The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  The guy was speaking my language.

  This is why, after a five-hour evening drive from El Paso through the shimmering blood-meridian expanse of West Texas, then a morning of sorting gear, meeting and greeting, and bouncing in a shuttle van through the ocotillo-and-yucca high desert of Big Bend National Park, I found my heart droop upon catching sight of a sag of umber water, its banks choked with cane. Great river? It looked more like a polluted tidal lagoon in Flushing, Queens. The put-in was at the foot of a boat ramp of bulldozed mud. An empty beer bottle, properly hurled, would have made it over to the Mexican side.

  At the edge of this slough sat a flotilla of 12 canoes, 1 kayak, and a supply raft. The lead guide, John LeRoy, a ropy, leathery dude with a gray beard and ponytail, was busy rigging the boats. Eventually, he gathered everyone for an orientation speech—safety, paddling and rigging technique, chain of command. He brought up the urination routine (“Pee in the river, whenever possible. Dilution is the solution to pollution”), but said he’d address the poop question later. Something about LeRoy’s edgy forbearance seemed to say New York City, and, sure enough, he was from Elmhurst—né Jean-Yves, the son of French immigrants. His father had been a waiter in the theater district. LeRoy had worked blue-collar jobs all over the country, including making tubular sleeves for die-casting foundries at a factory in Milwaukee. In 1996, he quit, moved to Terlingua, Texas, and, having never before worked on a river, set out to become a guide. He’d met his wife, also a river guide, on the Middle Fork of the Salmon. “This is blue-collar work, too, but it’s awesome,” he said. “Everywhere you go, there’s water.”

  We were a few miles upriver of Boquillas Canyon, where the river cuts through the limestone fortress of the Dead Horse Mountains, by the Sierra del Carmen. That’s the stretch we were heading for—four days, three nights, just 33 miles, in one of the most protected sections of the Rio Grande. The water flow was low, the workload light, the dangers few, the rapids negligible. This was a commercial guided float trip, cosseted and catered. Still, we’d be out of touch and off the grid. Four days without cellular coverage can lead to palpitations and debilitating night sweats. So can scorpions and rattlesnakes.

  For centuries, Boquillas Canyon was considered impregnable, by boat anyway. There is no record of anyone ever having navigated it when this territory belonged to Spain. In the nineteenth century, numerous survey parties, daunted by the prospect of big rapids and no escape, didn’t venture past the entrance. Three Confederate deserters claimed to have floated from El Paso to Brownsville, in 1861, in a pair of lashed-together dugout canoes but left no description of the Big Bend canyons, which would have represented a noteworthy test. In 1899, a boating expedition led by Robert Hill, an officer for the US Geological Survey, set out to explore the canyons. “Every bush and stone was closely scanned for men in ambush,” he wrote afterward. The country apparently teemed with bandits, the most fearsome of them a Mexican named Alvarado, who was known as Old White Lip, because his mustache was half-white and half-black. The Mexicans on Hill’s expedition were supposed to kill Alvarado if they encountered him, but, at some point, they floated right past him, without realizing who it was, as he watched from the bank with a baby in his arms. Maybe he’d shaved off the mustache. Hill and his men found the going in Boquillas less arduous than expected, and filled in a new section of the map.

  One of our guides was named Alvarado—Austin Alvarado. No relation: his parents were from Guatemala. Alvarado had recently returned from a trip led by a 29-year-old filmmaker named Ben Masters; they’d paddled, and ridden horses and mountain bikes, along the Texas border, from El Paso to the Gulf, for a documentary Masters was making, called The River and the Wall. Masters, a wry, redheaded horseman with a telegenic Texas drawl, was on this trip, too, along with the film’s producer and another cameraman. This time, strictly speaking, Alvarado was a guide and Masters a client. Another client was Colin McDonald, the one who’d done the source-to-sea trip in 2014, and who was now working on endangered-species policy for the Texas state comptroller’s office, having capitulated to the looming extinction of his own species, Reporterus localus.

