Since my family moved so often when I was growing up and I changed schools nearly every year, I don’t have a particular town I consider my hometown.  The rest of my family calls Houston home, but the only place I feel entirely at home is in the Lower Canyons.  Although I have lived in Laredo for nearly fifteen years, the Lower Canyons are more my element than the city of my residence.

So this leg of the trip was almost like a vacation from the trip itself. 

Andy Kurie was gracious enough to allow me to type Part II of the river report and let me use the laundry facilities while Hayesy visited with Fred and the contingent of Fun Canadians who followed me into the beach.  By the time I finished the report and visited with Andy, we decided to camp on the beach.  After we loaded up the rafts the following morning, we drove up to say goodbye to Fred and he put a sharp edge on the buck knife Laredo friend Danny Benavides had given me for the trip.  In order to demonstrate just how sharp Fred had the blade, he sliced off a half inch of the callus on his left index finger.  Hayes was impressed.

The transition from the canoe to the raft proved more difficult than I had anticipated.  Loaded with two weeks worth of supplies, the raft felt more like a barge than an inflatable.  I had to muscle each paddle stoke in order to make even the slightest turn.  Due to the substantial effort, I decided we would make the first day a short one, camping just short of Mile 5 downa from the Gerstacker Bridge, a camp I use often because of its easy access and abundance of wildlife.  In past trips I’ve seen bobcats, scorpions,  javalina there, and one of the principal attractions of this trip for Hayesy was the wildlife. 

At this camp Hayesy related to me that on his way through West Texas, he had encountered a man who professed to be an expert on the Rio Grande, and, specifically, on the Lower Canyons.  Among this man’s substantial cache of embellishments, exaggerations, and outright fabrications were these whoppers he laid on Hayesy: 1) a UFO is landing at the closed mine in La Linda to steal titanium in order to build more spacecraft; 2) there is a “big working gold mine 19 miles down from the Gerstacker Bridge;” 3) the current below the Gerstacker Bridge averages “60-65 miles an hour when the water is high and reaches a 100 MPH during floods.”  This same man claimed to have raced his truck over Andy’s beach in an attempt to gauge the speed of the current one summer.  He said, “I couldn’t even come CLOSE to keeping up with it!” 

The prevarications of this raconteur provided endless hours of camp humor.  Another source of camp humor stemmed from our mutual admiration of one of the Canadian girls we had met.  Hayesy described this adorable girl as “bubbly” and I asked, “which one?  They were all bubbly.”  He specified that he was referring to the particularly attractive girl with the dark complexion, so we began to refer to her as “Doubly,” and she was the object of more attention on this trip than even the teller of tall tales whom Hayesy had met en route. For instance, once Hayesy would set up his tent at night, he would quip, “tell Doubly I have the house all ready.”  Or when he shaved by the campfire, he would utter, “Oh, Doubly is going to like this smooth mug!”

So the mood of the trip began light, but just before we were going to launch the rafts the morning of our second day on the river below La Linda, we faced a tense few minutes.  The episode began innocently enough.  I heard the voices of a number of Spanish speaking guys moving through the brush above the Mexican side embankment above our camp.  Instinctively, I called out a friendly greeting to them in Spanish, and the mere sound of my voice sent the group of them scrambling to find the source of the words.  I could see as they moved hurriedly that each of the ten or twelve carried on his bag a bale-sized wet bag, doubtlessly filled with contraband.  One guy appeared just above us, directly across the river, and he asked nervously what we were doing.  I explained to him the extent of my trip, and he asked why I was doing it.  Then the whole group disappeared downriver.

I knew they wouldn’t travel far, and after an apprehensive few minutes, I decided we would have to go downriver and face them again.  Sure enough, they were all huddled in the shade of a riverside catclaw tree two hundred yards away, their backpacks now out of our eyesight.

I paused to talk to them for a minute, and they were visibly relieved to see I had nothing to do with law enforcement.  After I left Hayesy get a safe distance beyond them, I asked, “so what are you guys doing way out here?”  Their reply: “fishing.” 

