| John Graves | |
by Robin Bisha “The Brazos belonged to me that afternoon, all of it. It really did. The autumn-blue sky (fair skies in Texas at other times of year tend to be white, bleached), the yellow-white air, the cedars and oaks green and gold and red, the rocks the size of buildings, the sun on my back, the steady, comfortable stroke of the paddling, mohair goats kowf!-ing at me from the shore when they caught my scent… Belonged to me and the whistling birds and the unseen animals (deer and coon tracks overlaid each other in the shore’s silt) and to the big suckers that leaped and splashed… People’s sounds and a consciousness of them touched me from time to time – an ax’s chock up in the cedar, a cow call, a tractor sputtering in the flatland of a bend, a jet’s scar across the high blue and its blowtorch blare and the crack of its sudden liberation from its own sound – but it was fall, and they weren’t on the river. It was mine (52).” Rivers are on our minds this July. Floods have carried away homes and children near Ft. Worth. Closer to home, flood gates have been open at all six dams on the lower Colorado River, including four at Mansfield Dam, where the water level in Lake Travis is approaching the 1991 record high. The Guadalupe and Blanco Rivers have stayed below flood stage, but people around here are wary, still raw from their experience of the 4th of July flooding of 2002. Scores of people north of here will be spending this Independence Day in shelters, motels or with relatives who live on dry ground. The Brazos is expected to crest today, July 2. And it’s the Brazos that captured the attention of noted Texas environmental writer John Graves. Graves came to national prominence after the publication of Goodby to a River (1959), a narrative of his last canoe trip on the Brazos River before construction began on a series of dams that would alter the river forever. Those of us living downstream of the many dams that have been built on the rivers of Texas since the disastrous floods and droughts of the early 20th century probably only think about water when it threatens our homes and roads. We don’t stop to think that 100 years ago, we might have been overtaken by a flash flood without any warning. “Like most of the other sites, it lies high above the Brazos; Indian and white alike gave the river respect. You don’t have to be an old-timer in that country to remember when it was common, there being no dams above to take the shock, for a three- or four-foot curl of angry red water to roar around a bend upon a party swimming in quiet pools under a blue sky. A cloudburst far out on the plains could cause that (64-65).” If we think about water when we’re not in danger of being flooded out, some of us may think about the sustainability of the water supply for a burgeoning population. John Graves, however, encourages us to think about the lost wildness of the rivers. Graves on Texas Environmental History Graves plunges us into relationship with the Brazos, the creatures (human and non-) who inhabit it and the history that hangs in the air along the river’s banks, a harsh history of a cruel land and the cruel and wasteful people who inhabited it. While the Anglo-Americans struggled to tame the land and the Indians struggled to rid their territory of Anglo-Americans, neither group acted as particularly great stewards of the land. As Graves floats down the Brazos in the final weeks of autumn 1958, he remembers the slaughter of people and animals that took place along the river’s banks less than 100 years before. Massacres don’t ever count as environmentally sustainable strategies. Neither does wearing out the land and moving on, as many of the people who came to Texas from the East did. According to Graves, “The newer frontiersmen didn’t distinguish much among the different kinds of Indians. Likely they didn’t want to. They were the cutting edge of a people whetted sharp to go places, to wear things out and move on, to take over and to use and to discard (48).” He doesn’t want his readers to be the sort of people who would brag about using up the land as he had heard old-timers do in the past. “’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…. (29)’” So, in Graves view, we can’t look to history to find sustainable habits. The Making of an Environmental Writer Graves tells readers that his relationship with the natural world has been reformed from an earlier wanton use of animals, water and land that rivaled that of the old-timers. He wants us to know that f he could gain respect for the land and animals, we all can. “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…(29)” Although young Graves the wanton hunter felt more part of nature than he did as he embarked on his final canoe trip down the Brazos in November 1958, as he aged he had conceived a respect for the balance of nature that humans can so easily disrupt. He might have needed two of the three weeks of his canoe trip to regain his callouses and the muscles necessary to guide his boat with the dachshund in the bow along a stretch of the Brazos he knew like the back of his hand before he left Texas to explore the world, but in 1958 he caught only enough fish to fill his stomach and only enough fowl for Thanksgiving dinner. “Young, one moves in upon the country and thinks himself