Big River
The Rio Grande has been a stage for explorers, revolutionaries, smugglers, and now canoeists and kayakers. Amid this procession the river remains immense, mysterious, immutable.
(Page 2 of 3)
For one thing, other people, troublesome as always, seldom cede you the rights of ownership, but instead catch your fish, shoot canoes down your rapids, ogle your scenery, shatter your quietnesses with portable radios, strew your sandbars with beer cans and orange peels and busted minnow buckets, and wash their sweaty torsos in the rippling, living waters you have claimed as your own. Worse, acting as individuals or corporations or bureaucracies, they may foul your river with the sewage or poisons, grab part of its flow for irrigation and give back only a shrunken muddy surplus, or impound it in reservoirs that change forever the age-old manner of its functioning, if needed they don’t dam your own stretch and wipe it out of existence. In short, if you wax too possessive toward a river you stand a good chance of ending up permanently enraged.
For another thing, a river is a complex entity, and instead of possessing it you may turn out to be possessed, even obsessed. This holds true even if you limit your interest to one facet of the river’s possibilities, as did Robert T. Hill, who mapped the Big Bend Rio Grande in 1899, battering his way through its unknown canyons with his crew in three cumbersome wooden boats, passionately in love with the river’s geography and the magnificent jagged terrain that had produced it but contemptuous of the desert with its “spiteful, repulsive vegetation” and in general of people stupid enough to choose life in such surroundings. Equally obsessive is the fascination of local historians with the local streams, the loyalty of anglers to known pools and riffles, or the single-mindedness of addicted river runners in their kayaks and canoes and rafts. On the Rio Grande and elsewhere these last are a numerous breed with whom I feel much kinship, even if they’re sometimes jealous and authoritative enough within their watery domains that a birdwatching, rather wide-ranging friend of mine says they remind her of a certain aggressive African species of river duck that takes a linear segment of stream for its own and assaults any living thing that comes there.
But broader river obsession may be worse. It derives from having a slant of mind that needs to know how things work, and it doesn’t lead to easy answers. For a river does not work by just running handsomely through its allotted landscape but rather, with its network of tributary streams, as the drainage system of a wide basin within which lie a variety of terrains and minerals and climates, all of which have bearing on what the river itself is like, as do most human activities within that basin. It works too as a small stir in water’s eternal global restlessness, which not only is vital to most of Earth’s protoplasm, including our own, but also, in conjunction with crustal upheavals and subsidences, plays a main part in shaping the planet’s surface. Whether as pounding rain and hail, mountain-gnawing frost, erosive runoff from downpours and melting snow, floods laying down gravel and silt in bottomlands and deltas, seeping underground flow, or invading seas that drop their vast thick loads of lime and clay and sand and then recede, water is primary in texturing the land. Most of visible Texas, we know, has been deposited and carved by such action, and it will keep on being thus deposited and carved and changed even if, as seems most likely, our own sort of protoplasm does not survive its brief blink of geological time to witness and study the process.
Tricked into such bottomless and somber realms of inquiry by what may have started out as simple lyric appreciation of a quantity of pretty water flowing downhill in a channel, the possessor of a river, Adam-like, has lost his innocence. It’s unlikely that thereafter he’ll look at his river, or any other, and be able merely to note (as he still will note, however, if he ever did) what birds flit in the willows and what green tongue of current might hold feeding fish and what jumble of boulders would need some fancy paddle work if one were navigating where the water churns loud among them. He’ll be queasy about the river’s well-being even when it looks fine and will find himself pondering in addition where it comes from and why and how, what all its tributaries are like along with the country they drain, what sort of life various kinds of people have managed to shape in those places, how they’ve rubbed on one another and on the river system, and all such manner of things. He has diluted his pleasure based on wonder by turning it into a quest for knowledge, and such a quest once started seldom has an end.
Pleasure based on wonder is pretty nice stuff, though, and I find with gratification that in relation to waters like the Rio Grande, together with the Conchos, Pecos, Devil’s, and San Juan rivers that feed it, I can still keep a little wonder going. I am not inwardly compelled to learn all that I can about them, even though I do feel a sort of ownership in certain spots and areas and stretches along them that I’ve known passingly or fairly well.
One such place is the mountain country of northern New Mexico, which holds the snowy sources of the Pecos and lies not far below the high part of Colorado where the Rio Grande is born. Most of us, I believe, think of rivers as arising in mountain wilderness and flowing down through more wilderness to find civilization in lowlands and near the sea. But while there is some fine wild scenic ruggedness in that section, the Big River itself has contact with civilized folk almost from the very start, being used for irrigation within a few miles of its source near Creede and then dropping down to lands where Pueblo Indians maintained a high level of culture for many centuries before Spaniards arrived to take things over. Both Pueblos and Latins shaped rather tranquil and graceful lives there, bloodied a bit at times by conflict between them and by jealous incursions of Navahos and Apaches, and outland gringos in later years have sought to take that tranquility unto themselves, sometimes shattering it in the attempt.
That presence of appreciative and often quite literate outsiders in Santa Fe and Taos and other favored spots has produced a good many expert interpreters of the region, and I am in no sense one of them. But I learned to fish for trout there long ago, after the Second War, and once spent an agreeably lonesome six months in a cabin in a creek flowing to the Pecos, a high, fresh, sparsely peopled place. Sometimes I sought larger quarry in the Pecos, or I would drive to the Rio Grande itself, below where it left its gorge near Taos. I remember wading and fishing on a quiet evening there when caddis flies were thick on the water and above it, and trout were striking at them from below while bats and violet-green swallows devoured them in the air, swooping at times beneath my elbows as I cast.
There is no fishing like that in the river’s flat hot desert reaches lower down in New Mexico where the desert air and soils work their subtractive magic on its snow-fed flow, the land where in Spanish days difficult trails coming up through El Paso connected New Mexican colonials tenuously with their parent civilization far to the south, and names like Jornada del Muerto, “dead man’s march,” testify to the perils that were found there. Nor is there any real sportfishing where the Rio Grande becomes a real river again down in the Big Bend, though I remember we took much tackle with us on that cheerfully ignorant expedition to the Conchos one spring nearly two decades ago.
If I wanted to be contrary in a picayune sort of way, I might argue that we actually made that trip on the Rio Grande itself, for a number of respectable authorities—among them intrepid, wooden-boat-encumbered, canyon-surveying, desert-hating Robert T. Hill—have maintained that the Conchos is the mother stem of the Rio Grande system because of the immensely greater volume of water it brings to the confluence at Ojinaga-Presidio, the place early Spaniards had named Junta de los Ríos.
We made an effort to learn what we could about the Conchos beforehand, but that turned out to be very little. All we were able to glean came from a couple of sketchy maps, and in gladsome consequence, whether or not we were the first to paddle all the way down the last 130 miles of the Conchos (or whatever it was; I’ve still never seen a decent map on which close measurements could be made), we were at least able to believe that we were first—latter-day incarnations of Meriwether Lewis and John Wesley Powell, with maybe a touch of French-Canadian coureurs de bois and for that matter Robert T. Hill. This was, I admit, maybe a rather boyish feeling for six grown men in three aluminum canoes to have, but it was a fine one nonetheless and was enhanced rather than dashed by vague, rather gleeful accounts from Mexican customs officials of an enormous deadly waterfall—or was it several?—somewhere in the depths of the Conchos canyons.
My Library
