How such a benighted creature—a gringo with a dubious prostate, a beat-up pickup truck, and no obvious prospects for career advancement in a line of work so archaic that each new season on the payroll of the US government felt like a small miracle—became the object of her affection is a question best left to philosophers of the human heart more perceptive and cutting-edge than me. I do know that our culture conditions us to believe in the existence of a person, often defined as a soul mate, who will reach inside of us and touch our most sensitive place without fear, and in so doing take away at least some measure of our hidden hurt. I had always looked on this idea as a fairy tale, as nourishing and manufactured as Velveeta cheese. Then it happened to me, and not metaphorically.
I was one of those people seemingly born with an autumnal hoarfrost on my soul, whereas it appeared always to be springtime in hers. She had a serenity about her I found enormously attractive. A bilingual native of the borderlands, she was a tenacious reporter and a gifted storyteller. She had the fluid identity that comes from straddling cultures, equally at home on both sides of the line—a dual citizen of the US and Mexico. (Her great-grandmother had become a US citizen at the age of 100, just in time to cast a vote in the 2000 presidential election, although she died before the final result was known.) Whenever we were together, we began the morning with la hora Hispanica, during which she spoke only Spanish and demanded I do the same. Verb conjugation bedeviled me, but I was a quick study of the language of the kitchen and the bedroom, realms where it behooved me to please.
Having shared with me some of her world, Mónica was game to see some of mine.
To her, growing up in El Paso, a river was an unloved, used-up thing, a channelized ditch lined with concrete and littered with trash. I felt compelled to show her it could be otherwise, just as she had shown me a different face of Ciudad Juárez than the one I read about in the papers: a port of passage coveted by competing drug syndicates, and a city mutilated by the blood sacrifice of its vulnerable young women.
It didn’t hurt that she, like Teresa, was fearless. Or if not exactly fearless, then respectful of her fear but undeterred by it—brave, but not self-dramatizing about it. She had spent the early part of her career covering the cartel violence in Juárez, one of four journalists based in El Paso, all of them women, who dared cross the border and see the carnage for themselves. It hadn’t made her cynical so much as grateful for the life she had, the accident of birth that placed her on the safer side of an arbitrary line that year by year grew more militarized, more politicized.
Having seen what she had seen in the streets of Juárez, the thought of a river trip didn’t faze her at all. The entirety of her kayaking experience consisted of a ten-mile float along a calm stretch of the Rio Grande up near Taos a few months earlier—a Gila trip would more than quadruple that—and mine amounted to not that much more. I had run lower reaches of the river in previous years, but those were just afternoon jaunts through the Gila-Cliff valley, downstream of the proposed dam and hardly more than shouting distance from a road at any given time. All of which is to say that we were as green as the country after a month of monsoon rains, and that felt somehow fitting. The river would teach us the lessons we needed to learn, just as it had taught Ella Jaz and she had taught others.
I vaguely recalled someone telling me that the forty-two miles from the junction of the headwater forks to a takeout spot at Mogollon Creek could be run in one epic day if the flow was right, although the usual method involved camping multiple nights along the way. I made a couple of phone calls, hoping to confirm this rumor lodged in some dark fissure of my cranium. Neither was answered. We decided to go gonzo style and leave the camping gear behind.
Dawn of a gray and misty morning found us cruising north on the dead-end pavement toward the put-in spot. The campground at the convergence of the forks was empty. The morning and the river were ours. We had hoped to be on the water by 8 a.m.—we had no way of knowing the precise time, as neither of us bothered to wear a watch—but it seemed a safe bet that the target hour had come and gone by the time the kayak was inflated, the sandwiches made, the dry bags packed. Then we were off, under the bridge and around the first bend, beyond sight of man-made infrastructure until the gauging station that measured the river’s flow forty miles downstream.
