A Sheltered Cove

sabine river waterfall

My friend Buddy took this picture of me on the Sabine River in 2009. I hadn’t seen it in years, but I found it yesterday when going through files on my old computer. Here’s the story behind the photo—one of the weirder episodes from my first book, Running the River: Secrets of the Sabine.

About a mile from the boat ramp, we came upon a waterfall gurgling over a rocky ledge, into a sheltered green pool beside the river. The cavelike walls of the cove were painted green with moss. Sunlight reflected off the water and danced like currents of electricity through the shadows. I had never seen anything so pretty on the Sabine.

“We might have to go swimming later,” Buddy said, and I agreed.

Not far beyond the cove we came to a strange scene: an unmanned boat floating in the middle of the water. It sounded like the engine was running. When we came closer, we saw a long, white hose extending from the boat into the river. At one spot a few feet away, we noticed air steadily bubbling to the surface. Just then a man’s head bobbed up from the brown water, wearing a scuba mask, goggles, and a breathing apparatus.

mussel diver
Gathering mussels in the Sabine River

“Looking for mussels?” I asked.

The man affirmed my question by lifting his bag of shells out of the water. But my camera and questions aroused his suspicion. “Are y’all from the FBI?”

We said no, and when we boated past, the diver sank beneath the water. We eased a little farther downriver, through frequent rapids where the flow quickened and the boat scraped over rocks and gravel, and we passed the many abandoned concrete and wooden oilfield structures that I had marveled at during my earlier trip with Jacob. I watched the shoreline for signs of hogs, but my attention soon began to wander, and I started to imagine the view of the riverbanks from two hundred years ago, when the first settlers arrived.

Today, East Texas is scrub country. What land has not been paved or plowed is choked with thorn vines and brush. But at one time, the forest canopy was so thick it blocked the sunlight from the undergrowth, and the smaller plants that did manage to survive in the dark forests were cleared by occasional fires, leaving trees so large and well established that early travelers called this place the Pine Barrens.

“They say the pine trees used to be so tall in East Texas, you could ride a horse for miles, fall asleep in the saddle, and never hit a tree limb,” I said to Buddy as we drifted downriver. “There used to be huge trees here on the river, too. Just think how much prettier all this would be if we hadn’t cut everything down.”

Buddy glanced up from the trolling motor and studied the brush on the bank. “You can’t think about it that way,” he said. “It’s still pretty. East Texas is still pretty. Just be thankful you get to see it the way it is, because someday all of this will be gone, too.” He had a point, but I hoped he was wrong. Growing up, I had never given a second thought to this wild river running through my hometown. Now that I had spent some time on the Sabine, I didn’t want to lose what remained.

boat
Dragging the boat upstream.

Buddy and I never saw the hogs, so we turned back. The flow that had seemed so calm when we floated downstream was now a force we hadn’t reckoned with, and we spent most of the journey trudging through the water and fighting the current as we dragged the boat upstream. At times the water came only to my hips, sometimes up to my chest, but then I would step off a precipice and fall into a deeper channel. I learned to use my foot to feel for the firmness of the riverbed before committing my weight to a step forward. Before long, I forgot about my fear of being swept away by the river. As long as I stayed alert and moved slowly, I didn’t have to worry so much about drowning after all.

When we returned to the waterfall and the pretty little cove, we parked on some boulders at the entrance and jumped in. The water was cold and deep here and stunningly clear: I could see the bottom some eight feet below. Above us, the clearwater creek had worn the ground away to the eroded rock, cascading through a series of precipices, before tumbling into the cove. Buddy swam over to the waterfall and let it pound his back and shoulders. “It feels just like a back massage,” he said with glee. “You gotta try this.”

I did. It felt great. “Man, I could even bring a woman here,” I said.

Buddy
Buddy

This was the discovery of a lifetime, the kind of place that Buddy could enjoy with his wife and kids for years to come. We swam for a long while, then waded out of the cove and into the river. The water was much warmer here, around waist deep, brown, and muddy. Our toes sank into the silt.

When we returned to the cove a few minutes later, something had changed. “Wasn’t the waterfall a lot bigger when we first got here?” I asked. Instead of gushing over the ledge, the water had narrowed to a trickle. Then, as we watched with increasing horror, it began to grow again. Within minutes, the waterfall was surging at full strength. It was like someone had flushed an enormous toilet. Oh no, that was it! We were swimming in sewage—the discharge from the wastewater plant in Gladewater. No wonder the cove was so cool and clear. No wonder we kept smelling that faint odor of chlorine. I spit what I could out of my mouth.

We climbed out of the cove and then ascended a steep, grassy bank to see where the creek led. We came to an even bigger waterfall and then a series of smaller ones. We walked as far as we could through a leafy forest to a barbed-wire fence, then returned to the river and stood for a moment on the big gray rocks beside the beautiful cove.

