Journey to the Edge of Texas, A Memoir by Carlton Leatherwood, Chapter 6 -- Chico's Too

Chico's Too

When Steve Fromholz and his wife passed in a raft on the Rio Grande, he boasted about his success in marriage. "I married my best friend," he said.
I appreciate where he was coming from, for I lived with my best friend a half year or less and look back not with regret so much for the brevity but with awe at being served a full glass of wine.
I think Jenny (not her real name) brought pure fun in the door. That's why I welcomed her where no other had come.
I was forty-seven, she thirty-seven. Age never mattered. Oh, maybe she had an extra-playful touch with Chico, my proud Boston terrier, and maybe she had extra spunk as a mate, but she never indicated I was pulling her down.
It became a failing, but for once I didn't mention my mental health. I had changed doctors in order to receive lithium for what he was first to call my illness, manic depression. He said I would most likely not be hospitalized again. I looked to a future with Jenny without worry.

In our getting to know you dance, she sent a wave of chatty, sometimes witty, letters: "Carl, I can't get my mind off you today-you're turning into an addiction! But maybe if I write my feelings down, I won't call you so often.
"By the way are you planning to publish your journal this summer after you get in shape at the Y!! Oh, did I remind you never to let me tell you what to do???
"Hey, you're fun to be with, and to talk to. Thanks for being such a good friend-so soon."
After that I poured the coals on our favorite pursuit, adventure travel. The result was frenetic but not manic, not at the start anyway.
We went first to Kingston Hot Springs, the place upriver where Big Bend residents go to get away from it all. The ranch road out of Marfa was a spectacular drop through the towering white bloom of yuccas to the "hideaway," and for a few dollars we soaked in a hot spring in our room.
The next "event" was also my idea, a loop through the Old South with thirty-seven miles of backpacking from the trailhead of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia. It treated us to a first love, crimson sunsets silhouetting the ranks of small mountains, not at all like the behemoths out West. Water played a sonata-from the waterfall at the trailhead to the small trailside springs for drinking water. Orange and yellow wild azaleas flourished.
After that Jenny took off on her own for a long-planned adventure solo. She would camp for three months in the West as a single woman traveling alone. Bundles of letters arrived as she in free reign and wild abandon pitched her tent from Arkansas to Wyoming.
Her only gruff words had been over that tent. I had put a dirty boot inside, and she fussed about the housekeeping. On her own she didn't have that worry. And on her own she found a cowboy with a horse blanket. Like age, that didn't matter with us. We held tolerance in an open relation most holy.
She didn't mention the cowboy in her letters, nor for a while when she returned. But when he didn't write, she let me know her hurt.
Jenny came home to chaos. I had finished remodeling my condo, which she thought too crowded with furniture. But we took off for New England for the fall foliage with me manic. I shiver at my lunacy. On the north end of the Appalachian Trail, I tried to climb a rock face with a backpack in a blinding snowstorm. In the tavern that night, I joked that we had gone end to end on the trail in the same year.
The delusions were raking my mind. Jenny and I were no longer in unison. I wouldn't, for instance, give her the keys to the rental car in New England. Somehow, we made it back. The outdoors and a similar faith were no longer ties that bound. Sex flew my cage, contrary to a notion that in mania sex is manna.
I don't know if I asked her to leave or she left on her own. I hardly noticed her moving out. She did take me to Huntsville to see my new doctor, who at my insistence wrote a note to my employer saying I could work. I handed it to my supervisor who said he had done me a disservice.
Then I took off. The trigger was June's (not her real name) return of a bag of toys at the office that I had given her daughter. I thought someone was going to kill her and me, so I ran-all the way to California-in a watershed psychotic collapse.
The truckers on the long haul out Interstate 10 drove marvelous lighted rigs. Lights fueled my mania. I had seen Christmas lights dance in a starry night outside my Fort Worth hotel on a previous trip. This go-around Chico was in the car, and we made it almost nonstop to Los Angeles. When we entered downtown, the smog was terrible and I called a newsman friend. When he didn't answer, I left a message saying he was failing in his responsibility to clean the air. Then I bought Chico a hot dog at a mall and carried him through hordes of street people back to the car.
We headed toward home, until I decided to check into a tennis resort outside Santa Fe. The pro accepted my challenge, and the lodge a piece of roadside art. Yes, wacky. In town I paced in a park where I thought the new capitol of the nation would be. Then I continued onward to the shambles at home.
        Jenny had, of course, moved out but she did not move on. She stayed my friend through two more psychotic episodes within the year, and for four wobbly years after that. In the course of that time she moved to Sacramento.
Chico was another matter.
The California bust was his last great adventure. In a later mania I parked in a dark driveway one night, exhausted. I rolled out on the ground clutching mine and Jenny's little friend and then let go. He headed, his dark coat blending in the night, for a drainage ditch. I lost sight and I lost him.
I don't remember my former housemate having much to say about the loss, probably out of kindness. However, later, when Chica Tres jumped out of a cardboard box full of pups and into my arms for keeps, she reprimanded me. "It's not fair to the animal," she said.



