Game Over 
Run With the Devils
A two-day trip down the state’s wildest river was exactly what I was warned it would be: difficult, frightening, and unimaginably beautiful.
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We were headed to the campground at Devils River State Natural Area, a distance of 15 river miles. It was, literally, the only place we could camp. The rest of the riverbanks are privately owned, and local ranchers are famously ornery in their dealings with trespassers. They do not hesitate to have them arrested and prosecuted. There are stories of boaters being fired upon with high-powered rifles. In one account in Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine, a man who had been separated from his canoe was held down by gunfire for six hours. On the second day we would paddle roughly 9 miles farther downstream from the park to Bailey’s place. If we missed that, the next takeout was 24 miles away, at Rough Canyon Marina, in Lake Amistad. Kenny and I agreed that missing Bailey’s would be a serious mistake. It would mean spending two additional days on the river without food. And, of course, it would mean camping, or attempting to camp, on private land.
But such worries soon yielded to a more immediate necessity: keeping our yawing, overstuffed canoe upright and pointed downriver. This was not as easy as it might seem. The Devils is what is known as a “pool-and-drop” river, meaning that long, calm, somewhat lakelike sections alternate with narrow, swiftly descending rapids. The pools were easy, fun, and relaxing. The drops were often harrowing, especially since the approaches to so many of them were cloaked in dense clusters of river cane. In the first fifteen miles of river, we estimated that there were sixteen or seventeen discrete pool-and-drop sections. Many of the pools ended in canebrake and willow groves, through which several narrow, dark channels were cut. Because the cane was eight- to ten-feet high, it was sometimes impossible to see where the channels went, and it was equally impossible to know what the drop was like on the other side. We got used to listening very closely, and we got better and better at telling the big rapids from the small ones. The effect was that, at the end of each placid pool, we would repeat the same adrenaline-pounding sequence: apprehension, fear, and frantic struggling to turn the boat away from trees and rocks, followed by wild, howling exhilaration, then a sort of seraphic calm. It was an exhausting day.
What made it even more tiring was an activity known as lining, which involved holding fifty-foot bow and stern lines outside of the canoe and lowering it through rapids or waterfalls that were too big to run. The Devils has a well-deserved reputation for destroying marine hardware, even at low water levels, and a smashed boat would have meant real trouble for us. Because of the nature of the riverbanks—steep rocks or dense vegetation—portage was often difficult or impractical. But to line the canoe downstream, we had to be in the rapids ourselves, often up to our necks, which meant that we were constantly stumbling, falling, being swept downstream, getting our feet and legs pinned under boulders, and generally battling to keep the canoe from foundering.
Sometimes lining seemed more dangerous than actually running the rapids. At Game Warden Rock (one of three falls we recognized from our outfitter’s descriptions), the main channel was far too difficult even to line. So we bumped our way down a cane-choked side channel, complete with enormous boulders and a river bottom that varied from one to eight feet in depth. At one point, I got caught between the canoe and a rock in a three-foot-wide chute through ten-foot-high canebrake. As the water rushed up and over my head, I found that I could not move. After a moment of panic, I struggled to the surface, only to lose my footing, be pinned again, then carried miraculously out of the dark channel and into the main stream, where I clung to a rock and discovered that I was covered with small leeches (Kenny was covered with them too; fortunately, we noticed them before they took hold). It required all of our strength to stay out of trouble. Kenny and I had to negotiate several channels like this. Each time it took at least half an hour. We were bruised and bloody—Kenny’s feet especially—and by the end of the day my arms were so tired they ached.
Lining, however, was for only the biggest rapids, the ones we believed we could not run without capsizing. For the rest of them, we held our breath, pointed the canoe into the teeth of the white water, hoped that our calculations had been right, and paddled like madmen to avoid rocks, trees, and cane islands. Before this trip, I had been engaged in the sport of white-water kayaking for six years on rivers in Texas and Oregon. I had grown addicted to the thrill that accompanies the plunge into a steeply dropping section of river at high water, the panicky high of having big standing waves break over your boat, fighting out of a turbulent hole, or just screaming over a seven-foot waterfall. In a big boat in calm water, you have a pleasant and fairly casual relationship with your environment. In a white-water kayak, the relationship is more like a stormy love affair: intense, intimate, demanding, all-consuming. You are wet and fighting the whole way.
A standard canoe in a class II or III rapid provides exactly that same intimacy, with one stark exception: The craft is not designed for that sort of water. It does not turn nimbly like a kayak. In fact, in its stuffed-to-the-gunwales condition our canoe was hard to turn at all. It wallowed. In rapids the bow would submarine, sending a chilly arc of water over me (the bowman) and back into the canoe, which made it ride even lower in the water. Though we knew, technically, how to turn the canoe, actually making it turn was another thing entirely. The main problem, other than the six hundred pounds of deadweight, was that the thunderous whoosh of the rapids made communication impossible. As bowman, I would spot a rock dead ahead and begin screaming to turn right. Kenny, who could not hear me, and who could not see the rock, was more or less left to his own devices. Which meant that we were constantly working at cross-purposes, the boat sometimes careering into rocks and woody thickets.
At times, though, the water just seemed to take us on the aquatic equivalent of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride: mayhem pounding all around us, water crashing into us and over us, cane-lined chutes appearing and disappearing, seeming to trap us, then suddenly spitting us out into a wide, quick rapid. To say it was exhilarating does not quite capture the feeling: It was so physical, such a primal collision of river and rock and bone and sinew, that it had the effect of making the rest of the world disappear completely. For this entire day there was nothing in my mind but the river, the stark, chalky cliffs on our flanks, and the warm, flashing October sun overhead. It was, I realize now, a feeling of being very young again, of being back in a world where time meant nothing and the future was full of pure, wild possibility.
THOSE WERE THE DROPS, anyway. The pools, on the other hand, were lovely, lazy, and serene. Here the land opened up and the cliffs shimmered in the sun and the river was so flawlessly transparent that you could watch a crawdad walk on the bottom through eight feet of water and see him with absolute clarity. The Devils has the cleanest water in Texas and some of the cleanest in the lower 48. That’s because it consists of pure, Perrier-like springwater that is pumped from thousands of springs over fifty miles of riverbed, and it flows over limestone that has been polished and scrubbed by countless violent floods. There is no mud to roil it. This accounts for the river’s astounding color too, which ranges from vivid ultramarine to a limpid turquoise that would remind you of the Caribbean.
Then there were the fish—more than I had ever seen in any body of water. The river was jumping with them: huge schools of four-foot longnose gar that followed the boat, crossing and recrossing under the keel; hundreds of largemouth and smallmouth bass that hunted the downstream edges of the limestone; catfish, perch, crappie, and sunfish and enormous schools of minnows. During our first day, we encountered some fishermen, spectral old coots in decrepit johnboats who materialized suddenly from the riverbank, drift-fishing in the gentle current. We figured they were the residents, the ranchers who shot at people like us. They came over to inspect us with odd, insistent, inquisitive faces, and when we asked how the fishing was, one of them said, “Not as good today. Yesterday morning we caught eighty to one hundred.” We laughed. They did not seem to understand why we were laughing. There was lots of other wildlife on the river too. At one point we came abeam of a pair of beavers, paddling unhurriedly toward a cane island. We saw ospreys—a type of hawk that hunts fish—flapping above us and diving for prey, hitting the water at a very high speed but with a very small splash. Belted kingfishers, herons, and egrets all hunted the river. Though we did not see them, the place is also full of wild turkey, deer, javelina, mountain lion, and more kinds of snakes than I care to think about. (The area is considered a sort of paradise for herpetologists.)
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