By Kim Hilsenbeck

Wes Ferguson’s childhood near Longview, Texas, did not include swimming, tubing, fishing, wading or rope swinging into the Sabine River. It was the opposite, in fact. He and most everyone else in his tiny east Texas town of Liberty City avoided the Sabine like the plague.

“Dirty, polluted, snake-infested, full of dead bodies” were common descriptions of the muddy brown body of water that ran through his hometown.

It held no appeal or mystique for Ferguson.

So why, as an adult, would he spend many days in a boat traveling that same river, then writing a book about it?

“Every river is its own adventure,” Ferguson said.

In the book, he writes that on a trip back to his hometown, he was crossing Texas Highway 31 on a bridge over the Sabine. For the first time, after thousands of previous crossings, Ferguson viewed the river with a new perspective. He took notice of how the river went around a bend, out of his line of sight. 

He wondered for the first time ever, what was around that bend? He decided to find out.

Ferguson, a former editor of the Hays Free Press, has lived in Kyle for several years. He spoke with us last month about his book and his plans for a second river book.

Running the River: Secrets of the Sabine, came out April 5 by Texas A&M University Press. It’s the latest in a genre of Texas river books spurred by John Graves’ 1960s memoir, Goodbye to a River, about the Brazos.

Ferguson’s next adventure is to write a book about the Blanco River, part of which runs through Hays County.

How do you write a non-fiction book about a river?

He described it as a travel log.

“You just find a boat and go exploring. It’s basically a travel log with a lot of information about the history and geography woven in,” he said.

Running the River doesn’t read like your typical travel log. It combines Ferguson’s fluid, descriptive writing style with humanity and a wisp of humor. Never poking fun at his subjects, he manages to lead readers to see the lighter side of a situation.

Take for example the very first line of Chapter 1.

“A man shot at us our first day on the river. Of course he did. You expect that sort of thing to happen on the Sabine,” he wrote.

Whether the reader is familiar with the river or not, Ferguson manages to bring a smile to your face and leave you wanting to know, what happened?

He delivers.

Page after page, he evokes feelings and captures the experience in a way that brings the reader’s senses to life. With each description about a person, a tree or the water itself, Ferguson embodies the sensibilities of a reporter with the tempo and prose of a fiction writer.

Over about a two-year time period, he traveled most of the 555-mile long Sabine, sometimes alone, sometimes with his buddy and photographer Jacob Croft Botter. The pair spent many days in a boat and camping together, exploring the secrets of the river.

“I met some really interesting people who call themselves “river rats”, Ferguson said in a recent interview with the Hill Country Echo. 

These so-called river rats are people who live along the river’s edge, often without running water or electricity. They shoot squirrels and eat fish, living almost exclusively off the land, as it were.

Despite having grown up in that area of the state, “I never heard of this subculture of river rats,” he said.

Some of those river secrets Ferguson explored involved the people he encountered on his boating and canoeing adventures. One in particular, Danny Tidwell stands out as the most memorable. The book is dedicated in part to Tidwell.

“He ran away at eight years old,” Ferguson said of the river rat. “He never went back.”

Tidwell is a local character with a reputation, and criminal past to support that notion, of being an outlaw. The book lays out the history and occasional animosity between Tidwell and local law enforcement officials, particularly those from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Ferguson and Tidwell are still in contact to this day. He visits him when he’s in the Longview area.

The time Ferguson spent on the river was several years ago, beginning around 2008, when he still lived in the area and was a reporter for the Longview News-Journal — a job he did on and off for several years.

The idea started as four-part series in that newspaper.

Turning that story into a full-length book was an idea that came later. Just getting the manuscript into production took more than a year.

But it was worth the time and effort, Ferguson said, even if it’s not a New York Times best seller and won’t net him a million bucks.

With the early success of Running the River, Ferguson is about to embark on his next river adventure.

Using a kayak, he hopes to explore as much of the Blanco River as humanly possible. 

Why the Blanco?

Well, because the San Marcos and the Guadalupe already have books about them, of course.

That’s only part of the reason. The other part is that when Ferguson moved to Kyle to work at the Hays Free Press, he and friends would hang out at Five-mile Dam where the Blanco flows near San Marcos in the spring, but then by summer it was all dried up. 

“I would explore the dry river bed,” he said.

But he never much thought about the Blanco as the subject of a book until he was riding horses with (former Kyle mayor) Lucy Johnson at her family’s ranch one summer. 

“There the water was swiftly running,” Ferguson said.

His natural reporter’s instinct’s caused him to wonder how that was possible.

He learned from the Johnson’s that the Blanco flows both above and below the ground.

“The limestone in the river bed is so porous – the karsts [caves under the ground] act like a sponge,” he said. “The Blanco goes in and out of [the Edward’s] aquifer as it flows downstream.”

He said he learned there is a big hole above Kyle where the river goes underground, which is why the riverbed dries up before it gets to Five-Mile Dam.

Ferguson said the Blanco River water travels underground and comes up at Spring Lake in San Marcos and also at Barton Springs in Austin. 

“Researchers used dye and traced it,” he said.

So his summer adventure will involve traversing the Blanco from its headwaters in northwestern Kendall County down as far as he can go. Along the way, he wants to meet and talk with anyone who has a story about the Blanco River, which flows 87 miles to San Marcos.

“I’m reaching out to find people who live along or have stories about the Blanco,” he said. “I’d love to hear from them.”

If you have a story for Ferguson about the Blanco, shoot him an email here at news@Hays Free Press.com with the subject: Blanco River.

Meantime, you can find a copy of his first book, Running the River, at Book People in Austin or online at Amazon.com.