THE RIVER OF THE INNOCENTS

About a mile west of Interstate 35 in San Marcos, the headwaters of the clear, cool San Marcos River flow through Sewell Park on the campus of Texas State University. On the western side of the river, a grove of pecan trees shades a grassy expanse where students toss footballs and strike yoga poses. The eastern side of the river sits in full sun, a popular hangout known as Bikini Hill.

Just north of Sewell Park, upstream of a small spillway, students operate glass-bottom boats on tours of Spring Lake. Peering down into the cavelike springs, viewers can witness packets of sediment swirling up from the limestone lakebed. Colorful fish and languid turtles dip in and out of long green strands of Texas wild rice.

This spring is among the longest-inhabited places in North America. Archeologists have discovered 12,000-year-old stone hand tools used by the Clovis people to dismember mastodons killed near the San Marcos Springs. In 1719, the governor of the then-Spanish-held province of Texas, the Marqués de Aguayo, dubbed the waterway El Río de los Inocentes, or The River of the Innocents.

On a Friday afternoon in August, at the culmination of Texas State’s Welcome Week for the class of 2029, hundreds of young people swim, sunbathe, and frolic in Sewell Park. To encourage this sense of community, free shuttles bring them to the river. “This feels like an escape,” says Reese Levinson, a communications major lounging on Bikini Hill with three friends. Following her graduation ceremony, per Texas State tradition, Levinson will baptize her degree by leaping into the San Marcos River still dressed in her cap and gown.

Occupying the center of this little paradise are two locals who have achieved celebrity status: Frisbee Dan and Sun God. The two men have been near daily fixtures at the river for more than two decades. Sewell Park helped both Frisbee Dan and Sun God heal from personal hardship. They adopted new personas and rebuilt their lives around the spirit that emanates from the river. Their story is part of San Marcos lore. To understand the two men, you have to understand the river, and vice versa.

A circular concrete pad often serves as Frisbee Dan’s performance venue. He can kick a low throw with his foot to make the disc fly above his head, use his hands to tip the spinning disc back up into the air multiple times, then twirl and catch it behind his back. When you hear a shrill whistle, look across the San Marcos River. Frisbee Dan will point to you. Nod—the flying disc is coming your way.

Nearby, but not too close, Sun God rises from a crouch and raises his arms wide, beats bumping in his earbuds. His hands clenched into fists, he jumps up and down and spins in a circle two times. He bends down, windmills his open arms backward, thrusts forward his bare chest, and widens his stance. From deep within him comes a guttural cry. Sun God believes abundantly in good vibes and invites anyone to join in his meditation.

Many of the people who know of Frisbee Dan and Sun God also know that these one-time friends are now at odds, altering the cosmic equilibrium of the park. If you see them at opposite ends of the expanse instead of throwing a disc together, know their river rivalry goes way back, sparked by a silly video recording. After all these years, the mighty river hasn’t been able to bring these two San Marcos legends back together.

Dressed in short shorts and trail shoes, Frisbee Dan sits comfortably beneath a bald cypress. A group of students gathered during Welcome Week asks if he can watch their bags while they go get tubes, and he obliges. He pulls Dermoplast spray from his backpack and treats a young woman’s blistered feet. She worries swimming might cause an infection. He tells her, “You won’t find water cleaner than this.”

Frisbee Dan holds up a bright orange disc. “You ready?” he asks William Truemper, a freshman from Denton.

“For what?” Truemper replies.

“I’m Frisbee Dan,” he says. “I’m on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok.”

“Oh yeah, during our orientation, my advisor showed us videos of you on her phone. You and Sun God,” Truemper says.

Sun God came to Sewell Park earlier that day.

“Did you see him?” Frisbee Dan asks. “He was wearing a shirt. He must have terrible sun damage.”

Frisbee Dan claims he isn’t fazed by Sun God.

“When I try to talk to him,” Frisbee Dan adds, “he just makes faces at me.”

“I’m going to take a swim,” Truemper says. “I’ll be right back.”

Before he returns, Frisbee Dan finds someone else: two bros standing on a walking bridge over the river. Frisbee Dan sets up an impossible distance away, above the concrete platform from which students jump and flip into a deep section of the river.

It happens quickly. He takes two forceful sidesteps, leading with his right leg and pushing with his left. Holding his disc with both hands, he twists his shoulders away from the target, dropping the disc toward his left hip. Then, his body unwinds. The disc soars from Frisbee Dan’s extended right arm—his “rocket release”—spinning straight and level.

The bros on the bridge raise their arms. The disc hovers in the air for a solid four seconds.  Together, they jump and make the catch. Frisbee Dan smiles, “Just like clockwork.”

