Tom Goynes still remembers the first time he dipped an oar in the San Marcos River . He’d grown up paddling in the bayous of Houston, where the water was murky and black and anything that fell in disappeared in an instant. On the San Marcos, the spring-fed water was clear as a windowpane and a consistent 72 degrees. “I put my paddle in, and I could see it,” he says.

It was 1967, and he was sixteen years old. His mother had paid the entrance fee for him to join his brother and another teen in the Texas Water Safari, billed as the “world’s toughest canoe race,” an annual multiday, 260-mile slog from San Marcos to the Gulf Coast. (Started in 1963, the annual event continues today.) The boys dropped out by the time they got to Luling, about forty miles in, with a fist-size hole in their boa

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