  All told, there were 20 guests and 4 guides. Reicher, who had his daughter and his son along (one a recent graduate of Dartmouth, the other headed there next fall), made introductions. As people paired up, Udall, unaccompanied by staff or spouse, chose me as his stern man. He is 69 years old, of medium build, and had on a long-billed sun hat, sunglasses, thick sunblock, a long-sleeved fishing shirt tucked into khaki-colored quick-dry pants, and Teva sandals: no Amazing Feets, my bowman. He had a Jimmy Stewart aw-shucks air about him and a way of working my first name into every other sentence, but he wasn’t above having a beer on the water or sharing cold-eyed appraisals of his colleagues on Capitol Hill. He is a liberal-voting Democrat with a lifetime score of 96 percent from the League of Conservation Voters, but has some sensitivity to the needs of constituents trying to make a living off the land in the arid West. He’d spent a lot of time outdoors through the years. He’d been an instructor for Outward Bound, in college, and every summer he spends a week or two backpacking in the wilderness of the Wind River Range, in Wyoming. (His cousin—and longtime traveling companion in the Winds—Randy Udall died there five years ago, on a solo hike.)

  Udall began to tell the story, over his shoulder, of his family and its roots in the Church of Latter-day Saints. One great-grandfather, David King Udall, was a Mormon bishop and a polygamist, who went to prison for perjury. (He’d lied when Mitt Romney’s great-grandfather was being investigated for polygamy; his bail was posted by Barry Goldwater’s father.) A great-great-grandfather, John Lee, who had 19 wives, was one of the leaders of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in 1857, in which a Mormon militia murdered a party of settlers in southwest Utah; Lee was the only one executed for the crime.

  The family eventually made its way toward the political mainstream, as the West fell under the sway of Washington. Mo Udall, Tom’s uncle, was a liberal congressman who ran for president, in 1976. Mo’s son, Mark, spent six years in the Senate. Tom’s father, Stewart Udall, was secretary of the interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. “LBJ bullied my dad,” Udall said. “He considered him a Kennedy guy.” (Stewart had supported Kennedy over Johnson in 1960.) “But my dad had a great relationship with Lady Bird.” As a Mormon with deep roots in the Southwest and a dam-happy constituency at home in Arizona, Stewart Udall was constitutionally and politically inclined to develop natural resources, rather than preserve them. “I was born with a shovel in my hand,” he liked to say. But his adventures outdoors and his friendship with Rachel Carson and other environmentalists made him increasingly receptive to opposing arguments, and he wound up presiding over the federal government’s most prolific spree of land and species protection, including the Wilderness Act, the Endangered Species Preservation Act, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

  The senator and I were getting the hang of our boat. It was an Old Town canoe, almost 17 feet long and piled high with gear. We were approaching the old mining village of Boquillas del Carmen, on the Mexican side. Udall called out “Hola!” to some men squatting on the bank with a skiff that they employed to ferry people back and forth across the river, at $5 a head. The Boquillas Crossing, at a shallow and slack stretch of the river, has long been a port of entry. The Border Patrol shut it down in 2002, after the attacks of September 11. This devastated the village, which, on the Mexican side, is about four hours away from the nearest paved road. In the absence of tourism, some hundred remaining residents scraped by for a decade. In 2013, the US opened the crossing again, allowing Big Bend visitors to go over to Boquillas for the day or the night, and Mexicans to go to the other side to sell souvenirs—or to retrieve grazing cattle that might have strayed there.

  A little farther downstream, a stretch of fast water steered the boats toward a cut bank and some strainers (as midstream downed limbs and trees are called), and LeRoy pulled up on a gravel bar—Mexico—to supervise,
while a vaquero in reflector shades and a backward ball cap sat sentry on a burro. “Buenas tardes,” the senator said.

  “Everyone has a river story,” Udall told me. His had to do with a Grand Canyon trip he took with his father, when he was a teenager, in June 1967. As a congressman from Arizona, and then as interior secretary, Stewart Udall had for many years supported two controversial projects in the Grand Canyon: proposed dams in Marble and Bridge Canyons, which would have turned long sections of the Grand Canyon into reservoirs. Eventually, Congress killed the dams. Soon afterward, Udall and his family went on a raft trip in the Grand—what he called his “ride on the wild side.”

