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

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    For many of its readers, Goodbye to a River defines Texas, as writing it redefined John’s “home things” for him after his absence. It says more eloquently and truly than any other single piece of writing what Texas was and is and is becoming. It reveals—by describing the bitter toil and the bloody conflict and the unforgiving land in which it was created—the Texan soul, without adornment. There isn’t a speck of chauvinistic hokum or romantic baloney in his book.
    Neither is it parochial or provincial, for it also is about The World and Nature and Life in the way that great literature everywhere illumines these things—by incarnating them in such small, specific creatures as a man and a dog floating down a river.
    The journey wasn’t particularly dramatic or exciting. Neither men nor beasts nor the elements ever threatened John’s safety. He made and broke camp. He caught fish and shot ducks and squirrels and cooked and ate them. He wrote in his notebook and read the books he had brought with him. He had brief, uneventful encounters with other people, but most of the time he was alone.
    â€œWe don’t know much about solitude these days, nor do we want to,” he would write in his book. “A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness, and that to seek it is perversion. Maybe so. Man is a colonial creature and owes most of his good fortune to his ability to stand his fellows’ feet on his corns and the musk of their armpits in his nostrils. Company comforts him; those around him share his dreams and bear the slings and arrows with him….
    â€œBut there have always been some of the others, the willful loners. And out alone for a time yourself, you have some illusion of knowing why they are as they are. You hear the big inhuman pulse they listen for, by themselves, and you know their shy nausea around men and the relief of escape. Or you think you do….”
    We all yearn for escape and aloneness sometimes, and floating down a river, living off the land and listening to the water and the birds, seems a beautiful thing to do with solitude. Especially when the river is John Graves’ Brazos, which in his book isn’t just a string of water, but a history as long as the river itself, full of such stone-hard characters as Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker, Bose Ikard, Martha Sherman, Big Foot Wallace and all the blood-loving Comanches and flinty Anglo-Celts who strove against each other.
    It was of these and their world—gone now, but not so long gone—that John was thinking while he paddled. “No end, no end to the stories…” he would write. His thoughts were the long and deep thoughts of one who is alone but not lonely. And a reason so many love his book is that we imagine that if we were drifting down the Brazos in a canoe, John’s thoughts are the thoughts we would have.
    Goodbye to a River often is called a classic. When this is done in John’s presence, he smiles, pleased that you think so, then says: “We won’t know that for a hundred years.”
    â€œIn the simpler times I knew when growing up in Fort Worth, even we town youngsters had some almost unpeopled pieces of countryside, in the Trinity West Fork bottomlands and elsewhere, that were ours in exchange for a bit of legwork and a degree of sang froid toward the question of trespass,” John has written in Self-Portrait, with Birds , an autobiographical essay. “Later on there were Depression country jobs in summer for a dollar a day and keep—wheat harvest, fence-building and so on—and I can’t remember a time when wild live things weren’t a part of consciousness and when knowing something about them didn’t matter.”
    John’s father ran a men’s clothing store in Fort Worth, but had grown up in Cuero, in South Texas, wonderful quail country. John grew up hunting