Where the Ghost Bird Sings by the Poison Springs (Cont.)

Outside Magazine February 2002

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	The crossing: the New River from the U.S. slide, flowing in from Mexico

JOSÉ LOPEZ, AN EX-MARINE with a cheerful, steady, slightly impersonal can-do attitude, clerked at the motel where I was staying in Calexico. When I told him that nobody seemed willing to take me on the New River or even to rent me a rowboat, he proposed that I go to one of those warehouse-style chain stores which now infested the United States and buy myself an inflatable dinghy. I asked if he would keep me company, and he scarcely hesitated. "Anyway," he said, "it will be something to tell our grandchildren."

The store sold two-person, three-person, and four-person rafts. I got the four-person variety for maximum buoyancy, selected two medium-priced wooden oars, paid $70, and felt good about the bargain. Iíd prevailed upon José to bring his father over the border from Mexicali; the old man would drive Joséís pickup truck and wait for us at each crossing of the road, always going ahead rather than behind, so that if we had to walk in the heat weíd be sure of which direction to go. If we waved one arm at him, heíd know to drive to the next bridge. Two arms would mean we were in trouble.

I worried about two possibilities. The first and most likely but least immediately serious was that we might get poisoned by the New River. The second peril, which seriously concerned me, was dehydration. Should we be forced to abandon the boat in some unlucky spot between widely spaced bridges, it wouldnít take long for the heat to wear us down. It was supposed to be not much over 110 degrees, so it could have been worse.

José was behind his desk at the motel on the eve of our departure, laboriously inflating the dinghy breath by breath whenever the customers gave him a chance. This was the kind of fellow he was: determined, optimistic, ready to do his best with almost nothing.

At seven the next morning, with Imperial County already laying its hot hands on my thighs, the three of us—José, his father, and I—huddled in the parking lot of a supermarket, squinting beneath our caps while Joséís father stick-sketched in the dirt, making a map of the New River with the various road-crossings that he knew of. We were just north of the spot where the river comes through a gap in a wall that marks the border; across the highway, a white Border Patrol vehicle hunched in the white sand, watching us.

The river was pleasant, really, wide and coffee-colored. We can poison nature and go on poisoning it; something precious always remains.

The first place that the old man would be able to wait for us was the bridge at Highway 98, about a mile due north but four milesí worth of river, thanks to a bend to the west-northwest. The next spot he could guarantee was Interstate 8, which looked to be a good ten miles from Highway 98, if one factored in river bends and wriggles.

Sheep-shaped clots of foam, white and wooly, floated down the river. Still, all in all the water didnít smell nearly as foul as in Mexicali. We dragged the dinghy out of the back of the truck, and José, who from somewhere had been able to borrow a tiny battery-powered pump, tautened his previous nightís breath work until every last wrinkle disappeared. From the weeds came another old man, evidently a pollero—a coyote, or smuggler of illegal immigrants—who laughed at the notion that José and I were going to be literally up Shit Creek.

We dragged our yellow craft down a steep path between briars, and then the stench of the foaming green water was in our nostrils as we stood for one last glum instant on the mucky bank. I slid the dinghy into the river. A fierce current snapped the bow downriver, and I held the boat parallel to the bank as José clambered in. Then, while Joséís father gripped it by the side rope, I slid myself over the stern and felt Joséís trapped breath jelly-quivering flaccidly beneath me. I had a bad feeling. The old man pushed us off, and we instantly rushed away, fending off snags as best we could. There was no time to glance back.

Shaded on either side by mesquite trees, paloverdes, tamarisks, bamboo, and grass, the deep-green river sped us down its canyon, whose banks were stratified with what appeared to be crusted salt. An occasional tire or scrap of clothing, a tin can or plastic cup wedged between branches, and once what I took to be the corpse of some small animal, then became a fetus, and finally resolved into a lost doll floating face down between black-smeared roots—these objects were our companions and guideposts as we whirled toward the Salton Sea, spinning in circles because José had never paddled before in his life.

Every now and then Iíd see us veering into the clutches of a bamboo thicket or some slimy slobbery tree branches, and Iíd drop my notebook or camera and snatch up my oar, which was now caked with black matter (shall we be upbeat and call it mud?). Then woody fingers would seize us, raking muck and water across our shoulders as we poled ourselves away. The first drops on my skin seemed to burn a little bit, but no doubt I was imagining things.

José kept spraying me by accident. There was not much to do about that; certainly I couldnít imagine a gamer or more resolute companion. He was definitely getting tired now, so I laid down my notebook between my sodden ankles and began to paddle in earnest. We were passing a secluded lagoon into which a fat pipe drained what appeared to be clear water. We sped around a bend, and for no reason I could fathom the stench got much worse—whiffs of sewage and carrion, as in Mexicali. I vaguely considered vomiting, but by then we were riding a deeper stretch that merely smelled like marsh again. The waterís green hue gradually became brown, and the white foam, which occasionally imitated the faux-marble plastic tabletops in some Mexicali Chinese restaurant, diluted itself into bubbles. Everything became very pretty again with the high bamboos around us, their reflections blocky and murky on the poisoned water. Occasionally weíd glimpse low warehouses off to the side.

Another inlet, another pipe (this one gushing brown liquid), and then we saw a duck swimming quite contentedly. Black-and-white birds, possibly phoebes, shrieked at us from the trees. I got a beautiful view of garbage snagged under dead branches.

The heat was getting miserable, and my end of the boat, having punched into one bamboo thicket too many, hissed sadly under me, sinking slowly. Since the boat featured several airtight compartments, I wasnít too worried, but I didnít really like it, either. Meanwhile the river had settled deeper into its canyon, and all we could see on either side were bamboos and saltcedars high above the bone-dry striated banks. A wild, lonely, beautiful feeling took possession of me. Not only had the New River become so unfrequented over the last few decades that it felt unexplored, but the isolating power of the tree-walls, the knowledge that the adventure might in fact be a little dangerous, and the surprisingly dramatic loveliness of the scenery all made me feel as if José and I were explorers of pre-American California. But it was so weird to experience this sensation here, where a half-mummified duck was hanging a foot above water in a dead tree! What had slain it?

At midmorning the river, now a rich neon lime, split into three channels, all of them impassable due to tires and garbage. Above us, Joséís father waited at the Highway 98 bridge. I called it quits.

Even after taking a shower my hands kept burning, and the next day José and I still couldnít get the taste out of our mouths. We used up all his breath mints lickety-split; then I went to Mexicali for tequila and spicy tacos. The taste dug itself deeper.

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