From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 12/24/02-11:11:50 AM Z
Clay wrote:
> Shannon:
> I figure you're out of town, so I am sending you the bad news via
> email: The Houston Chronicle is reporting this morning that the city of
> Houston intends to put into service a garbage skimming boat to cruise
> up and down Buffalo Bayou beginning in April. That will give you only
> about 4 more months to make all of the ironic post-whatever landscapes
> that you will need in the future. After that, this town will be CLEAN.
Yikes! That's terrible. No more floating plastic bags or dead bodies to
photograph?
Luckily my washing machine and dryer in the creek here in TN are safe! We
have more enlightened local government here. We know that if we clean
things up too much, we might get tourists.
Geoff Winningham, who teaches at Rice and did a series of photogravures
about the bayou, broke the news to me a few weeks ago that they are cleaning
up the bayou. He had a lot of great pictures, from several years ago, of
jungly scenes under the freeway, where kudzu grows up the pillars that hold
up the freeway beside the bayou. But alas, that kudzu is gone. It's been
"cleaned up." It's starting to look downright suburban under the freeway
along the bayou, the last wild and weedy place left in Houston. Soon they
will start building that fake Riverwalk thing, so that we can go *sculling*
on Buffalo Bayou! Ha! They think we are really going to do such an effete
East Coast thing! It's bass boats or nothing, baby. Do you think we'll
still be allowed to set out catfish lines after that Riverfront monstrosity
is built?
Geoff said his series was about the struggle between the wild bayou and the
concrete world that people have built to contain it. I said that eventually
the bayou would win. Geoff just laughed. He said it would be a long time
before the bayou gets the upper hand. That may be true, but what's that
Walker Percy novel where kudzu takes over the interstate? The Last
Gentleman?
I will not give up hope as long as there are those big piles of rusting wire
and pipe under the freeway where Montrose goes under it. I love those.
Houston will always have plenty of junk, intermixed with tropical jungly
growth I think. Save the banana trees growing out of discarded toilets!
--shannon
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