Big Bend Region, Texas

2017.10

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I've been here at the peak of summer, when no one in their right mind would venture out into the scorching landscape.  A buzzy emptiness envelops everything; even the monsoon washes away nothing and then vanishes.  But just before the season, say late October, when the World Series is tensely playing its final inning, and local die-hards are anxiously hunkered in bars, you can feel the pulse of the land.  The heat has broken, but it's still warm enough to succumb to the magnetism of the river, and it's there, along a powerful line, that you will find the source of the pulse, the lifeblood of a region.

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I've always admired the inelegant way humans have carved out a hold here - just as the Rio Grande has.  The unabashed, unexacting existence of living in a desert steppe.  That, of course, is changing in Marfa.  But the substratal value system remains the same:  where is the water?  In an ecosystem with so little, it has formed so much and is a treasured commodity.  And so now we might ask:  who has the water?

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At some point the river became an international border, and the water, which is always apportioned, began to divide.  I find myself toeing the line of the river.  What does it mean to steep my feet inside a cool, fluid border?  Where the water that soothes my ankles bisects two countries?  Where the water that gives comfort isn't responsible for the disunity but where I feel like maybe it is?  Not responsible as in "having caused," but responsible as in "having been bestowed with" an unsought burden.

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The sun begins to light the Sierra Maderas del Carmen on the opposite side of the river.  A white horse nudges through the reeds and is colored pink in the glimmer of new day.  He bows, takes a drink, and I silently return his message across the tranquil water:  Buenos días... Hello, good morning.