Take Me to the River (7 page)

Chapter 14
We're in the Big-Time Now

W
E MADE IT ANOTHER
eight miles on rapidly rising water to a possible shelter pictured in the Lower Canyons guidebook. Twenty-seven miles below the put-in at the bridge, a rock house stood back from the river on the Texas side, maybe fifty feet above the elevation of the river. The one-room structure was a remnant of an old candelilla works, the mile-by-mile guide said. A nearby spring provided an optimum water supply, always clear and clean, for rendering the wax.

Before we walked up the slope to check out the rock house, we located the spring and filled our water jugs to the brim. From here on, the springs might be flooded out.

On our way up to the rock house we caught a good view of the scaly mountains on the Mexican side. Their tops were shrouded in clouds. We climbed a little higher and saw that our rock house lacked a roof. That was okay, we figured—our big blue tarp could do the job.

It didn't work out. The inside of the building was choked with giant prickly pear cactus, their pads big as frying pans. The needles in the pads were as long as my little finger. Rio informed me that the pads were edible, if prepared correctly. “Uh, some other time,” I told him.

Two miles downriver, at Mile 29, we found a place to camp on the Texas side. The large grassy sandbar there stood ten feet above the river and looked like a safe bet. While we were unloading the boats, however, the river came up another six inches. If it rose another nine and a half feet and flooded the campsite, we would be out
of luck. Behind the sandbar, the cactus- and ocotillo-
studded slope was as steep as a playground slide.

We liked our chances. Rio had never seen the river rise nine feet overnight. Unless we were very unlucky we would be okay, but what were we going to do for a shelter?

Rio wasn't worried. “No problem,” he said. “Let's make like Comanches, and build ourselves a wickiup out of cane.”

“Ever built one before?”

“No, but I've seen pictures.”

Amid lightning and thunder and a new squall with pelting rain, we gathered cane. Our rescue knives borrowed from our life jackets went through the stalks like butter. “Ever seen this much water in the river?” I asked.

“It usually gets this high every summer.”

“So, you don't think this is Dolly we're looking at?”

“It could be just a West Texas toad strangler. My dad and I have had the raft out a couple of times on five thousand cubic feet per second. We aren't looking at that much yet, but we're getting close.”

“What's the biggest flow you've ever heard of?”

“At the takeout below Santa Elena Canyon, on the outside of one of the johns, the Park Service painted a black stripe to show the high-water mark from the summer of 1958. The mark is higher than the door.”

“How much water was it?”

A huge grin spread across his face. “Fifty-two thousand.”

Mindful of the wind, we made our shelter low to the ground, beginning with four forked sticks jammed waist high into the sand at the corners of a five-by-seven-foot rectangle. We laid sturdy cane stalks into the forks, framed the roof and the leaning walls with more stalks, spread our blue tarp over the frame, then covered the whole thing with layer upon layer of the grassy tops of the cane. We had ourselves a wickiup, with only a crawl hole open to the weather.

By five
PM
it was prematurely dark under the dense, black clouds. The lightning and thunder had backed off, but the rain kept coming. We inflated our ground pads and crawled into the shelter with a can of beans and an energy bar apiece, our second and last meal for the day.

It was snug in our shelter—not bad at all—and we got to talking. Rio asked me about a canoe stroke I'd been using, and where I learned it. I told him it was called the Canadian. They taught it at the canoe camp I had done twice with the Nantahala Outdoor Center. I waxed enthusiastic about the Nantahala River and its rapids, about the Great Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge and the town of Asheville. He said he would love to run a mountain river with forests right down to the water, and I said we had to make it happen one day.

By now it was nearly dark, and it had been raining all this while. We thought we'd better check on the boats, and it's a good thing we did. The river was already lapping at the base of the salt cedars they were tied to. We carried the canoe up the slope and out of harm's way, and used our seventy-five-foot rope to tie the raft to a boulder on the slope above.

On our way back to the shelter we came across two rattlesnakes displaced by the rising water. Scorpions, more than I cared to count, were scuttling for higher ground.

We reentered our shelter with extreme caution. Rio gave me a little advice: “If you feel a scorp on your face or whatever, don't grab it, just flick it off. They can sting you real quick.”

