Circling Back: Chronicle of a Texas River Valley

18. The End of the River

18 The End of the River In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A statery pleasure dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" Ifyou look at a map of northern Jasper County made before the dam went in, you can see where the Angelina River entered a great bend about five miles south of the county line. The bend looks remarkably like a three-mile-high horse's head facing eastward. Several creeks coming from the east and southeast run into the horse's faceBeefCreek enters at the forelock, Hog Creek and Willow Branch halfway down the nose, and Mill Creek at the nostrils. Corbett's hogs roamed the country bordered on the south by Mill Creek, on the north by Beef Creek, and on the west by the Angelina River. He could find hogs with his mark in their ears all the way to the headwaters ofHog Creek and beyond. Not a soul lived in this twentymile -square piece ofcountry in the 1950S and 1960s; remoteness from a town and the infertility ofpinewoods sand had driven the few original setders out. Pa Graham's place at the southern end marked the last family farm to be occupied. We hunted the uplands and camped and fished along the river from the horse's forehead to the tip of its nose. Lumber companies owned most of the bottomland and the adjacent uplands, but in those days their land stayed open to the public. Small patches ofhigher elevation bottomland along the river had been settled early on for farming but had long since been abandoned. Beyond the main woods roads, you seldom saw a person. The old Warner place where Willow Branch and Hog Creek ran into the river remained the favorite campsite of my brother and me, and sometimes friends, during our teenage years. G. W. Warner and his wife, Katherine, had lived there and farmed the bottomland field until the need of schooling for their children had pulled them out of the bottom and into the Peachtree community. Loblolly pine saplings had invaded the higher and drier parts of the old field by the time we began camping in and near the small pine-board house they had left behind. Here, with a shelter handy in case it rained, we passed weekends and vacations. Spring intoxicated you on the five-mile walk in, and the blooming of the dogwoods, azaleas, and grancy-gray-beard trees told you it was time for fish to bite. Summers we lounged on snow-white sandbars cleaned annually by floods; we searched the sandy bottom of the river with our toes to find the river mussels. From October through December the bottom hardwoods wore a coat of many changing colors , and we shot gray and fox squirrels and smoked the meat inside a tumbled building with a cypress shingle roof that once had sheltered chickens. In low spots in the bottom, mud stains marked the oak and hickory trunks as high as you could reach and higher. When the river rose from rains, it spread out through the bottom, filling sloughs and potholes . Wood ducks flushed from these in winter. Once I shot a monster writhing in a swarm oftiny fish in a dark and log-filled pool, and when it floated lifeless to the surface, it turned into a two-foot grinnel, a fish I later heard called bowfin. It herds its young and takes them in its mouth in case ofdanger, say the books on fishes. Over large expanses of the bottom woods, you could see a sloughedge heron or an armadillo fifty or a hundred yards in front of you. The hardwoods interlaced their branches overhead, shading out underbrush. Water during flood time helped by drowning some kinds 165 The End ofthe River 166 The End ofthe River ~ 'I.:' . < ..... (. '1'1.. ,'"'':,..4. ~ Angelina near the mouth ofHog Creek in the late 195005, shortly before Rayburn Dam several miles upstream blocked theflooding. oftrees as seedlings. You could race along unhindered to chase a gray squirrel traveling tree-branch runways fifty feet above your head on its way to a hollow tree. In winter, hogs loved to lie on the high places in these bottoms. Here, safe from all but major floods, they found occasional loblolly pines and rooted piles of needles into communal beds. Downwind from these places, you could smell the musky odor unlike anything but hog. On spring and summer nights the barred owls rolled their ghostly calls up and down the river. Bullfrog and raccoon eyes flashed from riverbanks swept by flashlight, and flying squirrels coasted overhead from tree to tree. Daytime dawning echoed to the call ofpileated woodpeckers and a score or more ofother kinds ofbirds. The sounds ofsquirrels chattering in the distance made your heart thump harder. Once I watched a mink patrol a slough bank on a misty morning. ~We called this section ofthe Angelina simply the river. "Going to