From: Robert Newcomb (Robert.Newcomb@gactr.uga.edu)
Date: 01/02/03-08:48:57 AM Z
My money is on the Kudzu - it alwasy wins!
Robert N.
Shannon Stoney wrote:
> 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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