River of Contrasts: The Texas Colorado

Preface

Preface This project began simply enough with short canoe and kayak trips down the Bastrop County section of the Colorado River. The trips were just for fun. My husband, Bill, and I might cast a line out for bass or slip into the current to cool off on hot, bright afternoons. I’d watch birds, trail my hands in the water, duck under the boughs of sweeper trees, and watch the river unspool before me. One warm fall day, on such a pleasure jaunt, someone—I don’t recall who—mentioned the peculiar fact that from November to March, the river’s flow is composed primarily of wastewater from Austin’s sewage treatment plants. I remember recoiling a little from the water dripping off my paddle. As I peered over the side of my kayak into the cool, clear ripples, two thoughts occurred to me. The first was, “This came out of someone’s toilet?” The second was, “Doesn’t the same water flow from the headwaters all the way to the Gulf of Mexico?” It had never occurred to me that a river could be used up, much less recycled through a city’s sewers. When I started my trips exploring the river, I expected the Colorado’s character to remain constant from its headwaters to the Gulf. I was mistaken. The Colorado, I learned, has many faces. As it travels from its inception at the tattered hem of the Great Plains in northwest Texas, it flows (barely, in some places) southeast through multiple regions. The river’s character changes to reflect the geology, land use, climate, and temperament of the regions through which it travels. At times the river seems like the consummate traveler who takes on the dress, customs, and mannerisms of the country he or she visits. As droughts thin the flow into narrow streams and expose the streambeds and lakebeds, the river reveals different faces, and there are other dramatic personality shifts as the waters wildly rise and fall with storms and floods. The Colorado does not have a singular identity, but what it does have is character—deep down, tested Texas character: intractable but loveable, unpredictable but depended upon, and celebrated but often ignored. The Colorado xii Preface is many things to many people but it is never the same river twice—not in time, place, or perception. An angler casting flies for white bass under the limestone cliffs and fern- filled grottos of the river near Bend would not recognize the deep, slow muddy loops in Wharton County as the same body of water. Nor would the sailboat owner enamored of the blue depths and broad expanse of Lake Travis equate those cool waters with the warm, shallow stream of orange liquid above E. V. Spence Reservoir. Lady Bird Lake in the heart of Austin bears little resemblance to the salty, thin trickles at the edge of the Caprock escarpment. The river I discovered has sections of beauty, but it has also been sucked dry, corrupted by dams, polluted by industry, and gouged by hundreds of gravel pits; it has miles of stripped banks that are more akin to trashy suburban streets than a natural ecosystem. The more I learned about the Colorado and the oft-contentious issues that surround its shores and water, the more I wanted to know. I gorged on history, read accounts on fragile, faded pages, followed threads through the tangle of the Internet, pestered experts with my questions, and brazenly wrangled invitations to ranches, homes, preserves, and personal sanctuaries. Along the banks of the Colorado, people welcomed me, shared their stories, their passions, regrets, and concerns. In these people and their lives, I discovered an antidote to the feelings of despair I felt about the desecration and destruction of the river. The many individuals and groups who work, mostly without recognition, to preserve tracts of land both large and small, to restore grasslands, riparian zones, bottomland forests, to lure people onto the river in canoes, and to teach our children about our river have emboldened me to believe in the future. I hope that by meeting these people, readers will be inspired to participate—whether by the simple act of conserving household water, or by working to restore a piece of land, or even by launching a kayak or canoe to splash in the waters of the Colorado River. After many years of ambivalence about where my home lies, I’ve found certainty in over 800 miles...