the river" meant walking north and west from home, or sometimes driving ifdrier weather made the roads passable, to reach the Angelina somewhere on the horse's face. The farthest north along the river that I had walked from home had a tall hill near the river channel. To reach the hill you had to wade the wide and sandy-bottomed Beef Creek just above its mouth. Corbett called the curve ofriver near the hill McGee Bend, after an early family that had settled where the highlands met the bottom. Then came that day in 1955 when I heard Corbett say to Fannie, "I hear they plan to build a dam up on the river. It's supposed to be at McGee Bend." To Corbett, Fannie, and me, "they" signified an anonymous authority beyond our control. Only later did I learn that "they" in this case was the Fort Worth District ofthe U.S. Army Corps ofEngineers. I worried a little at the time but not a lot. McGee Bend seemed far enough outside my favorite haunts along the river that the building of a dam probably would not bring a lot of people to the woods or make much difference to the fishing. Shoot, you probably wouldn't even notice. Next winter, when I heard they'd started work, I took another daylong walk to McGee Bend. I heard the revving of the Caterpillars by the time I crossed Beef Creek. From the hilltop on the other side I could see past leafless trees. The tractors looked like toys in the distant clearing, playing in a yellow gash ofearth. A brochure put together later by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said: When construction of the dam in the piney woods area of East Texas began in 1956, the project was known as "McGee Bend Dam and Reservoir." It was designed to control floods, generate hydroelectric power, and conserve water for municipal, industrial, agricultural , and recreational uses. Project engineers took advantage ofthe great horsehead bend in the river. The dam when finished blocked the river at McGee Bend and shunted water to a spillway in the dam a mile or more to the west. From the spillway, water plunged into a channel cut across the horse's neck. The crafty engineers had bypassed the ten miles or so of river that had formed the horse's head, gaining several feet ofdrop from the 167 The End oftke River 168 The End ofthe River surface of the reservoir to the pool below the spillway and thus a few more kilowatts ofpower from the generators. The Corps ofEngineers brochure said: In 1967 the Fort Worth District, Corps of Engineers, was awarded the Chief of Engineers' Outstanding Engineering Achievement Award for the design and construction ofthe powerhouse and outlet works. Once the levee had been built, our stretch ofthe river turned into a long and shallow lake. Fed at the upper end only by Beef Creek and farther down by Hog Creek and Willow Branch, its rises and current almost stopped. During peak discharge from the dam's spillway, it rose a few feet - from the water backing upstream - and when Beef Creek rose from heavy rains you could sometimes see a little currentjust below the creek's mouth, but for all our purposes the river was no more. By this time I had gone away to school, and it was through vacation 's periodic window that I saw the river change. Bars of sand that had whitened every bend and crook turned to brush and briar tangles. Turtles found no sandy banks on which to lay their eggs, and the river channel clogged with mud that settled from the sluggish water. Fishing was no use; the scarcity of heron and raccoon tracks tried to tell me that before I sat all day without a bite. The bottomlands dried out. Sloughs shrank to wrinkled mud and skeletons ofturtles. Trucks found travel easier in the bottoms, and loggers hauled the bigger trees away. Wind carried loblolly seeds from the occasional pine in the bottomland to all the empty places, and their seedlings in remarkably short order cut the distance you could see in half, and then in half again. Shrubs and hardwood trees intolerant of flooding sprouted up and fought with pines to claim the openings. One vacation I decided to visit Hole-in-the-Rock again, just beyond the river bottom's edge. I'd not been to it in several years but felt an urge to find a sanctuary from the changes. On the way in, I could see that even upland woods had been invaded. Fresh-cut stumps of pines and ruts of logging trucks lay at every hand; I barely recognized the Hog Creek bottomland for all the slash and almost never found the mound of rock. Finally, the monolith loomed among the trees. When I drew near, I saw a heap ofearth and rocks piled near the opening of the little cave. Someone had come with pick and shovel and had excavated it. What had they sought? Around the small clearing the woods seemed suddenly two dimensional, just