Colorado Life Magazine: Life and Loss Along the Rio Grande

Published in the Fall/Winter 2024 edition of Colorado Life Magazine

We were near South Fork, Colorado, at our cabin along the upper Rio Grande, when my brother Kris died. It was the summer of 2003. It was our annual family trek to the mountains from our different corners of the country. My parents and brother had driven up from Texas, and I had flown in from Washington, D.C. We had come for the smells of pine and coffee, in the morning, early, with the sun barely rising above the mountains. We had come for the river, always moving, always steady.

The morning after we arrived, I slipped out of bed, tiptoed past my sleeping brother, and joined my dad downstairs. He greeted me with his quiet smile and asked if I was ready. I was. I had been ready for days.

The Hungry Logger was crowded as the early morning fishermen swarmed over the breakfast buffet. We waited in silence for our biscuits and gravy. I craved those moments with my dad; it was everything unsaid that seemed the most poignant. He asked me about my new boyfriend. I rambled on, but Dad could see through the fog.

“Do you like him?” he said.

“I do. Yes. A lot,” I said back.

“Okay then.”

Right. Okay then.

When we returned, Kris was brewing coffee, and Mom was out walking Sadie, our white Labrador. The sun, higher now, was lighting the canyon and the Rio Grande that cut right through its heart. It is a river that cuts right through your heart. Several summers ago, the river had been so low that I walked straight across it. Several summers before that, my best friend mooned my mom while we rafted down the river. The river, it seems, has always been with us.

Stretching almost 2,000 miles, the Rio Grande has a long and busy journey, snaking through changing landscapes, irrigating farms and fields along the way, separating Mexico from the United States, and finally merging into the Gulf. Dad once tried to find the source, hidden high in the San Juan Mountains, but was blocked by the swell of the river after a downpour.

“So what do you think about Schwarzenegger running for governor?” Kris said as he sat next to me at the table.

“No way. He won’t win,” I said.

“I don’t know, I think it could happen. He’s popular.”

“It doesn’t matter. People are not going to elect a movie star as governor.”

“They elected Ronald Reagan.”

I sipped my coffee and looked out the window.

Kris had been sober since Christmas. I wanted to be proud of him, but I was too angry. I was angry with him for sabotaging his engagement to his girlfriend of two years, angry with him for almost missing his law school graduation because he was too drunk and too high from the night before, angry with him for the cycle of sobriety and alcoholism he had foisted upon our family.

But here he was in Colorado, 31 years old, clean again and open to change. To prove this, he said he would apply for a job as a server at the Hungry Logger. He said he felt good about the possibility, a chance at something new. He said he would stay through the summer and then in the fall, as the weather changed, reconsider his options. He said, maybe Taiwan next, maybe China, maybe India. I rolled my eyes. I knew they were just words, to be filed away along with all of the other declarations he had made so many times before.

“It’s mine,” he said, two days into the vacation. “The job at the Logger. They just gave it to me.”

“That’s great, Kris,” I said. “Just don’t leave the cabin a wreck after we’re gone.” I just wanted him to be normal again.

Normal. As if I had any idea what normal meant for him, knew anything about what it meant when he wrote in his journal “I surrender,” knew anything about what it meant when he wrote “I need help and I can’t do it alone,” knew anything about how to help him so he wouldn’t feel alone. 

All my notions of normal would change when the man with the white polo shirt knocked on the cabin door the next evening.

“There’s been an accident,” he said to my mom as we stood on the porch, underneath a canopy of stars, so luminous in their intensity. I stared at the words “Victim Advocate” stitched into the top left corner of his shirt.

Six months earlier, when I had come home for the holidays, Kris and I went to hear our friend’s band play at a local bar. Since Kris was newly sober, I decided not to have a drink that night.

“How do you feel? Do you wanna get out of here?” I said, after a few songs.

“No, we can stay. I don’t mind.”

“Should we split dessert? I saw apple pie on the menu.”

He smiled, and we stayed for the rest of the set, pushing the plate back and forth as we shared the pie.

The rest of the man’s words were fragments, slipping in and out of my consciousness: “Highway 149…90 miles per hour…windshield…glass…pavement…head…spine…”

“But he’s okay,” Mom said, as if the sheer force of her will would make it so.

When the man said the word, it ricocheted in my mind for several seconds. Died. Dead. Done. Deceased. Expired. Perished. Passed Away. Checked Out. Cashed In. No Longer with Us. Never to Be Seen Again.

Then my mom collapsed, right there in my arms, right there on the front porch, right there in a place that was supposed to be easy. Right there.

A stand of Cottonwoods has forever blocked part of our view of the river. Those loathsome trees have menaced my mom for years. She has plotted ways to knock them down but only manages to stretch the weed whacker cord far enough to trim the tall grass. Now she just drags her lawn chair past the trees to the water’s edge so that riverfront means what it’s supposed to mean.

The day after Kris died, we collected his belongings from the wrecked truck, returned his unused apron to the Hungry Logger, and started the thirteen-hour drive to Texas, where we would bury him. We followed the Rio Grande south. It was the Fourth of July, and fireworks followed us home. Halfway, I pulled over to throw up behind a gas station.

I don’t know if it was for me or for Kris, my urge to destroy the road that quieted his heart, to scream at the bartender who served him the drink, to blame my mom for the Xanax he took from her when she wasn’t looking. I just hated that time had stopped for him, still hate that his passport lies, in my shoebox, unstamped and waiting for passage to places far away.

Rivers have always moved words. As Norman Maclean writes in A River Runs Through It, “I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched…Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.”

The next summer, I went kayaking on the Rio Grande. Gentle and forgiving, it is the kind of river that any novice could try. So I was surprised when I hit white water as the river dropped in elevation—it nearly flipped my boat. I held on. I paddled furiously, looks of desperation and determination commingling on my face. My boyfriend, floating next to me in an inflatable, erupted in laughter.

The Native Americans who lived along the Rio Grande attributed a living spirit to the moving water and blessed it for giving them life.

Kris is gone, but we still come. We come for the smells of pine and coffee, in the morning, early, with the sun barely rising above the mountains. We come for the river.

The water moves memories.