Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2022 i Texas Highways Magazine

It’s fitting that former Texas Highways managing editor Wes Ferguson’s return to our pages is for our annual River Issue. Not only has he written two books on Texas rivers—The Blanco River and Running the River: Secrets of the Sabine—but he’s responsible for bringing the magazine’s unofficial river editor, Joe Nick Patoski, into the fold. Now self-employed as a full-time writer and podcaster, Ferguson revisited the San Antonio River for a deep dive into one of the state’s few urban waterways. Here, he discusses his current projects and reflects on his time as an editor. What stands out as a memorable story you edited for TH? Dreaming up stories can be more fun than writing them, and I loved handing off ideas to our talented contributors. My all-time favorite dawned…

Originally formed by a logjam and now controlled by a dam, Caddo Lake harbors a network of bayous, sloughs, and ponds that spans the Texas-Louisiana border. Dallas-based photographer Sean Fitzgerald has explored the lake numerous times, including a recent summer time trip when he took this picture. Navigating the lake in a jon boat, he stopped to wade through waste-deep water and floating vegetation, holding his camera on a tripod above his head. “There are moments when the cypress trees, the hanging moss, the stillness of the water, and the play of the light swirl together into brief moments of magic that leave me stunned in silence,” Fitzgerald says. For more on Caddo Lake and the reintroduction of native paddlefish, see “On the Nose” (Page 20).…

Dallas 1.5 hours Austin 3 hours San Antonio 4 hours Houston 4 hours Rivers course through the history of Glen Rose. Settled in 1849 by brothers Charles and George Barnard, this settlement in the northern Hill Country got its start as a trading post. A decade later, George built a gristmill on the Paluxy River. In the bed of that same river in 1909, a local boy discovered fossilized dinosaur tracks. Visitors today can walk among the giant three-toed theropod tracks, found within Dinosaur Valley State Park. East of town, the Paluxy flows into the Brazos River, where the late writer John Graves grew up fishing and canoeing. Graves, a resident of Glen Rose, chronicled a Brazos River canoe trip in his 1960 book, Goodbye to a River, a classic…

Devil trees. Trash trees. Farmers and ranchers, and gardeners and land scapers alike have often cursed mesquite trees ever since non-Indigenous peoples arrived in what is now Texas. Mesquites will grow nearly everywhere and anywhere. They don’t need much water or any coddling. Just plentiful sun. The seedlings are perniciously difficult to uproot. Mesquites rarely grow straight and tall. They’re often built wide and low to the ground, their wayward branches revealing the truth of the wind. Their leaves are spindly, not big and wide, resulting in little shade. They’ll drip dark sap on your vehicles and your picnic tables, and their pale bean pods will overwhelm the ground. You’ll try to trim the branches and end up leaving thorns red-tipped with your blood. You’ll clear an area of mesquites,…

Like any birth, the creation of a new lake is both painful and miraculous. Over the past year, I observed the final stages of the creation of Bois d’Arc Lake, a new born reservoir near Bonham, about 65 miles northeast of Dallas. The North Texas Municipal Water District broke ground on the $1.6 billion project in 2018 to meet water demands in some of the fastest growing cities in the nation, including Plano and McKinney. Formed by the construction of a dam on Bois d’Arc Creek, the new lake will eventually cover 26 square miles and could be ready to deliver water as soon as spring 2023, said Steve Long, program manager for Freese and Nichols, a Fort Worth-based engineering firm that worked on the project. I first visited Bois…

Though small by Texas standards, the San Antonio River has played an outsized role in the state’s history. Sustaining at least 11,000 years of human habitation, its spring-fed waters have been used for everything from drinking to cooking, bathing, fishing, irrigating crops, baptizing infants, powering mills, brewing beer, boating, and—as seen in this photo taken near the Navarro Street Bridge in downtown San Antonio—washing buggies. The river starts in San Antonio, charged by the San Pedro and San Antonio springs, and runs 240 miles to its confluence with the Guadalupe River near Tivoli, about 10 miles from the coast. In 1690, a Spanish expedition encountered the Payaya people living along the river. The tribe called its home Yanaguana, or “land of spirit waters.” Within 30 years, the Spanish had established…

Texas Highways received numerous accolades during the 2022 magazine awards season. For the second year in a row, the magazine was honored as a finalist at the National Magazine Awards, this time for three stories from the September 2021 Cowboy Issue. Joel Salcido’s July 2021 photo essay, “The Origins of Magic,” received the City and Regional Magazine Award for photography, and texashighways.com won the Excellence Online category. At the International Regional Magazine Association awards, Texas Highways took home 11 gold prizes, including a Writer of the Year nod for Katie Gutierrez and Special Focus Issue for the Cowboy Issue. Featured Contributors Gabino Iglesias Moving to Texas from Puerto Rico was a big shift for Iglesias, who wrote the essay “The Water Asks Me Questions” (Page 12) about finding a slice of…