broken trees on a postcard. I never went back. Shortly after that, I saw a clipping Versie had saved from theJuly 28, 1966, issue of the Jasper News-Boy. A photograph of Corbett's Old Wash Hole on Hog Creek, the holy ground of my youth, splashed across the page. Little-known secret ofJasper County, the paper said. Here's how to find it. ~The Angelina River still flows the twenty miles or so between the dam and the river's confluence with the Neches. But, as the Corps of Engineers intended, it no longer floods high anywhere along this stretch or gets as low as it once did. It falls and rises with the rate of discharge through the spillway but never crests the brush-choked riverbanks to spill out to the flats beyond. If it did, the new homes that stand beside the river and that rim the oxbow lakes would get wet. Now when you cross the river on Highway 63 below the dam, the water nearly always flows dark and clear beneath the bridge. Even when the level rises, mud no longer stains it brown, except on rare occasions when the flooding Neches backs its water upstream from where the Angelina joins it down below. The fertile silt that once in floodtime fed the trees and animals in the bottomland now settles out in the upper reaches of the reservoir. The Corps of Engineers brochure tells us that politicians changed the project's name in 1963. People stopped calling it McGee Bend and began to speak of Sam Rayburn Dam and Reservoir. Mr. Sam's pork. The Eighty-eighth Congress of the United States legislated the change, in honor of "the late House Speaker Sam Rayburn, a champion ofsoil and water conservation." When the river's current flows its swiftest past the Highway 63 bridge and the water nears the level of the boat docks on the bank, the local people say, "They're generatin'." Above the dam, the reservoir swallows up fifty crow-flight miles of river and its bottomland. The length of streambed covered is perhaps a hundred miles, because beneath the lake the old river channel 169 The End ofthe River 170 The End ofthe River snakes back and forth. A map ofTexas shows the lake to cover half of the original length ofthe Angelina River. The reservoir contains a storage capacity offour million acre-feet of water, says the Corps of Engineers brochure. An acre-foot ofwater is one acre, one foot deep. When full, the reservoir covers 143,000 acres, or 225 square miles, nearly one-fifth the area of Rhode Island. The makers ofthe brochure may have known that Texans love superlatives: Rayburn Reservoir is the largest man-made lake within the state, they wrote. As the reservoir filled, the lower parts of the Plum Ridge farm that Corbett and Fannie had bought and worked in their early married years sank beneath the water. A Plum Ridge village sprouted up a mile directly south on another piece of Pleistocene river terrace. When the reservoir filled up, the water stopped at the edge ofthe new settlement. Versie and Boose bought an acre of land in the new Plum Ridge. It bordered on the water of the lake. At first, they commuted from their Peachtree home fifteen miles away to spend time there on weekends . Later on, they built a house. At night from the back side of the yard, you can look across the water and see the lights ofcars crossing Mr. Rayburn's dam. The original owner of the site where the new Plum Ridge proliferated built a brick home with the money he had made from selling land. More people moved into the lakeside community, mostly older folks retired on pensions. Those who continued working in the city built cottages or hauled in mobile homes and came on weekends and holidays. ~Just after dark one Wednesday night in early December of1993, I strolled from the edge of Rayburn Lake through Plum Ridge toward the missionary Baptist church on the outskirts ofthe settlement. Along the way, mobile homes on blocks looked across the street at concrete aprons spread in front ofpink brick walls. In one yard, blinking lights illuminated plastic Santas. "Holy Night" tinkled from an outdoor speaker. The ancient pine-board house ofthe original owner stared darkly. It looked an embarrassed gray in the midst of lights and tinsel. On its porch, in the beam ofa vapor lamp, furniture relaxed in accidental pos- tures. The new house next door resembled a mortuary with wroughtiron posts white against the brick. Two houses down, a dozen golf carts lined a drive. Plum Ridge is ten miles from the nearest course or putting green; perhaps the golf cart salesman hoped to convince those reluctant to buy that even trailer occupants could purchase status. Cart ownership guaranteed one a slot in the Plum Ridge Fourth ofJuly parade. I heard automobile engines crank up, one here, another there. Headlights moved up the street