“I don’t even care,” Buddy said. “It might be sewage, but they treated it first.”

We jumped back in. At one point, Buddy even swam under the waterfall, where he indulged in another back massage.

Excerpted from Running the River: Secrets of the Sabine by Wes Ferguson and Jacob Botter and published by Texas A&M University Press.


1,377 responses to “A Sheltered Cove”

  1. Pretty component to content. I just stumbled upon your weblog and in accession capital to say that I get in fact loved account your weblog posts. Any way I?ll be subscribing to your feeds and even I success you get entry to consistently quickly.

  2. I’d like to thank you for the efforts you’ve put in penning this blog. I am hoping to check out the same high-grade content by you later on as well. In truth, your creative writing abilities has motivated me to get my own site now 😉

  3. Thank you for sharing superb informations. Your web site is very cool. I am impressed by the details that you have on this web site. It reveals how nicely you understand this subject. Bookmarked this website page, will come back for extra articles. You, my pal, ROCK! I found just the information I already searched everywhere and simply couldn’t come across. What a great site.

  4. I’m amazed, I have to admit. Rarely do I encounter a blog that’s equally educative and engaging, and without a doubt, you have hit the nail on the head. The problem is something not enough men and women are speaking intelligently about. I am very happy that I came across this in my hunt for something regarding this.

  5. Your style is unique in comparison to other people I have read stuff from. Many thanks for posting when you have the opportunity, Guess I will just bookmark this web site.

  6. Hi, I do think this is an excellent website. I stumbledupon it 😉 I will revisit yet again since i have saved as a favorite it. Money and freedom is the best way to change, may you be rich and continue to guide other people.

  7. You’re so interesting! I don’t believe I have read something like that before. So wonderful to discover someone with a few genuine thoughts on this topic. Really.. thank you for starting this up. This website is something that is needed on the internet, someone with a bit of originality.

  8. I like the valuable information you provide to your articles. I?ll bookmark your blog and take a look at once more here frequently. I am quite certain I?ll be told plenty of new stuff right right here! Best of luck for the next!

  9. Thank you for any other informative website. The place else may I am getting that kind of information written in such a perfect means? I’ve a mission that I am simply now operating on, and I have been at the glance out for such information.

  10. Hello my family member! I wish to say that this article is amazing, nice written and include almost all important infos. I would like to peer extra posts like this .

  11. One more thing is that when evaluating a good online electronics shop, look for web shops that are continuously updated, retaining up-to-date with the hottest products, the most effective deals, along with helpful information on services and products. This will ensure that you are handling a shop which stays over the competition and give you things to make intelligent, well-informed electronics purchases. Thanks for the important tips I’ve learned from your blog.

  12. I have seen many useful factors on your website about pcs. However, I’ve got the impression that notebook computers are still not nearly powerful sufficiently to be a good option if you normally do projects that require lots of power, for example video croping and editing. But for web surfing, word processing, and quite a few other prevalent computer functions they are okay, provided you can’t mind small screen size. Thank you sharing your notions.

  13. What i do not realize is in truth how you are not really a lot more neatly-appreciated than you might be right now. You’re very intelligent. You know therefore significantly in relation to this topic, produced me in my view believe it from a lot of various angles. Its like women and men aren’t involved unless it is something to do with Girl gaga! Your own stuffs outstanding. Always care for it up!

  14. Can I just say what a relief to uncover an individual who actually understands what they’re talking about over the internet. You definitely understand how to bring a problem to light and make it important. A lot more people must check this out and understand this side of your story. It’s surprising you aren’t more popular because you certainly possess the gift.

  15. Hi there, I found your web site via Google while searching for a related topic, your site came up, it looks good. I’ve bookmarked it in my google bookmarks.

  16. I get pleasure from, lead to I found exactly what I was having a look for. You have ended my four day lengthy hunt! God Bless you man. Have a nice day. Bye

  17. With havin so much written content do you ever run into any problems of plagorism or copyright infringement? My website has a lot of exclusive content I’ve either written myself or outsourced but it looks like a lot of it is popping it up all over the web without my permission. Do you know any ways to help protect against content from being stolen? I’d truly appreciate it.

  18. Having read this I thought it was really informative. I appreciate you taking the time and energy to put this informative article together. I once again find myself spending a lot of time both reading and posting comments. But so what, it was still worth it.

  19. Thanks for your submission. Another item is that being photographer consists of not only trouble in catching award-winning photographs but additionally hardships in getting the best digicam suited to your needs and most especially hardships in maintaining the grade of your camera. This really is very correct and noticeable for those photography lovers that are into capturing a nature’s interesting scenes : the mountains, the particular forests, the actual wild or the seas. Going to these exciting places definitely requires a video camera that can surpass the wild’s tough landscapes.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *