Of Rivers & Storms: From New Orleans to the Rio Grande
By Tony SmithMy friend, the Mississippi, has been good to me. I have followed the famous first diver to enter the dark currents of that river, James B. Eads, to some minor fortunes and have lived alongside it, hearing the great thump of ship’s propellers passing in the night. Standing atop a levee during the usual high water of its Spring flood stage, the brown water boiling at my feet on one side and my rooftop far below on the other side, a tiny Lilliputian in awe of immensity.
Once, working in that strong flood current, I went to the aid of a stricken Greek freighter, after another diver had been killed in the attempt. Rivers need be reckoned with, and each has its own personality, be it the Salt, Hassayampa, Gila, Colorado, Rio Grande — giving life — and sometimes taking it away.
So it was with some preparation that I made ready to swim the Rio Grande. Once again seeking the rewards given by rivers, I had spied a number of deadfalls opposite my camp near Socorro, New Mexico, and some hundred miles north of where it becomes the U.S. border with Mexico. Deadfalls are piles of driftwood washed up on riverbanks, and I hoped that my swim might be rewarded in finding the rare bah-ko wood, wood for the artists of the Pueblo Nation to fashion images of their deities, the Kachina dolls. Since leaving New Orleans a few days earlier, it became apparent that I could not return there. Upon my departure, Hurricane Katrina had arrived.
A return to old livelihoods was in order, and in this case I would metamorphose to my former state as Indian Trader, wood, mineral and stone prospector along with other items to trade for Indian art. There is not a lot of cash to be so generated, the real pay is in camp-outs and exploring spectacular country and seeing again old friends among the Hopi, Zuni, Santo Domingo and other tribes who consider the fork-tongue paleface lies to be the worst sort of communication breakdown — something I experienced with regularity in working in the white-man’s world I had just departed.
But a hurricane had hit, it was the truth, so I was for the moment excused from that world. WOW! Mountains, again! I had a marvelous bus stored near Skull Valley, Ariz., and (hi-diddly-dee) a nomad’s life for me!
The Socorro locals advised me against swimming the Rio Grande as a dangerous undertaking, warning that two rafters had recently drowned when their raft overturned in the current and they were entangled in submerged barbed-wire. The embankment along the river was a uniform five feet, so I hacked several steps down to the turbulent waters, rather than jump into the swirling brown unknown.
I expected to be carried downstream for some distance before gaining the far shore, there to find a way to climb out and so investigate the deadfalls atop the banks. Gingerly testing the waters with one flipper, I discovered it to be only inches deep at the edge, and splashing full-length into the current I began to thrash with all my might, seeking the deep torrent of my imaginings, only to find myself beached on a sandbar.
Surprised and a bit relieved, I waded the remaining thirty yards of ankle-deep water to the far side. Surveying the deadfalls, I found two pieces of bah-ko, my reward for not having jumped from the riverbank.
On the banks of the Colorado somewhere north of Yuma, Ariz., I relocated from a first campsite to another near what appeared to be a recent rock-avalanche, figuring by the size of the boulders that it would be some time before another such rockslide might occur. The nearby cliffs afforded morning shade from the merciless sun. The night before I had made camp on a small, low-lying peninsula jutting out into the river, and after a swim and a meager supper, I had climbed into my bunk. Sometime after midnight, I was awakened by a loud bang announcing a black void against the starry sky, a cloud and winds advancing toward me from upriver. Like Godzilla walking on multiple lightening bolts, the master of this domain, urging swift departure for higher ground.
Beyond the Colorado is the Gran Desierto, that strip of Sahara-class sand dunes that separates the river from what’s called the Imperial Valley of California, or “Californy” as another wave of refugees from the 1930s Oklahoma dust-bowl might have called it. I put on a Woody Guthrie tape, pondering the word “Imperial.” The name was probably given by some past imperious patrone of a truck-farm empire, cracking his whip over the peon lettuce pickers. Appropriately, I wear sandals, white linen and a broad sombrero, but I doff the sombrero while driving, not wanting undue attentions from the Border Patrol.
I am aware of an intense cross-wind when my small pickup truck is suddenly pushed almost to the sands bordering the white ribbon of concrete that serves as the highway across these constantly moving dunes.
“Hard rudder to port,” I say aloud while compensating for the sudden blast, while the rattle of airborne sand and a moment of zero visibility inclines me to slow down, just short of a collision with a semi-truck that has slowed to a crawl.
Vision is deteriorating in a strange, rosy glow in gusts of sand as I crawl along, as concerned for the passing devil-may-care monster Hummers and the like who may have radar guidance, for all I know.
The semi’s tailgate seems to be leaning with the wind, when I see it between the gusts of sand. May this be the moment that the desert has chosen to re-claim the highway? Then as suddenly as it began, the wind is gone. Mariah! They call the wind ... Noting a new incandescent sparkle in my sand-blasted windshield, I breath a sigh of relief. I’ll make a pit-stop in El Centro, hub of the Imperial Valley.
Donald Brown and I, two junior high school kids seeking work on summer vacation, had arrived in El Centro in the blazing 110-degree heat, having hitch-hiked over from the soft life of suburban southern California to work alongside children, teenagers and adults of Mexican families employed there. Don knew the ropes, having worked there the summer before.
We were a curiosity to our soon-to-be friends of the fields. Child-labor laws prevented our working in any normal channel at 15, but did not affect children without visas or their parents, the non-persons of foreign poverty, and the life-blood of California’s many truck farms.
I learned some Spanish, and learned great respect for those dark peasants’ capacity for hard, skilled hand-labor. I was also cognizant of their mostly sunny dispositions on what much of the world would consider to be the very bottom of the economic ladder. Being that they were in large part of Indian blood, I had no idea of what their distant tribes may have suffered, as is fairly well documented with the tribes in the now USA.
We bathed in irrigation ditches, drank cheap wine with our new friends, and once saw a worker, bitten by a desert sidewinder rattlesnake, be bled, tourniquet-ed and laid atop a truckload of tomato stakes and bound for, it was said, the hospital. Our friends ate the sidewinder.
No longer do I seek the tomato fields, and passing through the Imperial Valley like some refugees before my time, I have a job offer in San Diego to investigate. Hurricane Rita has just slammed the Cajun coast, and Wilma is on the way. The Louisiana Governor is saying to we the departed: “Don’t come back.” I cannot raise anyone in New Orleans, all circuits are down.
The San Diego job fizzles; someone offering peon wages to clean yacht hulls in an area reputed to have the highest cost of living in the country. People retire from there to Bahrain, no doubt. Over a beer, I watch black refugees from Katrina on TV being characterized as the nation’s poor. Most people I know of any color who have lost their homes with all their possessions, car and employment would certainly fall into that category. I head up to Big Sur for some jade prospecting, then back to my bus in Arizona.
The Hassayampa is a much-storied river originating in the Bradshaw mountain range. From there it plunges through deep gorges in the high plains and goes down, down to the cactus-forested desert around Wickenburg to flow eventually into the Gila, that other fabled river of the Apache country.
Hassayampa gold still attracts prospectors, and I have met a few who make a living of sorts from it. Pauline Weaver, whose name may have encouraged this mountain man to explore solo into the lands of the Tonto Apaches, found nuggets as big as his fist along the Hassayampa. The miners who followed shot Indians on sight, they returned fire, and many a blood-bath ensued.
In more recent times, some ranchers went to rob a prospector, he ambushed them, killed one and wounded another of the cowboys before being himself killed. The prospector’s boy got away, and one cowboy went to prison, while another rode down to old Mexico.
The river’s history is a bloody one, and while seeking the illusive bah-ko along its banks, I am very quiet. By stealth, one can encounter an abundance of wildlife, and if there might be other people in those woods, I would prefer to see them before they might see me. The Great Spirit has seen fit to provide me a handsome load of bah-ko, and suddenly I’m wood-rich but gasoline and groceries poor, and it’s a long trip to fried-bread country, some two hundred miles away.
In Prescott, the Arizona food-stamp people tell me I cannot apply; their guidelines require that I was IN New Orleans when the storm struck — where most refugees were not. Hunger is irrelevant. Then FEMA comes to my rescue with a thousand-dollar check. I take my friends to dinner in Yarnell. I finally get a call from New Orleans saying my house there is intact but the neighborhood is devastated.
In the ideal Techie world, I might clone myself and be in ‘Frisco, Bahia, Blue Spruce Mountain, Key Marathon and Naw’lins simultaneously, while writing as many pieces. Great bombs containing no fission would thwart hurricanes, G.E. would reverse the ice-pack meltdown, providing good skiing into Mexico.
Deep mines would neutralize earthquake faults, and Brown & Root would vacuum off the hydrocarbons to make room for more, while charging we consumers a utility bill for the Ozone. The Apache Chief Victorio gazes out at me from his picture on the wall. Let us pray.
MG
