Hot damn. I’m sitting at a campground table in the cool of the evening listening to a mockingbird imitate calls I don’t recognize. If I look up from my laptop I look up at an incredible wall, a massif of ragged mountains, all teeth and boulders, the color of a McDonald’s milkshake.
We are encamped in Chisos Basin Campground at Big Bend NP. The tent is up. Bed is ready. We cheated and had dinner at The Lodge and Mary is sitting next to me to keep me company but it’s getting cold fast and she’ll be heading for the tent soon. But it has been incredibly bright and hot all afternoon and I’m loving the cool stiff breeze blowing through. Since starting this paragraph, interrupted by getting everything into the bear-proof cabinets, It has almost instantly gotten black as pitch. There’s a sliver of moon.
It took a LOT of driving to get here, with one-nighters in Buffalo TX, San Antonio TX, and Alpine TX. Yes it’s a big state. Leaving Leland we crossed the Mississippi (very high and heading for an all-time high, they say, higher than ’27!-- they are planning to blow up the levee to save Cairo) on a magnificent new bridge, with the old bridge we remember so well partially dismantled upstream. I think my GPS is set on “avoid interstate” option, we spent all day on back country LA and east TX roads: US165 through the AK delta (a red-winged blackbird every 100 Yards and a Baptist church every 5 miles), I-20 through Shreveport, US79 all across east Texas to Buffalo, a 70mph 2-lane with no traffic.. Everything is green, green and the temperature is perfect. Zillions of cattle, we decided not to play the “count cows” game.
Buffalo TX was chosen only because it got us close enough to have a short leg to San Antonio the next day, and we “did” San Antonio Tuesday afternoon and evening: The Alamo is really quite nice and gives you a sense of the complex Spain/Mexico/Tejas/Texas wars. We did the San Antonio “River Walk” that night and it is fun but we spent too much at a restaurant for what we got. Wednesday: a loooong ride across central and west Texas on US 90: no trucks, almost no cars; US90 is a GREAT road for cruisin’, cruisin’, cruisin’…into Alpine. As we go west and south it gets dryer and browner until at Alpine we are in an “Extreme fire danger” zone, its bone dry, Bella can’t find any grass to pee in. They’ve had some very big fires. We did see an oasis at Bracketville TX (yes, that was the name), which had a pretty spring and we picnicked and saw a hooded oriole, a say’s phoebe, and some kind of parrot that is NOT in the bird guide: big as a crow, deep blue-green body, a deep blue tail and deep blue mask on the face. Beautiful—but what? Probably an escape.
We liked Alpine. The little Maverick Motel was sure ‘nuff western motif (horsehide rug, Spanish tile, horseshoe over the door) and the receptionist was a stunning Latin beauty who offered to let us use their laundry (so Mary liked her too).
From Alpine to Big Bend: US119, an incredible, beautiful road into the mountains. Mary says the mountains here are all individuals, and she’s right. In the Appalachians the mountains are mostly rounded blue-green mounds that crowd together like sheep. Here every mountain is a character set apart, with apparently unique geology, history and origin; they are like crazy characters at a costume ball each with its own style: some look like Greek temples, some are sharp spires, one looks like donkey’s ears another like some weird castle. They are endlessly interesting. Often lonely sentinals bursting out of the desert like some subterranean monster.
But, after it all, we are HERE: our first National Park of the trip.
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