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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We walked on for another mile or so, following the rim, stopping every now and then to look out at the new perspectives it offered. We made camp in a little grove just off the trail. There was frost everywhere and the wind was intense. Little snowdrifts accumulated in the creases of our clothes. Garza and I put up the tent, and then I tried without success to light the stove in the wind. I was sapped. We climbed into the tent and resolved to wait out the cold. I was wearing my long johns, several layers of clothing, and a bulky coat filled with some miracle synthetic; I was bundled up in my sleeping bag, which was rated to ten degrees above zero; and I was shivering uncontrollably. I had never been this cold. It was growing dark. We would be lying here with out teeth chattering for fourteen hours.
“You know,” Garza said, “I halfway think we ought to walk down tonight.”
I had been halfway thinking the same thing. The Basin was six and a half miles away, a long walk in the dark, but it was mostly downhill. In another few hours we could be sitting in a heated room in the lodge watching television. We considered it for a while and then pulled down the tent and wadded it up inside my backpack. Oliver and Iverson called out from their own tent that they were comfortable enough to wait the cold out, and would meet us in the Basin in a few days.
We got our blood circulating. The trail led out along the rim, then cut into Boot Canyon. It turned dark almost immediately, but we could see well enough with our flashlights to main a good pace. We followed the canyon down to Boot Spring, where there was an empty horse corral and a ranger hut and a few picnic tables, at which we sat and wolfed down some canned goods. Then we started off again, following the contour of the canyon, passing the Boot, a freestanding column of rock whose dark shape was strangely delineated against the night sky. Soon we came upon the steep, never-ending series of switchbacks that led back down to the Basin. We rambled down them, rarely speaking, overcome by monotony and fatigue. We could see the Basin far below us, a grouping of lights that never seemed to come nearer. It was one of those occasions when it was possible to lose all belief in progress, in time itself. I knew I would be walking down this hill forever, and when my feet finally did hit the asphalt I had the feeling I had simply appeared in the Basin in some ghostly form, that my real self was back up on the switchbacks, wandering in the void.
I lay on my back on a little swath of curbside greenery in the parking lot, looking up at the stars and removing pieces of ice from my beard. The lodge was full, so we drove to the campground and set up Garza’s tent, an advanced apparatus that was supported by a cat’s cradle of flexible aluminum poles and was as roomy inside as a pavilion. I lay down in profound weariness, as washed out, as eroded, as the landscape.
In the morning we hobbled up to the restaurant for pancakes. There were only a few people there: toothy, radiant young women in down vests, and their ruddy, bearded companions, with whom they played footsie under the table in hiking boots that weighed five pounds apiece.
All at once the Basin seemed like a metropolis, alive with opportunity. I went into the store and looked at the cans of food displayed there, weirdly fascinated by everything I saw. To get our legs working again we climbed a small mountain, and in the afternoon we drove forty miles west to Santa Elena Canyon, descending all the way through desert, through the very scenery we had viewed from the South Rim. All along the way were strange formations, dikes and rills topped with freestanding rocks like the spine plates of a stegosaurus. There was an area quaintly identified as the “jumble of volcanoes,” a place of low, bone-white hills strewn with nuggets of red volcanic rock that looked as if they had been unloaded there by a dump truck the day before.
Santa Elena Canyon is a deep gorge cut by the Rio Grande through the Mesa de Anguilla, a corridor 1500 feet high that simply stops in its tracks at the junction of the Rio Grande and Terlingua Creek. At this point the river makes a right-angle turn to the Southwest, leaving a great floodplain on the American side.
The mouth of the canyon — with its concrete walkway and observation stanchions — is considered a must-see spot for visitors to the park, but in the middle of the winter few people were there. A hundred yards back into the canyon there was a stunning silence, or rather a stunning suggestion of silence, because I could hear a dim, thrumming sound, a constant tone that might have been a bird call echoing through the canyon or the operating sounds of some faraway piece of machinery. The whole thing was extraordinarily, soporifically peaceful. The river was as calm as the rock walls it reflected.
