Origins

This is where it all began. 

The story I will be telling is an origin story, a favorite genre of mine since reading Just So Stories as a little girl. I am aware that the last sentence was itself an origin story in miniature: a story about how I came to love beginnings but not so much endings. Like other origin stories, it is not perfectly true; it is a cleaned-up version that ignores or subordinates other details, other influences. If influence means “inflow” (etymology is an origin story par excellence) then I am ignoring other tributaries, other streams, other rivers, in my desire to identify where things began.

It was difficult, as my son and I left our house to look for the origin of Brays Bayou not to think of ourselves in terms of what was for me the most famous story of origins: the nineteenth-century search for the source of the Nile. Perhaps I was David Livingstone, a little elderly, a little stooped, worn out by the labor of looking for origins; perhaps Ross was Lord Stanley, finally credited with finding the source of the Nile in a lake he named after Queen Victoria. I had not thought about the Stanley Livingstone story since perhaps high school: for me, the question of origin had been solved, stabilized in The Encyclopedia Britannica where as I child I sometimes took the trouble to look things up. If you had asked me then, I would perhaps have been able to repeat the story’s famous sentence of recognition: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” without understanding its connection to nineteenth-century race and class politics. I would certainly have been able to tell you whatever that already outdated edition of the Encyclopedia had to say about the search for the Nile in volume M-P, which I imagined bubbling from the ground like the geysers I would have learned about in volumes C-G.

Now of course, I have the internet, which can both settle and unsettle. It was on the internet that I had two years ago visited the site of Project Brays and downloaded and printed the map of which I spoke in my last post. It was only a few days before I started to walk the Bayou that I noticed that this map, which I had enlarged until it was as long as my house is wide, cut off the Western edge of the bayou and thus the origin of Brays. How could I not have realized this in two years of looking at and living with the giant map, and its smaller version? I returned to the Project Brays site to see if the omission had been part of the printing process, and was amazed to find that the map, the beautifully lucid map, had disappeared, not only form the site but from the internet archive. What I held in my hands, what I unrolled over the floor was an artifact of a different search, a different internet, a shape-shifter. Undaunted, I did what anyone would now do: I googled “Brays Bayou origin.”  One sentence repeated itself across sources, as if one site had cut and pasted from another: “Origin: a retaining pond south of Barker Reservoir.” Barker Reservoir. 

Barker Reservoir had always lurked on the fringes of my mental map. Outside both the inner and the outer loops that ring Houston, it was one of a long list of places that as an “inner looper” I had relegated to what my friends sometimes call “Too Much Texas.” Even when the popularity of the day trip surged during the pandemic, the reservoir did not, for some reason,  cross my mind as a destination.  Barker, like the internet, is somewhat of shapeshifter; a 13,000-acre wilderness abutting Houston’s western suburbs and strip malls, it has served since the 1940s as a giant retention pond for Houston’s floods. Mostly, it stands at the ready  for the waters to pour into it from the sky and from the concreted strip malls. Home of George Bush Park, which is located on those places in Barker that rise above floodwaters, it is mostly a place of recreation, although there are tales of bobcats and coyotes deep in its recesses. Ross and I entered the reservoir—and we think the park as well—through a gate in a small parking lot on a beautiful spring day. Armed with our amputated map, we headed “somewhere south” along the Barker Dam. 

I think it is fair to say that everything in this portion of the story, from this point on, is ugly. Even Barker, crossed by Brays’ Bayou’s more attractive sister, is not a pretty place, at least not as viewed from the dam. Although the view ticks all the boxes—trees, water, big sky, nascent wildflowers—nothing is pleasant to look at. Perhaps on another day when the trees will be softened into bloom or leaf, they will be prettier. On this day, only just after the winter freeze, the trees are bare and not particularly shapely. The dam itself is bare, declaring its artifice as it thrusts itself squarely up into the sky. In its bold ugliness, Ross and I see, in a sinking moment of recognition, the handiwork of the Army Core of Engineers, who are also been responsible for “concretizing” Brays Bayou further east. If refusal to prettify is a style, this is the style of the dam and of the park. Ugliest of all is the thing in the world I most like to look at—the water. An unpleasant non-color, it lies almost still at the bottom of a series of trenches, concrete and metal exposed. Although there is surprisingly little trash, the water itself and the landscape around it feel like waste. We walk in a desultory way south along the dam, where joggers, bicyclists, and stroller-wheelers, stream past us looking straight ahead. It is easy to give up this quest for the mysterious retaining pond since we know, as is often the case in Houston, the scale is too big and we will likely have to drive. As we exit, the reservoir lies in wait in anticipation of a flood, a devasting storm, a hurricane to make it—perhaps—beautiful. No-one will be there to see it then.