In case you've missed them, links to the introduction and Chapters 1 through 5

http://bigbendtimes.blogspot.com/2014/03/journey-to-edge-of-texas-editors-note.html

http://bigbendtimes.blogspot.com/2014/03/journey-to-edge-of-texas-chapter-1.html

http://bigbendtimes.blogspot.com/2014/03/journey-to-edge-of-texas-chapter-2.html

http://bigbendtimes.blogspot.com/2014/03/journey-to-edge-of-texas-memoir-of-love.html

http://bigbendtimes.blogspot.com/2014/03/journey-to-edge-of-texas-memoir-by.html

http://bigbendtimes.blogspot.com/2014/03/journey-to-edge-of-texas-chapter-5-girl.html

Journey to the Edge of Texas A Memoir by Carlton Leatherwood Chapter 5 Girl Crazy

The 1980s got worse and better at the same time. While I explored Texas unsuspecting of the repetitive, vicious nature of my disease, I found a winning combination in female companionship. Some of it was romance.
Mind you, I was in my 40s. The decades before didn't compare, nor have they compared since.
It was a golden dawn, chocolate on chocolate, diamonds forever.
More often than not, the women were in the Unitarian Church and the Sierra Club, both liberal organizations, both of which contained beliefs that embodied common sense, to borrow from conservatives. Jesus was the son of God as we are all the sons of God. Women and men are equal and play on the same field. The natural world is our sacred trust. Ultimately, I think we saw the environment and God as one.
We dated vigorously. And although the church's minister spoke against sexual freedom, many of these women, and men, exercised it, it being in the days before AIDS made the front pages. It became my last liberation from teen years without parental sex education, that duty passed along to the church. And the church corrupted the meaning of adultery. All sex outside of marriage did not break the Ten Commandments.
Joy.

