Our cousin Jack Ward came home from the army and along with his brother Bill and my grandfather Wally helped Bergine gather and sell off the livestock. In 1945, Bergine left the Sears mail-order house beneath the great Window of the Chisos Mountains and said good-bye to the Homer Wilson ranch for the last time. She and Patricia and little Homer and Thomas moved to Alpine and then to Del Rio. Bergine never returned to the Big Bend.
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In my family it has always been said that when the park officials came in and forced out the ranchers, they also killed off the wildlife by removing all the waterings—the header tanks and water troughs and windmills the ranchers had spent years building. Patricia tells a version of this tale in her book, and she said much the same to me personally when I spent time with her and Grant, her husband. She shook her head in disbelief at the rudeness of a park ranger who aggressively challenged her with the accusation that the early ranchers had all overgrazed the land and permanently damaged it. As Patricia remembered it, there was always much more grass on the Wilson ranch in the 1930s than she has ever seen in the park in later years, and she recalled seeing more deer and turkey and other wildlife as well. Two strikingly opposed value systems come into conflict here. The ethos of the rancher, a businessman who always seeks to improve his property and believes that wildlife is a resource that requires careful management, just like any other feature of the land, cannot easily be squared with the ideology of the modern environmentalist, with his dream of a wilderness unmodified by human culture, who seeks to heal the damage committed by thoughtless agriculturalists, miners, and others who exploit the land and seek to extract value from it. At his prudent best, a rancher is a steward of the land, a conservationist who cherishes his property and everything in it; at his worst, he is everything the earnest environmentalist, who strives to re-create an ecosystem that has not existed for more than fourteen thousand years, fears and loathes.
Wildlife thrives where water abounds and cares not whether that moisture comes from a man-made receptacle or a limestone pothole. I have spent time in the Big Bend during dry spells and hardly saw a living creature. That summer with my sons, damp and green as it was, we saw many dozens of deer and uncountable species of birds, including a magnificent black hawk perched in an old pecan orchard along the banks of the Rio Grande. My boys were hoping to see an owl, and we had heard owls haunted that abandoned farm. Driving slowly back toward the basin at sunset, bathed in the last vestiges of a light that can only be called divine, we watched in awe as a great horned owl swooped across our path and landed, wings flapping dramatically, on a thorny stalk of ocotillo, silhouetted against the pale light of the vanishing sun. The next day we hiked down from the Chisos Lodge to the Window, hoping to see either the bear or the mountain lion that were both said to be active in the area. Water alternately seeped and poured down the craggy faces of reddish-brown cliff walls, set off in striking contrast by the almost radioactive green of the grateful grasses and desert shrubs clinging to small patches of volcanic soil, and tumbled down the winding bed of the creek toward the pour off. Mist wreathed the upper reaches of the mountains, winding in and among towering hoodoos, pillars of rock carved by water and wind. One group of hikers we spoke to had seen the bear. Insects buzzed and swarmed, and lizards scrambled out of our way. No one really expected to spot the great cat, because those animals move like ghosts through this country. Spike deer, still in velvet, watched us from patches of brush. Every plant capable of flowering was bursting in a vegetal frenzy of reproduction.
Down in the lowlands, on another day, at one of the few remaining windmills in the park, we played peekaboo with javelinas as they snuffled about in a thicket of mesquite and huisache that had grown up around a water trough and an old leaky concrete reservoir. Driving one bright sunny afternoon, I spotted a coyote as it dashed across the macadam. I pointed it out to my sons, and we pulled over to take a photograph. Oddly, the coyote paused halfway up the barren hill and commenced yapping and barking. This strange behavior continued until we drove on, and that must have been fifteen or twenty minutes. No one I spoke to later, among park workers or my family, had ever seen or heard such a thing before. We could only conclude that the desert canine was calling out a warning to a litter of pups, perhaps in the care of its mate.
