God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (38 page)

That evening we had dinner with Betty Moore, a former colleague of mine at
Texas Monthly
. She is a petite blonde with intensely blue eyes. When she was head of production at the magazine, she agreed to make a brochure for a rafting company on the Rio Grande. She returned to Austin, but found herself weeping when she remembered the desert landscape and the sere red mountains on the horizon. Finally, she quit her job, moved to Terlingua, an old mining encampment near the park, and became a river guide. Her move prompted an exodus of other women from the magazine, all of them drawn to this remote, scarcely populated corner of the state. “It’s not the same place I moved to,” Betty complained. “There are just a lot more people.”

The last census for Terlingua counted fifty-eight residents.

“There were only five women in town when I came,” said Betty’s friend Mimi Webb Miller. “And it was pretty lawless back then.” Mimi was a debutante from a prominent family in Wichita Falls, and the niece of former Texas senator John Tower. When she moved to Terlingua, she became the mistress of a notorious drug lord named Pablo Acosta. He was shot down by Mexican authorities in 1987, and Mimi was on the run for several years, with a $40,000 price on her head. “Daddy wasn’t happy about that,” she said.

Roberta and I were staying at Mimi’s eclectic inn, La Posada Milagro, with bottle trees and blue Christmas lights lining the flagstone paths and doorways all aslant. An old Mobil Oil Pegasus sign leans against a fence. Down the hill is a coffee shop where everybody shows up in the morning, and nearby is the Terlingua Trading Company, with its spacious front porch, where Terlinguans gather in the evening to play music and watch the sunset. “Sometimes you hear the most interesting conversations,” Betty says, “and other times it’s just a bunch of drunks.” There’s a resident guitar on the porch and an impressive assortment of hula hoops. A sign admonishes, No Dogs on the Porch, which seems to be the only rule in town.

Modern Terlingua, if you can call it that, is embedded in the ruins of the mining village that occupied this place from the late nineteenth century until the 1940s, when the price of quicksilver collapsed. You can see the remains of the former community in the stone walls of the old ghost town. The cemetery is filled with the graves of the Mexican miners, many of whom had fled the revolution across the river only to die of mercury poisoning from the processing of the ore. Others were on the losing end of a gunfight. By and large their graves are simple stacks of rocks with two sticks nailed together in a cross, but you also see the wild artistic impulse that runs through everything in this anarchic society. The ornamental Mexican graves are adorned with beads and candles and artificial flowers. The later Anglo arrivals in the graveyard are less dignified, festooned with flags, totems, sculptures, gimme caps, dolls, mounds of beer bottles, and coins of small denominations.

We came finally to our campsite at the foot of Pine Canyon. Before us were the towering red walls of an ancient caldera. It was remote and desolate, but the majesty of the place made us quiet for a while.

It had been a long time since I’d set up a camp. Memories of many wilderness trips we had taken before, in parks and forests all over the West, came into my mind. Our first camping experience as a family was in Colorado. Gordon and Caroline were ten and five. I had purchased a giant family tent, a dining canopy, a lantern, a Coleman stove, and a folding picnic table, and I hadn’t taken any of them out of the boxes until we arrived at night in Rocky Mountain National Park. Somehow, we set them all up. The next evening, it stormed, and we huddled around the lantern inside the tent playing Chutes and Ladders.

Now the kids were grown, and Roberta and I had gotten out of the habit of camping. I suppose we’ve been waiting for our grandchildren to get old enough to enjoy spending the night on the ground, with mosquitoes and ticks, when it’s too hot or too cold. I have always believed that memories have to burn a little to make an enduring place in your heart.

After lunch we hiked into the canyon, through a mile of grassland. Roberta has asthma, the legacy of getting pneumonia three times while she was teaching. Illness is a tax on teachers, especially at the elementary level. She was once chosen Teacher of the Year at her school, but I finally begged her to stop. It was just too hazardous. Now many of her students are grown. She still runs into them in restaurants or grocery stores. She was one of those teachers everybody remembers.

We passed a young Hispanic family sitting in the shade of a stand of juniper. There were two jumpy boys under the age of five. Their lovely young mother had the kind of merry eyes that disappear when she smiles. She pulled back a scarf to show us the baby she was nursing. When we parted, Roberta said, “I’m not going to complain anymore.”

