DREAMING OF MONSTER

DAWSON HEFNER

whipped the tunnel hull around river bends like he was sliding sideways through the hairpins of a dirt track, and as we shot around the first curve, a passel of hogs lit out across a clay bank in a jet-black blur.

This was a landscape unlike any I’d ever seen. An hour and a half southeast of Dallas, the Trinity River digs a steep-banked scar through Texas’s post-oak savanna. Willows crowd the banks all but for a few oaks and sycamores. Sand-colored clay rises sharply to vertical bluffs, the bases scattered with animal tracks where deer and pigs come to dip their noses into the river and drink. There’d been no rain since spring, and now at midfall the river was bottomed out. But the channel carved by floods and years ensured that in time the water would rise.

Here the river eats everything—ground, trees, fences, bridges, roads. A half inch of rain in Dallas and the water might rise five feet; a full inch and it could come up eight. Enough rain and the Trinity will crest its banks, climb the clay to flood pasture and field. Spring floods uproot full-grown trees and stack logjams two stories high. Rusted I beams long snapped and twisted show the bones of washed-out bridges. The place is littered with remnants of civilization, the drainage for a city of more than a million, but there were