At the beginning of the trip, the one thing I feared most was repeated encounters with the Border Patrol.  If you've ever had agents burst into camp while you're meditating alone around a campfire in the middle of the desert, you know how terrifying they can be.  Down here along the border, we deal with Border Patrol checkpoints every time we leave our cities, and few of the agents are cordial.  On top of that, I've heard stories of agents prohibiting people from launching boats on the Rio Grande, saying boating the river is "illegal."  The prospect of dealing with them on a daily basis made me think of the Rio Grande Valley leg of the trip as a test of wills: my determination to boat all the way to the gulf versus the B.P.'s determination to stop me.

Man, I was dead wrong on that call.

Beginning with my trip through Reynosa, Day 60 of the long trip, all the way to the gulf, I received so much help and favorable attention from Border Patrol agents that it almost felt like I had a personal escort for the last 160 miles.

For starters, the morning I paddled under the bridge in the center of Reynosa, I found a Border Patrol boat parked not far downriver.  As I approached, the two agents greeted me with big grins, and one said, "we've been expecting you."  Further down, two more B.P. vehicles were parked on the banks, and when I departed after a short conversation with the guys in the boat, the agent said, "Those guys will look after you for the next mile."

Not that the Mexican side offered any apparent dangers.  I didn't see a single person all the way from the bridge to the "rock crossing," a simple class II drop two miles below.

Agents had warned me about the rock crossing for days before I reached it.  The Border Patrol does not run its boats over it, and most agents thought I would have to carry around it.  I pulled in Mexican side to scout, just above a young, well-dressed Mexican man fishing its base.  After I scouted the drop and saw it offered a relatively easy lane dead center, I returned to the boat to make my run.  I saw that the fisherman was eyeing me nervously, as if he thought my run would bring calamitous results.  I flashed him the thumbs up sign, but he only nodded, shooting me a look that seemed to communicate, "I hope you don't expect me to go in the river to rescue you!"

My run went well, and the moment I reached the bottom, I flashed the fisherman another thumbs up sign, and this time he happily flashed it back.  Then he whistled to his brother who was fishing another fifty yards below, and the brother watched in disbelief as I approached mid-river in the canoe.  As I passed him, he shouted in Spanish, "You went over it in that boat?"  After I replied that I had, he uttered simply, "Wow!"

These "rock crossings," as all the English-speaking Valley residents call them, or "piedras," as all the Spanish-speaking residents call them,  become common for the next hundred miles; however, that was the only one I ended up running.  A couple more offered lanes I could have navigated, but elected not to.  A few were death traps.  In fact, either Border Patrol agents or Mexican water officials had stories of people drowning at nearly all of them.

I learned the rock crossings were man-made in order to back up the river in times of shallow flows so that pumping station pipes would reach the water.  Most offer no advance warning other than that the river suddenly disappears due to the steepness of the drop.  No warning signs are posted in advance of the drops, and access to shore can range from great to near impossible.  At one, I had to paddle back upstream a quarter-mile to find a place to get ashore.

The day after I left Reynosa, I passed under Retamal Dam, an immense suppression dam with three monolithic gates, which can be lowered in times of flood in order to slow the surge of water.  Luckily, I found them raised, but still I found floating under them intimidating, especially since my head barely cleared the bottom of the one on in the Texas side channel I ran.

Later that day, I reached the bridge at Progreso, easily the most impressive span on the entire border.  I docked in a drainage culvert and climbed the steep embankment to the B.P. access road just upriver from the Customs station.  Once up above, I scouted the area while simultaneously keeping an eye on three kids on the Mexican side who had rushed to the riverbank to look at my canoe.   I worried they might swim the narrow river to steal my gear.  As I watched them, a Border Patrol truck raced over to interrogate me.  The young officer, Joe Carrion, out of the Weslaco sector, appeared amused by my story.  When I asked him if he thought the canoe would be safe there while I walked to the store, he said, "Shoot, those kids swim that river every day to collect the clothes the illegals leave on the banks.  But I'll park just above it and watch it until you get back.  You have a long walk though.  That store right over there just closed last week."

I settled for a small convenience store at a nearby gas station, and just as I emerged, Joe appeared in the parking lot.  He had radioed another agent to watch my canoe and had come looking for me to give me a ride to a bigger store two miles away.  Since I already had what I needed, he offered me a ride back to the river, apologizing that I would have to ride locked in the transport cell in the back of the truck.  No problem!

