{"id":5137,"date":"2022-03-07T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-07T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/feathersandwhiskey.com\/?p=5137"},"modified":"2023-03-22T12:18:28","modified_gmt":"2023-03-22T16:18:28","slug":"goodbye-to-a-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/feathersandwhiskey.com\/?p=5137","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye To A River"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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By Will Burden <\/h6>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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In the Summer of 2013, I was a junior in college when I came across an obituary in the pages of Texas Monthly. A writer named John Graves had passed away. The author of the obituary heralded Mr. Graves as an elder statesman in the Texas literary world, and highlighted Mr. Graves\u2019 book Goodbye to a River<\/i><\/strong><\/a>, a narrative detailing a canoe trip down the Brazos River, as the work that had put him on the map. The obituary ended as follows: \u201cIt\u2019s an introduction long overdue: Mr. Hemingway, meet Mr. Graves.\u201d Because I had recently completed my summer coursework and had a break before Fall classes commenced, and because my parttime job at the time was as a security guard who spent his weekends alone in a bank, I decided to take a stab at reading Graves\u2019 hallmark work. While a detailed review of the book is beyond my ability, talent, and time, I only wish to convey a small part of what the story meant to me, how those meanings have changed over the years, and how we can continue to find meaning in ordinary places.\u00a0<\/p>

As detailed in the obituary, Goodbye to a River<\/i> is ostensibly a story about a man taking a canoe trip with his dachshund down the Brazos River in the 1950s. The Brazos River is soon to be dammed, and the narrator, Graves, is determined to take one last trip down the river in its wild state. The trip itself is not some grand expedition across the State of Texas. Instead, Graves travels through several counties south of Fort Worth over the course of about a week in late-November. Along the way, Graves discusses topics that range from the history of the region, local flora and fauna, and the superiority of the dovetail joints used in the construction of the cabins that dotted the landscape in the decades preceding his trip. The one consistency through it all is that Graves is an observer of place and people, and his narrative carries the force that it does because he knows of the places and people that he speaks of.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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View of Brazos north of Interstate 20, Parker County, Texas. This section of the Brazos, between Possum Kingdom and Lake Granbury, was the focus of John Graves' classic book Photo: Leaflet <\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The first time I read Goodbye to a River<\/i>, it opened my eyes to a world that I had never appreciated. I grew up in what most people would call rural poverty, though I didn\u2019t know it until well into my twenties since East Texas isn\u2019t all that wealthy of a place to begin with. While we didn\u2019t have many luxuries, we did have space. And we had quiet. When I was a kid, both passed without me noticing either because it never occurred to me that these things were special or unique or fading. Sure, my buddy from the house on the other side of the pasture and I would ride four-wheelers, shoot at snakes on the pond, and trudge through the creek on rainy days just for the sake of doing it, but these things were just sort of what you did to occupy yourself out in the sticks. They were wholly unremarkable activities, and I certainly didn\u2019t see a whole lot of poetry in shooting blue-jays with pellet guns when I was 11. John Graves opened my eyes to the land that I had roamed the surface of, but never saw the beauty in the local creek, felt the weight of the history that the land carries with it, or appreciated the complexity of my corner of the South.<\/p>

In the years since I first read Goodbye to a River<\/i> in 2013, I have probably re-read it eight or nine times. I\u2019ve carried my same copy from College Station to Anchorage to Austin to Memphis and countless stops in between. I have read it on my bed, in a work-truck at a job site when things were slow, and even packed it into my rucksack for an airborne jump to read while on a field-training exercise. While some readings have been just for the purpose to revisit it, more often than not, a rereading was a refuge.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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On subsequent readings, I\u2019ve found myself appreciating the book for more than just Graves\u2019 ability to describe a stream. When I lived in Austin, for example, I came to appreciate Graves\u2019 own silent resignation towards what seems to be the unstoppable march of \u201cprogress\u201d as it uproots places I\u2019ve known and the traditions that once bound us. For someone who grew up in a town where it seemed time stood still, I embraced Graves\u2019 observation that \u201cimpatience is a city kind of emotion\u201d as I failed to grasp the rage-filled faces of people fighting traffic on a city\u2019s interstate system. Further, I couldn\u2019t help but be dismayed at the site of pristine hill-country ranch land being put under the bulldozer\u2019s plow in order to meet the insatiable needs of a growing metropolis. But these are the same sort of complaints those of a bucolic persuasion have always had, just listen to John Prine\u2019s \u201cParadise\u201d. Indeed, Goodbye to a River<\/i> was written in the shadow of this progress seventy-years ago. As Graves wrote, all must go \u201clike the breed of people, like wild things along the shorts, like autumn . . . What is, is. What was, was. If you\u2019re lucky, what was may also be a part of what is. Not that they often let it be so now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As Southerners, it\u2019s easy to wax poetic about kudzu and good dogs and sunsets in open pastures once you have a drink by your side and Faulkner in front of you. When taken out of the pages of a book, however, these things are often utterly routine and ordinary, especially to those of us who grew up surrounded by country places and people. They weren\u2019t characters or settings in a novel, they were just your reality. Like a fish that doesn\u2019t know it\u2019s wet, the people of the country may go their entire lives never thinking just how remarkable their surroundings are until we\u2019ve left and returned. And while we may feel that the places we\u2019ve known are changing for the worse, stories like Goodbye to a River<\/i> show that these are old feelings in a nation as dynamic as ours. While John Graves may not have been able to keep the Brazos undammed, the river as it existed then is still alive thanks in part to his writing.\u00a0<\/p>

John Graves wrote about a place like the one I came from. It didn\u2019t have high mountain peaks or sprawling landscapes. But he knew of where he spoke, and he did so in a way that gave me a vocabulary to appreciate my own space. That\u2019s what Goodbye to a River<\/i> did for me.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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