It was something I always had wanted to do—go under my own power down a river to the sea. At its core was both the idea and the sensation of freedom. Living in a world so thoroughly carved up and sold off, there were only two ways I had discovered to really experience freedom in nature the way it once must have been everywhere. One way was hiking through a national forest. The other was traveling on a river, which, although usually flanked by private property, nevertheless was itself considered public, and by Texas law one was allowed to camp along its banks when en route. I had thought first of a canoe trip, perhaps floating down the Colorado from Austin to the Gulf of Mexico, camping all along the way. For a time, I entertained going full Huck Finn and even built a raft—an eight-by-sixteen-foot platform built of plywood that, at the water’s edge, got bolted onto forty plastic Sterilite storage bins.
Then, at age fifty and perfectly healthy, I had a stroke. One afternoon out of the blue while I was at work, a malformed artery in my brain ruptured and drowned an area the size of a golf ball. It required emergency brain surgery that likely saved my life. I spent ten weeks in hospitals and inpatient neuro rehab facilities.
But, by the grace of God and the patient work of lots of therapists, I recovered the ability to walk and to do many of the things I had loved doing, albeit with significant struggle. One thing that to this day has not returned is the function of my right hand, and yes, I was right-handed. My right leg still worked well enough that, with the help of a brace that prevented me from turning my ankle with every step, I could walk with a significant limp. I had to actively think about keeping my balance when on the move, and only with great struggle could I do things like squat, sit on the ground, roll over, and get off the ground.
But dreams are stubborn things, and within two years of the stroke, the thought of camping down a river to the sea reared its head above the water’s surface of my injured brain again. To surrender this dream to the stroke, as a completely sane person probably would have, was something I simply wasn’t willing to do. Not pursuing the dream might prolong my life, but would life without audacious goals really feel like living?
I thought again of the raft, but it was just too much for me to handle after the stroke. If I was going to do this, I needed to think light, think small, get back to basics. My mind returned to the original fantasy, a canoe. On a Boy Scout campout, I sat on the front seat of one of the eight red canoes we had rented and did my best to paddle on my left. My nearly paralyzed right arm and hand put paddling somewhere between ineffective and impossible. Significant paddling—let alone paddling all day for a week or more—was out of the question.
Raft, no. Canoe, no. There was exactly one option left—one class of vessel remaining that used human power, and that was a form of kayak driven by pedals that turned a propeller beneath the boat. These had been created so that anglers could maneuver their kayaks in the water without having to put down their rods to paddle. But they also allowed people with upper-body disabilities to operate a boat. After talking my friend Wade into making a trip with me one morning over breakfast, I bought a tandem kayak, the river-going version of a bicycle built for two.
After the stroke, my therapists often tried to have me ride a stationary bike, but my right foot would not stay on the pedal. It was not that my leg was weak—it wasn’t. It was that my leg was spastic. Whenever I really exerted myself, I lost control, and my foot would slip off the pedal and my leg flail.
With the kayak’s tiny pedals, experience had shown I had no hope of keeping my foot on the pedal for more than five revolutions before it slid off with a thud against the hollow plastic floor of the cockpit. I knew that if I was to ever get this to work I would need some sort of apparatus supporting the back of my heel. Perhaps some sort of box that I could fasten to the pedal would work. It had to be big enough to fit my sport sandal but not so big that it would allow my foot to turn, and not so wide that it would not clear the wall of the little cockpit on its orbit.
I went to the home-improvement store and thence to the home organization aisle. There, I spotted something that looked about right. It was a plexiglass drawer organizer, twelve inches long, six inches wide, and two inches deep. Just to make sure, I set it on the floor and stepped into it like a hardware store Cinderella. It fit just right. The box looked very much like a casserole dish, and that’s what we called it from then on.
After several months considering different rivers in Texas—the Trinity, the Brazos, the Rio Grande, the San Antonio—at last my eyes fell upon a river I had crossed probably two hundred times going between my adopted home of Austin and my hometown of McAllen but had never given much thought to, the Nueces.
The Nueces bisected a region my friends and I long had called the Nothing. Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome had come out our senior year of high school and so was still fresh in our minds as we began making trips as college freshmen back and forth between McAllen and Central Texas. In Mad Max, the Nothing was a vast expanse of desert in the Wasteland of postapocalyptic Australia.
