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?
(Page 3 of 4)
I knew that Oliver had been inoculated against rabies. I reminded him that I had not. He said that the Townsend’s big-eared was “not a bad rabies bat.” I reluctantly poked one of the bats with the end of my finger — it was indeed cold — and then wiped the finger on my pants leg.
Iverson crouched nearby, holding a vial for the parasites. The bats were too drowsy to feel fear as Oliver spread their wings and probed around with his forceps, occasionally blowing softly on the fur to expose a mite or a louse. The bats had very long, fibrous ears — like the feelers of a moth — that converged in the center of the face, creating an expression of alien wrath. When hibernating they ordinarily kept one ear retracted, but the more Oliver handled them the more that ear began to rise. By and by the bats shook off sleep and grew active. One of them twisted his neck around, made a strange whining sound like a tiny disengaged motor, and bit Oliver on the finger, which did not distress him in the least.
He was glad to discover two species of parasitic flies, which he held up for our inspection; they looked like pieces of grit caught in his forceps. A moment later he reaplced the two bats on the ceuiling as if he were hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree. Once their feet were securely rooted to an almost microscopic irregulatrity in the smooth rock, the bats flapped their wings once or twice, cloaked them around their bodies, and then, astonishingly, went back to sleep.
There were more bats farther back in the cave, which rose upward in a series of lofts to another entrance fifty of sixty feet above us. In some places a few square feet of roost accommodated dozens of bats, aroused now and watchful, with both ears extended. None of them were the long-nosed bats that Oliver had held out a faint hope of seeing. He searched the cave floor for a skull or some other evidence of the species’ presence, but then the light outside began to fail he had to give up the effort.
Back in the meadow I lay in the grass, exhausted, studying a hummingbird nest that had been constructed on an agarito branch. The nest was about the size of a plum, perfectly formed and covered with lichen that resembled a ceramic glaze. Up on Emory Peak, the sunlight ebbed and flowed, playing across the surface of the rock.
Emory was William H. Emory, who headed the 1852 U.S. Boundary Survey Team, which made one of the half-dozen forays by engineers and geologists into the Big Bend, attempting to establish roads and trade routes. The region was no more hospitable to them than it had been to the Spanish, who had tried for 250 years to secure their authority along the frontier of Nueva Vicayza. They sent entrada after entrada into the wilderness, searching for gold, souls, slaves, finally for lines of defense against the Apaches. The surveyors met with the same problems — a grave lack of food and water and constant threats from the Indians — and they suffered in the detached way of scientists, sketching their maps and tending their instruments while almost senseless with thirst.
It was the Indians who made the best use of the Big Bend. The Apaches were driven into the region by the Comanches, and the Comanches were in turn driven there by the Americans. Both tribes adapted, learning when the land could be depended upon to sustain life, when the springs were running and the tinajas, the waterholes worn into the bedrock, were full. The Mescalero Apaches traveled with their water stored in thirty-foot lengths of animal intestines that they entwined around their packhorses. They established rancherías — periodic campsites — here in Chisos, in this very meadow. Every year in May, during what they called the Mexican moon, the Comanches would follow the war trail down from the high plains, raiding the Mexican villages on the other side of the river and living primarily on the spoils.
All of that carnage and enterprise seemed now to have faded away, absorbed into the rock. Over these very mountains had swarmed Chisos Indians, Apaches, Comanches, bandits from both sides of the border, prospectors, businessmen, scalp hunters, refugees, Texas Rangers, miners, Pancho Villa, and General Pershing. Now there was the occasional Happy Hiker.
Before dinner the four of us passed around a canteen and a squeeze bottle of biodegradable soap and washed the bat guano off our hands. On my little Svea stove we cooked freeze-dried Chili Mac and made hot chocolate with crunchy dehydrated marshmallows. After that, though it was early, there was little to do but go to sleep. It was very cold, and the sputtering gasoline stove neither warmed us nor drew us into conversation. When we turned off our flashlights the night was complete: there was nothing visible or audible in it. There was simply its presence, the same night that had presided over the Chisos since they had risen through the crust of the earth.
