Take Me to the River by Will Hobbs Page A

like an express train. A few strokes from shore, and it was like I’d hooked onto a cable.
    My heart was buoyant. With that paddle in my hands, it all came back to me—everything I loved about rivers. There’s magic in moving water. Understanding what the water is doing, making those split-second moves you have to make to put yourself in the right place at the right time, you feel in tune with yourself and the whole Blue Planet. This was what I’d come for.
    â€œEverything good?” Rio yelled.
    â€œBetter than that!” I yelled back. “Yee-haw!”
    The river was running so fast, it took us no time at all to round the right-hand turn a mile downstream. We entered the gate of the Lower Canyons, with walls of limestone towering on both sides. My cousin had never been here before, same as me. Together, we were doing something epic, paddling into a tropical storm, no less.
    Was I nuts?
    Yes.
    Did I have any regrets?
    Ask me later.
    As if we needed any more drama the wind began to blow, and blow hard. The clouds darkened, lowered, and swirled chaotically. A stupendous bolt of lightning accompanied by simultaneous and deafening thunder rent the canyon right down to the river, no more than a mile ahead. Five cows and a bull came stampeding upriver, spooked out of their skulls. The skies opened up and poured rain more intense than I’d seen in my life.
    â€œHello, Dolly,” I sang. “Well, hello, Dolly.” My mother loved that tune.
    I could also hear my dad singing one of his Bob Dylan lines. He had one for every occasion. I sang along: “Buckets of rain, buckets of tears, got all them buckets comin’ out of my ears.”
    The torrents kept coming. I didn’t need to reach for my water bottle. All I had to do was tilt my head back and open my mouth. The night rain had been merely a lull. The sun was cooking Dolly’s topside, and she was riled up but good. Rio thought she might be stalled and sucking up even more fuel from the Gulf of Mexico.
    What a show. More lightning, more thunder, and waterfalls pouring over the canyon rims all the way down to the river. Some of them ran yellow, some brown, some red. The waterfalls were everywhere, falling a thousand feet and more.
    We had a lot of dodging to do. With all the flash flooding, the river was running with debris, every sort of thorny shrub and scrubby tree. Even deeply rooted salt cedars had fallen in.
    As fast as we were going, the canyon walls were flying by. It wasn’t long before we saw Oso Canyon entering from the right. Rio motioned me alongside to make sure I was on top of the situation. The mile-by-mile guide had warned us to stay off the Mexican side, where the river at high water ran under a head-chopping ledge.
    As we drew closer to the side canyon, we gave each other plenty of elbow room. Rio took a wide-left run, far from the head-chopper, and I did the same. The waves were wild, but I was able to reach out and brace on them when necessary, and apply power strokes when I needed to climb over their crests.
    Dolly kept it up. She was throwing everything she had at us. It was getting harder and harder to see our way through the windblown sheets of rain. Some of the gusts were so strong, they picked up the water off the river and threw it in our faces. There was more and more debris in the river.
    I pulled alongside Rio. “This is crazy!” I yelled.
    The rain was spilling off his bedraggled straw hat like he was standing in the shower. “Totally,” he yelled back.
    We rounded a corner and spied the cave, a huge yawning void fairly low in the cliffs on the Mexican side— La Cueva de la Puerta Grande, The Cave of the Great Door. The door was more than great; it was immense.
    We agreed in a nanosecond that we should check it out. We were in dire need of a safe, dry place.
    At normal water levels, it might have been tough to find a break in the cane anywhere near the cave. But the cane was