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The Turkey Vultures of Zopilote Beach
There’s a grand canyon in Mexico, and a river runs through it.
Moises is like a lot of flight attendants. Or doctors or cab drivers. He could’ve been a comedian. Instead he is a river guide-cum-historian and naturalist.
He kills the engine and we idle toward a pair of crocodiles lounging along the Mezcalapa River. The female eases into the still water, also called the Rio Grijalva. He teases us that they won’t eat people — we’re too contaminated with plastics. He’s as knowledgeable as he is funny.
This canyon is as old as the Grand Canyon, both formed from cracks in the Earth’s crust 35 million years ago. We’re hurtling through the Cañón del Sumidero in a hard plastic boat called a lancha and I wish I had snowboarding goggles — the wind pelts us as hard as the sun while Moises shouts the cities and important sites we’ll pass — Comitán, Palenque, Villahermosa, Tuxtla Gutiérrez.
But it’s not long before I forget about my wind-chapped eyes. Because all I can see are Oregon birds. Everywhere. Angel-white egrets and ink-black cormorants on both shores. I am completely awestruck, thousands of miles from where I grew up, careening through a canyon Moises tells us is up to 1,000 meters high. And deep in Chiapas, just like in the Willamette Valley, there are the…
