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Gone to Texas

an essay by Peter Behrens

in Big Bend: A Wildsam Field Guide. Austin 2022

Nineteenth-century Americans fleeing west to escape debt, misfortune or the law—or following some primal North American urge to be gone–would chalk GTT on the cabin door or a fencepost. Gone to Texas. Gone for good, it meant. Ain’t coming back. Catch me if you can.

We weren’t heading west but south, for the Big Bend. What we were leaving behind was winter.

Summer and fall we worked on trail crews in the Canadian Rockies and paddled our whitewater rivers–the Bow River, the Athabaska, the Kootenay–in sleek, slender 17’ Old Town canoes skinned with Kevlar. Bulletproof boats, almost frictionless; slippery over rocks and shoals. Good tripping canoes. You could carry enough supplies to travel for days.

Canadian rivers were freezing up. Winter was coming down. One night in the King Edward Tavern on Banff Avenue someone said, “Ought to think about Texas. Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande. Way down in the Big Bend. But it’s a hard place to get to.”

An afternoon spent in the Banff Library, studying National Geographic maps. Then another afternoon, in January–a stinging blue afternoon, well below zero, draughts of powder snow feathering off the crest of Mount Rundle--feeding quarters into a payphone on Banff Avenue, and querying national park rangers at their headquarters at Panther Junction, in Big Bend.

Water levels in the river downstream of Boquillas? How cold does it get in February?

The rangers sounded…bored. There weren’t many winter visitors in the least-known of the U.S. national parks. You people come on down, one ranger told us. Plenty of room. Sunshine. Plenty of flow to the river. Come on down.

Great places to get to are nearly always difficult places to get to.

We bought and organized rations for two separate ten-day river trips, ten people per trip. Hungarian bacon in tins. Packaged dense German bread. Cheese. Dried fruit from the Natural Foods Co-op in Calgary. Several dozens of eggs broken into big glass jars. Potatoes, onions, carrots. Coffee, sugar, tea. Everything packed into 5-gallon plastic pails; each pail containing one day’s breakfast, lunch and dinner for ten persons. We loaded five canoes onto a frail, lightweight trailer we’d haul 2000 miles to Big Bend behind a 1952 ¾ ton Chevrolet 3800, a retired farm truck, a type recognizable anywhere on the High Plains as a grainer with its high-sided wooden box for hauling wheat from combine threshers in the fields to elevators in town. It had a 216 c.i. blue-flame six engine, a 4-speed transmission, and had never in all its life been more than a hundred miles from Red Deer, Alberta.

Gone to Texas.

First hour on the road, the trailer blew over just outside Calgary. Found a welder, got more steel welded in for ballast. We crossed the border at Coutts, Alberta/Sweetgrass, Montana and followed blue highways down through Montana and Wyoming. The grainer did not pack enough punch for Interstate speeds. The two of us slept in shifts, and kept driving, smoking cheap cigars, windows cranked down. Traffic thrashing through Denver at rush hour was intimidating. It snowed on Raton Pass.

That sort of travel, in an old truck, across wide-open country, is more like a sea voyage than a post-collegiate road trip in a five-year-old Volvo inherited from Mom. Safe arrival is by no means a given. Wind and weather are factors. We babied the Chevy, changed her oil at Colorado Springs, greased her chassis and ball joints. Nursed her up and over the Raton in second gear. A gas station owner at Las Vegas, New Mexico tried to buy the truck, chasing after us, upping his offer as we were pulling away. Chevy, I learned, is often pronounced tchevy in New Mexico. As in Tchaikovsky.

On Llano Estacado the trailer was bowled over by forty-knot winds buffeting across the yellow plains. The tongue was bent and twisted. We couldn’t possibly right the rig against the power of the wind. So we lashed the whole outfit to a steel highway sign and hunkered down for the night, hoping the boats wouldn’t blow into Oklahoma. Canoes do like to fly.

The people who’d be making the river trip drove themselves to Big Bend from Saskatchewan and British Columbia, or they flew from Key West or Boston to El Paso and took a bus to Alpine or Marathon. My blonde sister flew from Boston and caught the Greyhound at El Paso. At the Sierra Blanca checkpoint the bus was pulled over and everyone aboard questioned by Border Patrol and asked to produce ID’s. Everyone, that is, except my sister, a Canadian who’d been living and working in Boston for a couple of years without any immigration status. They didn’t ask her for any proof of anything. Maybe they could not imagine someone being blonde and illegal.

First step I ever took out of winter: climbing out of the truck in front of Carmen’s Café on San Antonio Street in Marfa, Texas. Eleven o’clock on a mid-February morning. Bright sunshine, and sixty-five degrees.

We put our canoes into the Rio Grande at the head of Boquillas Canyon and took them out ten days later and a hundred miles downstream at a ranch south of Dryden, Texas. We bathed and swam in the river and slept mostly in the open, no tents needed, except one wild night of thunderstorms in San Francisco Canyon. Stretches of the river were green and placid but then there’d be a narrowing, canyon walls closing in and rills of whitewater seething and tumbling. For thousands of years indigenous hunters and travelers had been living, fishing and hunting along that river, but no one can predict what a river will be like at any particular hour on any particular day. Water levels in Big Bend are constantly changing depending on the volume of water released from dams in Mexico. During a thunderstorm, thick streams of rainwater gallop down the side canyons to flood the mainstream. Approaching each set of rapids, we would pull the boats ashore and walk the bank, studying the river and its ways, trying to plot a safe course through the excitement.

February and March in the lower canyons of the Rio Grande was nothing like a Canadian summer, no matter how warm it became. A landscape of browns and purples brushed with the soft green of the tule reeds. The only people we met along the river were vaqueros on horseback. Below Santa Elena canyon we all went ashore to help a vaquero extract a cow sunk up to her belly in river mud.

If you are fortunate enough to live for weeks at a time in country so remote—to live there mostly in the wild--you might find yourself imagining that you are in tune with the country. And maybe you are, a little. The cathedral silence. The flow. The piquant clarity of light in yellow/purple canyons.

Between river trips, we hiked the Chisos Mountains and had some rowdy nights in the Park Bar at Boquillas. There was no port-of-entry then; only a man with a tin flatboat who would row you across the river, a dollar a head. You had to cross with him; as you were expected to hire another man to guide you into the village; it was the way things were done. In the Park Bar in Boquillas there was a Texan with no last name, selling guns, and an old man with a guitar singing norteñoballads, and long after midnight a couple of young vaqueros bronc-riding in the street outside, horse-heels kicking up dust, the young men waving their hats and yi! yi! yi’ ing! for the people from Canada, the people from winter.