Photo by Tracy Lynch
The Chisos Mountains.
In Elephant’s Shadow:
Three Entrances to the Bend
by Thomas Gaffeney
I
once taught a seminar on writers
of the Southwest to Elderhostelers
in Big Bend National Park. I
wanted to touch on various dimen-
sions of the experience of getting to the
park, which I often felt was core to
much of the serious literature of the
Southwest. And I enjoyed verbally
bringing the groups down the three
different roads, one of which they’d
just traveled to get to the park. So
what follows is the experience of one
who has just arrived in the park. For
those who haven’t had this experience,
I hope that reading this will prick your
interest in the range of responses the
unique terrain that leads to the Big
Bend can call forth.
Three roads, each with its
own music, rhythms. Three
approaches, each ushering us,
8
in its own distinctive way, into
the Big Bend. All with a
moment – a big bang of a
moment – where the real
entrance begins.
Hwy. 118 south out of
Alpine: the dips and curves
through a dappled green of
cedar hills budding up our own
little
country
suburbia.
Cathedral Mountain. The
reassurance of a still-working
ranch house. Then there, that
last sweeping turn sliding out
alongside Elephant’s shadow,
the mountain within the state’s
wildlife refuge of the same
name, about 15 miles south of
Alpine – just there, the land
suddenly, expansively, opens
up, crossing into a different
dimension, where the senses
race out, springing free.
Up and over from Marfa on
67 to Presidio, there catching
FM 170 and continuing down
the river, it’s a mix of town and
desert and farm. Then a few
miles east of Polvo, the old
name for Redford, at the
Hoodoos – those weird land-
forms twisting up like
deformed sculptures on your
right – you enter a zone wholly
different. FM 170 tightens to
lace a run for some 12 miles
between the high rims of
Mexico and the Bofecillos on
the Texas side, when suddenly
it tilts straight up. A first-gear
climb. The steepest grade in
Texas. And topping Big Hill, as
far as the eye can see, a vastness
sweeps out! Nothing there.
Cenizo
First Quarter 2012
Nothing human. Pure. Only
that wisp of a Rio Grande far
below that takes us by the hand
and winds us back into – what?
South of Marathon on 385,
it’s a relaxed jaunt through still
extant ranch land, the spur off
to Hallie’s museum some miles
down and Santiago Mountain
rearing up close on the other
side when Persimmon Gap
pinches us through to that
sense of everything emptied
out except the essential. The
clean of park land.
Then the road, curving wide
left for just a couple of miles
past the entrance station and
lowering incrementally some
50 feet, coming astride Dog
Canyon, simultaneously touch-
es down to bottom, where
again, only now with a fierce
decisiveness, it turns south and
becomes, in the same instant –
runway! A thrust angled slight-
ly upwards, pointed squarely,
framing at its end, the Chisos!
Here, as we approach closer
and closer, the upthrust of the
mountain ring lifting higher
and higher, there stirs an antic-
ipation, a muted but insistent
drumming, gaining in the
blood. As if some long-sought-
after quest is about to be
achieved in those citadel
heights – a mythic castle keep?
But whatever it is, this rising
sense of imminence, this
“about to be,” becomes all the
more maddening – we hardly
seem to move, constrained as
we are by the park speed limit,