  Tom Udall told me, “My dad wanted, as he put it, to ‘let the canyons speak for themselves.’” For the first time, in that wild place, Stewart Udall came to appreciate why his opponents in the dam debates had felt so strongly that the river ought to be left alone. You had to see it to want to save it. He published an article soon afterward taking himself to task for his support of the dams. That year, he also traveled to upstate New York and paddled a canoe with Robert Kennedy in the Hudson River Derby, to promote the pending Wild and Scenic Rivers legislation. It passed the following year. The act now covers more than 12,000 miles of rivers and streams, including two stretches of the Rio Grande—the Lower Canyons and Boquillas. Now his son wanted to hear what this canyon had to say to him.

  And here we were. The walls closed in—steep, streaked limestone cliffs with a terra-cotta tinge, pocked high and low with dark openings big and small, made by waterfalls during an era, post–Ice Age, when these precincts were lush. The water, clearer here, took on the colors of the cliffs, and of the salt cedars that crowded the shore. The air had a prehistoric hush, except for the dip of paddles in the current and the tuneful descending song of the canyon wren.

  The first night’s camp, called Puerto Rico, was Mile 8, river right, a broad floodplain of sand, stones, and grass. Puerto Rico was in Mexico. (After September 11, Americans were not supposed to pull ashore, much less spend the night, on the Mexican side, but in recent years the authorities have relaxed a bit.) We set up a bucket brigade to offload the accoutrements of our portable hotel: folding tables and chairs, four-burner range, Dutch oven, propane tanks, coolers, water jugs, dozens of duffel-size dry bags, tents, and camping mattresses known as paco pads. You can carry a lot more in a boat than in a backpack. The laws of flotation allow for comfort and encourage excess. As the guides worked, the guests scattered to claim sites to pitch their tents. Dry bags spilled out domestic consolations: clean clothes, toiletries, pillows, headlamps. You could hear some light argument among spouses and siblings amid the clickety-clack of tent poles. LeRoy shooed away some grazing cattle and used a rake to remove cow dung from the prime tent spots. Udall took over for a while. Roosevelt said, “Someone has to get a picture of the senator shoveling shit.”

  Roosevelt, a 75-year-old investment banker, who served in Vietnam with the Navy SEALs, was dressed like Udall, but with a Stetson hat and a red bandanna around his neck. He had a radio-friendly baritone and a solicitous air. A lifelong conservationist and Republican, by inheritance and practice, he is among those in his party who are dismayed by Trump yet are still striving, against diminishing odds, to find some workable common ground. He’s the kind of environmentalist who can acknowledge and regret the occasionally invasive and inflexible nature of a federally enforced regimen. Nonetheless, the rollbacks and predations of this administration appall him.

  In 1903, Roosevelt’s great-grandfather, as president, established the National Wildlife Refuge system, with the designation of Pelican Island, in Florida—the first instance of the federal government putting aside land for wildlife. As it happens, one of the first sections of the border wall was scheduled to be built on a national wildlife refuge in the lower Rio Grande, the Santa Ana, one of the region’s most crucial habitats for migratory birds. Last year, contractors for the Department of Homeland Security arrived there to drill test holes. Just upriver last summer, at the National Butterfly Center, a privately owned refuge, a staff member discovered a crew of workers, sent by US Customs and Border Protection, on the center’s property, clearing brush and chopping down trees, in preparation for the wall, which would strand two-thirds of the center’s land on the “Mexican” side of the wall. The butterfly center has sued the federal government. “We understand that not everyone in the country may be as interested in butterflies or in the environment as we are,” the head of the center told the Texas Observer. “But everyone should care when the government thinks it can do whatever it wants on your private property.”

  This is one of the reasons that the Trump administration has been eyeing federal lands. Thanks to a 2005 Patriot Act provision—the REAL ID waiver—federal agencies were able, under the guise of national security, to ignore environmental and historic-preservation laws in building hundreds of miles of border fencing during the Bush administration. Earlier this year, a lawsuit challenging the waiver, filed by environmental groups and the State of California, came before a federal judge in San Diego, Gonzalo Curiel. Curiel, you’ll recall, was the judge in the Trump University case whom Trump, during his campaign, had called “a hater of Donald Trump” who “happens to be, we believe, Mexican.” This time, Curiel sided with Trump.

