Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2009 > December > 14 > Entry
River Tracing: Brazos, Part 1: Search for the True Mouth
This week, Joe Starr and I are tracing the Brazos River from its mouth to its source, then the Colorado River from its source to its mouth.
There’s an old mouth and a new mouth. And neither was particularly visible on this day. We started with the old, flanked by the villages of Quintana and Velasco (now called Surfside Beach). Occupied at least since Spanish colonial times, these outposts on slender barrier islands have been washed away by periodic hurricanes. Yet brave souls return after each storm to take advantage of river, sea and shore, as well as proximity to the giant shipping centers of Freeport and Brazosport just inland.
Since we are familiar with Sursfide, home to our annual Reading Weeks, we chose unexplored Quintana. Local historical markers inexplicably place the village’s founding in 1532, but I can find no reference supporting this claim, unless it refers to a Karankawa campsite encountered by the shipwrecked Cabeza de Vaca.
Its few lonely, stilted homes are now overshadowed by a Martian-outpost-looking liquid natural gas storage facility. We drove past the nearly deserted beach park to the south jetty that forms a shipping channel into Freeport and Brazosport and countless petrochemical plants.
We headed out the pink-granite-banked jetty, past unsmiling Vietnamese fisherman into mist. Cold waves crashed over the aggregate walkway, soaking our jeans and sneakers, but we persisted to the unlighted channel marker at the end. I clung to its rigging for security as the waves continued to boom around us.
The presence of the birds — and nutrients washed downstream with the trash and enormous logs — suggests that the old Brazos mouth is still somehow active, even though, in the 1920s, the main stream was diverted three miles to the south. This diversion saved Freeport from predictable river flooding — an enormous gate protects the town and its fishing boats from storm-driven surge — and enabled a steady channel for the clustered, deep-water ports. An enormous bankhead in Freeport — topped by a high-school football stadium — marks the spot where the Brazos formerly entered Freeport upstream. Perhaps there’s a controlled flow from pipes there.
We left the mystery of the jetty for an even more intriguing one at the newer mouth. We discovered this passage a few years ago during a Reading Week and it helped inspire this series of Texas river tracings. After all, it was the first time I had ever seen a major river directly meet the sea, with all the visible drama of currents, silt and wildlife that entails.
Why? We discovered when we passed the new mouth on foot. Yes, you read right. Passed it. It’s gone. Silted up. Or perhaps, Ike drove sand up its channel, forcing the fresh water into the estuary and the Intracoastal Canal. There we stood on the dry bed of a might river, with only a low bluff to indicate its former southwest banks.
Wow. Wow. As we already knew, autumnal rains had raised the Brazos almost to flood stages upstream. Yet here, at its new mouth, it disappeared. “Goodbye to a River,” indeed, Mr. Graves.
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