WE MADE IT ANOTHER eight miles on rapidly rising water to a possible shelter pictured in the Lower Canyons guidebook. Twenty-seven miles below the put-in at the bridge, a rock house stood back from the river on the Texas side, maybe fifty feet above the elevation of the river. The one-room structure was a remnant of an old candelilla works, the mile-by-mile guide said. A nearby spring provided an optimum water supply, always clear and clean, for rendering the wax.
Before we walked up the slope to check out the rock house, we located the spring and filled our water jugs to the brim. From here on, the springs might be flooded out.
On our way up to the rock house we caught a good view of the scaly mountains on the Mexican side. Their tops were shrouded in clouds. We climbed a little higher and saw that our rock house lacked a roof. That was okay, we figured—our big blue tarp could do the job.
It didn’t work out. The inside of the building was choked with giant prickly pear cactus, their pads big as frying pans. The needles in the pads were as long as my little finger. Rio informed me that the pads were edible, if prepared correctly. “Uh, some other time,” I told him.
Two miles downriver, at Mile 29, we found a place to camp on the Texas side. The large grassy sandbar there stood ten feet above the river and looked like a safe bet. While we were unloading the boats, however, the river came up another six inches. If it rose another nine and a half feet and flooded the campsite, we would be out of luck. Behind the sandbar, the cactus- and ocotillo-studded slope was as steep as a playground slide.
We liked our chances. Rio had never seen the river rise nine feet overnight. Unless we were very unlucky we would be okay, but what were we going to do for a shelter?
Rio wasn’t worried. “No problem,” he said. “Let’s make like Comanches, and build ourselves a wickiup out of cane.”
“Ever built one before?”
“No, but I’ve seen pictures.”
Amid lightning and thunder and a new squall with pelting rain, we gathered cane. Our rescue knives borrowed from our life jackets went through the stalks like butter. “Ever seen this much water in the river?” I asked.
“It usually gets this high every summer.”
“So, you don’t think this is Dolly we’re looking at?”
“It could be just a West Texas toad strangler. My dad and I have had the raft out a couple of times on five thousand cubic feet per second. We aren’t looking at that much yet, but we’re getting close.”
“What’s the biggest flow you’ve ever heard of?”
“At the takeout below Santa Elena Canyon, on the outside of one of the johns, the Park Service painted a black stripe to show the high-water mark from the summer of 1958. The mark is higher than the door.”
“How much water was it?”
A huge grin spread across his face. “Fifty-two thousand.”
Mindful of the wind, we made our shelter low to the ground, beginning with four forked sticks jammed waist high into the sand at the corners of a five-by-seven-foot rectangle. We laid sturdy cane stalks into the forks, framed the roof and the leaning walls with more stalks, spread our blue tarp over the frame, then covered the whole thing with layer upon layer of the grassy tops of the cane. We had ourselves a wickiup, with only a crawl hole open to the weather.
By five PM it was prematurely dark under the dense, black clouds. The lightning and thunder had backed off, but the rain kept coming. We inflated our ground pads and crawled into the shelter with a can of beans and an energy bar apiece, our second and last meal for the day.
It was snug in our shelter—not bad at all—and we got to talking. Rio asked me about a canoe stroke I’d been using, and where I learned it. I told him it was called the Canadian. They taught it at the canoe camp I had done twice with the Nantahala Outdoor Center. I waxed enthusiastic about the Nantahala River and its rapids, about the Great Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge and the town of Asheville. He said he would love to run a mountain river with forests right down to the water, and I said we had to make it happen one day.
By now it was nearly dark, and it had been raining all this while. We thought we’d better check on the boats, and it’s a good thing we did. The river was already lapping at the base of the salt cedars they were tied to. We carried the canoe up the slope and out of harm’s way, and used our seventy-five-foot rope to tie the raft to a boulder on the slope above.
