We had a great childhood in Brazos County. We grew up in one of the rural parts around College Station know as Oak Circle and Runaway Acres, but we didn’t know these labels at the time. In fact, we didn’t know many labels at all— we explored where curiosity led us, and those thorny, green wait-a-minute vines stopped us no more effectively than the barb wire kind.
Today, studying an aerial map, I can still fairly accurately pinpoint many of our typical Saturday morning routes of thirty years ago. Utilizing large print, land elevation maps on loan from the TAMU library, we might plan the quest the week before or recon afterward. We’d put on our long pants, long sleeves, and mud shoes, collect our snacks and lunches in a bag, and head out. Each journey began with the necessary exiting the neighborhood, the public roads, the acceptable. I can see on this map some nondescript shrubbery off the bend in a road where I recall we happened to know that the fence was easily passable because it was loose or missing a section. This was one of several portals to transport us between the exposed, hot, sunny walk along public roads into trespassing, unknown, and adventure.
We found terrific satisfaction having come out of the public and into the other side, our private, dangerous adventure underway. Everything was a discovery: the dried up mud hole where we prayed to God on our knees to levitate us out; the exposed dashboard of a sunken automobile stuck in the ground; the small, intimate family cemetery under a tuft of trees; unofficial dirt roads leading out to unofficial campfire sites with broken beer bottles. We hiked right up to the back of the TAMU observatory, nuclear reactor, and Easterwood Airport. We rarely had any specific objective other than wanting, ultimately, to reach that mighty Brazos River, the great divider between Brazos County and Robertson County, the brown body of water rumored to carry alligators (or at least alligator gars).
But we learned a lot on these adventures. We thought our White Creek was quite big. We found the scarce, picked-dry, white bones of a few unfortunate cattle who also thought the drops of the ravines were quite big. (I preferred finding deer skulls, because they looked cooler.) We confirmed that a color tv pulled from a wet creek, once the water had evaporated and webs cleared out, only required minor knob twisting to come back to full working condition. I used it in my bedroom for AV experiments and watching shows like In Living Color and forbidden music videos on The Box channel. We learned all at once that out here some folks use ravines at the edge of their property as landfills and that in these landfills a kid can find some really cool machine scraps and that running from an angry herd of cattle (what we thought was a stampede) was very scary and that that found 2-cycle motor we hoped to haul home for restoration could be dropped for the moment and retrieved at a later date.
And that goal of following the big creek to the river? The creek we followed had many tricky spots to maneuver: some places thick with pokey brush or no sand bank on which to walk without slipping into the water; some bends with a ridge towering high overhead; most of the creek had water in it; occasionally we’d find a segment where a fence literally spanned the creek. We always feared snakes, though I don’t think we ever saw any. The creek we followed steadily grew big enough that it had other smaller tributaries spill in to feed it. But what a feeling to get to where the high ridges drop straight down, the water is always present, and, lo!, the creek joined another, much larger stream, a river! Of course we had to cross it. Crossing such a breadth was tricky, but once on the other side, we rejoiced, victorious, and stuck a makeshift flag made of a dry stalk into the ground declaring ourselves rulers over Robertson County. Later, with the aid of an aerial map during recon, we would come to learn that all along we were following but a tributary and finally met and crossed only White Creek itself that day. What a let down, but, also, what a laugh. And what a lesson: even not reaching the contrived goal was a very rewarding achievement as well. We would save the Brazos River for another time. Now so many years later I can see just how physically close to the river we had actually come that day.
The walk back was always unbearable. Maybe our adventure was cut short and one of us was scraped up, limping, or both. Maybe we were lugging found treasures, taking turns if it was heavy. Maybe we were just exhausted from a long morning of hiking. One thing was always the case: the blazing hot afternoon Texas sun was baking-in our memories for a lifetime.
