The River (Part 1 of 3)
Webster defines a river as “A natural stream of water of considerable size flowing in a definite course or channel.”
Hmm. Interesting. As a kid growing up in Atascosa County in the ‘70s and ‘80s, that “considerable size” part was a head-scratcher, because the river I knew was nothing of the sort of Webster’s.
My grandparents lived on land that had a small tributary running through the back pasture. At some point, someone of some importance long ago decreed that tributary a “river” and gave it a name: the Atascosa River.
“Atascosa”, which I was told in grade school means “boggy creek” in Spanish, was also the name of the county that the river ran through.
The confusing part was that the “boggy creek river” in “boggy creek county” was not even 20 feet wide in most places and was dry most of the time.
Maybe they should’ve called it the “Oxymoron River”. Anyway, the Atascosa River has always been near and dear to my heart.
When the river had water, the fishing wasn’t bad. One night when I was 11, my Pap and I went out to run a few throwlines we had out where we could walk along the bank and check them.
All went well until I slid down the bank to pull in a line and, unbeknownst to me initially, sat in a fire ant bed.
You know, fire ants have a rather remarkable ability to wait until a good number of them have had the opportunity to reach some of the most remote nether regions of your anatomy before they all attack at once. True to form, that’s exactly what they did, and no amount of slapp ing, dancing or stripping off clothes made it any better.
Our fishing trip was cut short, and I spent the next week in search of relief from various and sundry potions, lotions and salves.
On another night a few years later, my friend Bobby and I used a small Jon boat to set out lines.
We were in high school at the time and thought we knew everything. Utilizing “the grass is greener” doctrine, we threw caution to the wind, paddled upriver to the end of Pap’s property, and trespassed to set a line on the neighb o r ’ s property. That property was about as heavily wooded as a property could get in the scrub brush, live oak dotted landscape of south Texas.
The tall, leafless trees that we weaved through after we left the boat looked other worldly backlit against a half-moon sky.
Rustling through fallen leaves as we walked, Bobby and I began developing a bad case of the willies, but we figured such a foreboding place surely must harbor waters where giant channel cats go to die.
We trudged on until we found a place to set a line. Rustling in the darkness. I looked at him; he looked at me. Neither of us were moving.
The willies increased significantly, so we decided to forget about fish and started to walk quickly back towards our boat. Rustling in the darkness. Now, the rustling sound was paralleling us as we traveled along the riverbank. We stopped. The rustling stopped. We started. The rustling started, never moving closer or further away, but mimicking our movements about 10 yards off.
The third time we all stopped, Bobby and I RAN! We raced as if we only had to outrun the other, both of us thinking that if the thing got one of us, the other might live. We scurried through the barbed wire fence and leapt into the boat. Paddling furiously, we smashed into the bank and several bushes along the way but eventually made it back to the truck.
At the truck, we were still two kids alone in the dark with some kind of crazed leaf-rustling thing not 200 yards away from us, but we felt safe. Ollie Ollie all-come-free Mr. Crazed Leaf Rustler; you can’t catch us anymore. The Crazed Leaf Rustler must’ve respected the sanctity of home base, because he/she/it left us alone from then on.
We’ll never know what the crazed leaf rustler was, but in the years since we have fancied it to be some kind of chupacabra, sasquatch, prison escapee, or the like. It makes for a more interesting story that way, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last story from my youth spawned from the waters of the mighty Atascosa. More on that next week…
