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PALUXY RIVER, TX Gray Water Rafting
Our camp at Tower Falls was amid the spruces above a cañon of the Yellowstone, five or six hundred feet deep. It was a beautiful and impressive situation, -shelter, snugness, even cosiness,- looking over the brink of the awful and terrifying. Our camp on the Paluxy river is amid the live oaks on a bluff about fifty feet high, looking over the brink of the muddy and enervating. We called ahead to reserve the site. My wife negotiated the terms of the stay with a Texas state park employee, who first offered her a "primitive" site. "How primitive?" my wife asked. "Well," said the woman, "y'all are going to have to hack in." "Oh dear," said my wife. "I'd prefer a site where I didn't have to hack my way in." She had visions of swinging a machete to get to camp. "Do you have anything where I don't have to hack?" "We sure do," said the woman. "You can drahv to some of the sahts, but for the rest you have to hack." "Oh, hike," my wife repeated. "I'd prefer to drive." The woman assigned us a "developed" site. We load up the station wagon. I think we're totally overprepared. My son wants to bring books and cards and a chess set. He has to be restrained from bringing a box of Lego. We end up filling half the rear of the wagon with stuff, including a huge cooler full of water and tinned food. I imagine us the scorn of the true campers, as we arrive in a station wagon filled with effete luxuries like clean water. We have been given a "primo" campsite, the park woman assures us. Its proximity to a sheer drop into the Paluxy makes it a coveted location. We drive up the path to the campsites. Suddenly I feel like a tiny mammal entering a den of dinosaurs. Our enormous station wagon is the smallest vehicle in the camp. Every campsite is packed with 4x4s, SUVs, Suburbans, Excursions, Expeditions, camper trucks, camper trailers, RVs, and species of RV that are well beyond RV. These ultrasaurian RVs are bigger than any house I've ever lived in. Just after we park at our primo site, one of these beasts slouches past us, scraping the live oaks on both sides of the path, snapping branches overhead, its wheels in the sand on both shoulders as it straddles the narrow tarmac. After the giant makes its way by, we stare at our campsite. It has been "developed" by placing a picnic table under a tree, a grill on a steel pipe, and another grill on a ring of stones on the ground. Its development has been reversed by one of the grills rotting off its steel pipe, and the other grill being twisted by the fingers of Mighty Joe Young. Its steel rods are splayed obscenely. In the fire ring are old coals, eggshells, diapers, towels, beer cans, and every manner of ordure. There's a water tap with a filthy wedge of soap crammed into its handle. A sign tacked to a tree says "No Gray Water." I puzzle at its meaning. Then I see another that says "Gray Water Dump This Way." It strikes me with horror that gray water is the stuff you treasure up in the bowels of your RV - your cooking and washing water, your own excrement - until it's polite to dump it at an approved location. RV camping entails lugging your own sewer around with you in a tank. I start to pray that the neighboring campers are the sign-obeying type. After we set up our tent and unpack the few things from our cooler, we walk over to the toilets. Everyone else is unloading their RVs. One campsite holds an RV, two pickup trucks, and a Suburban. Evidently several families have converged for a reunion. Or perhaps each member of a single family is very serious about having his or her own personal space. Whatever the reason, these cars hold some intense camping equipment. In the central clearing of their site, they've set up an eight-room tent that spills over the sides of a trailer. A four-room tent is pitched alongside it. Back under some brush, there are three tents the size of ours, pitched there so that some of the group can get away from it all and enjoy a woodsier experience. Alongside every tent are small vehicles: bicycles, trikes, Big Wheels, toy wagons, rollerblades and skateboards. This is a family committed to the wheel. Naked children run around the campsites. The adults are lounging barefoot in shorts and halters. I feel overdressed. I'm wearing stout black dress shoes and extra-thick navy blue cotton socks. "Did you see that woman we just passed?" my wife asks. "She stared at you with horror." "I'm making a fashion statement," I say. "Next week, when everyone starts wearing black shoes and navy socks with shorts, you'll know who started the trend." At every site, people are unloading coolers big enough to hold sides of beef. Some of the coolers contain smaller coolers. Complete lineages of coolers appear on campsite lawns: Mama Cooler, Daddy Cooler, and three little Baby Coolers. People string up hammocks. People use camcorders to tape other people stringing up hammocks. One father and son are wiring their entire camp with little