She's an old river, the Rio Grande, or perhaps you prefer to call her the Rio Bravo like the Mexicans do.  Two countries and three states lay claim to her, but she really belongs to no one - at least not as a continuous river that flows from Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico.  That river, the river that was here before people came in abundant numbers to live along her banks, does not exist anymore.  What we have now are several Rio Grande's, and this is because it becomes nothing more than a trickle in places, perhaps even dries up completely.  Maybe that river never comes alive again, but another one starts in it's place, in the same river bed the ancient river cut so long ago.  See it any way you like, call it what you will, but the river flows again. 

I've visited this river in all three states she flows through.  I've fished the river, hiked along her banks even, in New Mexico.  I've even crawled down the side of the Grand Canyon of the Rio Grande just north of Taos to fish it.  I've hiked along the banks near Albuquerque, and I've visited it south of Elephant Butte Lake near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico where she's hardly a river at all.  At El Paso, she's not much of a river, but she picks up some water southwest of there.  I hiked along her banks in Big Bend National Park, saw her again southwest of there near Del Rio, and then again at Eagle Pass.  By the time she gets there, when she's finished the run through the canyons, she's looking fairly good.

In recent month I've become acquainted with the Rio Grande from Laredo down to the area just south of Westlaco.  I stopped off at a federal bird preserve along the river not far from Progresso, took some pictures, walked along her banks a ways.  And I stopped long enough to notice how her rhythm has changed this far southwest.  No, she's not the same river I've visited in Colorado, or in New Mexico, or even at Ojinaga.  She still moves slow, but she's fairly deep and wide there in the park near Progresso.  In fact, she's beautiful in that setting of trees hanging over her banks, many of them dripping with Spanish moss.  Along the banks I find clothing of Mexicans who forded the river, then stripped off their wet clothes and headed inland in dry clothes.  It's a harsh country there around the river, not at all hospitable.  It's not rugged like in the canyons, but it's brushy and hard to navigate through.  Still, it apparently stops few from coming over.

I sat on a park bench in the beautiful square at San Ygnacio.  High winds made the trees sway back and forth.  I've lived in windy country most of my life, but this is a different rhythm than on the windswept plains of the Oklahoma panhandle.  The wind there hammers you, has a driving rhythm that makes you irritable after a while.  It was hot in San Ygnacio the day I stopped to take pictures . . . but the rhythm was soothing.  Two days later I was again enjoying the rhythm in the valley, on the river near Progresso.  It's different because the rhythm here has a hum to it . . . or maybe it's more like a buzz.  Maybe that's due to the large number of people moving about there.   And they move a lot.

I don't take notes these days, but I don't need to.  I remember things like that - the rhythms, the pulse of a place . . . and everything has a pulse it seems.  I had to get old before I could pick it up.  And on that day last week when I sat on the park bench in San Ygnacio, with the wind giving voice to the trees above me, being old didn't seem like such a bad thing.

PHM, 4/1/08