Directory:Goodbye to a River Plot Summary and More
Goodbye to a River is of course required reading material for all incoming freshman at Texas State University this fall. And of course the administration picked an obscure book to make sure sure students would actually read for once. However thanks to Search engine optimizing firm Page Creations the truly lazy now have an out. So without further ado...
Plot Overview
So the author John Graves canoes down 150-200 miles of the upper-middle Brazos River where most of his childhood memories were before 5 new dams where scheduled to go in.
Chapters 1-3
The book opens up in October with graves trying to personify the river. He gives us some facts like since WWII the governments already put it two dams and 5 more are scheduled to go in soon. He then gives his two cents on how we should embrace the good old days but he then concedes progress in inevitable. He's a bit taoist if you ask me.
Chapter two starts with him coming back to west Texas then after BSing with an old merchant Graves and his best childhood friend Hale drive up to the new Possum Kingdom dam where they take his canoe and all his gear down by the river. Hale heads back to the wife, kids, and work while Graves meanders down the river with his only companion a dachshund puppy. He stops for the night and camps out along the back reminiscing and worrying that all the rain will make the river too high.
The third chapter is a short stint all about history. The original Spanish explorers named it the "Arms of God". The Comanches were nomadic but roamed and owned the whole area. They were then compared to the Huns, Visigoths and others. You know outside nomads vs. the romans (this time whites and Spaniards.
Chapter 4
Chapter 4 is a longer one. It starts with the following rainy morning. Graves dawdles around waiting to see if its okay to break camp. A bit of blue sky shows so he packs up and heads out. Then Graves gets out of the canoe again and more history. This time he talks about the original white settlers, mostly southerners and war veterans caught up in a war of sorts with the Comanches. Graves then drifts into environmentalism my talking about the old farmers practice of not letting the land go fallow until nothing but dust was left then moving to a new place. He also talks about the few remaining bald eagles and parallels them with himself, not many like him left, needs lots of space. Graves passes two D-bags who flew their turboprop onto the river bank and are trying to fish. Then even more history about this part of the river, that part... Grave then calls it quits early by setting up camp and killing a squirrel for squirrel stew. He dreams about Jesse Veale an original settler killed by Comanches and how when he was in WWII in the pacific he hated the Japanese just like the whites hated the Indians. Graves threatens to quit if the rain won't stop but it finally does and he heads the next morning.
