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.
Photograph by S. C. Gwynne
THIS IS WHO I AM: a flyspeck of human vanity in a trillion miles of stone-dead interstellar space; a graceless lump of flesh and fear in a remote desert where nearly everything that I can see or touch is designed to hurt me.
At least that is how I feel just now. It is well past midnight on the chilly, windswept early morning of November 13, 2003. I am kneeling at the exact center of my REI hexagonal nylon tent, listening to the roar of the wind in the canyon and trying to decide whether to scream, pray, or try to go back to sleep. My tent is located near the Mexican border in southwest Texas, on the mountainous rim of a massive piece of geologic wreckage known as the Solitario, a mile-high, eight-mile-wide, nearly perfectly circular product of unimaginably violent volcanic upheaval. Its weird symmetry and upturned peaks can be distinguished clearly in satellite photos from outer space. Thirteen hours ago I was dropped at the mouth of a three-mile-long narrow stone canyon with 120 pounds of water, 21 packets of freeze-dried food, a tent, a sleeping bag, a small cooker, a pistol, a cell phone, and a flashlight and left to spend seven days alone. I am quite alone. As far as I know, there are twenty miles of jagged backcountry between me and the nearest human being.
I am here because I wanted to be. I had the idea some months ago that it would be interesting to travel from my home in the suburbs of Austin to an isolated part of the Big Bend and spend a week there, alone in the wilderness. The point was to go where there would be absolutely no chance of seeing people, even from a distance, to experience the majesty and peril of the high Chihuahuan Desert in the purity of solitude and write about it. Now, having been fully awake in the desert night for more than five hours, with all of its bumpings and barkings and slitherings and hissings and ghostly silences, I am beginning to rethink the wisdom of this idea.
That’s because at this moment I am experiencing a primal fear—maybe it is the primal fear—that has nothing to do with the specific physical threats around me, which include mountain lions, javelinas, flash floods, lightning, rattlesnakes, scorpions, centipedes, brown recluse spiders, tarantulas, and black widows. I am not afraid for my life. Such isolation forces you to name your mortal fears and I have named all of them and they do not include being killed and eaten. Not in this tent. Not tonight. What I am afraid of is the first thing I was ever aware of being afraid of and what I have told my daughter countless times she need not fear: being alone in the dark. It is a small prison of emotion from which there is no escape. It is also, in its own way, a shattering revelation. And it is why I am on my knees in my flimsy little tent trying to decide whether to scream or pray. Oddly, the flashlight is no defense, and no comfort; the darkness is infinite and universe-wide, and the tiny light’s pathetic beam is no match for it. Eventually I turn it off and lie down. For the next six hours I lie there in the dark listening to my own breath and to my accelerated heartbeat, waiting for the light to come. There is nothing else to be done.
WHEN THE LIGHT DOES COME it is gray and bleak, accompanied by a strong, cold wind that rattles through the mesquite trees and ocotillo plants. But I feel better. The nameless terrors of the night have vanished with the light, and now that I am finally out of the surreal monotony of the tent, I am much less anxious. There are important things to do: urinate, start the Coleman stove, drink some water, write an entry in my diary, and gaze in slack-jawed awe at the place I have put myself.
I have pitched my tent in an old Indian camp. Behind me is a 75-foot limestone cliff, with cascading prickly pear cactus and soot-blackened overhangs from ancient cooking fires. In front is a dry, sandy arroyo that, from the large amounts of waterborne debris piled eight feet high along its sharply cut banks, is also the scene of torrential flash floods. Around me is the vast escarpment of the Solitario: the huge, uplifted humps of the rim and cut canyons with seven-hundred-foot sheer faces. There are Indian artifacts everywhere, and one need only bend over to pick up a piece of hand-chipped chert or a stone knife. The first Indians were here some nine thousand years ago; remnants of hunter-gatherer camps have been found at archaeological sites throughout the Solitario. There is also evidence that cowboys once used this place. Several ancient decaying coils of barbed wire hang from a mesquite tree. A pile of crumbling, rusted-out cans suggests that the last people to frequent this camp were here in the tin era, maybe fifty years ago. Other than the fact that in a flash flood anyone bivouacked here would be in mortal danger, it is a perfect camp, tucked into a protected canyon at an elevation of around 3,800 feet.
In a larger sense, where I am is on the eastern edge of Big Bend Ranch State Park, some 270,000 acres of raw desert backcountry that stretches along the Rio Grande River between the border towns of Lajitas and Presidio. The park lies just to the west of its larger and better known cousin, Big Bend National Park, and was purchased in 1988 by the State of Texas from the Diamond A Cattle Company. A few improvements have been made since then, including a graded road, campgrounds, and a ranger station, but the ranch remains one of the most rugged, isolated, and forbidding parts of the Southwest. The Big Bend country itself, which occupies most of Brewster and Presidio counties, is an area roughly the size of Maryland or Vermont. The Spaniards called this region the despoblado—the uninhabited place—and it remains one of America’s last frontiers: vast basins of rolling yucca and sotol grasslands and wildly colored rockscapes broken by monstrous dark volcanic peaks that rise a mile off the desert floor and recede a hundred visible miles into the smoke-blue air of the borderlands.
Before I began to investigate the idea of spending a week alone in the desert, I had never heard of the Solitario. As a tourist attraction, it is virtually unknown. The relatively few people who have visited it are either locals from Alpine or Marfa or Terlingua (only a handful of hardy souls), archaeologists hunting Indian sites, or academics wanting to have a look at one of the geologic wonders of the world. To go there you must obtain special permission from the state park and may not enter without a guide. The park folks especially don’t want you camping there. The reason, as far as I can tell, is that the place is loaded with Indian artifacts and sites, most of which are undiscovered or at least unexcavated. Bringing me to this particular place was the idea of Greg Henington and Tom Williams, two stalwart desert rats from Terlingua who became my guides and advisers. Greg runs an outfitter called Texas River and Jeep Expeditions and has guided Rio Grande River tours for thirty years. Tom is a retired businessman and community activist who has hiked all over the Solitario and probably knows it as well as anyone. They chose the location of my camp (in a part of the Solitario that is on private land), and they took me in by Jeep over a daunting sequence of extremely rough four-wheel-drive trails.
Today I plan to hike through a narrow canyon called the Lefthand Shutup—one of three natural ways into the heart of the Solitario (there is a jeep road over the north rim). That is, after I face my first practical problem in the wilderness: how to make sure my tent doesn’t blow away. A blast of wind from the canyon at eight o’clock this morning caused the tent to flex so far that it nearly collapsed, and when it popped back up, it became airborne and landed in a mesquite tree. Though I was able to retrieve it, this raises the possibility that when I return from my hike today the tent will be gone, or at least in shreds, and I will then spend the rest of the week on the open ground. For a city-dwelling tenderfoot who goes car-camping with the family once a year and whose entire defense against the encroaching desert darkness is a fraction of a millimeter of nylon, this is an unpleasant prospect. A good deal of rain is forecast for the next few days. So I spend two hours using my knife to whittle mesquite branches to make bigger and better tent stakes than the ones I have brought, driving them into the ground with hunks of broken limestone from the cliff face, then tying the tent to both the stakes and the mesquite trees nearby. (I am reluctant to take down the tent, since I may have trouble getting it back up again.) When I finish, nothing short of a massive flash flood will dislodge it.
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