An undisturbed river is as perfect a thing as we will ever know, Tom McGuane once wrote, every refractive glide of cold water a glimpse of eternity. I knew whereof he spoke. I had found it possible to slip outside of time while fishing or walking along the river, or by sitting on its banks and remaining silent in the presence of its murmured profundities. In a boat, though, moving with a river, all thoughts of eternity vanish. There is only the present moment, and constant calibrations with your paddle to stay pointed down the main channel, and recurring anticipation of the river’s next movement, the next bend, the tricky chute, the eddy, the swirl. To be on a wild river in a boat is to snap to attention in the now.
We had our first kiss with whitewater sometime before lunch—merely Class II, but nothing to sneeze at in my tippy little Sea Beagle—and not long afterward we got a glimpse of a fallen tree across the river up ahead. To get the animal juices flowing, you can hardly do better than to be forced to pull hard across the current of a swift-moving stream to the safety of an eddy when the main channel has every intention of slamming you into a huge, half-submerged sycamore with “widow-maker” written all over it. Sometimes we floated on a surface smooth as glass for a quarter mile, only to round a bend and find a sweeper, a strainer, or a run of submerged rocks whipping the water into a frothy, chocolate meringue.
Late in the afternoon we came hard and fast toward a cliff face in a dog-leg bend of the river. We failed to find the safety of the slow-moving water along the near bank, then failed to turn the boat parallel to the cliff. The bow T-boned the rock in a perfect wall shot, the stern swung downstream, and before we knew it the craft had capsized. We both went under and bobbed back up, spitting and gasping. Mónica grabbed the boat and one of our paddles. I lunged wildly for the other paddle and her hat. Nothing was lost, no one hurt, but we both felt it to have been the sort of rude baptism that brings into focus the prospect of a sudden, soggy death—an adrenaline jolt and an indelible memory if luck holds, as ours did.
We floated twelve hours without seeing a single human being, indeed little evidence of a human presence at all, aside from a few pictographs and an adobe granary mortared into cliff rock a thousand years earlier. I could not recall a time in my life when I felt more invigorated. The aura of danger can have that effect. But it was also the water, and the light on the water, and the sounds it made, and the felt presence of unseen creatures that shared it with us, the hellgrammites and stone flies, the canyon frogs and catfish, the minnows and suckers and chubs.
On one quiet stretch of water I looked up at the tiered mesas above us and felt it might be true that my life was both a fire and a river, depending on the moment and the vantage from which it was viewed—and never more like a river than in moments like this, when memories of the past and concern for the future drop away, and there is only a feeling of immersion in the flow of a singular place where, as Siddhartha said, everything has existence and is present, the living and the dead, the creatures winged and finned and furred, their voices all alive in the voice of the river and us blessed to share in the music of that choir.
By nightfall we hadn’t made the takeout, as any sane person could have predicted. We bivouacked on a sandbar under some cottonwood trees, near where the boosters proposed to maim the canyon with backhoes and bulldozers. I lit a fire to dry out our clothes. We tucked ourselves in the boat side by side for warmth beneath the cold light of a gibbous moon. “You said this would be epic,” Mónica reminded me, “but I don’t think that word does it justice. It’s loco what you gringos do for fun. But I think I might learn to like it.”
Her sanguine demeanor did not surprise me; my overconfidence in my boatman’s abilities wen
t mercifully unmentioned. A down-canyon breeze rustled the leaves of the cottonwoods, and the hiss and splash of the water made sweet white noise to sleep by, if only fitfully. Sometime in the middle of the night, we agreed our next adventure ought to take us to Mexico, deep in the interior this time, to the high mountains of Michoacán, where monarch butterflies overwintered on oyamel fir trees at the southern end of their migration. We had heard tell that when the sun warmed them in the afternoons, they took flight above the forest and colored the sky like floating pieces of stained glass, each one representing the soul of a deceased loved one in the lore of the region’s indigenous people.
