Last of the day’s sun brushes the Sierra del Carmen, that long wall snowy and surf-like on the horizon. Nearer faces, those of the canyon and the canyon’s sidecanyons, grow steeped in shade, and with the twilight glow their textures appear more distinct and more endless, too.
Now a phoebe at river’s edge, late December sky losing its blue, though maybe the floodplain, where the borders of things are fading into lavender, is in some hurry not to. I sit in it, on a cobble bank’s flank. How smooth the stones, how many expressions they make, hues. Raven gutterals begin from back of camp, some cliff. Sounds as if the bird’s asking where what says begins, whether the echos, the untalk, or what.
Started down the river about five hours ago, after being dropped at the access in Big Bend National Park by Roy Englesdorf who with his wife Ruth runs the Outback Oasis Motel and Snake Room in Sanderson, Texas. This is first camp (big cobblebar, mouth of a sidecanyon), and it’s good, so good to be back in Boquillas Canyon. The place has stayed close since I first canoe tripped through it four years ago; in mysterious, nourishing ways, this desert river has drawn me and my gear back for two trips through the more challenging and remote Lower Canyons downstream of here (a rainy, flooded, eleven day trip in October and a ten day explore, dry and crisp, in January). It has also helped ground and buoy me through the day-to-day back home.
After being apart for half a decade (during which time their mom and I faced each other in over twenty five court dates) my two youngest kids, 10-year-old boy and girl, twins, live with me every other week now, have for over a year. We’ve spent many of those days exploring local rivers in small boats, and in winter we explore the banks, hunting rocks, driftwood, other treasures. I’ve thought some today about our readiness for exploring this place together (they are with their mom and me, each, for two weeks, now, at the winter holiday). There’s not one deciding factor, rather a swarm of details, hunches, feels. Can we carry enough water in our boats? Is the weather, not just meteorological, too shifty? If one of us is injured, what will we do? Who might come with us whom we’d all enjoy, trust?
Such thoughts, if not all thoughts, flow through the background in a place like this, as the landscape is demanding physically and aesthetically, in a frank, clarifying way. There’s something of the nude about a desert canyon, something both shocking and intimate, detached and seductive, especially if you live far away in mountains with similar geological DNA, but of a very different age and with dense soil and flora covering them.
*
First morning to wake on the river. A deep, restful sleep. The breeze has grown more spirited, and blows from the west, upstream; mesquite branches wear it in their sway. The canoe’s still here, tied fast to a boulder. The silt (there’s no sand here) remains damp from the snow and rain of three days prior. Dregs of last night’s fire in the pan, smoked herring cans burnt and curled among the ashes. Tent fly flutter, that nylon crinklesound. Sun is up, not yet down here in the canyon, and already a new country reveals its layers, an old country, too.
Up the sidecanyon, now, for a jaunt, each step’s grinding thwips and thwacks on the graylavendar gravel of its wash. Inside the first bend off the river, where the sidecanyon oxbows back west, I sit, watching the sun skin the peach of the river canyon’s far wall. Time’s funnelings, and weather’s, the breeze still from upstream. This wall – or call it a face, a mural of faces – the one I lean against, shadow-outlined on that one.
Feels like you’re always in a wave down here, a wave curling so patiently it would take far more than our children’s children to know its final foam. I poke among the stone forms, the hoodoos and keyholes, all the slots and grottoes off of and in the sidecanyon, as if some googly-eyed reef dweller. This dun shine, all this hardness and fracture and glow. And no soil below, no roots, unless petrified.
The barrel cactus’ hot pink spines, the lechugilla’s modes of spike. I swell here and tread, puffered and goof. You come a long way from home, sometimes, only to feel more at home. Time’s the subject, I mean. The way other lives, future and former, feel embedded here, seeded, embodied, too. I’d love to see my kids open up to this, for this to be available to them, to be felt, however they may feel it, and for them to know themselves here, in this landscape and then back home, in their two homes, with this landscape and its lives and deaths in them.
The cliff fragments’ strike-slip filigree. Shards of fossil – clam, oyster, ammonite, etc. — under most every step. And, meanwhile, the river’s dimplings, all the acoustics, metaphysics of echo. How seeing in this place expands via compression of vista by canyonwalls, jaw sore from staring, craning. If the body feels geological here, it’s not (or maybe it is, I’m no expert), but the ribcage, the pelvic floor, marrow’s sediment—you just have to walk with it. No matter what movement or stillness, it’s hard to escape the urgency and patience, the stories and futures, in all this rock.
