John Graves is one of America’s greatest nature writers. In particular, Goodbye to a River, an account of his 1955 solo canoe trip down a section of the Brazos River just before it was damned, is a truly exceptional book. He had known the river as a boy. It was about to be dammed. He did the trip while he still could. It is both a call for ecological awareness and a statement by a man who cares deeply about the river and about wild places.
In Goodbye to a River, Graves moves back and forth between appreciation for the river and the radical changes it faces – a tamed river, one more useful to industry. The book interweaves history, philosophy, nature and reminiscences of youth.
Some excerpts:
Drinking coffee with honey in it and canned milk, smoking a pipe that had the sweetness pipes only have in cold quiet air, I felt good if a little scratchy-eyed, having gone to sleep the night before struck with the romance of stars and firelight, with the flaps open and only the blanket over me, to wake at two thirty chilled through.
On top of the food box alligator-skin corrugations of frost had formed, and with the first touch of the sun the willows began to whisper as frozen leaves loosed their hold and fell side-slipping down through the others that were still green. Titmice called, and flickers and a redbird, and for a moment, on a twig four feet from my face, a chittering kinglet jumped around alternately hiding and flashing the scarlet of its crown.... I sat and listened and watched while the world woke up, and drank three cups of the syrupy coffee, better I thought than any I'd ever tasted, and smoked two pipes.
You run a risk of thinking yourself an ascetic while you enjoy, with that intensity, the austere facts of fire and coffee and tobacco and the sound and feel of country places. You aren't, though. In a way you're more of a sensualist than a fat man washing down sauerbraten and dumplings with heavy beer while a German band plays and a plump blonde needs his thigh...You've shucked off the gross delights, and those you have left are few, sharp, and strong. But they're sensory. Even Thoreau, if I remember right a passage or so on his cornbread, was guilty, though mainly he was a real ascetic.
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, slopping, rich, teeming spraddle will go on. It always has.
22
In the pocket notebook I carried is scribbled, early among the entries for that morning:
"The hard thing is to get slowed down."
What that means in relation to my activities just then is a bit mysterious to me. Probably it means I was impatient with my own dawdling slowness, prodigious and no trouble at all to attain, and that I then grew irked with my impatience. Impatience is a city kind of emotion, harmonious with "drive" and acid-chewed jumping stomachs, and I presume we need it if we are to hold our own on the jousting ground this contemporary world most often is. But it goes poorly on a river. One's repetitious clumsiness, byblow of irregular years away from the rock-bottom facts of ax and wood and fire and frying pans, and wet feet inside boots one forgot to grease, and the hauling of buckets of water up from the beach, and the endless packing and unpacking of sacks and boxes and the stowing and unstowing in the boat, is as solid a consideration as bird song and mesquite smoke and the lilt of a canoe in a rapids. To let it erode one's calm, for the time that it must last, is to deny the worth of being there, and is furthermore generative of still more slow clumsiness. Did one, in rage that all the good wood was soaked, chop logs carelessly against the rocky ground? If so, one had good cause for thirty minutes' more rage later, while honing out the nicks....
62
No buffalo had run the plains for decades; it was their disappearance, as much as smallpox and syphilis and Mackenzie's apocalyptic soldiers, that had finally chopped apart The People's (Comanche)way of life. Jealously, Mr. Charlie had built up and kept a little herd of them.
He knew one or two of the older Indians; he had fought them, and later had gone to see them and reminisce with them in Oklahoma. They asked him for a buffalo bull.
He said: "Hell, no."
They said: "They used to be ours."
"They used to be anybody's that could kill one," the old man said. "These are mine. They wouldn't even be alive if it wasn't for me. You go to hell."
"Please, Buenas Noches," maybe one of them said. Maybe not -- The People seldom begged.
He said no again and stomped in the house and stayed there for a couple of days while they camped patiently in his yard and on his porch, the curious cowhands gathering to watch them. In the end he made a great deal of angry noise and gave them the bull they wanted, maybe deriving a sour satisfaction from thinking about the trouble they'd have getting it back to Oklahoma.
They didn't want to take it back to Oklahoma. 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.
