Dry River: Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz

4. Border Crossings: The Kino Springs Reach

4 Border Crossings The Kino Springs Reach Life is where change and redemption are possible. —Wendell Berry Guevavi: Arizona’s First Mission: October, 52 River Miles An occasional car Dopplers along South River Road, which contours the Santa Cruz on our left. Melissa, my youngest daughter, who has joined me today, suggests that we duck and hide at the sound of tires on pavement . I know what she means; I feel it also. We’re too exposed. Our tall frames are too easily seen, trespassing among the brittle, desiccated seep willow and cocklebur as if being alive were somehow offending the dead. Mount Benedict wrestles for dominance of the western skyline, its buried pediments squeezing the aquifer enough to bring water above ground in the form of springs and surface flow, but not recently. Except for the occasional storm runoff, water hasn’t flowed here since 1993, the beginning of our current drought. And I’m guessing it’s been much longer for the springs. Where the river channel swings wide in its course along some low bluffs, laying up alluvial sediments in a field-size terrace , I imagine clustered pyramids of anemic cornstalks instead of the persistent seep willow and cocklebur. This could be the place. To reach the bluff, Melissa and I climb a granite outcrop just beyond the terrace, gaining footholds in a rough seam that could once have been the runnel of a spring, and slipping under a barbed-wire fence marked“U.S. Boundary NPS.”Melissa, noticing other signs on the fence, says, “There’s nothing we can do here that would be legal.” I, too, am bothered by the plethora of “Posted” signs on all the fences. I recall news items about gun-toting vigilante ranchers, and I’ve seen Border 66 chapter four Patrol and Department of Homeland Security vehicles, both marked and unmarked, cruising these back roads on the lookout for Mexicans on foot. But we keep going. At the top of the outcrop, I know this is the place. At my feet, a single round socket in the rock articulates both a fist of stone and evidence of the river farmers. It’s a three-hundred-year-old bedrock mortero, a grinding hole for corn. I scan the high desert grassland spread out beneath the gunmetal Santa Rita Mountains in the north. Dwarf mesquite rise to eye level and stop, releasing my view—and then I see them, chocolate walls poking up from the thin, crooked trees, the jaundiced San Cayetano Mountains behind them.We walk through what had been Father Joseph Garrucho’s entry into his courtyard (a clear path on the ground), turn right toward the ruins, and climb a slope of loose earth between two five-foot walls to enter the church’s nave. There’s not much here; the sun is still hot on my neck. These few adobe walls, bleeding back into the dirt from which they came, are all that remain of Arizona’s first mission. In 1701, Father Eusebio Kino established the Mission San Gabriel de Guevavi at the native village of Guevavi (from an O’odham word, gi-vavhia, which means “big spring”). Kino was keeping a promise he made to these people after his earlier visit to Tumacácori and Guevavi in January of 1691 when he first stepped into what is now Arizona. The legendary archaeologist and historian Charles Di Peso tells the story of how a delegation of Indians met Father Kino and his hawk-nosed companion, Father Visitor Juan María Salvatierra, as the two traveled up the Río Altar on a tour of Pimería Alta to assess the loyalties of the native O’odham. Kino’s and Salvatierra’s superiors thought the O’odham might be in league with the Apaches and attacking Spanish settlements, something Kino seriously doubted. The delegation, a group of Indians from villages along the Santa Cruz River, including Tumacácori and Bac, sought out the Jesuit as their champion, carrying simple wooden crosses as a gesture of friendship. “Those crosses which they brought were tongues that spoke much and with great force,” Kino would later write, “and that we could not neglect going where they summoned us with them.” Upon their arrival at Tumacácori, the priests found three ramadas— one for celebrating Mass, one for sleeping, and the third for preparing The Kino Springs Reach 67 meals—which...