Sonora Morning ...1950's

6 December 2006
Besford

Only when the rains came, around San Juan day, did the arroyo ever feel riverine. This morning the wan December sun floated through the dry and dusty bottom as men stretched, scratched and spit, rustling up muddy coffee, warming their tortillas on rocks set around the fire, forming them into pockets and filling them with frijoles refritos scooped from an old frying pan.

The plates, pans and cups all matched, blue enamelled metal with white spots, a design that was common up and down the Sonora and a half dozen other rivers. Washing up consisted of wiping them with river sand, water was too precious to waste on unnecessary hygiene.

Some men were still stiff from the overnight cold. It had been clear the night before, nothing unusual in that, but the wind had blown in a ‘norther’ and the mercury had dropped to single digits before midnight. Although the wind then dropped off, the temperature had continued to descend and this morning it was below zero.

Few words were exchanged, the men’s voices were low and quiet, scratchy from the cold, dry air, from cigarettes and tequila. The black, sugary coffee lubricated their voices only enough for instructions to be passed around.

The order that informed their preparations was not immediately visible. Men appeared to be acting independently, without reference to each other. Suddenly, however, the group set off; how they were organised was not immediately apparent but by the discipline that marked their departure from the campsite, fire damped and waste cleaned, was unmistakable.

All of the men, save one, were mounted on horseback. The exception was, however, clearly the leader, he rode a burro. The men treated him with an easy familiarity, they joked and gossiped with him but they also watched him, learning to interpret his moods, to read his body language. There was no fun made of his refusal to ride a horse. He was convinced that a burro was smarter and he would neither go where a burro would not nor go farther in a day than a burro wanted. His selection of camping spots, idiosyncratic but compellingly logical, was based entirely on the whim of his burro, when the burro stopped and would go no more, it was time to camp.

The paraphernalia of camping life - tents, army cots, kerosene lanterns, canned goods, utensils and cooking gear - was all loaded into heavy, waterproof rocket boxes. Surplus from the Second World War, the rocket boxes were heavy gauge aluminium. Fully loaded, each one must have weighed 100 pounds and at about 5 feet long, two of them made a formidable load for the burros that were unfortunate enough not to have been selected to carry the leader. It was, however a close call for the leader's weight verged on 200 pounds, not nearly as well distributed as the gear in the rocket boxes.

The camp was cleared and the party ready to move forward within an hour of waking. The last of the coffee was gulped down and unfiltered Mexican Raleighs lit up. A wispy haze of bluish cigarette smoke marked the trail of the group as it wended its way on up the river bed.