These informal and generally unregulated crossings were a normal part of rural life for generations. As years passed, border security tightened, and these communal partnerships died off, and were fast-approaching extinction.
While at a low point in his spiritual journey down the river, Sanchez hit bottom under the shade of a tree in eyesight of his father's grave. The house he’d buried his father in was gone, as was the marker he’d made those many years ago. Sanchez could still find his way to those bones layered not so deep beneath the surface, a depth only a small child of eleven could dig. On the day his father was shot dead by cartel bodyguards mistaking his van for a potential threat, he was delivering milk. No apologies were given when the mix-up had been realized. One of the men got out of the car and laughed at the sight of Sanchez’ father gasping his last breath. Sanchez saw that man's face every time he pulled the trigger. A cartel hitman's mistake forged a burning fire inside a boy of eleven. That fire burned out of control and all the hate and anger he felt toward the cartel was fuel to launch a personal vendetta spanning ten years of service, until the day his gun had taken the life of an out-of-her-mind wife and mother. The fire was doused by her blood.
Sanchez had to bury his father without any help. A boy of eleven used nothing but a coffee can to claw through the dry dirt. His father's death left him an orphan. His mother having died of complications during Sanchez' birth.
He had always been able to tell when his father caught a glimpse of his wife in his son. Sometimes a tear of joy, sometimes one of sadness, but every time he reflected his mother's image, his father wept.
Sanchez never thought of his mother as dead though. The unbearable pain of knowing his entrance into life had taken the mother who'd given it to him nearly crippled him. To beat back his demons, Sanchez found a different perspective.
He envisioned that in a moment where the door between life and death were open, she slipped out as he entered. In that version of his life's beginning, Sanchez met his mother at the door. He still believed time stood still while he and his mother shared a moment. She laid a kiss upon his cheek and whispered in his ear all the loving comments a mother would say in a lifetime of loving their child. He claimed to have heard as he grew to be a man. In his mind, it had been her voice he heard in the wind the day he graduated from the grueling fifty-three-week course it took to become one of the world's elite.
His mother stepped up and offered one last smile followed by a playful wink before she vanished into a thousand stars, blinding him in her brilliant light. Rafting became his connection to her, seeing his mother's radiance reflected in the shimmering droplets caught by the sun's light.
Split between the shimmering river and his father's unmarked grave, Sanchez felt it a fitting place as any to put a pistol in his mouth. It's why he brought the gun with him in the first place. He was on a one-way trip to remove the pain he felt in taking his last shot. The bullet he'd sent ended the life of an unarmed mother of a child who wore her blood a second after it left the muzzle.
He vowed the next time his finger pulled the trigger, it would be done to end his own life. It was in that darkest of places, where he found the light.
Sitting under the shade of a tree with the cold steel of his gun clenched between his teeth, Sanchez received his new calling in the scream of a woman.
Nearby, but downstream from where Sanchez sat, a woman in a flowered sun dress clung to a thick rope crossing the river choke point where less than twenty feet of water separated the two countries. A young girl screamed for help when she slipped on a rock. The mother caught her daughter by the wrist while maintaining a hold on the rope, both of which were slipping. Her four-year-old-daughter was being pulled by the water.
A terrifying scene to behold, Sanchez couldn't help but notice the oddity in that the woman and child were not crossing out of Mexico, but into it. Odder, both were American. He was left with two distinctly different paths whose choices required a fraction of a second to make, both with life ending consequences.
Sanchez made his choice with time to spare and rushed to the aid of the mother and child.
The child's hand slipped free just as he met them at the halfway point where the water was deepest, coming waist high on the mother. Sanchez' arm shot out like a bullet and snatched the girl by the collar, pulling her to safety before the river had a chance to take her.
In that gift of life, on the dirt bank of the Rio Grande River, Arturo Sanchez had been given a second chance at life. He took the gun he'd been intending to use to kill himself and tossed it into the river.
Sanchez escorted the traumatized mother and daughter the rest of the way, which turned out wasn't far from where they'd crossed. The hospital in San Antonio del Bravo was only a ten-minute walk from the crossing. Sanchez learned from the mother that a US citizen can cross the border to receive medical treatment free of charge.
Sanchez hadn't known this. Even though he buried his father there, he had only been in town less than a week when his father was shot dead. Sanchez moved on, taking refuge with an uncle in Nogales. Learning a secret about the town his father was buried in greatly intrigued him.
San Antonio del Bravo, Mexico and Candelaria, Texas, total population combined to be less than two hundred. In Candelaria, Texas, sick people drove nearly three hours to get to the nearest hospital. That is, if they chose to remain within the boundaries of the US border. The choice became easier when the hospital was a roped crossing of a river, followed by a ten-minute walk. The woman had felt an unfamiliar pain in her side and was worried for the baby growing inside her.
He saw the mother and her two daughters every now and again. They would always wave and Sanchez would send them a rare, dazzling smile. He'd been ferrying people ever since.