Launching onto the Neches River
From the July edition of County Line Magazine
Everybody’s always gushing about the Neches.
The river flows through the heart of East Texas, rising in Van Zandt County. The Texas Observer calls it a “superior ecological panorama.” Texas Monthly reports that canoeing it is like “drifting through a sun-dappled dream.”
Whatever those claims mean, the Neches’ sister river, the Sabine, has been getting no such love. When someone writes, “the Neches stands alone as East Texas’ last remaining wild river,” it seems to imply the Sabine is tamer and therefore inferior.
Paddling the Neches
This is no good for me, because I am writing a book about the Sabine. Wanting to see the Neches for myself and maybe nursing a twinge of envy — as though my river were lost in the shadow of a more popular sibling — I invited myself to a recent canoe trip with conservationists and members of the media.
They let me join their flotilla on a hazy afternoon in May.
We launched beside a wooden bridge in the Davy Crockett National Forest. The air was warm and the water was dark and cool. Sharing my canoe was Melissa Hayes, a newspaper reporter from the nearby town of Lufkin. She had never paddled before and seemed blissfully unaware of the logjams and other hazards that arise on even lazy rivers like the Neches.
I, on the other hand, had spent the previous weeks poring over newspaper accounts of drowning victims in the Sabine. The Sabine and Neches are strikingly similar. Before long, my partner’s cheer was clashing with my panic.
We had just gotten used to our paddles when the calm, quiet flow rolled into a churning current. Up ahead, a standing log and a mass of limbs blocked the left side of the river. A half-submerged, fallen tree blocked the right. The gap in between was maybe three feet.
If we aimed just right, we could squeeze through. Unfortunately, we hadn’t quite mastered the art of precise navigation.
The canoe slammed straight into the log. The log snagged our bow, and the current spun us around. The rush of water pinned the canoe sideways against the fallen tree, and the force threatened to push us over.
A borrowed, expensive camera dangled around my neck. A wrong move, and the camera and I — not to mention Miss Chipper in the front seat — would be tossed in the water. I paddled furiously against the flow, and to my relief the canoe slowly pivoted into realignment with the channel.
“Now push off the log,” I said.
Hayes jammed the wood with her paddle, dislodging the front of the canoe. Freed, we shot through the gap and were once again in the clear.
“You OK back there?” she asked, as sunny as ever.
“My heart is pounding,” I said. “I thought we were about to get wet.”
If the water had been any rougher, we might have. Later, she confided that she wasn’t much of a swimmer.
“My dad told me if I fell in, the river would be narrow enough to make it to one side or the other,” she said.
I looked at the banks. On both sides, the ledges towered above sheer walls of red clay.
“What would you do once you got over there?” I asked.
“Good point,” she laughed, as though it were a hypothetical question and not a pressing concern.
Pine tree roots protruded from the walls. They looked sturdy enough. The best I could figure, if I could swim to the bank then I’d try to grab hold of a root and hoist myself up. Fat chance. I vowed to do my best to stay in the canoe and out of the water.
Here, the Neches reminded me very much of my own river, especially where the Sabine forms the boundary between Smith and Wood counties. Along both rivers’ upper regions, the same oaks and other hardwoods cling to the same steep banks. The trees shade both rivers as their branches stretch and arc toward the open sun.
More than anything, the same yellow-brown water flows through the Sabine and the Neches, sending writers and journalists scuttling for hyperbole like “rich mocha” or “tea-stained.” Those descriptions are not close to accurate, but I’m too polite to say what the water most closely resembles.
If the two rivers are so similar, what makes the Neches so much better than the Sabine?
The Neches is more popular right now, I think, because it has been facing more immediate threats. People are less likely to take something for granted if they realize it might be taken away from them.
Until recently, the city of Dallas and Texas Water Development Board had been hoping to build a massive reservoir on the Neches, flooding thousands of acres in Anderson and Cherokee counties. The U.S. Supreme Court “pulled the plug” on the reservoir plans in February.
Now conservation groups are angling to have the Neches designated a National Wild and Scenic River. The Texas Conservation Alliance and Friends of the Neches River say the designation would protect the river from future reservoirs and encourage tourism in the region.
The Texas Forestry Association, which represents forest landowners, loggers and manufacturers of forest products, and the Texas Farm Bureau, which represents farmers, ranchers and rural families, oppose the wild and scenic designation. They say it would limit economic growth and lead to more federal regulation. The conservation alliance counters that federal protections would allow most development to continue, and landowners would keep their property.
A few weeks after we canoed the Neches, the same nine-mile stretch was named a state paddling trail. The trip ends at State Highway 7, about 15 miles west of Lufkin.
On the afternoon that I paddled it, we eventually learned to maneuver through and around the logjams. For long spells, the tranquility of the forest and the water’s gentle flow lulled us into quiet reflection and mind-clearing ease. Time drifted by as slow as an East Texas river, and we slowed to its rhythm.
Only a logjam could rouse us from our reverie.