October 2007

Excerpt from The Tecate Journals

By Keith Bowden

El Despoblado

Jan. 5—8

When I rounded the last bend before La Linda and came into view of the Gerstacker Bridge—the barricaded span connecting the abandoned mining town with the paved road on the U.S. side—I felt giddy. For one thing, I knew that just below that bridge awaited my close friend Hayesy—my favorite river partner—and that the spirit of the trip would turn festive over the next few weeks. Hayesy is a fun-loving Irish Catholic, with far more emphasis on the Irish than the Catholic, and his capacity for silliness and good times equaled my own. I could count on one thing: no matter how adverse the conditions—whether those conditions included freezing weather, incessant head winds, icy precipitation, or dust storms—Hayesy and I would find a way to think we were having the time of our lives. Whether the situation called for a prolonged struggle against the elements or an assault on our beer supply, he was equal to the task. Hayesy is the kind of never-say-never guy you want on your side for every endeavor. He’s part trench warrior and part Good Time Charlie. Also, he would come equipped with three weeks’ worth of supplies that included such luxuries as steak, fresh fruit, and Tecate.

My eagerness to see Hayesy was temporarily eclipsed by my excitement at the prospect of visiting Andy Kurie, the retired geologist who owns Heath Canyon Ranch. For me, Andy serves as a father figure, a mentor in the ways of the Chihuahua desert. He had spent much of his life there, working the mines in Mexico for Dow Chemical and Dupont. Upon retirement, he purchased the company guest quarters on the U.S. side and had spent the last decade running a guest ranch there. Except for occasional visits from his family, Andy lived alone in the main house, which sits a hundred vertical feet above the river just upstream from the bridge.

Andy describes himself as “an old hermit,” and he’s a man who has lived so long in remote areas that he, like the mountain men of the Old West, feels overwhelmed when he has to go into town for anything more than a shopping trip or an evening with his wife. Seven or eight years ago he suffered from prostate cancer and had to spend several months in Houston undergoing treatment. Afterwards he remarked, “I don’t know which was worse, that damned chemotherapy or that damned city.”

Another time he told me the story of watching a flood surge under the bridge below his home. Suddenly, an entire house came floating down the river, and as it passed, Andy saw a man sitting calmly atop the roof. Andy called to offer help, but the man said he preferred to stay with his home until the end. Andy said, “I bet he was scared to death of having to move into town.”

When I used to play baseball for the mine team, my teammates referred to Andy as el gringo amable (“the kind gringo”), but I didn’t meet him until he bought the company ranch after the mine closed. When I finally got to know him, I felt as if I were in the presence of a living legend, a man who knew the backcountry of Mexico south of the Big Bend better than any person. If you ask any Mexican in a wide area surrounding La Linda about Andy, it’s certain that person will break into a grin and say, “Es buena gente” (He’s good people).

I arrived at Andy’s river access a couple of hundred yards below the Gerstacker Bridge around lunchtime of my eighteenth day on the river. Far above, on the hill, I could barely make out the figures of Hayesy and Fred, the ranch’s security man, sitting in the bright sunshine next to a trailer. I made several exaggerated waves in the air with my paddle, and then hauled my gear and canoe up the steep embankment to the beach. Minutes after I finished the job, the Edmonton contingent arrived, and I helped as the large group emptied its six canoes, forming a sort of bucket brigade to move the mountain of gear from water’s edge to beach. Amidst all this activity, Andy arrived in his pickup, and we enjoyed a cheerful reunion. Hayesy followed him a few minutes later. I left Hayesy on the beach with the Canadians while I accompanied Andy up to his home, where we would visit while I did laundry and used Andy’s computer to write another river report to send to Louis in Houston.

“How’s everything been here?” I asked Andy as we drove the road up from the river.

“As usual, there have been all kinds of things going at the river, most of them at night. You know how it is. I keep hoping the bridge will open and we’ll have Customs down here to keep an eye on things.”

“What are the chances of that?”