In 1916, mathematics professor S. M. “Froggy” Sewell came up with the idea to dredge the marshy wetlands that once existed below San Marcos Springs and create a place where students could swim. Initially called Riverside Park, the area was built mostly by students. They drove cedar posts into the ground to create a defined riverbank and erected diving platforms above the natural hole in the river, which measured 15 feet deep.

To make a pool of wading depth for children, 60 loads of creek gravel were placed below the footbridge, according to a 1944 paper titled The Story of Riverside by Texas State history student Chloe Sandborn. Natural spring water flowed up into a drinking fountain used by park-goers. From 1917 to 1930, a park “matron” monitored the color and style of bathing suits worn—white or light-colored suits were not permitted. Sewell led swimming lessons for students and faculty and swam year-round himself.

When the sun is out, Sun God usually arrives at Sewell Park at around 11 a.m. He disrobes to just his shorts. His skin is dark, his hair bleached. He listens to electronic dance music. He remembers visitors by their Zodiac signs.

“You’re raving at the river,” students will tell him. Students who come to Sewell Park often sit and talk with Sun God. He’s always willing to listen. He’s been told he asks good questions. The photographer for this story, Jordan Vonderhaar, learned about Sun God while attending Texas State from 2008 to 2012. Now Vonderhaar is a lecturer in the university’s School of Art and Design. When Vonderhaar and his two young daughters see Sun God at the river, they often say hello.

After Sun God was banned from Sewell Park by campus police in 2012—a turning point in his relationship with Frisbee Dan—a group of Texas State students started a petition advocating for his return. “That was one of the biggest things that happened when I was at Texas State,” Vonderhaar says.

Sun God is an Aries. The astrological traits of the sign include energy, passion, and fearlessness. Aries are known for their loyalty. Aries can also be short-tempered.

Sun God bristles at the thought of Frisbee Dan. “Have you watched ‘The Golden River Man’?” he asks with indignation.

Frisbee Dan and Sun God started as buddies. Born in 1959 in Akron, Ohio, Dan Barry developed a passion for freestyle disc throwing at around 11 years old. But when Barry was 25, he says, “I made a big mistake.” High on drugs, he jumped from the bed of a pickup truck his older brother was driving. Twice. “The first time, I landed on the gravel and slid. I was cool,” he says. “The second time, I missed the gravel and landed on the side of my head. I was bleeding from my ears, eyes, nose, and mouth.”

Doctors placed Barry in a medically induced coma for 10 days. When he recovered, a judge in Ohio assigned him to state guardianship and relocated him to a rehabilitation facility near San Marcos called Tangram (now ResCare). The facility’s general manager, Harlan Shoulders, was a registered horticulture therapist. Through cultivating plants, Shoulders found that clients benefited from becoming caregivers instead of care recipients. Barry spent 10 years at Tangram, learning to maintain gardens grown from mere seeds.

After leaving Tangram in 1998, Barry began accruing landscaping clients in San Marcos and became the full-time groundskeeper at a Texas State sorority house. Almost every afternoon, after he finished work, he loaded a bag of discs, a cooler, and a chair onto a dolly and rolled it to the San Marcos River. To protect his lower leg from disc kicks, he wore a shin guard. For tipping the disc, he put thick duct tape thimbles on his index and middle fingers. His short shorts didn’t chafe. Students and river-goers spent hours throwing with him, and he never seemed to tire. He became Frisbee Dan.

“Part of becoming a Texas State Bobcat at that time was going to Sewell Park and throwing with Frisbee Dan,” says Christian Wallace, co-creator of the Paramount Plus series Landman and a 2010 graduate. “Frisbee Dan added to what made Texas State weirdly attractive. Not only was there this beautiful river, where you could skip class to go tubing, but also this mythical mascot with a floppy fisherman’s hat and a potbelly tanned the color of chestnut.”

Looking back, Wallace realizes Frisbee Dan always seemed to be performing—“either the art of Frisbee or the art of being Frisbee Dan.” He wonders now, “Who is Frisbee Dan’s friend?”

Around 2000, Frisbee Dan started throwing with another Sewell Park regular, Dillon Scott. Born in 1956, Scott swam in the San Marcos River as a little kid. “My dad was in the military, and growing up in San Antonio, we’d come up here and I’d jump off the diving boards with my cousins,” he says. He spent a semester at Texas State, joined the Air Force, then studied journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. After graduating and marrying, he worked in public relations for Shell Oil in Houston, spending more than 20 years producing stories for the oil industry.

Scott achieved the American dream: a house, two children, and a family van with a “baby on board” sign. But in the 1990s, his life started to unravel. “My dad died from alcoholism,” explains Scott, a victim of addiction, too. After divorcing in 1999, Scott came to San Marcos to care for his aging mother. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous, found sobriety, and returned to the river. In recovery, he says, “I got a laptop and started writing.”

