Tag Archives: Texas

Keeping Big Bend a secret

17 Sunday Apr 2016

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My out-of-office message on both voicemail and email said I was on vacation and “unplugged.” My boss knew how to get ahold of me in an emergency, but I warned him that I may not get his messages immediately.

Big Bend National Park is in the middle of nowhere. It’s a you-can’t-really-get-good-cell-service kind of nowhere. It’s 3G cell service in that southwest corner(ish) of Texas and even then, you’re lucky to get two, maybe three bars. And when you do, don’t be surprised when you get a text from your cell carrier saying “Welcome to Mexico where you’re going to enjoy roaming internationally!” because the only thing separating you from Mexico is the Rio Grande, which, by the way, you can easily cross on foot with the water not going past your ankles.

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Trust me, this is the Rio Grande.  (At Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National Park.)

So yeah, getting ahold of me on vacation was going to prove difficult because my phone was in “airplane mode” and yes, I really was unplugged.

When I say, “middle of nowhere,” I mean it.

You aren’t going to see Starbucks, McDonalds or a Subway sandwich chain anywhere around Big Bend. In fact, I hadn’t seen any of those for several days. This is Road Runner and Wyle E. Coyote country. Its palette of brown earth, cyan skies and the occasional red or yellow bloom is empty of the droves of people you find spattered over other Big Daddy national parks like Yosemite, Yellowstone, Zion, Bryce and Grand Canyon.

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Tunnel near Rio Grande Outlook (Big Bend National Park). Tell me, doesn’t this remind you of Road Runner?

We were at the park during peak season and still, there weren’t the crowds you’d find at other national parks. I remember my first trip to Yosemite back in 1995 and people were at every turn. Tent sites were staked within feet—not yards—of each other and trails were so crowded, you would bump shoulders with others on the trail. Imagine what it’s like walking around Times Square in Manhattan or along the Las Vegas strip—that’s what hiking the trails was like in Yosemite.

Even lesser-known parks, like Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming would have clusters of hikers on the popular trails, passing each other quickly whether coming or going like in an airport as people are scrambling to make their connecting flights. I remember hiking behind a man on one of the trails as he talked on his cell phone and I wondered how the hell he got any cell service in that area while also thinking, are you kidding? 

And same for those aforementioned parks, Zion, Arches, Bryce Canyon and Grand Canyon. All fantastic parks with geology that your mind has trouble taking in at first. Hoodoos, red rocks, big ass canyons in the earth, and an ominous hike called Angels Landing. These are some of my favorite places on earth, but the problem is everyone else seems to also want to see them.

What we need is a park that either people don’t know about or one that is not particularly easy to get to. That’s where Big Bend National Park comes in.

If you enter at Big Bend from the west—via the scenic FM170 highway—you’ve already been given a preview of the mountains. But that drive is only a snippet of what’s to come. That snippet, by the way is called Big Bend Ranch State Park and it has a whole bevy of activities to do for the adventurous—back packing, mountain biking, and horseback riding.

Back to Big Bend National Park, though.

Shhh. I’d rather no one else know about Big Bend.

Honestly, I’d love it, though, if you’d just keep this find between us, okay? Please don’t tell anyone about the acres of Ocotillo cactus, with its skinny tentacles reaching toward the sky. If you’re lucky like us, you will have arrived in the springtime and you’ll drive past fields of these with red flowers adorning each branch. Close up they look wonderfully delicate as they reach up to the sky in a “jazz hands” sort of way. At a distance, when you see acres and acres of them altogether it looks like a red haze laying on top of the horizon.

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Ocatillo cactus with its fiery red flowers.

Also keep it on the down low about the massive Santa Elena Canyon that’s been carved out by the Rio Grande over the course of 2 million years. The sheer, vertical walls of the mountains on each side of the gorge reach 2000 feet. Right now you can easily cross it by foot, but most people—when there’s enough water—will raft it, following it on to the nearby town of Lajitas. There’s a 1.7 mile (round trip) hike, which is mostly on paved stairs that will take you to great vistas of the Santa Elena Canyon.