“Pretty good, I hope. I’m getting too damn old to look after this corner of the world by myself. Fred is a big help, and I don’t know how I would manage without him. But the Mexicans are running all kinds of contraband. And who knows what sort of help they have on this side of the border?”

The next day Hayesy and I loaded the two rafts for the next leg of the trip to Langtry, Texas.

“You know one thing I like about this trip?” Hayesy said as -we stood above the loaded rafts. “Not only did I get to see Andy at the beginning, but I’ll also get to see him when we come back to get the canoe.”

“He is quite a guy,” I said.

“The best.”

The Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande extend from La Linda, Mexico, to Langtry, Texas, a distance of one hundred thirty-seven river miles, and the combined population on both sides of the river for the entire distance is zero. It’s a pretty safe bet that you can make this run at most times of the year and not see another person. This stretch of river is so remote that not even undocumented workers sneak across the border here. And two U.S. survey teams abandoned the effort to map it. The Lower Canyons remained the last great unexplored wilderness of the contiguous United States for more than three decades after John Wesley Powell descended the Grand Canyon. Legends about the area’s canyons and rapids grew. Many believed the Lower Canyons were as deep as seven thousand feet, and stories about bandits and boat-eating rapids proliferated.

In 1899 a U.S. Geological Service survey team led by Robert Hill finally completed the charting of the Lower Canyons. Hill enlisted the help of James McMahon, a trapper who knew the river well and served as his boatman. When Hill’s survey team reported that the canyons were only two thousand feet deep, interest in the mysterious area evaporated. Until white-water boating became a popular recreation in the 1970s, the Lower Canyons were ignored.

After ten days in the canoe, I found the overloaded raft as hard to maneuver as a barge. In the canoe each paddle stroke had lunged the boat through the current; in the raft each paddle stroke accomplished little. In the canoe I’d traveled four to five miles an hour; in the rafts Hayesy and I traveled exactly five miles the first afternoon. We made camp on the grassy floodplain at a narrow straightaway in the river beneath a towering spire on the Texas side. It was a camp I used often because of its easy access, its reserves of mesquite wood, and its -scenic beauty. Downriver, the narrow opening of Temple Canyon swallows the Rio Grande, the twin canyon walls rising six hundred feet. And if we could keep the noise down, this camp would afford a great chance to see wildlife. In the past, I’d often seen a horde of javelinas rumble across the beach, and bobcats lived in the mesquite immediately across the river.

Our mood in camp was light, and we drank Tecate and grilled steaks over the mesquite coals. However, the next morning, as we loaded the rafts for departure, the feeling changed abruptly. I heard the unlikely sound of voices moving through the mesquite growth above the opposite shore. A moment later I spotted two heads, and I called out a friendly greeting in Spanish. Suddenly ten or twelve men, all outfitted with bale-sized backpacks, scattered for cover. Even as they hurried to hide, I could tell that not one had seen me, although I was only a hundred feet away on the other side of the river. I noticed that all of the backpacks were identical—yellow and waterproof, similar to the wet bags Hayesy and I use to keep our gear dry while running white water.

It would be difficult to overstate how pervasive marijuana trafficking is along the Rio Grande, but even I found it surprising that smugglers had chosen this remote route. By river, La Linda sat only five miles away; by land, because of the need to circumvent two impassable canyons, the distance was more than double. Furthermore, the next access on the Texas side, via the rough road network of the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area, was six river miles away, but two more canyons required long walks around.

Rumors abounded—many passed along by very trustworthy sources—that the business of drug trafficking had infiltrated all levels of the Border Patrol, the National Park Service, and local law enforcement agencies in the Big Bend region. The most publicized case involved the bust of Presidio County Sheriff Rick Thompson, a twenty-year Marine Corps veteran, who was arrested in December 1991 after federal agents found a ton of 94% pure Colombian cocaine in his horse trailer at the fairground outside of Marfa, Texas. Thompson pled guilty and initially received a life sentence, which was later -reduced to twenty-two years on the grounds that he had “cooperated.” Reputedly, the ex-sheriff was part of an intricate smuggling network, originating with the legendary Pablo Acosta, that stretched through many of the backcountry ranches of the Big Bend area and included the cooperation of ranch owners and Park Service officials.

