01/22/08Big Bend , Bacteria, Van Fatigue, and the Irony of it AllAs the saying goes---all good things must come to an end, and not always perfectly. A day or so before reaching Big Bend , my co-pilot began to feel an itch in his throat. The itch soon became a cough, which then became an incessant hack. That coupled with high altitudes, advanced emphysema, and air pollution from Mexico meant that Big Bend was no place to be. As much as we didn't want to abort the trip, after a week at Big Bend the bacteria had won and we headed for the coast again. In his endless optimism, my co-pilot was convinced that the coastal air would cure everything and that he would be fine. When it didn't work, he finally took my advice and headed for the doctor. The same day he was at the doctor, I too began to feel an itch in my throat. When I woke up the next day it was painful to swallow and I felt like a sock had been stuffed up my nose... I knew it was over. Neither one of us were disappointed though. We had done nearly all that we wanted to and we had a great trip, besides that, van fatigue had begun to set in. Van fatigue is when the van starts to feel like a torture chamber and one person starts to look at the other one like, “this was your stupid idea not mine !” I hope to eventually return to Big Bend and I plan to do it for two reasons. One is to hike the South Rim, and two is to play and sing a few songs down in the Santa Elena Canyon . The South Rim was the next hike I was planning to take, and here's just a small part of its description taken from the book I purchased ‘Hiking Big Bend.'
For reasons of time, I had intended on doing the one day round-trip hike, but obviously it will have to wait. My other inspiration for returning came when I was hiking the trail in the Santa Elena Canyon . I let out a few yelps for the fun of it, and the echo was one of the most incredible things that I had ever heard. I immediately thought I have to do a song down here. If it hadn't been so late in the day and the van hadn't been so far, I would have done it right then, but that too will have to wait. I'm not the only one who had that idea either. The very next day while I was on another hike called The Lost Mine trail, I met a young couple and the girl was a classically trained singer. They were down at Santa Elena the day before, and guess what her boyfriend coaxed her into doing? She belted out two songs in the canyon, one of which was Ave Maria . I wish I could have been there, it must have sounded amazing. Big Bend is Big as in BIG, HUGE, COLLOSAL. The park is probably the size of a city and maybe even one of the smaller states. Long before you reach the park you are in Big Bend country and the mountains and desert are everywhere and endless. To me it was a hiker's paradise and I found the desert and mountains fascinating. It amazed me how much the terrain would change within one short hike to another and what a contrast there was everywhere that I looked. There were barely visible delicate flowers coming out of rocks, tall freakish looking plants and trees, sand dunes, mudflats, canyons, and cactus of every shape and size, including one that I called the Twisted Bitch. Like one of those really screwed up people that you can see coming from a mile away, one look at the Twisted Bitch and only a fool would go near it. It was bent and twisted in every direction with wicked prickly thorns coming out it everywhere. In all fairness and not to sound sexist, it could also be called the Twisted Bastard, but I personally favored The Twisted Bitch, I think it has a nicer ring to it. The people who laid out the park get an A+ for knowing the true heart of a camper/hiker who is seeking obscurity. One of the most popular camp sites is at Chisos Basin and it's also one of the more civilized, that's civilized as in water and bathrooms, and it's fourteen dollars a night. It's a heck of a drive up and down into the Basin, but the spectacular view is a huge pay off. You are completely surrounded by some of the tallest and greenest mountains the park has to offer, and it also provides you with access to some of the best trails. We stayed there one night and then moved to a primitive site which is what we wanted. Primitive sites are a one time ten dollar fee and you can use them for fourteen days, and that's primitive as in no bathrooms, shelter or running water. There is also no ground fires, pets, radios or generators allowed at primitive sites. Big Bend is probably one of the most remote and desolate areas in the US , and when you ask for primitive camping they don't screw around. Our next two nights were spent at a site poetically called The Gravel Pit (what a charming name) and the first challenge was getting there. Most of the side roads to primitive campsites are recommended for high clearance vehicles with four wheel drive. We explained what we were driving and the ranger didn't seem to think that it would be a problem, as long as we were careful and went slow. Well, I went slowly alright, about one to two miles an hour for about five miles and it seemed like an eternity. It was nerve wracking, there were ditches, holes, washouts, rock piles; I felt like I was dodging land mines. I seriously started sweating whenever I thought of someone coming from the other direction; much of it was barely wider than a sidewalk with no place for me to go. I finally made it to The Gravel Pit and was I freakin' relieved. I had no intention of going back out that road until I absolutely had to. In a jeep or a pick up truck it might have been fun, but the long maxi van was a bad vehicle for it. I could write a lot more about Big Bend, mostly good and some bad (visible air pollution from Mexico and a lot of it) but I'll get