Boating the Borderline: Reflections from the Rio Grande
How rivers defy our obsessions with straight lines and concrete walls
In February, I set out on an overnight river trip by canoe. It’s the first time my partner and I have paddled together. Dave is in the back, responsible for steering. I am in the front, attempting to hold my tongue. We try to learn how to maintain direction as the two other boats from our group glide ahead of us. We end up zigzagging, our turns too wide at first as we enter the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon. We’re on the Rio Grande, or the Rio Bravo; it all depends upon which shore you’re looking from. Our novice boating skills mean we’re doing a lot of border crossing: zig left to Mexico, zag right back to the U.S. Zig and paddle on the Rio Bravo, zag and paddle on the Rio Grande.
Rivers themselves deny the permanence of such borderlines. They can dry up and make a boundary vanish; they can overflow their banks and create a chasm between parties on opposite shores. They can choose different paths one year to the next. It is only through billions of dollars and a hundred-plus years of labor, accompanied by an endless flow of concrete, that the U.S. government has turned rivers into predictable, straight lines. Sometimes, even then, the concrete is not enough. The Glendale Narrows of the Los Angeles River, for one, have refused to be sealed up, no matter the tonnage in cement or human determination. Yet even there, where trees and the soil of the river bed have risen again and again until we let them be, the banks are hard and gray.1
Channelization—forcing a river into rigid confines that can be regularly plotted on a map—is death for a desert river. For we have yet to create complimentary tools to likewise force the rainfall into a regulated course; indeed, we seem better at causing the rainfall to disappear entirely. And so the rains go as they please, near the river or far, filling it or no. Unchannelized, a desert river may be able to grow, changing its course to feed on moisture throughout the landscape. Set in a concrete course, it gains reliability in direction but not in volume, losing most opportunity to seek replenishment. That is the case with the Rio Grande, so drained that in some locations it can be held in a small culvert—limiting its potential as a border-keeper and, it seems, requiring the use of yet more cement for the building of giant fences, by those who demand both rivers and people stay in predictable places.
The river that people seek out for recreation near the Big Bend, with rapids for rafting, is not made by rains above Texas or its neighboring states to the north. It comes, instead, from Mexico, who recharges the flow after its near decimation on the American side of the border. The river is caught up in a complex set of treaties and agreements around water usage that also includes the Colorado River, as though the two were somehow interchangeable, the same.2 We give you the water from here, you give us the water from there. A simple quid-pro-quo. But in this way each river is evaporated into an abstraction, existing only for water-as-commodity. All the other ways it might manifest are denied or forgotten: desert river as the gatherer of streams, the beating lifeblood of vast watersheds and all the animals therein; river as the first and greatest of all roads, swiftly bearing boats to seemingly unreachable locales; enduring river as the force capable of carving a Santa Elena or Grand Canyon.
The borderline is another such abstraction projected upon the river. Yet here in the Big Bend, the river both marks and dissolves that ideal. Printed on a map, someone far away from its presence might see only the thick black or blue indicating both water and demarcation of national territorial claims. On the river itself, there are no such straight lines, only water moving and bending, moving and bending. The walls themselves bend and curve with the water. Borders are a way of seeking permanence; they deny that everything is, ultimately, flux, change, and flow—the very essence of a river. Is it possible the map makers never read Heraclitus?
Surely the Big Bend, even off the river, is not a place to reassure one in the fixity of time or place, set still by markers. To travel TX 118 down into Terlingua and into the national park is to see the land’s own capacity for change and for remaking itself. It leans towards the grotesque: certain formations appear as though the planet went through a surrealist phase. Or maybe like it got a little tipsy and then opted to puke its guts out right here. It takes a few days for it to dawn on me that this may very well be what happened: this is volcanism and plate tectonic’s shared afterparty, with earth innards scattered every which way on top of one another, red to ochre to brown and back again, all in between dying cinder cones.
From this scene of discombobulation, you head down toward the river, tumble down the peaks of earth vomit, and discover the canyon—a towering fortress protecting a small portion of the river’s path, completely unlike everything you’ve been traveling through for hours and hours.
