A MOMENT AGO the world was a sunny, happy place, full of giant herons gliding like pterodactyls on desert winds and schools of uncountable gar and bass swimming in turquoise pools so clear you could see crawfish walking on the bottom in ten feet of water. A place of exquisitely tortured limestone, river boulders the size of houses, humped black canyons framing pale autumn skies.
But that is all gone now.
In its place is an entirely different reality familiar to civilized people who have taken small boats into wild rivers. Four of us, in two canoes, have entered a stretch of whitewater that we have grossly underestimated. Only one boat has made it through. The other is pinned sideways on a rock, transformed suddenly from a reasonably efficient craft into a fixed part of the river, a small waterfall with tons of water now cascading over it. The 16-foot-9-inch polyethylene Old Town begins, ominously, to bend along its thwarts. There is no budging it. Not even a millimeter.
While watching our expedition mates cling to their canoe, Bill, my sternman, and I now have the leisure to contemplate this predicament.
We would seem to have only one option, and it is not encouraging: abandon the canoe and all of its gear, empty our craft of most of its equipment, and run the remaining rapids with four men in one boat. There is really no other way into or out of these steep rock canyons. Paddlers with worse problems—like severe injuries or the loss of their vessels—are rescued by Border Patrol helicopters, if agents are not otherwise occupied chasing drug runners, coyotes, and other border crossers who tend to crop up in this part of the world.
Our problem lies in the fact that we are, in continental American terms, in the middle of nowhere. More precisely, we are on the Lower Pecos River, in West Texas. You have probably not heard of this particular stretch of the Pecos, the final 60 miles of which runs down to join the Rio Grande on the Mexican border near the town of Del Rio. Most Texans are aware of it only as they encounter it from the Pecos High Bridge on Route 90, where the river, widening before it joins the Rio Grande at Lake Amistad, cuts through a breathtaking limestone canyon. Travelers get out of their cars and take pictures, stunned by one of the most spectacular views in the desiccated wilds of West Texas, wondering where this wide, muscular desert river has suddenly materialized from. And then they move on to San Antonio or Los Angeles or wherever they are headed. Most people who do know the Pecos River know its New Mexican section, 800 miles or more upstream, which originates in the snowy upper elevations of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. This is not that river, in any sense, as you will see. No more than 40 people run the Lower Pecos each year. In many years, far fewer.
There are good reasons for this. The Lower Pecos is surrounded on all sides by private land and is inaccessible to weekend enthusiasts and other river runners who do not have a lot of time on their hands. You are allowed to put your boat in at exactly one place, a tiny cluster of cabins known as Pandale Crossing, and take it out at exactly one place, the high bridge on Route 90—and there are 60 difficult river miles and seven days of paddling in between. There are hardly any people or towns out in this rough, empty stretch of Chihuahuan desert. On nighttime satellite maps, this part of West Texas is one of the darkest areas in the lower 48. There are no public lands here, no national parks or national forests or friendly rangers, no park roads or convenient facilities. The river pierces country dominated by enormous ranches—20,000- and 30,000-acre spreads—that make it a sort of private wilderness, and all the more wild for it. It is a place, alternately, of cataclysmic floods and extreme droughts.
For all its obscurity, the Lower Pecos flows through one of the loveliest and most pristine landscapes in America. Spring-fed and limestone-bottomed, the river has a clarity matched only by its wild tropical color schemes, which would remind you of a Corona beer commercial except that the colors are far more varied. It is both a whitewater river, with dozens of rapids from Class I through Class IV, and a giant aquarium—jammed with spotted gar, catfish, perch, bluegill, and carp—where you can watch a largemouth bass wheel, rise, and hit your fly. The country around it is a sort of museum of Native American history, home to one of the greatest concentrations of ancient rock art in America.
