The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  It’s a weird feeling to know that I can’t go home anymore. I think about sitting on our deck and watching the sunset, picking ripe passion fruit off our vine, hearing the roosters crow each morning. But I remind myself that the island will always be there.

  One afternoon in late November, on our way back from the British Virgin Islands, Simonsen and I stopped at the Baths, a famous boulder-strewn beach on Virgin Gorda where you can swim in caves and jump off rocks and nap on soft white sand. Like most beaches in the wake of Irma, it was empty and stunning. I did some bouldering and squeezed through a couple of caves, then jumped into the water to cool off. A family of four, including two boys under 10, snorkeled by. I asked the father where they were from. “Originally the UK,” he said, before gesturing toward the lone sailboat in the bay. “Right now we’re living aboard.”

  I smiled to myself and told him they were lucky boys.

  NICK PAUMGARTEN

  Water and the Wall

  from The New Yorker

  When Dan Reicher was eight, he became fixated on wolverines. He admired their ferocity but, because they were endangered, feared for their survival. While poring over a catalog of outdoor gear, he came across a parka trimmed in wolverine fur. He was outraged. His mother, a schoolteacher, and his father, an ob-gyn, urged him to put his umbrage to good purpose, so he sent the gear company a letter. After some time, he received a reply: the company was discontinuing the parka. Had his protest made the difference? Probably not, but, still, he inferred that a citizen, even a little one, had the power to effect change. “Boy, was I misled,” he said recently.

  Reicher, now 61, is a professor at Stanford and the executive director of its Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance. Previously, he led Google’s climate and energy initiatives and served in the Clinton administration as an assistant secretary of energy. He has spent most of his adult life trying to help humankind move past its reliance on fossil fuels. Under President Trump, conservationists have seen decades of gains rolled back in a matter of months. Still, Reicher, like so many environmentalists, goes grimly about his business.

  Reicher’s real obsession is water. He grew up in Syracuse, paddling on polluted lakes, and liked to collect and test water samples. When he was 11, his parents sent him to Ontario on a canoe trip with a drill sergeant who failed to bring an adequate supply of food. Reicher, getting by on wild blueberries and toothpaste, had never been and would never again be as hungry, but, even so, he loved the whole thing. For a couple of summers in his teens, he attended the Colorado Rocky Mountain School, in Carbondale, where a French champion of the newfangled sport of white-water kayaking taught aspiring river runners the eddy turn and the high brace. Reicher got to spend a week on the Green River, paddling through the vast Dinosaur National Monument. He was captivated by the journals of a predecessor there: John Wesley Powell, the Union Army major who lost an arm at Shiloh and later led the first expedition to navigate the length of the Grand Canyon. As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, Reicher joined the kayaking team and the Ledyard Canoe Club, which is named for John Ledyard, the eighteenth-century American explorer, who dropped out of Dartmouth after a year and paddled down the Connecticut River, from Hanover to the Long Island Sound, in a dugout canoe fashioned from a tree he cut down on campus.

  In the spirit of these forebears, in 1977 Reicher and some fellow Ledyardians embarked on an expedition of their own. A classmate, Tony Anella, from Albuquerque, was preoccupied with his hometown river, the Rio Grande, and had determined that no one in documented history had navigated the river’s nearly 2,000 miles, from source to sea. He planned to be the first. The students secured backing from the National Geographic Society, which, a dozen years before, had sponsored a Ledyard trip along the Danube. For course credit, Anella, a history major, would compile a history of water rights on the river, while the other principal, Rob Portman, an anthropology major (and now the junior United States senator from Ohio), would take on the subject of mass migration. Reicher, a biology major, would assess the water and whatever life could survive in it.

  Generally, the storied river descents, like so many iconic American journeys, have tended to be those which run west, down from the Continental Divide to the sea. And, of those, the torrent that drains the far slope of the southern Rockies, the Colorado, seemed to draw the love and the lore—it had deeper cataracts, bigger flows, gnarlier rapids, bolder boatmen, and fiercer fights over dams and acre-feet.