Farther up the trail, a group of bird-watchers had their binoculars focused on some finches in the bushes. They were hard-core and proud of it. We compared notes about what they had seen. I said the only bird we had spotted not on their list was a silky-flycatcher.

“That wasn’t a silky-flycatcher you saw, it was a black-tailed gnatcatcher,” one of the women insisted, invoking her authority as a member of the Audubon Society in Williamson County.

“Well, it was small and black and had a very prominent crest,” I said.

“They don’t have crests,” she said, not giving an inch.

Back at camp, I boiled a pot of water on our camp stove and poured it into a dehydrated backpacker meal—lasagna—as well as a tasty apple crisp. We drank wine and watched the mesas bleed into the evening sky. Just before dark, a black-billed cuckoo perched on an agave stalk and joined the concert of mountain chickadees. The Big Dipper came into view above the horizon. It wasn’t even seven o’clock and it felt ridiculous to go to bed, but it was dark and getting cold. We climbed into the tent and zipped it shut. We had brought along wool hats and long johns, so we were warm enough, but I had forgotten how hard the ground could be.

In the middle of the night, I had the unwelcome realization that I would have to take a crap. I grabbed a flashlight and unzipped the door as quietly as possible, then crawled outside. The mountains in front of me were etched in black against the starry backdrop. There was no moon. The Dipper had risen almost directly overhead. A satellite traced its slender arc against the constellations. There was a physical sense of being pressed down by the starlight, as if it had weight, a gravitational force. Even without the flashlight I could see a path through the prickly pear into a nearby ravine.

My father once told me that he had a religious experience while taking a crap beside a trout stream. He was not the kind of man to talk about bodily functions, and I was so surprised I failed to ask what the revelation was. I so wish he had told me. Martin Luther, who was obsessed with scatology, recorded that he had been on the toilet when he received one of the central inspirations of Protestantism, that salvation is achieved through faith alone. It was then that he was “born again.” I have never had such a moment, but under these stars revelation once again seemed possible. In every generation until mine, most of humanity lived with the night sky. As people began moving into cities and using more illumination, the sky gradually disappeared. There must be a corresponding loss of wonder without the stars to remind us where we stand in creation.

When I got back to the tent, Roberta was awake, and she stuck her head out to look at the sky. “Oh, my God!” she said.

At dawn, there were two jackrabbits sitting in our campsite. They loped off a couple of yards and continued to stare at me, seeming to pass some ironic commentary between the two of them. Roberta emerged when the coffee was ready—Starbucks Instant, a miraculous improvement on the boiled grounds of olden days. We broke camp and headed down to Rio Grande Village, at the southeastern border of the park.

There, we hiked up a promontory and stared across the river at the little Mexican village of Boquillas, with its adobe houses in sherbet colors, “like Candy Land,” Roberta observed. You used to be able to take a boat across for lunch, but since 9/11 you need a passport to return, and we’d forgotten ours.

I noticed a couple staring into the water under a boardwalk that spanned a marsh. “Rio Grande perch,” the husband said, pointing to a pair of striking greenish-gray fish with bright cream-colored spots. “It’s the only cichlid native to Texas.” He was a petroleum engineer but had studied freshwater marine biology as an undergraduate at Texas Tech. The female perch had swept out a circular nest in the mud with her tail, while the male was diligently patrolling the perimeter. These perch mate for life, which is rare in the animal kingdom—among the few examples are prairie voles, sandhill cranes, macaroni penguins, black vultures, and pot-bellied seahorses. The list is pretty short. It raises the question of whether love exists outside of human society, or is it just a comfortable habit that some creatures fall into.

We ate lunch under an impressive stand of palms, beside the remnants of an old health camp. We had changed into swimsuits to soak in the old hot springs on the very edge of the river. There used to be a bathhouse here, but now only the foundation remains. It felt good to get clean after camping and hiking. The hazel-colored Rio Grande beside us had been refreshed by waters from the Rio Conchos, which flows through the Mexican state of Chihuahua. I could easily have tossed a pebble into Mexico. I got out of the hot bath and slipped into the river, which was swift and bracing.