In the vast desert triangle formed by Highway 90, Highway 385, and the Rio Grande—an area of roughly four thousand square miles—an extensive network of seldom-traveled ranching and wildlife management roads crisscrosses the terrain. Rarely visited by the Border Patrol or any other law enforcement agency, these roads offer smugglers routes to circumvent the B. P. checkpoints on all the area’s paved highways leading from the river to the state’s interior. Apparently, this group of a dozen “mules” who carried the backpacks in the mesquite grove adjacent to our camp was headed—or at least their cargo was headed—for this isolated network.

Hayesy grew nervous at once, but it became clear that the mules were more disturbed by our presence than we were by theirs. A moment later, two of the men emerged in a clearing downriver, and one insisted on conversing in his limited English.

“Hey man, what you doing?” he asked.

“We’re going downriver to Acuña.”

“Really, man. This is your work?”

“No, this is our vacation,” I said.

“That’s cool, man. Que le vaya bien” (Have a good trip).

Hayesy and I spoke in hushed tones as we tried to assess the situation.

“What are the chances these guys are going to give us problems?” Hayesy said.

“What kind of problems are you talking about?”

“Murder.”

“Zero chance,” I said. “I’m sure they’re more worried about us than we are about them.”

“There’s no chance they would try to get rid of us?”

“Why would they do that?”

“So we can’t rat on them to the Border Patrol.”

“Hayesy, where the hell are we going to find the Border Patrol way out here? These guys just want to ferry the drugs across the river and get paid. They’re not in this to murder.”

I decided that our best course would be to move downriver, where we almost surely would find the smugglers waiting for us to pass.

Sure enough, we boated only three hundred yards further when we found the group huddled in the shade of a catclaw acacia tree twenty vertical feet above the shore. I whispered to Hayesy to paddle past while I angled toward shore to chat with them. The men ranged in age from late teens to mid-forties, most of them anxious about my approach. The yellow bale-sized backpacks were nowhere in view. One of the men asked for cigarettes. As Hayesy paddled by, I took an exaggerated amount of time to retrieve the cigarettes. Once I saw that Hayesy was well beyond me, I tossed the pack of cigarettes onto shore. Three men sprinted to retrieve it, and I saw that they were more relieved to have cigarettes than they had been to learn I was not a drug agent. I asked in Spanish, “So just what are you guys doing out here?”

“Fishing.”

Nine miles out of camp the next morning, we came to a narrowing of the river where Big Canyon—a wide drainage—enters from the Texas side, and suddenly the canyon walls along the river soar to heights in excess of a thousand feet. This marks the beginning of Reagan Canyon, also known as Bullis Canyon, one of the more majestic enclaves on our planet. For the next forty miles, the river courses below dramatic canyon walls rising as high as two thousand feet, offering striking geologic wonders that have been carved over millions of years as the river has scored the limestone substrata. While -the Grand Canyon is no doubt more spectacular, you cannot, as I have done on the majority of my trips through the Lower -Canyons, -have the whole thing to yourself. No matter how many times I enter this canyon, my pulse inevitably quickens when I turn the sharp bend at Big Canyon and plunge with the narrowing river into the first mile of Reagan Canyon. If the sight of the mighty rock walls doesn’t humble you, certainly the challenges of navigating your craft through the surging currents will. You sense immediately that you are in a new ballgame.

A river guidebook published by the Big Bend Natural History Association warns: “Because of the remote and wild nature of this run, all precautions must be exercised to insure the personal safety of all members of the party!!” The same book says, “This trip is for properly prepared and experienced river runners only! It would be a very arduous and miserable trip for the careless or ignorant adventurer. You should not attempt this run unless the overall experience level of your party is very high. Help is, at the least, several hours, and possibly days, away.”

