On the Edge of Texas
The primal landscapes of Big Bend lure the harried city dweller. Where else can he commune with thousand-foot escarpments, magnificent panoramas, and Townsend’s big-eared bats?
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Garza, of course, dropped off right away. He was a machine. I listened to his light snoring and checked my watch every hour. When it read 7:30 I unzipped the tent flap and drew it back to get my first look at the park. The scenery was extreme, what little of it was visible through the clouds. Then I realized that the clouds were the scenery; we were on their level. They moved through the Basin swiftly and gravely like a dense current, leaving little eddying pockets in the hollows and drainages of the mountains. The sun was not yet up, and the light in the Basin was cold and steely. The peaks themselves, revealed intermittently through the clouds, were monstrous and abrupt. They surrounded us completely, a perfect bowl expect for the one giant chink to the west, a natural drainage known as the Window. The Basin had begun as a great cyst, a dome of bedrock rising beneath the most recent deposits of volcanic ash and sandstone. Erosion undermined the softer rocks in the dome, collapsing the center and leaving a ring of mountains. Some of the mountains were smooth, having been eroded through to the original intrusive rock. Others, like Casa Grande, the most imposing fixture in the Basin, were dominated by blocks of lava that were reminiscent of the temples found on the summits of Central American pyramids.
Oliver and Iverson were awake, looking sadly at their tent, whose rear half had blown down during the night. Next to it stood a century plant, twelve feet high, each branch holding out its withered platelet of flowers. All about the camping area were taut mountaineering tents from which people were beginning now to emerge, bleary and silent, walking to the full-service rest room trailing the untied laces of their hiking boots.
Despite the collapsed tent, Linda Iverson was in high spirits. She stood about braiding her blond hair and looking south to the highest elevation of the Chisos, where we were headed. She was 26, a native of Minnesota who had happened upon Austin and taken up residence there, working for a while as a waitress in a restaurant that specialized in omelets, and then enrolling in the university.
We spent the next few hours taking the tents down and rearranging the loads in our backpacks. The sun finally made it over the mountain rim, and the essentially monochromatic winter landscape was subtly enhanced by its presence. The peaks ringing the Basin were just as imposing in the full sunlight as they had been when they were veiled in the clouds, but they were more accommodating to our perspective. They were closer than I had though and not quite so sheer. I wondered how hard they would be to climb.
We ate breakfast at the restaurant and then browsed in the little gift shop. I bought a half-dozen polished rocks for my daughter and put them in a plastic coin purse that read Big Bend National Park. We made two more stops: at the park store, which featured racks of Harlequin Romances and freeze-dried food; and at the ranger station, where a genial, middle-aged volunteer park ranger in a yellow felt vest gave us a “backcountry permit” that looked like a luggage tag, and admonished us to carry plenty of water, since the springs were dry.
The backcountry we meant to explore was known as the High Chisos Complex, a fourteen-mile loop along a well-maintained trail that would take us along the South Rim of the Chisos. It was a walk that could be made easily enough in a day by a casual hiker, or by a tourist riding up the trail in a train of sure-footed, sleepwalking horses, but we planned to take our time and spend as many as three or four days. Consequently, we were loaded down with water and food. We hoisted our packs in the Basin parking lot and ambled off to find the trail. There were roadrunners on the asphalt, pyrrhuloxia and house finches in yucca plants outside the lodge, and on the fringe of the Basin we saw six or seven mule deer, surprisingly heavy animals with ears the size of a donkey’s.
The trail looped about pleasantly in the foothills for the first mile or so and then grew progressively steeper until it got down to business in a long series of switchbacks. The Basin dropped away all at once, as if it had been jettisoned, and every time I looked back I was astonished at how far we had risen. The mountains across the valley looked sheer, the vegetation sparse and grasping, but the slope we walked on was well-timbered with juniper cedar, piñon, and oak, plus an occasional madrone tree with its strange reddish-orange bark that looked like oxidized metal. I felt the weight of the water in my pack, which was scientifically designed to distribute its tonnage alone some imaginary force field high above the shoulders. I secretly pined for my old Boy Scout Yucca pack, which was secured to a wooden frame with a diamond hitch, whose weight was felt directly and not as a vague, unaccountable sensation, as if some invisible beast were perching on the hiker’s neck.