My companion protested that her friends were spending the summer in Colorado while she vacationed in humid East Texas. I quieted her with a ride on a bicycle built for two in Jefferson, Texas, along with the pursuit of other treasures of a grand scavenger hunt in the region.
The hunt was made possible by two books, The Best of East Texas and The Best of East Texas II, written by Bob Bowman. Although his imprecise directions could be aggravating, they turned a driving tour into a game on a broad scale.
The treasures were both winners and losers, something akin to those discovered in adventure games played on computers. One of the first and easiest discoveries was the East Texas Oil Museum in Kilgore, Texas. The museum's innovative "muddy" boom-town street provided fun insight into what became in the 1930s the largest oil field in the world. The museum was a tribute to Dallas tycoon H. L. Hunt, who made his fortune in the field, and to J. M. "Dad" Joiner, who persevered to drill the discovery well. That well, the Daisy Bradford No. 3, was still pumping.
Country Tavern near Kilgore was the Marfreless watering hole of East Texas. As at the Houston establishment, no sign told what was behind the doors. The secret was truly the best barbecued ribs around. As the guide said, the dark but respectable Gregg County honky-tonk clinged "to the northeast elbow of a highway intersection a few miles west of Kilgore."
Being summer, we headed for the "best swimming hole," called Blue Hole in Angelina County. A turn "less than ten miles out of Zavalla" proved difficult to locate because of the lack of a marker on the U.S. Forest Service road. I don't recall why the directions to cross three wooden bridges and turn right didn't work out, but we ended up stymied by a huge mudhole as did friends who earlier followed the guide. When we finally found the swimming hole, the loud radios of youths on the sandstone cliffs surrounding the two-acre lake forced us to turn the swim into a heads-under-water dunking session. 
We could feel we were close to the proverbial treasure chest in Jefferson. We rented bicycles near the Excelsior House, the "best country hotel," and took a leisurely ride through a neighborhood studded with Victorian houses. The Victorian period influenced architecture from 1860 to 1900. One of the best examples from the era in Texas was the House of the Seasons at Jefferson. Athough it retained a Greek Revival floor plan of a columnar front gallery, central hall and balanced rooms, the detail was Victorian. A cupola topped off cornices and round-headed widows. A view of the garden through the cupola's red, green, yellow, and blue glass reminded one of the different seasons. The public could tour the Seasons home and others, including  the antebellum Freeman Plantation built in 1850. Slaves worked its 1,000-acre cotton and sugar-cane fields.
"Cotton is where the business was" long after the slaves were gone, said Sam Vaughn, who with his brother Tom owned and operated the T.C. Lindsey & Co. general store at Jonesville, or according to understatement in the guidebook, "a few miles east of Marshall." The store came with a gin.
"The size of a cotton farm (in the first half of the last century) depended on the size of the family," Vaughn said "But the government changed the allotments. A family (that) had a 40-acre cotton allotment and was doing the best they could had it cut to three acres."
The gin processed a record 2,976 bales of coton in 1937. It closed after ginning four bales in 1973.
Cotton had paid the bills for food and supplies of up to 500 families who shopped at the general store, established on the same spot in the mid-1800s. The shelves were still packed with everything from cheese to clothes, and display space held tools such as the Kelly plow (forged in northeast Texas and no longer for sale).
The store on our tour was built in 1922. Sam Vaughn began working there as a bookkeeper in 1928, and bought it ten years later. His brother Tom joined him in 1947. Tom talked of selling out, but he did not wish to chance closing a store special enough to be a part of Disney movies. In a telephone call he got as excited as his brother about the film role of the store, saying the name was changed to Vainer Store when The Long Hot Summer was reshot for television with Jason Robards and Ava Gardner in 1985. The place was more than the "best general store" in East Texas. It was the treasure chest.

Mariscal Canyon

Jim Bones on Photo Tour

At the point where the Rio Grande turns from southeast to northeast is a canyon called Mariscal. This is the decisive turn that gives rise to the name, the Big Bend. River runners simply call it The Bend. Here, in the middle canyon of the park, black rock meets white. Limestone slabs of midnight are followed by intriguing imitations of icebergs. Patterns of reflected light swirl on the opposite wall. Low water furnishes another strange twist to our ten-mile passage through this wonderland. When one of our rafts jammed in the rocky shallows, several vaquera, or Mexican cowboys, came to the rescue. Roping the raft, they pulled it downriver on horseback.
Bones was again my guide this trip. He was appreciative that the woman I shared this outing with could wake up early laughing.
 In an afternoon rafting through the canyon we saw goldeneye and bufflehead ducks and yellow-rumped warblers. Leatherstem, a plant used by Indians to stop the flow of blood from wounds, grew in an arroyo. So did a nut-bearing guayacan tree. Beavers had parted Bermuda grass to slide into the river. And man had left his mark on the banks too. A recluse had abandoned icons in a reed hut. Someone else had once operated a wax factory here; its rusty parts remained. Wax makers added the locally abundant candelilla plant to a mixture of water and sulfuric acid to create their product. When the wax floated to the top of the vat, it was scooped off. It went mostly into chewing gum.

