Outdoor Adventures 
Conversations With a Grasshopper
Want to really get away from it all? Try spending a week completely alone in the most remote corner of Big Bend Ranch State Park. I did, and other than facing rattlesnakes, confronting my most primitive fear, and speaking to the occasional long-legged insect, I’ve never felt more relaxed in my life.
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My tent is just one of many concerns as I prepare for my hike. The first thing you learn when you are completely alone is that many of the seemingly simple, ordinary things you do—boiling water or whittling wood—are a risk. Just going for a short walk raises the possibility of getting lost, and I intend to hike ten to fifteen miles a day. If I take a wrong turn and do not make it back to camp, no one will come looking for me. If I do not find my way back, I will most likely die of thirst. So I take a compass and a topographical map, as well as three quarts of water, some trail mix, a flashlight, a first-aid kit, a knife, a lighter, and some warm clothes and an insulating space blanket in case I have to spend the night away from camp. Then there are freak accidents and chance encounters. If I break an ankle or get bitten by a rattlesnake, getting back to my campsite may be difficult or impossible. The cell phone I have brought with me does not work anywhere in the Solitario. My last-ditch option in the event of injury or other medical emergency is to hike out of the Solitario and up to higher elevations on the rim and try to use the cell phone there. This could take anywhere from an hour to four hours or more, depending on where I am and what my condition is. Assuming my emergency call goes through, I will be roughly six hours from rescue and then a 130-mile trip to the nearest medical facility.
There is also the remote but nonetheless real possibility that I will encounter a mountain lion. The statistical chances of being attacked are small, but this region is known to have a large population of lions. Six months ago an adult male hiker, walking alone in the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park, was attacked and mauled by a mountain lion. Anyone who is even marginally afraid of the big cats need only read the helpful books on lions sold at the Panther Junction ranger station to develop a full-scale paranoia. I purchased one called Mountain Lion Alert, which tells in exquisite detail how I will be attacked (without warning at all; mountain lions can’t roar, and their purpose in attacking is never to warn or scare, always to kill and eat) and how the cat will pounce on me (from behind, digging its claws into my back, then biting either the back of my neck to sever vertebrae or closer to the side or front of my neck to asphyxiate me). There are also these helpful hints: Never walk alone and never stay on the ground once the lion has knocked you down. It’s a wonder any tourists who read this book even get out of their cars. In any case, I have brought a Ruger .357 pistol and a pocketful of 180-grain Magnum hollow-point shells. The gun makes a god-awful loud noise, and the report alone would likely scare a mountain lion away.
These pleasant thoughts fill my head as I walk due west into the Shutup around noon. Half an hour later I am in the deep shadow of a prodigiously steep and narrow canyon. In places, the canyon walls rise seven hundred feet above me, and the widest point in the wash where I am walking is about one hundred feet. It is like standing in the nave of a medieval cathedral. Here, there are clues to the Solitario’s past. Thirty-five million years ago, a huge intrusion of molten rock lifted an eight-mile-wide slab of sedimentary limestone thousands of feet into the air, creating an enormous dome, or laccolith; later, magma erupted in the center, causing the roof of the dome to collapse, part of which crashed through into the caldera whence the lava had come, leaving the uplifted rim standing and creating a sort of impenetrable fortress with two- to three-mile-thick walls. Erosion then created three Shutups—so-called because they were narrow enough that cattle could be penned up with small amounts of barbed wire. The Shutups, which are the only ways for water to escape the Solitario, are places of considerable violence during heavy rains.
