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.
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In any event, we found enough river adventure to keep that feeling alive, along with some awesome and spectacular places in whose like I had not been before. Places that were twilit in midafternoon, the sky a thin bright slit hundreds or sometimes thousands of feet overhead, with perhaps a golden eagle or falcon momentarily silhouetted against it, and the only sounds, down where we were, a faint murmur of potent water against carved canyon walls and nearly always the muted hollow twitter of cliff swallows whose mud nests adorned those walls, with now and then the distant down-laughing note of a canyon wren, a raven’s croak, the rap of someone’s paddle against a gunwale. We had upsets in rapids here and there, a few portages where nerve failed us or good sense didn’t, and always the pit-of-the-stomach wonder about that big waterfall. Villagers we met along the way made it sound like a huge bathtub drain down which canoes would be inexorably sucked.
These people on the whole turned out to be among the most receptive and likable I’ve ever found on trips to Mexico, curious but not nosy about what we were doing and wanting to help to the extent that the intensely parochial tenor of their lives and their ken permitted. Their presence made the trip much different from the wilderness jaunt we’d envisioned, but it was still wilderness in a way because they were there so organically, a part of the river’s fauna.
Even back in the wilds of the canyons and the rough hilly desert, where there would be coyote and javelina and mountain lion tracks in sand by the water in the mornings, we found a few human beings, most of them outlaws of a hardworking amiable sort. These were sturdy souls engaged in harvesting candelilla, a low, many-fingered spurge plant of the region, and rendering out its industrially useful wax by boiling the stuff in iron vats set up in secret places along the river. They were outlaws because in a poor region of a poor country the candelilla trade was fairly profitable, and the government sought to restrict its harvest to favored licensees. They had the dash and certitude and color that being outside the law can give, together with the courtesy and aplomb that being country Mexican practically always does, and also more knowledge of the region than their kinsmen in the pueblos.
We found five raffish-looking friendly outlaws at their wax camp in a pile of boulders one morning, and they had the enlightenment we craved. Yes, said their mustachioed, bold-eyed leader, the waterfall lay only three or four kilometers downstream, and it was very frankly, my friend, an unholy son of a bitch, a place where the river ran between and beneath stones much bigger than houses and no boat could possibly pass. And so, quite exactly, it turned out to be, except that beside the falls—a huge long cascade down through a rockslide, really—we found a couple of other affable wax-camp types tending catfish lines, who for a few pesos each helped us mightily with a tough portage over boulders and chasms and reduced to two or three hours what could have been a day’s work.
I’m told there are big modern dams in the Conchos now, with good new roads running near the river and the pueblos, but they say also that despite that kind of change the candelilleros are still functioning and still being kept on the dodge, not only in their native land but in ours too, since “wax weed” abounds in Big Bend National Park, and park personnel with quite commendable ecological viewpoint try constantly to prevent its harvest. Myself, I’d hate having to persecute such noble criminals as those, but on the other hand their lives are no doubt made richer and fuller and more vibrant by that sustained matching of wits.
Few of them are simmering spurge beside the Rio Grande itself these days, however, even those who gather plants in the park. On that recent four-day raft trip through several canyons, we saw only some flood-silted remains of disused boilers and their stone fire pits in the Mexican side, which, should they endure, will in time, I guess, take on an archeological aura of the sort that attaches to the area’s old Indian caves, petroglyphs, walls of melted adobe and tumbled stone with bloody tales behind them, mine shafts, and ruined riverbank hot-spring spas where once travelers came from far and wide to achieve a cure, it is said, for gonorrhea and other rooted ills.
The problem is not so much an excess of law enforcement, it seems, as a lack of privacy, for no self-respecting outlaw would want to carry on his operations in the public gaze. And the public gaze is what the Rio Grande’s shoreline gets a great deal of these days in the Big Bend, which until the thirties and later was the river’s true wilderness section, a hostile, difficult, beautiful place where no one went from outside without compelling reason. Establishment of the national park and the building of access roads not only have changed that state of things but have just about turned it around. Now, from the point where river canyons begin, well upriver from the park’s western boundary, to far beyond its eastern one where they disappear in Lake Amistad, the Rio Grande’s course has been intricately charted, its navigational hazards analyzed and rated on an established white-water scale of one to six, its features of interest noted and described in maps and booklets available to those who want to run any or all of the canyons in canoes, rubber rafts, kayaks, or for that matter shallow-draft jet motorboats. And on days when the river is right, neither so low as to make travel hard nor so high as to make it dangerous, anywhere from scores to hundreds of healthy outdoor Americans are likely to be doing so.
A lot of river is there, of course—about 235 miles in the part most commonly used—with a good many put-in and take-out points, so that few stretches are more than occasionally what could be called crowded, unless perhaps by a Robert T. Hill or a wax-camp operator. Moreover, the people who go there to float, whether in pairs or small groups or sizeable commercial flotillas of rafts maneuvered by skillful guides, are for the most part the kind who go to see the river and the country for what they are, since fishing in the alkaline, usually turbid water is poor except for catfish caught on bait, and there are no standard American-garish attractions along the way, or even any standard American comforts beyond some showers and flush toilets at Rio Grande Village, where a good many canyon trips end. It is not, in other words, a suitable or comfortable place for large, loud, pleasure-bent groups of sightseers and revelers of the kind so often found amid the fleshpots of the Lower Valley, and there are no such around. Outside of some members of the jet-boat set, who seem always to be at the point of getting themselves banned by park authorities but never quite achieve that desirable status, most of the Big Bend’s boat folk are clearly good, quiet, interested sorts, often gifted with wilderness skills and sensitivities and knowledge and no more anxious to disrupt others’ enjoyment of the river than they are to have their own disrupted.
For the more solitary-minded among them, though, having others there at all does diminish what they came for. Treasuring wildness, they have journeyed there to be alone with it, either individually or with four or five friends at the most, because being alone with wildness is what wildness is all about. And the presence of other people, even or maybe especially other people who treasure it too, is a diminution of wildness and a diminution of the aloneness they seek. Crowds are not needed to achieve the diminution; it resides in the knowledge that on any given day you are most likely going to encounter, briefly, one or two or five or six other parties, passing them or being passed. In that mere knowledge there is a fracture of solitude, a using up of wildness.
You could see it, on that raft trip, in the quiet, almost embarrassed greetings that were given in return for ours, whenever two or three canoes passed us in a canyon of the Bend or in one of its long, winding, bird-loud desert stretches. Sometimes, more rarely, you would see it in the set jaw and averted gaze of some possessive African duck type who passed in hostile silence. I had come with a good-sized party of people on that trip and did not expect solitude, but if I had come with such expectation I think I’d have been hostile too.
There is irony. On that long-ago cheerful journey we made down the Conchos not knowing what to expect, we undoubtedly saw more human beings in an average day than you can count on seeing now along the Rio Grande, but because they so honestly and unthinkingly belonged where they were, they left the wildness intact for us and we possessed the aloneness that, without defining it, we had been looking for when we came. And in contrast, on the magnificent, admirably preserved river of the Bend, where you see only a few people who want to belong but don’t really, aloneness is hard to have.
Maybe we could all wear Mexican straw hats.
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