Currently, Bayport uses 3,330 feet of dock space, which is to say half of its potential capacity. But more ships are coming. Larger ones, too. Davis thinks that within the next decade, the PHA will be handling in the neighborhood of 125 million tons of cargo annually at Bayport and Barbours Cut, its other main facility. That’s nearly three times as much as it saw last year. Yet he insists that his team is prepared to manage the spike in business, even if Davis can’t quite predict how they’ll pull it off: “We’ve never reached a point with the container terminals where we’ve folded our arms and said, ‘Well, we’re done, all done!’ We’re always expanding.”

A seagull flaps its wings in front of Davis’s windshield. Somewhere out of sight, a foghorn wails.

“The backbone of an industrial giant”—that’s how a local magazine story described the Ship Channel in 1957. It’s certainly a powerhouse, one that’s only grown stronger with time. A recent study commissioned by the PHA determined that Houston’s port was responsible for 56,113 jobs in 2014 and generated $264.9 billion in statewide economic activity, accounting for a full 16 percent of Texas’s gross domestic product. It boasts the country’s largest petrochemical complex, ranking first nationally in total waterborne tonnage and second in value of goods transported. And port activity is poised to accelerate with the long-awaited expansion of the Panama Canal, opening this summer (more on that later).

From this vantage point, the port’s future looks rosy, bright and, at the moment, strikingly different from the city beyond the Ship Channel bridge. Or as Patrick Jankowski of the Greater Houston Partnership puts it, “just because oil prices have fallen, that doesn’t mean ships are going to stop calling.” As the city itself suffers through an economic slowdown that has left whole office buildings vacant, land near the port’s container terminals “is becoming pretty doggone scarce,” according to industrial real estate broker Kelley Parker. And even as tens of thousands of Houstonians have lost their jobs, Steve Nerheim, director of the Coast Guard’s Vessel Traffic Service, gazes out at the water and wonders, what recession?

“It’s like this other world,” says Traci Koenig, a former director of economic development at the Economic Alliance Houston Port Region. “Unless you’ve been down there, it’s very insular, the ultimate good ol’ boys club.”

Two different worlds. Despite their proximity, that’s what the Ship Channel and the city of Houston sometimes seem like. Both are big, powerful, complex and misunderstood, and each is unthinkable without the other. Nonetheless, they inhabit separate realities, each a mystery to the other.

J.J. Plunkett is always thinking about traffic. Tall, tanned and broad-shouldered, he is the chief operating officer of the Houston Pilots, an association of 96 master mariners whose job it is to guide ships—1,600 gross tons or larger—into and out of the Port of Houston. “Most of them are Type-A personalities, hard-charging kind of guys,” Plunkett says of the Pilots, who go through a comprehensive three-year training program. “They are proud of their tradition of taking 10 pounds of potatoes and stuffing them into a five-pound sack.”