beach brutality

Our great state of Texas has over 21,000 square miles of coastline (check it) facing the Gulf of Mexico, the choppy, brownish-green, offshore-oil-derrick-studded body of water in which we Texans love to party.  Many a Bud Light has been cracked along its seaweed-awashed beaches, where activities range from simple sunbathing to wenching your buddy out of Big Shell because he thought his truck could handle the birthplace of quicksand.

And we all live pretty close to said coastline; most of us can can hop into a car after breakfast and be catching waves before lunch.  Granted, these aren't the rolling waves you see in movies or in surfing competitions, but they ARE the hallowed waves of many a tiger shark story, so to say they don't have their own "charm" is kind of an injustice.  

At any rate, there are people who live at the beach.  Not ON the beach, just at it: people live in Galveston, Port Aransas, Corpus Christi, and other areas that are just a stone's throw away from where ocean meets land. 

But there's something about the people who live on the Texas Coast that just seems... well, they look HARD, and I can't quite put my finger on it.  You know how when you see a guy with a cauliflower ear, you think "wrestler," "boxer," or "bad listener?"  There's just something about the look of the Texas Coast lifer that distinguishes them from the rest of the crowd.  

First of all, they look NOTHING like the other beach dwellers of the world - the Brazilians and Hawaiians you see in travelogues.  The person who lives on the Texas Coast enjoys NONE of those physical attributes: the smooth bronze skin, the bleach-white teeth, the curves...  Nope.  Texas Beach Folk are LEATHERY, and tan to a nice roofing-shingle brown.

You see a girl from Ipanema burst out of the water in slow motion, and you notice droplets of clear water careening from her jet black hair as she whips her head back.  And that thing she does where she grabs her mane and rubs the rest of the excess water out before tossing it over a shoulder and walking to the beach?  Yeah, that doesn't happen in Corpus.  

A girl from Corpus bursts out of the water in slow motion, you notice the white sea foam clinging to her hair, and the rogue fishing leaders dangling from her swimsuit.  As she "saunters" her way to back to land, you notice tar on her heels and her overly cautious gait, always on the lookout for the purple globs of beached Portuguese man-o'-war.   

I'd like to know if this hard, rugged beach life is unique to Texas, or if everyone in the Southeastern U.S. has seen someone they know vacation at the beach for ten days and come back looking like they've been chain-smoking unfiltered Menthols for forty years.