Thanks for the Drink, Please Send More
(River • Nature)
Considering the name of this blog includes the Brazos River, it doesn’t seem that I’ve been writing much about it. This must be rectified!
Once it got light enough to navigate this morning, I sneaked out back and down to the river with Bosco the Wonder Spot. Word had reached me earlier in the week that the Army Corps of Engineers and the Brazos River Authority had put their heads together and decided to let loose of some of the water they horde so greedily in giant reservoirs along the upper river. This was good thinking since the lower river is evaporating away to not much at all at places such as Rosharon, where the depth had been headed toward the puny 2-foot mark.
There are entire environmental societies, whose members meet and plot strategy or publish occasional calls to action in defense of their beloved and admittedly beautiful Upper Brazos. But I don’t hear people sticking up for the brown, soupy and sometimes treacherous Lower Brazos.
This is a shame, because the crazy meandering of the lower portion of the Brazos has created a long, wide swath of nature preserve, albeit protecting plant and beast from godless master-planning bulldozer renters only through extreme topographic inconvenience rather than force of any law. The rich diversity of the resulting mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, insect and arachnid populations within this green zone is amazing to those who can sit still long enough to observe them.
But they require water, and the Brazos to provide it. Early this year, low water only being replenished by upstream sewage treatment plants provided nature with a major bloom of fish-killing golden algae. Since the beginning of this month, sunny highs of 98 degrees or more and a total absence of rain has helped turn the Mighty Lower Brazos into a stagnant ribbon of gruel. Three weeks ago I watched, undetected, as three somewhat intoxicated teenagers unsuccessfully powered a broken pedal-boat across my range of view, eventually tumping in mid-river. They simply stood up, in water between waist and chest high. A year ago the river wouldn’t have allowed such an insulting craft to launch, and if anyone were unlucky enough to tump in mid-stream, they would’ve found themselves swept a hundred yards downstream before even thinking about reaching shore.
When I reached water’s edge today, I saw it was true – a small gift from the Corps, but a gift nonetheless. A little beach still extended along a portion of the shore that more properly should have been under 5 or 6 feet of water, but a little of that beach had disappeared since Thursday, fish had noticed and were somewhat active, and you could see the water actually moving. I knelt and took a handful of the Brazos. From its viscosity, “nose” and drip, I deduced a hint of Stillhouse Hollow Lake, just west of Temple, and I sent a tiny prayer of thanks back up that way.
Oh, all right. I actually used the Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service web site to trace the gift water upstream as far as the lake. I also was able to ascertain that the amount of water being released has only raised the level of the Brazos from about 8.5 to 9.3 feet at the One Acre Ranch gauge, and from 2.5 to 3.5 feet in Rosharon.
I don’t want to look a gift Corps in the mouth, but some of the larger gators still can’t seem to lift their bellies off the sandbar across from the county jail, so could you boys please open the gates enough at Lake Granbury to give us another foot or so of clearance?
→ B.Dunn, Jun 27, 2009, 07 04 am
