Rio Grande

The Rio Grande is both a landmark on Ish’s projected route across the continent and the geographic reference point for an encounter that brings his community a possible agricultural future. Near Albuquerque, the river marks a difficult crossing in Ish’s calculations; in the boys’ account of their journey, its valley also leads to a small community still growing corn and beans. Seeds brought back from that community give the Rio Grande significance beyond geography: it becomes a link between a surviving farming tradition and Ish’s belated hope of restoring cultivation at home.

A Landmark on the Eastern Route

When Ish considers a journey east, he weighs routes against the damage to roads and bridges. He expects the Sierra Nevada and the northern roads to be obstructed by fallen trees and landslides, so he favors the more open country to the south. In his proposed eastward itinerary, the Colorado River comes first; beyond it, the Rio Grande at Albuquerque is the next major river crossing. Getting through the Sandia Mountains beyond Albuquerque would open the way to plateau country, and farther east the travelers could choose among more roads. The Rio Grande therefore occupies a practical place in Ish’s map: not a destination in itself, but a major obstacle and a marker of progress through unfamiliar country.

That plan reflects the limits of what Ish can know from a map. Bridges might still stand, or they might have fallen; roads might be passable, or blocked by the consequences of years without maintenance. The only way to resolve those uncertainties would be to travel and see. In that imagined itinerary, the Rio Grande makes the continental scale of the journey tangible: it is one of the large barriers separating the western desert route from the country beyond.

The Community Near Albuquerque

The boys’ later account supplies a different kind of knowledge about the Rio Grande corridor. They describe a small community at an old pueblo near Albuquerque, apparently numbering only a few dozen people. Ish understands from their description that the community’s dominant culture is Pueblo, chiefly because its life centers on growing corn and beans according to a long-standing pattern of farming. Only some of the older people speak English. The people keep to themselves, regard strangers with suspicion, raise horses, do not drive automobiles, and rarely go into town.

The account places the river within a landscape of cultural and practical continuity. The community is not presented as an extension of Ish’s own settlement: it has its own established way of life and meets outsiders warily. Its farming, rather than its access to modern machinery or its connection to towns, is the detail that most sharply distinguishes it in Ish’s understanding. The boys’ visit gives him evidence that a community can persist through the collapse while maintaining a way of living adapted to its local history and resources.

Corn, Seeds, and the Return Journey

For Ish, the most consequential report about the Rio Grande is that corn is being grown there. When he asks whether the boys saw corn growing wild elsewhere, they say they did not; the corn they encountered was cultivated by the community near the river. That distinction matters to his hopes. A crop maintained through farming has survived where wild growth has not, and the journey has brought back something more useful than a general account of distant survivors.

The boys have carried a small cardboard box from the community. Ish has not examined it until a quiet moment at home, after the expedition and the events around it have demanded his attention. Inside he finds kernels unlike the large, flat yellow or white corn he expected: these are small, pointed, and red and black. He recognizes that the larger kernels belong to a highly developed, perhaps hybridized variety, while the smaller seeds are more primitive, like those traditionally raised by the Pueblo people. The unfamiliar appearance is not evidence of inferior value; it identifies the seeds as a form suited to the farming tradition the boys encountered.

The Rio Grande’s agricultural importance thus reaches Ish only after the travelers have returned. The river itself does not provide a dramatic rescue or a guarantee of success. Instead, the box of kernels carries a possibility back from the community near it: Ish’s settlement may again be able to raise corn, after having delayed so long that he could no longer find living seed of its own. When Joey watches with curiosity, Ish calls him over and explains the seeds. The location’s significance passes from the expedition’s report into a moment of teaching between father and son.

Geographic Passage and Cultural Connection

The Rio Grande joins two kinds of movement in the narrative. Ish first places it in a route planned from maps, where it is a river to cross between the Colorado and the eastern plateau. The boys’ journey turns that abstract waypoint into a place associated with a living community, a distinctive farming practice, and seeds that can travel onward. The sequence shifts the river from a physical obstacle in a proposed expedition to a point of connection between separated survivors.

That connection remains limited and concrete. Ish does not gain a broad account of the community’s history, nor does the evidence establish what becomes of the seeds after he explains them to Joey. What the encounter does provide is an alternative to the assumption that his own community has permanently lost the means to cultivate corn. Near the Rio Grande, another group has preserved both the practice and the seed. The river corridor therefore stands in the narrative as a route through post-disaster isolation and, more decisively, as the source of a small but real opening toward renewed agriculture.