Goodbye to a River: Podcast 
Being There: The Brazos River 
The Old Man and the River
Fifty years ago a struggling writer named John Graves set off on a three-week-long canoe trip down the Brazos. He wrote about his experience in a book that has become a Texas classic— and one of my personal favorites. So what could I do to mark the anniversary? Try to follow in his wake.
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Such naturalist writing pervades Goodbye to a River—anchors it, in fact. Whatever else is happening in the book, you are always moving in the river’s swirl, gazing up at flights of geese against bleached wintry skies or down into black-water catfish holes or hearing the songs of canyon wrens. But for Graves, the natural world is just the beginning. The Brazos is history too, and lots of it. His river journey, in fact, took place along one of the most important frontiers in American history. From the 1830’s through the 1860’s, the upper-middle Brazos was the actual line of the Indian frontier in America. Since there were few settlements north of Texas along the 98th meridian, it was the only human frontier of any significance in those days. The line of settlements extending roughly from present-day Fort Worth to San Antonio marked the point where the westward march of Anglo-European civilization ran up against the largest and most powerful Indian empire in history, a 300,000-square-mile chunk of the North American heartland that the Spanish, who had been abjectly driven from it, called Comanchería.
The Comanche were nomads but had their preferred wintering and watering grounds, and the Brazos, with its plentiful water and sheltered and timbered bottomlands, was one of their favorite haunts. Which in turn meant that the areas of present-day Hood, Parker, and Palo Pinto counties—where the entire book takes place—were the scenes of some of their worst depredations. Wrote Graves:
For two arrogant horseback centuries they were The People, steady winners, powerful beyond any reverie of power their foot-bound Shoshonean ancestors could ever have shaped in the smoke of northern campfires. Dominant in the world they had selected, rich in the goods they prized, dexterous, cruel, wild, joyful, unbearable, lousy, bowlegged, and magnificent.
There are many Comanche stories here, almost all involving the torture and slaughter of pioneers: They are an obvious way to explain not only the Brazos River valley but also the American West, since the tribe held up its advance and settlement for some two centuries and defined the way of life along the borderlands. There are Rangers here too, local legends like Charlie Goodnight. Goodnight—the model for Captain Woodrow Call in Lonesome Dove—was both a ranger and a cattleman. He gave his name to the famous Goodnight-Loving Trail, over which thousands of head of cattle were driven in the days after the Civil War. Graves tells of a “scraggly bunch of reservation Comanches” who petitioned Goodnight to give them one buffalo from a small herd he had saved from extinction in the Panhandle. Goodnight said, “Hell, no.” They asked again, begging this time. Still, he said no. They responded by setting up camp on his front porch. Finally he relented and gave them the bull they wanted, “maybe deriving a sour satisfaction,” observed Graves, “from thinking about the trouble they’d have getting it back to Oklahoma.” But they did not want to take it back to the rez. Graves wrote, “They ran it before them and killed it with arrows and lances in the old way, the way of the arrogant centuries. They sat on their horses and looked down at it for a while, sadly and in silence, and then left it there dead and rode away, and Old Man Goodnight watched them go, sadly too.”
Graves is a literate naturalist, a belletrist who shoots squirrels, skins them, and eats them and knows how to birth cows and slaughter hogs and does his own stone masonry and can name, in order of efficiency, types of wood as fire fuel. In his writing, all of this blood and dirt and river water commingle with a meandering and occasionally ornate prose and with references, which seem casually apt, to the likes of John Milton, Laurence Sterne, William Butler Yeats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the Book of Job. He is like no one else I know. His closest literary cousins are probably political naturalists, writers like Henry David Thoreau and Edward Abbey, though he lacks the curmudgeonliness, preachiness, and stem-winding oratory of either one of them. In earnest simplicity—his desire to see the present clearly against the past and his obsession with the details of natural description—his nearest kinship is perhaps with Thoreau. Consider this passage: “Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over bridges,—a sound heard farther than almost any other at night,—the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barnyard. In the meanwhile all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs . . .”
It could easily be Graves, right down to the punctuation and the archaism, but it’s not; it’s Thoreau, from Walden, in a section titled “Sounds.” Like Thoreau—to whom Graves refers frequently and with mock reverence as Saint Henry—Graves is obsessed with nature’s noises; both can identify the songs of all the birds they see.