Once you enter Reagan Canyon, there are few places where help is as close as “several hours” away. In fact, for the next forty miles, exactly two such places await: one where a Mexican ranch sits twelve miles up a side canyon, and the other where an American ranch sits seven miles up an impassable road. Few river runners know the location of either.

During my twenty-eight trips through the Lower Canyons, I’d already experienced my share of dangerous confrontations, injurious accidents, and boating mishaps. In late June of 2003, for example, while boating the flooded river alone on a wild run from La Linda to Langtry, with the river flowing forty percent above the legal limit for rafting it in the size craft I piloted, I ran the three major rapids of the canyon flawlessly. However, that same evening in camp, while I was kicking at a two-inch-diameter black-brush acacia stump I intended to harvest for the campfire, the stump failed to snap despite my most powerful kick; my tennis shoe slid up the two-foot-high stump, and I fell into its pointed tip. The sickening consequence of my fall—I learned after I painfully extracted myself from the prickly pear cactus in which I had landed—was that the tip of the stump impaled my leg just below my calf, boring a neat but hideous two-inch hole in my flesh directly to the bone. As I stared at my exposed tibia, a yellowish fluid flooded out with each heartbeat. I realized immediately that I was in big trouble.

By the time I reached a hospital five days later, my leg was so swollen that doctors worried aloud that they might not be able to save it. The irony of the Lower Canyons is that you can meet all the obvious dangers the river offers and then be undone by something as routine as collecting firewood. One key to making a successful trip in such a remote area is to never let your guard down, to be aware at all times that if you can’t get out by yourself you’re not getting out.

When Hayesy and I entered Reagan Canyon on a balmy afternoon in January, my excitement at being back was not the edgy and anxious nervousness of battling the pushy river in a remote and intimidating setting, but rather the happy familiarity at being home again after a long absence.

Oasis

Jan. 9—10

Over three years had elapsed since Hayesy had last accompanied me on a Lower Canyons adventure. Health problems had forced him to miss several trips. Clearly, he seemed less than the invincible young man who’d been such an integral part of my first decade of Lower Canyons experiences—his back now bent from a lifetime of blue--collar labor, the skin around his eyes leathery, his hair now silver. Still, there remained something unmistakably youthful about Hayesy: his high-pitched laugh, his adolescent quality of exhibiting so much excitement over beautiful scenery, his crystalline blue eyes, which seemed forever childlike.

Hayesy and I work together as a team as well as any two people. Although my stubbornness may have riled him a few times in our dozen trips together in the Lower Canyons, he never let on that I was anything but a model partner. If his propensity for small talk about his hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts, ever drove me to the brink of rudeness, I never uttered a word. Together we had endured just about every conceivable hardship the river could throw at us, and I felt confident in Hayesy’s abilities as a boatman, a camper, and a decision maker. His strength, capacity for silly fun, and dedication to comfort and good eating helped to counter my endurance, my tendency toward reserve and silence, and my austere eating habits. Hayesy’s presence ensures that I have a lot more fun; my presence ensures that he has a lot more discipline.

Four days after leaving Andy’s, we arrived at a major drop named Hot Springs Rapids, a river runner’s oasis where clear warm pools of mineral water spring from the earth near the Mexican bank. The rapid re-forms itself often, as violent washouts entering from San Rosendo Canyon compete with floods roaring down the main channel of the river. On one trip, in July of 1999, I found the steep Class III+ drop in the river had been completely flattened by a surge of water through the canyon. In the ensuing years, the steep drop formed anew, the submerged boulders now creating two tiers to the drop in place of the one that had existed previously.

We pulled in to scout the rapid, and I could see that Hayesy’s long layoff from rafting had robbed him of much of his confidence. Not wanting to show him up or force him to think he had to run the rapid, I offered him alternatives. We could line the boats close to the Mexican shore. Or we could portage, a short carry through the dry wash of the canyon.

Hayesy didn’t seem comfortable with running the rapid, so I suggested we move the boats right to the beginning of the drop by hugging the Mexican shore. There, I suggested, we’d have a shorter carry if he elected not to run.

