Big Bend Inspires

It has been nearly two decades since my friend Vince first suggested I accompany him to far West Texas to see Big Bend National Park. Last week, I finally went.

Over the last 18 years, while I dithered, my uncles and cousins and my father have all made the journey west to the Chihuahuan Desert. Vince has made the thousand-mile trip more than two dozen times; that's about the equivalent of driving entirely around the earth.

In deference to my editor at RoadTripAmerica.com, which will publish a story on this trip next summer, I'll limit this blog entry to just the highlights.

It was hot. No kidding, the desert in mid-July is baking. The highest temperatures we recorded during four days were right around 116 degrees Fahrenheit. Higher elevations, in the Chisos Mountains for instance, can be 20 degrees cooler.

Despite the heat, even the lowlands never felt terribly uncomfortable. I'd have to dig to find the formula to figure out heat indices, but I'm guessing that 100 degrees in muggy old Austin may feel worse than 116 at the Croton Spring campground.

Turns out July and August are great wildlife viewing months, since these are the months when the park gets most of it's annual 12 inches or so of rain. The park, as one ranger told me, was "fat."

While we never got rained on there, we did see rainshowers off in the distance, and many of the washes and dry creeks in the park held evidence of recent runoff. There were even pools of standing water in some stream beds.

Millipedes were everywhere, and -- after dark -- so were tarantulas. Leopard frogs dove for safety in the tinajas as we hiked past, and red-spotted toads wandered the tarmac at night. We spotted the park's two largest lizards -- a colorful male western collared lizard and a delightfully polka-dotted longnosed leopard lizard. The leopard lizard was nearly 15 inches long.

I was entranced by the canyon towhees and Mexican jays, birds we don't often see in Central Texas. The large ravens -- I couldn't tell if they were common ravens or Chihuahuan ravens -- seemed as curious about us as we were about them.

Javelinas, jackrabbits, cottontails and kangaroo rats -- the last are fearless nocturnal visitors I know from Padre Island National Seashore -- were abundant.

In the desert, three species of ceniza bloomed. This is the plant that we've always called "purple sage" or "sageb(r)ush," but of course it's not at a salvia at all. Creosote bushes were blooming in yellow, as was esparanza, or trumpet flower. With the exception of a few strawberry pitayas, the cactuses were mostly bloomless.

Big Bend National Park encompasses about 1,100 square miles of desert, alpine and riparian habitat. It's the 15th-largest of the national parks but in 2007 ranked 138th in number of visitors among the National Park Service's 360 units. Padre Island National Seashore, by comparison, receives about twice as many visitors (more than 600,000) in a year than does Big Bend.

The park also is a geology buff's paradise; a cheerfully jumbled monument of metamorphic, igneous and sedimentary rocks in a rainbow of colors. There are bears, too, and mountain lions, and pictographs and petroglyphs.

But mostly Big Bend is vast, largely empty of people. It's one of the very few places left in Texas where one can camp under the stars and not see an electric light from horizon to horizon.

I find that spirit-expanding emptiness inspiring.

Lone Star state of mind

The hubris of Texans is legendary. "Everything," a Lone Star native might say, "is bigger in Texas."

Bigger. Better. Prettier. Nicer ... Finer. Easier. Kinder.

The stereotypical Texan wears a 10-gallon hat, boots and an attitude as big as his native state. Texans' braggadacio and self-promotion inevitably leads to a certain amount of resentment north of the Red River and east of the Sabine.

Wisconsinites might press cheese curds into the shape of their state's political boundaries, but where -- other than Texas -- do folks commonly tattoo their state's outline or symbols on their bodies?

Of course, it's more than just the geographical sense of Texas we're celebrating; it's also a "state of mind," we're fond of saying, and that state of mind no doubt arises from our unique history as a soverign nation that fought for its own independence and the unique priveleges our annexation by treaty gives us among the states.

As with many stereotypes, there is a kernel of truth to the oil-pumping, cow-punching Texas of myth. But Texas, to my mind, is no one thing. It is, without a doubt, vast. And in that vastness, there is great variety.

My Texas has always been more Jimmy Buffet than Waylon Jennings; more flip-flops than cowboy boots; more southern than western.

Truth be told, my Texas doesn't have the best of much, but it has some of just about everything and the most of some things.

In the early 19th century, the northernmost point in Texas was in today's southern Wyoming. By treaty, the state's westernmost boundary extended from the Gulf of Mexico to the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Texans claimed a bit of Colorado, a good chunk of New Mexico (including Santa Fe) and the Oklahoma panhandle.