By eight o’clock the next morning the sun was way below Emory Peak, and the wild grass in the meadow was as cold as steel wool. The clouds moved across the peak in droves, or in fast, spritely shreds that reminded me of spirit forms.
In the middle of the field George Oliver was already at work, combing the fur of a yellow-nosed cotton rat with his forceps. “I’d like to find another flea,” he was saying. “It’d be great to find another flea or a louse.”
He discovered his flea after ten minutes of picking over the rodent and inserted it into the vial Iverson held out. He let the rat go, watching for a moment as it scrambled through the grass to its burrow, and moved on to check the next trap, which was also full. “It’s like opening presents on Christmas morning,” he said.
Almost all of the traps were inhabited either by yellow-nosed cotton rats or by harvest and white-ankled mice. Oliver measured each one carefully, writing in his notebook the length of its tail and feet and body, and then checked it over for ectos. The rodents crouched and shivered in his grasp. Some bit him, and others sat still as he parted their fur with his breath.
Oliver was delighted with the traps’ success. He mentioned that his hands were numb from the cold, but otherwise he seemed happily preoccupied. He belonged here. His home in Austin was a minimal, transitory place, a rented house with a mattress on the floor and a few pieces of furniture that no one had bothered to haul to the dump. It was a ranchería, a foraging base.
I wandered about with my binoculars and watched a raucous group of sleek blue Mexican jays. I saw a woodpecker and a wren, some kind of wren. In my secret heart I knew I could not tell one bird from another, or one tree or shrub or flower from another. I required constant tutoring; I needed a course in Remedial Basic Knowledge. Every trip I made into the wilderness seemed to subtract from my already meager store of information. I envied Oliver his field identification skills — “Look! There’s a white-throated swift. Its markings remind me of a killer whale”— because they were so obviously not just skills, but gifts.
I was restless. Even here, on the second day of a recreational camping trip, outfitted and made shamelessly comfortable by a technology that would have stupefied one of those early explorers, I wanted to move on, to cover ground, to get it over with. I fingered the polished stones in my pocket, anxious to take them home. That was my problem: an absurd, pervasive homesickness. I knew I would have to keep one step ahead of this feeling, to outmaneuver and contain it. But to do so was a bother, and seemed out of keeping with the grandeur of this place that I wanted to love and in fact did love. I desperately wanted my emotions to be in pitch with the landscape.
During the morning the temperature dropped steadily. We ate lunch in my tent, and afterward I broke into my store of Del Monte chocolate pudding, the one food item that experience had taught me was absolutely indespensible for wilderness travel. By the time we had gathered up our camp, slung it up on our backs, and headed out the trail for the South Rim, it was three o’clock. It must have been about thirty degrees, and it grew colder with every foot of altitude we gained.
We moved into the clouds, following a canyon where all the trees were covered with frost. Another mile or so after that the trail opened onto a plain where the grass had been worn down into the sod by hundreds of horseshoes and Vibram soles. A few hundred feet farther on, where the plain ended, was the most magnificent sight in Texas. The South Rim is a sheer lava bank that looks out upon what a casual observer might take to be a sizable portion of another planet. I walked up to the rim itself and felt a flourish of wind behind me trying to shove the surface area of my backpack forward as if it were a sail. I took a few steps back and studied the view. The Chisos, the high, self-contained bastion in the center of the park, dropped and then surged outward to meet the desert and a field of remarkable landforms. Far off in the haze was Rio Grande, and I could see the other mountain groups — Punta de la Sierra, Chilicotal, that part of the Sierra del Carmens known as the Dead Horse Mountains — as clearly as the three-dimensional model at park headquarters. The mountains presented a tableau of arrested motion, an everlasting instant of geological time. The ancient rocks rose and subsided like waves; they pulsed with light, and the light itself seemed generated by the power of the wind.
My Library
