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1 Introduction The Neches River rises in Van Zandt County in Northeast Texas. It meanders 416 miles to Sabine Lake and then to the Gulf of Mexico, discharging six million acre-feet of water per year. It has its beginning in a small lake called Rhine Lake and is interrupted only twice by the dams of Lakes Palestine and Steinhagen (locally called Dam B). The river was called Snow River by the many Indians who lived along it because the wide expanses of sandbars reminded them of the snows that covered the land on rare occasion. Later, it was named Neches by the Spaniard, Alonso de León, after one of the tribes that lived nearby. The old name was recognized in 1874 when the newly organized Masonic Organization named their chapter Snow River Lodge. The French in Louisiana were finding trapping and trading with the Indians of Texas a lucrative business, so the Spanish in Mexico sent de León on five separate expeditions into Texas preparatory to establishing mission colonies and thereby preventing a takeover. On the fifth expedition, in 1690, he established a mission, San Francisco de los Tejas, named for the Tejas Indians, one of the Hasanai Confederacy of tribes. (“Tejas” means friendly.) Eventually, the state became known by that name, but it is spelled “Texas” today. The river has always been important to these who live in its watershed, whether Indian, early settler, or modern man. It offered a fast, easy means of travel during days when the overland traveler would flounder in deep sand one moment and in deep mud the next, or fight his way through miles of dense thicket or swamp. The inhabitants of the Neches River watershed today Introduction 2 Introduction are the descendents of the pioneers who felt the oppressive pressure of expanding population, increasing industrialization, and the regimentation of society in the East, and kept moving westward ahead of it. Now, there is no place left to escape to. Humanity has moved westward until it has gathered on the Pacific Ocean shores of California like the lemmings in the Arctic. When population levels reach numbers over and above what the environment can sustain, all lemmings make a massive, blind migratory rush to the sea where they plunge in and drown by the millions. My father loved the woods and river and spent his boyhood there, but time and the necessity of supporting a family took him first to the sawmills of Southeast Texas and then to the petrochemical megalopolis on the Gulf Coast. Daddy always said that his greatest desire was to retire and become a river rat. In my younger days, I deplored Daddy’s lack of ambition and appreciation of a “better” life, but as time has passed and I often grow weary and disillusioned with the world and everybody in it, I finally understand. Oh, the peace and rest! The glory of waking in the morning and seeing the sun rise over the water and watching the last, glittering speckles of fire through the branches as it sets behind the forest horizon! To be awakened by the singing birds and lulled to sleep by the calls of owls and the sound of the river swishing past snags! In short, to live the life of a river rat. Paradise regained! A preview of Heaven! In this day and age, it is almost impossible to find an acre of land that has not known the destructive, deforming, and defiling hand of man. The Neches River, by its floods and shifting, filling and cutting, his erased all evidence that it was once an important route of commerce and transportation, so one can still see there a bit of this world as God made it, and find refuge as Daddy did and as I have done. Why am I doing this? Why would a woman over sixty decide to leave family, a comfortable home, television, automobile, rich food and all the other amenities of the good life and take off down a river alone where one could go for days without seeing or hearing anyone or anything except the sights and sounds of nature, or a few river rats with whom to pass the time of day and perhaps share a pot of coffee. It could even be at the risk of my own life. When I try to justify this voyage down the Neches, or to explain why I am doing it, I’m not sure myself what drives...

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