In the morning I sprinkled a bit of John’s ashes in the river from the mouth of a plastic match case, knowing he would have appreciated the journey, hoping his presence in the flow might ward off evil designs on that flow. Then we shoved off and ran another five miles of gorgeous stream toward the takeout spot, five miles that, if the dipsomaniacs ever got their way, would never again hum with the energetic pulse of floodwater, but instead squalidly dessicate in the shadow of poured concrete and concertina wire.
We made several portages along the final stretch, not wishing to tangle with strainers and sweepers that littered the channel: a river doing its ancient thing, heedless of human designs.
Forever may it remain—a siren song of adventure to the curious, and a lesson in humility for those who still care to be humbled.
JOHN JOINED THE LIFE of two more mountains before the summer of his death was up. I hiked in to my tower for the last hitch of the season with the remainder of my personal portion of his ashes in that waterproof match case. It was good to be home again, and good to have him there with me. He had never visited while I occupied the mountain—our summer schedules typically coincided, making such a visit impossible—so I carried him around for a few days in my pocket, showing him all my favorite places, the high meadows and hidden springs, the stone grottos and arboreal chapels where I came closest to a feeling of spiritual devotion. By the time I finished the tour, I had nearly convinced myself that I had done it for his sake, not mine.
One evening after a thunderstorm, I carried the ashes into the meadow and sprinkled them in two separate huecos where the rains pooled. Frogs had emerged there again that summer, and it pleased me to think of a bit of John joining with the cycles of amphibian life: cycles of eating and breeding, death and rebirth.
It pleased me to think of him dissolving in water.
The mere scattering of ashes nonetheless felt insufficient. The moment called for something else, something liturgical, a secular catechism or incantation. I knew what I must do as soon as I had the thought, despite how goofy it would have appeared if anyone had stumbled up the trail and witnessed me in the midst of it. From the table in the cabin I retrieved my lookout’s commonplace, the coffee-stained notebook where I transcribed passages from my reading on the mountain going back years. I brought it to the edge of the bigger pool in the meadow, where his ashes still swirled smokelike in the water, and sat down with it open on my lap. I cleared my throat and apologized in advance to the birds and declaimed in my most sonorous voice every appropriate entry, a mishmash song of celebration for all we had seen and known during our years on the peaks, a litany for lookoutry and solitude and Wilderness and wildfire, with lyrics courtesy of Stendhal and Camus and Doug Peacock and Jack Kerouac, Ellen Meloy and Rebecca Solnit, Freya Stark, Willa Cather, a few dozen others.
For instance, Norman Rush: Infrared waves just below twenty hertz associated with approaching thunder seem to have strange effects on the temporal lobe in some part of the population, to wit producing feelings of baseless awe and ecstasy.
The words of others, apropos though they were, nonetheless felt slightly impersonal without a few words of my own. As the crepuscular hour overtook the land below me, and the long views receded until I was alone in a merging of shadows, I improvised a direct address:
You were beautiful, John. I don’t know how you became the man you did—I think it was an act of pure self-invention, one of the most remarkable I’ve ever seen the fruits of. You had every reason to turn out as one of those emotionally autistic men we grew up around in the native home of the passive-aggressive. Instead you became the opposite of that. You tasted tragedy early, too early, actually way too damn early, but as time passed you found it in you to focus on what a lucky son of a gun you turned out to be, how kissed by fortune your life ended up, and you made it your mission to kiss a little of that fortune forward into the lives of others. Yep, I just said son of a gun without thinking, but I bet you would have laughed at the unintentional pun—you son of a gun in more ways than one. You always got the joke. You never hid your enthusiasm, never reined yourself in when feeling ecstatic. Your first impulse was always to share, to give, to seek understanding, and perhaps most crucially you never feared appearing corny. How cloistered and crabbed most of us end up for wanting to avoid looking corny! How pinched and stunted, how armored in layers of irony, how diminished in our range of responses to life. You couldn’t tolerate such diminishment in yourself, quite the opposite—your emotional life appeared always to be growing and evolving. No one I know was more generous with affection. I don’t think I ever properly thanked you for that. I miss your hugs already, even though they sometimes made me uncomfortable, they went on so long and with such force. I miss your voice too. And those ice-blue eyes shining with mischief. It occurs to me now that you gave me two of the biggest thrills I’ve had in this part of the world. Each was an instance of what you called “white guys enjoying the fruits of peak oil,” a nod to our ridiculous good fortune: the afternoon we went 130 miles an hour in the foothills of the Black Range in your GT40, and the morning we flew over the forest in your Cessna, buzzing every lookout tower just before the start of fire season as if to offer them all our blessing. Both times I almost puked from motion sickness, but I still remember them fondly. Just as I’ll always remember you.
