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Holy trinity: unlike its North Texas stretches, the lower trinity river is an exotic shadowland of gators and giant cypresses, beautiful and forbidding.

Article Excerpt
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN ARLINGTON in the forties, the upper Trinity River was a dirty joke. No one wrote love songs about the Trinity, much less ate its fish or canoed its rank and odoriferous waters. Today, the upper part of the river is a metaphor for mismanagement and neglect, cited among the top ten most endangered rivers in America. Nevertheless, for more than a century, chamber of commerce yahoos have clung to the delusion that the Trinity will someday be a 524-mile ship channel--an ersatz Port Metroplex connecting Dallas-Fort Worth to Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

So you can imagine my surprise upon discovering that the lower Trinity, that stretch of the river just north of Galveston Bay, is a place so magical and exotic chat it seems right out of the pages of Tolkien. My education began last winter, while I was researching a story on Galveston Bay. My friend Shannon Tompkins, a 49-year-old biologist and outdoors writer for the Houston Chronicle, had taken me to a rookery just east of the bridge where Interstate 10 crosses the river. To my amazement, the rookery turned out to be part of an incredibly beautiful and mysterious cypress swamp, so unlike the Trinity of my boyhood that it was hard to believe this was the same body of water. Shannon grew up in Baytown, has lived...

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