“How about this?” I said. “I take my boat out into mid-river and look at it from there?”

“Are you high? What happens if the current sweeps you over the rapid?”

“Well, then I run it.”

I didn’t even give him a chance to voice his objections. After running the Rock Slide in a canoe without a scout, there was no way I was walking this one. I wanted to respect Hayesy’s wishes and save his dignity, but not at the expense of having to lug two weeks’ worth of supplies over slippery rocks to avoid a Class III drop. The run, I knew from countless times through, always looked more foreboding from shore, and the secret was to scout quickly before your mind had time to make the relatively small obstacles in the channel into boulders. The minute I walked back to the boat, I knew I would run the rapids.

Once I reached the bottom, Hayesy asked if I wanted to run his raft through. I remembered a time years before when he had asked me to run his raft and had then spent the next year regretting not having done the run himself.

“Hayesy, you know you’ll regret it if you don’t run it. It’s a lot easier than it looks from here.”

Still, he lacked confidence. A long layoff from rafting will do that. When you’re running good rapids all the time, it seems you can always find a lane through. When you’re rusty, even the smallest rapids seem really dangerous.

“Okay, all you have to do is line up off that triangular rock about forty percent of the way across the river, the one that is just two inches above the water line, and make sure your boat is going straight when you begin the drop. The river will do the rest for you. And if you hit anything when you’re lining up, just make sure you straighten the boat.”

Hayesy nodded, his countenance still flushed with nerves. He turned tentatively toward his raft, and repeated the exact directions.

“Hayesy,” I said, “You’ll ace this one. I know it.”

“The first one is always the hardest,” he replied. “But I’m just going to follow your directions, and then I’ll meet you down at the cooler.”

The sense of relief and exuberance boaters feel about ending their day with a perfectly executed run of a challenging rapid is one of the most seductive elements of the sport. Experiencing that exuberance at Hot Springs amplifies the high manyfold. There you have warm bathing pools, an inexhaustible supply of firewood, a hard-packed sandy beach for camping, and the soothing roar of the falling water. We bathed, and I washed my clothes and sleeping bag at the base of the runoff from the springs. Warmed by the sun, we lounged on the rocks in camp, organizing our gear, drinking beer, and talking. Hayesy asked numerous questions about my trip thus far, and later we talked about the different directions our lives would take once we reached our goal of Amistad Dam a couple of weeks downriver. When darkness fell, we built a glowing fire in a sand hole against the base of a boulder, and I told the story of meeting Antonio at this same camp several years before.

Antonio was one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met. He had walked into my camp at Hot Springs one December afternoon. The water had been very low, and I had struggled to reach this site, having had to drag my loaded raft through many of the shallows in the river. The rapids had been even more demanding; because all of them lacked sufficient water for a run, I had had to muscle the boat over one rock after another. By the time I reached Hot Springs after five grueling days, I was physically spent. I was worried about my body, and, frankly, I was feeling sorry for myself.

Realizing I had to lighten the load, I’d left some of my provisions, including a case of beer, on the trail leading from the river to the rough canyon road by which Mexicans accessed the area from the interior. Atop this small pile of foodstuffs and beer, I’d left a note in Spanish, explaining that I’d had to abandon them because I was oversupplied.

Carrying only a small plastic grocery bag filled with seven tins of sardines and about twenty key limes in one hand and a one-gallon water jug in the other, Antonio arrived at my campsite on his long walk to Fort Stockton, Texas, where he worked as a welder on a ranch. He had left his home in Múzquiz, 180 miles to the southeast, three days before. First he had hitched a ride with an acquaintance who made deliveries to the outlying ranches. When the friend left him fifty miles south of the river, Antonio walked.

“Me gusta caminar siempre solo” (I always like to walk alone), he said often.

