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I
rousted my 15-and-a-half-year-old from bed at what must have seemed
like the middle of the night—9 a.m.
“Come on, let’s go find the ghost town I told you about that’s resurfaced
at Lake
Buchanan.”
“No, I just wanna sleep,” she begged.
“Hey, it’ll be cool,” I said, trying to be hip. “The lake’s
lower than it’s been in 25 years. No telling what we might find.”
Finally she gave in.
An hour later, which if you knew Hallie you would understand is
fireman-down-the-pole fast, we were on our way to find Old
Bluffton, a 1850s-era town in Llano
County inundated when Lake
Buchanan filled in 1937.
In the mid-‘30s, as workers poured concrete at the dam site and
laborers just happy to have a job in hard times used handsaws to
denude the landscape in the future lake bed of oaks and cedars,
the Lower Colorado River Authority paid to have the occupants of
the Bluffton Cemetery
exhumed for reburial at a new site well above the future shoreline.
The town’s living residents soon followed, settling what for a time
they called New Bluffton.
Hoping to get my teenager more invested in this history-oriented
adventure, I handed her a “Mission Impossible”-like case file for
her study en route. The documents included a map, a satellite image,
an email with directions, and a printout of the “Texas Tales” column
I wrote on Old Bluffton in 2003.
Though she actually read the piece, I could tell Hallie still lacked
full engagement in the expedition.
Then I remembered the quicksand.
“Oh,” I said casually, “We’ve got to be careful. There’s quicksand
where we’re going.”
“Quicksand?”
I could see her processing that information, clearly thinking of
the various movies and TV shows she’d seen in which someone sinks
to their doom in a bottomless pit of the treacherous mix of sand
and water.
“Awesome,” she finally said.
Following
the directions, we drove along parts of the normally-submerged old
road between Llano
and Burnet
to a point more than 2 miles out into the lake. Then, armed with
walking sticks, bottled water and plastic bags for any treasure
we might find, we set about exploring the dry lake bed.
At this writing, the normally sprawling lake
is only 51 per cent full. On this getting-hotter-by-the-minute July
day, a dry south wind whipped up moderate waves that slapped against
the shore. Except for all the mineralized, iron-like tree stumps
left by the “brush cutters” as they were called, it was like walking
on a Gulf beach, complete with a liberal scattering of mussel shells
and fish skeletons.
While a few traces of the old town have become visible, most of
it is still under water. But we did find one substantial rectangular
rock foundation and a scattering of artifacts, including the base
of a green Anchor-Hocking Depression glass bowl and a piece of melted
lead from an even earlier era.
We hadn’t been doing this freshwater beachcombing for long before
my right walking shoe disappeared in the fine granite-mica gravel.
“Well, here’s the quick sand,” I said. “Use your walking stick to
check where you’re planning to walk.”
Hallie began stepping more gingerly while poking here and there
with her walking stick, now in full buy-in.
What excited me was not the quicksand, but the prospect of finding
old fishing lures. By the time we were ready to admit that the sun
had more staying power than we did, I had picked up at least $15
worth of lures snagged by normally submerged stumps.
“I can’t wait to tell everybody I was on quicksand,” Hallie gushed.
“I’m so glad I came.”
By this time, the temperature had risen well over 100. Our water
bottles as low as our energy levels, after about two-and-a-half
hours we turned to head back to our SUV.
Suddenly,
in mid-stride, my right foot again sank in quicksand. But this time
it took in my leg all the way to the knee. I put down my left foot
hoping to get enough purchase to extract my sunken foot but it too
sank.
As Hallie laughed joyously, I stood in quicksand up to my knees.
“I gotta get a picture of this for Facebook,” she said, a delighted
lilt in her voice.
Envisioning circling buzzards, I reluctantly posed for a couple
of shots while planning my exit strategy. OK, I thought, how would
Tarzan handle a situation like this?
At least I was not sinking any deeper. But in the full grip of the
grainy goo, I was beginning to wonder if I’d have to call someone
with a chain and four-wheel drive vehicle to extricate me. Hallie,
I knew, would find that positively hilarious.
Fortunately, with less effort than I thought it would take, I managed
to get un-mucked.
“This is so awesome,” Hallie said, digging in her pocket for her
cell phone so she could start texting her friends to report her
dad had been mired in quicksand.
Back home, after a long shower and supper, I found a digitized story-poem
written by a Bluffton
old-timer in 1932, when his home town’s fate was sealed.
“Old Bluffton, Old Bluffton, for thee I sigh,” he wrote. “When the
big lake is finished it will be a sight I will love to see…the great
big dam with its great white wall, but the memories of Old Bluffton
will rise above them all.”
He didn’t mention quicksand.
© Mike Cox
"Texas Tales"July
30, 2009 column
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