Sometimes, in the  pursuit of a story, a writer becomes as creepy and obsessed as a stalker. During research for my latest project, I think I might have crossed into that dark side.

No, I’m pretty sure I did. I kind of disgust myself.

The focus of my obsession is an ailing nonagenarian. His name is John Graves. If you’re from Texas and you read books, then you might have heard of him. He’s the granddaddy, patron saint and progenitor of modern nature writing here in the Lone Star state.

More than half a century ago, Graves wrote a nonfiction book titled Goodbye to a River. It’s about a canoe trip down a stretch of the Brazos. The story drifts along as slowly as the river itself, meandering through local lore, pioneer tales, and meditations on a rural landscape that seemed to be slipping away. Somehow, the prose is both stately and subdued.

Lesser writers in Texas have been trying to imitate Graves ever since his book’s publication. If he’s our patron saint, then Goodbye to a River is our bible. And us noncanonical hacks are left to paddle in his wake.

I was trying to re-read Goodbye this summer when I came to an awful realization. Graves had written the definitive word on rivers in Texas. My own attempt to write about a different river in the state, the Sabine, felt almost superfluous. It was paralyzing.

I couldn’t compete with him, so I did the next best thing. I googled him. I found an address and wrote a letter. Meanwhile, one of the lines from Goodbye to a River had been sloshing around in my head for days.

“Canoes,” Graves writes, “are unobtrusive; they don’t storm the natural world or ride over it, but drift upon it as part of its own silence.”

That line in particular, about the quiet dignity of paddling, had revealed the folly of my own undertaking.

All this time, I had been storming nature in a rip-roaring motorboat. To really get to know a river, I needed to experience it as Graves had, from the vantage of a canoe. One weekend toward the end of June, I got my chance. A cheap plastic number appeared in the classifieds. The owner said he had bought the canoe to use when duck hunting, but he and his brother-in-law had capsized the vessel only ten yards from the boat dock. He hadn’t been paddling since. Now he was selling it for a couple hundred bucks.

I ponied up the cash, and the next day I was paddling down the mighty Sabine. By the time I’d lugged my canoe into the water and loaded it with gear, however, the sun was high and bright, and the air was predictably muggy. The temperature hovered around 95 degrees. No problem. If you’re afraid of a little heat and humidity in East Texas, you’ll be stuck indoors for months. You can squander an entire summer that way.

Usually summer is the good time to go to the Sabine, and when you can choose, June is the best month — if, for that matter, you choose to go there at all, and most people don’t. Snakes and ticks and mosquitoes are active then, likely thriving if the heat has come early. Nights are warm and days are green and thick of air, and in the spread abundance of a Texas summer the beer guzzling and the mudding overlap and are both likely to be good. Scores of kinds of bugs, buzzing and unpleasant to see, hover and sting before they fly off to harass some farther prey. Men and women are scarce.

The canoe allowed me to approach wild animals that would have been spooked by the motorboat. Once, I interrupted a mother raccoon’s afternoon drink of river water, and as she trotted away, a string of five fuzzy pups trailed after her. Later, I glided past a family of black-and-white hogs so close to the water I could have thrown my paddle and hit one of them, if I was an idiot. Turtles wetted their dusty, sun-dried shells when they plopped into the river.

I paddled along with the mechanical rhythm of the rusty pump jacks that extracted crude oil and natural gas from the strata. The plan was to travel a little more than ten miles, from one East Texas highway crossing to the next. Then I’d decide what to do next. I could set up camp and paddle a second day, or call someone to come get me.

On a few occasions, my blood boiled when the canoe dropped into churning chutes between rock formations, which would have been submerged if the water hadn’t been so droughty and low. But most of the time there was very little current in the river. Within hours my paddling lost its rigor. My lower back began to ache. The sun beat down, and the water in my cooler seemed to be nearing the boiling point. Twice, I crawled onto a sandbar and lay in the shade. Let’s face it: I was soft. John Graves had spent three weeks in a canoe for his trip, and my body was spent before I was halfway through the first day.

After about five hours, a barely audible hum grew louder, then faded into the downriver silence. It was followed by another hum of a slightly different pitch, and another. They were the far-off sounds of passing cars. The highway was ahead! I hurried around the bend and looked for the bridge. All I saw was another bend. Then another. And another. But after an hour of taunting, I saw my destination — Texas Highway 31, south of Longview.

I stumbled up the bank. Two young guys were tying hooks to their lines beneath the highway bridge. “How’s the fishing?” one of them asked.

“Didn’t … fish,” I said as I staggered past him and stretched onto the sloped concrete of the bridge’s abutment.

“What were you doing?”

I lifted one finger to signal for him to wait a minute, and I lay there with my eyes closed. He gave me a bottle of water. Finally, I raised my head and told him that I was exploring the river for a journalism project. “Well the fishing’s good when the river’s flowing,” he said. “I caught a ten-and-a-half-pound cat up around River Road last week.”