The old crossing to the village of Boquillas del Carmen, probably the safest town on the entire Mexican side of the border, had been shuttered by the Department of Homeland Security, in its infinite bureaucratic wisdom. So my sons, who longed to cross the border into Mexico, threw rocks across the Rio Grande into our sister republic at the head of Boquillas Canyon. Later we left a few dollars in a tin can for enterprising Boquillas residents, who fashion simple handcrafts, such as lovely painted sotol walking sticks, dart across the border, and write messages for the tourists, encouraging them to leave money in exchange for their goods at trailheads. We stopped and contemplated a message left on a rock by Jesús the Singing Mexican, a famous character who sings sad songs for hikers from across the river. There was no sign of Jesús himself; business was very bad for singing Mexicans.
Homer Wilson ranch, Big Bend National Park
We seemed to have the entire park to ourselves. One afternoon we drove into the nearby town of Terlingua to watch the World Cup Final between Spain and Holland in a little watering hole called the Boathouse. The barkeep was a friendly Brit, a fan of the Dutch who didn’t hold it against us for being partisans of Spain. A motley assortment of local river guides, Big Bend outlaws, refugees from the wide world, and local country singers befriended my towheaded sons, who sat at the bar, before an enormous television, underneath a lovely old kayak suspended from the ceiling, and watched the great Andrés Iniesta as he made his magnificent and immortal world-championship goal.
It was a misty, foggy afternoon with low clouds slipping in and among the surrounding mountains and escarpments when we hiked into the Homer Wilson exhibit at Blue Creek. Situated just below a butte called Signal Peak, Blue Creek was the headquarters of the Wilson ranch, but it was not where Homer and the family lived. No trace now remains of the mail-order house at Oak Creek, which was demolished by the park. Homer and his men built the house at Blue Creek from local flagstones, and a foreman typically lived there with his family. Homer kept an office in the house, and he and the family would stay there from time to time. Homer employed up to a dozen hands on the ranch, depending on how many he could afford. Those men helped him construct this small flagstone cabin with its reed ceiling and concrete roof, instead of the traditional adobe, covered in corrugated steel; the window and door frames were made from knotty pine; and its long porch, with open windows showing no trace of a screen, opened to the jaggy vista of Signal Peak. The steel on the roof appears to have been replaced, and presumably the blue paint on the wood surfaces was applied more recently than 1943, when Homer died. An application to place the house on the National Register of Historic Places, filed in 1975, mentions an outhouse and a chicken coop. I saw no sign of those structures. All that remains of this ranch, the fruit of Homer Wilson’s life and labor, was this small stone building, with its ruined storehouse and rainwater cistern, and a circular cedar picket pen for halter-breaking horses. The desert had reclaimed this place. The Wilson ranch was now truly despoblado.
CHAPTER 2
PARABLES OF FIRST CONTACT
I set out from El Paso on a rainy September morning. I was returning to the despoblado, the grand canyons and basins and ranges of the Big Bend—110 miles to Van Horn, then south on 90 to Marfa, where a single right turn would take me down the Comanche trace to old Presidio del Norte, La Junta de los Ríos. My plan was to wander around Presidio and try to imagine what the unfortunate Spanish castaway Cabeza de Vaca and his companions had seen when they stood in that ancient riverine settlement in the 1530s. I thought I might go in search of Homer Wilson’s old cinnabar mine.
Another hurricane was dumping huge amounts of rain on West Texas. This time it was Odile sweeping across north
ern Mexico after hammering Baja California, pushing moisture eastward into the Chihuahuan Desert and beyond. I had flown in the night before and slept at my mother’s house, listening to the wind and thunder and lightning as the storm blew in across Chihuahua, southern Arizona, and New Mexico. I awoke before dawn, checked the weather, and saw there had been flash flooding overnight.
