Since rivers run through everyone, when you begin a subject like this, everyone has a story to tell. Everyone has a river to speak of and sing of. And that’s wonderful.
Absolutely wonderful. It is torrenting.
— Robert Macfarlane, author of “Is a River Alive?”
I’m captivated with the Middle Bosque River canyon, and I’m not alone — at least among Wacoans who know it. Long-time McGregor resident and writer Richard Phelan was too.
Forty years ago, he took a long walk through a remote section of the Middle Bosque River canyon and wrote about it for Sports Illustrated. Because of him, our little local stream became one of only two of 11,000 Texas rivers ever featured on the pages of SI.
Today when people first encounter the Middle — perhaps from the bridge on Speegleville Road or on a kayak trip down from Crawford, they say things like: “This is the true hidden gem of Waco,” or “Who knew this beautiful place is right here in our backyard,” or “Wait, I’m confused. Which of the Bosque rivers is this? Aren’t there three?”
Indeed, there are: the North, South and Middle. I have kayaked, fished or walked most of its winding journey from Turnersville to Lake Waco. I want to share some its stories with you and the stories of those who walked this river canyon before us. Rivers hold stories, some tragic, some redemptive.
And the Middle Bosque has stories worth telling.
Here We Go Again
I was an 11-year-old in Fort Worth when the November 26, 1984, SI issue, themed “There They Go Again,” would have arrived in our mailbox. I only know of it now in library archives. On the cover, President-reelect Ronald Reagan stands, beaming, beside Georgetown Hoyas coach John Thompson and star Patrick Ewing who were attempting to repeat as NCAA basketball champions [spoiler: they didn’t].
But the magic is in the back pages where in “Middle Bosque Canyon is a Welcome Refuge in Booming Central Texas,” Richard Phelan rediscovers the river he knew from his childhood. After finding his essay several years ago, I too was drawn to the canyon to see for myself if it was still the same as he described it.
Is any place still the same since then?
Texas has changed plenty since the 1980s. We’re more populated, more industrial and arguably less in touch with our neighbors and the land. So, I wondered, can a person still walk the same stretch of river canyon today? And would they find it as enchanting as he did?
Compelled by such questions, and the adventure of it, one early morning last spring I picked up my friend Joel Edwards and we set off to try to retrace Richard’s 10-mile walk.
Joel and I headed to a low water crossing to begin the same section Richard walked 40 years ago. With a copy of the SI article in my back pocket, from our first steps we saw the river just as Richard described it.
The canyon is still no more than half a mile wide and no more than 150 feet deep and the river still winds below limestone bluffs. Though the prairies up above on the plain are all but plowed up, in the canyon clumps of big bluestem prairie grass are vestiges of their former dominion. In the stream, knee-deep water flows clean over its limestone bed. As we stepped off, a gray dawn lingered over the wooded canopy. Crickets were singing their final notes in all-night sonatas. Otherwise, all was silent.
It’s easy to see why Richard returned to this stretch of river. He first wrote about it in 1976 in “Texas Wild: The Land, Plants, and Animals of the Lone Star State:” “As a canyon, it isn’t much,” he admitted, but “this country has the prettiest small rivers in Texas except for those on the Edwards Plateau. The three little Bosque rivers, North, Middle and South, make miles of small bluffs and rock shelters and swimming holes before they run into drab Lake Waco.”
Richard observed that “many of Waco’s residents don’t know or care about the quiet canyon in the far corner of the county, where little has changed since World War II.”
I suppose this is true still today. Yet he’s not the only one to have noticed something special here. Visiting President George W. Bush’s Prairie Chapel Ranch on the river, Texas Monthly noticed: “On the northernmost side of the ranch ran the Middle Bosque River: a stream of gin-clear water that threaded its way through the prairie grass, past thick stands of cedar elm and burr oak” in the November 2002 article, Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch.
A Hidden Gem
Joel and I walked purposefully, cautious of slick rock, and also as a spiritual exercise to walk with the flow of the life of the canyon. Joel’s an artist, which means he has cultivated the discipline of paying attention.
Artists help the rest of us slow down and see what’s in front of us with penetrating gaze. St. Francis of Assisi teaches us the meaning of such seeing is that we learn to find the vestiges of the Creator in the essence of each created thing. I’ve learned that with patience I can learn to see inner truth and beauty in places that I miss when I rush by. Joel helps me with this.
Remnants of barbed wire fence crossed the shallow waters, twisted from recent floods. Or old floods — who knows? The Middle was calm and shallow the day we walked but it can turn quickly into a rampage after a big storm. Kayakers often take advantage of the brief windows of adventure.
On this day, we stepped carefully around, under or over obstacles. Around one bend, a dozen cows and one wary bull stood knee-deep in the water. We stood at a safe and respectful distance until they all moved uphill, giving us permission to pass by in peace.