How’s this for corny: I wish I had told you I loved you, John. Loved you like a brother. I hope you were able to sense that I did.
More than that, I wish I had loved you better.
I guess I’ll try to stay thankful for having had the chance to know you at all.
OVER ON JEAN’S MOUNTAIN, a special delivery from Teresa, three hours by Jeep from Silver City—John’s Jeep, of course, yet another of his many toys—first along the highway to the Mimbres valley, then up past the Wilderness ranger station and onto the rough and rutted path of the old stage coach route, down into one rocky canyon and back up out of it and down into another canyon and back up out of it, past the Fowler place all the way to the fire camp near Jack Diamond’s ranch, and from there on toward the Turkey Track road and the trailhead that marked the beginning of two more hours to the mountain on foot, a portion of what was left of John arrived in a plastic sandwich bag. Jean’s first thought, she later wrote to me, was this: I don’t think I rate. I don’t deserve this honor. Teresa insisted without explicitly insisting. She had worked that mountain herself for years, liked the idea of some of John hanging out there, and more importantly Jean had been a good friend. John had loved and admired her. He would have been pleased at the thought of a piece of himself delivered into the life of the place by her two hands.
In the previous year they had conducted an email back-and-forth spanning several months and more than 25,000 words—a more candid correspondence, on a wider variety of subjects, than Jean had carried on with anyone else ever—and a major thread of it involved their shared thoughts about vulnerability and courage. Their frankness turned the discussion into an actual performance of vulnerability and courage. Parts of it, when Jean later shared it with me, made me cry.
Among the many things that struck me was John’s mention of the event that changed his life as a young man, which was part of a larger discussion about the human need for the intimacy of touch. When I was 17, my friend Mark and I were in the woods tinkering with guns and Mark shot himself in the head.
My dad picked me up from the police station afterwards without saying much, and when I got home, my mother turned her back on me as soon as I walked in the door… I felt so unloved and unlovable and angry and lost and alone. So much would have been different, he thought, if only his parents had reacted not with disappointment but with empathy, and simply given him a hug. One had to admire the fact that he became such an unrestrained giver of them, making himself an ambassador for a thing of which he had been, at a crucial moment in his life, deprived.
Another passage struck me in their correspondence, this one from Jean: I say yes to everyone. I don’t have the courage to say no. It was true. She had the classic Midwesterner’s attribute of wanting to please everyone, to never cause a ruckus, never disappoint, and people sometimes took advantage of it. She couldn’t help herself. It ran in the family. She was meticulous. She had a huge and sensitive heart, a fact she did her best to hide under a blanket of self-deprecation. She constantly examined whether she had done the right thing in a certain circumstance, constantly questioned her own motives—it was a trait both endearing and maddening because it made you want to shake her and tell her she was good people extraordinaire, when instead she found reason to doubt that fact every other hour of the day. With Teresa standing in front of her on the mountain, courage required her to say yes—as if she were capable of saying no in this instance, refusing a gift freely given, sending Teresa back down the hill without taking the bit of John measured out for precisely that place, precisely her hand.
A Song for the River Page 14