In our Nothing, the widely spaced small towns were in various states of depopulated poverty and existed almost entirely at the whim of surrounding oil and gas fields, always seeming like the remnants of some better time thirty years past. Now a junkyard. Now a boarded-up filling station with a stray dog wandering by. Now a low-slung motel with a peeling, decades-old sign proudly advertising that every room had air-conditioning and a color TV.
The Nothing is an unkind name for any place, I grant you. But we were young and unobservant and appreciated mostly bright lights and big cities. When we thought of natural beauty, we thought of the beach, or the mountains if we had ever seen any. It certainly wasn’t this—what naturalists call the Tamaulipan thornscrub.
In time I came to realize there is beauty in this land, a brutal beauty—arid and thorny and not for the sissies of any species, including our own. For untold millennia the land resisted settlement of any kind. The Homo sapiens who dared to live here subsisted on a razor-thin margin of carbohydrates and protein: cactus fruit, roots, mesquite beans, lizards, and the occasional windfall of a deer or javelina. Scholars lump them together under the name Coahuiltecans. They must have been both ingenious and as tough as nails.
This unsung, unassuming—almost invisible—river I had crossed at least two hundred times just north of George West was the first river in Texas to appear on a European map. The Portuguese cartographer Diogo Ribeiro drew it in 1527 on a secret Spanish map known as the Padrón Real (Royal Census), which is considered the first scientific world map. They called this the Río Escondido, or Hidden River, due to the fact that its mouth was obscured by what we call North Padre Island or Mustang Island. Before the Spanish arrived and renamed it, the Coahuiltecans called it Chotilapacquen.
After months of planning and preparation, we arrived in George West, and early the next morning—May 30, 2020—we drove to the river. Wade loaded the giant blue vinyl dry bag, cart, and red potty bucket and strapped it all down tight for the first of many times. I helped as best I could to jostle the two mesh bags filled with tortillas and peanut butter and tuna and coffee through the oval front hatch and into the hull’s nose.
I kissed my wife, Kirstin, goodbye. She flashed an authentic smile of happiness for me, one that coexisted with her admitted nervousness. Beneath the bridge now, as beneath every bridge, fishermen were taking an interest in this strange boat with its strangely dressed and heavily provisioned operators. “Love you!” I shouted, and then to the fishermen hastened to add, “Not you, her,” pointing above us to the bridge where Kirstin now stood shooting video on her phone as we disappeared down the winding, gray-green river.
At about noon, around mile 11, the character of the river began to change, widening and slowing as we approached the head of Lake Corpus Christi. At mile 21, the clouds to our northeast were growing darker by the moment, and their rumbling was getting closer. We had to land as soon as possible. We ran ashore on an island smaller than my front yard at the head of the lake.
Wade pulled the boat up on dry ground, and I tied the bow handle to a large orange plastic screw I had brought as a ground anchor. Back upriver, a lightning bolt lit up the sky, and the near immediate crack told us it had struck less than a quarter mile away. Now gale-force winds hit the tiny island, inverting the tent as Wade, like Buster Keaton, took on the Sisyphean chore of getting both ends of the poles attached so that the tent would finally assume its domed shape. Rain came down like bullets.
I unzipped the tent door and threw the duffle in, both to get it out of the rain and to add weight to the tent so it wouldn’t blow into the lake like a box kite. I followed the duffle into the tent and in a slow roll collapsed to the ground. In a minute that must have seemed to Wade like an hour, he climbed into the tent too, panting; lowered the rain fly; and zipped the door closed, both of us laughing in nervous disbelief at the Weather Channel special exploding all around us.
First light of day brought an explosion of pink in the clouds over the lake. The majestic vista shifted from bright pink to pale pink and, as the sun showed itself just south of the large island to our east, to gold, the effect doubled as whatever changed above us in the sky also changed before us in the water. As I stood there chewing a protein bar and chasing it with a tiny plastic bottle of 5-hour Energy, I looked at the clouds. This is why I do it, I thought.
That afternoon, as we slowly peddled the length of the lake, the waves kicked up, and we began to rock. My left hand was busy as it grasped the metal frame of my seat bottom to hold myself in the boat, then adjusted the tiller, then quickly grasped my seat bottom again before the next roll. We studied the shore to which we had been heading for quite a while, and despite our continuous pedaling, we were not convinced we were actually gaining on it. We had been heading that way for so long, and the chop was now so rough, that I had decided we should land at the nearest point, call my brother Erren, and have him pick us up there instead of our planned rendezvous where he would portage us around the dam.
