Now that I have deposited and defended my dissertation, it’s on to the next task: writing the book. My main strategy for this year will be to think about it as little as possible and focus on our projects like my river history website. When I do return, I have to figure out how to keep people’s attention who are not my committee or friends as we explore 150 years’ worth of history. I will make many of the same arguments that I do in the dissertation about the environmental and political legacy of slavery, but above all else, this will be a story. And the main character, that will tie everything together and that will undergo the greatest change has to be the Trinity itself. Right now, the Trinity appears in the introduction and early chapters and mostly disappears in the final chapters.
Over the last seventy years, the Trinity has been largely forgotten with fewer people living and working in its floodplain. It has also been a time of dramatic change for the river, and not just because of climate change. The Trinity has also become an even more fearsome place—a fact reaffirmed by several people who have read this very website and share stories of death and loss related to the river. Not everyone can afford to forget the river.
I have been lucky enough to have Bill deBuys, whose writing on rivers is a model for me, mentor me through this final year and he has been the most insistent on this point about the river as a character. One suggestion was that perhaps I needed to organize a trip down the Trinity that would give the book a structure. This sounds like a great adventure, but who knows when my career and fatherhood might allow for such a journey. I do already have a lifetime of experience to draw from.
Though I have not lived full time near the Trinity since I was a boy, I return there regularly to visit my father and be in the country. On the drive from the DFW airport, we exit the interstate onto US highway 287. The Trinity used to close the highway pretty regularly due to flooding, but when I was in high school, they raised the roadbed by a few feet, and at least for now, that’s been enough to keep commerce flowing. Near the end of the two-hour drive we cross the river. As we approach the bridge my dad always rolls down the windows and the Trinity air hits you at seventy miles an hour, its rich smell and humid feel. The odor is so familiar that it simply smells like home to me. I suppose this is a challenge that many authors face, it is much easier to describe new experiences rather than the ones that have become a part of us.