HARVEY: The Wild Bayou

On my desk beside me is a gift. I am looking down at it as I type, although the last few weeks have taught me not to look down at what it offers. Two weeks ago, my friend, colleague, and collaborator left it for me on my back porch in a black carrier bag. Knowing my interest in Brays Bayou, Brian had bought me the slim Bayous of Houstonby James L. Sipes and Matthew K. Zeve. The little volume can be found for purchase in many different places in Houston; I have seen but not bought it over the years in museum bookstores; seen but not bought it in antique stores in Galveston; seen but not bought it in gift shops for Houston’s few official tourist attractions. This one, Brian tells me, comes from a Walgreens, in an end cap of the makeup aisle. I don’t know why I never purchased something whose topic is of abiding interest to me; perhaps I thought of it as more souvenir than source of information, more like a t-shirt (“Houston Proud”) than a book. In any case, I turned away, turned up my nose, for years-- to the point where I stopped seeing it in front of me. In making it a present and dropping it off of my home, Brian also gave me the gift of another chance to read it. It is a gift book in many senses.

Part if the “Images of America” series published by Arcadia Press, the book both is and is not directed to tourists and to the celebration of Houston. As the name of the series implies, it relies heavily on photographs, most of them credited to the Harris County Flood Control District. Even to the tourists who might buy and skim the book, disappointed perhaps that the pictures are in black and white and not particularly well reproduced, it would be clear from a quick glance that the history of Houston is in large part a history of its bayous and that the history of the Bayou City is a history of flooding.

The book tells me some things I know and many things I do not. On one level, it tells a familiar story. From the time of first settlements along Buffalo and White Oak Bayous which came to define the borders of the city in the 20thcentury, the waterways were understood both as carriers of and threats to opportunity. As “money followed the bayou” and took the concrete  form of homes, bridges, docks, warehouses, and municipal buildings, Houstonians risked the destruction of what made them rich. Rising to prominence because of a Hurricane that in 1900 destroyed its rival city of Galveston, Houston was made and unmade, lived and died by the whims of the Gulf.  If the recent story of Houston is marked by the confluence of names and dates (Alicia, Allison, Tax Day, Memorial Day, Harvey), the landmarks—the high water marks--hi of the first half of the twentieth century were the two floods of that terrifying year 1929 and the Great (unnamed but dated) Flood of 1935. It was soon after the disaster of 193 that the Harris County Flood Control District was founded by the Texas legislature. 

What I did not know—but what some of you reading this may have long understood--—is that the history of flood control seems to have been deeply entwined with photography. More remarkable than the legislative attempt to control flooding is the process by which lawmakers were convinced to take steps, centered on what Sipes and Zeve called a “photographic essay” entitled “Wild River” that documented the flood of 1937. The authors of “Wild River” itself used a different name for the document they created: on the title page they call it a “pictorial petition,” emphasizing as the term “essay” does not, its instrumentalism and its demands for action. 

While I was able later to access “Wild River” online. My first encounter with this powerful text was in Bayous of Houston, where a composite photograph of the title page and the nineteenth page of the petition appeared among some 200 other photographs of Houston’s bayous and surrounding cityscapes. I want to linger in Bayous of Houston and in the grainy but shiny reproduction of “Wild River” there rather than immediately going to the online archival version, to think about the relation of “Wild River” to the longer visual story that BayousofHoustonis eager to tell. For the time being, I will focus on three images from the gift book: the photograph of the pages from “Wild River,” and aerial photograph from 1937 of the affluent neighborhood abutting Braes Bayou at Main Street, and, finally, a family photograph taken in front of a flooded home in 1950. For those who want to see the images from “Wild River,” you can use the link above to visit Harris County Flood Control District’s web site where the photo-essay can be found on the page devoted to the history of HCFCD.  I have cut and pasted the other images, perhaps illegally, although I give full credit both to Bayous of Houston and to HCFCD, which Sipes and Zive name as their source.