electric lights, as if it were Christmas. I expect them to drag out Santa and Baby Jesus. Furniture ensembles appear from the depths of RVs. There are mesh lawn chairs and lawn sofas and chaise lounges. There are metal frame chairs that fold, and acrylic bucket seats that don't fold, and beanbag chairs. One family is wrestling a redwood sofa off the back of a pickup. There's every variety of cooker, from hibachis and Coleman stoves to propane grills and smokers and fully-fitted gas ranges the size of Volkswagens. One massive item is still in its carton. turkey deep fryer, the box reads. for cookouts, parties, picnics, and emergencies. I wonder what sort of emergency would prompt people to deep-fry a turkey. "Tornado took the house and the 'lectric stove, Ma. Damn good thing we still got this here deep-fryer, this oil, and this frozen turkey." We've brought twelve liters of spring water. I had thought that excessive. Now I see families set out trash cans full of lemonade, food-service fountain coolers of ice tea. No alcohol, however. Signs everywhere prohibit the public consumption or display of open containers of alcoholic beverages. The word "display" intrigues me. In other words, you can drink yourself stocious in the privacy of your RV and stumble out the hatchway to vomit in the woods, but if you set a can of beer on the ground outside, you will be escorted from the premises. We don't mind what you do here in Texas, we just don't want anybody to see you doing it. Everybody's white. We see nobody black or Mexican all day, except once in the bed of the river, when a black church group fords the stream and the white campers part, cowering, to let them pass. The white folks look at the church group as if they are dirtying the stream. The church group is going across the stream to look at dinosaur tracks in the bed of the Paluxy River. The main attraction of this park is a network of dinosaur trackways that weather out of the limestone bed of the river. Millions of years ago, this was a seacoast where dinosaurs of several species squished their way through the muck. Their footprints, filled with a providential stratum of soft clay, fossilized. Now, when the clay washes out, you can see traces of three-toed raptors and stump-limbed sauropods. At several points on the bluff, park rangers have set up hollow pipes along the guardrails to guide visitors' sight toward especially interesting tracks in the streambed below. I look through one such pipe near our camp. I get a neatly framed view of a gigantic half-naked white man in a blue plastic inner tube, wallowing in the shallows. I step back in fright. The only way I'll get to see any dinosaur tracks is if I descend to the bed of the river itself.
Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling . . . To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don't dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, herky-jerky. As we go down the bluff-well, it's more bank than bluff; steep, but there are footholds all the way down, a sort of stairway notched into the dirt by previous descenders-I step gingerly one way and the other, grabbing at saplings. I'm not afraid of falling. I'm afraid of not falling, of twisting around to maintain my balance and wrenching muscles in my back. My wife and son bounce to the bottom and look up at my perilous descent. I have to pause between each step and the next. I wonder if I should call the park authorities and invoke the Americans With Disabilities Act. Reasonable accommodation has not been made here for out-of-shape fortyish men. Finally I reach the riverbed safely. There are tracks. I look at them. My son takes off his shoes and stands in the footsteps of dinosaurs. The immense white guy is still there. He is talking to his father-in-law. "You know what's great about that house we stayed in last summer? It was just like this, you had this river, and you could wade in the river, right, but you know something? Just off his back porch, this old guy had this slide, you know, and it was a hundred-and-sixty feet down to the river. You just got out of bed, and you climbed into that sucker, and you could slide all the way down to the river. We did that every day, and it was great." It sounded great. Not only could you befoul nature, but you could make the maximum racket doing so. I remembered a couple of motorbikers who had passed me some years before while I was walking along the beach on Galveston Island. "Ah-hah!" cried one of them. "This is great!" "South Padre is better," answered the other. "South Padre, you can do this for twenty miles!" They gunned their motors and spun away down the sand. There must be something wrong with me. I don't even want to be here in the first place, but now that I've arrived, I want to be as quiet and inconspicuous as possible. The prevailing ethic, however, seems to be that now that you're out in the wild, you should make as much noise as possible, throw as many objects around as you can, and goddamn it, make an impact.
