A Bend in The River

70 years ago they labored here. Drive in on Park Road 11, and you see their handiwork -- retaining walls and terraces and culverts made of red stone cut from the hills. 70 years ago they did this and their work still stands.

Perhaps 70 years ago crews of them ate here in this building they built on high ground, with a massive fireplace in the kitchen at one end, and a sheltered breezeway for the mess with open walls facing into the wind this way and out over a bluff on the San Marcos River that way.

Stand here and look at what they built, this red stone building with flaring walls that push out like buttresses, and listen to the voices of the men at the end of the day after working with the rock and the sand in the woods and the swamp and the tangled thicket of the bottom lands. And feel the cool breeze blowing across their hot arms as they sit at the tables.

Last year when the skies opened on Central Texas, the waters came down the river in a flood to find the Gulf. Here they crested ten feet or more above flood stage, washing away the bank and flooding the high ground where no water is meant to be. Today, standing in the woods 20 feet or more above the swift-moving water of the gray-green San Marcos River, we stared up and saw the flotsam and jetsam of that day caught in the branches of the trees several feet above our heads.

The waters must have come crashing down the riverbed, slamming against the bends in the river, tearing away the roots and trees and sand, carving a new path. It must have come smashing down in a frightful torrent. And for a time, it must have looked as if the red stonework of those men was in peril, for their building sits at a bend in the river that tried to move downstream, and the wash-out came within 20 feet or so of the red stone buttresses.

Yet it stands here still.

Did they know? Did they know to build well back from the brink as they knew how to face the prevailing breeze, as they knew how to cut their rock from living hills? Did they know this, too?

No they could not have known. You can never know what water will do. And were it not for a new buttress of trucked-in stone holding up the bank that almost washed away, the red stone building where maybe those men ate and sat in the evening breeze... that red stone building from 70 years ago might not be here anymore.

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Palmetto State Park, Gonzalez TX, May 2003

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