  Yet, last month, Congress, in its $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill, essentially blocked the building of a wall through the Santa Ana refuge—for now, anyway. The bill provided hundreds of millions of dollars to enhance existing fencing and to reinforce levees on both sides but mandated a three-mile gap. (For patrollers, this is the busiest section of Texas’s southern border; they apprehended more than 137,000 people crossing there last year, 23 times more than they did in the bigger but far less populous sector of the Big Bend.) Other wildlife refuges along the river were not spared. The South Texas stretch of the Rio Grande was the most affected. Still, Congress provided nowhere near the funds Trump had requested, and so in recent weeks he has started talking about deploying the military to the border, or raiding the military’s budget to fund a wall. On April 3, he announced that he was calling in the National Guard, though, strictly speaking, he doesn’t, as president, have the power to do so.

  The kayak on the trip, which a few of us took turns paddling, was one of the vessels that had conveyed McDonald from source to sea, a few years before. It still bore traces of the messages that his wife had written all over it, in indelible ink, to keep him company. Lean, bearded, fervid, and quick-spoken, McDonald had brought along some books about the river for people to look through before dinner. He also had a photocopy of Reicher’s 1977 journal, in a freezer bag. He seemed to know more about the current state of the Rio Grande than anyone. “The Colorado, always the Colorado—it’s like the pretty girl,” he said. “The Rio Grande isn’t seen, treated, or valued as a river. My wife’s from Brownsville, and I introduced her to the Rio Grande. People think, The river is dirty, it’s poverty, it’s disease.” He was involved in efforts to address various ills, but, in light of the obstacles (and in spite of his enthusiasm), he did not evince much hope. “We have nineteenth-century laws, twentieth-century infrastructure, and twenty-first-century problems,” he liked to say. His focus, in the short term, was finding ways to get kids on the water, to introduce them to its glories, such as they are, and to begin to restore awareness of it, from the ground up.

  He pointed to the shrubs that clung to the base of the steep cliff: candelilla, a source of wax used in the production of lip balm, candles, religious figurines, and chewing gum. A hundred years ago, there was a Great Wax Rush here, with factories on both sides of the river, but now it’s a small-time affair. He described how people on the Mexican side rip the shrubs out of the soil, boil them with sulfuric acid in vats at a camp downstream, skim the wax off the surface, and then transport it by donkey out of the canyon, up to the mesa, and into Boquillas. On a good day, a candelillero can produce about $10 worth of it. “It’s either that or running a ferry,” McDonal
d said.

  That night, after dinner (tilapia), flashes strobed above the canyon’s southern walls. “Heat lightning,” someone said, as someone usually does, and there arose a debate about whether there really is such a thing. The wind changed direction and began honking downriver. The camp seemed to be blowing apart. Then came hot pods of rain. I was determined to sleep under the stars, but after an hour of being blasted by sand, amid a light show of indeterminate origin and consequence, I gave in, and Ben Masters and I set up a tent in the dark. As we lay down, he barked, “Scorpion!” We began thrashing around, our headlamps berserking until my beam found a pale spider the size of a silver dollar, which he’d brushed from his leg. Masters got it with his water bottle, and, with the tent flaps slapping around in the wind, we settled down to a night of fitful sleep.

  A river trip is a comedy of manners that commences each day with the sheepish, intermittent parade to the groover. The groover is the name of the makeshift portable latrine, which is typically set up at some remove from camp, out of sight and yet often with a stunning outlook, to make up for the flies and the lack of a stall door. It is called the groover because the body of the toilet is an old ammunition can stood on its side—on a wilderness river, you must pack everything out, including human waste, and an ammo can, being sealable and unbreakable, is ready-made—and, when one sits on it, one winds up with a groove on each cheek of one’s rear end. Usually, nowadays, a toilet seat is placed atop the opening, to moderate the experience. Still, the old moniker pertains, as does the ritual of campers competing, without demonstrating that they are doing so, to be the first, or at least among the first, to visit the groover, each day after dawn.

  Typically, there is a sign indicating that the groover is occupied—a paddle, or a bandanna on a bush. On the Rio Grande, this was a smaller ammo can, like a lunch box, which contained paper, hand cleanser, and (for the lucky camper on groover detail) latex gloves. The smaller box’s visible presence, in a designated spot en route to the groover, indicated that the facility was free. The sight of someone carrying a lunch box to the shit box, and the experience of cheerfully passing a fellow boater on the way to and fro (perhaps with a tip of the hat and a “G’morning, ma’am”), become so commonplace that, by day three, any stigma surrounding the procedure is gone. The groover unites us all.