The most important consideration when hiking trails beyond the Pecos River boils down to water. People haven't adapted to the desert and abutting country as have two of the most frequently seen creatures on the highways, the roadrunner by day and the jackrabbit by night.
The roadrunner puts the sun to work in energy conservation. It lowers its body temperature in the night chill by as much as seven degrees from a normal 101 degrees. At dawn, the bird suns a patch of back skin by raising its feathers and spreading its wings. The skin acts as a solar panel, increasing the roadrunner's temperature without burning energy. The jackrabbit hops into a depression shaded by a bush and radiates heat skyward from its large ears, thus reducing the use of water by removing body heat. Humans, of course, don't grow big ears, and we don't have lots of feathers. We depend on the evaporation of perspiration to remove excess body heat from exercise and the sun. The water lost through perspiration needs replenishing. You require maintenance of a water level within narrow limits. It is essential for physical and mental efficiency, and ultimately life.
A naturalist advised hikers to drink water even if they aren't thirsty. "Warm temperatures and low humidity can be deceiving," he said. "The reason that 94 degrees at 10 percent humidity feels so comfortable is that perspiration evaporates as quickly as it appears, thus keeping your surface skin temperature cool.. This can result in rapid dehydration in an individual who feels comfortable and thinks that he hasn't even worked up a sweat."
And water out here is scarce. Virtually no streams cross the trails as they do in Colorado or California, where a person can dip a refreshing cup of water almost at will. The situation limits the backpacker. The pack must contain a reservoir, a gallon of water for each person for each day of the trip--a rule of thumb averaging variations in individuals, topography, and climate. A gallon weighs 8.3 pounds. For a three-day trip that adds up to 25 pounds of water for each back. You can see the limitation. The weight makes more than a long weekend uncomfortable and almost unthinkable.
Otherwise, backpacking looks as easy as putting one foot in front of the other repetitiously. Usually, it is. But in my first adversity in the sport, I lost a young woman figuratively--and literally--on a trail in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Worse, she panicked, and we sideswiped disaster.
Later, I would hunt out pages on wilderness survival previously given scant attention in fifteen years of on-and-off backpacking. A surprising number of books about backpacking simply warn against panic. Many ignore the basic procedures that I also ignored which led to trouble. Even the authoritative walker Colin Fletcher admitted to never really giving the matter of survival the thought it seems to deserve.
Fletcher noted that "this kind of 'survival' mostly amounts to 'experience.'" He quoted an adviser on the subject as saying, "What it generally amounts to, anyway, with inexperiened people, is simply not giving in to terror. That's what usually happens: ignorance--then panic ..." My tale of woe illustrates the point. I share it for emphasis and to warn that, as basic as walking is, in rough terrain with a house on your back, there is more to it
The Guadalupe Mountains are, collectively, one of the more rugged places in the state. You can climb to the highest point in Texas, Guadalupe Peak (8,751 feet), and gaze on salt flats a mile below. More of the largest known fossil reef appears here than anywhere else. El Capitan, a 2,000-foot cliff, rises dramatically as you approach the park from the south.
Sara (not her real name) and I averaged 1.3 miles an hour in a late afternoon climb from the car parked at Pine Springs Campground to Pine Top, a primitive campsite up four miles of steep switchbacks. We packed four gallons of water (35 pounds, 4 ounces, including containers) for the 48-hour outing. A two-gallon plastic container of distilled water found at grocery stores fit perfectly in the bottom of a pack. The other water dangled on the outside of both packs in four quart-and-a-half bottles. 
My companion had shown commitment to nutrition and readily agreed to draw up the menu. She bagged and labeled each meal. The entrees included lamb curry, sweet and sour pork, and shrimp creole (all freeze dried). In addition, she got ingredients to mix for gorp (a trail snack combining nuts, sunflower seed kernels, raisins, and coconut) and cereal at a health food store. And there was no denying my companion's fitness.
Sara had not backpacked before, only a trial day hike with full pack before the trip. She outdistanced me on the trail the seond day, however, with a drive that approached macho. Thus was born the first mistake. I take it easy, smell the pine-scented air often, and let a less-than-fit body plod along. I ignored rules of the path, which go something like this: Travel at the speed of the slowest, keep each other in sight, plan your route carefully before setting off. But in good weather, on a rocky trail along a dry gully arched with trees, with a bright and physically tough companion, I relaxed the guardian role dictated by my experience. It was not a concious decision, just something felt--the opposite extreme of caution felt with a child. And I lost her. She vanished, and in less than two miles I reached a junction that pointed the way to fear.
We had spoken of having lunch at the Mescalero campsite, mentioned on trail signs, without consulting a map. The junction marker showed it .9 miles in the opposite direction of Bush Mountain, our next campsite. Translated, that's about 1.5 hours out of the way. and that's the first of three reasons I decided  my companion didn't head to Mescalero. Almost no one with a pack 25 percent overweight would travel such an extra distance for lunch. Experience on the shakedown hike and planning this one also told me she was adamant against backtracking, and going to Mescalero meant later backtracking to the junction. Finally, she wanted to arrive in camp before dark, by about 4, and that was hardly possible by extending the walk. I headed for Bush Mountain. What was outside of reason for me, though, was not for her. As I later learned in certain terms, Mescalero meant lunch to her, and a junction was no red flag urging her to wait.
And water would play its hand. My companion, alone in wilderness for the first time, had panicked. The couple who "saved" her roughly two hours after she and I parted company had found her peeling prickly pear pads for water. As Sara explained after the ordeal, "I thought I was going to die." She had even reflected on the lack of a will.
In this unexpected situation, I am reminded of the classic tale of Hugh Glass, an early Western fur trapper, who was mauled by a grizzly bear deep in Indian country. One of his two companions was the young and inexperenced Jim Bridger, who became a legendary guide. Glass was unconcious and apparently fatally injured when the other two left with his rifle to protect themselves. He regained his senses and realized he was abandoned. Unable to walk because of his wounds, seething with hatred and a determination to kill his former partners, he crawled to a trading post 200 miles away. Glass lived because of that anger. He later forgave his companions, a gesture not coming my way in the years since the ill wind blew.           

