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Holidays On The Trail

honoring the pagan impulse

By Alan Kesselheim

Just at dark, on the shortest day of the year, Marypat pulls our family into a huddle. She hands out white, round, floating candles - five of them. They sit in the nests of our palms like squat eggs. She strikes a match, moves to each one of us, lights the wicks. There is no wind. It is warm enough for shorts.

Our camp is at the bottom of Santa Elena Canyon on the Rio Grande River, a slot in the earth 1,500 feet deep. Fern Canyon comes in on the Mexican side, a limestone gully full of seeps and sheer, fluted walls dripping maidenhair fern. An hour earlier, the three kids had been chimneying up polished narrows, mucking around in a patch of quicksand.
Now it is very dark. We hear the river more than we see it. Overhead, the canyon walls form a jagged border for a corridor of stars. The days are always short in the depths of this canyon. Sun is a brief daily blessing even in June. But this day, Dec. 21, is especially so.
We have been on the river four days. We have another 10 to go. Just upstream we navigated Rock Slide Rapid through a maze of boulders the size of cars. In two canoes and an inflatable kayak, we dodged through the flood-polished bottleneck, paused in eddies, squeezed through narrow tongues of river with inches to spare. Sublime, the explorers called places like this, and sublime it is. An apt place to honor the earth, the celestial movements, endings and beginnings; an apt place to simply pay attention to how very dark and still it is at this cusp of the year.
Celebrations are a backcountry tradition for our family. We rent Forest Service cabins near our home at winter solstice. We have celebrated the longest day of the year on trips to the Far North, where the solar influence never wholly retreats. On the first day of spring it is best to be in the desert, Canyonlands or Escalante or Zion, bringing in the green, lush time of year, a time of cactus blooms and springs busy with birds and peepers raucous as frat parties.
On this journey tracing the border of Big Bend, and straddling solstice, Christmas, and New Year's, celebrations punctuate the itinerary as often as canyons. Marypat put together a sack of goodies on the 12-days-of-Christmas theme. Each morning we open a new round of books, candies, puzzles, food treats. For the solstice and Christmas dinners the menu includes fresh salad, bratwurst, ham, dressing, three-bean salad, and sparkling water.
All of it is embedded in the larger theme of Ruby's coming-of-age journey, another ceremony. She is 13. We paddled this same stretch of the Rio Grande when Marypat was seven months pregnant with Ruby, and when the boys were 2 and 3 years old. Fourteen years later, we have returned as a family to pay homage to her birth river, to salute this girl, to be together, a competent backcountry family, in recognition of her passage.
"Okay," Marypat says. "Everyone makes a wish. We put the candles in the river, see whose lasts the longest."
The competitive element ratchets up the interest level. We walk to the edge of current, set the lit globes of wax on the surface, stand back. Nothing happens. The candles cluster like sheep in the shallows, jostling against each other. Their small light flickers across a short radius of green water.
Then Sawyer's takes off upstream in a micro eddy. Just as suddenly, Eli's follows in pursuit. The boys jog along shore, urging their bobbing lights. Ruby's moves out from shore, hits some current, slides downstream toward a big eddy on a corner where it makes a long circuit, bumping against rocks, making side excursions into overhung coves, the small light twinkling.
The boy's candles hit some fast current. Both of them die out. Marypat's and mine never travel far, they flicker out a few yards from their launch. But Ruby's lasts and lasts.
Marypat is sucked in to the metaphor of Ruby's candle. She cheers every time it dims, almost dies, but blinks back on. The little light motors around the contours of the large eddy, confident and cheerful. Eli gets bored, threatens to chuck a rock at it.
"Don't you dare!" Marypat says.
It goes on long enough that I find myself contemplating the stripe of stars overhead, listening to the chords of water rippling past, thinking about the rapids upstream, and the return to open country in the morning. Marypat is absolutely intent on Ruby's candle. Finally, the light is captured by the main current. It accelerates, becomes erratic, takes off downstream, and then goes dark.
We walk back to the tent through the impenetrable night. Marypat holds Ruby's arm tight against her side.
Fifty miles and three days downriver, on Christmas Eve, our camp is on a narrow island with the international border drawn down the middle on the map. Volcanic landmarks jut into the horizon, a sheer limestone cliff rises in Mexico where the map is blank. There are no signs of humanity, no motors, no airplanes. Mourning doves coo in the darkness from thickets of acacia and mesquite. The moon is a fingernail crescent.
Mist rises off the river at first Christmas light. We lounge in down cocoons. Everyone has drawn a name for a present and we have carried the sack of gifts in a dry bag. We each open our present and stash them in our personal bags. When the sun warms the air we emerge, build a fire, make coffee. The kids play a lethal round of gravel bar baseball with driftwood bats and rocks for balls. A red-tailed hawk circles in the early air, back and forth between nations, across this arbitrary, ultimately meaningless line on our maps. Mexican gophers taste the same as the Texas variety.
And a week later, many bends downstream, when we hold Ruby's ceremony, we are 20 miles from our take-out, only a day away from cars and interstate highways and Wal-Marts. Two weeks in the canyons, camped on sandbars, hiking up dry washes, sleeping under stars and beetling along all day under the pale sun, have ?desertified' us. We are coated with it like an extra layer of skin.
Marypat and I have been looking for the right spot for days, and when we find it, a mile up a major side canyon on the Mexican side, we both recognize it. It is a deeper slot in the floor of the wide wash, an alley of limestone worn smooth by flash flood, rock as sensuous as skin, a cool, shaded alcove. Small pools of precious water resist evaporation. They reflect the distant roof of sky.
Marypat casts the circle around our family. Ruby straddles a pool in the center. The rest of us face her, take up compass directions. Each of us holds a symbol for an element - a feather for air, a lit candle for fire, a small rock for earth, a container of water.
"By the earth that is her body," I say, feeling the weight of stone in my hand. "By the air that is her breath," Sawyer says. "By the fire that is her bright spirit," says Eli, setting the candle on the ground. "By the waters of her living womb," Marypat pours water onto the gray limestone floor. "The circle is cast," we chorus.
Marypat steps forward. She holds out a bracelet for Ruby. Inside the inscription reads, "Ruby Zitzer - Rio Grande River - 2008". Ruby slips it onto her tanned wrist. Marypat takes her face in her hands, kisses her girl. Their eyes glisten. We all press in toward her, take her in a messy embrace - bare arms, bad hair, gritty skin - awkward and holy.
Then we break the spell, walk away from the circle of symbols left behind in the desert air, back toward the river and the boats, into the sunlight of the coming year.

Writer ALAN S. KESSELHEIM is the author of six critically acclaimed books, including Threading the Currents, Water and Sky, Going Inside, and Silhouette on a Wide Land. He lives in Montana and visits the Southwest frequently to play.