River of Contrasts: The Texas Colorado

Foreword

Foreword Although I grew up on the Brazos, the Colorado is my river now. I have the good fortune of living just a few hundred feet from Lady Bird Lake, the most downstream of the Highland Lakes on the Colorado River, named for one of our most beloved first ladies. The lake sits in the heart of the Texas capital, and I am on it in one way or another every weekend. I have a Labrador retriever and a Jack Russell terrier who love to swim. I take them down to Red Bud Isle below the dam that forms Lake Austin where they would gladly jump into the lake for hours to retrieve their training dummies. Or maybe we go to the hike and bike trail along the lake in downtown Austin with thousands of other walkers, runners, cyclists, and dogs. Sometimes I rent a rowing scull from one of the docks or paddle my own canoe past the mouth of the creek that is fed by fabled Barton Springs and brings clear, cool water into the lake. Lady Bird Lake is the result of a great force of nature. The Colorado’s reaches here in Central Texas have been called “Flash Flood Alley” because of the frequency of intense, often violent storms. About every decade we get a big one, including a storm in 1915 that killed thirty-five people along Waller Creek in Austin. According to the Austin American Statesman: “Whole sections of the city were submerged for hours. Houses were washed away, cows, horses, chickens, and other fowl careened down the Shoal and Waller Creeks to join the human corpses that had gone swirling before them to the bosom of the Colorado.” In the face of these recurring disasters and following two unsuccessful attempts to tame the river, six reservoirs known as the Highland Lakes were built in the Hill Country in the 1930s and, 40s upstream of Austin to stem the floods. Lady Bird Lake in 1960 was the seventh and last. The Highland Lakes also brought the promise of hydroelectric power to the Hill Country, which, prior to World War II, was one of the poorest regions of the United States. Overgrazing by cattle, sheep, and goats in less than a century had eroded the soil of this once-lush savannah, destroying its productivity x Foreword and exhausting the area’s economy. From its bleak prospects and demoralized citizens arose one of the nation’s most effective politicians, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson grew up on the Pedernales, a tributary of the Colorado, and graduated in 1930 from Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College (now Texas State University and the sponsor of the series this book joins, River Books). After teaching for a while in South Texas, the young politician joined the New Deal and walked door-to-door in the Hill Country, talking often-destitute people into signing up for electric power produced by the Lower Colorado River Authority, which was modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority on another of America’s great rivers. Today, the fate of the longest river that begins and ends in Texas is largely in the hands of Austin politicians who will decide whether, after all the claims are made on its waters, some of the vital resource it carries will stay in the river and flow into Matagorda Bay for the benefit of the coastal environment that depends on it. The efforts to protect the Colorado are aided by the art and eloquence of Margie Crisp in these pages, which capture her passion for the river she also calls her own, and by the commitment and financial support of the Trull Foundation of Palacios, Texas, where the great river meets salt water. Thanks to them and many others who have fought for the Colorado through the years, folks like me will continue to have the privilege of walking along its banks and plying its waters. I’m grateful to them for my river. —Andrew Sansom River Books General Editor ...