Not a Border, But a Path: Swimming Across the Rio Grande
On a cool November day, I floated in the middle of Amistad Reservoir, a lake formed by a dam on the Rio Grande. I was swimming from the United States to Mexico and back, a ten-mile round trip. From the middle, I could see two of the widely spaced buoys that mark the path of the river under the reservoir, one on either side of me; up on the dam, I could see two flags waving in the wind, one for each country. But in the water itself, there was no way to tell if I was in the United States or Mexico, no line to mark the boundary between the two nations. My body floated in both countries and in neither. There was no border; there were only the water and the sky.