Bayou Walk

 The one thing I do regularly, other than eat and sleep, is walk.  It’s good for me, and I enjoy it, but I don’t think I could manage it daily if I didn’t need to take my dog for a long walk every day, rain or shine, to keep her happy and healthy and out of trouble.  We generally like to walk by long flowing bodies of water.  If you’re not from Houston, you’d call these things creeks or rivers, but here I walk every morning by a bayou (said “by-you” by me and almost everyone and “by-oh” by folks who want to let you know their people have been here a long time and Hank Williams, Sr).  There might not be a difference between a river and a bayou, practically, but lots of people think of our bayous as slow-moving and muddy; maybe with swampy vegetation and wildlife, and closer to a coast than not.  If you swam in a bayou, it would be warm as bathwater most of the year and your toes would sink into silty muck at the bottom, cooler and less unpleasant than you’d think.  Buttercup and I park along Buffalo Bayou or White Oak Bayou and walk up past the dog park to catch glimpses of mansions and back, or we walk through our neighborhood and under interstates in caverns so broad you can’t hear the traffic above.

Often we walk to the heart of the city, to the confluence of these two Bayous on the edge of downtown where two brother speculators decided they could sell land on this murky waterway to the Gulf as long as they didn’t mention the mosquitoes.  We try to avoid the man who makes a bench into his pulpit there.  He shouts so that everyone who is even kind of close could hear, if there were anyone but me and my dog, and holds what appears to be a Bible.  He’s not reading from any Bible I know of: “And Jesus shall send every man a woman thick enough to grab and hold but not so big you can’t put her down when she needs it!”  We turn around when we hear his voice echoing against the vault of the Main Street bridge.  When he’s not there, we enjoy the relief from the heat the concrete and the water provide.  The Bayou is deep and the surface smooth, and the reflections of the tall buildings are broken by snake-necked birds diving for fish.  You can stand there and look up into downtown and see that this water path brought everything to these streets, that this hidden, broken parking lot was the center of a whole country for a little while.

Yesterday it rained a lot, and from the highway on the way home in the morning I could see one of our paths had been swallowed by the Bayou.  When I drove past that afternoon, the waters had receeded, and this morning I thought Buttercup would enjoy smelling things that had been underwater for a while yesterday.  We were early and passed work crews unloading hoses and flat-edged shovels to clean up the paths. Thick mud that is both sticky and slippery sucked at my shoes and splattered our legs and the backs of cyclists; the dust from farms and gardens and chemical plants is stranded here on the way to the gulf.  It makes patterns on the path that are the same as you see in sand through clear water.  There are broad curves and arches, repeated with a regularity that looks machine-made but without the sharp edges of a tread.  Railings over bridges are tangled with weeds and branches and Starbucks straws and a bit of fake hair in a really excellent pink color.  I saw a whole kiddie pool, empty and brightly blue, floating down the middle of the bayou like a boat.  The night heron we’ve seen in the same spot on the bank for the last few weeks, guarding a nest, I think, was missing, as were the men I sometimes see waking up in the shadows under overpasses.  The swallows, though, were feasting, clouding the air and taking their prey to their bubble-shaped mud nests stuck to bridge pilings.  The wildflowers and trees on the banks are unbothered by their dunk, which will probably happen a few more times before summer’s end.  If I had another human with me, it would difficult to hear each other over the noise of the Interstate that runs parallel to the Bayou and crosses over it several times as the water chooses its curvy path, but the birds and the bats and the rabbits and the rats are unconcerned, and the noise isn’t louder than the stillness of the water for me.

I went to a Christian high school for a couple years, one that had daily chapel but also holes in the science curriculum that left me able to argue that the existence of dinosaurs is a hoax, which is a neat party trick, at least.  During one of these chapels, a former state Highway Patrol officer told us gruesome tales from traffic fatalities he had worked to frighten us into salvation.  After each story, he repeated a verse, King James Version, of course, “For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”  Whether it was the extreme number of times he repeated this verse or the accompanying gore or that the idea spoke to my cute teenage proto-existentialism, those words stuck with me.  Life is a vapor.  It appears for a little while, and then vanishes away.  I read the other day that Buffalo Bayou is estimated (by people who didn’t get science from a fundamentalist curriculum) to be 18,000 years old.  Water has been running to the Gulf in this place for thousands of lifetimes, whether you count human lifetimes or lifetimes of the 40-pound catfish said to sport in the depths.  The banks are inundated and the water moves on, leaving some epic smells behind. The mist gathers over the wild and ancient Bayou and lifts, revealing the glass and metal of the city; clouds gather and the sky clears.