 City Hall, Threatened

 In the diptych representing “Wild River,” the left-hand image is the title page, the space above the above the heading dominated by a rectangular photograph of rushing water, unanchored by geographical context. There are no banks, no trees, no buildings in this image, and no caption to give it what Shakespeare calls a “local habitation and a name.” I do not know if I am looking at Buffalo Bayou, at White Oak and its tributaries, at my own Brays Bayou—or less likely, a Bayou further south and east. The image, with its evocation of a singular “Wild River,” suggests the terrifying possibility of all Bayous becoming one. Despite the fact that I am looking at a third-or-higher-generation image (the printing of a photograph of the original photograph), the picture does its work in pulling me into untamed and unnamed water; the picture chooses depth over context, the downstream pull of current over the horizontal space of the city presumably on either side of the image. The problems of reproduction only serve to make the water murkier, more horrifying.

Juxtaposed to the title page is an image from page 19 of the 25-page “Wild River,” consisting of a page with a photograph of downtown Houston during the 1935 flood. The caption reads, in all caps, “Rising Waters Threaten City Hall Located Blocks from Bayou. ”This image is, of course, explicitly about place; the wild river is now located by a landmark, albeit a threatened one. The waters have reached City Hall and the administrative heart of the city. Although we do not know from the title exactly how many blocks City Hall is from what is presumably Buffalo Bayou, the slight vagueness suggests the indeterminacy of the bayou itself, the problem of counting “blocks” in a flood. The caption that makes sense of this disaster, offering us locations on a map, determinedly remains in the present tense (“Rising Waters threaten”). While presumably culled from a contemporaneous newspaper headline, the use of the present has several functions. As the epic present that in classical literature announces important action, it emphasizes both danger and the need to act. As a form of the continuous present, it suggests that actions in the past will happen again—and again. Houston’s history can be written in a continuous present of the verb “to flood.”

The photograph that accompanies the text about City Hall focusses not on the depth but on the surface of the water. What I see most clearly is the glare of city light bouncing off darkness, an effect very similar to what I experienced as my family fled our neighborhood flooding in our car, our headlights showing us something of the way to go but making it impossible to gauge the depth of the water into which we were driving. Light makes orientation (and photography) possible but at a cost: we cannot tell looking simply at the water how deep it is. For this visual calculation, we need gauges. In this photograph, as in real life some 80 years later, the gauges are manmade. We see the water in the photograph rising halfway up what I take to be the first story of City Hall. In 2017, the gauges were also sometimes buildings foreshortened by the water, but also curbs, street signs, lampposts. As we drove, we were increasing the distance between us and those official gauges on the Bayou, measuring in precise numbers the height of the water, the distance to the top of the bank, the possibility or probability of overflow. I do not know (yet?) if in 1935 Houston had a rough version of these gauges, themselves no doubt swamped by rising waters.

The Millionaires of Brays/Braes

 Of course, what I have been wanting to see represented in the photographs is not Buffalo or White Oak, but Brays Bayou. By my count only 11 of the 206 photographs in BayousofHoustonare of Brays Bayou or the surrounding area, and most of these are in pictures taken after 1950. It is clear to me that Brays, sometimes spelled “Braes” to strengthen the connection to the names of surrounding streets and their invocation of Scottishness, is something of a stepchild in the family of Houston bayous. Settlement around Brays came later, after the city had mapped and defined itself according to Buffalo and White Oak Bayous, moving out but sticking close to the point of confluence between them. The first time Brays is mentioned in Bayous of Houstonin an explanatory caption to the photographs is something of an afterthought. For most of an unusually long caption, readers think they are looking at Buffalo Bayou. The caption explains: “Buffalo Bayou has a great diversity of flora and fauna along its banks, with some of the more common trees being black willow, box elder, loblolly pine, and sycamore.” It is only several lines later that our sightline is adjusted: “This photograph shows an undeveloped area along Brays Bayou.”  Brays Bayou, belated in every way, is slipped into the story of biodiversity at the last moment. 