It feels good to be out walking in the canyon, away from the paralyzing uncertainties of last night, watching red-tailed hawks wheel along the stunning ocher-and-black-stained limestone cliffs. The sun has come out at last and is throwing long shadows along the northern canyon wall. The silence is profound and disconcerting. The sound of my footfalls and the squeak of my backpack are astoundingly loud. A startled covey of scaled quail makes a noise so abrupt that every nerve in my body jumps. I take a break for water, sit for a long time in the bizarre, unyielding silence, then decide to climb into a narrow side canyon, the entrance to which is a fifty-foot scramble over some large boulders. I have climbed nearly to the top of the rise when I notice that the stone notch that I am about to put my hand in contains a rattlesnake. At the moment I see it, it is less than two feet away. The snake, which I later identify as a rock rattlesnake—a small, purplish-blue rattler with narrow brown bands—was sleeping, apparently. Had he been awake, he might have bitten me in the face or upper body. Now fully alert, he rattles at me as I back away, heart and adrenal glands pumping furiously, toward the main canyon.
I am lucky. This late in the season, the snakes who have not gone to ground are typically aggressive, venom-laden, and looking for one last meal of lizard or kangaroo rat before hibernating. An envenomated bite—as opposed to a "dry" bite, where only residual poison is delivered—would mean excruciating pain and massive swelling. I would probably not die, but as Greg Henington, who is an emergency medical technician, pointed out, "You might wish you had." The encounter is another reminder of the rules of wilderness solitude: Be very careful, because no help is on the way. I decide not to explore the side canyon.
Back at the camp, I make a fire and watch a giant brown-and-yellow tarantula cruise by my tent. As I gather wood, a whole fleet of small scorpions appears, all headed south for some reason. For the first time, I notice the blooms around my camp: yellow desert marigolds, purple Tahoka daisies, tiny yellow flowers on the creosote. Across the wash are dozens of spidery ocotillos that leafed after the big October rains here and have since turned gold. They extend flaming yellow tentacles into the sky. One thing: I have terrible indigestion and no appetite, which I interpret as a product of nerves. So I sit before my fire, which I have made of fallen mesquite branches and which smells like exotic incense, and watch the night come on. On my second evening I will not eat; the very idea gives me heartburn.
GOING ALONE INTO THE DESERT is not, of course, an original idea. History, particularly religious history, is full of such journeys. Moses did it for forty days and forty nights, an idea that worked so well that it was duplicated by Elijah and later by Jesus of Nazareth. It was after Jesus’ forty nights in the desert that he began preaching. Muhammad went alone into the wilderness. Buddha did it. So did Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Black Elk. Solitary trips into the wild are a cornerstone of Native American religion. The Lakota Sioux word for it is "hanblecheya," which means "to cry through the night." Even the Indians, as it turns out, found such raw solitude an unnerving experience. They viewed it as a form of psychological death. According to Lakota holy man Lame Deer, "You go up on that hill to die."
I have not come to the Solitario to see visions, hear divine voices, find God, embrace the void, or be reborn. That is not to say that I, a fifty-year-old lapsed Episcopalian, would not welcome any or all of the preceding. It’s just that I don’t know where to start. On the other hand, it would be dishonest to insist that I’m not looking for something, and I am indeed curious to see what happens to me out here. And by my third day in the wilderness, something very unusual is clearly happening to me. The person I am on day three is already a vastly stripped-down version of the person who suffered his grievous night terrors on day one. The old circadian rhythms have disappeared; there is no trace of the endless sequence of minor activities and conversations that fill my normal day. I have nothing to do, and more important, I have no reason to do anything. I am adrift in an ocean of time. Even reading, which is what I always do when I have time to myself, has become oddly irrelevant. Not that I do not try. I have a book on Arctic adventure that I keep going back to, in an old time-killing reflex, only to be distracted by what is going on around me and discover that time need not be killed. There are scudding clouds and hooting great horned owls and the circumambient scent of sage. There are hummingbirds in the Jerusalem thorn and whimsical canyon zephyrs that can flatten a creosote bush thirty feet away and still leave me in calm air. There are foxes, roadrunners, my very own Say’s phoebe, with whom I share the site, and ravens whose wing beats I can hear one hundred feet above me; I can even hear the rush of air over their airborne bodies. With all this going on, I find it nearly impossible to read sequential paragraphs. (In seven days I will have managed to read 110 pages.) A few days into my sojourn, I have begun to rediscover what it means to just sit.
My Library