We stayed up late playing cards by the light of our headlamps. We played every game for two that we knew—War, Crazy Eights, Go Fish, and Rummy.

My cousin fell asleep as soon as he put his head down. If it wasn't for my fear of scorpions, maybe I could've done the same. I kept feeling them on my face, on my hands, all over. I kept slapping them off. Were they real or imagined?

I was too warm, that's why I couldn't go to sleep. Our wickiup felt more like a Comanche sauna. I threw open the sleeping sheet but that didn't seem to help.

Time dragged as my mind raced to the tune of the muffled yet relentless rain. I kept thinking how far from home I was, and how far out on a limb. Knock it off, I told myself. It's gotta be way after midnight. Just knock it off. You're not in any real danger. The river sounds loud and scary in the dark, that's all.

I was nearly asleep—finally—when I had an eerie sensation. I was lying on my side, facing my cousin, when I felt something moving along my back, something distinctly snakelike.

Was I imagining it?

No way. The contraction of snake muscle along my spine was terribly real. I had a serious problem.

I tensed, and when I did, the snake stopped moving. What was the most common snake along the river corridor?

Rattlesnake, Rio had said.

What was the second-most common?

Copperhead.

I wanted to jump out of my skin. I wanted to scream.

Don't
, I told myself. Just chill. And hope it doesn't crawl across your face.

I realized I was holding my breath. I couldn't do that forever. I let it out slowly, took another, tried to breathe normally. All the while, my heart was going like a bass drum.

The snake was on the move again, tight against my T-shirt. Its head was following the contours of my back, and now my neck. It took forever for its body to follow in wavelike contractions of muscle.

When I thought it might be gone I rolled slightly toward Rio. In response, the snake rattled. I felt the vibration against my shoulder blade.

“Rattlesnake!” Rio whispered.

“Tell me about it. It's right behind me.”

“Don't move.”

“I won't.”

Maybe five minutes later Rio whispered, “Is it still there?”

“No idea.”

An eternity later, I still couldn't tell if it was gone. This might've been stupid, but I had to know. Slowly and cautiously, I reached for the spot where I had set my headlamp. To my great relief, my fingers came to rest on the headlamp and not a snake. I flicked it on, got up on one elbow, and shined it all around. “Can't see it,” I reported, “but maybe it crawled around behind you.”

“Well, look behind me!”

I got up on my knees and made a more thorough search. “I don't see it, Rio. It must've crawled back out, unless it's inside your sheet.”

“Hey, that isn't funny.”

“I know.”

“You know what, the river must've kept rising. It sounds kind of close.”

Uh-oh, I thought, and pointed the beam through our crawl hole.

“It
is
kind of close,” I reported. “It's three feet from our door.”

Lingering only long enough to pull on our rain gear and shoes and to stuff our sleeping sheets in our river bags, we bailed out of there. Five minutes later and we would've been sleeping with the fishes. We pulled the tarp free of our shelter's roof and scrambled up the slope with it and our ground pads, slipping and sliding and falling in the mud. We draped the tarp over a boulder, weighted it all around, and crawled underneath. There wasn't enough room to lie down, just a place to huddle, hemmed in by bristling cactus. What can I say; it was a long night.

Dawn came slowly, under a leaden sky and a steady rain. There wasn't a trace of our Comanche wickiup to be seen. It was on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. The high sandbar we had camped on was entirely underwater. The river was in flood, a turgid yellow-brown, swollen by the runoff from thousands of washes draining hundreds, maybe even thousands of square miles of desert. “We're in the big-time now,” my cousin said.

Chapter 15
Hello, Dolly

W
E MIXED SOME POWDERED
milk and ate cold cereal in the rain. It streamed off our faces and into our bowls. Dolly was parked right over us and going nowhere fast.

Staying put wasn't an option. We needed to get back on the river and find a place to wait out the storm.

“Too bad my dad is missing this,” Rio said. “The river is really cooking. I hope you can handle the canoe. It's going to be a challenge.”

“I can handle what we're looking at from here,” I told him. “Around the next corner, I'll have to wait and see.”

“Hey, don't feel like you have to try it. We can hide the canoe. When my dad gets back from Alaska, we can come back for it.”

