(Not) Walking Brays Bayou

The idea of walking the 31 miles of this particular Houston “slow river” came to me soon after that river had flooded our home back in 2017. I realized then that this uninvited guest that had turned our house and our lives upside down had a life of its own. I have written two previous posts on the Bayou itself—about the resonance of the word “Bayou,” and the disappointment I experienced every time I crossed or walked along its sluggish waters; and about the anxiety I experienced when those waters swelled to terrifying proportions in Houston’s many recent 100-year floods. I would walk the Bayou to face my fears. I would walk the Bayou to understand it on its own terms. I would in walking begin to shape for it a biography that would unfold alongside—and sometimes across—my own. In this enterprise I would be participating in a movement to write the lives of bodies of water, like Scott F Atkinson’s The River we Have Wrought (about the Mississippi), David Abulafia’s The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, or my favorite, which sits under stale glasses of water on my nightstand, Jack E. Davis’s The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. Since I have never intended to write a book about Brays Bayou, perhaps even more relevant are water-inspired project like Louise Carver’s multimodal Mattering the Mississippi or interdisciplinary collaborative The Mississippi: An Anthropocene River. Mostly, what I wanted to do, though, was to actively see Brays Bayou, and to see it in its entirety, beyond the confines of my daily walks along its more familiar stretches.  Walking the Bayou, of course, is a way of managing it, of managing the aforementioned anxiety and disappointment. Like the concrete walls erected around Brays by the Army Core of Engineers as a flood control project, my attempts to manage the river—let us at least once give it the name it deserves at its most powerful—were always problematic, always finally at the mercy of the life of the Bayou itself.

             My first effort to manage and control, my preparation for walking the Bayou, was to turn it into a familiar object, a subject for academia. I needed a map. In 2018 the best and clearest map I found of the Bayou was on the website for Project Brays, whose motto, “Reduce the Risk. Rediscover the Beauty,” I have quoted before and will probably quote again before I reach the end of the Bayou in Harrisburg Texas. My first instinct was to take that digital map, with its reassuringly bright purple line marking the Bayou’s path from its beginning to the Gulf of Mexico, enlarge it for my aging eyes, and print it on water-resistant paper so I could, as I imagined, carry it with me neatly rolled up in the backpack I use for day camping. I took the digital file down to the basement of Rice’s Fondren library where they can produce large documents on a spool printer. The descent into the basement felt something like an academic project and something like a shopping expedition: I was asked to choose my what I wanted the image printed on, as one might be asked to choose wallpaper. I ran my hands over the samples and went for something a little coarse with a matte finish that I imagined writing on with a Sharpie. Pleased with my (very cheap) purchase, I retreated to my office. I had not yet walked--but I had shopped--the Bayou.

The first sign that something was a little off came when Sophia, my research assistant, whom I had asked to pick up the map, seemed a little hesitant: “it’s very big,” she said. Big seemed like a good idea to me, since in the last few years I have spent much of my time with important documents squinting and adjusting my glasses. I did not want to depend on reading glasses on my imagined 31-mile journey. Then I noticed that Sophia was carrying a roll of paper almost as tall as she was. Like the Bayou itself, the map had swelled unexpectedly. Going with the flow, Sophia and I rolled the map out on the floor of my office. There was no room to spread it flat. Its edges lapped against my desk and the little bench I had just bought to make the office less formal and more welcoming. The space was not only too small, but the wrong shape; the map of the Bayou was insistently horizontal; it had a direction, a current, a life of its own. After crawling over the map trying to tame its edges, I decided it was time to ask for a smaller one.  As an archival scholar, I am used to making embarrassing mistakes in front of people who work in libraries, so I went back down to the basement of Fondren determined to get the dimensions right. I had to do some calculations on the fly, but I was helped out by a former student, more embarrassed than I was, who spent the time the new map was printing apologizing for not having taken my first-year writing seminar seriously.

            Even once I had my backpack-sized version, I knew I wanted to live with the enormity of the first map and thus, somehow, with the enormity of the Bayou. I took it home with me to my post-Harvey house, bigger than the old one, with a second floor just in case we have a 1000-year flood in the next few years. The scroll fit neatly across the back seat of my big post-Harvey car. Once hoe, I set the scroll down in our upstairs hall and rolled it out like the runner we had always wanted to place there. Contained, and quite beautiful, in its lively pastels, the Bayou rolled smoothly along the hallway from the back to the front of the house, from the bedroom to the upstairs balcony. I had, for a moment, turned the Bayou into a decoration, a piece of household furniture—anticlimactically, a rug. For a moment, perhaps longer, I thought that the map might have found a permanent home in mine; although the craze for vinyl rugs had not yet reached its ecstatic climax (I have one on order as we speak) the material—can I call it fabric?—did not look bad against the wood floors. Decorators are always talking about flow and movement; positioned correctly from west to east, the map-as-runner would embody a movement from inside to outside. If Feng Shui household arrangement attends to energy flow, perhaps I could invent a system of home decoration shaped around the flow of water, or more prosaically-- as the Victorians would think about it--drainage. Of course, it only took one dog crossing its surface somewhere near the Texas Medical Center to remind me that maps are not rugs. It would take actually walking the Bayou, as I started to do last week, to remind me that bayous are not maps.

            For two years after bringing both maps home, I put off walking the Bayou. There are many reasons for this, the pandemic of course among them. My first task, about which I procrastinated for a very long time, was to take out the map (either one) and break the 31 miles into manageable chunks. While at first I imagined walking five or six miles and having someone pick me up and drive me back to my car, the pandemic made it impossible to imagine riding in a car with anyone not in my shifting and eventually shrinking) household. I would have to walks three miles each way, perhaps first on one bank and then on the other. It got very hot, and then sort of cold. I found other forms of exercise. The Bayou slipped beneath the surface of my everyday life.

            It resurfaced in January with the reestablishment of the Rice Feminist Seminar, where faculty, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students work in teams on a project. I had a teammate, the wonderfully wise ecological anthropologist, Kristin Gupta, who knows something about water. Since she left Houston during the pandemic, she could not walk with me, but she could hold me accountable for walking. She also occupied a position I have often claimed for my own: the voice of realism. Looking, not at the maps I had sent her but at Google maps, she asked gently, “are you sure you can actually walk along the Bayou in all these places?” The answer, as I would soon realize, is “no.” At various spots, including the beginning stretch, the Brays Bayou is not neat, not walkable, indeed not always recognizable on the ground. Skeptical but determined, I corralled my son, who happened to be visiting. We got out the camping backpack, two water bottles, sunblock, and a giant Sumo orange. I rolled up the small map and looped it into the webbing of the backpack. We forgot, then remembered, our phones. I put on my walking shoes.