When people talk about building “the wall,” I always wonder if they know about places like this. Do they want to pour heavy blocks of concrete right here, where the river is already surrounded, the walls of Santa Elena Canyon a testament to geologic craftsmanship surpassing anything humans could possibly construct? All in a vain attempt to make the territory look a little more like some versions of a map? To force some humans onto one bank, and the rest onto the other?
The canyon is a special place on the border. We wait in no lines before loading our canoes, have no documentation checked as we trudge from one side to the other. Which we do: this is the dry season, here in the midpoint between summer monsoons. The water is shallow enough that, heading upstream, we often get out of the boats and drag them along. On our way back the current will be enough to help push us over the gravel, if we also shove with our paddles.
This relaxed approach to border crossings was once true outside the canyon as well. Those entering Big Bend National Park could easily boat over into the neighboring villages in Mexico, and purchase handicrafts and other goods. Once, there was even a festival: International Good Neighbor Day. It was ended in the era of so-called national security after 9/11 that led to the creation of DHS and ICE, in which security, apparently, meant fear of one’s neighbors. The villages on the Mexican side of the border have been shrinking ever since, the town of Boquillas de Carmen’s population cut in half.3 In a parallel statistic, the number of deaths via drowning—by migrants attempting to cross northward—has continued to increase in step with the growth of the border’s security apparatus.4
The river, of course, was not a border until the U.S. government decided to wage a war to make it so. Even before the modern era of overuse, the water drained for agriculture and suburban development, its name was a sly joke. There is many a river more grand, more difficult to cross. It did not form a natural boundary for the many people who lived in the region before the Spanish arrived, and before the infiltration of American settlers. The Chisos, the Mescalero and Lipan Apache, the Jumanos; all traveled into the land south of the river, and then back north of it again, as season and need determined. The Mescalero name for the river says nothing of its girth. Tú 'ichii-dí means, instead, "the water that is the color of red ocher.”5
Truth be told, I had previously avoided the Big Bend in large part because of its location on the border. It seemed wrong, somehow, to take advantage of the strange privilege of the white American outdoor recreationalist, to be able to lollygag back and forth over the invisible line that others cross at such great cost and out of much greater need than my desire to gawk at cliff formations. To not make use of such privilege, though, does not erase the having of it. I had begun to wonder what it might be like to visit with the intent of holding that experience up to say, see? See how easy it could be. No barbed wire, no guards with guns, no months or years of back-and-forth with bureaucracy. No need to swim across in the dead of night. Simply choose your method of travel—be it foot, boat, or burro—and set out. If unsure about your route or skill, hire a guide; we certainly needed one. No coyote or smuggler to let one out in the dead of night, unsure of where you are. Just a guide, who will tell you which beach below the canyon walls is the best place to camp for the night, and who will cook you tacos for dinner and tacos for breakfast. He is cheaper than a coyote, too, and will make sure you know about the quicksand at the mouth of the side canyon you set out to explore. I dream of when such a thing is possible, not just for tourists, but all who seek to cross the river. For it’s not that the journey isn’t without its dangers; it’s only that we’ve made it far more dangerous than the earth ever did on its own. Even here, in this land marked by volcanic upchuck and barbed plants.
The river knows that the difficulties of the present-day traverse is not of its own making, but rather the doing of human imagination and will. As it burbles along in its February shallows, it too says, see? See how easy it can be. Paddle on the left side of the boat, I am the Rio Grande. Paddle on the right side, I am the Rio Bravo. You may also come to know me as the water that is the color of red ochre. Come to me in the right season and you, too, will see, even beginning boaters make the crossing with no problem.
https://www.laweekly.com/the-glendale-narrows/
https://www.ibwc.gov/Files/1944Treaty.pdf
I learned about the now-gone festival from Adventures in the Big Bend, by Jim Glendinning, fourth edition, p.29. Information on the town of Boquillas and its port of entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boquillas_del_Carmen. It appears the park service has been trying to maintain the port of entry again in recent years, but it was still closed in early 2021, because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The border crossing policy is a model of the inconsistent (or simply unfortunate priorities) of governments on both sides: trucks transporting goods may cross by land, but individuals driving to see family members in an adjacent town may not. Tourists, likewise, may not cross by land, but can cross by air, as Ted Cruz did the same month of our trip.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/us/politics/migrants-drown-rio-grande.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mescalero