At Texas Ranches, we celebrate Texas stories and voices—old and new, established and challenging. One of our favorites that of John Graves, a true Texan whose love of the land and reverence for its natural rhythms echo through every page of his classic Goodbye to a River. Part memoir, part history, part quiet meditation, the book recounts a solo canoe trip down the Brazos River as Graves reflects on vanishing wild places, fading traditions, and what it means to be shaped by the land you love. It’s a timeless reminder that in Texas, the story of the river is the story of us.

That afternoon I got only to Eagle Creek, still probing courageously against weather’s ire. Rounded gray stone cliffs stand beside the creek mouth; in the river itself massive, split-away, rhombic blocks twist and slow the green current of a long pool. Big oaks gone red, and yellowed ashes rose precariously from slanted alluvial soil beneath the cliffs, piles of that against their boles in prophecy of their fate: it is on the outside tip of a bend, and in those places the river lays down rich sediment for maybe centuries and then in a fit of angry spate cuts under it and carries it away, trees and all…A canyon wren was singing there; one always is. They love high rocks above water, and the wild walling song itself is like a cascade.

For want of other level ground, I made camp on a high yellow sand bank under the oaks and the cliff and built a big drift-hardwood fire against a boulder to drive back the chill damp and to dry my wet feet a little. Before dark I crossed the creek to look for the stones of a little circular Indian rock shelter I remembered there but couldn’t find them; in their place was a great hump of gelatinous silt piled up by the springtime floods.

I ate creamed chipped beef on the last of my store of bread and drank coffee laced with whisky and honey and slept hard despite an old charley horse’s digging under my shoulder, the pup an established bedfellow now. What old man had it been somewhere in the books, who’d slept with a dog to cure his aches? I couldn’t remember. The passenger cured none of mine. In the morning it was raining again, with thunder. I waited it out in the tent, and when it had stopped, I ate, washed, and loaded, cursing sore hands and slick riverside mud and the cumbersome boxes and bags, though still without knowing how I'd have managed with less gear at that time of year or how, having what I had, I could handle it more easily. In summer or a drouthy fall, when the river is low and you know it is going to stay that way, you can camp on low bars almost beside the boat and can reduce lifting and staggering and sliding to a minimum, but not with the big water running and two-foot rises and falls commonplace.

The big water scooted us on down—I know the “us” is an anthropomorphism, but in the absence of other company a dog makes a plural, and not a bad one either—and through a fine, pounding rapids above the Boy Scout Ranch at Kyle Mountain. I wanted to go there as a kid, but for some reason never made it. Maybe it was the smoking; most of us started when we were thirteen or fourteen and felt morally obliged to give up Scouting with its insistence on physical rectitude.