pining for the river

Pictures courtesy of my friend S. Green who did the Pecos this spring.

Painted Canyon on the Pecos River, W. Texas

With Thanksgiving coming up it has got me thinking about being on the water.

Most of my holidays, for about 10 years, were spent on the water.  This was during my river guide days.  Easter, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving.  That was how I marked the passing of the year, from one river trip to the next.  The long winter between Thanksgiving and Easter was sometimes broken up by a private trip with friends and semi-regular day trips on Buffalo Bayou in the city.

Now that I don’t do the river guide thing anymore and my river camping buddies have mostly moved away (and with them the various gear spread out amongst us that made the trips possible), I find myself here, and at loose ends, during the holidays.  

I miss being on the river for days at a time, sleeping out under the stars, anticipating and dealing with the weather, being 24/7 out in nature, pooping in the can.  Well, OK, maybe I don’t miss the pooping in the can bit.  

On the short trips, you usually could get away with not having to deal with the weather but if you were going to be gone more than 3 or 4 days, you could count on a change in the weather.    

One trip with friends, on the Pecos, on our second to last night at Painted Canyon, we got rained on.  We watched the lightning come in from the South until it got pretty gusty and the rain started.  It sort of skirted us, coming and going several times.  We got one crack of lightning pretty close that made us all jump.  Everytime you thought it would quit, it would start up again.  Rained like that for four, five hours or so.  We pitched our tent up against a rock wall because we didn’t want to haul all our gear up on top and I woke up in the middle of the night to find about 2” of water in the tent and rapidly rising.  All the rain was pouring off the rock wall and into our tent.  Experienced guides and campers r us.  I finally had to cut a hole in the lowest corner to give the water an exit.  See, only an experienced guide and camper would know to do that. The other two couples didn’t fare much better and we all had our stuff spread out the next morning to dry while we fixed breakfast and broke camp.  Fortunately, in the desert, it doesn’t take long for stuff to dry.

Now you might think that that would have put us all in a terrible mood, but it didn’t.  Life is so real and immediate out there that when the day dawned clear and bright, when we emerged from a night without real shelter from the elementals, we were elated.  We laughed and sang, we gloried in the day and set out on the water again with a light heart.

tinajas further up the side canyon