Beware the back side of a full moon in December or January is an adage I invented after years of watching our worst northers blow into south Texas not long after a full moon winter after winter here along the river.

When Hayesy had asked how I thought the river trip would go for the next two weeks before I reached Laredo, I told him my 'beware the back side of the full moon' line.

For the first 39 days of the trip, the total precipitation I encountered was a mere one-inch of snowfall on Christmas Eve day.  For the next eight days, I not only had to contend with rainfall day and night, but a continuing cold, no single day reaching 50 F except perhaps the day I finally arrived in Laredo, as thoroughly saturated as I've ever been in my life, including the two interminable autumns I spent in Vancouver, B.C.

I learned on the first day below Eagle Pass that the warmest place to be during the daytime was sitting in the canoe, paddling incessantly.  On land, I just could not get warm without a robust campfire.

And I had another problem: unless you're talking about my aunt's incredibly delicious sandwiches or an Argentinean steak, I'm not a big eater, the one exception being when the weather turns cold.  In the cold, I go from a diet of two light meals per day to three hearty ones.  My problem occurred because when I shopped at a tiny store in Acuña for the trip, the day was borderline hot and I bought just enough supplies to eke it out to Laredo eating two light meals a day.  I was poorly provisioned for the change in the weather I encountered and I could see by the second morning down from Eagle Pass that I was quickly running out of food.

Leaving Eagle Pass the river is powerful, the current pushy, the drops frequent, and the waves large.  In particular, cross currents present a formidable challenge, especially given that I had in excess of 2,000 CFS.  Running water of this scale on a warm day would be delightful.  With temperatures hovering around 45 F and wind chills below freezing, anxiety over the possibility of capsizing cast a cloud over my capacity for enjoying the challenge.

Besides the cold, I was also looking at one of the strangest sights I have ever seen on a river, legions of trash strewn in every branch of every riverside tree with thorns or stickled branches.  The autumnal floods had swept seemingly every piece of disposable consumer culture from Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras downriver and trapped it in trees, rock clefts, and river cane.  I thought of the ugly simile that the riparian environment looked as if Mother Nature had hosted the most hideous Christmas holidays office party and the thousands of inebriated guests had attempted to establish a tree 'decorating' record worthy of inclusion into Guinness Book.  For twenty miles, I saw all manner of trash draped in disconcerting proportions, and the saddest sight of all was the appearance of perfectly good children's' toys swept right from the backyards of kids and pushed miles downriver.  After I saw tricycles, dolls, toy cars and soldiers, I found on one beach where I ate lunch, one thing which made my eyes well with tears: a little girl's purse with a Snoopy logo, partly opened and filled with river mud and imitation lipstick. Pobrecita.

Sixty Mexicans died in that flash flood, and I couldn't help wonder how many thousands of children were left without their playthings.

Also, about fifteen miles below Eagle Pass you reach Kingsbury Falls, a very rocky drop which merits a long scout.  I counted three different routes to run, but each required some careful maneuvering.  History books will tell you that large boats which tried to come down river from Eagle Pass could proceed no further than this point.  None of the channels are wide.  I had a decent run through, though I faced a tense moment near the bottom when I encountered a nasty rock, which I couldn't see from my scouting point.

When I awoke at my island morning about 24 hours after I left Eagle Pass, the north winds were raw and the rain icy, and I wondered if I would be able to make any miles at all.  Once I did a close inventory of my supplies, I realized I had no choice but to move.

To say I've been extraordinarily lucky this trip is becoming a tiresome refrain, but just as I was feeling the first pangs of desperation about the predicament I had placed myself in, a boat appeared upriver about one-third mile.  I expected the two guys in it to drift down past me.  When they didn't move for half an hour, I jumped in the canoe and paddled upstream against the shoreline to visit with them.  They were fishing, though shivering while they did it.

The older of the two men patiently answered every question I asked about nearby stores by saying, "retirada," or roughly, "no longer open for business."  I told him my wares were awfully lean, and asked what he would do if he were in my situation.

He thought for a long time, and then suddenly broke into a smile, telling me that if I were willing to do some walking, I could arrive to a tiny store in a tiny village called San Vicente.  I found his directions somewhat typical of the way Mexicans give directions.  He said, "when you arrive at a wide spot in the river, you will see a water pump.  Leave your canoe there.  Above, you find a ranch road and walk on it past the horses.  After the horses, you will pass cattle.  After the cattle, you will go up a hill.  The store is on top of the hill, the third house."

"How many kilometers from the river?" I asked.

He shot me a quizzical look and began repeating the exact directions.

