West with the Light

"In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous." - Aristotle

The first time I was in Big Bend National Park I was a wee, skinny lad on a slight motorcycle a long way from home. Oddly, though, I felt comforted by the absence of human endeavors and a sky that curved more than any my youthful eyes had ever beheld. There were emotions that overtook me without explanation, and if I knew what I was experiencing at the time, I might even had thought there was a thing or two mystical that I didn’t comprehend. I only know that the air and the imagery and the sunlight and the night sky are etched into my brainpan in permanent colors.

The park had its 79th birthday this week on Monday, and I wanted to acknowledge its glory. Texas gifted 700,000 acres to the National Park System in 1942 and further acquisitions have increased the size of the holding to 800,000. I have been drawn back to its rugged trails and ocotillo-covered mesas and grand horizons since that day I puttered southward toward the entrance. Usually, I ride a motorcycle all day from Austin, which is considerably more challenging in the summer than other seasons, but the resultant beauty is always worth the mileage.

Nights in the park can be as glorious as the days. Starlight in the Chisos Basin is equalled hardly anywhere else on the planet. I have often laid on the ground outside my tent with the sense I was falling into that sky. I’ve seen night skies comparable only in the Australian Outback and up on the Great Divide in Colorado. I have been constantly amazed at people arriving from their urban lives, exclaiming over the first time they actually saw the Milky Way.

The Window, Big Bend National Park

I have also sat the bench overlooking the Window up in the basin for eight hours without leaving and stared across to the distant desert floor. No overactive imagination is required to envision ancient creatures crossing the far plains that were once the bottom of a vast inland sea. Time seems not to exist in Big Bend and your own humanity with its fleeting minutes seems impossible to be of consequence.

I remember the first night I ever camped up on the South Rim. No one was with me and I had not planned the adventure well but I popped up my tent and unrolled my bag. There was plenty of water and jerky and granola to get me back down the trail the next morning. I walked out to the edge of the rim where trees were gnarled by wind and even when it was not blowing there was an unmistakable sound that I sensed as a hum. Maybe Pythagoras was right about the music of the spheres. I was only certain, though, the view was beyond language to describe but spurred emotions that felt almost primitive.

View from the South Rim Toward Old Mexico

Up there, with Mexico mostly beneath your feet, the earth looks comprised of crenellations of battles before time began being measured. The urge is to fly above and away without knowing if you can find anything equally beautiful. When darkness came, I lay in my tent trying to sleep while listening to nocturnal noises of all the live things moving about in the high desert. Sticks and limbs snapped and there was huffing and howling and the wind came up and relentlessly shook my tent. There seemed a party going on not far from where I was attempting sleep. I was glad the morning hike was downhill.

Bluebonnets Frame the Distant Santa Elena Canyon

In January of each new year I make an effort to travel to the park and get down to the Rio Grande. Invariably, the first bluebonnets of each new Spring in Texas make their appearances in the Big Bend. The river makes its mighty turn to the Northeast some miles after exiting Santa Elena Canyon and rock walls carved by the eons will prompt wonder in even the most cynical of hearts. The weather is inexplicable in the region of the park, too. In March this year, I was camped in Marathon and awoke to freezing temperatures prior to making a run to Santa Elena. By the time I reached the river the temperature was 86 degrees and it was 28 when I got on the motorcycle that morning in Marathon.

Although I have hiked more trails than I can remember over almost five decades, I will likely never get to as many as I desire. The park is just too big, and nature has a beautiful complexity that defies our modern brains and their demands for order. I truly do not understand the mystery of this place and the hold it has on me. I rarely go more than a few months without returning. I have felt a similar spiritual thrum at the Grand Canyon, too, and have hiked and run it rim to rim a dozen times beginning when I first stood on the South Rim at twenty-one. I suppose it is just human nature to be drawn to spectacular natural beauty, but there is an indefinable and unknowable “other” that offers a spiritual connection, too.

Santa Elena Canyon

It’s hard to think of a place like Big Bend National Park having a birthday. A celebration might be fitting with a change of a geologic epoch. Seventy-nine years, though, is not even the movement of a second hand on eternity’s clock. I am grateful that Teddy Roosevelt created our national park system, and equally pleased Texans of the past were visionary enough to gift the giant holding to the federal government. But nothing makes me happier than the fact I found the park as a young man, and can still roll my wheels westward toward its welcoming skies.

Indigenous peoples describing the Big Bend to Europeans moving through the border region are said to have explained its beauty by suggesting it was where the great spirit stored all the materials he had left over after completing his task of making the world. I am not sure there is a better explanation for its ancient beauty.