the two hundred yards to the church. Cars and trucks converged beneath yet another vapor light in the balmy evening; people entered to an organ playing "It Came upon a Midnight Clear." A few days later my mother took me to Corbett and Fannie's old homeplace where she had lived her early years. To get there, we climbed the hill beyond the church, turned right where the pavement met a sandy road, then a quarter mile beyond turned back toward the lake where a pile of trimmings from a Plum Ridge yard hid the entrance to a two-rut road. We wound a mile or so downhill among longleaf pines. Suddenly the road leveled out, turned left, and shot straight across the flat beneath overhanging trees. A quarter mile later, it fell through a clay red slot offthe table's edge and ended at a sandy beach beside the water. "Daddy had his cornfield on this flat," my mother said. "He worked about twenty acres here with Old Queenie." Loblolly pines towered overhead, the biggest ones a foot thick at the base. Here and there, sweetgum and blackgum trees fought to reach the sun, and yellow jessamine vines clung to yaupon, dogwood, and blueberry beneath the canopy of pine and gum. Cornfields could be seen only in memory. "Right down there," she pointed into the lake, "stood the old church and the canning plant. The government built the canning factory in the early thirties, as I recall, to give the Plum Ridge people a place to put up food. A grove ofhoUy trees where I used to play stood over there, and down beyond that in the bottom Daddy planted sugarcane and sometimes cotton." We left the road fifty paces from the water's edge and fought our way through vines and briars to the old homesite. Secure once from 171 The End ofthe River 172 The End ofthe River river floods and now from Rayburn Lake, it perched on the flatland's edge, and from the tumbled sandstone chimney you could see the water glimmer through the bushes. "Here's the well we used," Versie said as she pointed out a bricklined hole nearly filled with dirt and leaves. "And Mama had the garden here. She grew everything, even some of that kohlrabi, which I haven't seen much of since. The garden gate hung here, beneath this old pecan." I saw a rusty hinge nailed to a sagging board. The board and hinge clung to a post. With my pocketknife I cut into the post; the orangeyellow wood smelled of longleaf heart. I pushed against it, and it did not budge. It had stood there sixty years, with still no sign ofrot. My mother looked beyond the homesite and through the trees, maybe thinking ofa cornfield and Corbett plowing with Old Queenie. "Every winter late when the corn got low in the crib," she said, "the rats didn't have any place to hide, and we'd have a rat killing. One time the county commissioner came by when we were chasing the rats out of the last of the corn. He had on a pair of high-top leather boots, I guess to protect his legs, but when a rat ran up his boot, he really done ajig." As we left the old homestead and climbed the hill, she said, "Daddy had his cows out in the piney woods. He'd take a little corn out on the highest hill and call and they would come. "When Kirby's people cut the timber in the early thirties, they left hardly any trees on these hills," she continued. "It was all grass. "Not long after that, we moved to Peachtree. But Mama loved it here. She didn't want to leave." ~Now the roar of motors splits the weekend air, and the thumpthump -thump ofspeedboats slapping waves helps justifY the dam. An open sheet of water has replaced the land and all its hidden corners. No longer do the people mingle with the plants and animals in the landscape; they ride across the water and sometimes drop a lure where their depth-finder signifies a likely spot for bass. But nearly everybody seems to like the new way. In boats they ply the lake, and from Winnebagos and trailers at its margin they plug into power outlets. Nearby in the National Forest land surrounding The end ofthe river. The Corps ofEngineers cut and scraped and molded, and the Sam Rayburn Dam and Reservoir tookform where the Angelina used to run. Photo by Carolyn Chambliss. Plum Ridge, a day's walk through the woods can be a lonely one; the only signs of human presence off the roads are the rutted trails blazed by four-wheeled Hondas that are piloted by plastic-coated kids from town. People seem to have become addicted to the power of machines. Their presence is announced by the noise of a gasoline motor, an air conditioner, or a television set. Only on occasion can one see an old man with a paddle maneuvering his boat among the lake-edge snags, and sometimes in the evening shadows, an aging couple walks the road that climbs the hill beyond the church. 173 The End ofthe River ...