*
Good miles today, canyon-by-canoe miles, easy paddling. Look ahead a little, look back up, down, around. Faces from and at all angles and lights, shadow. Not much to say, the wind says it pretty much nonstop.
Ten miles or so travelled before second camp, a grassy bench a hundred feet from the bank. A nest of a spot for the tent, willow-walled. Next terrace up, a sidecanyon’s blowout sprawls, pale guts of bedrock busted, some storm god’s flood dust.
Spires on the opposite canyon wall, spires a hundred feet tall, with narrower spires reaching off of those spires. So many wonders in the weatherings of carboniferous, in what wears off and what remains. My kids, total rockhounds, would love to see this. They have weathered much, and will weather more, as all beings do. The times are gusty and apt to sudden floods, if not drought. And look at the lower slopes, between the cliff faces and river plain, how gravelly they are, lechugilla-pocked.
What the battered, old boot upstream at the abandoned candelilla wax camp said, “Desert rivers hardly know crap, and you even less.” What the gar skull in the trash midden said, “Time to fix time once and for all.”
If the art of good camp is symmetry, and if symmetry in camp is as much setup as chance and patience, then so be it. There were three other places upstream, each good for camp, but this one, of course, is very fine. Anyway, there’s no bad camp, no camp that happens in bad.
Hot little blaze in the firepan and a steady, mild breeze from the south; some might call it wind. Though mild, the air cuts cool enough to spark a windchill. Cuban coconut beans rehydrated for dinner, a beer. Stars like a bag of spilled sugar, a bag big as vision itself. Is it Milky Way or further stars, those densities of twinkle? Or is it what juices the stone’s thick, what juices the brokenness? No saner densities.
Saw a foal nursing off its white mare yesterday, up the sidecanyon before we broke camp. They stood on the busted stone, lower legs lost in pricky pear and ocotillo, the mom leaning her head on her offspring’s back as it supped. My kids would have loved seeing that. Even now, I am seeing them seeing that in some constellation.
*
Slow morning, coffee and grub and walks, before it’s time to break it all down. I start with the tent, upstake and depole it, and then leave it lying and walk down the cobblebar where the bluff at the edge of it drops down to the river with its aquamarine and sluggish, low flow. The forms currents have made there, in the silt, the chunks of bark-stripped tree, also limbs with their greenery – salt cedar? – sorted and piled on the silt according to direction and size. Seems to be evidence that last night, while all around was being punctured a trillion times by the stars, a beaver, maybe more than one, was down here munching, all lit up.
I head back, roll up the tent with its poles and stakes, and slide it in its nylon package, fat cigar. Next, the food box, the water jugs, the glances at the canyonwall, the sky, or upstream to the corrugations of shine on the river’s rippled bend. Or just down at the shadows of the willow branches bending in the wind on the sleeping pad being rolled now, deflated and rolled some more.
Before long, the canoe’s loaded and launched. The first paddle strokes to stretch you out, every departure a confluence of reflection and anticipation. Soon, the miles drift on, simple and packed.
*
Why canoe, why here, in a desert, to travel by canoe? Why canoe at all? To see what water has made of the land, and to feel those remnant waters? To be uncreated? To know the river as the former life, how the river does not lead to but is the former life and this one and the deaths in them and in the future ones? And for the moments unbubbling into moments bubbling again?
I canoe because most days it feels like there’s so much love in my torso it could jumpstart an aircraft carrier. I canoe for the seeing in glances and in the staring. I canoe to find a way out from inside the noise. Is it rock I canoe, or is it river, is it surf or is it paddle, revel, is it trees or critters or shiver; it is plant and stone, bones and sliver?
I canoe for the passion of being freed from passion. To do no evil, to purify time, to undo craving. To digest the reading, to feel the designer’s desire in every part of the craft, the paddle, and the place. To read the digesting by the place of its past every moment being made. For the cherry light on the stones, the pockets of shadow, the wet spots, the dry, the turds, the births, the flesh and throat’s response to the air bearing it all, all it may.
And for the surprises I canoe. For the river to river me wave, chute, eddy, pool, and bed. I canoe to carry plenty of water over the damaged water, to stay hydrated here in this land of little rain, and for the sleep after the miles, the headwind, the cadence of the lift and purchase of the blade. And for the emptying and the loading again of the canoe. I canoe to awaken a tenderness.
