March 31, 2007
Texas Flood
Deron Bauman, writing of Cooper Renner’s Love of Weather (and other matters), recalled “driving with Renner many years ago over one of the viaducts in Dallas that connect south Dallas, cut off by the Trinity River, with the city.
“It had been raining torrentially for a few days, as is it now,” Deron wrote, “and Renner looked out his window and said, ‘Stupid rain. Stupid river.’ ”
Here is a postcard picturing one of those viaducts and, swelling below it, what purports to be the Trinity River. The postcard is old. It may even be a BRE (Before Renner’s Era) artifact. And I will tell you this: Never in all the days I endured in Dallas, whence I fled in 1975, did the Trinity River manifest itself as anything other than a rivulet etched within bottomland. A site for gar-fishing and corpse-dumping.
Now regard the visual record and behold the large and mighty Trinity as it flows ‘neath the Houston Street viaduct.
Truly, it may be said: Whatsoever It was, there was More of It in the olden days.
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11 Responses to “Texas Flood”
This is the sort of thing I associate with the Trinity River.
I’d say that’s some pretty liberal artistic license.
Deron, it’s true!
That is, I do associate the Trinity with corpse-dumping, same as I do any of the Cook County Forest Preserves. Where is it that luckless wanderers stumble upon ‘decomposed remains’? Why, in and around Chicago, it’s any one of the many forest preserves. In Dallas, it’s the bottomlands through which the Trinity flows.
When I was a youngster, the very phrase ‘Trinity River bottoms’ gave me the heebie-jeebies!
Oh, I’m with you Sheila. It practically calls out for a dead body. I was simply referring to the image in the post card with the water clean and blue and up near the viaduct. It’s sort of an idealized version of Dallas. The one everyone wishes were true.
Well, call me a baboon! Your comment, applied to the postcard, makes perfect sense. How goofy of me to have read it off-center.
Yeah, I don’t think the Trinity ever approached such a height. To look at that image, you’d think it was Lake Pontchartrain.
By the way, another detail: I do love the “Seagram’s 7″ billboard. It’s like a beacon beckoning Oak Cliff-dwellers to cross on over to the promised land (Industrial Boulevard?) and buy ‘em some likker.
Sheila, that seems to be a byproduct of the medium.
the miscommunication. not the river.
I attribute it to the stupid river.
I’ve seen the Trinity levee to levee. Not quite as high up the levee as in that postcard, but enormously full of water nonetheless. It’s probably the only interesting thing ever produced by rain in north Texas.
You said bottoms.
It’s okay if you’re talking about the stupid river.