The Jeep in the Water
The Jeep in the Water
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Shareby Octavio Solis
The Rio Grande is what we on the US side call it. Rio Bravo is what they call it in Mexico. The difference is the difference. Somewhere in the murky depths of this beleaguered band of water is a demarcation line invisible to all but the respective governments of both nations.
One morning a long time ago, which in El Paso could mean either 50 years ago or yesterday, two Border Patrol field agents on their rounds spotted a brand new cherry-red Jeep parked in the shallow middle of the Rio. It lay unattended right in the center, the brown water coursing half-way up the doors, loaded with kilos of marijuana.
Upon their inspection, the agents surmised that some audacious smugglers from Juarez had somehow got it into their heads that if they had the right vehicle, they could simply drive through the river at its shallowest ebb and safely transport their illicit cargo to its destination. It seemed to work, too, and they probably felt like geniuses as their Jeep easily churned through the water in the dead of night. But right at midstream, where there were no horses to jump to, the Jeep had come to a gurgling halt and mired itself in deep silty sludge.
The trace spatters of mud on the shiny red exterior suggested to the agents that there had been some desperate heaving back and forth of the vehicle. Apparently, at some point during the night, the deflated smugglers abandoned their mission and simply waded back to Juarez, sans Mary Jane.
Pleased with their catch, the Border Patrol field agents notified their superiors and summoned a tow-truck to drag the Jeep to shore. By now, a small crowd of people had gathered on both sides of the river to gawk, alerted to the spectacle by the traffic choppers of the morning radio shows in El Paso. The group seemed harmless enough, more bemused than alarmed at the sight of a stranded Jeep in the middle of the river, so the agents took no notice.
The tow truck appeared on the scene in due time, and the young attendant began running a long tow-line to the Jeep. That’s when things took an ugly turn. Before he could reach the vehicle, the poor man was pelted by the Juarez assembly with stones, slabs of concrete, bottles, and whatever else was handy, and was thereby driven back out of the water. The agents shouted admonitions to the suddenly sweltering mob, but at that moment a tow truck on the Mexican side backed up to the bank and two men charged into the river with their own tow-line. This brazen act afforded some incentive to the Border Patrol tow-man and he barreled back in with his tow-line. An uproar of curses rose from both sides of the river in two languages, sometimes three, as the men sloshed like madmen to the Jeep with their tow-lines. The Mexicans secured theirs to the rear fender of the Jeep while the American tied his to the front. Then the real contest began.
The tow trucks revved their engines, pulled the tow-lines taut, and proceeded to pull on the Jeep in opposite directions. A tug-of-war commenced with great fanfare and cheering from the gathered spectators, many of them already picnicking on the promontories. Back and forth lurched the Jeep, first toward Mexico, then toward the US, then back Mexico-way.
Wagers were taken on who would prevail. Some brave boys even grabbed the line and tugged hard to stack the odds in Juarez’s favor. The Border Patrol fired warning shots in the air to disperse the crowd and persuade the tow-truck desperados to cease their malignant pulling, but that was to no avail. Nobody could hear the shots above the shouting and the clamor of the news choppers directly overhead. This was now a full-blown international incident.
At long last, a larger heavier-duty tow behemoth designed to haul semi-trucks and tractors pulled up to the US embankment, and its seasoned driver, long in the tooth and short in the saddle, dodging various projectiles, succeeded in attaching his own tow-line to the derelict Jeep. Once ashore, the intrepid man climbed into his cab and set to towing it out of the water.
The crowds fell silent as the steel cable tautened right to the surface. Señor Jeep heaved mournfully for a moment over the loud grind of the overheating engine of the Mexican tow-truck. Then a hideous crunch was heard as the rear fender snapped off and flew into the air like a reeled catfish. To cheers from the Americans, and jeers from the Mexicans, the Jeep slowly taxied northward to America, but not before some daring lads rushed to snatch some bags of pot to keep as mementoes of this mighty trans-American match.
The Jeep was impounded, the marijuana seized, displayed and destroyed, and the story, broadly circulated for a time throughout the Southwest with many a chuckle, was eventually forgotten in the mix of more sensational and bloodier stories of the continuing ever-worsening War on Drugs which bedevils this region so.
But somewhere below the surface of this river, covered over by the silt of years and the lore of the frontier, lies imprinted like the footprints of ancient dinosaurs the tire-tracks of a solitary Jeep which challenged the legitimacy of this invisible line we call the Border.
