River 

by Ron Wetherington

 

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

            –Norman Maclean

 

            It began with tiny springs seeping upward through deep conduits in the crust. Separated in their several valleys by folded ridges, these small capillaries braided their way down slopes. Joining others from obscure origins, these became minor brooks. They converged one by one and gained momentum, answering the pull of gravity, gathering energy in a focused direction southward as if beseeched. It happened just over three million years ago, over a time too long to witness.

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            The several brooks joined as creeks, the creeks as streams to be named by cartographers millions of years later. But eventually, all things merge into one: as tectonic forces lifted nearby mountains, the coursing waters congregated, cutting a single channel through volcanic rock at a relentless rate of a few stubborn centimeters a century, and a river was born in what is now southern Colorado.

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            We know it as the Rio Grande—the Great River—given its name by 16th century Spanish explorers awed by its power and daunted by its role in curbing passage: the great boundary-keeper. I have crossed it, dipped into its frigid waters. It doubles its volume as it leaves its origin in the San Juan Mountains and receives the flow of New Mexico’s Red River at Questa. Here it cuts deep into basalt, becoming a canyon with depths of 800 feet. I have descended into that canyon, following an ancient path, reading the petroglyphs pecked into basalt a thousand years ago down there at the river’s edge. The ancients must have been gripped by its power, transcribing it in sacred images, telling stories.

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            Both the rise of the Sangre de Cristo mountains to its east and the subsiding volcanic plateau through which it slices increased its rate of flow and cut a wider gorge at Taos, a quarter mile across. The passage intimidated westward wagons two centuries back. I could not have breached it, then, but I have rafted its white waters through Pilar, striking hard against the rocks beneath the rapids, struggling in captive terror, jubilant at each small victory. The memory of those waters still electrifies and haunts me.

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            The great river exits its mountain course at Velarde, entering the high scrub at Santa Fe and slowly exhaling toward the dry basin of the Jornada del Muerto beyond Albuquerque. At El Paso it was called Rio Bravo, where the Camino Real guided passage across the boundary between Old Mexico and New, the 18th century caretas creaking with trade goods outbound from Santa Fe and then returning. My imagination has taken me there, trudging beside the yoked oxen over the white desert.

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            Beyond El Paso it slices and twists through majestic limestone canyons at Big Bend. But the river is gentler here. I have crossed it on burro to visit Boquillas del Carmen, the row of Mexican adobes on a spit of land across the river. I remember a chained black bear outside a dusty tienda, drinking from a bottled cola which cost me a few pesos.

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            Beyond the last bend, the river broadens and straightens its course and becomes navigable through Brownsville, Texas. Steamboats plied its waters in the 1850s. I have crossed the bridge there, into Tamaulipas, towards Victoria.

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            And here, at last, the Great River exhausts its energy, dispersing its identity into the Gulf of Mexico and disappearing. Only a fifth of its original content makes it this far. Evaporation and irrigation ditches and city extraction siphon most of it along its 1,900 miles. The loss is continuing. In Las Cruces, where the Chihuahua Desert creeps across the border and the Jornada begins, not an ounce now flows in the Rio Grande after the growing season in September. The river used to run through it all year.

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            One does not think of a river as ever dying.

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            Most of the important events in any life are accidental, but some are not, and a river’s life is like that. I am haunted by its waters, still.