Rio was trying to keep it light, but he wasn't looking me in the eye. He didn't think I could handle the canoe on this much water.

I took another look at the river. It was fast, real fast—pushier than I'd paddled back home, but not by much. And besides . . . I'd come out here to do some whitewater canoeing, and what I'd seen up to this point didn't even qualify.

“I'll let you know,” I said with more bravado than I felt.

“Good for you. I'm sure it will be a blast.” Rio didn't look convinced.

“We'll see how far I get. You'll be out in front to catch me if I capsize.”

After girding for battle, we took a last-minute look at the upcoming miles in the guidebook. Good thing the pages were waterproof—the rain was constant. A mile around the corner, at Mile 30, we would leave the scaly mountain slopes behind. For the next forty miles, we would be in a tight corridor the river had incised in solid limestone, the fifteen-hundred-foot-deep Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande. That's where the rapids were waiting.

At Mile 34, where Oso Canyon entered from the Mexican side, the river ran under an overhanging bluff. “Use caution at higher water levels,” the guidebook warned.

At Mile 36, a huge cave would appear on the Mexican side, the “
Cueva de la Puerta Grande
.”

The first rapid we would come to was waiting at Mile 38. It was rated only Class 1 on the 1-to-6 scale.

The first of the major rapids was at Mile 40, at San Rosendo Canyon. It was rated a 3 or a 4 depending on conditions.
Ouch
. Class 4 was for kayaks, not canoes.

“We'll take it as it comes,” Rio said. “We'll go to shore for anything that needs to be scouted.”

I remembered a mantra I had learned at canoe camp, a saying meant to dispel fear and the mental paralysis that comes with it: “Breathe. Organize. Act.” I closed my eyes and took half a dozen slow, deep breaths. I remembered another saying that went, “Stay calm, be brave, and wait for the signs.”

When I felt calmer, I opened my eyes. Rio was standing by the raft, waiting on me. I had the red canoe rigged just how I wanted it. The brand name emblazoned on the bow—Mad River—couldn't have been more apropos.

I was organized and I was ready. My rain top was zipped and my life jacket was cinched tight with rescue knife in place. My hat was snug. It was time to act. “I'm good to go,” I announced. “Let me help you launch the raft.”

We launched onto a river moving by like an express train. A few strokes from shore, and it was like I'd hooked onto a cable.

My heart was buoyant. With that paddle in my hands, it all came back to me—everything I loved about rivers. There's magic in moving water. Understanding what the water is doing, making those split-second moves you have to make to put yourself in the right place at the right time, you feel in tune with yourself and the whole Blue Planet. This was what I'd come for.

“Everything good?” Rio yelled.

“Better than that!” I yelled back. “Yee-haw!”

The river was running so fast, it took us no time at all to round the right-hand turn a mile downstream. We entered the gate of the Lower Canyons, with walls of limestone towering on both sides. My cousin had never been here before, same as me. Together, we were doing something epic, paddling into a tropical storm, no less.

Was I nuts?

Yes.

Did I have any regrets?

Ask me later.

As if we needed any more drama the wind began to blow, and blow hard. The clouds darkened, lowered, and swirled chaotically. A stupendous bolt of lightning accompanied by simultaneous and deafening thunder rent the canyon right down to the river, no more than a mile ahead. Five cows and a bull came stampeding upriver, spooked out of their skulls. The skies opened up and poured rain more intense than I'd seen in my life.

“Hello, Dolly,”
I sang.
“Well, hello, Dolly.”
My mother loved that tune.

I could also hear my dad singing one of his Bob Dylan lines. He had one for every occasion. I sang along:
“Buckets of rain, buckets of tears, got all them buckets comin' out of my ears.”

The torrents kept coming. I didn't need to reach for my water bottle. All I had to do was tilt my head back and open my mouth. The night rain had been merely a lull. The sun was cooking Dolly's topside, and she was riled up but good. Rio thought she might be stalled and sucking up even more fuel from the Gulf of Mexico.

What a show. More lightning, more thunder, and waterfalls pouring over the canyon rims all the way down to the river. Some of them ran yellow, some brown, some red. The waterfalls were everywhere, falling a thousand feet and more.

