Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (22 page)

And maybe I wouldn’t.

The shores on either side of the river from the island were dirt and steep, twenty feet high, surmounted by pecans and oaks with the bare sky of fields or pastures beyond. They seemed separate from the island; it was big enough, with a strong enough channel on either side, to seem to have a kind of being of its own distinct from that of the banks—a sand and willow and cottonwood and driftwood biome—though in dry times doubtless there would be only one channel and
no island, but just a great bar spreading out below the right bank.

Jays, killdeers, wrens, cardinals, woodpeckers … With minute and amateurish interest, I found atop a scoop in the base of a big, drifted, scorched tree trunk five little piles of fox dung, a big owl’s puke ball full of hair and rat skulls, and three fresher piles of what had to be coon droppings, brown and small, shaped like a dog’s or a human’s.

Why, intrigued ignorance asked, did wild things so often choose to stool on rocks, stumps, and other elevations?

Commonsense replied: Maybe for the view.

On the flat beach at the head of the island the night’s geese had laid down a texture of crisscrossed toe-prints. Elsewhere, in dry sand, I found little pointed diggings an inch in diameter and four to five inches deep, much like those an armadillo makes in grassland but with no tracks beside them. A bird? A land-foraging crawfish? Another puzzle for my ignorance, underlined now by the clear note of the unknown sad-whistling bird from a willow a few steps from me. He wouldn’t show himself, and when I eased closer said irascibly:
Heap, heap!
and fluttered out the other side.…

The trouble was, I
was
ignorant. Even in that country where I belonged, my ken of natural things didn’t include a little bird that went
heap-heap
and

and a few moronic holes in the sand. Or a million other matters worth the kenning.

I grew up in a city near there—more or less a city, anynow,
a kind of spreading imposition on the prairies—that was waked from a dozing cow-town background by a standard boom after the First World War and is still, civic-souled friends tell me, bowling right along. It was a good enough place, not too big then, and a mile or so away from where I lived, along a few side streets and across a boulevard and a golf course, lay woods and pastures and a blessed river valley where the stagnant Trinity writhed beneath big oaks. In retrospect, it seems we spent more time there than we did on pavements, though maybe it’s merely that remembrance of that part is sharper. There were rabbits and squirrels to hunt, and doves and quail and armadillos and foxes and skunks. A few deer ran the woods, and one year, during a drouth to the west, big wolves. Now it’s mostly subdivisions, and even then it lay fallow because it was someone’s real-estate investment. The fact that caretakers were likely to converge on us blaspheming at the sound of a shot or a shout, scattering us to brush, only made the hunting and the fishing a bit saltier. I knew one fellow who kept a permanent camp there in a sumac thicket, with a log squat-down hut and a fireplace and all kinds of food and utensils hidden in tin-lined holes in the ground, and none of the caretakers ever found it. Probably they worried less than we thought; there weren’t many of us.

I had the Brazos, too, and South Texas, where relatives lived, and my adults for the most part were good people who took me along on country expeditions when they could. In terms of the outdoors, I and the others like me weren’t badly cheated as such cheatings go nowadays, but we were cheated nevertheless. We learned quite a lot, but not enough. Instead of learning to move into country, as I think underneath we wanted, we learned mostly how to move onto it
in the old crass Anglo-Saxon way, in search of edible or sometimes just mortal quarry. We did a lot of killing, as kids will, and without ever being told that it was our flat duty, if duty exists, to know all there was to know about the creatures we killed.

Hunting and fishing are the old old entry points into nature for men, and not bad ones either, but as standardly practiced these days, for the climactic ejaculation of city tensions, they don’t go very deep. They aren’t thoughtful; they hold themselves too straitly to their purpose. Even for my quail-hunting uncles in South Texas, good men, good friends to me, all smaller birds of hedge and grass were “chee-chees,” vermin, confusers of dogs’ noses.… And if, with kids’ instinctive thrustingness, we picked up a store of knowledge about small things that lived under logs and how the oriole builds its nest, there was no one around to consolidate it for us. Our knowledge, if considerable, remained random:

This age, of course, is unlikely to start breeding people who have the organic kinship to nature that the Comanches had, or even someone like Mr. Charlie Goodnight. For them every bush, every bird’s cheep, every cloud bank had not only utilitarian but mystical meaning; it was all an extension of their sensory systems, an antenna as rawly receptive as a snail’s. Even if their natural world still existed, which it doesn’t, you’d have to snub the whole world of present men to get into it that way.

Nor does it help to be born in the country. As often as not these days, countrymen know as little as we others do about those things. They come principally of the old hard-headed tradition that moved onto the country instead of into it. For every Charles Goodnight there were several dozen Ezra Shermans, a disproportion that has bred itself down
through the generations. Your standard country lore about animals—about the nasal love life of the possum, or the fabled hoop snake—is picturesque rather than accurate, anthropocentric rather than understanding.

But Charlie Goodnight and the Ezra Shermans and their children and grandchildren all combined have burned out and chopped out and plowed out and grazed out and killed out a good part of that natural world they knew, or didn’t know, and we occupy ourselves mainly, it sometimes seems, in finishing the job. The rosy preindustrial time is past when the humanism of a man like Thoreau
(was
it humanism?) could still theorize in terms of natural harmony. Humanism has to speak in the terms of extant human beings. The terms of today’s human beings are air conditioners and suburbs and water impoundments overlaying whole country-sides, and the hell with nature except maybe in a cross-sectional park here and there. In our time quietness and sun and leaves and bird song and all the multitudinous lore of the natural world have to come second or third, because whether we wanted to be born there or not, we were all born into the prickly machine-humming place that man has hung for himself above that natural world.