For the next several days we hung around the Basin, taking our meals there and driving back and forth through the park in the truck. It was as if, after a life of consequence and rigor, we had fallen into a decadent lethargy from which we could not escape. The food in the restaurant was consistently acceptable, and as we sat at our table, staring out the picture windows at the brute scenery, we came to recognize the other regulars. Most of them were retired couples wearing identical quilted jackets or vests with patches obtained at the other stops they had made on the national park circuit. They sat at their tables in comfortable silence, the wives with a look of loving forbearance, an air of humoring their husbands on this vast itinerary, this connect-the-dots odyssey of natural wonders. The windows of their motor homes were covered with decals — Yosemite, Royal Gorge, Mammoth Cave. There was no place for these big, lumbering vehicles in the prevailing backcountry ethic. Hikers came down from the mountains, their blood purified, their spiritual priorities in order, only to encounter the noxious fumes of a Chinook. And yet there was something guileless and credible about these people; they were staking their last years of life on the notion that in these government-certified vistas there was something profoundly worth their attention.
One day we drove east, into a stark low-elevation desert sparsely covered with creosote bushes and agave and candelilla plants. Near the river we took a road that was little more than a jeep trail and followed it north until it deadended on the top of Cuesta Carlota, a low, regular ridge that put me in mind of an earthen dam. On the other side of the cuesta was Ernst Basin, a desert savannah bounded on the east by the Sierra del Carmens. The brush on the basin floor was thick, and there was a barely noticeable trail of greenery running through it.
We walked down on the other side of the ridge, following an unanimated trail that frequently disappeared into the hard alkaline soil, marked only by occasional piles of rock. I was looking for a place I had read about in one of George Oliver’s poems — “Syzygy at Ernst Tinaja.”
M.A. Ernst had been a storekeeper and public official around the turn of the century at the little town of La Noria, a few miles north of here. He was ambushed one day as he rode home on his horse, shot in the back by parties unknown or at least never convicted of the crime. They found him leaning against a Spanish dagger plant, still alive and holding his intestines in place with one hand. He had written a note for his wife, who did not find it until just after he died: “Am shot. . . . First shot hit, two more missed.”
The trail snaked back into a deep canyon that cut through the cuesta to the basin. We followed it toward the desert and came across not one but a series of tinajas, swirling, polished depressions in the limestone that were all but dry. We stopped by the largest of them and watched the water bugs swimming in the few inches of water that remained. Compared to the outright grandeur of Santa Elena Canyon, it was nothing special, but the magic of place is an arbitrary phenomenon — I felt comfortable here, among the bleached, rococo rock forms. I would have liked to stay there all day, but the sun was going down and I was not sure we would be able to find the trail again in the darkness. Still, it was tempting. We were nearing the crepuscular hour, when javelinas would begin to snort and rise from their wallows, ready once more to face the desert gloaming.
That night George Oliver and Linda Iverson walked down from the South Rim and pitched their tent next to ours in the campground. They had had a good time, had climbed to the summit of Emory Peak and had experienced continued success with the traps. No sooner had the two of them touched ground in the Basin than they wanted out again, back into the solitude of the wilderness, back into their natural habitat. We ate some chili and then got into the truck and drove to Grapevine Hills, a weird, haunted region composed of seemingly random piles of soft, scruffy rock. In the darkness we could see the haphazard silhouettes of the formations. It looked as if they would collapse at any moment, but they were obdurate and, to the fleeting perceptions of the creatures who beheld them, timeless. But they were part of it too, at their own pace, part of what the novelist Wallace Stegner calls “the mystery of transitoriness.”
For a moment I felt suddenly displaced, removed from the scene by a new wave of homesickness. It took more of my attention to combat it than I was willing to relinquish. I decided that one way around this intrusive emotion might be to think of Big Bend as home. I did. It worked immediately.
We stood on a bed of sand in the center of the canyon. We were the only people around for twenty miles.
“Maybe I can attract a predator,” George Oliver said. He put the back of his hand up to his mouth and made a sound that he hoped approximated the cries of a small rodent in distress. It was a terrible, high-pitched wailing and squeaking sound. For a long time it had no effect, and Oliver finally put his hand back in his pocket and turned to go.
“Wait!” Iverson whispered. “I think I hear something.”
The four of us stood still and listened. We could hear it faintly now, the sound of a predator moving toward us through the brush.
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