62 years later, Graves’ Brazos remains quiet and peaceful
I’d never say so out loud, but I’ve always thought of myself as a “manly man” — ball player as a kid, sports fan, willing to get down and dirty when there’s hard physical work to do — until a few days ago when I finally had to admit I’d been fooling myself. I came to that rueful awareness when my wife Laura and I were strolling by a bookstore next door to an REI, and I found myself tending like a wayward canoe toward the bookstore.
Laura had to reorient me, knowing that I needed gear for a three-day canoe trip with three friends down the upper-middle Brazos in Palo Pinto County, near Mineral Wells. On my shopping list were a hat, a bedroll and pants that would shed water, since I’d probably end up in the river at some point.
Did I mention that I’m not an outdoorsman? I had last wielded a paddle a couple of years ago when Laura and I joined former Houston mayor Bill and Andrea White and several mutual friends on a leisurely Saturdayafternoon kayaking trek down Buffalo Bayou. Not long after we got on the water at The Dunlavy, rounding the bend just beyond the Wortham, Laura glanced over her shoulder with a question: “Are you sure you’re paddling back there?”
Last week’s Brazos trip was a literary homage of sorts to a Texas writer all four of us admired. In November 1957, the late John Graves, accompanied by a 6-month-old dachshund named Passenger, spent three weeks canoeing the stretch of river we were on, 150 curlicued miles between Possum Kingdom Dam and the upper reaches of Lake Whitney. Graves’ account of that trip, “Goodbye to a River,” is generally considered among the three or four best books ever written by a Texan.
Georgetown resident Sam Pfiester organized the trip and served as camp cook and guide. A retired oilman who spent a major portion of his career in Midland as an associate of oiland-gas magnate (and gubernatorial candidate) Clayton Williams, Pfiester is a writer and more recently a movie producer whose latest project features a plucky chicken named Blanche. An outdoorsman who has paddled rivers all over the world, he
was good-humored about his companions’ camping ineptitude.
In addition to a journalist more comfortable with pen than paddle, Sam was stuck with my old friend Mark Busby, a retired professor of southwestern literature at Texas State University and the author of a literary biography of Graves, and Steve Davis, the congenial curator of the Bill Wittliff Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State. The collection Steve oversees is home to Graves’ papers and memorabilia, including the paddle he used for his trip down the Brazos. The three of us did our best to repay the ever-curious Sam by sharing stories about the quiet, self-effacing man who wrote so winningly about history, nature, country life and Texas lore.
We were surprised by the relative emptiness of the socalled Palo Pinto country. (The name shared by the county, the tiny county seat and the general area means “painted stick.”) The river runs through it.
“When you paddle and pole along it,” Graves wrote more than six decades ago, “the things you see are much the same things the Comanches and the Kiowas used to see, riding lean ponies down it a hundred years ago to raid the new settlements in its valley.”
It’s still that way. We floated past a Boy Scout camp and maybe four houses in the wooded hills along the 20-mile stretch of river.
Graves in ’57 thought he was seeing the Brazos for the last time in its natural state, knowing that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was set to tame the occasionally raucous river with a series of dams. He could imagine what was coming: Like the Highland Lakes on the Colorado, the placid bodies of water behind the dams would attract noisy boaters and skiers; second homes and condos would crowd traffic-choked shores.
The dams were never built, in part because of the eloquent persuasiveness of “Goodbye to a River.” The river still flows between castellated sandstone bluffs and past giant rhombic blocks, the stream bending like a giant’s bobby pin between cedardraped hills, the dark-green foliage complemented these spring days by newly leafed oaks, as bright green as Bibb lettuce. Glancing down as we paddled, we could see “stone by stone,” as Graves noted long ago, “the texture of the bottom as it slid past.”
Occasionally Graves crunched the canoe’s bow into a sandbar, stepped ashore with stumpylegged Passenger at his heels and visited with an old farmer, a fisherman or a storekeeper in an isolated community near the river. In our three days on the water, we visited with no one. We saw a total of four people — three in one motorboat headed upriver, one in another. They waved but didn’t tarry. Except for our own voices, the sluicing sound of shallow water over rocks and the antic yips of coyotes at night, it was quiet in the heart of Texas.
Graves communed with other river denizens, as well — with ghosts of settlers from the century preceding who had pushed their luck farming and raising a family on the raw farthest edge of frontier safety, and with Comanche and Kiowa, their eon-sold way of life inexorably being eradicated.
He told about Jesse Veale, the last man killed by Indians in Palo Pinto County. One afternoon in 1873, young Jesse and a buddy named Joe Corbin were setting fish lines in the river when they ran across saddled Indian ponies staked out in the cedar. The young men took them.
At Ioni Creek the next morning, two Comanches caught up with them. An arrow bore into Jesse’s knee; his horse went to bucking. Joe yelled: “What the hell we gonna do?”
He thought Jesse yelled, “Run it out!” and so he did. “When he last looked back (how many times did he see it again, the rest of his life, how many times did he wonder if what Jesse Veale had said was: ‘Fight it out’?), Jesse was on the ground shooting and clubbing with his pistol, and they were all over him.”
The only stories we heard — except for those we told each other — were from outfitter Bud Rochelle as he drove us in his pickup to the put-in place. His stories were tamer. An ex-Navy man in a sleeveless T-shirt whose beefy arms made me wonder whether he had pulled oars on a Roman galley, Rochelle grew up in Houston but decamped to the family outfitting business in 1980. His grandfather had started Rochelle’s Canoe Rental in 1969.
He told us about the eightmonths-pregnant woman who insisted on an overnight trip. You can guess what happened; she named the baby Brazos. And there was the Metroplex fellow who didn’t trust Rochelle with the keys to his brand-new pickup, despite his wife’s advice to leave them on the keyboard in the office. The fellow didn’t expect a raccoon to make off in the middle of the night with a Tupperware bowl, truck keys inside.
We saw tracks around our camp but no raccoons. We did see birds — great blue herons and ring-necked ducks, snowy egrets and a flock of black vultures, a woodpecker hard at work on the trunk of a dead tree, his tap-tap-tapping echoing through the woods. We saw an osprey poised in mid-air above the water, his osprey eye homed in on a fish below the surface.
Mark and I tumped over only once. Somewhere near Chick Bend, we miscalculated shallow rapids looping around an island and rammed into the exposed roots of a tree on the bank. The last I saw of my brand-new hat, it was bobbing down the river far beyond us.