Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (2 page)

By heaven! cried my father, springing out of his chair, as he swore
,—
I have not one appointment belonging to me, which I set so much store by, as I do by these jack-boots,—they were our great-grandfather’s, brother
Toby,—
they were
hereditary.

USUALLY, fall is the good time to go to the Brazos, and when you can choose, October is the best month—if, for that matter, you choose to go there at all, and most people don’t. Snakes and mosquitoes and ticks are torpid then, maybe gone if frosts have come early, nights are cool and days blue and yellow and soft of air, and in the spread abundance of even a Texas autumn the shooting and the fishing overlap and are both likely to be good. Scores of kinds of birds, huntable or pleasant to see, pause there in their migrations before the later, bitterer northers push many of them farther south. Men and women are scarce.

Most autumns, the water is low from the long dry summer, and you have to get out from time to time and wade, leading or dragging your boat through trickling shallows from one pool to the long channel-twisted pool below, hanging up occasionally on shuddering bars of quicksand, making six or eight miles in a day’s lazy work, but if you go to the river at all, you tend not to mind. You are not in a hurry there; you learned long since not to be.

October is the good month.…

I don’t mean the whole Brazos, but a piece of it that has had meaning for me during a good part of my life in the way that pieces of rivers can have meaning. You can comprehend a piece of river. A whole river that is really a river is much to comprehend unless it is the Mississippi or the Danube or the Yangtze-Kiang and you spend a lifetime in its navigation; and even then what you comprehend, probably, are channels and topography and perhaps the honky-tonks in the river’s towns. A whole river is mountain country and hill country and flat country and swamp and delta country, is rock bottom and sand bottom and weed bottom and mud bottom, is blue, green, red, clear, brown, wide, narrow, fast, slow, clean, and filthy water, is all the kinds of trees and grasses and all the breeds of animals and birds and men that pertain and have ever pertained to its changing shores, is a thousand differing and not compatible things in-between that point where enough of the highland drainlets have trickled together to form it, and that wide, flat, probably desolate place where it discharges itself into the salt of the sea.

It is also an entity, one of the real wholes, but to feel the whole is hard because to know it is harder still. Feelings without knowledge—love, and hatred, too—seem to flow easily in any time, but they never worked well for me.…

The Brazos does not come from haunts of coot and hern, or even from mountains. It comes from West Texas, and in part from an equally stark stretch of New Mexico, and it runs for something over 800 miles down to the Gulf. On the high plains it is a gypsum-salty intermittent creek; down toward the coast it is a rolling Southern river, with levees and cotton fields and ancient hardwood bottoms. It slices across
Texas history as it does across the map of the state; the Republic’s first capitol stood by it, near the coast, and settlement flowed northwestward up its long trough as the water flowed down.

I have shot blue quail out by the salty trickles, and a long time ago hunted alligators at night with a jacklight on the sloughs the river makes in the swamplands near the Gulf, but I do not know those places. I don’t have them in me. I like them as I have liked all kinds of country from Oahu to Castilla la Vieja, but they are a part of that whole which isn’t, in the way I mean, comprehensible.

A piece, then … A hundred and fifty or 200 miles of the river toward its center on the fringe of West Texas, where it loops and coils snakishly from the Possum Kingdom dam down between the rough low mountains of the Palo Pinto country, into sandy peanut and post-oak land, and through the cedar-dark limestone hills above a new lake called Whitney. Not many highways cross that stretch. For scores of years no boom has brought people to its banks; booms elsewhere have sucked them thence. Old respect for the river’s occasional violence makes farmers and ranchers build on high ground away from the stream itself, which runs primitive and neglected. When you paddle and pole along it, the things you see are much the same things the Comanches and the Kiowas used to see, riding lean ponies down it a hundred years ago to raid the new settlements in its valley.

Few people nowadays give much of a damn about what the Comanches and the Kiowas saw. Those who don’t, have good reason. It is harsh country for the most part, and like most of West Texas accords ill with the Saxon nostalgia for cool, green, dew-wet landscapes. Even to get into it is work. If you pick your time, the hunting and the fishing are all right,
but they too are work, and the Brazos is treacherous for the sort of puttering around on water that most people like. It snubs play. Its shoals shear the propeller pins of the big new outboard motors, and quicksands and whirlpools occasionally swallow folks down, so that generally visitors go to the predictable impounded lakes, leaving the river to the hard-bitten yeomanry who live along it, and to their kinsmen who gravitate back to it on weekends away from the aircraft factories and automobile assembly plants of Dallas and Fort Worth, and to those others of us for whom, in one way or another, it has meaning which makes it worth the trouble.

P
ERSONAL MEANING
, maybe, that includes trips when you were a kid and, with the others like you, could devil the men away from their fishing by trying to swim against orders where the deep swirls boiled, and catfish on the trotlines in the mornings, sliced up then and there for breakfast … And later trips when they let you go out with a friend named Hale and a huge colored man named Bill Briggs who could lift entire tree trunks to lay across the fire where you camped under pecans by a creek mouth, above the wide sand flats of the river, and who could fry eggs, rounded and brown on the outside and soft within, in a way you have never seen since … Later still, entrusted with your own safety, you went out with homemade canvas canoes that were almost coracles in their shapelessness, and wouldn’t hold straight, and ripped on the rocks of the rapids. Squirrel shooting on cold Sunday mornings, and ducks, and skunk-squirted dogs, and deer watering while you watched at dawn, and the slim river bass, and bird song of a hundred kinds, and always the fly-fishing for fat bream and the feel of the water on bare skin and its salty taste, and the changing shore. The river’s
people, as distinct from one another as any other people anywhere, but all with a West Texas set to their frames and their faces which on occasion you have been able to recognize when you saw it in foreign countries … Even first bottles of beer, bitter, drunk with two bawdy ranchers’ daughters you and Hale ran across once, fishing …

Enough meaning, enough comprehension … Not the kind that might have ruined it for you, though. It had always the specialness of known good places where you had never actually lived, that you had never taken for granted, so that it was still special when in later years you would come back to it from six or eight years away to find it still running as it had run, changed a little but not much. After the dam was finished at Possum Kingdom near the beginning of the war, it began to filter out the West Texas drainings, and that piece of the Brazos ran clear for more of the year than it had before, and the old head rises no longer roared down, and the spring floods were gentler and the quicksands less quick. But it was there still, touchable in a way that other things of childhood were not.

The history was in it, too. When we were young we would beg tales from surviving old ones, obscure and petty and always violent tales, hearsay usually and as often as not untrue, and later we confirmed and partly straightened them in our minds by reading in the little county histories and the illiterate memoirs, and they were a part of the river. All the murdered, scalped, raped, tortured people, red and white, all the proud names that belonged with hills and valleys and bends and crossings or maybe just hovered over the whole— Bigfoot Wallace, Oliver Loving, Charles Goodnight, Cynthia Ann Parker and her Indian son Quanah, Peta Nocona, Satank, Satanta, Iron Shirt … Few people outside of West
Texas ever heard of most of them, and long ago I learned that the history of the upper-middle Brazos was not the pop of a cap gun in the big pageant, but that knowledge never stopped the old names from ringing like a bell in my head.

Meaning, yes.