After the lashing, tying, distributing, and re-distributing of dry bags, paddles, tables, chairs, paco pads, and coolers, we’re ten writers, three guides, and one distinguished poet sitting two to a canoe on the Rio Grande. The prospect of writing and paddling for six days along the Rio Grande has drawn us from all corners of the country—Oregon, Montana, Massachusetts—to the very last few trailing feet of this country.

The river is flowing at 60 cubic feet per second, our guide Sierra tells us. And dropping. October heat. Time to get a move on. We push off into brown silt.

It’s not my first time meeting the waters of the Rio Grande. What I remember about this land is cholla, creosote, mesquite, ocotillo. The Chisos Mountains looming in the distance. Five years ago, I ran through the mouth of Boquillas Canyon at dusk, dipped myself in purple waters, and lay on the sand to watch the last light of day pull itself back into shadow.

But moving with the river is an entirely different story. I didn’t grow up around rivers. The only water I saw in my Southern California childhood was the crowded surf of the Pacific Ocean; families of tourists, packs of teenagers, couples, all teeming alongside the flashing lights and ringing carnival bells of the Santa Monica Pier. And the trickling creeks in the San Gabriel Mountains, where I spent weekends hiking with my mother, which had often dried to dust by late August.

Five years after that trail run, we enter the canyon and float through the small mouth at high noon. This year’s hikers leave footprints on the sandy banks. I look for my younger self, but we pass quickly, and I don’t see her.

Two strangers to a canoe is a dicey business. We can’t seem to get our tasks straight. You, in back: steering. Me, in front: reading the water, adding muscle to our forward progress. The other four tandem canoes seem to be faring only slightly better. We spin in circles across the river’s thalweg. Mexico—America—Mexico—America—

The importance of whose boundary, whose jurisdiction we fall across at any one moment quickly washes away in the ancient movement of water sliding across land.

My mind scrambles to describe this landscape. The red of the canyon looks like a hallway, a corridor out of time and place, bathed in southwestern light. Like 1,500-foot-tall walls of eroded limestone. Like the memory of flood and surge and carve. Like exposed crescents of grassy beach where pairs of wild horses graze, where I can imagine passing an entire lifetime sitting, watching these waters pass by.

My arms aren’t used to this work, pulling taut against low waters. The waters reach no higher than my kneecaps when we pull our canoes ashore for lunch. Yet my heart pounds at the way the river sometimes surges between rocks, carves insistently along cane-infested banks that threaten to take our hats off.

In Montana, my grad school classmate Skylar, a summer river guide on the Yampa, had said: I dare you to be unmoved by waters.

After lunch, we come up on a rock sideways. Thud of painted plastic against rock. Our canoe begins to fill with water. We rush to untie all our careful lashes and haul our goods out.

My phone is in my pocket. All morning, I’ve been trying to capture, fruitlessly, the improbable beauty of desert red rock. But now, the river’s thin fingers reach into my shorts pocket and pull the phone out, and away.

The Rio Grande—brown, muddy, silty, wide—has a secret dexterity. The first flush of panic: Did I back up all my photos? How will I contact my ride home from the airport? How can I afford a new phone with my already-tight grad student budget?

But then, more quickly than I would have predicted, comes acceptance. A shrugging away that what’s done is done. It’s the relief of surrendering to circumstance and letting go.

Well, almost. At the bottom of my dry bag, I have a plastic camera and one extra roll of 35mm film. Six days along the Rio Grande. Thirty-six exposures. Six photos a day. Careful choices in noticing each day.

Somewhere in these days of paddling, the wind picks up and blows us sideways. The tail end of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. The guides lash one canoe to another—now it’s four of us, pulling hard in the low waters, trying to stay in sync.

We make it to safety—a shore of soft grass with plenty of space to pitch our tents. We dig deep in our dry bags for another layer. A pair of fleece gloves, a towel used as a scarf. The hurricane sends 50-mile gusts through our camp. A howling, a whistling. The soft nylon of my tent brushes my face all night in half-dream.

Three years ago, the guides ran this same trip down the Rio Grande. Flash floods from side canyons upstream converged into a raging torrent. In the middle of the night, camp flooded, the waters rose dangerously high. Two canoes were swept away. I imagine writers, cold, wet, tired, shivering, scared. The river’s dammed memory of itself returned to full power. Terrifying, I imagine, the sudden turn toward the possibility of death. Such violence, I imagine, yet such beauty. And a reminder of all the unknown faces of the river.

From half-dream, I wake to find my camp chair missing from where I tucked it under the rain fly. Crawling out into the moonlight, I see the river is as we left it, the great shroud of it rolling downstream forever. Canoes knock paint off each other’s shoulders.

It’s gone, I think. Is this another lesson in letting go?

But then, no, there it is, 25 yards away, a sail of nylon caught in the bush of a creosote. Still here. And here we are too, ragtag at the edges of this country.

In a few weeks, back in Missoula, I’ll drop off my rolls of film to be processed and loaded onto a USB. Eagerly, I’ll sift through the snaps. Thirty-six exposures, six photos a day.

Some are surprises—Anna and Jarrett commandeering the camera and mugging for a selfie; a blurry closeup of an ocotillo’s red bloom. The reds and gold of the desert will already look like nostalgia amidst the first Montana snows. And I will see how I loosened my grip on the shutter in the last few days, let the images come a little faster, a little thicker—canyon walls, smiling faces in canoes. But I’ll flip through quickly, and when the parade stops, it’s not the thirty-six photos I’ll remember.

It’s mornings, canyon wrens trailing descending scales into soft purple sky. Cool air reverb—zigzag—zinging—singing the canyon-long whoop of being alive. Lingering around half-finished coffee, the river shushing downstream, waiting for us to join in.

Afternoons, Colleen rising from brown water in the thick afternoon heat. Pale in her thin cotton bra, holding her two hands up like a question mark to light. The knock of paddle on canoe. The ease of rhythm. Laughter rising from two boats back.

Evenings, a raven perched next to a prickly pear on the canyon in the last of light. His neck feathers ruffling in evening wind floating down the canyon’s thin slot. Swiveling his head left—right—left—right—

I dare you to be unmoved by waters, Skylar said. I couldn’t do it.

What I’ll remember is reading poetry to each other, the bone-numbing tired of a good paddle down the river, all the moments shared but never quite captured.

***

Guest contributor Willa Zhang is a writer from the suburbs of Los Angeles. She received her MFA from the University of Montana and lives in Missoula. Willa was the inaugural recipient of the Freeflow x NRS Open Waters Scholarship. All photos courtesy of that trusty 35mm plastic camera.