Every few yards Oliver would crouch down and look off into the brush, at a brown towhee kicking through a pile of leaves, at a nondescript rodent he identified as a Texas antelope ground squirrel, at an acorn woodpecker. “Take a good look at his eye,” he said. “There’s something about that yellow ring around their eyes that makes them look insane.”
We stopped more often as the trail got steeper. Looking down through binoculars I could see the Day-Glo backpacks of a group far below us, but they were the only other people I had seen. We had come two or three miles, but I had given up trying to gauge the distance. I was merely relieved when the trail began to level out, passed over a saddle, and led to a broad mountain meadow carpeted with stipa grass. We walked past a pair of fiberglass outhouses and then veered off into the meadow and dropped our packs in a bower formed by the drooping branches of alligator juniper. Then we took off our shoes and attended to our separate lunches. I watched with revulsion as Garza opened a can labeled Potted Meat Food Product, spread the contents onto two pieces of rumpled white bread, and then proceeded to eat his sandwich with inexplicable pleasure. I opened a can of chicken spread, which was not much more appetizing, and ate a few dried apricots.
After lunch we set up our tents and then followed Oliver around as he laid out a series of small aluminum live traps, baited with peanut butter and rolled oats. Trapping is of course rigidly controlled in the park, and collecting permits of any kind are hard to come by. Oliver was, in his way, a fastidious ecologist. He trapped his animals alive, measured them, checked them for ectos, then released them in the same spot. He worried that this procedure might traumatize the creatures, a concern that would strike most conventional zoologists as eccentric, if not absurd. I had once watched a group of zoology graduate students at work in the field and had been appalled at the slaughter. They set out traps (brand name: Havahart), recovered the small mammals that entered them, injected them with sodium pentathol, eviscerated them, cleaned the carcasses with cornmeal, stuffed them with cotton, and arranged the resulting specimens in a laboratory tray with others of their kind.
“Most people are into this collecting syndrome,” Oliver said. “I’ve had people outright say that my data were no good, that there’s no way you can get the proper identification from a live rat. These guys who go out and kill tend to be descriptive rather than interpretive biologists.”
When the traps were baited and set, we made our way up the slope of Emory Peak, which loomed at the east end of the meadow and whose summit — at 7835 feet — was the highest elevation in the park. There was a cave somewhere in the peak that Oliver had heard about, the maternity colony for the Big Bend long-nosed bat. We worked our way up the steep slope of the mountain, above which sat the stark lava cap, jointed into long parallel blocks that had formed under the heating and cooling effects of Cenozoic weather. Oliver found a group of snails under a dead agave plant, large round striped snails that he arranged on the palm of his hand and stood for a moment admiring. They were named Humboltiana agavophila, for the great German naturalist who had discovered them as well as for their affinity for agave composts.
Oliver replaced the snails and we trudged upward again. The face of the cliff, when we arrived there, looked massive — there were no doubt dozens of caves in the seams of the rock. Oliver set out and in a matter of minutes had found the cave entrance he was looking for, a high vault obscured by brush. Inside, the cave was dry and strikingly angular, made of smooth, collapsed boulders that fit together like masonry. There was a damp, ammonialike smell&mdashguano. Oliver squatted down under a low ceiling and motioned the rest of us forward, with his finger on his lips.
“I’ve found two hibernating Townsend’s big-eared bats,” he whispered, pointing to a furry clump on the ceiling. “I am going to attempt to get some parasites off them while they’re still asleep.”
It struck me as an ominous, eerie statement. “I am going to attempt to drive this stake through the vampire’s heart while he is still asleep.” I wasn’t sure I wanted any part of it, but I watched, enthralled, as Oliver reached up and plucked the two bats from their roost in one bare hand.
“Yeah,” he whispered again, looking down almost tenderly at the bats. “They’re hibernating all right. They’re very cold. Feel them.”
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