  The Rio Grande had neither a John Wesley Powell nor a Lake Powell. It is typically considered, by those of us who don’t depend on it, little more than a boundary separating Mexico from Texas, a squiggly moat on a map. It represents a gateway to opportunity or escape for the migrants and fugitives, in life and in song, who cross it in the hope of a fresh beginning—a kind of baptism by border. Known south of the border as Río Bravo del Norte, and to the indigenous Pueblo people as P’Osoge, its various sections were given an array of now mostly forgotten names by sixteenth-century explorers—Río Caudaloso, Río de la Concepción, Río de las Palmas, Río de Nuestra Señora, Río Guadalquivir, Río Turbio, River of May, Tiguex River. The Rio Grande drops out of the San Juan Mountains, in southern Colorado, bisects New Mexico, north to south, and then, splitting El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, tacks southeast. The majority of its length, from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, with the S turn of the Big Bend, forms the southern boundary of Texas, and of the United States. The river empties into the Gulf just past Brownsville, Texas. No part of the river is like any other. Typically, it is treated more as a managed scheme of discrete local parts—Taos Box, Elephant Butte Reservoir, Big Bend, Lower Canyons, Valle—than as an essential artery feeding a vast corner of our continent and a watershed connecting interdependent ecosystems, cultures, and nations.

  Reicher, with Portman and Anella and another classmate, a photographer named Pete Lewitt, hiked down from the source, at Stony Pass, just east of Silverton, Colorado, and put in 25 miles later, below the first dam, in fiberglass kayaks, brittle precursors of today’s polyethylene creek boats. Two weeks later, they encountered their first great challenge, in the tricky rapids near Taos. The surge of snowmelt was greatly reduced by dams upstream. (And by drought: 1977 was the worst year, in terms of snowpack, in the past half century. The second worst? 2018.) The river was, in kayak-speak, bony. By the time they reached the confluence with the Santa Fe, below Cochiti Dam, there wasn’t much water left. Even 40 years ago, the flow south of Albuquerque was so depleted by farmers and by the city’s sprawling population that the kayakers had to divert to the network of irrigation ditches that run alongside the river. At one point, a farmer in an El Camino pulled up next to them, unloaded two water skis, strung a rope from the trailer hitch, and towed Reicher along the canal. “First time I ever water-skied with dust in my face,” Reicher said.

  Farther downriver, in the muddy flats at the head of the Elephant Butte Reservoir, in southern New Mexico, the water would neither support their weight nor allow them to paddle, so they devised a method of pushing their boats with their hands and feet while lying on the stern. Crossing into Texas, where the river meets the Mexican frontier, the Ledyardians switched to bicycles and rode along paved roads until, a couple of hundred miles later, the Río Conchos, running out of the Mexican state of Chihuahua, replenished the ancient riverbed, so that they could saddle up their kayaks again. Because of upstream depletions, the Rio Grande is really two rivers: one that fizzles in southern New Mexico (the locals there refer to it as the Rio Sand) and one that begins in West Texas. In between is the puddled and trenched borderland east of El Paso and Juárez—the Forgotten Reach, which, prior to the big dams, had been regularly revived (and scoured) by seasonal floods from New Mexico. There had even been eels in Albuquerque—1,500 miles upstream of the Gulf of Mexico.

  The Dartmouth expedition, now five strong, made it through the deep canyons and riffles of the Big Bend and then entered the Lower Canyons, the river’s most remote leg, which Congress, a year l
ater, designated part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. The desert eventually gave way to a subtropical luxuriance of palms, broccoli farms, and citrus orchards, the riverbanks and wetlands teeming with wildlife. The birds and animals didn’t recognize the border. The people, though, were defined by it. The kayakers regularly encountered Mexicans crossing the river with burlap bundles. Near Eagle Pass, they came across a bloated male corpse, with a noose around the neck. (“We tried to report him, but neither side was terribly interested,” Reicher recalls.) At night, burrowing into the invasive wild cane to make camp, they set off seismic sensors installed by the US Border Patrol.