67
A doe…Deer go with mornings. Sleeping and unfocused, I went into the woods for breakfast fuel and stood out of the still big wind in a sheltered place by a heap of fallen post oak, unwilling to rive the silence with my ax. She came picking her way along a fence line at right angles to me. Half catching my scent, she flicked up her tail and went away soundlessly and without desperate speed; then another came the same route, snuffed the whirlpooling scent full, coughed, and tore off across a field with a big fawn behind her.
145
Origin being as it is an accident outside the scope of one's will, I tend not to seek much credit for being a Texan. Often (breathes there a man?) I can work up some proud warmth about the fact that I indubitably am one. A lot of the time, though, I'd as soon be forty other kinds of men I've known. I've lived much away from that region, and have liked most of the places I've lived in. I used to know who the good bullfighters were and why they were good. I'm familiar with the washed silent streets of Manhattan at five o'clock in the morning, and what Los Angeles promises in the evening when you're young with money on your hip, and once almost saw the rats change sewers swarmingly in Paris, and did see dawn wash the top of the old wall at Avila. . . . I've waked in the green freshness of mountain mornings in tropical lands, and have heard the strange birds cry, and the street vendors, and maybe music somewhere, and have felt the hit of it like a fist in my stomach, going sleepy-eyed out onto a balcony under the green mountains and above flame-flower trees to thank God for life and for being there. And I'm glad I have.
211
But he said the locals had a point, too, fighting off change. It was hard as hell to get yourself left alone nowadays, as he thought he ought to know as well as anybody ….The flexibility of his insight was of the kind that comes sometimes from not owning anything or anybody and therefore not being obliged by your interests to shape your thought narrowly. “People of that kind are good to be around, though they’re fairly rare even among have-nots, since the quality depends on some brains and an absence of envy.”
292
You could go on forever. You know it. Your muscles have gone supple-hard and your hands as crusty as dry rawhide, and your head has cleared, and your boat goes precisely, unstrenuously where and how you want it to go, and all your gear falls into its daily use with thoughtless ease. There is merely not enough river, not enough time … You don’t miss anyone on God’s earth’s face. You’re no more bored wit the sameness of your days and your diet and your tasks than a chickadee is bored, or the passenger on the sunny bow, or a catfish; each day is its fullness, bracketed by sleep. In the evenings by the fire and in the clear mornings are when you have it strongest – the balance, the rightness, the knowledge.
Or when you think you have it … And does it especially matter that, like the dead duck and the river and the shifting cedar hills behind, the knowledge may turn out to be illusory? Illusions are worth having.
You were spare, bare, and ascetic. You knew Saint Henry, Yankee moralist though he might be, and knew too all those other old loners who’d ever baked their bread by fires in manless places. You knew the sovereign pulse of being.
Or you thought you did…
A John Graves Reader
John Graves’ book of essays, A John Graves Reader, published in 1996 and now out-of-print, is notable for a number of reasons. In addition to excerpting it in Goodbye to a River, the book contains short stories, essays and other book excerpts exploring Graves experience as a Marine in the Pacific in World War II, his travels in Europe after the war, and his efforts to make a living as a writer and then as a small time rancher in Texas. He is a lover of dogs, of old men who have truly lived, of the life of the mind. He is a farmer despite the dubious economics, a hunter despite reservations, a university professor despite a disaffection for bureaucrats. He has come to terms with life’s compromises.
A John Graves Reader, starting with essays published in 1986 and ending with excerpts of his unpublished fiction from the mid-fifties, shows the development of a serious writer. His early efforts are forced – poorly developed characters, unconvincing dialogue. His personal essays, starting with Goodbye to a River, published in 1960, are unlike any I’ve read – his relaxed use of the language, his clarity and understated but obvious conviction. His profiles of older men who have accepted life’s imperfections and who have remained in awe of the natural world are very moving. His perspectives are presented easily, offhandedly. He is a man who has seen a lot of the good and bad of what humanity is capable of and not lost his sense of respect for our potential for beauty and dignity.
Two parts of the book in particular stick out in my mind – two parts other than the Goodbye to a River excerpts I have read and re-read over the years. One is the death of a young Marine in a military hospital. He just wants to hold the hand of the man in the bed beside him as he dies. The other, The Green Fly, written in 1954, explores civility and gentleness through the character of a Spanish surgeon and fly fisherman. It is a crude, yet beautiful, portrayal of a man in possession of himself despite adversity – a man of grace.
A John Graves Reader traces the development of an important, if largely unknown, American writer.
