BIG BEND NP

Chisos Basin Campground

We are hanging out in the motel in Carlsbad this AM, after a grueling desert drive up from Big Bend and a short stop in Guadalupe Mountains NP on the way.  We will go do the caves this afternoon and watch the famous bat emergence this PM. Meantime, though, this morning it is very pleasant to just sit in the AC in semi darkness. Outside the sun is white hot and we have the blinds closed except for a slit which lights up the room like a xenon lamp.

Big Bend did not disappoint! We arrived there in midafternoon at a spectacular campsite and successfully got our camping act together. For all those without faith who doubted my plan to camp (and Mary was one of them) we had a GREAT experience at Chisos Basin Campground.  I just checked with Mary and she claims she agrees with this assessment.

A pro: it is off-season, the campground was about only 10% occupied. A con: it’s off-season for a good reason: by May the sun is a hammer.  The campsites have shelters over the tables and you could not, I believe, make it without them.  In the shade it is pleasant and it is nice and cool at night, but in the sun it’s over 110.  Mary has NO cooling capacity, her face turns beet red and she gets dangerously hot.  This means she gets out of a lot of the work.

Our sleeping was just fine: tent has good ventilation   and  stood up under a lot of hard wind.  We slept on double foam mattresses and temperature at night was great.

The Park is a huge place with a green southern border where the Rio Grande makes its Big Bend.  The fantastic mountains (especially the Chisos Basin in the center of the park) ) are lonely 6000’ crags surrounded by the most forbidding desert you can imagine. Even for this place it is unusually dry now: everywhere you see bright red “Fire Danger: EXTREME” signs and one famous easy trail we hoped to take has been closed.  Still, on the one full day we had here I took three hikes totaling about 5 miles while Mary and Bella skulked under the trees. Each was just breathtaking (in both senses). I probably drank 2 gallons of water during the day and my pee was like motor oil.

Hike one: an early morning looking for birds.  Went to a small bog made by the campground water treatment plant outlet. Since there are very few water sources around this was birding heaven.  In about 30’ I saw: Say’s phoebe, painted bunting, blue-throated hummingbird (a big hummingbird!), summer tanager, acorn woodpecker, and Wilson’s and Audubon’s (western yellow-rumped) warblers. Also deer and a bear.  Back in camp before leaving to tour the park: Mary spotted a roadrunner and then up pops a Townsend’s warbler—on his way to the Pacific northwest.

Hike two: at Rio Grande Village campground on the southeast side of The Bend. Birds: a verdin and blue grosbeaks.  It was high noon, and anything with sense was not moving. I hiked a little nature train then took a wrong turn and did a loop up onto a little peak with—my God! A sudden extreme view down onto a loop of the Rio, looking both north to the Chisos, and south to the Sierra del Camren, an 8000’ range in Mexico. These mountains look so majestic because of the way they rise out of the desert. 

Looking south: the Rio Grande and the Sierra del Carmen in Mexico

Hike three: we then motored over to the southwestern side of the bend and there is Santa Elena Canyon: you come up to this massive black wall, a 1500’ barrier about 10 miles long and in the middle of it is a deep gap looking like it was sliced with a knife, out of which emerges the Rio Grande.  I hiked back into the gorge and (more painted buntings and a snowy egret!) spent a lot of time looking up with my mouth open at the vertical 1500’ walls.  Possibly the most spectacular 2 miles I have done in my life (but maybe Zion Canyon…). 

Santa Elena Canyon

Our dinner routine is: I cook, Mary washes dishes. That night we had Chef BOD ravioli, cheap white wine ice cold, chips and fig newtons. I cannot recall a finer meal.  Slept very well indeed.

  

PB&J: MAY 8

We left Selma on Sunday morning and hit Roosevelt State Park in MS about noon; went into the convenience store at the entrance and found 100’ of shelves devoted to junk food--but did find a small jar of Jif peanut butter, a squeeze jar of Smucker’s grape jelly; no bread (too healthy, I guess) but some very solid graham crackers. That was lunch, at a pretty table overlooking a lake.

That night we scrounged the leftover bread at Lillo’s restaurant in Leland and had PB&J for Monday lunch in LA east of Shreveport.  Same thing  Tuesday  in a parking lot in Austin.  Wednesday we scrounged some English muffins at the San Antonio Super 8 motel breakfast bar (they were very nice about it) and PB&J’d at Bracketville.  We snacked on the graham crackers.

At Alpine we upgraded to purchased bread and ham and cheese but there is still some PB&J left, and a few graham crackers. Were saving them for a rainy day.

FROM LELAND TO BIG BEND, MAY 2-5

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.

THE DELTA

Since Tuscaloosa was hammered by the tornados we went to Leland MS by interstate to Jackson, north on 49W to Indianola and then US 82 west.  Crossed a fantastic new bridge over the Yazoo, and boom, you drop into an unending  flat green landscape.  The Delta. You drive and drive through the vast fields (corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, almost no cotton anymore) and the horizon seems never to move, it’s like being at sea.  Roads are great, almost no traffic, and things look a little more prosperous than last time. 