It is remarkable with what pure satisfaction the traveler in these woods will reach his camping-ground on the eve of a tempestuous night like this, as if he had got to his inn, and, rolling himself in his blanket, stretch himself on his six-feet-by-two bed of dripping fir twigs, with a thin sheet of cotton for roof, snug as a meadow-mouse in its nest. Invariably our best nights were those when it rained, for then we were not troubled with mosquitoes. It's finally too dark out to see. There's no point in putting it off any longer; it's time for bed. We unzip the tent and crawl inside. The tent is five foot ten in diameter, and I am six foot one. I lie on my back with my knees bent and stare at the apex of the tent. My wife is on one side of me, my son on the other. I should feel like Abou Ben Adhem. They fall asleep. I try to extend my legs. My feet touch something squishy. I pull my legs back up. I try to breathe. Not much air gets through the netting of the tent. I try to fall asleep. I mentally run down the Vice Presidents since Alben Barkley. Counting veeps, I think. I chuckle. I am about to lose my mind. It starts to rain. My wife wakes up. The tent, impervious to air, leaks like hell in the presence of water. She struggles outside and straps a plastic tarpaulin over every still-exposed surface of the tent. She comes back in and promptly falls asleep once more. I can't breathe. The tent spikes an internal temperature of about 105 degrees. My knees are pressed to my chest. I can't see or hear anything but the plopping of water onto the tent. I try to calm myself by replaying World Series in my mind, figuring that if I go slowly enough I won't get to 1999 till morning. I am trying to remember whether Cy Young or Bill Dinneen was the hero in 1903 when I start to sweat profusely. I shake and sob. Finally I realize that if I stay in the tent a moment longer, I will plunge into insanity. I get up onto my hands and knees and slap the pockets at the base of the tent till I find my eyeglasses. Then I try to unzip the tent flap. I unzip and zip and unzip again till I find the proper combination. I crawl frantically through the flap. "What are you doing?" asks my wife. "I'm just going for some air," I say. "I may be some time." I stand upright in the rain. It's actually cold outside, despite the heat of the tent. Things are moving on the ground, probably snakes. I thrash my way over to the station wagon, unlock the door and sit in the passenger seat. It is the most blissful moment of my life. I'm safe now; I'm back in my car, where Texans belong. I recline the seat to its fullest extension. It's like a dentist's chair. Never have I been so grateful for extended legroom. Toward morning, I'm still asleep in the extended seat. I'm at an academic conference. The late DeForest Kelley is there too. He invites me to come to his house while I'm in town. He introduces me to the cast of "The Honeymooners," who are sitting together on a sofa. Gleason is not there. Art Carney looks very old, till I remember that he's still alive and the others have died younger, so naturally they look a bit better than he does. Kelley tells me that it's time for lunch. I find the banquet room, pour myself some red wine from a carafe, and fix an elegant salad. I sit at a table. George Hamilton is sitting across from me. He reminds me that I have to chair a session at 12:30. I look up at the clock on the wall. 12:35. "Oh God," I remark. I stop eating and sprint toward the session room, which is in another building. It's the American Museum of National History, and there's a 160-foot slide down to the meeting rooms. I hop into a street luge to make my descent swifter. In one room, cultural studies scholars are screening Gone With the Wind for a thousand-seat audience. My session is Pinocchio. I introduce the film, and Pinocchio walks off the screen toward me. He has a stuffed toy cow and a toy electric milking machine. He milks the cow for a moment and then gestures to me. I'm supposed to milk it too? No, the lad wants to me attach the machine to his knee, and milk him. The audience loves us. And then my son wakes me up by drumming on the car windows. I have to pee. I stumble toward the toilets. The guy on one side of us is a Promise Keeper. He must have promised his family some meat. He'd started grilling meat last night a little before dusk. As night fell, he stood by his grill turning pieces of flesh. The next morning, he is still standing in the same place, with the same utensil in his hand. Has he been standing there all night? Who has been eating all the meat?