I told Hayesy a moment later when I caught up with him, “I forgot to warn them about “the big gold mine” at Mile 19.  He countered with, “Yea, I was really nervous about Doubly’s safety there for a few minutes.”

The next noteworthy event of the trip occurred two afternoons later when I espied a pronghorn sheep very close to the river just before the Texas side rock ledges at Oso Canyon.  Hayesy was able to snap a couple of pictures of it at close range.  By the time I dug out my camera from the depths of my ammo box, the sheep had retreated behind cacti.

On Day 4, we arrived at Hot Springs, our camp for the evening.  We decided to scout the rapid closely because it seems to change every other time I come through, and we ended up running a path closer to the Mexican side than the path I ran in higher water in the summer. 

After I made my run and was detailing to Hayesy exactly what he had to look for as he positioned his boat, I noticed a look of nervousness on his face.  I said emphatically, “and this last part is REALLY important because if you don’t know this you could lose the boat and get seriously hurt, even die.”  He was almost sick with anxiety at this point and he turned to me with an expression which bordered on dread, saying with great concern, “what?” I said, “a UFO is landing at the closed mine in La Linda to steal the titanium in order to make new space craft!”

Hayesy broke into laughter and made a perfect run through the rapid.

Two days later we ran Upper Madison.  I stayed in the boat after the first stage and sent Hayesy up to the scout rocks to make sure there were no strainers in the main drop and to check to see if the plaque commemorating Leonard was there.  He shouted back to that the drop was clear, so I made my run, then docked on the island to photograph his.  When we met at the bottom of the third drop, I told him, “we both get an A plus for that one.  Now let’s go ace Lower Madison.”

In camp at Panther Canyon that afternoon we explored far up into the canyon, and Hayesy was so mesmerized by the beauty of the canyon that he snapped more pictures during our walk than I had taken in the six days to that point. 

Day 7 we faced a tough decision.  Jerry and Georgia Hendy, friends of mine from the days when they used to winter at Heath Canyon, had invited us to hike up to the rim of San Francisco Canyon for cold beer.  Hayesy and I were torn between making the long climb and pushing down river to one of his favorite camps, which we call Bobby’s Nickel Factory after his father. 

The last time I had seen Jerry and Georgia was at Heath Canyon in December 03 before I was beginning my ill-fated low water run on which I ended up destroying the raft and had to be rescued by the lovable French Canadian kids.  Before I left that trip, Jerry offered to drive me via Black Gap 20 miles downriver to get past the shallows, and when I asked him for a price, he said with a poker face, “Well Georgia thinks this is way too cheap but I’d do it for $300.  The only problem is you’ll have to wait five days until I can take you, but the day after tomorrow, you can ride up to Fort Stockton with us.  That will help you kill one day.”

I shot back, “let’s be straight on this one, Jerry.  The only reason you want me to go to Fort Stockton is so that I can use an ATM machine so you can soak even more money out of me.”

Fred Keller, sitting nearby at the time, uttered, “Ka ching, ka ching,” mimicking the sound of the old time cash registers, and everybody had a good laugh at my expense.

On that same trip, I boated down to Mile 20 where Jerry would be visiting a couple days later and I wrote in big stick letters, “KA CHING!”

As Hayesy and I were passing beneath San Francisco Canyon on Day 7, I needed binoculars to read the sign Jerry and Georgia had posted for my behalf: CA CHING!

We stayed on the river and camped on the still water leading to Sanderson Canyon Rapid.

On Day 8 we boated below Dryden without having seen any other boaters so we knew we wouldn’t see any the remainder of the trip.  That night we stayed at the bottom of the beautiful rapid at El Zacate Canyon.   While we were cutting firewood up the canyon, we found much evidence of people discarding clothes before they crossed illegally into the U.S. a half a mile downriver from the rapid.  One guy had left a duffel bag stocked with numerous tins of food and more clothes than I was carrying on my own trip, but we left it exactly where I found it.

