The Man Who Loved the Bayou
Kathryn Jones
June 18, 2023
“There’s something about a river
that sets a man to dreaming,” said the man
who found his soulmate in Buffalo Bayou.
Don’s oar stroked the water, spinning tiny whirlpools.
He pointed out a Ruby-spotted Damselfly clinging
to a bush. Floods had left bits of plastic bags
in the tops of trees. They looked transformed,
translucent like the damselfly’s delicate wings.
We floated by homeless men living under a bridge,
the manicured grounds of River Oaks Country Club,
the woodlands of Memorial Park, and Rainbow Lodge,
where people dined on rainbow trout with lump crab
at the top of terraced steps. A red-slider turtle sunned
on the bank while a Great Blue Heron waded in shallows.
Bubbles from a submerged alligator floated to the surface.
“Oh, there you are,” Don said as if speaking to a friend.
Concrete pylons of Loop 610 loomed overhead;
we floated between them. Serenity can exist in
the most unlikely places, even under Houston’s freeways.
Don had paddled on waterways around the world,
but this one belonged to him. He worked hard to preserve
the bayou, taking people on canoe trips to show its natural beauty.
Everybody is trying to get away to someplace, he told me,
and what they’re trying to get away to is right here.
Don died several years ago. Friends sprinkled his ashes
along Buffalo Bayou so he can paddle on without a canoe.
I treasure the long conversation we had about Texas rivers
and why they must be saved from pollution, development,
and especially, apathy. “We need rivers,” Don said.
“The rivers need us.” Whenever I drive over a bridge now
and glimpse a ribbon of water, I wonder who is down there,
floating, fishing, dreaming while damselflies alight on delicate wings.
Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas. Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.