a tile in its tessellated ecology, and believes that he always would have been such a tile, and hoots with the owl, and scorns even tents. “Older, one knows himself an excrescence upon the landscape and no kinsman to any wild thing; one hears the bass drumbeat and the gabble of the rapids below and the roar of the rain and feels abrupt depression and wonders why he barged out alone into the wetness and the winter. And thinks that perhaps, in the old time, he would have been one of the cautious who stayed in the jammed East (37).” The Graves we meet in Goodbye to a River is a bit citified, but he has little patience for so-called environmentalists who do not truly engage with nature. “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…(29)” Damming Rivers Graves believes that humans have irretrievably altered the natural world, and that it will not be able to recover from our efforts. “Now the cedar has spread its sterile shade in the flats where grass no longer grows, and though some of the upland ranches with sentient owners still show thick carpets of curly mesquite and grama and buffalo and blue-stem grasses, and some even of the damaged parts can be brought back, most of the earth’s surface there will never again be what it was. Goats and other such Mediterranean fauna – burros, and magpies, and tawny water thrifty rodents that live among the rocks – somehow symbolize for me those lands that will never again be what they were. “One waxes pessimistic? Not so much … There is a pessimism about land which, after it has been with you a long time, becomes merely factual. Men increase; country suffers. Though I sign up with organizations that oppose the process, I sign without great hope …. Islands of wildlife and native flora may be saved, as they should be, but the big, sloppy, rich, teeming spraddle will go. It always has (57-58).” Graves journeyed down the Brazos before the dams were built in the 1960s, not because he was excited about the prospect of flood-free living downstream, but because he needed to make peace with this land. The book is almost an apology to the river for what humans are about to do to it. “Of the projected Brazos dams – one is to be slapped up against those bluffs [where the speaker hunted squirrels] – he said: ‘I’ve learned to get along with her pretty good the way she is. Don’t know how I’ll like her when she’s a lake. Good bottomland, them fish’ll be grazin’ on (124).’” Damming the Brazos took away the river’s agency and domesticated it. After the dams made lakes out of pastures what would this body of water be? As Graves wrote, “A river in a sense makes its own country along its course, renewing the lowlands with silt, pampering on its banks trees and shrubs and grasses of species different from those on the ruined slopes of its watershed (216).” What is the Brazos now? Or the Guadalupe? Or the Colorado? Or … Texas and Us John Graves tried to leave Texas, spending the better part of his youth in Europe, but he came back and still lives here. “The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man…. It’s not necessary to like being a Texan, or a Midwesterner, or a Jew, or an Andalusian, or a Negro, or a hybrid child of the international rich. It is, I think, necessary to know in that crystal chamber of the mind where one speaks straight to oneself that one is or was that thing, and for any understanding of the human condition it’s probably necessary to know a little about what the thing consists of (145).” And for those of us who aren’t Texans, it is just as important to know about the place we have chosen to live. Pick up a copy of Goodbye to a River (the book is still in print after all these years) and head out for a different kind of float down the river nearest you. Remember the dams upstream that keep you safe today on the lakes they have created. Think about the land underneath your water skis and imagine the Indian, Spanish and Anglo families that struggled to come to terms with that land before it became a lake, before humans had the means to control great forces of nature. Remember that John Graves loved the Brazos so much that he floated the river in the wintery rain of November with only a dachshund for company. Think of the devotion that pulled him to stay until he had made peace with the change. “December was a right time for bad weather, and I’d gone about as far as I needed to go to tell my stretch of the river goodbye. I’d made the trip and it had been a good one, and now they could flood the whole damned country if they liked, chasing off the animals and the birds and drowning out the cottonwoods and live oaks and sloshing away, like evil from the font, whatever was left there of Mr. Charlie Goodnight and Satanta the White Bear and Cooney Mitchell, and me. “As they would, for praiseworthy purposes… We’ve learned to change unchangingness, and it seems we’ll keep the knowledge working. That long and bedrock certainty of thoughtful men that regardless of the race’s disasters the natural world would go on and on is no longer a certainty. It’s an improbability instead (295-296).” I hope not. July 2007 |
Rivers of Texas Angelina and Neches River Authority Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority Lavaca-Navidad River Authority Lower Colorado River Authority Upper Colorado R iver Authority |