The Brazos River meanders 923 miles from the Texas Panhandle to 
the Gulf of Mexico, crossing the High Plains, the West Texas Lower 
Rolling Plains, the Western Cross Timbers, the Grand Prairie, and the 
Gulf Coastal Plain.

    Journalist Jon McConal has spent many hours hiking the river's 
banks and camping out on its sandbars, discovering the many bridges 
that cross the river, and studying maps and tracing the river's route. 
His friend Eddie Lane has canoed and camped the Brazos, even 
retracing the canoe journey made famous by John Graves in Goodbye 
to a River.

    The two drove more than four thousand miles to look at sixty-two 
bridges ranging from a private bridge made from oil-field pipe to 
modern concrete structures. They stood on the bridges and watched 
the river, sometimes loaded with trash, sometimes serene and gentle. 
They met the people who lived near the bridges, heard their stories, 
and ate in local cafés.

    This is the story of two men with a love of the outdoors and the 
Brazos River and the people they met along their journey. They hope 
readers, too, will want to take a few day trips and explore the Brazos 
and its bridges.

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A native of West Texas, JON McCONAL was on the staff of the Fort 
Worth Star–Telegram for forty years, twenty as a contributing editor and 
twenty as a columnist, writing most often about rural and old-time 
Texas. Now retired, he and his wife make their home in Granbury. 
McConal is the author of Jon McConal's Texas and My Years with Bob 
Wills.