Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (5 page)

And after the hour or the two hours or the year (though, without logic or the need for it, it is only now grayish dawn at the crack between the flaps), a fox or a coon or just the
constantly rehearsed utile fear that grips wild things spurs a blue heron into action and he flies downriver screaming with precise panic:
Help! Help! Help! Help!
except that with distance it becomes the same old querulous
Frawnk, frawnk!
of all your life. The pup, though, it being the pristine first heron’s
Frawnk, frawnk!
of his life, tenses and gruffs in the bottom of the bag. The rain has stopped; there is only a staggered drip from the leaves of the mesquite. A cardinal chits, and what lies outside the canvas wedge is no longer a void but a tentative stir of leaves and light, wings and water, and the ragged beginnings of breeze.

Day … Time now …

In the pocket notebook I carried is scribbled, early among the entries for that morning: “The hard thing is to
get slowed down!”

What that means in relation to my activities just then is a bit mysterious to me. Probably it means I was impatient with my own dawdling slowness, prodigious and no trouble at all to attain, and that I then grew irked with my impatience. Impatience is a city kind of emotion, harmonious with “drive” and acid-chewed, jumping stomachs, and I presume we need it if we are to hold our own on the jousting ground this contemporary world most often is. But it goes poorly on a river. One’s repetitious clumsiness, byblow of irregular years away from the rock-bottom facts of ax and wood and fire and frying pans, and wet feet inside boots one forgot to grease, and the hauling of buckets of water up from the beach, and the endless packing and unpacking of sacks and boxes and the stowing and unstowing in the boat, is as solid a consideration as bird song and mesquite smoke and the lilt of a canoe in a rapids. To let it erode one’s calm, for the time that it must last, is to deny the worth of being
there, and is furthermore generative of still more slow clumsiness. Did one, in rage that all the good wood was soaked, chop logs carelessly against the rocky ground? If so, one had good cause for thirty minutes’ more rage later, while honing out the nicks.…

“One” gave up on the fire, finally. The morning was not all that cold, though cold enough, with a lowering sky and a cutting breeze. I put on an extra wool shirt under my wind-breaker and made coffee on a little German alcohol stove, eating store bread with it and a can of apricots. The pup lay in the tent atop the tumbled sleeping bag, shivering, gasping pneumonically, showing his eye-whites. I felt guilt for having brought him so young, and decided not to strike the tent until I saw whether or not it was going to start raining again, as the sky swore it would. Resigned or impatient or however, you can stay reasonably dry in rain if you’re set up when it comes; to have to scramble muddily ashore and make a new camp under a downpour is a pure and lasting misery.

Redbirds called weakly, and then a canyon wren, and a Carolina, and chickadees, titmice, killdeers, kingfishers, gulls. I saw none of them. As the wind picked up, it hushed them as wind does, and drove them to cover. Three or four thousand robins in a strung-out, undulating flock flew from around the mountain, barking, and disappeared into wet autumn-bright woods across the river. For me those great aggregations connote the bleak time, the bare months, and I supposed the weather was what I deserved for having started so late in the year.

My watch had run down during the night; I set it again by guess, and with a second big cup of coffee smoked the last of my ready-rolls, throwing the crumpled pack on the night’s fire’s paste-pounded ashes.

Finally three or four patches of blue showed improbably in the west, and disappeared. The rest of the sky looked as bad as ever, but taking the brief blue for my omen I knocked the tent down, rolled stakes and poles inside it, and tied it into the canoe with the other gear. I lashed a tarp over the whole cargo and of its rear edge made a protective awning for the pup. When I picked up his blanket, he came to life. His existence theretofore had been a series of known rituals, one of them tug of war with that moth-perforated sheet of wool. He squealed and growled and shook his head, pulling backward as he held onto it. I dragged him that way down to the canoe, wadded the blanket between the awning and the white-cedar ribs, and put him there on top of it. From beneath the canvas then he gazed out at me with sadness, or what looked like it.…

The wind was stout and wetly cold, and seemed southerly. But you can seldom tell exactly on the river; the snaking trough of its valley twists wind and turns it back against itself and usually, it seems, against a canoe. I had loaded badly; the heavy boxes were amidships rather than forward, and the wind catching the light bow shoved it perversely upstream as I pushed away, and I was drifting backward through a fast riffle. I fought it around in time to see and miss a rock, and kept it straight by hard paddling, and knew I would have to stop again before long and rebestow the load. It didn’t matter much; I had no idea of making distance and wanted only to be ready to quit when the rain started again.

