped produce two previous nature documentaries set in Texas, has served as associate director of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation, and is currently the executive director of the Gulf of Mexico Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to conservation along the Texas coast. He’s also a scion of South Texas’s legendary King Ranch, and, in 2022, was the democratic nominee for state land commissioner. As Texas Monthly reported at the time, his experience in land management and conservation gave him an impressive résumé for that job, but he ultimately lost the race by more than fourteen points to the Republican physician Dawn Buckingham.
Just a year later, in October 2023, he and Chrissy set out on their trek. The concept was that they would walk nearly twenty miles every day for twenty days. Early setbacks aside, the Klebergs make impressive time down the coast. Along the way, they are cheered on by local residents, beachgoers, and conservationists. We see the couple trek through bright sunlight and pelting rain. There are a few low moments—in a posthike interview, Chrissy confides that Jay was panicking a bit on the first day and that she feared the crew doubted whether the couple could pull the thing off—but you get the sense that, for the most part, they’re happy to be there, walking, chatting with folks, and spotting wildlife. By the time the couple arrives in Port Aransas, friends and supporters have set up a beachside party and a paella dinner.
Despite the cheery mood that pervades the hike, however, each topic the series covers is serious, and sometimes bleak. The first episode discusses the prevalence of the oil and gas industry along the Gulf—how it has poured billions of dollars into the Texas economy and brought jobs to large swaths of the state while contributing inexorably to climate change, an unsettling force that poses an existential threat to Gulf towns and ecosystems. The series unpacks the pros and cons of the massive engineering undertakings—such as the so-called Ike Dike, a proposed barrier that would shield Houston and Galveston from hurricanes—that are aimed at protecting coastal residents and infrastructure from rising sea levels and disastrous storms. We learn about shorebirds, seabirds, endangered sea turtles, falcons, redfish, oysters, and myriad other vulnerable species featured in the series. Just about every one of these species faces significant dangers that have been created or worsened by one of the many prongs of climate change.
As the series follows the Klebergs’ progress, each episode explores the issues, creatures, and people of that particular section of the Gulf. Presenting the topics this way, in a kind of video collage, allows interesting themes to emerge. The third episode may be the richest of the series. It ends with a segment on wildlife followed by a segment on culture. We hear from scientists and locals who have worked to protect the ghost wolves of Galveston Island—a pack of canids that carry both coyote and red wolf DNA. Data that scientists gather on these rare hybrids may prove invaluable to efforts to save the endangered red wolf. The Klebergs’ cinematographers catch rare and stunning footage of the creatures as they prowl through tall grass with suspicious regard for the camera. In the segment immediately following this one, we hear from members of the Karanakawa Kadla, a tribal organization for an Indigenous group once thought by many to have gone extinct but whose history in the state dates back centuries. Today the Karankawa maintain a vibrant presence along the Gulf despite centuries of oppression. Together, the two segments illuminate something difficult to articulate about ancestry, belonging, and perseverance along the Texas coast. It’s an environment where life learns to adapt and persist.
While Goodbye to a River was written as an elegy for the Brazos—viewing the construction of its dams as almost a foregone conclusion—Chasing the Tide positions itself as a call to action. But what action, exactly? The issues presented here are so varied, complex, and unrelenting that the viewer may wonder if Graves’s stoic resignation is a more apt perspective. After all, many of the dangers posed to the Gulf by climate change are now unavoidable. You could argue that, in trying to make sense of a region as vast and multidimensional as the Texas Gulf Coast and a problem as unwieldy as climate change, the series tries to tackle too much—that each of the subjects it touches deserves its own documentary, and that the limited time this one devotes to each environmental threat doesn’t do the topics justice.
But one also gets the sense that it’s the filmmakers’ intention to present the Texas coast as a single, kaleidoscopic thing. The threats it faces are so formidable that the response needs to be coordinated around a unified vision. The Gulf is not always central to Texans’ identity or culture, but the film argues it should be. As the series concludes, Chrissy declares that “Texas is a coastal state, not just a state with a coast.” Chasing the Tide aims to lay the foundation for that unified vision.
And one shouldn’t discount the potential for a good nature narrative to take hold of the Texan conscience. Despite the writer’s resignation, Graves’s book ultimately helped protect the river it was written to eulogize. Thanks in part to Goodbye to a River, most of the dam proposals were abandoned. Today, a section of the Brazos that Graves paddles in the book has been designated the John Graves Scenic Riverway and enjoys more far-reaching environmental protections than almost any other waterway in the state.
Just as Graves does with the country surrounding the Brazos, Chasing the Tide illustrates vividly the simple but essential truth that there are lots of folks up and down the Gulf who love its waters, its wildlife, and its culture. During their trek, the Klebergs developed a friendship with Ellis Pickett, a surfer from Liberty with deep roots in the state who, in 1999, founded Texas’s first chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, an ocean and beach conservation group. As increased development and sea level rise have hemmed in Texas beaches, the foundation has fought to maintain public access.
At first, Pickett was just going to be one of the many locals the couple met and interviewed for the series, but the project struck a chord with him. He quickly became a member of the support team—following behind the Klebergs in his Honda truck—and in the third episode, the 74-year-old declares that he expects the undertaking to be “the last great adventure of my life.” In final episode of the series, he’s driving down the shore, explaining what motivates his advocacy. “One thing was the meaning of life for me,” he says, choking back tears. “And that is preserving the Texas coast.” Like the countless critters that have weathered all the storms but for some reason keep coming back to this stretch of sand and water, Pickett just can’t quit the place.
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