Of Time and a River
REARDON, JOHN
Of Time and a River Goodbye to a River. By John Graves. Knopf. 306 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by John Reardon Assistant Professor of English, Miami University ON THE LAST day of his three-week canoe...
...The author, for the most part, writes well —he is a teacher of creative writing at Texas Christian University— though occasionally one feels the presence of another outdoorsman, Hemingway: "One might make symbols out of those fingers...
...The main flow is contemplative...
...One felt damn good...
...The Federal Government had decided to construct five dams along the upper-middle Brazos, and the river would never be the same again...
...He had no bitterness about the dams...
...The weather turned good, however, the man hardened, and even the dog became brave though never competent...
...There was a run on old Gold-water buttons...
...He set off from Possum Kingdom, in November—too late in the season really, but this was to be a farewell journey...
...But he does admit to an enraged awe discovering that the river, which "all men of that place have known always back into the red dawn of men, will shortly not exist...
...The fight was not against the dams but against the loss of the river as it had always been known, its history, its legend, its whimsical meandering, its meaning to people—and particularly to Graves who had played, hunted and "THERE WERE SOME amusing sidelights to the election...
...A lady out walking her dog and observing a sign thai predicted 'The Kennedys Are Coming,' commented, 'My God, lace curtains in the While House.' In the midst of all this nonsense...
...These are, nonetheless, minor ripples in a good book, by a man, not provincial, who loves his province...
...Graves' work, however, perhaps necessarily, because it was not written in that "rosy preindustrial time," is without the grandeur or at least the grandiose self-assurance of Thoreau, and, incidentally, without his epigrammatic poignancy...
...Up until 2 p.m...
...Graves, too, is no doubt glad he fought against her, and he need ask no pardon for his good book, which is his fight...
...they were even essential to a country alternating between floods and droughts...
...Hidden in the brush, chicadees cursed one kind or another of bad luck in that buzzing code they use, and a redhorse sucker shot four feet off the surface and fell back onto it in a smacking belly-buster...
...Sandpipers flushed, and a kingfisher and a great blue heron...
...There was a great deal to be seen on the river...
...the day afterward the Trotskyite candidate for President had still refused to concede...
...It was a leisurely one, made difficult at first by weather and some softness, the product of civilization and time...
...But these are digressions (which Graves unaccountably apologizes for to a reader he calls Ma'am...
...Graves had certainly not joined that group who proclaim about "dam foolishness" on the rear bumpers of automobiles...
...He relishes their names and their tales, for the region is rich in legend...
...So the author loaded his canoe with, he admits, a good deal more than an ascetic might approve of and a refreshing, cowardly dachshund called simply The Passenger...
...Though the book has something of the charm of Robert Gibblings' river journeys in Britain, coupled with pleasant engravings, here by Russell Water-house, the author recognizes by his frequent mention of Thoreau that he is writing in the tradition of "Saint Henry...
...But one didn't...
...In saying goodbye to his river, Graves was saying goodbye to a good deal, and by recording it so well, perhaps not having to let it go altogether...
...Paradoxically enough, Graves is also fond of occasional excesses: "Wind, big wind, slopping choppy spray at me from the full dirty river, slowing the boat so that the chips and sticks thick in the current floated downstream faster than I could paddle...
...A river is a continuity not only in space but in time...
...But in a time when dam building and all the other necessary forms of mechanical humanitarianism endanger one man's right to the old ways, to tranquillity in time, to loneliness, this little salvage of the upper-middle Brazos is not without meaning...
...Reviewed by John Reardon Assistant Professor of English, Miami University ON THE LAST day of his three-week canoe trip down the Brazos River in Texas in 1957, John Graves could not get an old rebel song, sung to the wrong tune, out of his mind...
...We demand of a book of this kind much of bird and fish and landscape, and Graves can show them fully, for he likes them all...
...And he slips with great ease into stories of other times, of Old Man Charlie Goodnight whom the Indians called Buenas Noches, of Oliver Loving, and Choctaw Tom, and Neighbors, Slaughter, Waggoner, Savage...
...Graves' Brazos, however, is more than a river for camper, hunter or naturalist...
...I'm glad we fought agin her and I only wisht we'd won, And I ain't ast no pardon for anythang I've done...
...fished on it since he was a child...
...Max Lerner solemnly noted that, with the Kennedy ascension, America had come of age...
...What region is not for those who care about it...
...The author describes those who live along its banks now, the poor farmers, the ranchers, those who raise goats for the Japanese mohair market—only those animals will stay healthy on the tough bitter leaves of the oak brush on land which once raised buffalo and antelope and longhorns...
...Goodbye to a River is not a book that rattles its significance, nor does it quite justify the assumption that "one river, seen right, may well be all the rivers that flow to the sea...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 47