We do have something of a plan. A bicycling blog called “Hidden Waters” mentions that the first actual sign with the name “Brays Bayou” on it is in a development called Westheimer Place, on a bridge by an elementary school. We decide that rather than walking south until we find the retaining pond, we will try to work backwards from that bridge, if we can find it. And, after a few odd turns, we do. As someone who loves labels—on paintings in museums, on plaques on the walls of London houses, on jars of different kinds of flour in the pantry—I am perhaps not surprisingly moved to see the tiny, crooked sign that spells out the name of the Bayou. I am also moved to see the Bayou, unconstrained by concrete but otherwise looking exactly like the body of water I saw almost every day before fleeing to Houston Heights. Its familiar ugliness is strangely reassuring: “this is it, this is Brays,” I say to Ross as I snap a picture that captures it for posterity.

We know now that we must walk along it, if we can, towards the Northwest. Perhaps we will trace it to its lair. Soon the path along the Bayou disappears and we are crossing meadows at the back of housing developments. Soon after that, the water loses its shape, then disappears, only to reappear hundreds of yards later as a puddle or a trickle from a drainpipe. All around us, in the unmowed grass, alive with wild onion blossoms but somehow not pretty at all, are large square indentations. Their relation to water is marked by pipes, some small and silted, some startlingly big as if a giant dropped his ugliest toys onto human neighborhoods. There are sometimes signs of the bayou itself in puddles of dirty water. The landscape cobbles together retention ponds that protect—and sometimes of course fail to protect—the modest neighborhoods they encircle.  Streets dead end at the empty ponds; when we walk we are confronted by sagging fences; when we drive, the streets twist and turn so that it seems we are always leaving what remains, if that is the right word, of the bayou. To look for the bayou here, among the network of pipes, is to me a hopeless act in many senses. Ross, like his predecessor Stanley is more confident. He feels we have found the source in the ugliest, emptiest ditch. Perhaps he is right; perhaps ugliness defines—even creates—the Bayou.

We get back in the car and drive broad highways that take us further West and that skirt more affluent, gated communities. Peering through the wrought iron fence that encircles “Waters of Westheimer” we see what could be Bayou water deployed into decorative fountains and colored blue. We have not found the origin of the Bayou, the one retaining pond among others where it begins. As Brays appears and disappears, we have been forced away from it by the exigencies of city planning, but we assure ourselves, there would have been little to see in any case. What, we wonder, is Brays Bayou? What makes it Brays and not, say, a puddle of rainwater made rusty by pipes? Is the Bayou the water itself or the channels that shape it? 

At night, I settle down with the story of Stanley and Livingstone. It turns out that the origin of the Nile is still disputed. Lake Victoria is itself fed by a river that by definition would extend the source Southwest to the Rawanda-Tanzania border. That river, the Kagera, has its own two tributaries. Officially, the source or origin would be the furthest point from the headwater; it is apparently unclear even today which tributary is longer and thus further from where the Nile enters the Mediterranean. 

This confusion should make me feel better about not (perhaps) finding the source of Brays Bayou, but it doesn’t really. I am used to Victorian certainties being undermined and then reasserting themselves again. Coming of age as a literary critic at the high point of deconstruction, I am also used to a critique of the concept of origin. No general embrace of uncertainty, no acknowledgement of the marshy ground of knowledge, compensates for my desire to see the trickle that became the stream that became the deluge that destroyed my house and the houses of others on a particular day in 2017. If I could have found the first waters of the Bayou (which I cannot), and those waters had been potable (a ridiculous idea), I would have wanted to drink it, to drink to it. Now I feel the pull of the Bayou in the other direction—through the city of which I am fond and towards the Gulf I love so much. I know it will be a while—in miles and days-- until I can walk along the Bayou and say its name with confidence. Not this is where it all began, but this is where I am now.