The following day I awoke to rain, and that rain persisted all morning and well into the afternoon.  For the first time all trip, I didn't break camp.  I spent the morning scavenging firewood and kept the campfire robust all day as the rains pelted me.  I found the rest welcome, and it gave me an opportunity to catch up on my journal writing.

The next morning, not far out of camp, I turned a corner and found a father and son fishing on the Mexican embankment.  Rather than answering my question about how the fishing was going, the man nervously warned me about "piedras" just around the bend.  I asked him on which side I should land, and he answered apprehensively, "there is nowhere to land."  I asked him if the "piedras" offered a very dangerous drop, and he said, "Many people die there."  Yikes!

I shot over to the Texas shore and found a "tractor cut" leading up off the river to a B.P. access road above.  In the distance, above the rock crossing, I could see a pump house, but before I could take a step, a Suburban approached from that direction, and the driver, Chuy, who operated the pump, stopped to answer my questions.  He said I could trespass around the locked gate and put in below the dam.  Before I began carrying the gear up from the water, I walked down to look at the drop.  Above it, I met Border Patrol agent Ramon Garcia, also out of Weslaco, reading the Sunday paper as he sat in his truck.  Within moments, he offered to truck my gear around the dam, an offer I happily accepted.

Just as we were finishing the job, Chuy arrived and the three of us conversed for another ten minutes.  Chuy warned me that three more rock crossings lie ahead, and Ramon told me a grisly tale of finding a ten-year old boy drowned at the base of the steep drop.

When I bid them goodbye, Ramon accompanied me to the boat and offered to drive into town to buy me groceries if I wished, the stipulation being that I couldn't ride with him due to Border Patrol regulations.  I politely refused, but it was comforting to have the offer.

At the next rock crossing, the one for the La Feria, Texas pump house, I docked at the base of a steep embankment Texas side, and climbed up to have a look.  I didn't like at all what I saw.  I found no possible access below the drop, and the Mexican side was choked with river cane. I wandered over to the pump house and found a Spanish-speaking man who had a difficult time grasping the idea that I didn't have a pickup truck to move the boat and the gear.  When he finally got that straight, he said, "well, you'll just have to walk along the river to the end of that line of trees, and go in the river there."

The line of trees extended further than I could see, well over a half mile, and this man wasn't taking the bait I was jingling trying to get him to offer the use of his truck. 

I gazed a long time at that drop, and as people who scout  know, the longer you look, the worse it looks.  You can find all kinds of things to scare you off.  I could have run this one.  It had a powerful lane surging between the rocks.  The problem consisted of two large twin eddies at the base of the drop.  If I capsized in the lane or strayed out of it, either eddy would feed me back into the base of the drop.  I could see losing the boat as a distinct possibility.

Despite having promised Ramon just two hours before that I wouldn't do any more portaging on the Mexican side, I opted to cross the river, cut a trail through the Mexican side cane, and reenter the water well below the eddies.

The following morning  I reached the steep weir dam where the Border Patrol agents drowned last summer.  Fortunately, the Mexicans have a cement stairway leading right to the river fifty yards before the drop, and I tied off there and climbed above to investigate.  I found two men watching television in the pumping station, and they were eager to assist.  One man walked me right to the precipice of the thirty-foot drop, and he suggested I land there and carry on the path at the water's edge.  When I expressed my reservations about being able to land due to the swiftness of the current, he said, "don't worry.  I'll catch you."

I worried.  Halfway down the thirty-foot drop sat sharp boulders which would shatter the boat and likely kill me.

I elected to carry the long way around, and both men offered to help, though I refused their assistance.  They did relate the story of how the B.P. agents drowned.  They had moved the boat too close to the base of the dam, and the reversal current there tipped the craft.  One agent was able to swim to the Mexican shore (though looking at it from above, I had to wonder how he managed that seemingly impossible feat), but the other two churned hopelessly at the base of the dam.

