A Charred Life 
The End of the River
Our state is defined by its legendary waterways, and none has inspired as many cherished myths as the mighty Rio Grande. But after a decade of drought, cut off from its headwaters and sucked dry by irrigation, this Texas treasure is beginning to disappear—and with it, a vital piece of our history.
ON A WARM JULY AFTERNOON I am going to see the mouth of the Rio Grande for the first time. Sixteenth-century Spaniards called the stream Río de las Palmas; the bright forest of palm trees around the mouth was a landmark for navigators of the Gulf. In good years, the lowlands surrounding those groves would be marshes teeming with shellfish and minnows hunted by ibis and herons stepping sprightly in the brine. But today, as I ride eastward on Texas Highway 4, the most striking features ahead are airborne white swirls of sand and salt. Decades of clearing for agriculture and development have isolated the last native sabal palms to a small Audubon preserve outside Brownsville, and most of the wetlands have gone as dry as chalk. The sprawling river delta has been reduced to a nearly barren, eroded strip of earth, and some residents of Port Isabel are having trouble breathing because there's so much windblown grit in the air.
My guide is a pleasant man named Gilberto Rodriguez who grew up on a farm in Weslaco and now roams the lower Rio Grande as a watermaster specialist for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). In layman's terms, Rodriguez is an unarmed water cop; he spends much of his time checking pump gauges on the Texas side, making sure none of its farmers are drawing more water than they're allowed. For many Rio Grande Valley residents, the mere inference of such cheating sparks outrage, and Rodriguez tells me he often fears violence. "The hotter the water," he reflects, "the more hostile people become."
He is not referring to water temperature. Valley growers are livid over what they believe is Mexican theft of Rio Grande water in the northern state of Chihuahua. You might think the Rio Grande begins with snowmelt and rapids in the Rockies of Colorado and New Mexico and then marks the plains with graceful lines of cottonwood and willow as it claims its legacy as the Texas-Mexico border. Technically, that's true. But these days, dams in New Mexico, the thirsty and sprawling border cities of El Paso and Juárez, and giant tangles of nonnative salt cedars strangle the Rio Grande's once mighty flow by the time it enters Texas. In reality, the river's headwater today is Mexico's Río Conchos, which begins high in the Sierra Madres, crosses the Chihuahuan Desert, and revives the parent stream at Presidio and Ojinaga, above Big Bend. Roughly 50 percent of the water in the border stream now comes from the Río Conchos.
By terms of a 1944 treaty, two thirds of the Conchos flow belongs to Mexico; the remaining third is supposed to continue on to the United States. But in recent years, Mexico has amassed a huge "water debt." Instead of regularly releasing Río Conchos water downstream, Chihuahua has stored it in reservoirs and put it to the use of its towns and irrigating farmers. Texas farmers believe that their way of life is being sold upriver, and they're frustrated by the lack of action from the U.S. government. They calculate the loss to their fields at about 489 billion gallons of water and warn that the Valley economy could collapse. Their anger has embroiled Mexican president Vicente Fox in a domestic political furor that has soured relations with the U.S. Invoking the rhetoric of the war on terrorism, Texas agriculture commissioner Susan Combs, one of the farmers' key political advocates, has called Chihuahua "a rogue state." But the farmers' frustration and vituperation is aimed not only at Mexico. The conflict has also embarrassed Governor Rick Perry and President George W. Bush.
A dwindling supply of water is an issue for every citizen of Texas, but few residents have as desperate a case as Rio Grande Valley farmers. They've suffered a dry spell in the past decade that rivals the legendary drought of the forties and the fifties that turned most of Texas into a federal disaster area. Because the groundwater is brackish, the Valley gets no help from aquifers; the Rio Grande carries all the water there is. Every drop of Conchos water is vital, but that spigot too has been all but turned off.
Nowhere is this reality more clear than at the mouth of the Rio Grande, which is further consumed by mats of water hyacinth and hydrilla. At the terminus of Highway 4, Rodriguez and I jostle from pavement to loose sand. It's a pretty day at the beach. The white-capped waves are bright dark blue, and squadrons of brown pelicans fold their wings and smack beak-first into the surf, trying to catch dinner. Boca Chica, which means "small mouth," has none of the glitz and development of nearby South Padre Island, but families are out fishing, splashing, building sand castles. Ahead, a portable light tower has been erected. That landmark, Rodriguez tells me, is Mexico. Parked on the beach, hood pointed toward the surf, is a green-and-white SUV marked U.S. Border Patrol. For hours on end two agents sit and stare at beachcombers and the Gulf.
