Texas:
Water Everywhere!

June 15^th-16^th, 2018

[Click on any photo to get a higher resolution.
Ask Tim to email you the highest resolution.]

I rarely think of Texas as a land of water - because it really isn't. In the heart of the summer it is a hot and dry place. So, yes, the title of these piece is deceptive - except that it isn't, because while I was there we seemed to spend a lot of time hanging around water!

Every few years I travel down to Texas to visit my brother and his family. An Uncle's prime job is to arrive with little warning and check out how my niece and nephews are growing up, and commiserate with my bother and sister-in-law. I also have a nephew's graduation to approve - which is of course the easiest of task, given my stellar young relative.

But now onto water.

The Brozos River - near Bryan, Texas

My brother Jonathan knows I love canoes, a passion he share, and so on the first day of my Texas visit he took me down a long and lazy river. Jonathan tells me that there are those who complain that the Brozos is not a particularly exciting river; except for one ripple it was without rapids. But what I enjoyed so much about it, is the way the river creates its environment and then ignores the landscape around it.

In general, the bottom lands of the Brozos Valley are vast swaths of cotton fields. On a day like today that means intense sun overhead and dry, dusty land underfoot. In those flats there are only few trees around the occasional farm house - or former homestead, but by enlarge it is a shadeless desert. But the river has carved out its own world.

The river has cut a trench thirty or forty feet deep and has lined it was trees. It is still true that in the middle of the river the sun is as intense as in the cotton fields, to this northerner it seemed as if the oils in my sun screen sizzled, but under the cottonswoods there was shade and promise of something cooler.

We paddled without intensity, stopping to explore gravel bars and talking like brothers do about the family, the world and what is around the next bend. Jonathan, as a geographer, usually has something to say about the lands morphology. I, as a curious student of the world, delight in every meander and every side creek which joins the Brozos. We have a good.

As the day wound down, we circled one last ox-bow, hauled the canoe up the embankment to the road, and headed back to town.

This time the water is as clear as the sky and a great deal of it is being splashed.

Oliver and Lillian raced today - and I am going to let the photographs talk.

Oliver

Lillian

After the intensity of the swim meet Jonathan took me off to a quite place to calm my nerves. We headed northwest out of Navasota, climbing out of the broad Brozos Valley. Our first stop was at Piedmont Springs, a sulphur spring where wealthy Texans "took the waters" in the 1850's. Not much is left of that fashionable resort.

We then continued to Singleton where we stretched our legs, walking down Country Road 177. We walked and talked and dodged in and out of the shade of trees along that dusty lane. Around us the world was quite, perhaps it was too hot for anything to stir; the countryside was enjoying a siesta. "Mad dogs and Englishmen", or at least two guys of European descent.

Where is the line between prairie and savanna? Great stretches of grasslands, with the occasional tree. At one point, at the top of a small rolling hill, before us stretched a pasture with cows in the distance under towering oaks. I, for some reason, was momentarily reminded of the landscapes of John Constable. However, I expect Constable never set his easel up in this sort of heat.

After a few miles we turned an wandered back to the start. The silence, more then the heat, was deafening.