The Okies, by all accounts, still want in.

Two wars, a couple of boundary disputes and some political wrangling later, the Lone Star State has been whittled down to about 261,797 square miles of land and 6,784 square miles of water; about as large as New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina combined. Somewhere along the line, we got screwed-out of a mighty fine trout stream and a couple of decent ski areas.

Even now, in our much-reduced state, the longest straight-line distance from north to south is 801 miles; the greatest east-west distance is 773 miles. Once, during a brief sojourn in New England, I heard a woman explaining that she and her husband got down to New Milford, Conn., to visit their son only about once a month.

"We live all the way up at the Mass. border," she said, by way of explanation. About 60 miles, from what I could tell on the map. Hell, in Texas we drive an hour for dinner sometimes.

Some years back, a professor of Malthusian persuasion insisted to me the world was about to founder under the weight of humanity. I did a little figgerin' and figgered this: The entire population of the world could fit inside of Texas with every man, woman and child esconced in a comfortable 1,300 square-foot living space. And Texas would still be less densely populated than the island of Manhattan (which, you'll recall, includes Central Park).

Some more numbers to consider:

Texas contains more than 22 million acres of forests -- an area larger than the state of Maine. Much of that forest is found in the state's share of the great Southern pine forest that stretches across the southeast portion of the nation.

Texas boasts 3,700 named streams, 15 major rivers and some 3,300 miles of tidal shoreline along the Gulf Coast.

The Dallas-Fort Worth area has more residents - 5,221,801 - than each of 31 other U.S. states. For example, Arizona has about 5.1 million residents.

Texas is home to three of the nation's 10 largest cities.

Texas has more than 90 mountains over a mile high; in fact, a whole bunch of mountains taller than anything east of the Mississippi. As best I can tell, we have only two ski areas (both artificial), but, hey ... Riudoso (once part of Texas) is only a couple hours drive from our border.

I invite anyone who believes our beaches to be only the brown sand and brown water of Galveston to spend a late summer day on Mustang or Padre Island. With cool green water and 20-foot viz, they look a lot like Destin or Fort Walton Beach sometimes.

Austin is the self-proclaimed "live music capital of the world." Not so sure about that one, but, man! There is some great music to be found in the River City. Tues.-Thurs., one can catch Kacy Crowley and Will Sexton at Momo's and turn around and hear Jon Dee Graham and James McMurtry the next night at the Continental Club. All for less than $20 total.

From Texas, we sent forth into the world the likes of Buddy Holly, ZZ Top, Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Meat Loaf, George Strait, Freddie Fender, George Jones, Stephen Stills, Don Henley, Lyle Lovett, Ernest Tubb, Lightnin' Hopkins, Boxcar Willie, T-Bone Walker, the Dixie Chicks, Norah Jones and a host of others.

Of course, we also spawned Christopher Cross, Barry White, Beyonce, Nelly, LBJ and the political ambitions of los dos presidentes Bush. We may still be in karmic debt.

Steve Martin, Carol Burnet and Bill Hicks (check him out on NetFlix, the man was truly funny) all hail from Texas.

For a while there we had a lock on the nightly news: Sam Donaldson, Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite, Stone Phillips and Bob Schieffer all are Texans.

Really these sorts of lists are a bit of a cheat; after all, if a state so large, so populous, did not produce at least a few over-achievers, something would be amiss.

Perhaps it's the droughty years, or maybe we just lean that way, but here in Texas we seem to be well-aquainted with the sulfurous pit: we can take you to the Devil's River, show you Devil's toenails (fossilized oysters) and Devil's claws (wicked-looking seed pods), hike through Devil's Hall (a rock formation), gaze into Devil's Sinkhole (a famous bat cave), party at Devil's Cove and drive across the Devil's Backbone dodging dust devils.

Oddly enough, Farm-to-Market 666 will take you to none of these sites. It's way the hell down south.

I can find no corresponding references in the Lone Star State for heaven or the Heavenly Father.

That's not to say that Texas is actually hell. There's ample historical evidence that at least some folks consider them two distinct geographical locations.

"If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell” said Gen. Philip Sheridan in 1866.

The famous frontiersman and two-term U.S Congressman from Tennessee, Davy Crockett, also made a distinction between Texas and Gehenna: "You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas," he said, after quitting politics and his native state in disgust.

A popular bumper sticker around here these days reads: "I wasn't born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could."

Lyle Lovett assures us that even if you're not from Texas, "Texas loves you anyway ..." So, come see us. You'll have a hell of a good time.