Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) by Graves John

Author:Graves, John [Graves, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

and a few moronic holes in the sand. Or a million other matters worth the kenning.

I grew up in a city near there—more or less a city, anynow, a kind of spreading imposition on the prairies—that was waked from a dozing cow-town background by a standard boom after the First World War and is still, civic-souled friends tell me, bowling right along. It was a good enough place, not too big then, and a mile or so away from where I lived, along a few side streets and across a boulevard and a golf course, lay woods and pastures and a blessed river valley where the stagnant Trinity writhed beneath big oaks. In retrospect, it seems we spent more time there than we did on pavements, though maybe it’s merely that remembrance of that part is sharper. There were rabbits and squirrels to hunt, and doves and quail and armadillos and foxes and skunks. A few deer ran the woods, and one year, during a drouth to the west, big wolves. Now it’s mostly subdivisions, and even then it lay fallow because it was someone’s real-estate investment. The fact that caretakers were likely to converge on us blaspheming at the sound of a shot or a shout, scattering us to brush, only made the hunting and the fishing a bit saltier. I knew one fellow who kept a permanent camp there in a sumac thicket, with a log squat-down hut and a fireplace and all kinds of food and utensils hidden in tin-lined holes in the ground, and none of the caretakers ever found it. Probably they worried less than we thought; there weren’t many of us.

I had the Brazos, too, and South Texas, where relatives lived, and my adults for the most part were good people who took me along on country expeditions when they could. In terms of the outdoors, I and the others like me weren’t badly cheated as such cheatings go nowadays, but we were cheated nevertheless. We learned quite a lot, but not enough. Instead of learning to move into country, as I think underneath we wanted, we learned mostly how to move onto it in the old crass Anglo-Saxon way, in search of edible or sometimes just mortal quarry. We did a lot of killing, as kids will, and without ever being told that it was our flat duty, if duty exists, to know all there was to know about the creatures we killed.

Hunting and fishing are the old old entry points into nature for men, and not bad ones either, but as standardly practiced these days, for the climactic ejaculation of city tensions, they don’t go very deep. They aren’t thoughtful; they hold themselves too straitly to their purpose. Even for my quail-hunting uncles in South Texas, good men, good friends to me, all smaller birds of hedge and grass were “chee-chees,” vermin, confusers of dogs’ noses.… And if, with kids’ instinctive thrustingness, we picked up a store of knowledge about small things

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