BEFORE NOON THE NEXT day, Rio and I were on the road to adventure with Ariel at the wheel of her relic of a pickup. We were going to bite off even more of the river than we talked about at first. Not only were we going to run the Lower Canyons, we had tacked on three days upstream for a total of ten days.
Why three more days? That was Ariel’s idea, and we were happy to oblige. On our first day we were going to drop some donated supplies at a Mexican village called Boquillas del Carmen. It was all good, according to Rio. After dropping the donations, we would run Boquillas Canyon, a spectacular section of the river I would have missed had we started our trip downriver, at the put-in for the Lower Canyons.
Our sixty-mile drive to the river skirted the Chisos Mountains on their north side, then dropped into a starker and starker landscape dominated by creosote bush and by ocotillo, which resembled buggy whips. We were going to intercept the Rio Grande at a place called Rio Grande Village, in a far corner of Big Bend National Park.
Ariel’s old pickup didn’t have AC. The heat was so intense, we had to keep the windows down and blast air through the cab by opening the fins on both sides. Conversation was impossible. As the miles rolled by I was left alone with my thoughts, which were up and down and all over the place.
I had a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, and it wasn’t from something I ate. This wasn’t anything like I’d been picturing this trip since forever, like my parents were picturing it right now, with my uncle along. I was in uncharted territory in more ways than one. I hadn’t told my parents any lies, but I hadn’t told them the truth, which pretty much amounted to the same thing. Would they have given me the green light, knowing it was going to be just me and Rio?
The chances of that were slim to none.
I hated the way this felt. It felt like I was starting down a slippery slope. To have come this far, though, only to turn back and go home—that would be totally unacceptable.
Before any river trip, you get the jitters. Man, did I have them now. I felt like asking Ariel to stop the truck so I could throw up on the side of the road.
Ariel picked up on my state of mind. “Nervous?” she asked me, almost shouting. I was right at her side, sandwiched between her and Rio.
“I always get some butterflies,” I admitted.
“That’s good, that’s normal. These canyons are something special. You guys are going to have an awesome trip.”
“Hope so,” I said.
A few miles on, and something new came into view. Between us and a soaring mountain range, a winding strip of bright green vegetation marked the course of a river. I let out a whoop when Rio confirmed it was the Rio Grande. I could feel my adrenaline jets beginning to fire. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that beats moving water.
As Ariel drove into Rio Grande Village, Rio explained that it wasn’t much of a village. For the sake of the tourists, Big Bend National Park had a campground here, a visitors’ center, and a general store that sold gas and groceries. At midsummer, with the temperature around a hundred every day and the price of gas having soared out of sight, we found it virtually deserted. There were only two RVs parked in the cottonwood-shaded campground.
I ran up a trail to a hilltop for my first look at the river. Rio was on my heels, and Ariel was following at a walk. Once I got to the overlook, I didn’t know what to make of what I was seeing. This couldn’t be the Rio Grande. It looked more like a drainage ditch. “Uh, where’s the river?” I asked my cousin.
“You’re looking at it,” he replied.
The riverbed was fifty yards wide, but mostly dry. The river itself was less than fifty feet wide and mostly ankle deep. At its deepest it might have come up to your knees. The water was pea green, not my favorite color, with no discernible current. “C’mon, you’re kidding,” I said. “This is a side channel, right?”
“Afraid not. That’s the Rio Grande.”
“I thought you said that the river runs highest in the summer.”
“When it rains. July and August are our rainy season, but the rains haven’t started yet.”
By now Ariel had joined us on the hilltop. I wasn’t going to say a thing more about the river. I could pretty well guess I’d already ruffled my cousin’s pride. I knew the Rio Grande wasn’t going to look like the rivers back home, but this was pathetic. How we were going to go a hundred and sixteen miles in ten days, I had no idea.
The low flow must have looked so normal to Ariel, she didn’t even mention it. What she was keen to point out to me was the Mexican village where Rio and I were going to drop the donations. Even with my dark sunglasses cutting the glare, it was hard to spot. Finally I made it out, shimmering in the heat, a couple miles downriver. “Bo-KEY-us” was how she pronounced it. Boquillas sat at the foot of the soaring mountains called the Sierra del Carmen.
The stuff we were going to drop off included used laptops for the village school, some empty propane bottles that couldn’t be filled on this side of the river for some reason, half a dozen small motors reclaimed from exercise treadmills, a secondhand solar cell, an old sewing machine, and half a dozen trash bags full of fabric scraps that the women of the village would turn into quilts. It was okay to take donations across the border without going through a customs station as long as they had hardly any resale value.
We had some work to do if we were going to reach the village before dark. We were about to start down the path to Ariel’s truck when we heard the distant chop-chop-chop of helicopters.
“Border Patrol?” I wondered aloud.
The helicopters were getting ever louder. Rio had them spotted, but I hadn’t yet. “Unreal!” he shouted. “Those are U.S. Army!”
Rio was pointing north of the Chisos Mountains. Now I saw them. The helicopters, half a dozen of them, were flying low, along the route of the road we had just traveled. They were coming fast, with a whirring thunder like a breaking storm. These were serious war machines—attack helicopters. “Black Hawks!” I shouted over the din. “I’ve seen them back home at Camp Lejeune!”
“They’re heading for Rio Grande Village!” Rio shouted back.
They sure enough were. The Black Hawks circled the campground a couple of times. Twice, they passed within a hundred yards of our hilltop. The side doors of the choppers were open, with soldiers at their battle stations manning machine guns. We caught some heavy downdraft; the roar was deafening.
The gunships pulled back to allow even more helicopters to approach the river—three giant Chinooks, made for hauling troops and fuel and supplies.
The Chinooks hovered just short of the river as the Black Hawks circled them protectively. We watched the three Chinooks put down in the Park Service campground, in a clearing only a stone’s throw from those two RVs.
The Black Hawks didn’t follow them in. To our amazement, the gunships raced across the river and into Mexico.
“Mercy!” Ariel cried.
At first I wondered if they were heading for the village across the river, but within minutes, they were far beyond Boquillas and miles into Mexico.
The Black Hawks were gaining altitude rapidly, flying up and up, in the direction of the Sierra del Carmen. It looked for all the world like they were going to smack into the cliffs. It wasn’t long before they crested the forest atop the range and blinked out of view.
It crossed my mind that maybe this wasn’t such a good time to be spending ten days on the Mexican border.