Last Chance

Having a great time, wish you were here. I'm jostling down a dusty lane high on the ridge of the levee in a big white van with canoes on top, driven by a Hemingwayesque guide who has a great mustache, hair below his shoulders and a crumpled Aussie bush hat. We are up so high we look down on hawks patrolling a grassy plain. In the distance, cottonwoods drape pale-green branches that graze like backs of fingers on the shoulders of the river as it glides between burly, deep-cut banks.

This is the Trinity River floodplain right in the middle of downtown Dallas. But I see and hear nothing of the city in this place. If a herd of antelope came flying over the veldt pursued by cheetahs, I would be less surprised than when we make a sharp turn and suddenly I see traffic on Northwest Highway.

I'm astonished. All these years I have been a place snob. I knew about the deep wild forests farther down the river near McCommas Bluff. But the floodplain? Downtown? Nah. I just never thought of this as a serious place. You drive over it on the bridges, right? It's sort of pale green and brownish beneath you, a smudge of a place.

Today for the first time ever, the very first time since coming to Dallas almost a quarter century ago, I feel as if I finally understand the nature of this landscape. Before today, I have always understood the geography of Dallas in terms of what it is not.

Not quite as greeny and moisty as East Texas. Not as prickly and stony as the land just west of Fort Worth. Not quite as plainsish as up along the Red River nor as hilly as Central Texas. The Land of Not Quite.

But that's not what I see from the levee. Come out here on the floodplain with Charles Allen as your guide, and suddenly you see something else, something unique and strongly printed on the land, a quality I keep thinking of as African, based on what I don't know. Bogart movies, I guess. Of course, Charles Allen over there at the wheel has got me in a big Bogart mood, which could be part of it.

This is exciting, whatever it is. I feel as if I am discovering a lost land, but it is the land on which I have lived for 25 years. We buried it, cloaked it in concrete, shoved it into pipes and culverts, replaced its grass and trees with things from florist shops. Today I finally see the land.

Watch out. I'm about to start singing some really bad Arlo Guthrie.

If the Trinity River Plan that's before Congress right now dies, its death will provide us with our last opportunity to save what I am seeing today. We may have this one last window on the natural world where we dwell. This river.

To do what's right by the river, we would preserve it for just what it is today, and we would all come out here with Charles Allen and fall in love with it.

Dirty water? Yeah, there is dirty water through this stretch, although the Elm Fork, even more natural and unaltered than what we're looking at here, has quite clean water in it. But even dirty water is an eminently fixable issue. I remember as a very young reporter canoeing a stretch of the Detroit River in Michigan: Something in the water caused the plastic logo on the outer hull of my aluminum canoe to shrivel up like a dried apple. You see something like that, you're going to keep your pinkies dry.

That was way long ago. Since then, the Detroit River has been the beneficiary of an enormous cleanup, and it's now a premier sport-fishing venue where you can catch just about anything you want from brook trout to tubenose goby.

Joanne Hill, an environmental activist and a critic of the highway-building aspects of the river plan, pointed out to me last week that my blanket condemnations of the entire plan as a plot from Satan may be oversimplified. Hill said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which I vilify for a living, has actually offered what she thinks are some smart ways to redeem the river where it flows through Dallas.

"I think the Corps has a very good restoration plan that is not attached to this [highway building] plan at all, in which they would work with the city to make the floodplain a recreation area and a wildlife refuge."

That's the point, really: If the plan as it is presently designed gets killed in Washington this week, and it might, then we have an opportunity to refashion it. Today, that's exactly what Charles Allen is telling me he wishes could be done--something to protect the river the way it is instead of turning it into something else.