On our way back to the shelter we came across two rattlesnakes displaced by the rising water. Scorpions, more than I cared to count, were scuttling for higher ground.
We reentered our shelter with extreme caution. Rio gave me a little advice: “If you feel a scorp on your face or whatever, don’t grab it, just flick it off. They can sting you real quick.”
We stayed up late playing cards by the light of our headlamps. We played every game for two that we knew—War, Crazy Eights, Go Fish, and Rummy.
My cousin fell asleep as soon as he put his head down. If it wasn’t for my fear of scorpions, maybe I could’ve done the same. I kept feeling them on my face, on my hands, all over. I kept slapping them off. Were they real or imagined?
I was too warm, that’s why I couldn’t go to sleep. Our wickiup felt more like a Comanche sauna. I threw open the sleeping sheet but that didn’t seem to help.
Time dragged as my mind raced to the tune of the muffled yet relentless rain. I kept thinking how far from home I was, and how far out on a limb. Knock it off, I told myself. It’s gotta be way after midnight. Just knock it off. You’re not in any real danger. The river sounds loud and scary in the dark, that’s all.
I was nearly asleep—finally—when I had an eerie sensation. I was lying on my side, facing my cousin, when I felt something moving along my back, something distinctly snakelike.
Was I imagining it?
No way. The contraction of snake muscle along my spine was terribly real. I had a serious problem.
I tensed, and when I did, the snake stopped moving. What was the most common snake along the river corridor?
Rattlesnake, Rio had said.
What was the second-most common?
Copperhead.
I wanted to jump out of my skin. I wanted to scream.
Don’t, I told myself. Just chill. And hope it doesn’t crawl across your face.
I realized I was holding my breath. I couldn’t do that forever. I let it out slowly, took another, tried to breathe normally. All the while, my heart was going like a bass drum.
The snake was on the move again, tight against my T-shirt. Its head was following the contours of my back, and now my neck. It took forever for its body to follow in wavelike contractions of muscle.
When I thought it might be gone I rolled slightly toward Rio. In response, the snake rattled. I felt the vibration against my shoulder blade.
“Rattlesnake!” Rio whispered.
“Tell me about it. It’s right behind me.”
“Don’t move.”
“I won’t.”
Maybe five minutes later Rio whispered, “Is it still there?”
“No idea.”
An eternity later, I still couldn’t tell if it was gone. This might’ve been stupid, but I had to know. Slowly and cautiously, I reached for the spot where I had set my headlamp. To my great relief, my fingers came to rest on the headlamp and not a snake. I flicked it on, got up on one elbow, and shined it all around. “Can’t see it,” I reported, “but maybe it crawled around behind you.”
“Well, look behind me!”
I got up on my knees and made a more thorough search. “I don’t see it, Rio. It must’ve crawled back out, unless it’s inside your sheet.”
“Hey, that isn’t funny.”
“I know.”
“You know what, the river must’ve kept rising. It sounds kind of close.”
Uh-oh, I thought, and pointed the beam through our crawl hole.
“It is kind of close,” I reported. “It’s three feet from our door.”
Lingering only long enough to pull on our rain gear and shoes and to stuff our sleeping sheets in our river bags, we bailed out of there. Five minutes later and we would’ve been sleeping with the fishes. We pulled the tarp free of our shelter’s roof and scrambled up the slope with it and our ground pads, slipping and sliding and falling in the mud. We draped the tarp over a boulder, weighted it all around, and crawled underneath. There wasn’t enough room to lie down, just a place to huddle, hemmed in by bristling cactus. What can I say; it was a long night.
Dawn came slowly, under a leaden sky and a steady rain. There wasn’t a trace of our Comanche wickiup to be seen. It was on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. The high sandbar we had camped on was entirely underwater. The river was in flood, a turgid yellow-brown, swollen by the runoff from thousands of washes draining hundreds, maybe even thousands of square miles of desert. “We’re in the big-time now,” my cousin said.