Journey to the Edge of Texas
A Memoir of Love, Travel, Natural Beauty, Writing, and One Man's Victory Over Manic Depression
By Carlton Leatherwood
Chapter 1
First Journey
Those were the days, the ones in which I roamed and romanced Texas--despite serious mental illness.
Chaps slapped cacti.
With J-strokes, our canoe rounded bald cypress knees.
Awesome canyons called.
Then I was surrounded by tamer walls and introduced to Monet and to Imax.
And the old term for a girl friend--squeeze? Well, we breathed new life into it. With mountaintop kisses, we squeezed every drop of crimson out of splendid sunsets, later to stumble down rocky paths in the dark.
At the same time, I and the medical profession were stumbling down a rocky path toward a better treatment for manic depression. But the mania came less often then. Thoughts about it--the horrors of waking nightmares--trailed in river wakes and desert duets.
My Texas odyssey began on a raft in the state's outback. Cruising alongside heavy vegetation, we leisurely paddled the Rio Grande toward Santa Elena Canyon, the quintessential canyon to traverse in Big Bend National Park, 600 miles west of Houston. Naturalist photographer Jim Bones told us to ease up as he began his explanation.
Tamarisk (or salt cedar), a frilly exotic introduced into this country from North Africa for windbreaks and ornamentals, edged the river. Tubular yellow blooms of tree tobacco announced it was spring.
"You'll notice that what we have got here is called a ribbon oasis," Bones said. "It is a linear oasis right along the river. If you go back thirty or forty feet, you're in the desert vegetation since the roots can't get down to the water. From the air it is really beautiful to see. It's just a green ribbon along the river for as long as it flows through the land.
"OK, let's paddle forward again."
Common and giant reed (another import) thickened along the banks. Beyond them spread honey mesquite.
"OK, we can ease off again," Bones said. "What we will do is paddle like that for a little bit and rest, and paddle and rest--eventually, fall asleep. Try to fall into the boat.
"The water we are floating on is all from Mexico," he added. "No water (from the upper Rio Grande) gets past El Paso. Elephant Butte Reservoir north of Las Cruces impounds that mountain snow melt for the cities and irrigation. And then for almost three hundred miles the river is just bone dry. And all this comes in from what is called the Rio Conchos (filled by subtropical rains) in Mexico.
"Let's paddle forward."
Amazingly, a dust storm blew across the river.
"you get a taste for the country this way," Bones said.
The land had been ocean bottom 100 million years ago. Large plumes of lava eventually worked their way up and erupted as volcanoes on the ocean bed. "Let's stop. Turn around and have a look at this," Bones said. "Big blocks split and faulted and lifted up. The lava worked its way through those faults and cracks and spread out on top of the limestone. What we are seeing here is the lava (a red layer). We are getting into the limestone. Around the bend you will see places where the lava was spread out on top of it. The whole event took 50 or 60 million years, so you had sporadic eruptions and then periods of quiet."
It was twelve miles through this geological paradise to the mouth of Santa Elena.
The land had begun to heave during the time of dinosaurs. The largest known flying creature in the world from that time on was a pterosaur with a fifty-foot wingspan. Its bones were discovered in the park in 1972. No other parts of this hairy reptile with wings, named Quetzalcoatlus northropi, after the Aztec god who took the form of a feathered serpent, have appeared anywhere since, but bones of a dozen smaller, similar pterosaurs were found in another part of the park.
Some scientists suggest that pterosaurs became airborne by jumping or falling off cliffs, by dropping from roosting places in trees, or by rising into light winds from the crests of waves. A stronger possibility exists that Quetzalcoatlus may have waited like the vulture each morning for the sun to warm the ground and develop strong thermal updrafts.
That afternoon we pitched camp on a sandbar in the foothills of Mesa de Anguila, ready to embark the next morning into the canyon. Guides set up the kitchen and prepared a campfire meal of steak and fresh vegetables. We got by without tents, the climate pleasant and insects few.
