For want of a tourist...

(Originally published June 26, 2002)

"If they call it tourist season," reads the bumper sticker, "why can't we shoot them?"

"Tourist, terrorist," someone popped off, "they're pretty much the same thing."

Those who live in Port Aransas, Texas, chastise themselves when they forget to go to the grocery store before the Friday onslaught of weekend tourists. And you learn the best time of the day during the week is early in the morning before a lot of the vacationers arise.

In fact, just driving down the street can be difficult. Tourists tend to think things like traffic laws take a holiday along with them. Like kids out of school, they blithely walk or bike into the street in the middle of traffic.

So you take the back roads, through residential neighborhoods, in order to avoid the main thoroughfares congested with tourists driving their SUVs, honking the horn and waving from electric rental buggies, pedaling bicycles or wandering around on foot. And you chart your course to try to eliminate any unprotected left turns.

Just as you begin to think that you'll be able to coexist peacefully with your temporary neighbors, you see a string of trash ejected alongside the road. And you remember stepping outside the house last night to determine where that terrible noise was coming from and finding that it is rolling over the sand dunes from the beach, audio systems so loud that they actually disturb you inside your home.

CURSE OR BLESSING

But we're not all that different from many other communities.

I grew up smack dab in the middle of the Great East Texas Oil Field. There were oil pumping jacks on the school grounds. Any time we walked outside the house, we could hear the squeaking pumps. And there was the smell, not an awful stench like people get when they live near a pulp processing plant, just a fairly constant oily smell.

But people embraced all that. In fact, the high school mascot is the Roughnecks, named after a particular oilfield job, and the school paper is The Gauger, named after another oilfield position.

Why would they be so accepting of it? Why do folks put up with farm implements slowing traffic in an agricultural community? Why do people learn to ignore the constant noise coming from a neighboring factory? Why do the full-time residents of a college town adjust to thousands of wild students during the school year?

Why do we try to get along with tourists? Because we all know deep inside that these are blessings in disguise.

EVEN TOURISTS?

Our community would not be the same without tourists. Heck, it would hardly exist. If the tourists disappeared, the accommodations industry and the souvenir shops would close overnight. Restaurants would soon follow suit because the remaining people will not be eating out. The fishing business as we know it would fade out too because fishermen are tourists. Some commercial fishing might appear once there was affordable space, but that would likely be small fries.

As tourist-related businesses fold, full-time residents would reluctantly begin moving away in search of work. Then everything else caves in. The convenience stores would be gone, followed pretty quickly by the grocery store. New construction has stopped and even maintenance takes a drastic hit. There is no longer a need for as many police officers or ferry boats or school teachers.

"For want of a nail," goes the old parable, “the kingdom was lost.”

Be it tourists, an oil field, a logging industry or manufacturing plants, many communities have some burden they must put up with ... thank goodness.

(c) 2002 by Steve Martaindale