I canoe for the newly fallen across and in the river and the decision of when and how to skirt and bless such gifts, such obstructions. And to share the pleasure of the canoe’s motion on the water with everyone who knows that such pleasure is not all sensual. I canoe to be in touch with the majestic drift and the majestic uselessness.
For to know the sides of the river, some cinnamon worship, a centering. For the full continuous thank you of the being alive in it. And sometimes from the canoe I snap bad pics of the corridor as it swallows me like a snack. I am in awe before the awe of it all, and canoe to know the changing moistures, the nature of root and stone, and often am in stitches before the loaded hull’s scratches and dents.
For the filaments of passing glances, how they combine and drift, disperse and congeal. I canoe to be inside as much as out, and to go with that being into its outsides and ins, being’s. I canoe for the distances and distance’s closenesses. I canoe to hock up the gunk. I canoe for the hug, for the wind’s hug is forgiveness, as the water’s is, too.
For the brethrening and the curves and the straights and the drops. To return, to feel the saner velocities, without hope. To bed in the body of motion and to rest after such motion in the momentum of stillness. To remember the bone’s componentry. I praise the paddle’s simplicity as I stroke and drift. I praise the straps with which the gearbags are lashed to the thwarts. And, stroking again, to etch the breath with the edge’s tablature.
O, canoe, big and leaky, I ride the river in you, to be erased, to read, be read and rewritten. And to know the canoe canoeing back to be carved in and out of the always eddying gradient, reshaped, as the undrifted dispersal of all tumblehome meeting the resistances. I canoe for the drift’s hope, but it is the hull’s integrity, not hope, that floats us at all.
And for the sound, though canoes don’t make sound. The sound of a canoe is the sound of water. The sound of a canoe is the sound of its machine. The sound of a canoe’s machine is the sound of a person driving the canoe. The sound of a person driving a canoe is the sound of that person stirring the river with a paddle. The sound of a paddle stirring the river is the sound of a stirred thing being stirred. The sound of a stirred thing being stirred is the sound of much stirring, and stirs much.
Like the passing bees nest. The turkeys, the javelinas, the zone-tailed hawk. Running up onto the gravelbar before the strainer-choked bend. For eddying out because big bear’s on one side of the river and cubs on the other. For the highwater lines, the cutbanks, the water’s load, sediment and molecule. To know the changes in every crease and upwelling. To heat the grease the kneecaps are packed in. To become unheeled. To thank the gunwale. To become let in.
And to kneel, and reach, kneeling, hip-swiveling amongst the knock-kneed rocks. The way waves slap the hull. The longest shortcomings. Canoe the vehicle that seduces its fuel, drifts on its engine. Canoe patient in the transference of there into here & here & here. Canoe, here, you are holy ovalness of angles, vectoring. Here, canoe, you are becoming so many onenesses vaguely tasting of salt – or is it steel? – riverborne neither north nor south nor toward nor from but all of the below.
*
Good miles, strange trances, daydreams, riffles, brainwaves, stroke after stroke, and now it’s time to break. I drive the bow onto another cobblebar. Typical stuff: stones, silt, horse crap, some drift. I note the mesquite, acacia, carizzo cane (border bamboo), various small bones. The cobblebar part of a big island, twenty feet above waterline at peak, driftwood mats tangling shrubs at the upstream edge of the peak. It’s lunchtime. I eat, stare, and it’s good.
Two falcons ride the south breeze along the canyonwalls’ fissured contours. A bit of a nap, and then a wander down the island, stopping to stare down, reach, examine various stones. Walking feels good, a little funny. Eyes on some wonder, I nearly stumble on a carcass. The long legs and tail, the small skull, that one ear, the leather of it—gracious, there’s no question. But it wasn’t full grown, the mountain lion, maybe forty pounds before it came to permanent, silted rest on a cobblebar, fur still on paws, legs, back, tail. Its repose a posture of leap, no sign of wound, though one canine appears mighty worn, too small perhaps to function. It’s been a dry year here, too, five inches of rain total in the last 368 days, so maybe there just wasn’t enough food.
Or maybe it broke its neck or jaw and starved. The mountain lion, which like this river has many names – panther, painter, cougar (Amazonian roots), puma (Incan roots), Mexican lion, swamp screamer, deer lion – hunt by stealth, timing, and impact. Their lung-capacity unfit for chase, they creep close, then burst, with their strong collarbones, upon the necks of deer and javelina, their usual prey here, and sometimes the bounty is large, or the strike is off a hair, and the cougar’s jaw breaks, or the neck.