straight to the defining moment for me. On our third night of camping I climbed up on a large bluff to watch the sun go down. Though going up wasn't too difficult, I took a flash light with me because I knew that coming down in the dark would be tricky. After the sun set and it grew dark, I realized that there was absolutely no sign of a civilized world anywhere to be found. I hadn't noticed it earlier, but there was no plane traffic over Big Bend at all, and no traffic of any kind anywhere. About five miles to the west there was one tiny light flickering and that was it. As far as I could see in every direction there was nothing but the outline of the mountains and desert, and all I could hear was silence. If it weren't for my knowledge of cities and civilization, I would never have known that they existed. Throughout the trip, my co-pilot and I often talked about the early settlers and Indians and what it was like for them when they traveled and settled these places. That was especially true early on when we were driving the Natchez Trace Parkway . The Natchez is a four hundred and forty mile stretch of road that has a fifty mile an hour limit. It starts in Tennessee outside of Nashville and goes through Alabama , Mississippi , and ends at the border of Louisiana . There are no commercial vehicles allowed on it, no billboards, no vendors, and it's a beautiful relaxing ride that parallels the old Natchez Trace. The old Natchez was formed by horse and wagons and I doubt that the settlers found it very relaxing or pleasant. It was mosquito infested and there was no bug spray for mosquitoes, so morning noon and night they were bitten and tormented endlessly. There was no running water at the end of the day to rinse off the combination of humidity, sweat, dirt and grime either. There were no diapers for the babies, no local doctor for the snake bites or any refrigerator or cooler to pull the sandwich and water out of. Most of the time there was probably no place to sleep except the wagon. Even relieving ones self would have been an uncomfortable chore, especially for the women. It's no wonder that in those old photographs the husbands look mean, the wives look stern, the kids look like they're in military school, and no one is smiling. I don't think that they had much to smile about. Day to day living was mean, difficult, and a matter of hour to hour survival. Hollywood in its typical fashion often romanticized those times in the old western movies, but I'm guessing that it was a bunch of bull; I don't think there was anything romantic about it for them. Had those settlers been able to step forward in time into a modern American home, they probably would have thought they'd been sent to heaven...Look... A giant metal box that keeps food cold and look at all the food!!! Wow... another giant thing and fire comes right out of the top of it… the air in here is so cool and yet it's so hot outside…how do you do that?... And look at this!! It's called a toilet, I can sit on it, push this handle, and it all gets washed away without having to bury it. Where does it go? This must be heaven! The irony of it all for me is this; I suspect that like me, many of the people at those primitive sites were there to turn their back on civilization and forsake those heavenly modern conveniences. In a sense, we wanted to go back in time, and those settlers would have probably thought that we were nuts. Why on earth would we want to give up modern living, especially a bathroom and a toilet for a tent or a van? Well, once they learned about jobs, overtime, property taxes, car insurance, house insurance, health insurance, politics, corruption, gas prices, inflation, recession, traffic jams, bills, bills, bills, time management, appointments, deadlines, mall shootings, drive by shootings, suicide bombers, stress stress stress, child abuse, missing children, child porn, day care, health care, eye care, anger management, tuition, mortgages, air pollution, noise pollution, reality TV, depression, AIDS, eating disorders, dysfunctional families, suicide, stress stress stress,...well... maybe they would have understood. That moment on the bluff will probably surface in my mind from time to time for the rest of my life, and its contrast to the modern world was clearest to me about a day after we left Big Bend . It was about four thirty in the morning and we were driving in the dark, but unlike that one tiny light I saw that night, I was now looking at hundreds and thousands of small red lights zooming around me everywhere. They were the tail lights of cars, and already a heavy rush hour had begun in the Houston area. I suddenly felt like I was in the midst of some kind of madness. Thinking about that contrast made me wonder what I would do if I were forced to choose between the realities of the two worlds that I had experienced; an idea that may seem silly to some, but I'm a person who hasn't owned a TV for six years and has only now begun to look into purchasing a cell phone. I can honestly say that I would have to think long and hard about it, and I'll leave it at this…there are those who would stand on that bluff, pay the somewhat uncivilized price I had to pay to do it and say “this isn't at all what he cracked it up to be” but at the same time, one long hard look at the world around me and I would have to say this…neither is our so-called civilization. Well, now that I'm back, assuming that I still have a band, we'll be dusting off the songs and getting them ready for our first show of the year at Tiger O'Stylies. The details are below. I hope everyone's' year is off to a good start and hopefully I'll see you at one of the shows. John Tiger O'Stylies
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