Where, tell me, is the terror and wonder of an elephant, now that they can be studied placid in every zoo, and any office-dwelling sport with a recent lucky break on the market can buy himself one to shoot through telescopic sights with a cartridge whose ballistics hold a good fileful of recorded science’s findings? With a box gushing refrigerated air (or warmed, seasonally depending) into a sealed house and another box flashing loud bright images into jaded heads, who gives a rat’s damn for things that go bump in the night? With possible death by blast or radiation staring at us like
a buzzard, why should we sweat ourselves over where the Eskimo curlew went?

The wonder is that a few people do still sweat themselves, that the tracks of short varmints on a beach still have an audience. A few among the audience still know something, too. If they didn’t, one wouldn’t have to feel so cheated, not knowing as much.… Really knowing, I mean—from childhood up and continuously, with all of it a flavor in you … Not just being able to make a little seem a lot; there is enough of that around. I can give you as much book data about the home life of the yellow-breasted chat as the next man can. Nor do I mean vague mystic feelings of unity with Comanche and Neanderthal as one wanders the depleted land, gun at the ready, a part of the long flow of man’s hunting compulsion. I mean
knowing
.

So that what one does in time, arriving a bit late at an awareness of the swindling he got—from no one, from the times—is to make up the shortage as best he may, to try to tie it all together for himself by reading and adult poking. But adult poking is never worth a quarter as much as kid poking, not in those real terms. There’s never the time for that whole interest later, or ever quite the pure and subcutaneous receptiveness, either.

I mean, too—obviously—if you care. I know that the whicker of a plover in the September sky doesn’t touch all other men in their bowels as it touches me, and that men whom it doesn’t touch at all can be good men. But it touches me. And I care about knowing what it is, and—if I can—why.

Disgruntled from caring, I went to run my throwline. Coons’ fresh tracks along the beach overlaid my own of
the evening before; one had played with the end of the line and had rolled the jar of blood bait around on the sand trying to get inside it. The passenger followed some of the tracks into a drift tangle but lost interest, not knowing what he was trailing, robbed by long generations of show-breeding of the push that would have made him care.… In my fingers the line tugged with more than the pulse of the current, but when I started softly hand-over-handing it in, it gave a couple of stiff jerks and went slacker, and I knew that something on it in a final frenzy had finished the job of twisting loose. They roll and roll and roll, and despite swivels at last work the staging into a tight snarl against whose solidity they can tear themselves free. Whatever it had been, channel or yellow or blue, it had left a chunk of its lip on the second hook, and two hooks beyond that was a one-pounder which I removed, respectful toward the sharp septic fin spines.

In the old days we’d taken the better ones before they rolled loose by running the lines every hour or so during the night, a sleepless process and in summer a mosquito-chewed one. Once in Hood County, Hale and I and black Bill Briggs had gotten a twenty-five-pounder, and after an argument with Bill, who wanted to try to eat it, we sold it to a bridge-side café for a dime a pound. Another time on the Guadalupe to the south—but this is supposed to be about the Brazos.…

Tethering the little catfish to the chain stringer by the canoe, I got a rod and went down to the sharp tail of the island to cast a plug into green deep eddies I’d seen there while exploring. Without wind, the sun was almost hot now. From a willow a jay resented me with a two-note muted rasp like a boy blowing in and out on a harmonica with stuck
reeds, and in an almost bare tree on the high river bank a flock of bobolinks fed and bubbled and called, resting on their way south.

Cast and retrieve, shallow and deep, across current and down and up, and no sign of bass … The sun’s laziness got into me and I wandered up the lesser channel, casting only occasionally into holes without the expectation of fish. Then, on a long flow-dimpled bar, something came down over my consciousness like black pain, and I dropped the rod and squatted, shaking my head to drive the blackness back. It receded a little. I waddled without rising to the bar’s edge and scooped cold water over my head. After four or five big throbs it went away, and I sat down half in the water and thought about it. It didn’t take much study. My stomach was giving a lecture about it, loud. What it amounted to was that I was about half starved.

I picked up the rod, went back to camp, stirred the fire, and put on a pot of water into which I dumped enough dried lima beans for four men, salt, an onion, and a big chunk of bacon. Considering, I went down to the stringer and skinned and gutted the little catfish and carried him up and threw him in the pot, too. While it boiled, I bathed in the river, frigid in contrast to the air, sloshed out the canoe and sponged it down, and washed underclothes and socks. In shorts, feeling fine now but so hungry it hurt, I sat by the fire and sharpened knives and the ax for the additional hour the beans needed to cook soft in the middle. Fishing out the skeleton of the disintegrated catfish, and using the biggest spoon I had, I ate the whole mess from the pot almost without stopping, and mopped up its juices with cold biscuit bread.

Then I wiped my chin and lay back against the cotton
wood log with my elbows hanging over it behind and my toes digging into the sand, and considered that asceticism, most certainly, was for those who were built for it. Some were. Some weren’t. I hadn’t seen God in the black headache on the sand bar and I didn’t want to try to any more, that way.… Starving myself hadn’t had much to do with spirituality, anyhow, but only with the absence of company.

Philosophically equilibrated, I rolled down into the sand and went to sleep for two or three hours, waking into a perfect blue-and-yellow afternoon loud with the full-throat chant of the redbird.

Wood … I went roaming with the honed ax among the piles of drift, searching out solid timber. Bleached and unbarked as much of it is, you have a hard time seeing what it may be, but a two-lick notch with the ax usually bares its grain enough to name it. Cottonwood and willow slice soft and white before the first blow, and unless you’re hard up you move on to try your luck on another piece; they’re not serious fuel: