Little things reflect real beauty of Big Bend area

TERLINGUA GHOST TOWN, Texas -- In Big Bend, time has ticked a heaven round the stars, and the effect is overwhelming. Even for Texas, distances are astronomic, and time, laid bare here by wind in layers of lava, limestone, sandstone and volcanic ash, is starkly geologic. The landscape of jagged terra-cotta mountains rising out of ocher desert is beautiful, forbidding and very strange.

"It takes a little while to get over the hugeness of this place and to see the little things, which are its real treasure," Angie Dean said of the region defined by the U-shaped border with Mexico carved in stone by the Rio Grande River and the national park that occupies much of it.

Dean is the proprietor of the Starlight Theatre, a former movie house built to entertain the miners who wrested mercury-bearing cinnabar from the hillsides of the town of Terlingua, Texas. The last mine closed in 1952 when the mercury played out and the town was abandoned.

Some of the miners, poisoned by the liquid metal, remained behind in the hillside cemetery where bodies lie under rock piles or within vaulted adobe shrines topped with weathered wooden crosses.

The graveyard lies just outside Big Bend, one of the nation's most remote and least-visited national parks. It occupies 1,250 square miles of mountains, desert and grasslands grazed into desert by a century of ranching. With cattle, goats and sheep gone, the grass has begun to come back, as have peregrine falcons, black bear and mountain lions.

Many of the 350,000 visitors who make the six-hour drive to Big Bend from the closest place a decent-sized plane can land -- Odessa or El Paso, 350 miles away -- come to see the wildlife. Big Bend in spring is a birder's paradise. Others come for the surreal Martian scenery, the warm dry winter weather and the hiking, rafting, peace, beauty and quiet.

Two roads lead to the park. The eastern, Texas Route 385, is the old Commanche War Trail used to conduct raids into Mexico. The western crosses a broad flat frying pan whose rim is formed by the Chalk, Santiago, Christmas and Rattle-snake mountains.

My brother Richard and I traversed the pan in mid-May during a heat wave and what some say was the fourth year of a drought. Not far from the Woodward Agate Ranch where campers can roam 4,000 acres of the Davis Mountains in search of gems, we came upon a drought scene captured in countless cartoons. Just inside the barbed-wire range fences that line Texas highways, three patient vultures stared at us from their perch atop a bloated but as yet unexploded steer.

May and June are Big Bend's hottest months, although, depending on the rains, May can also result in spectacular cactus blooms in the Chihuahuan Desert. We had come to hike and to float through the Rio Grande's sheer canyons. But as we soon heard, drought had left too little water in the river to float a raft.

We arrived hungry and too late to camp. A readers' poll in a local paper -- local meaning Alpine, Texas, 86 miles away -- had given the Starlight the nod for serving the best dinner in the Big Bend. So from nearby Study Butte -- named for a rancher who pronounced his name "Stoody" -- we followed the glittering lights in the distance to the marquee of the Starlight Theatre and a delicious platter of picadillo, a stir-fry of beef tips with onions, tomatoes and jalapeno peppers.

Locals were watching a Western movie on a big screen behind the mesquite-wood bar hung with bleached longhorn skulls. The population of Terlingua, 120, increases a hundredfold for one brief week in February when two rival camps of chefs hold the annual International Chili Cook-off before a crowd of 10,000. But visitors are few in May because of the heat, which topped 100 degrees every day of our stay.

Dale Jennsen, our waitress, came to Big Bend from Massachusetts to work as a raft guide, but was left jobless when the river dried up. "I guess I just had my fill of humid green," she said of life in the verdant East. "I've become a desert rat now, and the hills and trees almost feel claustrophobic to me when I go home."

A ceiling of stars thick as clouds overhangs the desert on clear nights when the smoke from Mexican power plants and Lousiana refineries blows the other way. The landscape's unforgiving beauty, mercurial weather and vast spaces dominate life. "We clear the restaurant frequently for moon rises and rainbows" Dean said.

The word "Texas" comes from the Spanish word "tejas" meaning "friendly," and the people we met were. Dean sketched out a rough itinerary of "musts" and advised that if we were only going to sack out anyway, we could save the price of dinner by staying at the Easter Egg Motel, a line of double-wide trailers strung together to create a gift shop, general store and motel catering to truckers.

In the morning, we awoke to the sound of diesels. We went to check out and found a note taped to the motel door that said, "We've gone to the night office. Use a dime in the pay phone to call us."

Business is handled casually in the Big Bend. Shops that don't take credit cards all seemed to accept personal checks, and the national park uses an "iron ranger"? to collect its $7 per night camping fee.

Our original plan to hike in nearby Big Bend Ranch State Natural Area, Texas's newest state park, shriveled in the heat. "Not even the real desert rats are going hiking in this," Bernadette Kowalik, the state park ranger in charge of the Warnock Environmental Education Center, said. "The ground temperature out there in places is 150 degrees."

The center contains an exceedingly well-done museum of the region's natural history and of the 10,000-year habitation by humans -- Jumano Indians were followed by Spanish missionaries and gold seekers, Comanches, Mescalero Apaches, Mexican settlers and finally American ranchers and miners. The museum offers an hour's respite from the relentless heat that sought to turn us quickly to leather and bone.

To stay cool, we drove the El Camino Del Rio (the River Road), which follows the Rio Grande from Study Butte to Presidio, Texas, site of the Army fort used to guard the border and hunt Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary whose raids swept through Big Bend in the early decades of this century.

According to the guidebook, this route was called possibly "the prettiest drive in all America" by a National Geographic magazine writer. The road signs list the drive as FM 170. The letters stand for "Farm Road," although these fields of parched volcanic scree have grown mostly dreams.

The route grants stunning views of the steep limestone canyons that separate Mexico from the United States along much of the river's course. Locals refer to the formation as "The Great Wall of Chihuahua," and it remains the same barrier to border crossings that it did for the Apaches and Comanches.

The rule for desert hiking -- drink at least a gallon of water per day -- had been upped to six quarts or more during the heat wave. A short climb from the road up to an overlook so scenic I could only look and laugh left us with thick tongues and heads aching from dehydration.

We were drawn from the car at another stop by an outlandishly picturesque abandoned village where Contrabando Creek joins the Rio Grande. It was a border town village like those seen in countless movies starring the likes of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and with cameras firing steadily, we walked its dusty streets.

When we ducked into the shade of the old mission church, we found that this picture-perfect town had plywood insides. It had been built in 1978 as a stage set for a movie starring Burl Ives.

The drive is beautiful, though eerie, for in shadow the cinder cone mountains and gnarly buttes recalled visions of Tolkein's Mordor. In Lajitas, a historic river crossing that is now a model frontier town with a golf course, we stopped to buy Clay Henry Jr., the town's mayor, a beer. The mayor, who is also the town drunk, is a goat.

It was 105 when we hiked up Closed Canyon, a passage 20 feet wide and 300 or so feet high.

Appetites that have been killed by the desert returned with the aid of air conditioning, and we dined in La Kiva, an artfully done underground restaurant and bar in Terlingua justifiably famous for its barbecue.

Copyright 1996
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