About an hour later I found the wide spot in the river, the pump, the road, the horses, and the cattle.  I also found a man chopping mesquite wood not far off the road, and I called a greeting to him but he ignored me.  I moved closer and called to him, "is the store nearby?"

Again he ignored me, and I noted grimly that it was the first time in all my years traveling in Mexico that a man had failed to return a greeting.  Worse, I didn't like the idea that he was wielding a rather heavy mallet.

I found the store, and the woman attending it in a small room inside her home found me humorous.  When I told her how I had arrived, she replied, "Oh, you're a gringo wetback.  I knew sooner or later I'd see one of one."

Just before I walked away with two sacks of groceries (and the coup of the week, her husband's beer stash!), I asked her about the man I had encountered who had ignored me.  She asked for a description of him and then reassured me, saying, "don't worry about him.  He's deaf and dumb and he also can barely see."

A couple hours downriver I saw a flat boat ferrying people across the river, four at a time, while the other members of the group waited eagerly on the Mexican side.  All except the guy paddling the boat were unfazed as I approached.  The current was snail-paced through there, and just as I arrived to talk to them, I could guess why.  About a kilometer downriver, I saw the telltale signs of another dam; the telephone wires spanning the river were strung through those large red balls.  This indicates one of two things: a dam below or a cable crossing.  In most cases, both are present.

I asked the guys about the dam and they told me it is called Los Cortines, and I should portage on the Mexican side.

This is one of two dams below Acuña I would have run if I had been in a raft.  The Quemado/Jimenez dam could likely be run even in a canoe, though I carried it, but this dam was so steep I wouldn't have risked running the canoe over it.  It dropped at an angle of probably 30 degrees for perhaps twenty feet, but except for one boat eating backflow near the Texas shore, the river bounded right through the base of the dam and entered a long Class II rapid, an easy II.  I ran the rapid after a very dangerous carry down the slick cement of the dam abutment.

Late that afternoon I arrived at the rock ledges of Guerrero, river-wide slabs of rock that you can barely scrape over in a canoe.  The town itself is not visible from the river, but it owes its founding to the ledges.  In the early 19th century when various entrepreneurial spirits were trying to open the Rio Grande to shipping, they could get no further than the ledges; thus, the fort was established there. 

You can certainly see why.  Even one would present a formidable challenge for a big boat, but the river has six in succession, the last being part ledge, part big steep drop.  It is impossible to run in a canoe and I chose to try to line/walk right down the middle, probably not the wisest choice.  The competing currents are so intricate in there that at one point while I was pushing my canoe over a barely-submerged rock slab, I could see that within the fifteen-foot section of the boat, I was dealing with three different strong currents, each pushing hard in a competing direction.  Although I left canoe paint on the first five ledges, it was the sixth which really had my adrenaline flowing.  Despite that I was freezing as I waded the boat through, I felt supremely happy once I reached the bottom.

I camped on the Mexican side about a mile below the last ledge and endured yet another rainy night.

My third day down from Eagle Pass, now Day 44 of the long trip, I hit a wall physically.  Since I don't have whatever policing mechanism in my body that tells me when I'm fatigued, I had been going non-stop at a terrific rate for over six weeks, the only day of rest being when Hayesy and I returned to La Linda to get his truck.

In retrospect, I believe what happened was I had finally used up all the fat stores in my body, and I was running on fumes.  Suddenly, in mid-afternoon that day, I dug my paddle into the water, and, without warning, I felt all the power go out of my arms. 

And from that moment until I reached Laredo, I never really dug in on a single paddle stroke again unless I had a charge of adrenaline due to the sudden appearance of a rock.

But I kept paddling.  It was too cold to stay on shore, even if I paced or jogged to try to generate warmth.  I decided that I could make the 56 miles between my camp below Guerrero and Hidalgo by the third day.  I stayed in the boat far longer than I wanted to, so long that the incessant rhythmic sound of my paddling almost lulled me to sleep several times.

About mid-afternoon that second day below Guerrero, my feet were thoroughly chilled and I was beginning to shake with cold. 

My strategy for combating the possibility of hypothermia in the event of a capsize always centers on the idea that I have to have more warm clothing in reserve than I have on.  Due to the daily rains, I was under-dressing in order to keep that reserve of dry clothes from getting wet.

In my wet bag, I had one remaining pair of dry socks, and they were hand knit wool socks made by my close Nova Scotian friend Eric Clem's mother Shirley.  He gave them to me for this trip, but aside wearing them a couple of times on really frigid nights early in the trip, I hadn't used them while boating to keep them dry in case on an emergency.

