ONE ADVANTAGE OF CANOEING Buffalo Bayou in early June is that the water isn’t cold when your canoe tips and you find yourself thrown overboard. My old friend Geoff Winningham and I had put in under the Shepherd Drive bridge, where the bayou makes one of its frequent long, slow arcs. We were just twenty feet below the top of the bank, but we were in a different world. The opposite bank was a steep slope thickly covered with vines and weeds and small, leafy trees hanging out over the water. But our side was flat and sandy, almost like a beach. Up under the bridge someone had laid out flattened cardboard boxes for a mattress, and nearby there were upturned plastic buckets around the cold ashes of a campfire. Geoff and I strapped on life vests, proving for all eternity that we are not as dumb as we look, and pushed off in his aluminum canoe into the bayou.
Geoff is a highly regarded photographer whose work is in the collections of major museums across the United States. He has published often in Texas Monthly and other publications and has six books of photographs to his credit as well. For the past couple of years he has been working on a book of photographs that will trace Buffalo Bayou from its source in Fort Bend County, west of Houston, through the city and down the Houston Ship Channel all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. As it happens, that’s a journey I’d always wanted to take myself, although today’s trip was just a little float from the bridge at Shepherd down to Allen’s Landing.
Houston has never made its peace with Buffalo Bayou despite being stuck with the historical fact that except for the bayou, which allowed ships to sail well inland from Galveston Bay, the city wouldn’t be there at all. While San Antonio has made its river a showplace for the city and Austin has made its river a popular area for recreation and Dallas recently passed bonds to develop its riverfront, Buffalo Bayou remains unused, unwanted, and to the greatest degree possible, unseen.
And, it must be said, the bayou does not make itself easy to love. Its constant twisting makes it seem evasive and sinister, a kindred spirit with the many dangerous snakes that live along its banks and sometimes dangle from tree limbs that jut out over the stream. The water beneath our canoe was dull brown and so thick it seemed to slide off our paddles like mud. Occasionally, a gar would splash, an ugly, prehistoric monster with rows of spiked teeth and hardly any brain. Geoff has seen water puppies, peculiar salamanders two to three feet long that swim in schools. And there are alligators still, perhaps not as many as legend would have, but a few joggers along the trails near the bayou swear one still lives near downtown and sometimes slithers out to snap up a small dog.
When tropical rains descend on Houston, which they can do at any time, the water runs in torrents through the storm drains and into Buffalo Bayou, which can rise more than twenty feet so quickly that it’s dangerous. The bayou overflows its banks, deep as they are, and the water rushes downstream, sweeping everything along with it. From my seat in the canoe, I could see far overhead on the bridges the black watermark left behind by some recent flood. Geoff has seen all sorts of clothes and trash and even an iron bed stranded high in the branches of a tree when the water resided. During normal times the trash accumulates behind tree limbs in the water and in the tiny bays of still water created by the meandering turns the bayou takes. This trash is white—white plastic bottles, white plastic bags, and white plastic boxes and cups. None of this ever disintegrates; not even the ravishing power of a flood, which can sweep away a strong swimmer and rip a tree up by its roots, can break them apart. As Geoff and I paddled along, alone except for an occasional buzzing insect or a turtle on a stump or a splashing gar, these plastic things floating in mucky ponds impressed me as the trashiest trash our civilization produces, bobbing just at the surface, sickly white, like the bellies of dead fish that will never rot.
Despite all that, I was really enjoying myself. I like the edges of things—the edge where the suburbs meet the countryside, the edge where the ocean meets the land. Buffalo Bayou, though it divides Houston in half, is the edge where the city meets raw nature, and on this sunny day raw nature was a very pleasant place to be. When we had loaded the canoe on Geoff’s Suburban, the heat and humidity had us both sweating, but down along the bayou, which I thought would be heavy and even hotter, there was some breeze and a pleasant coolness. We could hear the city—there was a consistent low growl of unseen traffic all around us—but for most of the trip, we couldn’t see it except for the pilings and bridges we passed under. The bayou wasn’t beautiful. The foliage is thick and tangled with big leaves and does not bloom. But it is wild and defiant. In the midst of Houston, we were in another world, one that even had its sentries. Solitary men, camped under the bridges, watched impassively as we passed. They did not respond to a nod or a wave but continued to stare at us, as remote as Buddhas.
Geoff and I talked idly or paddled in silence in the sluggish current as we watched the bayou world pass by. Here and there he shot pictures. I had sunk deeply into a reverie where the bayou was some unknown and untamed tropical river whose very danger lured us forward. Then we made yet another turn, and through a clearing in the trees overhead, we could see