Books: Landscape with Ghosts

GOODBYE TO A RIVER (306 pp.)—John Graves—Knopf ($4.50).

Rivers, except for the big navigable ones, are a little out of date. So dam builders in the Western states are turning them into strings of placid lakes, stocked with fish, vacationers and beer cans. Only unregenerate wildlife cranks doubt that progress is served in the interests of flood control, irrigation, electrification and the outboard motor industry. Author John Graves is no crank, and from the evidence of his book, he is something of a fatalist. When he heard that a section of the Brazos River valley in the west Texas scrub country, where he grew up, was soon to be drowned by five dams, Graves did not tilt at turbines but said farewell.

For three weeks in raw November weather he steered a canoe down the Brazos, alone except for an unruly Dachshund pup and chance riverbank acquaintances. He hunted and fished sparingly, thought a good deal, stopped often to poke about in the ruins of a settler’s cabin or the barely traceable midden of an Indian camp. Graves’s record of the journey is an eloquent elegy. While the author makes it clear that he finds one era fascinating and the other dull, he does not make the sentimentalist’s mistake of saying “that Texans were nobler men in the days of the cattle drives than they are in those of “pink Thunderbirds and patio living.”

Graves, a short-story writer who teaches creative writing at Texas Christian University, tells accurately of the echoing loneliness a housebred man feels during the first night’s camp, and then, days later, of the quick resentment stirred by the intrusion of another human being. During the stillnesses, the narrative wanders to the old tales of what Graves calls “the good and bad and beside-the-point” of Brazos history. He tells of one settler, John Davis, who built the first floorboards in any cabin in the Palo Pinto country, and who, when his bride died in childbirth, tore up the floor to make a coffin.

Prowling about farther downriver, Graves finds old wagon ruts leading from a ford to the sandstone foundation of a vanished cabin. A man named Henry Welty, the author recalls, built the cabin and bred children and cattle there successfully until one night in 1863 he was slaughtered and scalped by Comanches. Dammed-up river water will deprive Welty’s ghost of its local habitation, if not its name, and that is part of the point of Graves’s book. Scrub-country legends are worth knowing, as is the country itself, its game and its rivers. So, too, is the solitude replacing the loneliness of the first night’s camp, and that is disappearing from the land as surely as are the old ghosts themselves.