He would walk day and night for the next six days to reach his workplace, sleeping only when he grew too tired to walk another step. Because he did not carry a blanket or a sleeping bag, he usually awoke due to the cold after only a short sleep. Then he would walk again. Antonio planned his walks around a full moon so that he could walk all night. He seemed to think no more of the 200-mile walk than we would think of our morning commute into the city to our jobs. This was his eleventh trip via the paths that led past Hot Springs. He had made another half dozen trips via La Linda.

“Why did you go home this time? Did you miss your family?”

“I had a toothache. The dentists in the U.S. are very expensive.”

I convinced him to camp with me that night, and I promised to ferry him across the river in the morning. I asked him many questions about his family, which included a wife and six children, all of them living in Múzquiz.

“I work for the youngest, a girl. She’s nine years old and she’s very intelligent. I did not go to school, not even for one day. My daughter attends three schools. She’s already much smarter than I am.”

“How long have you been married, Antonio?”

“Twenty-five years.”

“How old is your wife?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Thirty-two? And you’ve been married twenty-five years? How old was she when you married her?”

“Fourteen.”

I learned he couldn’t read either. After we had eaten a meal together, I wanted him to proofread the short note I’d left with the supplies I’d abandoned, so I walked back up the trail and retrieved it. He crouched down above the note for several minutes, but his eyes never moved. Finally, I realized that he not only couldn’t read but was too embarrassed to admit it.

“Se ve bien ¿no?” (It looks okay, right?), I said.

“Sí, pero no me pegan las palabras” (Yes, but the words don’t stick to me).

Around the campfire, we talked about our fears. I told him the story of the mountain lion charging into my camp.

“Aren’t you afraid of pumas?” I asked.

“I fear only three things. I hate rattlesnakes, and that’s why I walk in the winter when they’re sleeping. And buffalos give me much fear. There is a ranch in the mountains on my way to Fort Stockton, and there they keep buffalos. I walk many hours to avoid them.”

“What’s the third?”

“La onza.”

“La onza? What’s that?”

“It’s a wildcat, smaller and darker than a mountain lion, but much more deadly. It eats people. It stalks you for hours, waiting on the edge of the camp while you sleep. At dawn, when it is satisfied a larger onza isn’t going to kill you, it charges in. This is the fiercest of all animals. I do not camp because of it.”

“I’ve never heard of this animal.”

“You don’t have them in the U.S. For that you are lucky.”

I learned later that only three onzas have been spotted since 1970, all of them on the Pacific side of the Sierra Madre. Andy Kurie explained Antonio’s fear of them as “the result of Indian myths.”

“How is it, Antonio, that you can walk all the way to Fort Stockton with so few provisions?”

“I eat very little because eating slows me down. Every day when the sun is high, I eat one can of sardines. That’s all. When I tire, I suck on a lime.”

“And you have so little water.”

“I find water at the ranches along the way. The ranchers know me now, and most are very helpful.”

In the morning, after a restless night in which Antonio repeatedly chased a skunk from our camp, I ferried him across the river, where he began the next six days of his walk by ascending a steep drainage up the thousand-foot canyon wall.

Another half day on the river brought Hayesy and me eight more miles to an island camp, and on the way we ran two more marked rapids and explored Cañon del Caballo Blanco, or White Horse -Canyon. Almost five years before, Eric Clem and I had paddled this same stretch in March, and near the canyon’s opening, we found two horses feeding in the grass of a thin beach along the canyon wall. Eric had grown up around horses on a Nova Scotia farm, and as we passed one of the two horses, a white mare, he noticed that it still wore a bit and bridle. The crude rope dangling from the bit suggested that the mare had recently broken free from a ranch, probably the ranch up San Rosendo Canyon. Eric surmised that the mare might slowly starve to death because the bit hampered her ability to eat. Immediately, I pulled hard for shore, telling Eric I was determined to remove the bit and bridle. “OK,” Eric conceded, “but it might not be nearly as easy as you think.”

In the last couple of years of my daughter’s life, her love for animals became one of the principal sustaining forces in her life. In fact, for her Make A Wish Foundation trip, she chose a trip to the San Diego Zoo and a visit with Joan Embery, the zookeeper who often brought animals onto a popular late-night TV show. Eric’s suggestion that the white mare could starve to death, or even struggle to eat, instantly made me think of my daughter, and I had to rescue the horse.