Hoops and Wigs were the theme of Sandi Turvan's Big O Birthday Party

Photo Essay by Voni Glaves

Editorial

by Voni Glaves

Hey, it's Spring Break!  We've got lots of fun stuff going on here

 in the Big Bend of Texas.  More serious topics next week.

Journey to the Edge of Texas, A Memoir by Carlton Leatherwood, Chapter 4--Hospital Daze

Morning broke hard in Herman Hospital on the first day of the first confinement for going mad. Still mired in delusion, I was allowed to rest from the exhaustive pace outside. But a blaring radio brought my horror inside.

The news of the hour was a massive traffic accident on the Southwest Freeway interchange next to the Houston Post building. A truck loaded with chemicals had gone off a ramp, and in a chain reaction cars were smashed up. The poisonous vapor from the chemical would soon denude the lush landscape at the newspaper plant, but there was a more immediate, graver concern, and Hobby, the owner, marshaled the staff to the top floor to escape the deadly onslaught.

It's almost transparent what I though next. I linked this happening to yesterday's concern for the well being of myself and Hobby. My mother was still at the hospital and said, "I hope (a cousin) isn't involved." And I concluded that the cousin had sent the truck bomb to avenge my conceived treatment at the Post.

The hospital called out its heavy weapons to combat my evil forces. A psychiatrist was assigned, and he ordered a large daily dose of the drug Prolixin. We didn't talk about delusions, which surprised me, for they were still very much my reality. But then again we didn't talk very much at all. I was, of course, green to the process and didn't know the doctor and his couch had been replaced by the doctor and his pills, pharmacology. Still, as my care under that psychiatrist lengthened, I was known to comment with derision that I couldn't talk to my psychiatrist.

I think my experience--indead, all of my experiences, from the first to the last, and fifteenth, episode--all underscore my complaint with a degree of legitimacy. I entered Rusk State Hospital in East Texas and said that I had stopped my medication, Depacote, because I could no longer bear the diarrhea that was its side effect. I added that I had often voiced this concern to my doctor. The facilitator was critical of the doctor "He wasn't hearing you," she said.

In the Houston hospital's arsenal, however, the real talk came in group therapy, usually in the morning.

Evenings I played chess with a staff member.

After three weeks I was well enough to walk across the street to visit the Hermann Park Zoo.

With my head mostly clear, though questioning some of what I had thought, I was free to go home.

Freer still to drive through the western United States for a rendezvous with other Sierra Club canoeists on the Main Eel River in northern California.

And then work. I was welcomed back with handshakes, and a note from Hobby saying, "We missed you."

