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| The Rio Grande doesn't look like this in Texas |
At 4:30 on Sunday morning Collins
put on the coffee. That is not something
unusual for James—he makes coffee every morning at 4:30. Has for years. He gets up when he wakes up, makes coffee,
and then sits, drinks coffee, and plans his day. I think it is one of the reasons he has
always been successful. He’s thinking about
problems and working out solutions three hours before the rest of the world
wakes up.
Neil, Ratisseau and I straggled into the kitchen as we awakened. It was forty degrees—too cold (and too dark) to
sit at the picnic table outside. McMullen mixed up a batch of scratch biscuits,
fried a pound of bacon, made gravy and we feasted—bacon, eggs, biscuits, gravy,
coffee, orange juice, and sweet milk—Collins quoted a high school friend, “The
Queen of England don’t eat no better’n this.”
We quoted a lot of old friends that morning. We decided Charles Flowers had picked up the
“Queen of England” quote from Robert Benton, who used it often. We talked about people I had not thought of
in years. We laughed about things that
happened during high school, while we were learning math and English and how to
live and who we were. We remembered
sixty years ago, when we were teenagers trying to decide who we should be when
we grew up. We all helped each other
over the adolescent rough spots.
By the time it was daylight, we finished breakfast, cleaned the kitchen,
made more coffee and moved outside to continue our visit. I enjoyed these same guys in high school. They were older, and perhaps wiser now, but
they were the same friends with the same personalities I had been drawn to over
sixty years ago. We shared the same high
plains values, the same ambitions, the same goals. After all these years, McMullen
still lights up the room when he smiles, Collins can double me over with his
dry wit, and, of course, Ratisseau just loves to tell a story.
About mid-morning, the
fishermen, like so many gladiators, pulled on their waterproof armor and
girdled up for battle. Trout are
civilized fish. They mostly don’t care
for breakfast before ten am or so, and it is foolish to try to catch them
before the day warms up. Evidently, the
fish take a siesta in the early afternoon, and have dinner around five, because
the fishermen adopted that schedule and were very successful with it. My friends were pros—no frenzied casting, no frantic
splashing from place to place, no indiscriminate fly-switching—just quiet,
skilled fishing, dropping the fly at the proper place, and teasing the trout
into taking it.
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| There may be three better fishermen in the world, but I doubt it. The Rio Grande is just behind those bushes. |
Neal and Wayne hustled off to a
pre-selected hot spot, and Collins, knowing my interest in Texas history, gave
up his morning session with the trout and took me on a guided tour of the Rio
Grande headwaters. We drove the high
road past the Rio Grande Reservoir and followed the river up toward its
source. The road was literally cut
through the forest. It was unpaved,
narrow, steep, and rocky, with no guard rails or shoulders. I was glad for
James’ four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser.
As we climbed higher, the Rio Grande branched into a north and south
tributary. The river was no more than a
creek now, and the north branch cascaded downhill past us and on to the intersection
below. Stony Pass, where this primitive
road crossed the Continental Divide, was about three miles farther up. From that pass, the road meandered seventeen
miles downhill into the old mining town of Silverton, Colorado, on the western
slope.
Five hundred yards uphill from where we
stood, a snowmelt spring marked the source of the river and once defined the
westernmost border of the Republic of Texas.
From the spring, the border went due north to the 42nd
parallel, which was Texas’ northern border, in present-day Wyoming.
In my youth, nothing would have kept me from fighting through the trees
and following that creek uphill to stand at its source. I would have insisted upon a picture,
standing astraddle the Rio Grande. Now,
I had to admit the mountain was steep and I was not forty anymore—hell, I’m not
even sixty anymore. With some effort,
James found a place wide enough to turn around, and we went back downhill and
downstream to join the fishermen. I had
been close enough to the ancient Texas border.
I could feel it. Thanks to James,
I can write about being there.
The rest of the day, the Rio Grande was kind to the fishermen. James called it, “One of the single greatest
afternoons of fishing I ever had.” I
felt he was being rewarded for taking the time to let me explore.
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| The cobbler looked better after it was baked. As you can see, we ate well. |
Somewhere in the bowels of the big Ford pickup, Ratisseau found a jug of
Crown Royal for happy hour that evening, and we prepared an oriental stir-fry
with veggies and chicken that was simply delicious. I fixed a black-iron skillet peach cobbler
that would have been somewhere around average at home, but was absolute
perfection in the clear, crisp air, sixteen miles north of Creede. Tomorrow, we are going to meet Roy Turner at
a place I’ve never heard of—a place high in the mountains called Platoro, which,
in Spanish, means silver and gold.
To Be Continued-----
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