Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (3 page)

To
NOTE THAT
our present world is a strange one is tepid, and it is becoming a little untrue, for strangeness and change are so familiar to us now that they are getting to be normal. Most of us in one way or another count on them as strongly as other ages counted on the green shoots rising in the spring. We’re dedicated to them; we have a hunger to believe that other sorts of beings are eyeing us from the portholes of Unidentified Flying Objects, that automobiles will glitter with yet more chromed facets next year than this, and that we shall shortly be privileged to carry our inadequacies with us to the stars. And furthermore that while all the rivers may continue to flow to the sea, those who represent us in such matters will at least slow down the process by transforming them from rivers into bead strings of placid reservoirs behind concrete dams …

Bitterness? No, ma’am … In a region like the Southwest, scorched to begin with, alternating between floods and drouths, its absorbent cities quadrupling their censuses every few years, electrical power and flood control and moisture conservation and water skiing are praiseworthy projects. More than that, they are essential. We river-minded ones can’t say much against them—nor, probably, should we want to. Nor, mostly, do we.…

But if you are built like me, neither the certainty of change, nor the need for it, nor any wry philosophy will keep you from feeling a certain enraged awe when you hear that
a river that you Ve known always, and that all men of that place have known always back into the red dawn of men, will shortly not exist. A piece of river, anyhow, my piece … They had not yet done more than survey the sites for the new dams, five between those two that had already risen during my life. But the squabbling had begun between their proponents and those otherwise-minded types—bottomland farmers and ranchers whose holdings would be inundated, competitive utility companies shrilling “Socialism!” and big irrigationists downstream—who would make a noise before they lost, but who would lose. When someone official dreams up a dam, it generally goes in. Dams are ipso facto good all by themselves, like mothers and flags. Maybe you save a Dinosaur Monument from time to time, but in-between such salvations you lose ten Brazoses.…

It was not my fight. That was not even my part of the country any more; I had been living out of the state for years. I knew, though, that it might be years again before I got back with time enough on my hands to make the trip, and what I wanted to do was to wrap it up, the river, before what I and Hale and Satanta the White Bear and Mr. Charlie Goodnight had known ended up down yonder under all the Criss-Crafts and the tinkle of portable radios.

Or was that, maybe, an excuse for a childishness? What I wanted was to float my piece of the river again. All of it.

OCTOBER is the good month, in a normal year at least. But normality in Southwestern weather is at best a stacking together of extremes, and that was the year the drouth broke that had been the norm for seven burning years—from the tree rings, they said, the worst since early Spanish times. Oil money from the cities, looking for a place to invest itself, had kept land from selling quite so cheaply as fat Jack Falstaff’s stinking mackerel, but otherwise it would have. No one was certain that the region was not about to become another Middle East, its tenuous fertility transmuted by misuse into desert. Some fundamentalist ministers expressed gratification and said sin had brought it on, and maybe that was so, if in another sense than theirs.… But in the spring it broke with tropical flooding rains, and summer was lush with weeds and flowers, and even scrub stocker steers brought show-cattle prices on the hoof, and in October there was rain again, all month long.

With luck, though, November can be all right.…

A merchant of Weatherford, an old friend somewhat
monomaniacal in matters of regional lore, hated to let me go when we stopped by to see him on our way out to the river. He piled papers and maps on me, and instructions to see things he knew of and to look for things whose existence he suspected—Indian sites, beavers, an eaten-away silt cliff where longhorns’ skulls and the remains of bison still came occasionally to view. Though he was older now and couldn’t explore much, the countrymen brought him reports at his store. They were fond of him but maybe ironic among themselves afterward, in a café on the square, over his pleasure in rusty adze heads and branding irons and the hieroglyphics on old chimney stones. Most of his interest was focused tightly on his own county (once, when I’d told him of a good log house I’d located in the Littlefield Bend, he said with impatience: “Yes. I think that’s over the line in Palo Pinto.…”), but within its boundaries he knew most of what could be known in a latter day of the turbulent local past.

He said: “There’s a spring near old Brannon’s Crossing. Two years ago they were blasting for a pipeline there and it disappeared and then came up three hundred yards away, stronger than ever. Someone told me.”

“I’ll look for it,” I said.

“Do,” he said. “They all used to get water there, the river so salty.”

In the yard around his baroque Victorian house he has shrubs transplanted from the Hermitage, and a pecan grown from a nut picked up at Governor Hogg’s grave, and roses from cuttings at the site of the cabin his grandfather built east of the town in the 1850’s. Not many people like him will still be among us in another few years. In this country they are mostly of the South and New England, retrospective
cultures, and the time has lurched up onto the horizon, as it must inevitably for retrospective cultures, when the South and New England will not exist.

So much the better, someone forward-looking answers.

All right. But he is an entire man and a bright one, and if we’re establishing viewpoints this early I can tell you that I like knowing someone who can read to me from a school composition book, with enthusiasm, the epitaphs of Indian-victims buried in the graveyard at the defunct farming community of Soda Springs in western Parker County, Texas. Or who can show me with exactness, if I drive him out there, where Mr. Couts the banker stood when he had his mighty gunfight. A point of taste, certainly …

From there Hale and I—he was taking me out—drove across the stripped and eroded farming section to the northwest which had once been a solid forest of oaks, and into the jagged Palo Pinto country, strewn with big sandstone boulders, less totally raped in a century’s exploitation because less had been there in the first place worth the raping. Where the narrow dam blocks what used to be the canyon at Possum Kingdom, we turned up a hill and came out on a flat above the lake, beside the concrete control tower. The afternoon was leaden. When we got out, a raw north breeze picked at our clothes and grayed the surface of the big lake, and Hale said again, with a kind of satisfaction, that it was a hell of a time to be starting a canoe trip. I said again that I knew it, and rattled the gate of the chain-link enclosure around the tower and a grim humming network of wires above squat finned transformers classified deadly by red-painted signs.

A short, thin man in a Stetson, seam-faced, came out and looked at us and at the canoe on the car, opened the gate, and
showed curiosity and a willingness to talk. November is a quiet month for sociable people at lakes.…

“All by yourself?” he said. “Without no motor?”

I said yes.

He looked disgusted and, walling his eyes across the lake, said as though to a fourth, disinterested person that he’d never had no use for canoes, not even in summer. But he was friendly, and said they’d likely be letting water out just as they were now, full and strong through two gates, for another twenty days at least without much variation, unless more big rains came upstream. In that case they’d be letting out more—probably too much, he said ironically.

“You watch them big rocks in Post Oak Bend,” he said. And then, in much the same tone as Hale’s: “Hit’s a hell of a lookin’ kind of weather.”

Below the dam the river cuts next to high cliffs of stone, yellow-gray and red and stratified like laid brick, with the dark cedar all along the top, though on an afternoon like that one you had to take the yellow and red for granted, remembering them from times of sunshine. Standing there at the low bridge after we’d loaded the canoe, I doubted the dark sky, and the bite of the wind and its ruffle on the water; and under that grayness even the rapids below, rolling now with the two gates open above, looked sullen and dangerous.

But rivers tend to look that way when you start a trip, and so does the ocean when you clear the breakwaters and hit the gray swells, headed out on a cruise.… They say our protoplasm, the salt of its juices the same still as sea water’s, yearns back toward that liquid that brewed it, and I guess that may be so, but the air-breathing, land-walking structure the protoplasm molded itself into sometimes argues otherwise. Familiarity helps, as the skin divers know, and living
beside the sea you lose the caution and can swim out daily a half-mile or more to float bobbing for hours with the slow rise and fall of the big, smooth-crested waves. I’ve done that, and then have left the sea for a few months, and, returning, have found the fear there again, to be fought down again. It’s the same with a rolling, roaring river. I didn’t want a Bold Journey; I wanted the quiet October Brazos, and it wasn’t there.…

Hale had been going partway down the river with me till business and his wife’s opinion got in the way. He glared at the equipment stowed and tied into the canoe.

“I wish …” he said, and didn’t finish. He said: “You call from One Eighty. Maybe I’ll drive out and float with you a couple of days.”

I said: “I’ll call. You won’t come.”

“There won’t be any ducks,” he said. “You saw those on the hatchery ponds. They don’t like the river when it’s high.”

“All right,” I said. Getting in, I collared the pup to keep him from scrambling ashore, and pushed away. Hale yelled something as I swept into the bubble-hiss of the rapids. It was fast but smooth, and spewed me into a long flowing pool below. With only enough paddling for steerageway, the current carried me swiftly the mile and a half down to the sharp turn of the Flint Bend and around it, under the cliffs. In the clear water I could see the tip of the paddle with the blade and half the loom submerged. Sandpipers flushed, and a kingfisher and a great blue heron. Hidden in the brush, chickadees cursed one kind or another of bad luck in that buzzing code they use, and a redhorse sucker shot four feet clear of the surface and fell back onto it in a smacking belly-buster totally unconsonant with the clean grace of his leap.…

By the time I pulled onto a sand bar below a narrow flat that lay between the river and a mountain, the wind on my neck carried flecks of cold rain. I set up the little tent under a twisted mesquite, threw my bed roll into it, chopped dead limbs into firewood, and finally carried up the other things from the boat—the map case and the shotgun and the rods and the food box, heavily full, and the cook box and the rucksack, all of them battered familiarly from other trips long before. With a juvenile shame from those days when we had tried to model ourselves on the old ones, going out only with a blanket, tarp, skillet, ax, twenty-two, jar of grease, and sack of cornmeal, I knew that I’d brought too much gear for one man. But it was November, and our stomachs had been tougher then, and anyhow the point was no longer to show one’s hardihood. The point was to be there.