The weather is still cool, and I felt sluggish today. I spent a leisurely morning digesting yesterday’s Island adventure and posting content on social media. Someone commented on one of my wildflowers videos: “Is that the cemetery in Galvy?” Galvy?!? Yikes! I’d heard that term before but I’d been hoping it would not catch on. I cringe every time I hear it and so do the Island people I know. But it turns out the TikTok commenter knows a very different set of locals from my people, and they all embrace the name ‘Galvy.’ But, why? I don’t want to get into a whole debate about who is a true local as gatekeeping is not cool, and I believe that the Island belongs to all of us who love it. But why would anyone who loves Galveston call it Galvy? I get that it’s an endearment, but like any diminutive it lacks gravitas. Our Island has not survived countless storms, the plague, and the great fire only to be given a ridiculous pet name. Yes, there are sweet little houses in pastel colors with gingerbread trim, and all sorts of pretty flowers, but our Island is also home to rattlesnakes and every so often it’ll do something wildly temperamental just to remind us all that it can kill us. The Island is not cute. It’s beautiful. There is a difference. Also, it’s a badass survivor, a place with many facets, with layers, depth, undetones of darkness, and giant prehistoric looking jellyfish that wash up on shore. It’s a place where birds that retain distinct dinosaur features sit on wires and mock you while plotting to steal your food. It’s haunted and briny and occasionally scrappy, and yes, it’s lovely too, not despite its allure of danger but because of it. It’s a place of romance and contradiction. Of pirates, vagabonds, gamblers, and many other strays. It’s spicy with hot sauce and gumbo and salt water and summers that are too hot. It’s a beach with brown water and oil tankers in the distance. It’s a heaven for stray cats and the coyotes that hunt them. It’s a place of death and rebirth, a place of peace but also of raucous parties. It’s got an untamed soul and untamed nature and it will fight you in its attempt to hold on to these things. I think we all need to respect that.
Then again, call it whatever you wish. If you truly love this place, rattlesnakes and all, if you respect the dunes and the wild things living there, if you don’t litter, if you pick up beach trash, if you cherish the wild things and know to leave them be, then we are happy to have you, differences in semantics aside.
Still, I’m curious, what do you call the Island?