El Paso was weirdly green, I could see, even in the dim light of dawn; the omnipresent dun-colored stone was everywhere wet and dripping. Driving my gigantic rented 4x4 white Ford F-150 pickup over the ridge on McRae Boulevard, I could see the lights of Juárez sprawling out over the valley, dotted with green instead of the usual dull brown. It was almost pretty. Thunderclouds massed in the west, beyond the Franklin Mountains, whose peaks were shrouded in mist. An electronic billboard, with flashing orange bulbs, warned El Paso drivers, who I suppose are decidedly unused to driving in wet conditions, to beware water on the roadways. Slippery conditions were to be expected. Bob Dylan was singing “Desolation Row” through my USB-equipped car stereo, a particularly fitting soundtrack, I thought, as I gazed across the river at what was still the most dangerous city in North America: Ciudad Juárez. Even better was the next song, “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” the phrase taken from Ovid’s Tristia, a poem of despair and loneliness written on the shores of the Black Sea, where the poet languished in exile, spending his last years along the empire’s rim. Behind the clouds, off to the west, I knew that a concrete Jesus, his arms spread wide, was standing watch over us from high atop the peak of Mount Cristo Rey.
Flying down the interstate in my huge white truck, I was again transfixed by the site of grass, green grass, in the outlying areas around El Paso. A monsoon season had descended, and the sandy wastes sprouted in response. Last night’s rain, moreover, had caused all the draws to run, so water stood in all the culverts and creek beds along the way. The terraced fields and orchards along the river, which normally stand out in almost radioactive contrast to the bare reddish ground, seemed far less lonely amid the creosote, white brush, catclaw, and occasional sotol that populate this stretch of country. The mountains of Sierra Blanca were gorgeous in their wispy white cotton-candy mantles.
After dodging an errant box spring shed by a pickup hauling furniture piled up high like something out of The Grapes of Wrath, I stopped at the Van Horn truck stop, where a loud voice informed shower customer number 29 that shower number 2 was ready for his ablutions. Turning south, I passed Hereford Street, Brahman Street, and a few old horses and rusty trailers, but no actual Hereford or Brahman cattle. They would have found little to eat thereabouts among the cast-off vehicles and other agricultural debris, unhidden by the flat brushless terrain, amid bare dirt and greasewood in pastures so abused that not even a season of Pacific cyclones would yield a crop of grass.
Conditions improved rapidly as I pushed southward, and the grass was soon embarrassing in its proliferation. The old spring known as the Van Horn Wells, about twelve miles south of town, was used by Indians long before it was “discovered” in 1849 by Major Jefferson Van Horne while searching for a shorter route to El Paso. The spring served stagecoach travelers, mail riders, and soldiers throughout the nineteenth century. Now adjacent to a large pecan orchard and the ruins of Lobo, Texas—as well as a striking orange tractor-trailer rig sitting idle, year after year, in a large pasture—the neglected old spring was once fiercely contested, with Indians burning the adobe buildings of the small garrison that stood there. The town of Lobo came later, originating as a land swindle that lured investors west to a nonexistent community furnished with bathing springs and a luxury hotel. Lawsuits followed, and the hotel promised by the speculators was eventually built, only to be destroyed by an earthquake in 1929. In recent years three Germans bought what was left of the Lobo country store and have sought to promote a film festival called Desert Dust Cinema. Patrons, a sign advises, should bring their own chairs.
A few miles down the road, the air force’s expensive radar blimp, now ceded to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, was sitting on the ground. In all the years I’ve been driving this road, I’ve never seen it aloft (though shortly after I arrived home I read that the CBP had finally succeeded in getting the aerostat back in service). I stopped in Marfa for lunch and eavesdropped on beautiful young people complaining about L.A. while I ate a delicious kale salad.
Surveillance blimp near Marfa, Texas
From Marfa the road undulated and wound its way through rolling hills, steep draws, damp drainages, and narrow defiles. Down in the bottoms the grass was tall, yellow with numberless bright wildflowers, sunflowers; dead cedar dotted the hills, testaments of fire or drought or both. Roadrunners popped out from wide-gauge fence wire, and hawks perched on telephone poles, one eating a snake, as if enacting the Mexican flag. The hills, with their jagged outcroppings, appeared at sharp angles and loomed close to the road. A jumble of hoodoos—called Elephant Rock by an official-looking sign—appeared to thrust upward from the plain. Astonishing vistas opened suddenly as a canyon revealed itself around a curve, the road hanging along the edge on a terrace blasted into the picturesque hillside. Alas, a hideous high-capacity power line ran right down through the middle of the canyon, spoiling the view.