“What kind … of bait … you use?” I asked. Next thing I knew he was standing over me — my body still laid out flat beneath the bridge — as he demonstrated how to keep chicken livers from dripping off a hook. He tied a loose strand of fishing line to the eye of his swivel and wrapped the strand around the liver. “See, it holds the liver on there and the fish hate it, so they really have to yank, and that sets the hook,” he said.

“I’ll … have to try that.”

My canoe was docked to a pile of cement rubble. After catching a ride about a half mile down the road, I washed my face in the men’s room of a SerStaGro — as Graves would have called it — ordered a Dr Pepper and sat for a while in the refrigerated air. It was too hot to be out on that river.

A couple of weeks later, my letter to Graves appeared in my mailbox. The U.S. Postal Service couldn’t deliver it. I had written to the physical address of his ranch outside the Texas town of Glen Rose, aware that he probably used a P.O. box instead. So I returned to the Internet, and I found his phone number. I wrote it down and stared at it. No, I shouldn’t call him. He was an old man. Another website had said that his birthday was approaching, and he’d be ninety years old the first week of August.

That last paragraph was kind of creepy. Through a handful of Internet searches, I had found the man’s physical address, phone number and birthday. Nobody — not even a Texas legend, the grandaddy of Texas nature writers — is granted a smidgen of privacy anymore. Even so, I believed I needed Graves for my book, to give it a boost of legitimacy. So I wrote out a short transcript of our imagined phone conversation:

My name is Wes Ferguson. I’m a journalist; I’m writing a book for Texas A&M University Press about the Sabine River

I’ll be passing through Glen Rose for an unrelated magazine assignment in the next week or two

And I was wondering if you would allow me to come by and talk to you about something I’m trying to sort out.

I’m trying to get some context for the Sabine’s place among Texas rivers, and I know you have written a little about the differences between rivers in West Texas and East Texas

In his book Texas Rivers, Graves writes about an East Texas river called the Neches: “For those of us who live in the more open country of the central and western parts of the state, the wooded zone along our Louisiana border can be a little daunting. Blessed with copious rainfall, laced with the perennially flowing creeks that feed strong rivers, shaded by forests except where they have been cleared, … the region at times seems foreign to persons accustomed to the drier prairies, plains, rocky hills, and the dialects of the rest of the state.

“Yet not all that foreign.”

One could argue that his description applies as readily to the Sabine as the Neches, but I wanted to hear Graves say it.

Once again, I stared at the phone number and let my mind wander. If I had the chance to interview him, we’d sit on a rustic back porch, or in a cluttered room with comfortable chairs that emitted the faint, musty smell of old things. He’d talk for hours, and I’d further the conversation with respectful questions, illustrating my immediate and thorough absorption of his words. He’d explain why he and other authors have rarely included the Sabine when writing about Texas rivers. And he’d be so taken with his young disciple that he’d offer (unsolicited, of course) to write a blurb for the back cover of my soon-to-be-published book.

I hastily dialed the numbers, hoping to finish before I changed my mind.

A woman’s kind voice answered.

“Let me ask him,” she said. “He doesn’t like talking on the telephone.”

John Graves was now on the line. His voice was soft and frail, and higher-pitched than I had expected. Suddenly there was a crash and loud voices coming from his end.

“What?” he said. “I can’t hear you with all that hollering.”

My name is Wes Ferguson. I’m a journalist; I’m writing a book for Texas A&M University Press about the Sabine River.

“About what?”

“The SABINE RIVER!”

That was it — my sales pitch reduced to a shout.

“I’m nearly ninety years old,” he replied, “and I’m just not up for interviews and things of that sort anymore.”

This was foolish. I had no right to disturb this old man, this stranger. I needed to get off the phone. I needed to hang up right now. I thanked him and apologized.

“Well,” he said. “Okay.”

I thanked him again, apologized again, and the conversation was over. A week after our brief conversation, a magazine article about him appeared on newsstands. The article explained that Graves was still suffering after a fall from his porch the previous winter. The article said he was bent and frail.

If you thought that would convince me to stop pestering him, though, you would be wrong.

I didn’t stake out his ranch or anything. But it occurred to me how I could find his mailing address. His local appraisal district had to know it. Using the wireless internet in a public library, I found the appraiser’s website, and I plugged his name into the property records search. Bingo. The display told me the size of his ranch and revealed his property’s market value. It enumerated the taxes he’d paid over the previous three years. And sure enough, it gave me his address.

I wrote another letter. A week later, on a sunny East Texas afternoon — among a handful of bills and a catalogue or two — was my self-addressed, stamped envelope. The typed reply filled a narrow piece of paper, which measured nine inches by five-and-a-quarter inches.

In the second paragraph, John Graves wrote, “You sound like good folks, & I wish I could be of help in regard to the Sabine River, but I can’t.”

He said a few other things. Pleasantries, mostly. It was a generous letter. I’d tell you more, but I’d hate to violate an old man’s privacy.