Gray sky, gray pale green of the willows not yet turned by frost, and gray black-green of the cedar on the hills, gray-red and gray-yellow of the tall oaks and cottonwoods and pecans, ingrained gray of great sandstone boulders tumbled
along the shore. Gray blow of the gray wind, counterthrust of the gray current …

At Shut-in Crossing I tired of the needless fighting and stopped on a sand bar with a half-inch of mud spread evenly over its surface. Skating about the canoe on clogged boot soles, I made the laborious rearrangements and tied things down again and tarped them again and then, unwilling to start out again in the day’s unpromising monotony—it seemed somehow a waste of good river—walked followed by the pup into the valley above the crossing. Backed by steep hills, it lies on the other shore from where most of the old ones settled along that bit of the river, which I guess is why they called it Shut-in. A man named Davis homesteaded there in 1857, a year or so before the Comanches (restricted by then legally, if not in fact, to a reservation up the Clear Fork) reached a startled awareness of the newcomers’ solidity and began the really bloody fighting.

They were diverse, the first Saxons who came here, the old ones, and it is hard to talk knowingly about them from a century’s distance. There was very little Hollywood about them, and not much Fenimore Cooper. Rough, certainly … Mainly Southern, but not altogether, and even the Southerners heterogeneous in origin and type—rednecks and slaveholding younger sons from the cotton states, Texas-Revolutionary veterans from the older cattle counties far down the Brazos and the Colorado, hillmen from Tennessee and Carolina. Judging from the dialect they passed down, and the religion, and the narrow, straight-line living broken occasionally by sprees and murder, the hill people may have predominated, but a lot of them came later, when other people had moved on after exhausting a farm or so.

Sharp around the edges, not tender … They couldn’t
have been, bringing wagonloads of women and kids and chattels where they brought them. Like the Comanches, they were unlovable to neighbors of other breeds, but like the Comanches too they did not care. They had a notion, handed tangled down from the dank European forests, that
they
were The People. There wasn’t room enough in the Comancheria for two tribes with that illusion.

What part John Davis played in the consequent uproar is not recorded, but someone relayed a sad, sentimental story about his floorboards. He drove a wagon south to Waco to get them, and brought them back to lay them in his cabin for his bride; it was the first floor in the Palo Pinto country which was neither flat dirt nor puncheon. They say she was proud of it, and a few months later she died in childbirth and John Davis tore up the floorboards and made them into a coffin.…

Maybe then he stayed in the valley, morose, and proceeded with mule and plow and straight uncontoured furrow, with cotton and corn year after leaching year, to wear it out. Someone did. It lies fallow now, its old small fields choked with briars and the low second-growth oak brush they call shinnery. I didn’t know where the old Davis cabin had stood, or whether any signs of it remained, but near the river I found what was left of some log corrals, and beyond that a bulldozer had been at work and a bright goat-wire fence stood taut, evidence probably of new city ownership. Up through the thirties and the war and even till the drouth of the fifties, individual families still subsisted on some of those little farms in the valleys and on the flatlands inside the river bends. It was a hard-scrabble life. Most of them have moved away now, leaving the farms to lie brushy and neglected, convalescing from a century of abuse. Businessmen
buy up blocks of them as ranching investments, dozing away the scrub and the cedar that has moved down from the hills, and replanting in grass. If the land is to be used at all, that practice probably does it less harm than the other did, though a kind of people, backwash of the old ones, are disappearing with the change.

Towhees and cardinals hopped about in the brush, untouched by the wind that hissed in the treetops, ignoring me and the pup in the assurance that thick undergrowth gives them. Bewildered by so much untailored shrubbery, the passenger stuck by my heels. Mud … An old corncrib, collapsed at one corner, and the rat-chewed gray cobs spilling out between the logs like a travesty of a cornucopia … Frostbitten sumac the color of arterial blood speckled the high hillsides. Deer tracks pitted the old corral. Silence. Ruin …

Trespassing, I climbed over the new fence. The old kind of owners didn’t worry much over that kind of property rights, roaming the country as if it were still open, letting others roam, too. The new ones are testier, when they are there, but they’re usually not there and even then they’re fretful only if you’re hunting. I’d left the gun in the canoe. Having climbed over, and crossed the sterile slash of the bulldozer’s path, I found nothing on the other side different from what I’d already seen, and climbed back over again.… At the canoe, I got out my fly rod and was setting it up when a yellow Cub came flying up the river low along the wind, with two men in it. They waved. I jerked my head in answer.

Irked perhaps by my calm—people who fly around near the ground seem to require delight and awe from earthbound watchers—they banked into a tight circle and came back to
buzz me, too low now, and with the plane’s wheels slapped the top branches of a Cottonwood.

It scared them. They pulled up steeply and flew off in the direction they had come from, and the roar of their dive became a drone.… The pup yapped after them.

The silent air of ruin is fragile.

Though the day was bleak and low still, moseying up the valley had cleansed my feeling about it, a little. Below the crossing’s fast water, bream were surface-feeding on midge nymphs or something else too small to be seen. Anchoring with a rock, I cast a little Rio Grande King to where the rippled water turned slick, but it wasn’t little enough. They ignored it for a dozen or so casts, and when one finally took he was the size of a silver dollar with tail and fins, a goggle-eye. To me, bream on a fly rod are as pretty fishing as a man can want, but there are times when they aren’t worth working for. I put the little one back in the water, reeled in, and shoved on.

Just around the bend there, the canoe balanced now and shooting smoothly along, I saw another cleanness. A bald eagle came flapping easily down the wind, passed within short shotgun range of me, and lit in a dead tree upstream. I put the glass on him and he sat there, spruce black and white, fierce-eyed enough for anyone’s Great Seal.…

They practically do not exist any more in our part of the country. Those who study such matters believe that the whole nation, not counting Alaska, contains only a couple of thousand or so of them now. They don’t adapt. They need big space and big time and big solitude for their living and their breeding, and not finding them, perish.…

Most people who feel at all about birds and animals seem to have a specialized affection for those species that adjust
tidily to the proximity of man and man’s mess. I lack it, mostly. A robin’s nest in a pruned elm in one’s garden is pleasant to watch, and English sparrows’ squabbles and loves are worth laughing at if you haven’t got anything better to laugh at, and gulls do circle with white grace about our coastal garbage dumps. But for me they lack the microcosmic poetry that some see in them. They lack the absoluteness of the spacious, disappearing breeds—of geese riding the autumn’s southward thrust, of eagles, of grizzlies, of bison I never saw except in compounds … Of wolves … Of wild horses that have been hunted down in twenty years or so and have been converted into little heaps of dog dung on the nation’s mowed lawns. And antelope, and elk grazing among the high aspens, an old bull always on guard …

I’m aware that the bald eagle eats carrion and has other unaesthetic habits, noted by good Benjamin Franklin. It doesn’t affect the other feeling. Sheepmen shoot the goldens now with buckshot from airplanes, in the western country. We don’t deserve eagles; they will go.

What hurt was knowing that when I was younger I would have shot this one. The gun lay by my foot, and an ancient itch had stirred my hand toward it as he passed.… For nothing, for pride of destruction that has marked us as a breed …

“Hell,” the old-timers used to brag in front of the feed stores in Weatherford and Granbury, “I’ve done wore out three farms in my time.…”

Anyhow, he sat there on a barkless worm-runed branch, twisting his neck to set the full yellow glare of his eye upon me, and when my own neck was twisted around too totally for comfort, I waved him goodbye and took up the paddle again.

A long gravel island … Along one side of it lay a calm pool that would end, I knew, in a safe riffle where I might be able to float or might have to get out and ease the canoe through, wading. Down the other side the main force of the river ran in a hard fast roaring chute with willows lying out horizontally and a big rock or so sticking up. Earlier, in quenched mood, I would have chanced wet feet on the safe side; now I steered into the chute without even considering a walk down the island to see what the water did below, this high. Startled by the sudden bumpy speed, the pup came out of his hole and stood up with paws on the gunwale to watch, just in time to get a harsh willow branch across his muzzle. It caught me, too, and for a moment about my ears and neck there was the itch of the little insects that manage for a time to survive frosts among the thick leaves.… Then a rock to slew past, twisting the bow aside and jumping the stern over with a levered side stroke, and finally a long rough clear run with the gravel to the right and the root-woven overhanging shore to the left … Straight and coasting fast, I glanced across the flat island and saw, parked in its center, the little yellow airplane that had buzzed us upstream. No one was near it. While I watched it, puzzling, we bore down on another rock, and I didn’t move fast enough to avoid a long scrape that made the ribs crackle. Though the canoe had a new fiberglass covering and the gear was lashed down, I craved no holes or overflips or other emergencies. I think as kids we used to; certainly we had enough of them.… Cursing, I settled to business, and in a minute or so the chute vomited out into a great calm pool below the island.