Two hours of chasing the two horses back and forth across the powerful but shallow current finally yielded results. The mare allowed us to stand within three feet of her, and I lunged for the crude rope. I held the fidgety horse while Eric deftly removed the rudimentary bit and bridle, a souvenir I still hang in my kitchen. The white mare and her coffee-colored mate then spent the next four years grazing in the immediate area of White Horse Canyon, and each trip through I’d call a gentle greeting to the pair as I paddled by. This year, however, the horses had gone, perhaps reclaimed by the ranchers from whom they escaped.

Our island camp offered an opportunity to repack all the gear because the following day we planned to run the two biggest rapids of the Lower Canyons: Upper Madison Falls, a long, violent Class IV, and Lower Madison Falls, a steep Class III. Upper Madison would be the biggest challenge since I had run the Rock Slide back in Santa Elena Canyon. And less than a mile out of camp, we would descend a drop called Rodeo Rapids, so named because the interference wave at the bottom of the six-foot drop bucked rafts nearly out of the water, much as a bull or bronco rider is thrown by its high--kicking and reluctant carrier. Upper Madison, because of its length and technical difficulty, offered the greater number of potential problems, but I worried more about the shorter, steeper and faster Lower Madison, which kicked as violently as Rodeo Rapids but included an additional hazard: two tiers of barely submerged boulders, which the river surged over as it charged toward the bottom of the twenty-foot drop. We spent the afternoon packing and tying our gear so that we wouldn’t lose anything if we capsized in the rapids. We could worry about the rest the following day.

Some boaters prefer to end a day by running a major rapid and camping below it, secure in the knowledge that the obstacle is behind them. Others prefer to meet the challenges of a major rapid when they are fresh in the early part the day, the one drawback being that anxiety over the obstacle ahead often interferes with a restful night’s sleep. For me, neither of the Madisons constituted a major threat, and I could probably have slept soundly on a barrel tethered to a post in the middle of either one. Hayesy, however, showed signs of pre-rapid nerves as we broke camp the following morning. I did not ask him how he had slept. I could already guess what his answer would’ve been.

I didn’t worry about Hayesy’s ability to negotiate any of the rapids on the Rio Grande, instead interpreting his nerves as a healthy sign of his respect for the dangers of our isolation. People who regularly boat the Lower Canyons often stress the warning “You can never let your guard down.” I think the most trying four days I ever spent on the river were the result of a tiny cut in the pinky toe of one of my feet. Because the cut was so small, I neglected to administer first aid, ignoring the increasing soreness until swelling due to infection made walking very painful. My difficulty walking narrowed the parameters of what I could do to such a degree that I suddenly felt overwhelmed by my inability to perform even the most basic chores like gathering firewood, loading and unloading the boat, and setting up the tent. Finally I realized the cut wouldn’t heal itself, and within twelve hours of treating it, I had full mobility.

But that’s the way it often goes in the canyons. You match the obvious challenges with determination, concentration, and caution. Then, with your confidence increasing to the point where you have begun to think you are invincible, one false step into a cactus gives you painful notice of your vulnerability. And virtually every plant and tree in the canyons is armed with barbed thorns, daggerlike spines, or sharp spikes. Even river cane, the one notable exception in the spiny plant world of the desert terrain, grows razor-sharp leaves capable of slicing skin to dangerous depths. When I impaled my leg on a black brush stump, the wound stopped secreting fluid within fifteen minutes, but I’ve had river cane cuts spill out an hour’s worth of blood.

Hayesy understood the dangers, small and not so small, that we confronted the moment our guards dropped. His long absence from boating, however, seemed to inflate his respect for the potential problems that could occur at the major rapids. When a day of successes had bolstered our confidence to the level of complacency, we always reminded ourselves: “We haven’t accomplished anything yet. Let’s wait until we’re safely off the river before we start the
congratulations.”