Onlookers watch as the Houston Police Department recovers a vehicle and the body of a teenaged girl from Brays Bayou in 2022. The car, carrying three teens, went over the bridge and into the water.

View of downtown Houston on Thursday, March 9, 2023.

The sun sets on Westbury Lake on Jan. 14, 2022, at Willow Waterhole in Houston. The lake is one of six that form a detention basin created to help absorb and detain potential flood waters from Willow Waterhole Bayou and Brays Bayou in the Westbury neighborhood.

Growing up near Houston's bayous came with a warning: Stay away.

That was the refrain of many parents back then. They didn't need to explain why. The bayous weren’t just unguarded bodies of water; they were the city’s shadow, a murky undercurrent threading through the urban underbelly. They carried snakes, stray dogs, debris and weeds, and the constant threat of danger — real or imagined — was woven into its current.

As kids, we concocted tales about the boogeyman rising from the dark waters. The older women in the neighborhood who walked along the bayou every morning clutched long, heavy sticks not just to ward off stray dogs, but to guard against dangers of the man-made kind.

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Houston novelist Attica Locke describes Buffalo Bayou like this in one of her crime thrillers: "The thick brush along the banks of the water........

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