Big Bend

Big Bend National Park is a place you have to want to go to. It is not on the way to anywhere. When we leave Marathon the next building we will see is the park headquarters is 70 miles away. The campground is 25 miles beyond that. Here we are pulling into Marathon, TX.

The scale of the land is as big as the distances. The park is located at the big bend in the Rio Grande River. Here the Chisos Mountains in the U. S. and the Sierra del Carmen in Mexico force the Rio Grande to change direction from flowing southeast to flowing northeast. It is here the west is preserved as it was, vast and empty.

The park is the size of Rhode Island. It has four paved roads, two gas stations and a lodge. Bring everything you need for it is 120 miles to a grocery store, 150 to a Walmart. There is no TV. Cell service can be had by driving 10 miles on an unimproved dirt road to a rise to catch a distant signal. At night the signals from AM radio stations hundreds of miles away strengthen and recede as they bounce off the ionosphere on to the empty land below. But no one is listening. The few that want the night life have left before sundown to Marathon 95 miles to the north or Terlingua to 70 miles the west for each has a bar and maybe music if someone has decided to play that night. Those that remain wait for the dying rays of the sun to disappear and then as the last reflected light in the western sky dims the stars begin to appear on a vast dome of black stretching from horizon to horizon. At first one by one, then by the hundreds and finally thousands of stars begin their silent, stately march across the dome punctuated by an occasionally by the brief streak of a shooting star trying to reach earth. These are the darkest skies in the lower 48 states. The night sky as it was before Edison blurred the distinction between day and night

We have been here before and hope to come back again. The solitude and silence is refreshing. Where we stay along the Rio Grande, America and Mexico meet in a casual way much as the border was 100 years ago. The border with Mexico is over 1500 miles long. U. S. Border Patrol divides it into seven sections. The Rio Grande section that includes Big Bend is the longest of the seven. It is also the one with the least border incidents. This in part because of its remoteness. It is not easy to get to the border from either side and once you arrive, there is nowhere to go on the other side. Crossings, though illegal, are casual. The purpose is to sell something or buy something. Sell some crafts and buy some candy bars.

The next day I head out to Boquillas Canyon where I met Jesús last year. I did not expect much. The pandemic has closed the border to crossing here. Without the tourists there were probably few people in the town of Boquillas.  I wanted to see the canyon anyway. I had never walked all the way to the end of the sand bar.