Brays pops up again in an aerial photograph of the intersection of South Main Street and Braeswood Boulevard, apparently known (shockingly to me) to me, as “Millionaires Row.” This single photo of an affluent Houston neighborhood shows it in a state of flood. The caption reads: “During the floods of 1929 and 1935, Brays Bayou overflowed its banks, causing significant damage to the adjacent development.” When I lived in the neighborhood, to parrot the Wild Rivercaption, “only blocks” from Millionaires Row, I did notice some large decaying houses at the corner of Main and the bayou, sitting well back on their enormous lots. I saw over the years of living there some hopeful sings and signage—mostly placards announcing these houses are for sale. To my knowledge no one has moved in, or if they have, they have not made the spectacular improvements that characterize the Houston real estate scene. The houses remain props for Halloween; they stand out for their age, their decrepitude, their darkened windows and for their flat-footed rootedness to the land. When the wealthy came back to other parts of Brays, they did so by constructing modern, ship-shape and indeed ship-shaped houses raised, as regulations now required, many feet off the ground. For me, the corner where the two houses stand, apparently once the haunt of millionaires, recalls another kind of haunting: the voice on local television of a woman trapped in her attic in a small house across the street from the older houses. As she was being interviewed over a crackling cell phone by a tv reporter, the woman was trying to get help for herself, her ailing husband, and her grandchildren, all stuffed into the tiny openings under the eaves that pass for attics in that Houston neighborhood. The reporter finally remembered to ask the woman her address: “I’m on the corner of Main and North Braeswood,” she said. “Send a helicopter.” 

Family Portrait, with Floodwater

 My favorite picture of Braes Bayou is the one with people in it. On page 74 of BOH, well into the story of urban development, is a photograph from 1950 that, according to the caption “shows a family whose home was flooded when Brays Bayou overflowed its banks.” The family, consisting of a mother, a father, and a toddler (male, I think), is grouped in front of the house in the classic pyramid of a Christmas card photograph, with the father slightly behind the mother, and the child in the front. If you cut off the bottom and the left-hand side of the picture, you would see a typical 50’s (white) nuclear family, although the husband has a cigarette in his mouth and is stripped to the waist revealing the ideal male body of that time: slim and muscled without being muscular. All three family members are smiling, and looking in the same direction, their conjoined gazes attesting to their unity and solidity. If we move out from the solid triangle of man woman and child, we take in another more official figure dressed in a heavy full-length raincoat with some kind of helmet or hard hat. The smiling gazes of the family turn out to be directed towards this man, whose arms separate as if to answer the question “how much?” or “how high?” As our gaze travels, we notice the water that cuts the man off at the lower calf, the woman just below her modest knee-length dress, and the toddler at the thigh. The still photograph cannot tell us if the water is rising, falling, or itself still; the distance described by the official’s gesture could indicate any of these possibilities. Whatever news he is conveying, whatever he is saying about the moments that might follow after he and the camera leave, the family does not seem anxious. In fact, their body language suggests an “ask a policeman” public service film of the kind popular in the ‘fifties. The toddler is reaching out towards the public servant, seemingly enthralled by his uniform or his gestures. The family has given themselves over to his authority, his knowledge of the floodwaters that are encroaching upon their home. Floodwaters and the official combine to divest the father and husband of his authority, even of his relation to his property. As he bends to guide his child, his head blocks the house number on the door and blocks the reader from noting his address.

My readings of these photographs are preliminary. They signal to me a moment in time before I do more research, before I walk and map the Bayou, take photographs of my own. This moment is also one in which archives are closed and phone and email inquiries go unanswered. Covid, like the Great Flood of 1935 has shaped access to the Bayou and its history. Those who know my academic work know that I have written about “archival desire,” the longing to know more, to touch crumbling papers, to find documents that have been hidden or missing or simply unnoticed for years. Sitting at home during COVID, I feel that desire as an almost literal itching of my hands, a need to get my hands (perhaps encased in the protective gloves archivists sometimes want you to wear) dirty with the dust of 80 years. I may well have to wait to know more about the early photographs, all marked “courtesy of HCFCD.” Where did the Flood Control District get these photos? Who took them? What is their provenance and context. I will have to wait to touch them, to see the photographs that Sipes and Zives chose not to include in their gift book. In the meantime, I can walk the Bayou and take photographs of my own.