From El Zacate Canyon to Langtry, I have a series of camps I use year after year, and each is a thing of beauty.  My two favorites are down below the Weir Dam, the first being a smooth rock bowl below a rock ledge at the bottom of one of the few riffles in the area.  This camp I call Opus 1934, after my uncle, a name he uses online to cite the year he was born.  The camp is even more beautiful than my uncle’s nickname is clever, and Hayesy positively loved it.

But the next night we planned to camp in the single finest camp of the entire Lajitas to Langtry run, a breathtaking rock bowl some sixty feel high.   I stay there so often that I often leave gear and firewood there for the next visit. 

Since we had been doing a good job of hiking up numerous bluffs to photograph the river, I decided that we should make the attempt to reach the rim of the bowl by docking a mile and a half upriver, following the rough ranch road to Rattlesnake Canyon, then walking the canyon rim until we reached our target.  The walk took much longer than I thought, and even longer still because we explored Rattlesnake Canyon looking unsuccessfully for a rock art site Louis Aulbach’s close friend Dana had mentioned to me, but when we finally reached the rim, the pictures we took easily merited the two hours we spent getting there and back.

The unfortunate thing, however, was while we were hiking, we tripped a Border Patrol sensor, and as we were leaving in the rafts to boat back to the same camp we had just photographed from above, a Border Patrol vehicle arrived.

By then, we were on the river, but later that night while we were in camp at the rock bowl, two very unhappy agents shone their flashlights down at us from atop the rim of the bowl.  They weren’t buying the story about the hike to photograph the camp from above, and they weren’t buying the story that only two of us were in camp.  Their problem, however, was they had no way of getting down into the bowl.  They asked Hayesy to describe in detail the footprint on his hiking boot.  Perplexed, he said, “Uh, I think it makes a big V.” 

Thirty minutes later they appeared again, and now they were really frustrated.  Apparently, the thousands of footprints we left while scrambling around above trying to find our rock bowl were proving too difficult for them to read.  One agent demanded I retrieve the tennis shoes I was walking in and “read carefully the exact print.”

I then had to detail in painful detail our exact movements from the moment we left the boats until the moment we returned.  I bet it took me ten full minutes to itemize each micro-hike we took. 

Finally, I pulled out a trump card and threw them the name of one of their superiors at the Comstock Border Patrol office, an officer who took two of my English classes at Laredo Community College in the early years of my tenure there.  It worked, and they left.  Hayesy quipped, “Wow, I can’t believe you didn’t tell them about the UFO raiding the mines at La Linda!”

I almost never enjoy take-outs, especially the one at Langtry which requires a long portage from the river edge to the top of the bluff where Pete Billings is gracious enough to drive in to pick up my gear.  The easy solution would have been to leave much of the gear hidden in the river side growth since once Hayesy and I returned to Heath Canyon to pick up his truck and my canoe, we are continuing down the river/lake to Amistad Dam together, but Pete flatly rejects the idea of leaving a single thing down there on the vega.

After I caught a white bass to bring to Pete, we toted the gear up to the base of the bluff; then I made the ling walk up the hill to Pete’s house, where he eagerly listened to the stories of my trip thus far while he made me a lunch of macaroni and cheese with rice pudding for desert.  Then we drove down in his truck to get our gear and to retrieve his fish which I still had on the line in the water next to my raft.

Pete was admiring the raft so much that I simply gave it to him, a good gift to a great friend.

Pete has been going up and down the river since 1947, but these last few years, as he nears 90 years old, he has been unable to go.  He raft will allow him to do what he enjoys best.

We boomeranged to La Linda, camping one more night there on the beach at Andy’s, and now we’re on our way back to Langtry for the next leg.

Thanks to the lovely Gallego sisters here at Sul Ross State University for the use of the computer and a fine packed lunch for the road.