Battling over the Brazos

In 1957, author John Graves decided to take a canoe trip down the upper Brazos River before a series of dams would turn his favorite stretch of river into a string of lakes. Graves feared that his beloved river would be squeezed dry if five proposed flood-control dams were built in the upper Brazos.

Starting at Possum Kingdom Lake, the location of the first dam, Graves canoed about 175 miles down the Brazos to bid farewell to the river that had held him in awe in his youth. His emotional journey, which he chronicled in what is now an American classic, Goodbye to a River, evokes his “enraged awe” over the river that would “shortly not exist” as he had known it.
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Today, three dams — Possum Kingdom Lake, Lake Whitney and Lake Granbury — control the upper reaches of the Brazos, the same stretch of river where Graves paddled his canoe and predicted the dams would transform the river into “bead strings of placid reservoirs behind concrete walls.”

Goodbye to a River is an elegy to Texas’ wild and mighty river before it was lost to modernity, to man’s attempts to tame it and control it. Yet the book is also prophetic. Today, the river is in a death grip, facing what climatologists fear may become the worst drought in Texas history, even drier than the “Big Dry Up” between 1950 and 1957 that drained the Brazos River and scorched its fertile 42,000-square-mile basin.

More at http://res.dallasnews.com/interactives/drought/brazos/index.html .