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Santa Elena Canyon (Big Bend National Park)

Don’t tell your geologist friends either. They’ll start coming in droves because the geology of Big Bend is complex. It’s a mix of sedimentary basin with significant faulting and volcanic activity, which means you’re going to find elevations in the park ranging from 2,000 feet above sea level to just over 7,800 feet. And all makes for a variety of unique bio zones contained just in one park, which leads me to the next thing that is awesome about Big Bend: birding.

Big Bend contains the most species of birds than any National Park in the U.S. That would be 425 birds, making it a mecca for birders. This was really the reason why we were at Big Bend National Park on this trip. We were a few weeks too early for the elusive Colima Warbler, but we weren’t disappointed in what we saw.  (Oh, and fun fact for your next dinner party: High in the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park is the only place in the U.S. where you would find the Colima Warbler.)

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Birding Chisos Basin. (Big Bend National Park)

Also, be sure to not say anything about the fantastic wildlife here at Big Bend, especially the Carmen Mountain White-tail Deer, which don’t seem to mind if you’re standing or hiking two yards away. They’re not hunted and so they’re not wary of humans.

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Carmen Mountain White-tail Deer

Promise me that you’ll keep Big Bend National Park a secret—especially from those in the office. The last thing you need is a Starbucks or McDonalds with WiFi out here. To unplug is to get away from the madness. Right now Big Bend is far from madness.

It’s pure happiness. Purely unplugged.

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Viewing the “The Window” from Chisos Basin in Big Bend National Park.

 

What Marfa can teach us

03 Sunday Apr 2016

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Hotel Paisano in Marfa, Texas

Upon arrival the hotel desk clerk hands me a piece of paper—a photocopy of a chart someone put together—titled, “Marfa Time.” It contained a list of the different restaurants in the area including what times they opened and closed. Some were only open Thursday – Sunday. Others showed that they were opened all week, but with different times on different days. One restaurant, the Grilled Cheese Parlour, was only open from 9:30 p.m. until whenever it decides to close.

The paper not only is a helpful guide for Type-A folks like me who rely on the regularity of structure and predictability, but the chart of inconsistent and unexpected times gives you an immediate sense of Marfa. Basically, Marfa does what it wants to do when it wants to do it.

But it wasn’t the food that brought us to Marfa, or the art scene I’d heard about or the general quirkiness of Marfa, Texas. Frankly there were two reasons we stopped over in Marfa for a couple of nights during our 11-day West Texas road trip:

  1. See the Marfa Prada art installation
  2. Experience the area where the movie, Giant, was filmed

Prada in the middle of the desert

Yes, I’ll admit it: I love shopping. But I also love irony, so when I heard about this strange art installation in the middle of the desert I had to see it with my own eyes. I won’t pretend that I know a lot about the installation. What I know is basically what I read here from Wikipedia in advance of our trip.

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Prada Marfa

It was on our way to Marfa, after visiting the Carlsbad Caverns National Park, that we finally found the Prada structure. You can’t miss it. It’s on U.S. Highway 90, and about 26 miles northwest of the city of Marfa and from a distance you might think it’s a little convenience store on the side of the road. We weren’t the only ones who pulled over on the side of the road to get a closer look. There was a woman on the opposite side of the highway, with her back facing the Prada structure and taking photos with her phone of the flat landscape that stretched for miles. When she finally turned around to take snaps of the Prada structure,  I asked her if she’d like for me to take her picture with it. I stood in the middle of the road (because no one is on this highway) to get as close as possible without losing the visual of the broad, expansive dry  desert and snapped a picture of the lone woman in front of this ironic structure.

I, of course, had done my Wikipedia search prior to our trip, so I expected to see Prada in the middle of the desert. Perhaps the woman did as well. But then a long camper pulled up and sat alongside the road for 20 minutes before a stocky couple in their 60s waddled toward the structure (waddling like all of us do after sitting for too long driving through West Texas). Did they know about this or did they just stumble upon it and thought, “What the hell? Why is this here?” I hope so. That’s what makes Prada Marfa so delicious.

Giant

Now that I could check Prada Marfa off my list, I moved on to my second and even greater love: old movies. During the rest of our drive toward Marfa I pretended to be the eyes of director George Stevens (or his location scouts) in the search for the location for Giant. It must have looked exactly like this 60 or so years ago. Where was Riata? I wondered. Where was Little Riata?