A turkey gobbled in the distance. Cardinals and mourning doves greeted one another.
Jurassic-sized lamb’s-ears grew in the thin riverside soil. The canyon walls were draped with yellow mustard bushes. We would eventually encounter deeper water and have to slosh our way through or pick our way around pools as we passed deer blinds and a few old cabins.
Like Richard, we didn’t see a single other person the entire day. We didn’t see much wildlife either, besides a few deer bounding away. Our splashes flushed a blue heron which we’d been hoping to see. Herons were anointed by Richard as “the presiding spirits, and perhaps the real owners of quiet American streams.”
Joel is a quiet walking companion, so I had plenty of time and space to think and take it all in as we stepped in and out of the water. Morning light dappled through the crowns of cedar elms and live oaks. If any of this sounds like I’m being too romantic, part of the delight is that this place is right here, just minutes from home. And you’d hardly know it if you weren’t in it.
I was aware that just a few miles away Waco was busy bustling, traffic barreling through interstate construction, everyone going somewhere, tourists snapping photos in front of the Silos. Richard thought Central Texas was booming in 1984, but Waco is even more a happening place these days.
But for one day, we were in the heron’s world — an older world. The leaves of cottonwoods clapped in the breeze. Occasionally I’d see Joel, as the contemplative artist, standing still, soaking in the details of a new composition forming in his mind’s eye — a bend in the river, a small waterfall, a rock outcrop, the kind of dramatic scene you might not believe could be so close to home if you weren’t out there.
Life in the Canyon
I wonder how people just a few miles away have any way of knowing the cliffs, the waterfalls or the SUV-sized stones strewn around. In Texas less than 5% of the land is public, but rivers, where navigable, are legally publicly accessible. Though there are plenty of stories about riverside-possessive landowners who get testy about apparent trespassers. I suppose they have good reason, or at least believe they do.
Still, Texas rivers can connect us more than divide us if we give one another a little room to roam and if we’re respectful to the place. They can help us discover one another as neighbors and find connection with our history. Rivers attract interesting people and connect them to each other and their environments in beautiful ways. Richard particularly admired riverside residents who were rooted in the place, not just weekenders from the big cities.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some of them. Dr. Ned Snyder came to the Middle Bosque in 1979, established Side Oats Ranch, and has been re-establishing native Texas grasses as a way of healing the soil and ecosystem.
Downstream, Rick Tullis went kayaking on the river with his children and found his passion. When the opportunity came to buy over 100 acres on the river, it was more land than he’d wanted at a higher price than he’d imagined paying, but he told me, “I just had to do it. I had the philosophy of the man in Jesus’ parable — if you find a treasure in a field, sell all you have to buy the field. This place is the best investment I’ve made in my life in every way.”
Texas rivers are in his blood. His great-great-grandmother and her brother were the only survivors of a deadly Comanche raid on the Brazos recounted by John Graves in “Goodbye to a River.”
At the headwaters, Don and Natalie Risinger acquired the old Tharp Springs place in Turnersville. While pulling down layers of mid-century siding from an old house on the rim of the canyon, they discovered the original 1855 log cabin, constructed by William E. Young. Hiding in plain sight was one of the oldest structures in the county. They have restored it as a showcase of frontier life.
As Richard described the canyon as a welcome refuge, these are some of the people who have found refuge for their lives within its life.
I believe that many others have found sanctuary in this river long before us.
There is another, older story to tell of this river-as-refuge. It starts in antebellum Texas, when cotton was king and McLennan County’s free population was 3,799 alongside 2,404 enslaved. The western edge of the new, booming city of Waco wasn’t a dam-impounded lake but a deep, thick ravine collecting the convergence of the South, Middle and North Bosque rivers. In 1858 James Harrison brought 41 slaves with him from Mississippi and became one of the largest slaveholders in the area. By 1860, at least eight of Harrison’s slaves were reported as missing and were never found, writes Karla Price, author of “Slavery in Waco” at wacohistoryproject.org.
Where did they go? Perhaps south to Mexico. We know now from Alice Baumgartner’s “South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War” that as many as 10,000 enslaved men and women escaped to freedom across the Rio Grande. By my reckoning, if escaping slaves from Waco were trying to go south, the Middle Bosque River canyon could have been the route. They could evade capture below the cliffs and in rock shelters, thick brush and winding shallow river bottoms until climbing out onto the prairie somewhere west of Crawford.
It’s not hard to imagine that the canyon, and perhaps its landowners near the headwaters offered refuge for someone looking to hide and make their way west and south. I like to think of the river in this way, of the Middle Bosque offering welcome refuge to those who needed it most. In the crucible of the American experience, it sets the story of our little river in the realm of redemption, at the threshold of geology and theology.
