Travels with George, in Search of Ben Hur and Other Meanderings

Making a Dam in Segovia

Making a Dam in Segovia Bob Winship and I are at his ranch in Segovia, Texas, an hour and a half west of San Antonio, standing on the bank above the Johnson Fork of the Llano, which cuts across the corner of his property on its way north to the Colorado. “Guidry [that’s Mike Guidry, out from Houston, who lays claim to one of Winship’s hunters’ cabins] put in a trotline last night, and he said the river’s silted in. But it’s not that.” He points to the rock dam that arches two thirds of the way across to a tapering shoal. “The dam’s got gaps in it.” “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” I start to say to him, then do, because he’s an English teacher too—on occasion only, now that he’s retired. He picks up on the Frost allusion. “Well, two can’t pass abreast through them, but there’re gaps just the same.” “And apparently Nature wants the dam down.” “Maybe, but I don’t,” he says, “and this is my slice of river here, my stones, my time and energy, and I’m going to put it back up. Guidry’s shamed me. A man can take what Nature deals him, until some man shames him into resisting, and repairing.” “Or some woman,” I say. “They’re much better at shaming you into doing things than men are.” I want to remind him of Emerson’s “Hamatreya,” a poem in which Earth mocks boastful men who claim ownership of the soil, but I let it go. Besides, this is river and stones, and maybe they’re different, though I don’t see how; seems to me a river’s even more unclaimable than dirt since it moves away always. Maybe the stones. Maybe you can claim them since they stay pretty much where you put them until a great swell rolls them around. Whatever. Philosophy’s wearisome out here, with so many things to look at and so many things to do. The water’s as clear as newly Windexed glass, polished almost, and slick except where it ripples thin across the stony bottom. 52 Things Literary, More or Less “When it’s like this and that’s most of the time,” Winship is saying as we look out across the wide, flat bed, made that way years ago when he brought in a dragline and reworked the channel, “you’ve got twenty-six gallons a second going under the bridge, maybe thirty when there’s rain upstream.” Doesn’t sound like much, I’m thinking, but then I remember how short a second is and how much twenty-six gallons of water weighs, well over a hundred pounds, and I am impressed. When you try to hold it back, you’re even more impressed. “When they were setting the pilings on the highway overpass downstream back in the fifties, they asked my grandfather to help them out by pumping all he could onto the fields, which he did, and he slowed this stream to a trickle. That was a lot of water to dump, but he did it, with that old onecylinder engine pounding away and the eight-inch take-up pipe humming. It helped, they told him later, and they thanked him.” “And it all came back to the river,” I muse. “Went down to bedrock, which isn’t far, and came right back to the river.” “He slowed it down, don’t you see, which is all they wanted.” But back to the dam. It’s only when you try to tell twenty-six gallons of water a second that the trip it’s making is interfering with something you want to do that you get a notion of exactly what you’re dealing with. You can build and build the dam, but ultimately twenty-six gallons of that water is going to go on downriver every second, come hell or—you know. You may make it pause and reflect, but it will go on down, sure as sin in the inner city. So I say to Winship, “Do you want to get down there and start repairing it now, or do you want to go have another beer and think about it some more?” “Well, it’s late,” he says, “so we’ll do it tomorrow, when we’re fresh—early, before beer call. I want to be able to...