Late that afternoon, I passed under Los Indios bridge, and I decided to walk up to U.S. Customs to get drinking water because Brownsville was still about three days distant and I was down to two gallons of water.  I followed a rough road up from the river for half a mile before finding myself at a high fence separating me from the immense Customs complex.  I couldn't find a way through or under the fence anywhere, so I walked along it to the import lot where agents inspect incoming trucks, and there an agent spotted me and said he would call security to have them let me through the fence.  However, when the two security agents arrived, they said the only way I could enter the U.S. was to boat back over to Mexico and walk the bridge.  In a pleading tone, I said, "come on.  All I need is some water.  Can I just throw the jug over the fence and you can fill it partway and throw it back over?" 

That was not an option.  For the first time in my long tenure on this planet, I was refused entry into my own country.

One mile later, I found yet another rock crossing I had to portage, a long portage, on the Mexican side.

The following day I rounded a bend and saw a water tower on the U.S. side, so I docked to investigate.  Amazingly, I found myself no more than a quarter mile from Highway 281 and the small town of La Paloma, Texas, where I not only was able to get water but anything else I needed as well.  Also, I phoned Jesse Bogan, who had promised to pick me up at the gulf, to tell him exactly when I would be arriving.  He said he had received permission from his editor to paddle the Brownsville to Boca Chica section of the river with me, or the final fifty-five miles, so we made plans for a rendezvous in Brownsville two days later.

In those two days, I portaged several more rock crossings and made friends with a number of Border Patrol agents from the Brownsville sector.  One guy, a native of Rio Grande City, lamented the changes in the river since his boyhood.  He said he used to drink the water right out of the river, but now he wouldn't even eat a fish from it.  He found it unbelievable that I hadn't had any problems with Mexicans the entire way, commenting, "I would have thought they'd have killed you several times by this far."

Just before noon on March 3rd, I arrived at Gateway Bridge in downtown Brownsville, and seeing a Border Patrol vehicle parked above, angled the boat toward it.  The agent, Pete Lozoya, hurried halfway down to the boat to talk.  When he heard what I was doing, he offered the use of his cell phone so I could call Jesse's cell phone to see if he had arrived.  Remarkably, Jesse was a mere two blocks away, having just arrived from Laredo.  While Pete and I were talking, a man joined us because while walking across the bridge, he had seen my canoe and came to inquire "if it were legal" to canoe on the river.

Jesse brought along a newspaper photographer to shoot pictures, and Pete guided them to a better landing back upriver while I paddled upstream to meet them.  While I was reorganizing the gear to make room for Jesse, the photographer allowed me to use her cell phone to call my favorite person on the planet, my dear Aunt Sally, and I think this short conversation rated as the high point of the many wonderful conversations I enjoyed on this long river trip.

We still had one more rock crossing to pass, and about five miles after Jesse joined me, we reached it.  The easier carry would have been on the Mexican side, but I saw two B.P. vehicles parked above it on the Texas side so we docked there and started carrying the gear up a trail leading to the access road.  The agents hadn't seen us approaching, and once they saw us carrying gear, they hastened over to investigate.  The two senior agents were on horseback, and the two junior agents in the vans looked through all the gear we had brought up, then accompanied me to the canoe to check through all the gear we had yet to unload.  Then both Jesse and I had to produce identification, and one agent did a criminal check on us.  During all this, I noticed that there was no easy way back into the river below the dam.  One possibility involved carrying down steep rocks and the second involved dropping the gear and ourselves down a twelve-foot vertical ledge. 

Suddenly, one of the senior agents told the junior agents to carry us to an easier access a mile away.  The mood of the encounter changed radically, and as we loaded the gear and the canoe into the back of the van, all the agents began offering suggestions for camping possibilities down the river.  All six of us moved from the dam to the easy access, the two men on horseback trailing the two vehicles.  Once we had put the canoe back in the river, the two horsemen trailed us down river to make sure we found the best camp, and during the night they came by periodically to make sure we were doing o.k. 

By the way, that camp was the single best site I had all the way from Amistad to the Gulf.

The river still has a little current down that far, though the flow, which had been 1,700 CFS at Los Ebanos, was now a mere 300 CFS.  Headwinds cause large waves nearly every afternoon.  We were able to do twenty miles each day, but if we took a paddling break while in the boat, the canoe abruptly stopped moving forward.

For almost two weeks before I reached this section, Border Patrol agents had been warning me to expect a heavy presence of Mexican military along the river between Matamoros and the gulf, but I hadn't seen any at all.  On our second day below Brownsville, we came upon three utility workers who were fishing on the Mexican side, and one, while driving me to the store in the large company truck explained why.  The military had pulled out the week before.  He told me two Americans from Tennessee had been murdered near the very store where I shopped, and although the official explanation had been that the shooting was an accident, the locals believed the Americans were in the drug trade.  Their murders, just two more in a continuing series of violent acts in Matamoros, had prompted Mexico City to send in the military.

