Hornius Emeritus
2,500+ Posts
Has anybody read "Goodbye to a River," by John Graves? Sheesh what an great book!
It was published almost 50 years ago and describes a long canoe trip that Graves took on the Brazos river in Palo Pinto county in a canoe with nobody else except his dachsund puppy. It takes place before the river was damned up but he put his canoe in just below where Possum Kingdom dam is now and stopped at where Lake Whitney dam is today. It's part armchair history, part travelogue, part anecdotal observations about the old Texans in his family, part sorrowful elegy for a river and a way of life that disappeared when the dams were constructed and the bottomlands and ranches submerged and everything changed forever.
I met Mr. Graves a few years ago and told him that I'd given probably 5-6 copies of this book to friends. He graciously signed the one that I was buying and told me that, in retrospect, he thinks that some of the language is a built stilted. But I didn't see it that way at all and told him so. I said that, to me, his prose is spare, understated and laconic ------ much like the river journey that it describes.
Anyway, I gave a copy to my girlfriend a couple of months ago and she finally picked it up and is reading it and so of course I've been picking it up and reading it when she is not and I am simply in awe of it and wondered if any of you are fans.
I think that part of the reason it appeals to me is because its subject ---- the disappearance of a way of life ----- is partly what I try to reflect in my photos of Texas.
It was published almost 50 years ago and describes a long canoe trip that Graves took on the Brazos river in Palo Pinto county in a canoe with nobody else except his dachsund puppy. It takes place before the river was damned up but he put his canoe in just below where Possum Kingdom dam is now and stopped at where Lake Whitney dam is today. It's part armchair history, part travelogue, part anecdotal observations about the old Texans in his family, part sorrowful elegy for a river and a way of life that disappeared when the dams were constructed and the bottomlands and ranches submerged and everything changed forever.
I met Mr. Graves a few years ago and told him that I'd given probably 5-6 copies of this book to friends. He graciously signed the one that I was buying and told me that, in retrospect, he thinks that some of the language is a built stilted. But I didn't see it that way at all and told him so. I said that, to me, his prose is spare, understated and laconic ------ much like the river journey that it describes.
Anyway, I gave a copy to my girlfriend a couple of months ago and she finally picked it up and is reading it and so of course I've been picking it up and reading it when she is not and I am simply in awe of it and wondered if any of you are fans.
I think that part of the reason it appeals to me is because its subject ---- the disappearance of a way of life ----- is partly what I try to reflect in my photos of Texas.