Seeking Richard
I pondered these things and others all morning. By noon the sun burned off any clouds. The air was warm, and the time ripe for a midday rest. I needed one, having just then slipped and landed hard on my back onto the rocks.
Joel and I climbed up onto a dump truck-sized boulder, dozed in the sun, and talked about the ghosts of the past. Joel studied bass and sunfish lolling in the stream below. My thoughts turned back to Richard.
How does a local McGregor boy grow up to write about his childhood stomping grounds for Sports Illustrated, and what happened to him after that? I wanted to know him as I have come to know my neighbors up and down the river. Yet, I discovered, there aren’t many access points to his life. The archives of The McGregor Sun, his hometown newspaper, are missing for all of 2009, the year he died. The Waco Tribune-Herald did not report on his death. He has no Wikipedia page. Sports Illustrated was no help. Most of what I learned is from a tribute written for him in The Texas Observer by his friend Elroy Bode titled “Meditation on a Friend’s Suicide” on April 17, 2009. It is beautiful, and heartbreaking.
Richard’s early years in and around the Middle Bosque canyon were mid-century boyhood magic. From there, he attended the University of Texas at Austin, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, went to France on a Fulbright scholarship and studied at the Sorbonne. After World War II where he served in the Pacific, he returned to Texas to work at various newspapers and then moved to New York to become a staff writer for Sports Illustrated. Later in life, to care for an ailing family member, he returned to Texas where he took long walks in the Hill Country, the mountains and deserts of west Texas and the swamps and piney woods of East Texas. He marshalled his encyclopedic knowledge of our vast and diverse state in 1976 to compile “Texas Wild,” which still holds a place on the shelves of many Texans.
His story turns tragic. As arthritis and other ailments in old age made walking first painful and then nearly impossible, the man who embodied Texas’ once free-range landscapes and freedom-seeking people dreaded being physically helpless. And then the heartbreaking end. On the morning of March 18, 2009, Richard walked into a pasture near his home in McGregor, took out a .38 caliber pistol and took his own life. His obituary only stated the sparse facts:
Richard Phelan was born on October 15, 1921, and passed away on Wednesday,
March 18, 2009. Richard was a resident of McGregor, Texas.
Friends and relatives scattered his ashes in a field of bluebonnets near Waco. I never knew him personally, but when I learned that he died, and how he died, I felt I’d lost a friend. As we walked in Richard’s steps, I pondered suffering, and life and death, and the duality between the delight he experienced in this very place and his pain at the end.
Learning of his death shook me. I could walk where Richard walked, but I would never catch up to him.
But we do share this river, so I resolved to try to answer, if possible, the questions he carried about it, and about life. Will the river remain undeveloped, or will it be impounded? Will the blue heron still find a home here? Will places like this still offer refuge for contemplation amidst the noise and industry of modern life into the 21st century? Richard worried if the canyon could remain safe from development or abuse years into the future.
Forty Years
If I could, I would assure him that the Middle Bosque canyon, like many places all through our state, is still in good care of people who respect and revere it. While as a nation we can be recklessly destructive of creation around us and sometimes show little care for the past or the future, this is not true here.
Not yet anyway.
There is still refuge in this geography and wisdom in people who make their lives here in Central Texas. There is hope for goodness and care of people for the spaces they inhabit and love. The river still flows with a grace you experience when you enter its world on its terms. I suspect that this is true along all kinds of quiet, ordinary rivers all across our nation.
Sitting by any river in the cool of the evening, we are reminded that a river is not merely a resource to be exploited; it is gift, refuge, prayer and history, slipping on by, as it has always done for all time for those who have the patience to see it.
There is one more story in the beauty and sadness this river carries. It might just be the best one yet: A redemption story.
Each year, on Easter Sunday, Waco’s Church Under the Bridge goes out to picnic and worship at a camp on the banks of Middle Bosque. Whereas most Sundays they meet under an I-35 bridge, once a year they come to the river. Men and women share testimonies of liberation. Most give thanks for freedom from drug and alcohol addictions and the compassion of God. Then, they are baptized by Pastor Jimmy Dorrell in the river. The Middle Bosque becomes part of their own story of refuge and search for freedom.
Standing on the banks of the river, Jimmy preaches, “People saw Jesus resurrected but still didn’t recognize him because they weren’t seeing with their eyes open. If you have your eyes open, you’re seeing what God sees.”
What I see in all these stories is that the Middle Bosque is still safe, a welcome refuge for blue herons, freedom seekers, artists and writers, sufferers, pilgrims and all God’s children. May it be so for another 40 years, for all of us and by all of us because, as Wallace Stegner wrote, “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”
Late in the afternoon, Joel and I walked around the last bend on our walk. We climbed out of the riverbed to the rattling sounds of modern life, the clack-clack of tires barreling over the bridge. Out of the canyon, back up on the flat land, we drove back to our homes.
It wasn’t far.