Between 2012 and 2015, Scott self-published three books. He calls them the River Trilogy, set in the town of San Marvel and Swell Park—not typos. The books’ protagonist, Jarad, spends much of his day at the river, often throwing with his friend “Disc Dude.” After leaving a corporate job, Jarad must confront his ego and insecurities to live a free life.

“I taught Dillon how to throw,” Frisbee Dan says.

Frisbee is Dan’s language. Stand with your throwing shoulder pointed at the intended target, he coaches. Throw from the waist, not the chest. Flick your wrist and follow through. Most importantly, stay loose.

But as time passed, Scott needed space. “If you weren’t throwing the way he wanted you to throw, he was going to let you know,” Scott says of Frisbee Dan. “I started hanging out on the other side of the river, listening to music.”

A student turned him onto the DJs Deadmau5 and Bassnectar. The rhythm moved Scott. The students gave him a name. This was, he says, “the birth of Sun God.”

In 2011, the University Star student newspaper published a video to YouTube that started the rift between Frisbee Dan and Sun God. In the tightly edited video,  titled The Golden River Man, Sun God sits on Bikini Hill and seems eager to share his newfound personal philosophy. “I want to do my life all over again,” he says. “I don’t work—I be. I be me.”

Talking beneath the bald cypress, Frisbee Dan doesn’t say anything nice about Sun God. It’s like their friendship never happened—or jealousy had set in. “It’s sad that somebody is that confused,” Frisbee Dan says. “I run my own business; he lives at home with his mom.”

Sun God took offense to Frisbee Dan’s comments. In January 2012, the two got into an altercation. A witness observed Sun God “push Mr. Barry several times because a disc landed near him,” one report states. Sun God also called Frisbee Dan “an insect.”

The university operates the park. According to Jayme Blaschke, assistant director of media relations, “Sewell Park is a jewel of the state university system, and we encourage anyone who comes to the campus to visit the park.” Following the incident, Sun God received a criminal trespass warning. He was banned from Sewell Park until 2013. This prompted the petition drive from Texas State students. When Frisbee Dan saw Sun God at the park in violation of the ban, he called the police. Officers found Sun God in the river, arrested him, and took him to the Hays County Jail.

On a sunny Friday last fall, I arrive at the river. Perhaps naively, I hope that through this story, Frisbee Dan and Sun God will mend their split.

I find Frisbee Dan beneath the bald cypress. “Go over there and stand behind that burr oak,” he instructs. He arcs a disc above the canopy, right into my hand. With an arm across his turned head, he shows me his no-look “blind throw.” To my surprise, I catch a disc behind my back.

Frisbee Dan looks down into the low river. “We need rain, bad,” he says. He tells me off-color jokes. I try not to laugh. 

I pay him $35 each for two uniquely decorated discs, signed Frisbee Dan: one for a college friend who threw with him two decades ago, another for my 12-year-old son and me.

Beneath the shade of a pecan, I sit down with a couple named Sharon and Dave Depmore, who’ve come to the river since 1974. They grew up in Greenville, northeast of Dallas, the historic cotton capital of Texas. “And then, to come to this?” Sharon gestures toward the river. She only did one semester at Texas State. “I was canoeing and playing racquetball and not doing well in math class.” In 2020, after Sharon retired, the couple moved here.

Dave and Sharon’s seven grandchildren often visit and swim at Sewell Park. I ask them about Frisbee Dan and Sun God, and as we talk, I begin to see these two San Marcos celebrities as siblings—alike, yet individual.

“Dan’s going to do his thing and then act all innocent,” Sharon laughs. She says Frisbee Dan stopped coming to the river regularly due to concerns of sun damage. But when I mention this to Frisbee Dan, he turns the conversation to Sun God. “He doesn’t wear a hat,” Frisbee Dan says. “He puts a lot of sunscreen on his arms, but he can’t do his back. The worst cancer you can get is skin cancer.”

Later in the afternoon, I find Sun God as he’s leaving the river. We spend a couple of hours talking. For the past eight years, he’s lived in a recovery community for men called Horton House, in a little cabin, with his cat, Sweetie. “We just want to have a better life,” he says. “If you have principles in your life, you’re happy with your life, you bring people to you who are happy with their lives.” 

I ask, “Will you ever make amends with Frisbee Dan?” “Never,” he says.

I unravel my towel, lie down, and open Scott’s third book, River Rising. The water that feeds the San Marcos River falls from the sky in the hills west of San Antonio, more than a hundred miles away. It seeps through ancient layers of limestone and emerges from the ground filtered clean, pure enough to drink.

Journalist William A. McClintock described the San Marcos Springs in his Journal of a Trip through Texas and Northern Mexico in 1846-1847 as so strong, “the water is thrown two or three feet above the surface of the stream.” Every minute of every day the river is reborn. 

I roll onto my back, hold the book above my head, and turn the page. Maybe Frisbee Dan and Sun God don’t need to make up. They just need a place like this, where they can belong.