Like Thoreau, too, Graves was something of a proto-environmentalist, though less sure of himself and nothing like the bomb thrower Abbey would become a decade later. (Abbey’s suggested solution to the building of dams was to blow them up, the subject of his most famous novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang.) On the river, one of the first things I realized was the sheer size and violence of the damming and lake building that was being planned in the fifties and which was completely real to Graves when he wrote his book. The canyons we paddled through were immense, deep, and breathtakingly beautiful; one could only imagine the wanton destruction of living memory if the water were to come in fifty, one hundred, two hundred feet above our heads.
For him, though, the damming was just an extension of the destruction of land already under way—not a point of view commonly expressed in the America of that time. Though he doesn’t sell this idea hard, it throbs quietly through the book. It is, after all, his reason for writing it: Something loved was being destroyed in the name of progress. Gazing at a herd of goats, he admires their “self-sufficiency” and their “yellow, wise, evil eyes”; he also sees them as emblems of abused land:
They symbolize a further degeneration of the country; there is about them the smell of the burnt Near East where their breed began. . . . This region raised antelope and buffalo with rich fat on their ribs once, and later its longhorns were the sturdiest that went up the trails. 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.
And later:
There is a pessimism about land which, after it has been with you for a long time, becomes merely factual. Men increase; country suffers.
Like many avid hunters and fishermen, Graves is an ardent conservationist. Unlike them, he admits to second thoughts and even regrets about killing things. He does this a good deal. Early in his trip, he sees an eagle and confesses to an itch to shoot it, saying, “What hurt was knowing that when I was younger I would have shot this one.” Later he writes of hunting doves:
It knifes through you, for instance, after waiting through a long golden evening for doves beside a stock tank in someone’s pasture, watching your first bird coming in high and swift on the north wind, laying down knowing before you fire that you are on him, watching him contract raggedly and fall in a long parabola to baked hard earth and then going to pick him up—it knifes to feel suddenly in his warmth against your palm, in the silk touch of the feathers at his throat, all the pity of that perished gentle wildness. . . . No fiercely nature-loving female could ever have felt it stronger than I have, at times, and those people I care about hunting with feel it too. It goes away if you keep shooting and is replaced by a stone-hard exultation that is just as real . . .
This doesn’t mean that he decides to stop killing doves or squirrels or ducks or anything else he wants to eat. He goes right ahead, but it is his thoughtful consideration of the act that makes him interesting to read, a circumspection that Larry McMurtry says is a stylistic trademark. “One of his most frequent rhetorical devices is to undercut himself: questioning a story he has just retold, doubting an observation he has just made, twisting out from under a position,” McMurtry wrote in 1981. Graves, who in his life has killed everything from robins to frogs, armadillos, and snapping turtles, hunts throughout the book. Most of the time he seems perfectly happy to do it.
On our third night following the ancient trace of John Graves upon the river, we made camp at a sandy, grass-covered island by the right bank that was nested in with three or four other islands, all cut by dark, rocky channels through which passed swift currents. When we first nosed the canoe in, we came upon a wolf spider the size of a tarantula, carrying her young on her back; then we saw more wolf spiders, hundreds of them. The place was otherwise one of those ideal campsites you dream of finding. We named it Spider Island. We hauled mesquite and pecan wood in the canoe, built a roaring fire, cooked dinner, and watched a perfect windless sunset, a sky with gray clouds sailing in a pink sea. We were surrounded, for some reason, by thousands of robins and thousands of frogs. The moon rose; we saw deer in the water, heard cows lowing behind the high-bank island across our little stream.
We did not know exactly where we were, but it didn’t matter—on the river somewhere, on an island somewhere, a certain unknown distance downstream from the rocky cliffs at Eagle Creek, where Graves put in for the night. Then it occurred to me that I knew exactly where we were. We were inside a book, near the bottom of page 42, just at the part where he is about to pass under the east face of the Chick Bend mountain, then muscle into the sweeping turn of Dalton Bend and onward into the wild, tumultuous, legendary river beyond.
Goodbye to a River is available through www.amazon.com
Available as an unabridged audio from Recorded Books and in paperback from Vintage Books.
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