This was the first event in the Texas Music Series of outfitter Far Flung Adventures, based in Terlingua. Although margaritas and Texas country singing enhanced the trip for a fleet of participants, rating one of five river canyons bordering the Big Bend area would, we anticipated, highlight the adventure.
And we were not disappinted. The next day we entered Santa Elena and saw enormous blocks of rock that had peeled off the 1,500-foot walls a million years ago. The cabin-sized boulders lay in our path at the point called Rock Slide.
"The main danger is that you will be swept into a channel that filters out among many rocks," said Steve Harris, a partner in Far Flung. "We call that a sieve. The water is flowiing under the rocks. and you have nowhere to go.
"But channels do get through it (the Slide), so it's like negotiating a maze," Harris continued.
The guides scrambled up a 300-foot rock pile on the Mexican side of the river to chart our course. What they saw was not much changed from what Robert Hill encountered in 1899 when he led a U.S. Geological Survey expedition to become the first man to explore and document all five canyons.
He wrote of the Rock Slide: "The boulders were mostly quadrangular masses of limestone fifty feet or more in height, dumped in a heterogeneous pile, like a load of bricks from a tip-cart, directly across the stream."
In moments we were back in the rafts, headed into the maze. We breathed deeply, and the oarsmen pulled hard as we twisted and scraped through those monster boulders. On an international scale, the difficulty for boatmen and the whitewater thrills for us measured a four of a maximum six. But we did not spill. And spit into calmer water, we could breathe.
A little later we set up camp.
That night, studded with stars this long-ago spring, I snuggled into a sleeping bag, margarita in hand, and listened to country-western singer Steve Fromholz strum. The sleepng bag and I were on a sandbar deep inside the canyon on the Texas side of the river. Fromholz sat near a campfire surrounded by some thirty-five other rapt listeners. On the wings of "I Never Thought I'd Be Chasing You Out Loud" and "I Saw the Feather River Fly." I stared out from that black canyon chasm at the constellation Orion's belt and drifted out into the cosmos and sleep.
For all its hard features, the canyon shelters softness.
Yellow rocknettle, a delicate flower with many stamens, nestles in crannies on flagstone ledges up side canyons. Here too was a side canyon, Fern Canyon, with quiet pools and greenness.
A rock wren trilled.
A cliff swallow glided to its mud nest as the river riffled by our camp.
A burro's bell sounded at dawn as a gentle wind blew in.
The journey with Bones was like a fresh breeze in the fifth year of my incurable illness. I was two manic episodes down an increasingly rough terrain, two hospitalizations toward losing count of them.
In my first encounter on alien soil, paranoia had chugged into the workplace, in the second floor newsroom of The Houston Post. For weeks I had thought that my supervisor, the night managing editor, was trying to fire me. I wrote a memo to his superior, who checked out the assertion. The managing editor replied that I was "as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar."
But my paranoia kept rolling, like an iron wheel downward, toward more serious psychosis. I lost my car in the parking garage of the Galleria, Houston's premier shopping mall. Office bosses' laughter (an hallucination) surrounded me as I hunted the missing vehicle, a white Buick Regal with a T-top. Giving up the hunt, I took a cab to work in a blinding rain, did my job as a general wire editor, and returned late that night when the garage was almost empty. The car had been moved, I feared, and tampered with. I called the Post's legal counsel about the brakes and the mirrors, believing my immediate supervisor was now trying to kill me, although I did not say so out loud.
My mind raced.
Oveta Culp Hobby, commander of the Women's Air Corps in World War II and later the first secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, owned the Post at the time and was chairman of its board. I decided that the villain was trying to kill her, too. I had never talked with Mrs. Hobby, but I had corresponded briefly with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, who had known her in their early days. I would fly to Washington to speak with him.
I raced to Houston Intercontinental Airport.