Ditto with my only pair of long underwear.

But I was so chilled by that afternoon that I threw out all caution and put on those Shirley Clem socks and my long johns.  Instantly, I felt better, and when I got back in the boat, I turned one corner, and there on the Mexican hillside sat the town of Hidalgo, Nuevo Leon, the biggest village between Eagle Pass and Laredo, and the only one visible from the river. 

Thinking I couldn't possibly be that far along yet, I peered at the buildings hoping to see movement so I could walk up to ask exactly where I was.

A minute later, I espied a man standing high above me at the first house, and he was watching me closely as I paddled.  Once he returned my wave, I cut the boat hard for shore, and he came running eagerly down the path toward shore. 

I called to him as he approached to ask the name of the place, and when he responded it was indeed Hidalgo, I was so happy I could have hugged him.

Except there was something about his demeanor which suggested such a possibility might have been exactly what he was hoping for when he made the long trek down to the river.

He directed me to la bajada and gave me rough directions into town, and I happily bounded up the cut stone road from the beach to the plaza, where two more men laughingly informed me that I actually had a choice of two stores.

I can't express how nice it was to have a store selling warm tortillas, two full aisles of canned goods, a third aisle of various goods, and a cooler stretching along one entire wall.  The women attending the store would talk to me only during the commercial of the telenovela (soap opera).

I was so ravenously hungry at that point that I needed to summon restraint not to tear into the potato chips before I paid.

And then I happily carted two large plastic sacks filled with food, beer, and fruit juice through town and back to the boat landing, my feet as warm as they had been in weeks.

One quick memo to Shirley Clem, who likely will never read this and likely doesn't even know Eric gave me the socks: Shirley, you make the best darned socks I've ever worn in my life!

I made camp less than a mile below Hidalgo on a gorgeous island where a large tree of driftwood sat waiting for me to make my first bonfire in many years.

The 45 miles from Hidalgo to Laredo are a delightful canoe run, and unbelievably nobody runs it.  Tom Miller, who runs the Environmental Science Center here in Laredo, is the only other guy I know who has made the run and he told me in all his trips in the area, he has never seen another canoeist.

I took only a day and a half to make the run, such is the good current.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that for much of the way you will be watched by Border Patrol cameras which sit high atop towers every mile or two once you pass Columbia Bridge, thirty-three river miles from downtown Laredo.

The presence of these cameras does not, however, deter legions of Mexicans from wading across the river at every shallows.

I encountered one such group of four the next afternoon as I boated in the chilly rain about ten miles down from Columbia.  Unbelievably, their were stripped down to their underwear, and then when they saw me approaching, they retreated to the Mexican shore and huddled about forty meters from the bank waiting for me to pass. 

Instead, I boat directly to the shoreline, and called out to them in a voice sounding not unlike a school principal, "Didn't anyone tell you it's freezing out here?  And you're walking in water in your freaking underwear!  Who do you think you are, Canadians?"

One shivering young lad responded meekly, "It's not cold."

I broke into a rant about how they obviously seemed physically tough enough to endure what it would take to make it into the U.S. but the idea that they had retreated at the sight of my canoe called into question their mental toughness.  After I gave some quick advice about toughening up their attitude, I told them, "now get your freezing butts across that river and get to work."

I don't often make myself giggle, but this was one time when I chuckled all the way into camp.  And just to be sure they paid me heed, I turned after a couple minutes and saw they were dutifully marching back across the current to the U.S.

I had one final gorgeous camp on a large grassy island less than fifteen miles out from Laredo, not far from yet another B.P. signal tower.

Then the following morning, Day 47 down from El Paso, I made my run down to the Laredo Community College campus where I work, docked, and walked to solicit the help of Tom Miller and Chase Tidwell, the baseball coach, in getting my canoe and gear up the slick, steep bank.  Chase sent me two of his players, my former student Joey Brade and Joe Villa, to take on the tough job of lifting the half-loaded canoe up the fifteen-foot bank.

Tom drove the gear and me to my palatial ranch on the second floor at 1709 Iturbide, where I discovered I had left the door keys with the car keys in Langtry.

I did what I think any guy in my predicament would have done: poured a saucepan full of water, took a cold bath, and promptly retreated to the warmth of my office, calling periodically on the phone to my landlady until I could get a spare key.

When I finally gained entry later in the evening, I noted wistfully that I wouldn't be having a campfire tonight or for the next week while I recuperate, return to Langtry for my car, and restock for the next section, which features the one truly daunting obstacle from here to the Gulf of Mexico: the 45-mile long Lake Falcón.