The agents represent the increased vigilance of Homeland Security, but their presence here also marks the death of a river. The riverbank they've parked beside is now a land bridge. It is not unlike other strips of sand and shell that the tide and currents lay out in the Gulf's endless construction of beaches becoming dunes becoming barrier islands. The difference is that this sandbar has obliterated a natural frontier between nations and left the mythic Rio Grande a tepid, stagnant shallow. It has too little push to cross the bar and reach the ocean.
On this day the pool trapped at Boca Chica looks blue enough, but its biological illness is indicated by crusts of salt that line the banks for hundreds of yards upstream and resemble icy slush. Freshwater inflow is an estuary's lifeblood, but these days the Rio Grande has little of that to give. I watch some Mexican boys skimming the stagnant pool with fishing nets. One stands in the middle of the river, about a quarter of a mile inland, and the water comes no higher than his knees. "I have not brought you to the mouth of the river," Rodriguez says with a slight smile. "I have brought you to the end of the river."
THE RIO GRANDE'S RICH AND COMPLEX story has turned on many human events—the bravery of Mexican settlers on the lower river who refused to yield to Apache and Comanche Indians; the emergence of El Paso, whose citizens had constructed a bridge by the early 1800's and made the city a gateway of immigration and trade; the coming of the first norteamericanos as beaver trappers in the highland river valley and farmer-colonists in Texas. But history's most important bend of the river was the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848.
Until then, the Rio Grande had been a long but fairly ordinary stream on the Indian frontier. Mexico had lost its war with Texas in 1836 but refused to recognize the infant republic and in any case maintained that Texas' border was farther north, on the Nueces River. But after American troops had overrun Mexico, sacked the capital, and imposed martial law, Mexican negotiators could not bargain from a position of strength, and the Hidalgo treaty established the Rio Grande as the U.S.-Mexico border from its mouth to the thirty-second parallel. Mexico watched Texas' annexation become final and also lost all, or parts of, land that became California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming—a full third of its territory. Bitterness and resentment were planted in the Mexican psyche that simmer to this day.
The change in sovereignty transformed everything. The young state of Colorado, with backing from English investors, seized on the potential of Rio Grande agriculture and put its water to use in the San Luis Valley. By 1896, between 350 million and 500 million gallons of water a year were being lavished on farms in Colorado and New Mexico. The upstream farmers maintained that the water was theirs even if the river went bone-dry by El Paso. Mexican growers each year saw a decrease in water reaching the El Paso Valley. Fields withered and orchards died, and Juárez faced a shortage of drinking water.
To make matters worse, in 1897 another British-financed company, headed by a physician in Las Cruces, announced plans to build a dam near a big barren clod called Elephant Butte, 125 miles north of El Paso. The speculators promised flood control and more orderly distribution of the water, but Mexicans cried that they would be dried up, and boosters in El Paso claimed that a more rightful place for such a dam was in their city. The U.S. Secretary of the Interior embargoed construction of the dam. Congress held hearings. A lawsuit reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The matter remained unresolved for seven years.
Finally, an irrigation congress convened in El Paso in 1904. The feuding parties suddenly reached a stunning compromise: The United States would build the dam at Elephant Butte. Mexico was guaranteed 60,000 acre-feet of water a year which, most years, would be a small fraction of what would be available to the U.S. (An acre-foot is the amount of water required to flood one acre of land one foot deep—about 326,000 gallons.) Was Mexico steamrolled again by U.S. power? Was there a covert payoff? Or did Mexican officials just perceive self-interest in the dam? The thinking behind their concession is veiled in a dense murk of years, pride, and diplomacy, but whatever the explanation, the country was once again treated like poor and unwanted kin. The new treaty was ratified by the countries in 1907, and the dam was completed in 1916, effectively cutting the Rio Grande in two.
On the outskirts of Truth or Consequences, a town that changed its name in honor of the famous game show in 1950, the Elephant Butte Dam today holds about as ugly a lake as I've ever seen. No trees grow on the shores, the campgrounds and picnic tables are deserted, and only a few fishing boats are scattered about. Between the opaque blue water and the slopes of maroon rock and soil is a strip of ground that looks bleached.
"People call it the Bathtub Ring," chuckles Steve Harris, a conservationist and river guide, who has joined me for a tour of the river north of Texas. The 54-year-old Harris organized his first whitewater trips in Big Bend in the seventies and now lives in Taos, where his company, Far-Flung Adventures, runs whitewater tours through the Class IV Taos Box. He's passionate about the Rio Grande. He says the dark ground around the lake marks Elephant Butte's historic waterline, and the pale strip below gauges the recent years of too little rain: "The lake was supposed to hold 2.2 million acre-feet. It's filled up and gone over the spillway a few times. But after they built it, the first thing they got was thirty years of drought."
My Library