Villains were in adjoining lanes. A whistle sounded as they passed, (an auditory hallucination). I dumped the car in a no-parking zone at the terminal door, bought a ticket, and walked to the waiting area. My actions were errant enough to cause guards to retrieve a phone number of a cousin-in-law from my glove compartment and call him. He came, sat beside me, and tried to talk me out of the trip. Then a guard frightened me. I heard him say that they (I thought killers) would get me in Atlanta. Finally, a contingent of guards surrounded me as the plane was boarded, and they walked me to an outlying station. My parents, in Beaumont, had been called, and we waited. "He's bright," Jim Nickles, the relative, said. "They usually are," a guard said.
It was the middle of the night when my father and mother retrieved me. I quietly got in their car. They had talked to my general physician, and he had referred them to the psychiatric floor at Hermann Hospital. They drove the dark, deserted streets to the medical center, and hesitated, before taking me in.
I search now for an analogy to the river and my interior journey, and none is found, except in the negative. I rafted 155 miles of the Rio grande to see all five canyons, discovering that the jagged cuts into river's route are the ultimate beauty, the piece de resistance, of that moveable feast.
Jagged cuts to the brain are the antithesis of beauty. The mind--intellect and mood--run ragged for want of a better cliche. Intellect, mood, and fear become bedfellows. Some sufferers find the jags, the mind's explosions, to be exciting highs. I do not. From that night in Hermann Hospital onward, I have never--even in a stretch--found a mental jag comparable to the exhilaration of whitewater rafting.
As with Bone's rafting technique, in this tale we will paddle the natural odyssey forward some, then ease up for the other days of my life and for my psychotic daze.
The story of the river rises swiftly today. It is a spring in Houston that matches the springs of sunshine and mild temperatures and the rebirth of plants on the river. I cannot sit here, with patio doors open to the green shoots of crepe myrtle, and not let my mind wander back.
The Lower Canyons took me east of the park in wilds where few humans stray. Genuine back country.
On a seven-day eighty-three-mile float, the river edge and the arroyos were covered with the profuse blossoms of blackbrush acacia and huisache, shrubs and trees that bees dearly love. In one side canyon, I could see a ladder fashioned from tree limbs and wire leading to a huge honeycomb--men love the bees who love the shrubs.
The canyon landscape resembled a fairy-tale setting. Walls glowed like gold at sunset. At Hot Springs Rapids, class 3-4, thermal springs flowed into a series of pools suitable for warm bathing. Just beyond Lady Finger Bend, turrets rimmed the canyon walls as they would castles, towering above a large expanse of white sand and grass that glistened in the morning sun. Swallows performed a dazzling aerial ballet around their cliff dwellings. And, I swear, I found a tiny people's path among these spangled rock walls--and their stone dance floor. Slanted slightly, it had boulders for seats and places for romantic interludes between jigs.
But this trip through the Lower Canyons was not merely a leisurely, fantastic idyll--it was also tinged with adventure. The danger was telegraphed to us as we entered Upper Madison Falls, where the jagged remains of a canoe poked up from the rocks and made it clear that this was, indeed, a class 4 rapid. We took it gingerly and still ripped the raft's bottom. But a quick repair let us finish our whitewater joy ride through this remote world, where the flora and fauna take odd and beautiful twists of their own. The place is just as much home to the Mexican buckeye, a beautiful form of wheat scented with clusters of purplish-pink flowers, as it is to the javelina, the continent's only native pig.
On a rugged, week-long trek, a good cook adds mightily to the vitality of any exploring party. My guide, Dennis Yount of Big Bend River Tours, fell into the proper category. In fact, as the trip progressed, he achieved the stature of chef. For breakfast he mixed chorizo, a garlic sausage, in scrambled eggs or sliced fresh mushrooms into a ham-and-cheese omelet. He emphasized a fresh larder, serving tender, sweet cauliflower with a T-bone steak. And he touched off one evening meal with an original concoction: baked bananas stuffed with cream cheese and chocolate nuggets.
Ah, how sweet is spring.
No comments:
Post a Comment