Twenty miles from Presidio I came upon Shafter, an old silver-mining town. I thought perhaps the town was named for a hole in the ground, but in fact it was a colonel in the U.S. Army, based in Fort Davis, who gave the place its name in the 1880s. The mine closed in 1942, after producing thirty-five million ounces of silver, and only about two dozen people still lived there, in a pass cut through the southeastern fringes of the Chinati mountain range by Cibolo Creek. A few years of production in the late 1970s and early 1980s yielded another twenty-four million ounces, and in 2008 a small Canadian mining company called Aurcana reopened the mine, chasing after another forty-seven million. The aim was to make it one of the largest primary silver mines in the world. Jobs were created and taxes were paid, and overnight the mine became the county’s largest taxpayer. But the little company’s timing was off: the silver market dropped 38 percent in 2013, and Aurcana shuttered the mines once again. A large church or mission with a shiny new metal roof and a bright red statue of the Virgin adorning its facade stood near the side of the road; limestone ruins crumbled on the adjacent hillsides, near an enormous black satellite dish, surrounded by ocotillo, that occupied the yard of a modest white house. Jagged Chinati peaks directed my eyes toward heaven.
On down the road an enigmatic sign declared, PROFILE OF LINCOLN. I confess I could not see the resemblance on any of the various mountain silhouettes, and I very nearly ran off the road in my attempt.
Descending into the valley of the Rio Grande, an undulating, barren, eroded expanse of badlands to my east, I saw before me the cities of the floodplain, Presidio and Ojinaga. Junkyards littered the outskirts of town, busted-up school buses and tractor trailers, mobile homes and RVs, old cars, bails of wire, rusting pipe, old pickups from the 1930s—all smashed and twisted, the slowly combusting detritus of industrial society.
The road into Presidio proceeds along the edge of a mesa formation apparently composed, like the eroded badlands to my east, of volcanic tuff. From this vantage I could just make out the meandering track of the Rio Grande to my west, and what I took to be the converging green line of the Conchos as it captured what remains of the younger river’s pathetic northern stream. I could see no obstacle to floodwater.
Descending to the plain, I entered what at first looked much like any other impoverished West Texas settlement. Desert towns wear everything out in the open. No sizable trees grew along the fringes of garbage pits; weedy instances of mesquite and huisache served only to accentuate the clutter. An Alco discount store greeted me, followed by a sad little Radio Shack, isolated and lonely, far from its natural habitat in a strip mall. Empty gas stations, modest little homes, the lowest possible reaches of motel life; architectural desolation punctuated with struggling dusty palm trees. Trailer homes nest
led in among antique vehicles and neat frame houses; two-story buildings abandoned and windowless; adobes slowly melted back into the mud whence they came; shacks atop hills that might even hide a dugout room in the traditional Indian style.
I turned down O’Reilly Street, downtown Presidio’s main drag, and parked across from a Family Dollar. I could see the small city hall, its galvanized metal roof glinting in the sunlight, just up the block. There wasn’t much foot traffic or many cars moving about town. My eyes fell on a Dollar Tree and a Payless ShoeSource, a diner called El Patio, a small lumberyard. I stood in the middle of the street and took photographs, then climbed back into my pickup and drove on. A crumbling storefront caught my eye. It was brick, partially stuccoed, with half of a broken sign reading MID-WAY in green letters. Around back, behind the remnants of a fence, there was what looked like a small rock well house next to the remains of a pump and some old pipe, in a yard littered with small mesquite bushes, tall clumps of green grass, rubbly piles of stone, and a large earthen mound.
Presidio, Texas
Brown-stained plywood covered the front windows. Someone had scratched the anarchy symbol on the board covering the left window, under which I could barely make out the word “Fireworks.” Adjacent to the Mid-Way building was a sturdy cement storm-water culvert with walls about two feet high. A steel pedestrian bridge, with steel railings, spanned it. On either side of the bridge, attractive stone walls lined the sidewalk for about six feet, then stopped. The culvert opened directly onto the street. It was all very mysterious to an outsider, and strangely beautiful.
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