It’s daunting to try to describe either the place or my feelings about it. There’s not enough time to do it justice.  I worked there for 12 years at the USDA Southern Weed Science Laboratory at Stoneville, a wonderful place to be a young scientist, you’re in the heart of Big Ag--but a huge social adjustment after my post-doc in Corvallis, Oregon!  I remember arriving there in my “McGovern & Shriver” T-shirt and discovering a place where you almost could not find another white person who would admit to ever having voted Democrat.

The place and the people who live there are unique.  We’ve been gone 27 years but have gone back to visit several times—each time the feeling is we have never left and are just returning home. That’s because our experiences of the place were extreme. Tragedy and healing.  A murder and a suicide, and a church and friends (some of the finest Christians I have ever known) that quite literally saved me, and the union with the woman who has made the rest of my rather happy and productive life possible. We stood at the altar in the little Leland Presbyterian church with 3 teenage girls next to her and 3 little boys next to me and there was not a dry eye in the place.  Those Presbyterians had borne my first wife Lois’ bipolar religious and social experiments with love and grace and attempts at help.  After her death they carried me and my boys for months.  And my marriage to Mary, the end of the story, began when Lois and I met her in Leland Presbyterian Sunday School. 

When we visit Leland now we always stay with Kikki  and Jody Stovall, part of one of those big Delta clans.  They live right on Deer Creek in a…I want to say “magnificent” but that makes it sound like some kind of MacMansion and while it is pretty big and full of beautiful things it seems absolutely unpretentious, how does she do that?  Since they will read this I must be, ah circumspect but the fact is we always just sit around on their porch and enjoy each other, have wonderful conversations and catch up on Leland, The Delta the church, families.  Dinner at Lillo’s with Ray Beckham and Bessie Bennett (now married and that’s another story) Nancy and Charles Bryson (a colleague in the Weed Science Lab), all Presbyterians. I have a great story about everyone, relationships here are so intertwined and dense and rich, memories both joyful and painful crowd in with every meeting, every corner turned as you drive around. We run into Mary Francis Shaifer-something (she has married) a wonderful sparkler of a girl and a vivid memory of her seizing me at Lois’ funeral—she had been widowed not too long before—and saying through tears “Praise God, Don!”

Oh my God what a place.  The horrendous racial history here is just part of the overall starkness, the black-and-whiteness and yet green-ness of the place!  Somewhere, here, is the possibiity of ultimate human reconciliation.

Monday we took off but visited Stephanie, Jody and Kikki's stepdaughter, now living in Leland and running the "Leland Progress: newspaper.  What a hopeful sign, some of the next generation are coming back to the Delta to live, something we all despaired of ever happening. And then we visited Ann Aldridge, a stunning beauty of 90 who radiates love: I walk in her back door and she turns and says "Don Wauchope, I love you!" what could be better than that?

FIRST LEG: PISGAH FOREST TO SELMA APR 28 - MAY1

               The day before we left an enormous tornado system tore through the Southeast, killing  300 and converting many places to rubble. Irony: those of us it missed were left with a beautiful high, brilliant, cool weather.  The trip to Selma took eight hours of pleasant driving.  We ripped down through Atlanta on I-85,  got off the interstate at La Grange and took a nice quiet 2-lane, US 29, south.  Stopped at a Corps of Engineers park on Lake West Point and I honked on my French horn for a while. Went through West Point with its huge dead textile factory, and into Selma in time for dinner with Norm and Jackie Trotter.

               I have three buddies that go all the way back to high school:  Robert Taylor, Norm Trotter, Joe Wright.  We were always bunched together by teachers who sat classes in alphabetical order, and we were geeks: me the scientist, Robert the doctor, Joe and Norm engineers.  50+ years later, we still keep in touch and try to get together once a year, though Joe has a hard time participating. We’ve been good husbands, hard-working career guys, only two of us have been married more than once and those two were widowers.  We enjoy reuniting.  This weekend we are attending the Selma Civil War Reenactment. 

L-R: the Wauchopes, Trotters and Taylors (missing: the Wrights)

Selma! A fabulously wealthy town in King Cotton days,

Mabry-Jones home (1850) one of the finest ante-bellum Greek revival houses in the south

but most famous for the Voting Rights Marches to The Bridge and Bloody Sunday,  1965, the climactic event of the civil rights movement.  A vicious attack by the Sheriff and his deputies with dogs, night sticks and tear gas, on marchers pledged to nonviolence .  Television images outraged the nation and  led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. 

               So—aging liberal that I am, I wondered if we were going to be taking part in a reactionary celebration of the Ole South and white gentility (and supremacy).  Well—yes and no!  Norm is clearly a big fish in this small pond and greatly enjoyed showing us his town. Many magnificent old homes (including his, which is known to be haunted) which deserve preservation as treasures of architecture.  Jackie is a horsewoman and we met her beautiful horse:

We met the mayor and the chief of police:  guess what, both black and impressive moderates.  The Mayor, wonderfully,  uses The Bridge  as a symbol for looking to the future, not the past. 

On the wall of the mayor's office...

