The River Nuts

Writer and weekend outdoorsman Avrel Seale had always dreamed of boating down a river to the sea, but he had never found the right boat, the right river, or the right opportunity. Then, at age fifty, he suffered a massive brain hemorrhage, depriving him of the use of one arm. But, as he writes, “dreams are stubborn things,” and less than two years after his stroke, he was again mulling such a trip. With the recruitment of a lifelong friend and the purchase of a two-person pedal kayak, he set out to journey down the Nueces River in South Texas to the Gulf of Mexico.

The resulting memoir is a study in perseverance and problem solving, set against the backdrop of an underappreciated river. Seale must overcome numerous physical, mechanical, and logistical challenges even to get to the launch. Then he and Wade Walker set out to descend the Nueces, once considered by Mexico to be its border with the United States. Today, the Nueces (Spanish for nuts) is a twisting ribbon of prehistoric beauty, lush and wild, secretly flowing just out of view of the cotton towns, truck stops, and wind farms that line the highways of Texas’s coastal plains.