Big Bend National Park is a tough sell because there isn’t any one scene or location that’s especially notable or so beautiful that it deserves to be your desktop background. But the park does have an overall effect on people that keeps them coming back year after year. I said in the previous entry that Big Bend is one of the least visited parks in the country—but I’ve since learned it’s also one of the most revisited.
Tourists from all over the world visit Big Bend for its big views. At certain high points on clear days you can see the curvature of the earth. The International Dark-Sky Association recognizes the park as having the darkest skies in the continental United States and named the park one of 10 places in the world where dark-sky stargazing is possible. Visitors to Big Bend can also cross into Mexico at the Boquillas Crossing if they have their passports.
Devon and I pushed 30 miles uphill till we reached the visitors center at Panther Junction. We were sitting and enjoying the shade when I recognized a couple that I had met in Marfa several days ago, Karen and Skip. Actually, we were sitting on the same bench. I met Karen and Skip in a campground and they fed me an enormous amount of chili on a Tupperware top, and it just so happened to be my 23rd birthday. We go way, way back.
Karen and Skip were touring the park before they headed back to work in San Antonio. My de facto friends said they’d be happy to take us to Boquillas Crossing in their already-packed crossover, as long as we were willing to squeeze. It was getting close to 4:00 so we had just enough time to reach the river before the ferry shut down. On the way there I re-remembered why I liked Karen and Skip so much: They’re real travelers, who love visiting other places for simple pleasures like hiking, cooking hamburgers, and ending the day in a hot tub. Karen will say with a straight face that she enjoys sleeping on the ground in a tent, and Skip says she has a remarkable talent for finding live music.
They dropped us off at the border crossing station, a fortified bunker manned by a single park ranger. We presented our passports and walked down to the Rio Grande. Everyone refers solemnly to the Boquillas Crossing as a “ferry,” but it’s really just a guy with a rowboat who will take you both ways for $5. If you don’t care about keeping your shoes dry, you can walk across the ankle-deep water. For another $5 you can rent a donkey to carry you around town, because Mexico is wonderful like that. We had a limited number of dollars, so I let Devon take the donkey. My job was to keep it moving. The man in charge of the stable gave me a brief tutorial on how to wack a jackass on the ass, and then handed me the stick.
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza trotted to Boquillas, found the nearest restaurant, and ordered tacos and tequila. The town is the definition of a tourist trap, but we were still very much in Mexico. The tables and chairs were all branded by Tecate beer, and a mustachioed cowboy played folk tunes on a guitar for an elderly couple dancing at the other end of the restaurant. The park ranger told us that we needed to check in with Mexico’s customs office, but nobody asked for our passport, and besides, there was a woman in a customs uniform sitting and laughing at the table across ours. It made a nice contrast to the park rangers on the American side, who had just flatly (and rather rudely) refused to let us put our gear in the station because of things like “rules” and “liability.” Devon and I only had an hour in Mexico, but checked off a lot of boxes on our whirlwind safari.
We rowed back across the river to find Karen and Skip waiting for us on the other side. With only a few hours of daylight, we got back on the bike to chip away at our next day’s ride. We were still 70 miles from Marathon, Texas, and needed to get a head start. Finally, our luck was starting to change, because the initial miles were downhill. The sun went down at 8:00, and we kept pedaling. We put lights on our bikes, but with so little traffic going through the park, we had the road to ourselves.
Almost every story about Big Bend, it seems, has to do with the park’s massive size, its isolation, and its brutality. On the National Parks website you can find a poem written by Oren P. Senter, the first Park Ranger to serve in Big Bend. In 1944, the so-called “Lone Ranger” wrote this about his frustrating job:
Apparently the Parks Department and every other company that operated in the Big Bend area had its challenges finding people to stay on board. In 1921, the general manager of La Harmonia Company wrote to a cook in El Paso asking if he’d move down south to run the company kitchen. He offered a small salary at $35 a month. The boss admitted “The salary does not sound high but when you consider the class of work and also the fact that there is nothing to spend your money for except an occasional bottle of beer or cognac, it is not bad. You can save practically all of it.” Apparently the cook never showed up.
Big Bend is in Brewster County, the largest county by area in Texas. Not much has changed for the American consumer here since 1921. Long-time residents later regaled Devon and I with tales of the Brewster County Trader Facebook page, a lonely site for people desperately yelling into the void that is west Texas. If only we were residents we could take advantage of the bargains offered daily: “T-shirt for $3,” or “used mousepad,” or “free bag of clothes.” For whatever reason, Brewster County uses its Facebook page like craigslist. Our friends on the inside said people were willing to drive for hours to buy sacks of old clothes because there’s so little to do in Brewster County. People are lonely, and they’re looking for things to buy.
After 40 miles biking in the dark, Devon and I found a nice patch of grass in a ditch along US 385, set up our tent, and went to sleep totally exhausted. We had spent practically all day moving through Big Bend’s gargantuan acreage and we were still a day’s ride from the nearest town and a desperately needed shower.
