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[see also Desolate
Majesty: Preserving beauty without borders]
Big Bend Field Notes
National Geographic
BY JOE NICK PATOSKI
February 2007
The author jumps over a watery passage in the Chihuahuan Desert. Two
and a half million acres (one million hectares) of this desert straddle
the Texas-Mexico border in a block of protected land known as El Carmen–Big
Bend Transboundary Megacorridor. The area is one of the most biologically
diverse desert regions in the world, so Patoski had to watch his step.
As the locals say, if something doesn't bite, stick, or jab, it's probably
a rock.
Best
While researching this story, I joined five
other people and walked across the bend in the Big Bend, a six-day, 80-mile
(130 kilometers) hike. That may have been the most physically difficult
trek I've ever attempted. It was certainly the first time I'd ever done
extended overnight backpacking. My lower back ached for weeks afterward.
Eight months later, I'd forgotten the pain and--for the first time ever--soloed
in a canoe through 60 miles (100 kilometers) of the lower canyons of the
Rio Grande. The lower back acted up for a while after that, too, but in
a good way. Both experiences underscored the efforts one endures in search
of the kind of solitude many seek but few ever realize, regardless of
lower back pain.
Worst
"If you don't like the weather, just wait a
few minutes; it'll change." That old homily about Texas weather popped
into my head after I dodged the bullet that photographer Jack Dykinga
and Mexican environmentalist Patricio Robles Gil took.
After spending a couple days in Big Bend National Park, plotting and planning
our adventures and camping out near Old Ore Road, I headed back to civilization
while Jack and Patricio prepared to paddle Santa Elena and Mariscal canyons,
two of the three major canyons on the Rio Grande within the boundaries
of the national park.
When I left them on a Saturday morning, the skies were clear, and the
temperatures had already climbed to around 70 degrees (20°C). It
looked like it was going to be a warm and sunny early spring day. But
I hadn't driven more than an hour when the winds started whipping up out
of the north and dust kicked up on the horizon. By the time I reached
Fort Stockton, about 120 miles (190 kilometers) north of the park, the
temperature had dropped to the upper 40s.
I talked to Jack a week later to ask about his trip through the canyons.
"It was the trip from hell," he said wearily. Once the winds began to
blow, they didn't quit for a week, with some gusts exceeding 65 miles
(105 kilometers) an hour. More than once, their canoe was blown away from
their campsite. Jack's sniffles turned into a full-blown case of the flu,
and he passed it on to Patricio. I waited until he was finally done with
his complaints. "Welcome to the Big Bend," I replied.
Quirkiest
The Cemex preserve in the Sierra Del Carmen,
is 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Boquillas Crossing on the Rio Grande,
as the crow flies. Driving there on rough dirt roads used to take a little
more than two hours, once you paid a boatman two dollars to row you across
to Mexico in his dinged-up Mexican johnboat. It was a funky way to travel,
made more adventurous knowing there was no customs or immigration on the
Mexican or the U.S. side (although U.S. Border Patrol highway checkpoints
and Mexican military stops manned by bored uniformed teenagers toting
automatic weapons loomed farther in the interior). This was too middle-of-nowhere
to justify permanent posts. Then September 11, 2001, happened, and everything
about the Borderlands changed--including traditional means of crossing
the river.
A drive between those same two points now takes at least ten hours. Heightened
border security put an end to the freelance ferry tradition. In the past,
almost all ferry passengers were tourists from Big Bend National Park
bound for Boquillas del Carmen, a primitive village of 300 about a mile
from the river, whose residents largely supported themselves selling food,
drink, quartz, overnight accommodations, walking sticks, quilts, and trinkets
to the visitors. Now the village is slowly depopulating; half of the people
have already left.
In the high country of the sierra, I found another Boquillas resident,
David, one of the boatmen who used to row visitors across the Rio. These
days, he tends to a tricked-out log cabin lodge the Cemex corporation
has built overlooking a dammed-up stretch of a clear-running creek. He's
glad to have a job, he said. On weekends, he can go home to Boquillas.
It could be worse, David added. Other locals who still call Boquillas
home work in Musquiz, another 50 miles (80 kilometers) distant, and many
there return home but once a month.
see also Desolate
Majesty: Preserving beauty without borders
[National
Geographic magazine]
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