Editor’s note: This is Part 4 of Drifting Toward Disaster, a Texas Observer series about life-changing challenges facing Texans and their rivers.
During busy summer days, more than 200 recreational boats launch from Red Cove Cafe & Marina in the unincorporated community of Mico, west of San Antonio. But on a Wednesday morning this May, only two boaters’ cars sat in the parking lot on the shore of Medina Lake. Chance Heyen, the young proprietor, said his family closed their cafe in 2021 because of the lake’s dropping water levels and dwindling numbers of tourists.
Given Mico’s tiny population, “we pretty much rely on traffic coming from out of town,” Heyen said.
Medina Lake stretches for 18 miles, forming a skinny dragon shape on the border of Medina and Bandera counties. It was built in 1912 by damming the Medina River to create an irrigation reservoir for farmers. Mico, less than an hour’s drive west from San Antonio, was named after the Medina Irrigation Company and then morphed into a seasonal vacation destination. To thrive over the decades, the family-run marina and cafe has had to adapt to a boom-and-bust water and tourism cycle.
Right now, the community is stuck in a deep bust. This sliver of Texas on the edge of the Hill Country has been the epicenter of an intense statewide drought that began in fall 2021 and has never fully broken. At the beginning of May, Medina Lake was only 5 percent full. Most of the reservoir’s 164-foot dam was exposed, and many homes’ private docks sat stranded on dry land.
Heyen said his family has come to expect dry years, and hopes to reopen Red Cove Cafe whenever the water level rises again.
But not even local farmers depend on