A river can have moments of almost microscopic intimacy, when all signals of life are received, and if not understood entirely, respected for their simple and unceasing activity. Sometimes the eye must be laid at the very waterline, the ear on the very earth. My son is eager to go for a walk. There are plenty of beaten trails in the park, but he says we have to go down and walk in the riverbed. The Paluxy is a serious river, over-your-head deep in places. To walk it, you have to climb down the bluff, an exhausting procedure in itself, and then make your way along a bank that is alternately choked with reeds or gummed up with silt. The path along one bank may be walkable for a while, but then suddenly expires. When it does expire, you have to ford the stream and pick up a trail on the other bank. If you are a ten-year-old boy, that's not only no problem, it's the whole appeal of river walking. You walk a ways, getting your feet up to the ankles in mud, and then you splash a ways across the river, and walk a ways more. When you are, by contrast, a 41-year-old college professor whose main source of exercise is punching elevator buttons, it doesn't seem so joyful. Plus, I'm not only out of shape, I'm neurotic. These are my good shoes, they are my only shoes, and I have to go into the office on Monday wearing them even if they're gray with Paluxy mud. But you can't ford a river with your dress shoes on. So off they come. I immediately regret it, because when I step into water that is icy even in a Texas July, I remember why I've worn these stout dress shoes to begin with. The pebbly bottom of the stream features stones of fiendish sharpness. When they're flat or rounded instead, they are covered with moss of a consistency somewhere between K-Y jelly and shredded wheat that's been left to sit in milk overnight. One false move on these mossy boulders and you slip backwards to crack an elbow or a skull on one of their sharper cousins. I raise my eyes to take stock of the situation. There seem to be still a hundred yards of river to cross. The next rock is as forbidding as the Hillary Step. My wife and son prance on the farther bank as they wait for me. I should keep moving, keep progressing, but the fact of the matter is that it's sometimes better to stand still lest you fall. And then, all of a sudden, the other bank, safety, warmth to my feet, the process of squeezing my feet into socks and my socks into shoes. And it's over. Till a quarter-mile down the bank we have to ford the other way again.
An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one's attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds. A few weeks later, we head out to West Texas. This time, no camping for me. I've booked a hotel room. My wife and son, though, pick out a "primitive" site on the rim of Caprock Canyon, where they stake their tent into red clay flecked with salt and gypsum. It's in the nineties. The only shade is provided by the Earth itself, when the sun moves to the other side of it. They hang bags of fruit from a mesquite tree to protect it - well, it can't be from bears; probably to protect it from ravenous armadillos. After they've settled in, we hike down a crumbly mudstone bank into an arroyo. Much better than the Paluxy for my shoes, this dry river leads like a pleasant trail across the canyonlands, linking back to the main road at a point a mile or so away, or so the map insists. We walk for ten minutes. The arroyo gets deeper. We walk another ten. The banks loom above us like walls. It's shady in here; between the walls, it's curiously like a street in Manhattan, only without the guys in power suits and yellow ties. There's no one here at all, in any kind of suit. We've brought no water. We plod along. I'm determined to cause no fuss, this time. The others begin to worry, just a little. "Let me see that map. Are you sure the road crosses the river? What scale is this drawn to?" There's no noise at all, no animals or birds, nothing but shade and red walls and a slice of blue sky above. To go back or go forward? And what if the riverbed has forked and we've lost our way back? Are we going to perish of thirst, twenty minutes' walk from our station wagon? I start to hum a song: "Keep a movin', Dan, you're a devil not a manŠ" It doesn't go over real well. But then, providentially, at twice the distance indicated by the map, we do cross a road, suddenly ascending an overgrown bank to come out on a merry strip of blacktop where RVs lumber. I relax. I've been humbled by the awesome power of nature and still have a rest area with a water fountain and a chemical toilet at the end of the experience. Thank God for America. As night falls, my wife and son prepare to drive me to a town called Quitaque, about five miles from the canyon. We cross what appears to be a tree branch in the road; on closer inspection, it turns out to be a rattlesnake. We stop at the park exit and tell the ranger we've seen a rattler in the road. "Oh, I've taken about six of them out of the RV park this week," he sighs. "Rattlesnakes are native here. This is their home. People come out, they wander around the tall grass without shoes, then they wonder why they've got to be careflighted out to Amarillo with snakebite." We ask how to avoid the snakes. "They'll avoid you," he explains. "Snakes are scared of people." My wife and son sigh in relief. "Just one thing, though," says the ranger. "You did zip up your tent before you drove out, right?" They nod at him. They look at each other. We leave quickly and return to zip up the tent. Finally I get to Quitaque, where I'll be staying in the town's best hotel. I am the only guest. After checking in, I take a walk around Quitaque. It consists of a streetful of empty shopfronts. The shopfronts contain displays of life in Quitaque, circa 1945, when the town had a newspaper and a department store, and was welcoming its boys back from the war. The children of Quitaque are scattered to the winds now; their descendants live in Amarillo, Fort Worth, Paramus, Redmond. The only surviving businesses are an Allsup's convenience store and the hotel, and the term "surviving" is generous, applied to this hotel. The proprietor shows me the stairs and then melts into her office like a wraith. I get into bed and start reading Proust. Quitaque is way, way out beyond the côté de Méséglise, and there isn't an aubepine in sight. As I lie there half-dreaming of a paysanne to embrace, I feel a warm breeze cutting through the air-conditioning. It lifts a curtain along the wall. I get out of bed and see that this curtain, which I thought was a wall hanging, actually covers a big opening in the wall, a few feet away from the locked room door. I walk through the curtain and I'm back in the hallway. My room, I discover, has only the barest pretense of a wall. I've gone indoors only to sleep, once again, in the open air.