In my mind I can’t separate Rock Hudson from Bick Benedict. Liz Taylor is Leslie and James Dean will always be Jett Rink. It’s all a messy beautiful combination in my head that makes sense to me. Rock Hudson is straight and madly in love with Liz, and by the way, I swear Brad Pitt was channeling Jett Rink/James Dean in Thelma and Louise when he was leaning against an outdoor sink on the side of the road before Thelma and Louise turned around and picked him up. (So confusing my reality even more.)

I hadn’t seen the movie, Giant, until I was in my 30s. A local movie theatre would play classic movies on weekends and Giant was on my list of Top 100 films (according to the American Film Institute) that I was ticking my way through. Not surprisingly, I was the only one in the theatre. The movie, based on Edna Ferber’s book carried themes of racism and strong women—surprising themes for the 1950s, but themes that reached right into my heart.

It was late in the day when we checked into the Hotel Paisano and I was handed the “Marfa Time” piece of paper. Unless you stay in Hotel Paisana, my guess is that the deep roots of Marfa and its connection to Giant is completely lost on most visitors.This was the same hotel where most of the cast stayed for about two months during filming. Rock Hudson and Liz Taylor each rented homes in the area rather than stay at the hotel, but newcomer James Dean! Dennis Hopper! They were there.

Rather than do the normal thing and seek out live music in the area or eat grilled cheese sandwiches at 9:30 p.m., Steve and I stayed in. I downloaded from iTunes the PBS documentary, Children of Giant that aired last year and Steve and I watched it on my laptop as we laid in bed eating squares of chili dark chocolate.

Edna Feber’s book was controversial with the oil tycoons of Texas, portraying them as big wealthy controllers of power, and it called out the discrimination between Mexican-Americans and Anglo-Americans. Layer on top of these themes director George Stevens’ recent return from World War II, having just filmed many atrocities, particularly in the Nazi concentration camps once the war had ended. This combination—Stevens and Ferber—is why the themes in Giant worked well both cinematically and on a social conscious level.

According to the documentary, even while filming in Marfa there was a separation between Mexican-Americans and Anglo-Americans. “A literal separation by the train tracks,” the narration from the video said, and just as those words came out through my laptop’s speakers, the loud “HOOOOOT! HOOOOOT!” came as the train, only a block from our hotel, rolled down the tracks.

We looked at each other. “Whoa. That was weird.” I said.

The reality of it all set in. Just days before terrorists exploded several bombs in Brussels. The election for a U.S. president has incited both anger and separation in my country, where we act like a political election is rooting for our favorite football team. It’s “us” against “them.”

And over the past year, racial tensions appear to be on the rise in the U.S. “It’s been the year of outrage,” a friend recently said to me. Yes, we’re all outraged right now. Terrorists. Candidates. Citizens of all colors.

No one wants to listen to anyone.

I’m with Bick. There’s hope.

It was a weird time to be in Marfa and thinking about the movie, Giant.

The end of the movie is one of my favorite scenes. Bick and Leslie, both with gray hair, are slouched on the couch.  A few minutes prior you witness a major transformation in Bick when he protects, not just the honor of his Mexican-American daughter-in-law, but of some Mexican-American strangers who were refused service in a diner where they were eating. He doesn’t win the literal fight that occurred in the diner, but he did win in that he changed.

As he and Leslie are relaxed on the couch, Leslie shares that she’s never been more attracted to Bick than when he fought for what was right. (Oh, how I love that sentiment.) And then as the camera turns to the their two toddler grandchildren in the play pen in front of them—one white- and one dark-skinned, and right then you know that Bick has not just accepted how his world is changing, but that he has changed. You know this because of the affection he shows in his eyes and that the cuts and bruises he still has on his face from the diner fight were to protect everyone from racial discrimination.

There are a lot of terrible things going on in the world today. I’ve always wanted to live in a world where things got better and improved, not get worse. But Giant reminds me that we may not win, but we can change.

There is great irony found in Marfa and in the desert. Whether it’s Prada that can represent whatever you want it to represent, or if it’s Hollywood descending on the desert to make a film. Or if it’s that the Marfa cemetery still had a fence separating Anglo-Americans from Mexican-Americans even up to last year when the documentary, Children of Giant, aired. (I didn’t check to see if that was still the case in 2016.)

Do we really change? I hope for that. I really do.