Just Another Float Trip

It was the summer of 1975, I was 15 years old and had been at Terrace for about 2 months. Terrace was one of the schools at this notorious Gatesville state School for Boys a juvenile training school in Coryell county Texas. The school was in the early stages of compliance with a major class action lawsuit, Morales vs. Truman, filed against the Texas Youth Council the state agency responsible for the the old training school and had recently been ordered to shut down because of the atrocities perpetrated against the boys by their keepers. The place has maintained a history of child abuse since it opened in the 1880's and had provided the surrounding farms with child slave labor for decades. Terrace and Sycamore were the only two schools besides Mountain View left opened at that time. That same summer the last of the boys from the notorious Mountain View school were being moved to Hackberry school.
The facilities had been preparing to close and that summer an influx of boys came into gatesville from the Brownwood reception center filling the dorms to capacity and forcing the reopening of Valley school and talk of reopening Riverside. Some of the 2 timers and the old dorm men who came from Riverside when it closed in 1974 had some stories about that place. All together the facilities were a zoo, and the lawsuit that everyone worked so hard to skirt around was a word we heard while getting our ass kicked.

Anyway about the float trip. Four of us decided we would hop on the morning bus to the shop class's up at Hilltop school. With all the coming and going of so many boys, what appeared to us as unexpected, we figured we had about a 5 minute head start from Terrace and another 10 minutes before they found out we ran from Hilltop. We got off the bus at the vocational shop building and went into the building, then we went right out the other side of the building, climbed a barbed wire fence, crossed hi way 36, climbed another barbed wire fence and headed across a field for the Leon River. Running in state shoes is a bitch but try swimming in those things, one dudes pair disintegrated after a few hours in the water. Some of us had attempted escape before and knew what was ahead if we were caught, CIC, crises intervention center, lockup and the the bust line.
We jumped in that river like kids heading to the swimming hole at summer camp. Although we weren't running from no summer camp, we were still a bunch of kids getting to float down the river on a cool adventure. A cool adventure all right, we figured by floating out of hell on the river the dogs couldn't get us, they would loose our scent. We heard stories about boys who went to the river and were never seen again. We were warned about the underwater ledges where a boy could drown, the poisons snakes, and the vines and underbrush that could grab you. If you didn't know, we must have looked like boys out for a morning swim on a hot July morning in the beautiful Texas hill county. But we were 4 dangerous escapes from the Gatesville State School for Boys, that could be shot on site. We were being perused by the most dangerous men around, Coryell county horsemen and dogmen. These were former state men but because of the law suite they transferred agencies where they could be more brutal.
There was a dogman of whose reputation was grim in nature. Very scary stories were told of this man and where his evil soul might reside. He was called the kitchen and it was said he was a state man but the redneck I saw who I was told to be the kitchen was wearing a deputy shirt not a state shirt with no patches as was the custom among the security personnel, I would first encounter one of kitchens dogs on this float trip. We heard the dogs all around us during the morning hours, it was towards afternoon we felt the dogs getting closer. At one point we hid behind brush at various spots along the river to avoid being seen by the horsemen. We had made our way to what seemed like an island on this river and laid in the brush to rest from swimming. We heard the bells the dogs wore on their collars and before you knew it they were in the water and on that island. We all laid there still and petted the dogs calmly. I was able to slip a bell off of one of the dogs, a suviy from the trip if you will. The dogs were eventually called to return to the dogman and the horsemen unwilling/unable to cross the river to what looked like a nothing of a sand bar talked about going for lunch.
We lied there on that island for what seemed like hours holding our breath, and they were gone. Quietly we slithered back into the river and floated without saying a word for most of the afternoon. Towards dusk we happened upon a more populated part of the river and decide to get out and boost a car. One of the boys was a car thief and said he knew all about boosting a car for our get away. We should have had him be in the name on that one because we never did find a car that fucker could hot wire. And those towns people, they knew who we were, we was state boys. Everybody and their dogs were on us like stink on shit. We were busted and that was the end of a hot July day on the Leon River.