Headwaters
A Retelling
“I reached some plains so vast, that I did not find their limit anywhere I went, although I traveled over them for more than 300 leagues, with no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea. There was not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.”
The land was hard.
Had it ever been fertile?
Perhaps.
But there was nothing to indicate it now.
Bedrock.
Chaparral.
Cacti.
Dirt.
Sand.
Vegetation that defied the heat.
A near absence of rainfall.
Not quite a desert,
Clearly not an oasis.
Obviously uninhabitable.
Rattlesnakes.
Scorpions.
Lizards of various kinds,
With mean-looking bodies;
Like an arrow with spines.
Poison everywhere.
The land was called Llano Estacado.
And Blackwater Draw.
Out of this ancient, primordial wilderness,
Several routes emerged, leading west and east.
Simple geography took what rain that fell east and south.
A headwaters formed in the valley of the draw
And slowly moved across the expanse
As the elevation gave way to lower ground to the east.
For millennia, the waters cut deeper,
Forming a definite path,
Rising in what would become eastern New Mexico,
Crossing inexorably into western Texas,
And eventually flowing into a confluence with other waters.
There, a river proper formed on the plains of western Texas,
And it would become one of the longest —
If not best known — rivers in the United States.
The Salt Fork and Double Mountain Fork Rivers
Came together in Stonewall County to form
The main channel of a wider, bigger river.
This river, like the land that spawned it, was unyielding,
Ever-changing, never-ending, and mean — dangerous.
Over time, animals, Native Americans, European explorers,
And eventually, the oncoming white settlers,
Would each come upon its swirling currents to discover
Relief and danger simultaneously -
The waters provided relief and quenched their thirst,
But there was peril in any attempt to cross it.
Blood was spilled into the parched, dry ground
And into the devil currents as tribal conflicts flared, calmed,
Abated, and then reignited, over and over, again.
As the 19th century passed into the 20th,
And the ancient battles and the land itself
Were finally brought to heel —
The former more than the latter —
Rough roads were cut into the land along the ancient river.
One of those roads came in from Quanah in the north
Meandering southward, until it turned southeast near
A nondescript and uninhabited crossroads at Stamford.
The road would ultimately join the big river near Waco,
And the two would continue on together symbiotically,
South and east, crossing back and forth over and under one another,
Until both the road and the river terminated at the Gulf.
The river was called the Brazos.
The road was Texas Highway 6.
And so, like many before him
The man traveled slowly and methodically east and southward
Starting at the headwaters, and then down the road
Along the primordial river
Because he had nothing but money and time on his hands.
He was on a mission of sorts,
And the road and the river would take him to his target.
Glen Hines is the author of the Anthology Trilogy of books — Document, Cloudbreak, and Crossroads — and Bring in the Gladiators, Observations From a Former College Football Player Who Was Never Able to Become a Fan, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His forthcoming book, Cathedrals in the Twilight, will be published later this year. His writing has also been featured in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, the Human Development Project, and elsewhere.
