The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories by Bryan Woolley Page A

there. He also wrote Goodbye to a River, which I think is the best Texas book of this century. John hates interviews and hemmed and hawed when I asked him. He lately had turned down quite a few people who wanted to write about him, he said. If he let me, somebody might get mad. Let him think about it and call him back in a few days, he said. When I did, he said, “Come on out. I’ll talk to you.”

    O N A FALL AFTERNOON 35 YEARS AGO , J OHN G RAVES SHOVED A CANOE containing a shotgun, a couple of fishing rods, some camping gear and a dachshund puppy into the Brazos River, then climbed aboard and began paddling south. The day was raw and windy, one of those gray, cut-to-the-bone spells that North Texas can get in November, not the crisp, golden day that he had hoped for the beginning of his journey.
    He planned to float from Possum Kingdom Dam, where he had put in, to a spot near Glen Rose, not far above Lake Whitney. As the crow flies, the distance between the two points is only about 60 miles, but as the river flows, twisting like a snake on a hot rock, it’s close to 175.
    From childhood John had fished and hunted along the Brazos and listened to the stories of what had happened along its banks in the days when the Comanches, who called themselves “The People,” held this part of Texas in terror. This stream, which the Spaniards had named “The Arms of God,” had become a part of him.
    Although he didn’t know it yet, he was about to become a part of the river, too. In years to come, when people would think of the river, they would think of John, and when they would think of John, they would think of the Brazos. For this journey was different from the other times that he had spent on the river.
    The government had plans to build five new dams between Possum Kingdom and Whitney, turning the part of the Brazos where John was into a string of lakes. So his journey, he thought, would be his last along this beautiful and familiar stretch before it was drowned in its own waters. It would be a farewell journey. He would see the river one last time and say goodbye to it.
    John, who was 37 that year, had been away from the Brazos for a long time, living in foreign places. He only recently had returned to Texas, and was revisiting old haunts, trying to regain the familiarness of the things that had gone into the making of him. That was most of the reason for the journey. He hadn’t yet thought that he would write a book.
    â€œI had a little scribble notebook,” he says. “I would sit down in the evening and write up the day. I was thinking at the time that it would make a good magazine article, and my agent had gotten a commitment and some money from Sports Illustrated.”
    When the three-week-long journey was finished and the article written, Sports Illustrated rejected it. “It wasn’t sporty enough for them,” John says. Holiday magazine published it instead. By the time he had finished writing it, John saw that he had put much more into his notebook than the mere facts of his trip. “I became aware,” he says, “that I had the material to make a book.”
    He wrote it and named it Goodbye to a River . “In a way, I was trying to explain Texas to myself by writing it,” he says. “I was redefining home things. And I liked it. But my experience at that point was only a failed novel or two. I didn’t have any great euphoria about its prospects.”
    It did better than John expected. The critics received it warmly. It was nominated for the National Book Award. And although it lost to William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , one of the most popular nonfiction works of the 1960s, John’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, has kept its hardcover edition of Goodbye to a River in print for 32 years now, and Gulf Publishing’s paperback edition remains one of the most popular items on the bookstores’ Texana