Droughts are ghosts, as floods are, and everything else out here, and ghosts live and die every breath. I don’t want to leave this place either, little lion, and I don’t think you have; you’re here, your trot and stare, your stalk and crouch and leap, in all that’s cracked and solemn, grave and spare, cementing and breaking, conjugating itself ad infinitum and whole.
In the greens that light up this place after rare rains, in every gesture of this vast patience and quiet.
In the crags.
In all that remains, elegies to what has been and is still being scooped and deposited, birthed and swept away.
*
I move on downstream in the canoe, feeling grave, honored, foolish, alive. Little by little, as the canyonwalls descend, the horizon stretches out. Everything seems overexposed, as if not just the vista has lost its frame, its filter. There’s no going back, only coming back, and that’ll be a while.
Now out of the canyon, I notice, for the first time this trip, empty water bottles and electrolyte wrappers. I think of my children, curious how they’d experience this place between countries, where borderness is both more real and more abstract than on a road, in a city or airport, amongst signs, a wall, passport checks. They’d see here that, physically, whether we camp on river left or river right, a border is arbitrary, and that rivers make convenient borders. They’d see birds and wind and these feral and winter grazing horses and burros and cattle crossing back and forth through the shallow river. And see the signs of people crossing, having crossed.
When they first explored the Chattooga River, river of my heart, border between South Carolina and Georgia, the kids were often very curious what side we were on, what state, but soon that aspect of it moved to the background. It’s good, in part, to have a sense of border that’s rooted in watershed consciousness, divides between waterways, as well as politics. Of course, my kids would notice the water bottles and electrolyte wrappers left on the bank, and we’d talk about it.
They know on a deep level, my kids, the borders defined by marriage, and they’re aware that their dad crossed that border when they were young, and how this choice has caused us all (and our extended families) suffering. What they are learning now, too, I sense, is how a border, whether honored or crossed or both, is always a source of suffering and possibility, perhaps even safety.
They’d be curious about why people are coming to America, risking their lives to walk through this unforgiving place without a canoe to hold ample water, gear, food, etc. Walking across hundreds of miles of desert on either side, many dying or injured along the way, some making it across only to be detained and sent back to the same, if not worse hell.
I’d offer my thoughts in small doses. Many people’s lives are intolerable, I’d tell them. They cannot make a living in their home countries, cannot feed their children, nor often themselves. Many, in fact, are children, many under threat from gangs. They have been threatened with death. They have been assaulted and beaten. Their family members have been killed. Their lives are incomprehensible. They seek refuge.
Of course, my kids would notice the agents with their dogs, armor, and machine guns at the border patrol station one drives through on the way back to Roy and Ruth’s motel after getting our river permit at the Big Bend Visitor Center, and they might ask, “Is this what the U.S. is doing about the border?”
In part, I’d say, yes, and I’d refer them to the books on our shelves at home, books that share each in their heart- and mind-wrenching, intelligent ways the impossibly complex, tender, and brutal stories of the border, books by Fernando Flores, Valeria Luiselli, Anthony Cody, Javier Zamores, Luis Alberto Urrea, Charles Bowden, Yuri Herrera, Eduardo Corral, Gloria Anzaldua, Sebastian Rotella. And I’d list some of the documentary movies that are available for us to watch someday, like No Le Digas A Nadie/Don’t Tell Anyone, Inocente, Who is Dayani Cristal, The Other Side of Immigration, Which Way Home, and others. And I’d tell them about the people working along the border to serve those who cross, organizations (like Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition in Del Rio, to whom we donate) with volunteers and activists who offer aid, from legal to medical to clothing, food, water, shelter, and many other forms of help. And I’d remind them how we’ve brought extra water food and clothes for anyone we might meet.
*
Camp again on the river right bank, a small butte just above the flat where I set the tent, views from it all around, to distant and solitary peaks, to the Sierra del Carmen, its limestone bands, sculpted flanks, the mesa stretching out into the haze. Dun expanses. Golden cane that marks the corridor. Different raven probably, but the same old squawk.
A world of rock. Not much moves but the river and the breeze and the things they move. But you feel the movement because you see the patterns of it in everything. Time’s erosion maps each place the eyes fall. The eyes, they fall, they fall and fly. They drift. You’d have to sit a long time to see the rainbow cactus send out the growth of one entire spine, but it’s a pretty evening, my last out here for a while, and I’m going to try.
