Chapter 8
TO APPRECIATE Caballo’s vision, you have to go back to the early ’90s, when a wilderness photographer from Arizona named Rick Fisher was asking himself the obvious question: if the Tarahumara were the world’s toughest runners, why weren’t they ripping up the world’s toughest races? Maybe it was time they met the Fisherman.
Total score all around, the way Fisher saw it. Some spit-chaw towns bag a ton of TV for their oddball races, the Fisherman turns into the Crocodile Hunter of Lost Tribes, and the Tarahumara get primo PR and become media sweethearts. Okay, so the Tarahumara are the most publicity-shy people on the planet and have spent centuries fleeing any kind of relations with the public, but…
Well, Fisher would have to deal with that speed bump later; he already had far stickier problems to handle. Like, he didn’t know jack about running and barely spoke a lick of Spanish, let alone Rarámuri. He had no idea where to find Tarahumara runners, and no clue how he’d persuade them to follow him out of the safety of their caves and up into the lair of the Bearded Devils. And those were only the minor details: assuming he did assemble an all-Tarahumara track team, how the hell was he going to get them out of the canyons without cars and into America without passports?
Luckily, Fisher had some special talents going for him. Top of the list was his amazing internal GPS; Fisher was like one of those house cats who reappear at home in Wichita after getting lost on a family vacation in Alaska. His ability to sniff his way through the most bewildering canyons may be unrivaled on the planet, and it appears to be mostly raw instinct. Fisher had never seen anything deeper than a ditch before leaving the midwest for the University of Arizona, but once there, he immediately began plunging into places better left unplunged. He was still a student when he began exploring Arizona’s mazelike Mogollon canyon range, venturing in just after the head of Phoenix’s Sierra Club was killed there in a not-uncommon flash flood. Fisher, with zero experience and Boy Scout-grade gear, not only survived, but came back with breathtaking photos of an underground wonderland.
Even Jon Krakauer, the adventure überexpert and author of Into Thin Air, was impressed. “Rick Fisher can fairly lay claim to being the world’s leading authority on the Mogollon canyons and the myriad secrets they contain,” Krakauer concluded early in Fisher’s career, after Fisher had led him to “an utterly spellbinding slice of earth, like no place I’d even seen”—a Willy Wonka world of lime-green pools and pink crystal towers and subterranean waterfalls.
Which brings up Rick Fisher’s other skill set: when it comes to grabbing a spotlight and persuading people to do things they’d rather not, Fisher could put a televangelist to shame (well, as much as that’s possible). Take this classic Fish tale that Krakauer tells about a rafting trip Fisher made into the Copper Canyons in the mid-1980s. Fisher really didn’t know where he was going, even though he was attempting, by Krakauer’s estimation, “the canyoneering equivalent of a major mountaineering expedition in the Himalaya.” Yet he still managed to convince two pals—a guy and his girlfriend—to come along. Everything was going grand … until Fisher accidentally beached the raft next to a marijuana field. Suddenly, a drug sentinel popped up with a cocked assault rifle.
No problem. Fisher just whipped out a packet of news articles about himself he carries everywhere he goes (yup, even on very wet rafts through non-English-speaking Mexican badlands). See! You don’t want to mess with me. I’m, uh, whatchacallit—importante! ?Muy importante!
The bewildered sentinel let them paddle on, only to have Fisher come to shore at another drug encampment. This time, it got really ugly. Fisher’s little band was surrounded by a band of thugs who— being womanless in the wilderness—were drunk and dangerously lusty. One of the thugs grabbed the American woman. When her boyfriend tried to pull her back, a rifle barrel was slammed into his chest.
That did it for Fisher. No fanning out his scrapbook this time; instead, he went berserk. “You’re muy malos hombres!” he screamed in an absolute spitting fury, calling the thugs “naughty, naughty men” in his junior-high Spanish. “?Muy, muy malos!” He kept screeching and raving until, as Krakauer tells it, the thugs finally silenced the shrill lunatic by shoving him aside and walking away. Fisher had just brazened his way out of a death sentence—and, naturally, he made sure that the journalist Krakauer heard about it.
Fisher loved the sound of his own horn, no doubt about it, and that spurred him to keep finding reasons to toot it. While most wild-men in the ’80s were pushing skyward, racing Reinhold Messner to scale the fourteen highest peaks in the Himalayas, Rick Fisher was burrowing down to more exotic kingdoms right beneath their feet. Using notes from Captain Frederick Bailey, a British secret agent who’d stumbled across a hidden valley in Tibet in the 1930s while reconnoitering with rebel groups in Asia, Fisher helped locate the fabled Kintup Falls, a thundering cascade that conceals the entrance to the deepest canyon on the planet. From there, Fisher moled his way into lost worlds on five continents, sliding through war zones and murderous militias to pioneer descents in Bosnia, Ethiopia, China, Namibia, Bolivia, and China.
Secret agents, whizzing bullets, prehistoric kingdoms … even Ernest Hemingway would have shut up and surrendered the floor if Fisher walked into the bar. But no matter where he roamed, Fisher kept circling back home to his greatest passion: the bewitching girl next door, the Copper Canyons.
During one expedition into the Barrancas, Fisher and his fiancée, Kitty Williams, became friends with Patrocinio López, a young Tarahumara man who’d wandered into the modern world when a new logging road pushed into his homeland. Patrocinio was Holly-wood handsome and musically gifted on the two-string Tarahumara chabareke, and so agreeable to working with the Bearded Devils that the Chihuahua Tourism Department adopted him as the face for the Copper Canyon Express, a luxury vintage train that makes whistle-stops along the rim of the Barrancas and allows tourists in air-conditioned railcars to be served by bow-tied waiters while peering at the savage country below. Patrocinio’s job was to pose for posters with a violin he’d carved by hand (a handicraft legacy from the Spanish slave days), as if to suggest that the life of the Tarahumara down yonder was all hunky guys and fiddle music.
Rick and Kitty asked Patrocinio if he could take them to a raráji-pari, the ancient Tarahumara ball race. Maybe, Patrocinio replied, before demonstrating that he’d adopted the modern world as much as it had adopted him: If you’re willing to pay. He made Rick and Kitty an offer—he’d roust some runners, if they’d pony up food for his entire village.
Deal?
Deal.
Rick and Kitty delivered the chow, and Patrocinio delivered one hell of a race. When Rick and Kitty arrived at the village, they didn’t find some rinky-dink fun run awaiting them; instead, thirty-four Tarahumara men were stripping down to breechcloths and sandals, getting prerace rubdowns from medicine men, and slamming back last-minute cups of iskiate. At the bark of the village elder, they were off, charging down the dirt trail in a sixty-mile, no mercy, dawn-to-dusk, semi-controlled stampede, flowing past Rick and Kitty with the speed and near-telepathic precision of migrating sparrows.
Yow! Now THAT’S running! Kitty, a seasoned ultrarunner herself, was enthralled. She’d grown up watching her father, Ed Williams, turn himself into an unstoppable mountain racer despite living along the lowland banks of the Mississippi. Testament to Ed’s toughness was the fact that of all races in the world, his favorite was one of the scariest: the notorious Leadville Trail 100, a hundred-mile ultra-marathon held in Colorado, which he’d finished twelve times and was still running at age seventy.
A beautiful marriage was forming in Rick’s mind: Patrocinio could get him runners, and future dad-in-law Ed could get him inside juice with a prestigious race. All he had left to do was hit up some charities for corn donations to tempt the Tarahumara, and maybe get a shoe company to put them in something sturdier than those sandals, and …
Fisher schemed on, clueless that he was fine-tuning a fiasco.