“You are a light on a hill, o people, light for the City of God, shine so holy and bright o people, shine for the City of God…” got the hymn fragment stuck in my head, but really what is running through my mind is the image, not of cities on hills, but of cities on hills with – yes, you’ve heard this before – rivers running through them. All started when I saw the word Brazos recently, printed on the buttons of Robin’s flannel shirt. How did they know, I wondered, that we live in Brazos County, in the Brazos Valley, on the Brazos de Dios River? Then I got to wondering what it would be like to have a city on the Brazos River, I mean right astride it, and I realized it just couldn’t happen, at least not this far downstream or, contrariwise, not this far upstream. Closer to the coast, and the thing would be deeper and more navigable, closer to its source, and it would be shallower and more manageable. But here, it runs between high, wild, clay banks, in a bed full of snags. Just now, it is nearly bank-full with all the rains (at last!) and looking to flood, and when it floods, the Brazos Bottoms fill up with silt again.
“Wide as the arms of God” was how it was described by the Spanish, somewhere at its mouth, but when the Brazos is in flood, hereabouts, the whole Bottom floods, and that looks wide enough for God’s arms to us folks. Out on the Bottom land, the cotton fields, corn fields, sorghum and watermelon patches stretch out flat and wide, nearly as far as the eye can see, and they say that the first crop of cotton that was taken off the Brazos Bottoms was six feet high. Cotton is a great depleter of soils, however, so we are down to the usual two feet, nowadays. Cotton was king in Texas, until the Civil War, and practically all the slaves raised out in Virginia, were sent out here to work it in the killing Texas heat. It is still a yearly question of whether the rains will come at the right time for the cotton, and whether the gins will be full of bales in the fall, and there are still slave quarters to be seen, taken off the plantation lands and perched on small land-holdings, all over the county: little wooden double-cabins with steep-pitched roofs and a porch, fading away in the sun and harsh winter weather.
We had snow, yesterday, and it is colder here than all the other places Robin keeps on his desktop: Berkeley, Paris, and Sendai. When the jet stream loops south, there is no mountain range to keep Canada out of Texas: it just invades as it likes, only meeting resistence from the onshore breezes of the Gulf. When the wind starts to blow from the north, the Blue Northers come in and kill our pot-plants before we can hustle them indoors, but then when it comes again (as usual) from the south, then we are freed from frost, and the frost mostly doesn’t get to Brazos County; generally stalls out in Waco. Things happen fast, and big here, weather-wise, and we have learned to snatch our opportunities when they blow through, however briefly they come: our young folk run out into the parks and golf courses and dance in the rain, when it comes down in buckets as it surely can, and when we get the rare snow, all classes must stop and the people rush out into it.
Like yesterday: the super-big, Texas-sized snowflakes were falling thick and fast, all over the place, like a slow-motion summer downpour. We were on campus for early voting and by the time we got back to the car, my wool coat wast spangled all over with big white flakes, and the students were going nutty. Two giggling anthropology coeds were making a snowman on the hood of a car parked outside the Wooden Ships Lab, and other wild-eyed women were lying in wait with snowballs for the Corps cadets, who were stumping along in their camos as if they were practicing up for Afghanistan – as they well may be, bless their hearts! – but the girls didn’t have the heart to actually throw the things at the guys; rather they threw them up into the air. (Men, take note: rare snows drive women wild; one suspects the mood is on them for any sort of madness!) Snowmen were up in a jiffy, however, and “WHOOP!” quickly spelled out with footprints on the “grassy knoll” in front of the Architecture building, from the roof of which snowballs were being lobbed randomly on passers-by. A woman asked us, at the voting: “Is this snow or ice or something? I’ve never seen snow falling, before!” Now, folks, snow does fall here, every seven years or so, so she must never have run outside before, to catch it, but to fall so thickly and for so long is a very rare thing here in the Brazos Valley.
Cities on rivers are common enough, where we’ve been and where we’re going: Paris started on an island in the Seine, Sendai has the beautiful Hirose-gawa winding like three rivers through its heart, Berkeley has its creeks, running off the hills into the Bay… Rome has its island in the Tiber… but it also has its seven hills: there also needs to be rock under there, somewhere, hills to put the houses on when the river is minded to flood. The Brazos stays out of College Station: we have several ridges between us and the Bottomlands to keep us dry, unless Wolf Pen Creek or Carter Creek run through our backyards. But here, there is no rock to climb up to, along the Brazos, not around here: all clay, clay, clay, and either slippery or hard as rock, and no way down to the water, save by slipping. So here you will find no City on a River. Just a city charmed by snow, for one brief moment, and always ready, for the briefest of moments, to find joy.
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