Fifteen major rivers and many hundreds of miles of smaller streams run across Texas, giving adventurers and anglers countless opportunities for exploration. And lately, from the cypress-shaded banks of the Sabine to the gin-clear tributaries of the Rio Grande, a growing number of fly fishers—armed with springy rods affixed with feathery offerings—have made their presence known among the travelers drawn to the state’s aquatic bounty. Whether wading or floating, those who enjoy this hobby learn to cast beneath an imaginary clock, moving their rods between 10 and 2 o’clock. Ben Tabor, who owns Fatties on the Fly guide service in Granbury, hosts fly-fishing trips on the Brazos. He also runs a specialized subscription service for flies selected according to region, season, and species. Tabor started his guide business three years…

THE BRAZOS is a river of contradictions. Flowing more than 800 miles on a diagonal course across the breadth of Texas, the Brazos starts as a Western river coming off the High Plains and ends as a Southern river lazily looping its way to the Gulf of Mexico. Over the course of two centuries, engineers have dammed, channeled, diverted, and fragmented the Brazos, partly to control deadly floods. But while the river has been moderated, it has not been tamed. It still runs wild every now and then, thwarting even the mightiest barriers. As recently as 2016, Brazos River flooding damaged 1,400 homes and killed six people in southeast Texas. Understanding the Brazos is no easy feat, no matter how many miles you’ve paddled, how many hours you’ve sat on…

In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower founded the International Sister Cities goodwill program, which encouraged cities in the U.S. to befriend communities in other countries with common goals and interests. Most participating U.S. cities have one or two partner communities, but Laredo has more than 40 from different states of Mexico: Guerrero, Oaxaca, Nuevo León, Puebla, Morelos, and Michoacán. In honor of its many sister cities, Laredo has held the International Sister Cities Festival since 2002, where artisans from the different communities gather at Sames Auto Arena to sell their crafted goods and food. Due to the pandemic, this year’s event is the first in two years. The festival is free to attend and showcases about 200 exhibitors selling pottery, art, clothing, jewelry, and Mexican foods such as aguas frescas,…

@sharon_bass_wright Back to Boerne I was there in March [“A Creek Runs Through It,” May]. The last time I’d been there was March 1992. To say it’s changed would be an understatement. Susan D. Rayburn, Alpine Way Up North From Texas to Alaska, Nan Cook brings a strong work ethic, energy, excitement for adventure, and love for meeting new people [“My Hometown: Perryton,” June]. Angela Daily Thompson, Anchorage, Alaska Lone Star State of Mind The Hill Country is a geographic area, but it’s also a state of mind [“Pushing the Boundaries,” May]. It’s the spirit of Texas. @travis.sells.property1 On the Border In my youth, my family would go to Laredo a lot [“Always Both and Neither,” June]. I loved staying at La Posada Hotel. We would have Easter there with…

When Hank Lee opened an art gallery next to the San Antonio River in 1989, his new neighbors in San Antonio’s Southtown area included free-ranging flocks of chickens scratching the dirt. Women who lived across the river from his gallery were always giving him oranges from backyard trees. And the river itself—the alluring, spring-fed stream that had sustained human life for some 11,000 years—was all but a memory, having been replaced by a concrete drainage ditch. One mile downstream from the heart of the city, San Antonio’s world-famous River Walk did not yet extend this far south. “It was just a dirt trail,” recalls Lee, who still owns and operates San Angel FolkArt Gallery at Blue StarArts Complex on South Alamo Street. For decades in San Antonio, there was the…

On the first Friday and Saturday of each month, a steady stream of customers parks at the back gate of a yellow Victorian bed-and-breakfast in Fort Worth’s Near Southside neighborhood. People walk past a big pecan tree and step inside the small storefront of Three Danes Baking Company to claim a box or tray laden with pastries bearing names they probably can’t pronounce. The pandemic undercut the Three Danes Inn, home of the bakery, as guests stopped traveling, but co-owner and pastry chef Darlene Marks found a silver lining. When the world went into lock down, patrons new and old rediscovered a passion for sweets. Their zeal for Three Danes’ baked goods kept the inn and bakery afloat amid the pandemic storm. “People craved sugar, and that kept us in…

When Robert Earl Keen hits the guitar chords that open his classic anthem “The Road Goes on Forever,” live audiences by the thousands shout his own lyrics back to him, all but drowning out the raspy voice of the renowned singer-songwriter on stage. Keen, 66, has spent more than four decades performing his twangy blend of Americana at upward of 200 concerts a year. The road, it seemed, really would go on forever. But Keen also wrote the beloved song “I’m Comin’ Home.” Earlier this year, he announced his current tour would be his last, culminating in September with three shows at John T. Floore’s Country Store in Helotes. (Tickets sold out immediately back in April). A longtime Kerrville resident, Keen grew up in Houston and earned an English degree…