Nature will not be conquered, but gives herself freely to her true lover-to him who revels with her, bathes in her seas, sails her rivers, camps in her woods, and, with no mercenary ends, accepts all. The next day, my son decides he wants to go fishing. In search of fish, we drive up into the Texas Panhandle, to a lake that's been built by damming a sandstone canyon. There are no natural lakes in Texas, and indeed there shouldn't be. The whole state is a slow slope into the Gulf of Mexico. Untouched by Pleistocene glaciers, Texas doesn't feature the little pit-and-kettle ponds of Minnesota or the mountain pools of New England. Instead we have a fan of rivers that drain across the state like lines on the forehead of a chronic worrier. To provide water for the cities that shouldn't be here because the state is in strict point of fact uninhabitable, these rivers have been dammed. The resulting reservoirs are called "lakes" in Texas parlance and heavily used for recreation, which means that today's drinking water was yesterday's powerboat bilge. To get to our lake, we drive over dirt roads to the "marina," which is a trailer parked in a gravel lot. The place is packed. Families, couples, guys out for a weekend of fishing are clamoring for camping passes. We buy a day pass. We buy bait. A girl whose leg is in a full cast hobbles over to a half-sized fridge and pulls out a small tub marked "Chicken Livers: Unfit for Human Consumption." She shows us on a map how to get to the honey holes of the lake. We set off over pocked rock roads. We know we're getting closer to the lake when we hear the powerboats droning. Finally we are up on the crest of a bluff and we see the boats, almost as big as the lake itself, churning it round and round like gigantic Mixmasters. Ski counterclockwise, announces a sign. We park at the top of an abandoned boat ramp and look around. This lake really shouldn't be here. It is, to be brutally honest, in the middle of a desert. On the sandy rim of the bluff, nothing grows but mesquite and prickly pears. It's 92 degrees. All around the top of the bluff, people have pitched camp right out in the open, using every available inch that is neither road nor actually covered with cactus. Shade is unthinkable. They've put their tents in full sunlight, as if that were the pleasantest recreational idea that could possibly occur to them. The boat ramp is littered with pop cans, rusted car parts, and discarded fishing lures. I keep my shoes on this time. At the bottom of the ramp there's about twenty square yards of waterfront. The water is crammed with large people floating in colorful plastic seahorses. Three or four fishermen stand on the sand, casting out over the seahorse people, their lures flapping back into the crowd, who dodge as they cast. A dog snarls at us and tries to get near enough to bite, but he's held back by a wire weighed down underneath a boulder. "Set still, Rusty," says its owner. "I promise he won't hurt you," he says to us. He runs over and holds Rusty still. Rusty tries to bite him. A kid sitting under an umbrella waves at me. "I gossome fish," he calls. I walk over. "Lemme see," I say. He opens a bait bucket. A few disabled minnows float inside, gulping and thrashing. "You sure do have some fish," I tell the boy. Sawn-off tin cans are everywhere, pressed into service as makeshift ashtrays. Everyone except the fish boy is smoking. A few yards offshore is the roof of a sunken sheetsteel utility shed. We look around for a place to cast from, but there isn't even enough room to set down our tub of chicken livers. I take a deep breath, and I ask myself, where do you come from if a place like this is where you come to for a holiday? How completely miserable does your life have to be in order for this to seem a refreshing alternative? Possibly these campers are all on weekend furlough from death row in Huntsville. That would be the only way to explain it. We drive back toward Caprock Canyon. The lake has done one salutary thing for me: it's made me appreciate Quitaque. After they drop me off, I go straight to the Allsup's, buy a big box of Pop-Tarts and a red pop, and settle in for an evening of Proust. You can't get this in Paris. 
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