Road Music, Day 15: San Marcos, Texas

For this series, we’ll be following Geoffrey Himes as he sets out on a massive road trip across the South, exploring musical landmarks, traditions and history along the way. In this installment, he visits San Marcos, Texas. (You can check out day 14, on his stay in Austin, here.)

The San Marcos River is one of the main attractions of Texas State University, for this spring-fed stream winds through the San Marcos campus, providing a welcome respite for students and townspeople alike during Texas’s six oven-like months.

But there’s more to the waters than that, and TSU staffers Anlo Sepulveda and Paul Collins, photographers and filmmakers both, wanted to explore the river’s biological diversity, long history and rare beauty—especially now that the stream is threatened by increased development and runoff. The result is the documentary movie Yakona, named after the American-Indian word for rising waters. It had its world premiere at South by Southwest on Tuesday, March 11.

Photo courtesy of Yakona

Sepulveda and Collins didn’t want to make yet another environmental-expose film with talking heads and graphs presenting logical arguments and political outrage. There are so many such movies already that the filmmakers were sure their small-budget project would get lost in the crowd.

“I remember someone telling me,” Collins said, “that if you want people to protect something, you have to make them love it.”

So he and Sepulveda decided to take the “pure cinema” approach of two of their favorite pictures: Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka, films that forego narration and talking heads to present one spellbinding image after another. The difference between those movies and this one was a narrowing of focus. Instead of examining nature’s beauty and fragility around the globe, Yakonawould concentrate on several miles of a Texas river.

That was enough to supply a continuous series of arresting images: the fronds of wild rice plants undulating in the current, the river bottom erupting in sandy geysers where the springs bubble up, a read-eared slider turtle digging a hole in the mud and dropping a slick white egg in that cavity, a blind albino salamander, a snapping turtle clamped onto the foot of a struggling duck.

It’s believed that humans have lived near the springs for more than 12,000 years. To represent that aspect of the river’s life, the filmmakers staged recreations of American Indians fishing and camping and then battling the European settlers who invaded the territory. Such recreations can be stilted, but Sepulveda and Collins were smart enough to chop up the docudrama into small fragments that were spliced into the pictures and sounds of the natural environment. They do the same with footage of more recent environmental struggles.

The result is a feast for the eyes and the ears (composer Justin Cherburn took the Philip Glass role and created a soundscape out of field recordings and keyboards). But it’s not always a feast for the mind, as the lack of hard information and skepticism leaves one hungry for some substance beneath the romantic valentine to the river.

One of the film’s subthemes is Aquarena Springs, the most popular amusement park in Texas during the ‘50s and ‘60s, built right on top of the feeder springs for the San Marcos River. It went bankrupt in the ‘90s, and its rusting buildings were removed only a few years ago. Renamed Spring Lake, it is now a lovely natural setting.

I know this because a few of us were invited after the Yakona world premiere in Austin to take a bus to San Marcos. There we boarded one of the refurbished Aquarena Springs glass-bottomed boats and glided out into Spring Lake. All around us were stalking herons, sunbathing turtles, hovering vultures and limestone cliffs. Soon 20 of us were leaning over the wooden railing and through the long rectangular window where the boat’s keel might be. On the other side of that glass were grazing sunfish, yawning bass, diving turtles, thick pastures of waterplants and springs bubbling through the sand.

It was a look at what’s going on beneath the surface of Texas in the most literal sense. It was enough to make you love the state’s rivers and want to protect them.