Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    On a boulder two old countrymen were still-fishing with casting rods. They looked at me. An eddy caught the boat and drifted me close, and I got out my pipe to fill it.
    “Come down in at air airplane?” asked one, a cadaver in overalls.
    I said no.
    “Tole you not,” the other said to him.
    “Catch anything?” I said, because one has to.…
    With monosyllabic unwillingness, the cadaver confessed that they hadn’t. I lit my pipe, and from the corners of narrow farmers’ eyes they flicked glances at my boat and possessions. The second one, short and wiry, reeled in an empty hook above a huge sinker and began to rebait it from a jar.
    “Hod-damn stuff stinks,” he said.
    “What makes it good,” the cadaver averred.
    For a few moments I sat, smoking and resting, in the aura of their strained indifference, then shoved on down, having given them fuel for an hour’s taciturn, conjectural conversation. There was a fine long piece of river below, deep but with a pull, and running somehow—a miracle—sidewise to the wind, so that the water next to one bank was sheltered and smooth. I steered there and drifted quietly. On either shore the castellated sandstone mountains rose. The day held sadness still, but I had the feel of the river now, and the boat, and the country, and all of it was long-ago familiar.
    There is no way to equate canoeing with the ways of the old ones in that country. We used to try, reading books of northern Indian lore, but it was an alien injection and I guess we knew it, imitation Chippewas in the Comanche country. The whole tradition there, Indian and white, was horseback; they didn’t need to travel the alternately dry and flooded streams. But their kind of penetration into the country is no longer a possibility; barbed wire and the universal privacy of property obstruct passage, and the highways aremere gashes across the land, having little to do with what the land is.… I can’t give you three