Free Take Me to the River by Will Hobbs

any punches.”
    â€œOne thing I forgot to mention back home—I’ve never been past here.”
    He’d said it casually, but this was big. “You mean, downstream of the bridge?”
    â€œYeah, right.”
    â€œYou mean you haven’t run the Lower Canyons before?”
    â€œNever laid eyes on it, except in pictures.”
    â€œBut I thought you’d done it with your dad.”
    â€œI never said that, did I?”
    â€œI just assumed, I guess.”
    â€œMy dad hasn’t run it for the last two years. None of the guides have. There isn’t much market for week-long trips. Some private river runners do it, mostly in the spring.”
    â€œMan, that’s different.”
    â€œDifferent from what?”
    â€œFrom what I was thinking.”
    â€œOkay, it’s different, and maybe I should’ve told you, but would it have made any difference?”
    â€œI don’t know . . . I could have factored it in . . . I guess not.”
    â€œSo, you’re good with it? We can always go home and shoot hoops, watch DVDs of Man vs. Wild . Hey, no pressure. I’m cool with whatever you decide.”
    I hesitated. The heat was so intense, it was hard to think at all. This is it , I told myself.
    No doubt Rio could hear my gears grinding. Here’s what I kept coming back to: You play it safe, you’ll disappoint your cousin and yourself. You’ll have to live with that.
    â€œI’m in,” I told him. “I’m going all the way, till the wheels fall off and burn.”
    â€œThat’s what I was hoping to hear, mi primo loco .”
    Rio had just called me his crazy cousin. This felt great, absolutely great. We slapped hands and got back on the river.
    Floating under the walls of Heath Canyon and then Temple Canyon—tantalizing appetizers of the mighty Lower Canyons to come—we passed into the broken and rugged country beyond. Once again the quiet of the wilderness prevailed. We were beyond the reach of the helicopter patrol; we’d left all that madness behind.
    Everything on the Texas side was part of the Black Gap Wildlife Area, and we were seeing wildlife. We watched a herd of bighorn sheep, their young included, charge down a slope that would’ve made an extreme skier vomit. They were doing all sorts of insane aerials, huge leaps off of boulders, just unbelievable stuff. We thought for sure a mountain lion must be chasing them, but it turned out nothing was. They were simply having fun on their way down to get a drink.
    We floated past a huge rock formation on the Mexican side called El Caracol —The Snail—and ran the Class 2 rapid below a dry wash on the Texas side. The bow of my canoe caught some air, but I took on barely enough water to soak my boat sponge. The best part was, Rio liked my style. He could see I was far from being a novice.
    Downstream we found a shady beach, went swimming, and took naps. We were living the life of Huck Finn. I had made the right call.
    At Mile 13 we replenished our freshwater jugs from the springs that emerged between rock layers on the Texas side. We were lucky the river wasn’t any higher, or the springs would have been underwater.
    We made it all the way to Las Vegas de los Ladrones, the Outlaw Flats, at Mile 17. A grassy flat on the Mexican side in front of a spectacular butte called El Sombrero made for a perfect campsite. The grass had been mowed by cattle and all the pies were dry. The guidebook said we would be seeing quite a few cattle, “more than half wild.”
    We pitched the tent and set up our camp table and chairs. Rio dug out his fishing tackle, which wasn’t the kind I was expecting. It consisted of a tackle box and a couple of laundry detergent jugs, capped and empty. I’d never done any jug fishing but I’d heard of it. The basic idea is to suspend a couple of hooks from the jug, which serves as a float. For anchors, Rio had brought along four-inch