“Dude,” I said from the rear seat, “which is closer, that shore straight ahead or that point we passed back on the right, the one with the palm trees?” Wade craned his head to look back over his right shoulder. “Definitely that one,” he said, pointing behind us. If we didn’t have enough sense to get to shore right then, Wade’s words, “Definitely that one,” might be his last. We had to cut our losses.
As we turned, waves began breaking over the side of the boat, and although I was bailing as fast as I could with the little yellow cup, by now there was so much water in my cockpit it looked like I was sitting in a bathtub. I single-mindedly pedaled and, with my one good hand, rapidly alternated between bailing and adjusting the tiller to keep us heading toward the closest point on shore.
Our vessel now landed hard amidst breakers coming off the lake. As the waves pounded the muddy bank, since I had not stood for several hours, I lost my footing immediately and fell backward into the shallows. Erren found us, and at length we found a place below the dam to put back in. It was good to be back on a river, even as the rain returned.
Evening fell with the tap-tap-tap of light rain on our tent coming and going. Throughout the night, barred owls kept up their call-and-response, one a tenor, the other, on the other side of the river, an alto. Each one would recite a two-line poem, a question followed by an answer: “Who cooks for you? You cook for you.” The other then would repeat the question and the answer: “Who cooks for you? You cook for you.” This went on seemingly for hours into the night. “Who cooks for you? You cook for you.” At one point, I thought about bursting out of the tent: “Look! I know the question of who cooks for whom is an important one. Establishing a clear understanding of the division of labor is crucial to any successful relationship. I get that! Maybe this week, you, sir, the one above me, can do the cooking for both of you, and you, ma’am—across the river—you can clean up. How does that sound? Actually, I don’t hear any disagreement! Both of you have been crystal clear that the other one should cook for themselves. Why are we still talking about this?!”
The next morning, we headed out on day three, again in a steady rain, which I found peaceful. The surface of the river, normally as smooth as glass, was pockmarked with each drop, their ripples intersecting at all angles, as if the river was simmering. Green herons continued to fly along and across the river, not the least bit intimidated by the rain. Thunder rumbled in the distance, so far away we felt it in our chests more than heard it.
Our choice of early June was paying dividends, as we were not cold, even soaked to the bone. The scene was one of peaceful surrender, a surrender dictated by the intersection of nature and our vacation schedules. While in other times we might have sat in the tent and waited out the storm, by day three we already were battle-hardened by the storm far worse than this that pummeled us as Wade struggled to set up the tent on night one, and by the rain that soaked us while we were on the lake the next morning, and by the rain that rinsed us off yet again as we pulled into the camp last night. We were now way beyond caring about being wet. Pulling on wet socks every morning and wading knee-deep to float the boat before taking our seats had become routine. Wet all the time. Might as well lean in.
At around mile 56, I spied a textbook river-camping site on the left for night three: a sandy beach jutting out a little into the river, with a long, high bank leading up to a clearing. That night, we left the rainfly off to ventilate the tent more. So naturally, at midnight, the skies opened up again, and Wade had to scramble in the dark to get the fly on and rotate it to its correct position. But I fell back to sleep with a smile on my face, a deep satisfaction that we were doing what we had set out to do: camping down a river to the sea.
When we got home, I tried to sum up the trip for friends with four lists:
Things seen: alligator gar in the hundreds, snakes falling out of trees, huge barred owls crossing the river in front of us, green herons in the dozens, violent storms, peaceful rain, tear-jerking sunrises and sunsets, a family of swans gliding on the water, an alligator, a severed hog’s leg, Spanish moss, fishermen under bridges, bald cypresses, palmettos, wild turkeys, willows in the millions, rabid wolf spiders.
Things heard: barred owls, great horned owls, bullfrogs, coyotes, crickets, barking dogs, lonely trains, songbirds, and laughing gulls.
Things tasted: tuna, peanut butter, cold coffee, and tortillas.
Things smelled: ourselves.
Adapted excerpt from The River Nuts: Down the Nueces With One Stroke, by Avrel Seale, TCU Press, 2023. Used with permission.
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