 He was charming and self-assured, and clearly enjoys the struggle, clearly a hopeful bridge himself. Still, conversation with my hosts reveals a continuing deep resentful cultural divide between blacks and whites. The blacks celebrate Bloody Sunday here with little participation by whites (“They trash the city!”).  Whites celebrate the Reenactment with zero participation by blacks.

               So: two versions of history still prevail.  The economic disparity is still obvious, and vast. But there is progress.  Sheriff Jim Clark and his dogs and cattle prods are long gone. The police are integrated, as is the town council.  Some of those fabulous old homes in “old town” (Norm is active in the Olde Towne Association) are owned by African-Americans.  Norm agrees with me: Selma is a place where somehow folks might ultimately learn how to be a diverse community that gets along--because they have to.  My feeling is, while whites might need to show more grace across the divide, blacks might need to look more to the future, perhaps to treasure their historical grievance a little less—kinda like us Confederates. 

         Awright, bluebellies! The fight is this afternoon and the rebs are gonna win, and tonight we will peer through the fence at a grand ball in period dress where the War of Northern Aggression looks like it will be won by the right side this time.  It will be fun. Tomorrow they will fight the same reenactment again and the historically correct winners will prevail.  Seems like the blacks could come out and cheer...

Johnny gets ready for battle. The golf cart isn't authentic but the raggedy uniforms are: this battle occurred close to the end of the war and the rebs were in desperate straits. These boys are lucky to have shoes.

The "Alabama 5th Ingantry Regimental Band." Istruments are not authentic but the music was--and well done. I requested "Just before the Battle, Mother" and they said they planned to play it--just before the battle.

High-water mark of the Yankees, on the day that they lose.

The spectators.  It was fun and in fact brings a lump to the throat. I know it's glorification of a cause that needed to lose. Can't help it. Hallowed ground.

“Priceline” Hassle

Since Mary and I are certainly taking our Cocker Spaniel “Bella” on our SW trip, we have to find “pet-friendly” hotels/motels along the route. This pretty much eliminates the high-end establishments. The way we’ve been doing this is to use Google and just enter “hotels, motels, ‘pet-friendly’, and the location, e.g., Moab UT or Buffalo, TX.  This has been OK provided you mostly avoid the “Cheap Hotel Finder!” sites that crop up at the top of the results.  These sites have no idea if a hotel is pet-friendly or not and of course they do everything in their power to keep the actual contact info for the motel/hotel out of your hands. 

For example, you know “Priceline.com”, that site that advertises so heavily on TV? The one with William Shatner? They popped up on a search and said they would find us pet-friendly hotels.  So I went to one of their listed motels which said it’s  prices were about $80 but on selection the rooms actually available were $130 for a King no-smoking.  OK, I figure the premium is for the dog and I sign up. But then, thinking better of this, I figure I better check and (after much research) found the phone # of the hotel. 

No, they are NOT very pet-friendly: they have a “a few” rooms in which they allow pets but the one I have reserved is not one of them.  AND I can’t cancel my reservation then and there, I have to go BACK to Priceline to cancel the reservation—and apparently I have to call them.  I find the customer service number for Priceline and of course I get a roboreceptionist and get to (a) listen to their advertisement (b) key in data working through the options;  at one point they try to get you to go to the web to cancel (an option that for some reason wasn’t obvious when I had returned to the site), I persist and finally get a live person who was courteous and cancelled the reservation for a full refund—not always the case, apparently.

Bottom line: look carefully at the cancellation rules for these motel finder sites.

The Packing List

So we are goiing to a grandchild's graduation in Albuquerque, camping out at some National Parks and staying in motels at others.  Here's our packing list:

CAMPING	COOKING	PERSONAL	TRAVEL
2-Person Tent	Camp stove, gas	1 Suitcase	Travel guide books
Dog pillow	Large pot	1 Travel bag	Atlas
2 Pillows	Med. Pot	Sunglasses	GPS
2 sheets	Coffeet perc.	Pills	Travel cups
4 foam pads	Perc. Filters	Laptop	Snack cooler
2 Water jugs	Utensils	Cell phone	Dog Food & dishes
Folding table	Large spoons	Toiletries	Dog medicine
2 folding seats (buy)	Potholders (2)	Towel	Dog shampoo
Butane lantern	Matches	Washcloth	Dog towel
Small flashlights	Spatula	Clothes	French Horn
Rope, var. sizes	Knives l/sm	Rain gear	Gig valise
Clothespins	Napkins	Cold wear	Bicycle
Xtra tent stakes	Cups	Hats	Leash
Sun shelter (buy)	Bowls	Hiking boots	Bicycle Hitch Rack
Insect repellant	Plates	Day pack	Flashlight
Hand axe	Tablecloth	Sandals
Hanging mirror	Glasses	City shoes
Large cooler	Dishpan	4 days camping clothes
Small broom	Dishwashing detergent	1 set nice clothes
Shovel	Dishrag	Camera
	Dish Towels	Tripod
	Egg carrier	Binoculars
	corkscrew
	Garbage bags

OY