When I told Jesse the story and remarked that I was disappointed not to have seen and talked with the soldiers, he gave me his stock reply which he offered in response to many of my opinions: "Bowden, you've been drinking too much river water."

I had expected the final section of the river to be remote, but that wasn't the case.  A Mexican side highway parallels it for much of the way.  When the utility worker drove me to the store, I was amazed to find two hotels and two stores within three hundred yards of our landing on the river.  On the U.S. side, we frequently heard farming vehicles, and on the next to last day passed a string of riverside homes.  On the Mexican side, fishing shacks are a common sight in the last fifteen miles before the river's mouth. 

At our next to last camp, just before we were going to turn in for the night, two Border Patrol boats, running the river with the use of night vision goggles, passed  They saw our camp and returned to interrogate us.  At first, the tenor of the conversation was not warm, and one agent seemed particularly upset because Jesse had snapped a picture as they were landing.  Slowly, however, they warmed up to us, and I counted this encounter as yet another positive one with the Border Patrol.

By the time we reached the final camp, six miles away from Boca Chica, the smell of the sea was strong, and its proximity had changed the riparian landscape significantly.  Few trees remained, and we could see for miles in any direction.  The river had grown wide, about 400 feet.

The next morning we rounded a bend about an hour out of camp and heard the heavy sound of ocean surf, and in the distance we could see the lighthouse at Bagdad.  The river still makes a very long bend, going three miles around to proceed one mile toward the gulf, but clearly we were quickly running out of land.

At 11 a.m. on the morning of Day 70, we arrived at the mouth of the river, and the hard charge of the incoming tide forced me to line the last 40 yards.  While Jesse hitchhiked back to Brownsville to get the truck, I moved the gear up the beach to the hard packed sand and tried not to reflect too much on the end.

I knew then I was going to miss the trip for the rest of my life.  Now all that remains is to go back to Amistad Dam and float the thirteen miles I missed between the dam and the international bridge at Acuña.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: 

I wish to extend my deepest appreciation to "Pecos" Jack Richardson for the use of his Tour de Tejas mileage log which details the distances between roughly eighty points along the river.  Since I had a river map only for the first two sections, this log proved invaluable.  In fact, I can't conceive how I could have functioned without it.  Sometimes we do a little thing for ourselves but it becomes a large thing for someone else.  Such was the case with Jack's log for me.  I always knew where I was only because of his work. 

Most of all, I would like to thank Louis Aulbach, not only for suggesting the idea of posting these reports on his website, but also for going to all the trouble of typing the handwritten ones.  Because of Louis' work and idea, my family, friends, and colleagues were able to follow my progress and rest easier knowing I was safe.  I suspect I'm going to embarrass him when he reads this, but I think Louis was the single biggest help of any person involved in any way with the trip, and the trip was a much richer experience for me due to Louis' involvement, inspiration, and sage advice.  He was the one person who best understood the scope of the trip, the dangers, the necessity of doing a lot of research beforehand, and the logistical problems.  He offered countless helpful suggestions and keen insights.  Though I usually boat alone, I consider Louis as my river guide, not just for his books, but for all the wisdom he has shared with me in our e-mail correspondence. I'm honored to have Louis as my river mentor.

Finally, Pete and Linda Billings of Langtry are -no simpler way to put it-two of the greatest friends any person could be blessed to have.  They kept and maintained my car for eight weeks while I was on the river, drove 120 miles roundtrip into Del Rio for me, fed me countless times, assisted in getting my gear up from and back to the river (not just on this trip but on nearly every trip), as well as offered their warm companionship and interesting conversation.  And for those of you who don't know Pete, if you can get him to open up, that man knows more about the river than the rest of us combined.  He's been running it since 1947.  I'm not suggesting everyone invade Pete and Linda's privacy, but if you happen to be in Langtry and you go out the county road leading from the Visitor's Center to the river and you see a very young looking 89 year-old man working outside the last house on the right, the nicest home for many miles in any direction, say hi to Pete for me, and he may treat you to some fascinating stories about his long life along the river.  That man is a national treasure!