We've got a guest writer for the Dispatch this week - journalist and river guide Sam Karas who takes us, literally, into the Rio Grande.
From the end of the switchback I see it – a thin green line wavering in the heat. After seven miles of lifting myself up and over jagged quartz ridges and through catclaw-ridden canyons, there’s soft grass, rustling cane. A riotously orange butterfly glides past, showing me the way to the river.
I’m hot, maybe too hot. When you stop sweating you know you’re in trouble, and I feel my body struggling to compensate, my forehead becoming dry and feverish. Propelled by something primal, I tear through the mesquite, sliding on my butt down a stumpy cutbank and onto the beach.
I shed my backpack like a horse bucking its rider and dive in headfirst. The water is cold, so cold it punches my chest. I grope down below for the bottom and there is none, just a blue void.
When I come back up the sun is my friend again, a warm arm around my shoulders instead of a white-hot blade. I filter some water through a pump and mix it with Gatorade powder to mask the flat taste. Then I eat my lunch, a tin of tuna with a little bit of lime and Tajín – which in the moment might as well be filet mignon.
The water in Boquillas Canyon is an otherworldly turquoise. If you cut the limestone canyon walls and salt cedar out of view it looks like the Caribbean. The water here is largely spring-fed, gushing out of the rock.
Then there’s the sounds of the animals, horses and cows and donkeys that wandered over from the little villages that dot the border on the Mexican side. Many of them wear bells in case they wander too far from their keepers. Together, the water and the animals make music, playing a song that never repeats, never ends and never leaves the water.
My friend Tim taught me that the river is only two million years old. A newcomer, just like me.
If I get too far from the water I feel a little bit crazy. The story I tell strangers is that I came here for the Chisos Mountains, after a backpacking trip gone wrong – I had never been to the Big Bend before, and I vastly underestimated my own fitness and how cold and rainy it would be. But the swirling fog and flowing springs convinced me to pack up all my things and head west.
I came for the mountains, but the river is why I stay.
I became a boatman just before the pandemic. I like the term “boatman” even though I’m not a man – it sounds elegant, antique, nothing like my actual day-to-day life as a boatman in Terlingua, where I spent all my money on cheap beer, rarely showered and lived out of the back of my truck.
Before that I’d been a hiker, launching long trips into the backcountry with only my Gatorade and tuna to keep me company. I was all legs, content to carry only what I needed. As a boatman, I learned a canoe can hold an astonishing amount of stuff – tables and chairs and cast-iron skillets, enormous coolers stuffed with gourmet groceries.
As a boatman I grew arms. I became whole.
Before I started working in Terlingua I had been in a canoe exactly two times in my entire life. I quickly found out I was not a naturally talented paddler; the motion of pulling a boat through the water in a straight line didn’t make any sense to my limbs. I was a newborn colt on sticky legs, a constant source of frustration to my coworkers, who tended to teach by shouting.
But I loved it. I loved how quiet it was, how animals on the shore regarded me like a bizarre fish. I loved unpacking everything from the boat and putting up a makeshift home with a full kitchen, a primitive bathroom and a living room with a fireplace.
Above all, I loved the river. I loved her temperamental moods – terrifying chocolate milk floods that stunk of dead animals and garbage; lazy crystalline drags where you could see every rock and every plant at the bottom.
I loved that she didn’t care how much she mattered to people as an imaginary line drawn between countries. Animals didn’t care about that line either, freely wandering back and forth wherever there was food.
To some humans she signaled the promise of a better life; to others a goodbye, the dark knowledge that the future is never simple, that the present is stained with violence and greed.
In all of my trips I try to balance the light and the shadow. This place is not a playground. It commands respect, but it brings pleasure too – in the beauty around every corner, in its surprising lushness, a ribbon of green in a world of rock and thorn.
Shivering in the sand, I think about the four people who’ve died on this trail since I’ve been writing about the national park – tourists from all over the country who set out expecting adventure. And I think about all the people washed up on shore, all of whom mean something to somebody, who have names the lawmen who pronounce them dead will never learn.
I also think about how lucky I am. Here I am straddling the line; here there are no checkpoints or drones or walls, none of the screens and sickness and anxiety of contemporary first-world life. Maybe I’m getting a taste of something my ancestors once knew, as far back as people stood upright to walk.
So far it’s a very good day, spent doing what I love in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. If my body and fate cooperate I’ll get to go home later, see my friends at the bar, show them the pictures that will never exactly capture what I’ve just seen.
Hopefully the sun will set over the river without me, and the stars will come out, shining for everyone and no one. Hopefully I’ll get to come back.
Caló
Llevarse - Spanish for to take oneself, as in, “I take myself seriously.” In Caló, it means to grant or be granted permission to joke with somebody. Two individuals who tease each other - even to their limits - are said to be llevandose. And each would say that they se la llevan with the other.
Caló is a borderland dialect. You can find more episodes here.
Other programming:
Local officials and Texas lodging industry advocates are supporting a bill from State Rep. Eddie Morales that they say would give the city of Alpine more flexibility in how it spends money generated from the Big Bend region’s tourism industry. The bill - HB1039 - would repeal a unique part of state law that forces Alpine - and only Alpine - to spend more than 50% of the money it makes from taxes on hotel and vacation rentals on tourism advertising. Travis Bubenik has that story here.
Stretching from West Texas to Durango, Mexico, the Chihuahuan Desert doesn’t lack for superlatives. It’s the continent’s largest desert, and the most diverse desert in the Americas. In terms of distinctive species, it may be the most biologically diverse desert in the world. It also stands out for a particular type of terrain. Gypsum landscapes occur globally, but they abound in the Chihuahuan Desert, from Coahuila and Durango to the Guadalupe Mountains in Texas and New Mexico’s White Sands. These white-sand outcrops are certainly harsh, but they’re also hotspots of biodiversity. That’s on Nature Notes - listen here.
High Five
For this river Dispatch, five songs about rivers:
- River - Bonnie Montgomery
- Take me to the River - Talking Heads
- Walking by the River - Ella Fitzgerald
- Yes the River Knows - The Doors
- Five Feet High and Rising - Johnny Cash
You can find DJ Dr. Love's entire show on our Mixcloud.
PSAs
Ballroom Marfa in partnership with Sul Ross State University presents “In Our Voices, The World Is Created”, a pop-up art exhibition featuring the work of undergraduate and graduate students from the fall Women In Art course at the University.
Organized by Ballroom’s Felix Benton, Jaime Herrell, and Mo Eldridge, instructor of Art at Sul Ross, this exhibition will showcase the work students presented as their end-of-year finals.
The exhibition will have an opening reception this Saturday, December 7 from 5:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. at the Ballroom Marfa annex gallery next door to Marfa Public Radio.
If you have PSAs you want on the air or in this newsletter, head to www.marfapublicradio.org/psa.