We had a lot of dodging to do. With all the flash flooding, the river was running with debris, every sort of thorny shrub and scrubby tree. Even deeply rooted salt cedars had fallen in.

As fast as we were going, the canyon walls were flying by. It wasn't long before we saw Oso Canyon entering from the right. Rio motioned me alongside to make sure I was on top of the situation. The mile-by-mile guide had warned us to stay off the Mexican side, where the river at high water ran under a head-chopping ledge.

As we drew closer to the side canyon, we gave each other plenty of elbow room. Rio took a wide-left run, far from the head-chopper, and I did the same. The waves were wild, but I was able to reach out and brace on them when necessary, and apply power strokes when I needed to climb over their crests.

Dolly kept it up. She was throwing everything she had at us. It was getting harder and harder to see our way through the windblown sheets of rain. Some of the gusts were so strong, they picked up the water off the river and threw it in our faces. There was more and more debris in the river.

I pulled alongside Rio. “This is crazy!” I yelled.

The rain was spilling off his bedraggled straw hat like he was standing in the shower. “Totally,” he yelled back.

We rounded a corner and spied the cave, a huge yawning void fairly low in the cliffs on the Mexican side—
La Cueva de la Puerta Grande,
The Cave of the Great Door. The door was more than great; it was immense.

We agreed in a nanosecond that we should check it out. We were in dire need of a safe, dry place.

At normal water levels, it might have been tough to find a break in the cane anywhere near the cave. But the cane was flooded, and we floated over its tassel tops. We landed in a boiling eddy at the foot of the slope falling from the mouth of the cave. Rio jumped from his raft, tie-rope in hand. He went down hard on the muddy bank, and for a second it looked like the river had him. He managed to scramble up and over the bank without letting go of the rope. “You okay?” I yelled.

“I'm okay!” he hollered as he ran limping to tie up.

With the raft safely secured to a boulder, Rio limped back to help me land. I tossed him my rope and he steadied the canoe as I stepped out. “Safely off the river!” he declared, all pumped up. “Give me five!”

“You hurt your knee?”

“Yeah, but it's nothing.”

We clambered up the muddy slope, seventy feet or more, to the mouth of the cave. It was horizontal across the top and vertical down both sides, square as a door frame. What an amazing sensation it was to suddenly step onto dry ground, out of the weather and under the protection of that massive ceiling of limestone.

We still had some more climbing to do. We could only hope that the slope inside the cave would lead to some usable ground above.

What we found up there was way better than that. We came upon an almost perfect circle of hard-packed dirt maybe a hundred feet in diameter. Here and there lay a few rock slabs fallen from the ceiling, but otherwise the ground was smooth as the infield of a baseball diamond. At the rear wall we found ancient pictographs—a snake, a scorpion, a hand, and a crescent moon.

I'd never felt so removed from modern times or so connected to people from the distant past. It was like I was sheltering in this cave thousands of years before, looking down through sheets of rain to the swollen river during a flood just like this one.

“This is a whole other river than I've ever seen,” Rio marveled. “This is the river that carved these canyons.”

“At the moment, the
Rio Bravo
looks more berserk than brave.”

“Right on. The word
bravo
is closer to berserk than brave.
Bravo
means ‘fierce.'”

“You mean, your middle name means fierce, not brave?”

“You got it,
primo
.
Bravo
is a word you use to describe something wild and aggressive, like a bull running amok. When the conquistadors named this river, it was probably flooding, something like now.
Rio Bravo
. Fierce River.”

We decided to bring everything up from the boats that we would need for an extended stay. We had given ourselves nine nights, ten days given the likelihood of low water throughout the journey. As it was, we were well ahead of schedule. We could wait out the storm here and get back on a falling river with plenty of time to spare.

I went aboard the raft and began to hand the gear up to Rio. Once the raft was empty, we would be able to carry it to higher ground well out of reach of the river.

We were nearly done with the unloading when we heard a shout. We looked upstream through the rain and saw a rowboat. A dark-haired man was at the oars and a dark-haired boy sat on the front thwart.

The metal rowboat was pitching and bucking in the heavy water. The boy was tossing out water with a plastic milk jug converted into a bailer. “It's them,” I said. “Carlos and Diego.”

“In a rowboat, without life jackets!” Rio exclaimed. “That's insane!”