  After four months on the river, they reached the Gulf. They posed on the beach, five gringos, tan and lean, brandishing the Ledyard flag. Relations among some of them had frayed, amid a clash of egos—endemic to such expeditions. Reicher and Anella have hardly spoken since. But the trip remains a highlight of their lives. To Anella, it was a religious experience. “One-half of the hydrologic cycle—it reached something deep in my soul,” he says. He likes to cite Ecclesiastes: “All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.”

  Reicher prefers Heraclitus: “No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” Since 1977, he has been back to the Rio Grande six times; the river may have changed more than he has. Four years ago, a young newspaper reporter in San Antonio named Colin McDonald set out to duplicate the source-to-sea trip, using Reicher’s journals as a blueprint. He dubbed it the Disappearing Rio Grande Expedition. He soon discovered that the river was in even worse condition than it had been 40 years earlier. Groundwater depletion, suburban sprawl, periodic droughts (attributable, probably, to climate change): every year, people were asking more of less water. He wound up having to walk a third of the river’s length. Reicher, who had helped McDonald raise money and get attention for the trip, joined him for a couple of actual-water segments—in the Big Bend and then the last miles, where the river limps into the Gulf. When McDonald did a slide show in Albuquerque, Anella approached him afterward and said simply, “That was my trip.”

  After Donald Trump was elected, he pursued his campaign promise to build a wall along the nearly 2,000 miles of border between the United States and Mexico. The Rio Grande’s “disappearance” took on fresh meaning. As imagined, such an undertaking would be devastating to life along an already threatened river.

  Having been determined by the 1848 peace treaty that ended the Mexican-American War, the border traces the river’s deepest channel—the thalweg—which, because the riverbed frequently shifts according to the water’s whims, is in some respects notional. Of course, no one is proposing that a wall be built in the middle of the river, or for that matter on Mexican soil, even if Mexico is going to pay for it. So the wall would go on the American side, some distance from its banks—miles into US territory, at times. It would cut people off from their own property and wildlife from the main (and sometimes the only) water source in a vast upland desert. The Center for Biological Diversity has determined that 93 listed or proposed endangered species would be adversely affected. The wall could disrupt the flow of what meager water there is, upon which an ecosystem precariously depends. And it would essentially seal the United States off from the river and cede it to Mexico: lopping off our nose to spite their face. It would shrink the size of Texas.

  There is also the matter of efficacy. The wall would probably delay a hypothetical crossing by a few minutes, depending on its design and the manner of the breach. There are videos of Mexicans deploying ladders, ramps, ropes, welding torches, and tunnels to get over, through, or under border fences. (There are about 700 miles of fence already, most of it in California and Arizona.) For a great deal of its length, the river is insulated on both sides by hundreds of miles of desert—inhospitable terrain that does more to discourage smugglers and migrants than a wall ever could. (The vast majority of hard drugs intercepted on the southern border is coming through so-called points of entry—the more than 40 official crossings—hidden in vehicles and cargo.) And, while the banks of the river, for much of it, are free of impediments, except for thick stands of invasive cane and salt cedar, which can make life miserable for the Border Patrol, about a hundred miles of it cut through deep canyons far more imposing and prohibitive to a traveler on foot than a slab of concrete or steel. The canyons don’t require funding from Congress.

  This winter, Reicher put together a trip on the Rio Grande, with American Rivers, an advocacy group, of which he’s a board member, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and to begin to articulate, in an informal but pertinent setting, a response to Trump’s wall. (Last week, American Rivers, for the first time since 2003, included the Rio Grande in its annual list of the 10 most endangered rivers.) This wasn’t so much an expedition as a floating Chautauqua, with a missionary bent. He and Bob Irvin, the president of American Rivers, invited me along. Among the guests were two grandees with dynastic connections to environmental conservation: Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, whose father, Stewart Udall, spearheaded the protection of vast tracts of American wilderness and was a crucial proponent of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act; and Theodore Roosevelt IV, whose great-grandfather, the 26th president, used his bully pulpit, and hundreds of executive orders, to turn the federal government into a force for, and an enforcer of, land and wildlife conservation. Before American Rivers got involved, Reicher had invited Rob Portman, who has the kayak from the 1977 expedition mounted in his office on Capitol Hill, but his schedule was too tight, and he’d been back to the river a year earlier, with his family. “Last thing a Republican needs now is to be seen spending a week on a river with a bunch of tree huggers,” Irvin told me with a chuckle.

