House of Pain: New and Selected Essays

Big Bend

B I G B E N D The calcite cliffs behind me were pink at sunset. I drove the old Maverick Road north. The entablature of those cliffs ran for miles and miles like that, fifteen-hundred-foot walls of sheer rock ruled flat against a paper sky. The daylight was so intense that we seemed to be caught in an invisible flame,tequila on fire.Now crashing through dry washes of chert and shale, leaping over their far banks, Maria and I could see the sun dip behind the low hills of ash, peppered with stunted trees like an arctic tundra. All life here was dwarfed by the silent thunder of the sun. We spun out a wagon train of dust behind us. It would soon be night, and we would have no light to speak of at the camp along Terlingua Creek. I stole glimpses in the rear-view mirror . The cliffrock ran to deep purple, streaked with bister. The truck danced through flinty draws on spider legs, throwing its awkward shadow all the way down the desert floor. Bats on leather wings veered and jerked around us like spirits freed from destiny. Down on Terlingua Creek at last, Maria and I huddled on our haunches in the sand and felt night come on like a power failure. It was  degrees when we pitched camp. Terlingua Abaja was known to be the hottest place in the park. Maria was a naturalist, small and vulpine,beautiful.She knew these things: The creek ran mostly underground at that time of the year. The desert did not come alive at night as in a nature film. Few things yet moved.A pair of doves made listless dives and skimmed along the desert floor in trail.No,the desert simply sat there with its hot tongue all over us. That was its secret: it would sit there until it had sucked everything out of us, and we were left like the dried molting of a cicada.It was a place of contradictions.For there in the deathly crepuscular light as we squatted on a rock, small fish  were swimming in stagnant pools, and the green fingers of some unnamable saltweed reached up like dead and moldering hands to grasp the air. We found our sleep at last light around nine-thirty. The temperature was  by the Jeep’s thermometer. –––––––––––––– Stark naked in the mountains, Maria and I sat before our scullery fire. She knew enough not to interrupt the silence of this place. An early wind bent the stoveflame like a pennant and tilted it to the earth. It felt as if we wore clothes, though we did not. The air and our skin were exactly the same temperature.It felt as if a few swimmer’s strokes could take us to the surface where that full moon,chased by Mars andVenus, floated like a luminous ball of cosmic gas on the surface of that lake of air. But we were stranded at the bottom, drowned Argonauts, yet still conscious. During the night big winds shook the tent and threatened to pick it up. But in the morning that front had passed, clearing the world of the smoke from forest fires in Texas and Mexico. Unlike the night, dawn was a long time coming. Saturn was so bright in the east that it looked artificial. My citysense told me it was an airplane, but it wouldn’t come to me.Anyway, I saw no airplanes there, no tic-tac-toe of contrails to spoil the sky in its first daylight quaking. Big Bend was on the path to nowhere. We were going to see the canyon that in the s confused the Spanish so badly that they turned back in humiliation from their imperial advance north. –––––––––––––– Vast reliquary valleys always there at my elbow,offering up the bones of the dead to those who would walk there.Huge purgatorial voids of white volcanic ash and endless fields of ejecta, as if a tremendous explosion vomited all these rust-colored rocks out here,which is more or less what happened, said Maria. She gave me these tidbits when she bothered to speak at all.We both preferred the silence. The land and the mountains were built by volcanic action followed by erosion. Hot bile rose out of  BIG BEND the earth, which was stove through to its spinning iron armature. And...