  I’d never given any thought to the Rio Grande, despite its being the fourth-longest river in the United States. My first river trip was a five-night commercial float, on rafts, on the Middle Fork of the Salmon, in Idaho’s River of No Return Wilderness. It was 1985. I was a teenager, with my family and about 20 strangers—a group of gay men from Houston and New Orleans, and a biker hippie from Portola, California. The biker, who was a friend of one of the guides, went by Feets (he had got himself listed in the white pages as Amazing Feets) and spent his Middle Fork days aboard the supply boat, in jean cutoffs and a white tank top, rolling and smoking joints. I remember sitting on a sandbank one evening, after a consultation with Feets, watching the river flow—the molecules jostling past, toward the Main Salmon, the Snake, the Columbia, and the Pacific, and then up into the atmosphere and the jet stream and eventually, via cumulonimbus, back to the mountains upstream—and appreciating, really for the first time, the fact that this conveyor belt of snowmelt and runoff never stopped rolling, a quintessence of incessance unlike anything I could conceive of, except maybe time itself. Or an escalator. Then I wandered off in quest of some leftover Dutch-oven apple crisp.

  Even in the clear-eyed light of day, the Middle Fork worked its magic. There was something addictive about the unfurling, around every bend, of new vistas. The fellowship, too: by the end of the trip, all of us, clients and guides, vowed to visit one another soon, making what I now know are routine pixie-dust promises that in this case were so unlikely to be kept that it took only a few days for the spell to wear off. (A river trip is a little like summer camp that way.) I passed through Portola a year later and found “Feets, Amazing” in the local phone book. No answer.

  Soon afterward, I learned how to do an Eskimo roll, and spent a decade white-water kayaking wherever and whenever I could. Lehigh, Lochsa, Youghiogheny, Ocoee, Gallatin, Tohickon, Penobscot, Payette: the names of the rivers summon up boulder gardens, azure pools, high-speed surf waves, life-threatening keeper holes—and those mesmerizing cellophane stretches where the water, clear and unriffled, accelerates over a rocky bed, getting ever shallower, before dropping into the aerated tumult of a rapid. To safely n
avigate big rapids, and to play in them with some assurance, you have to acquaint yourself with a fundamental principle: water seeks its own level. This is why it flows toward the sea, why it churns back on itself when it drops steeply, and why, if you lean the wrong way crossing an eddy line, it flips your boat—and why, if you fail to roll up and have to swim, it fills your boat (and your sinuses) as it dashes you against the rocks. Whatever level the water is seeking, you are better off with your head above it.

  Work, city life, injuries, and children put an end to my boating. But, like Ishmael, I intermittently get a strong urge to take to the ship. Several years ago, I joined a private—unguided—raft trip on the Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon, put together by a few friends, some of whom had guided on the river in their 20s. Most of us were strangers to one another, but the pixie dust was strong. Two weeks in the canyon, with no connection to the outside world. The rim the edge of your universe, the river your only way through it. Among the promises I made to myself, down on the Colorado—promises that were inevitably broken—was that I would spend a greater portion of my life, or what remained of it, on swift, wild, and scenic American rivers.

  So I signed on to Reicher’s trip. At his urging, I started reading Great River, Paul Horgan’s muy grande Pulitzer-winning account of the Rio Grande, which, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, reaches about as far back as a history can. It begins:

  Space.

  Abstract movement.

  The elements at large.

  Over warm seas the air is heavy with moisture.