My troubles with employment and my caregivers would come when I slipped several cogs further into involuntary commitments.

Terlingua School students listen to and learn from ex-Globetrotter Melvin Adams By Bernadette Devine

A surprise visit from Melvin Adams last Wednesday (March 5) brought laughter, shenanigans and food for thought to Terlingua School students.

Adams, a former Harlem Globetrotter and gifted youth speaker, brought his compelling message of overcoming adversity and following your dreams.

Adams shared his own story with candor and humor to inspire our students to look beyond themselves to create and discover their own futures.

The students speak for themselves about his visit:

“I thought Melvin Adams was very motivational and he believes in the good in people. That is a great trait to have.” — Kaeli, Grade 9

“Melvin Adams was so funny and had some good rhymes. I liked when he was doing basketball tricks. I felt sorry when he told the story about his dad and mom.” — Maritza, Grade 4

“He was funny and athletic. (He made me feel) like I could have my dreams and even go to space!” — Caleb, Grade 5

“I thought Melvin Adams was funny and cool to be around. He had a good attitude. He was telling us the truth.” — Eduardo, Grade 9

 Terlingua students visit and “play” with motivational speaker Melvin Adams. He played basketball at San Jose Christian College in California and led the nation in scoring his junior year with 28 points per game. He also played professionally in New Zealand, Europe, South America, South Africa 
and Central America.

 (Photos by Bernadette Devine and Jennifer Pena)

Excerpt from Big Bend People after the passing of Cowboy Connie Chris Calvin

      By Carlton Leatherwood

Chris Calvin at his non-alcoholic saloon

The Cowhead Ranch has always butted a hardscrabble environment, and the drought this year brought no exception.

As hay costs skyrocketed, the animal population at the unusual guest ranch (25 miles north of Terlingua on Highway 118) was peeled away. "I gave away three horses," Chris Calvin, the ranch owner, said. "I just couldn't afford to feed them."

He posted a sign at Cottonwood General Store asking for a new home for some goats and pigs, too. "It was not long before they were all gone," he said. "Everybody got a good home."

He kept two horses and some good laying hens. He usually gets about 10 dozen eggs every week and sells those to the Cottonwood on Sunday mornings.

The ranch was started seven years ago on a piece of land as plain as a nearby greasewood hill. Cowboy Chris, as he is sometimes called, didn't have a plan, and he only worked with a pick ax and a couple of other hand tools. He built one building at a time.

"I tore down old barns," he said. "I tore down the old Baptist church in Terlingua. People would call and offer a little shed to tear down. These buildings are made out of whatever I could drag up."

Over the years, he has erected enough sleeping units for 20 people, the Nine Point Social Club, where people gather for breakfast around a wood stove, and a saloon, which doesn't serve alcohol, among other buildings. "The church came from right on the other side of neighbor Charles Jenkins," he said. "I put some 20-foot posts under it and pulled it here with a tractor."

If a building isn't square, not exactly right, guests just like it more, he said.

Calvin was raised on a dairy farm in Northeast Texas and had one of his own. He became a champion cattle auctioneer.After 15 years, he rambled a bit, ending up at the Alamo movie set near Brackettville, where he played guitar and staged shootouts in the streets. Then he and a fellow named Doug Davis got in his pickup with $150 between them and headed for Terlingua.

After wrangling for Linda Walker's Big Bend Stables for five years, the dream of a guest ranch was born.

"This is where the Lord dropped me, right here," he said. "He said, this is where you belong. I had a chance to be something totally different."

“People love it, and I love this old country,” he said. “I don't charge very much. I get a lot of young couples with three or four kids, and I know they are strapped. If they have any money, good. If they don't have any money, I tell them to enjoy the Big Bend.”

He has had guests from Belgium, Germany and Switzerland, among many other places. They leave their signatures on the walls of the Social Club. "I've built up a pretty good clientele," he said. "Quite a few motorcyclists stop by now" to enjoy such things as the cowboy shower tub.

Some mornings he sits out at the saloon with a cup of coffee, ready to enjoy his creation himself, looks around and thinks, how did I build all this by myself?

And he misses auctioneering some. He can still belt it out and does for benefits, raising money with such items as pies and homemade quilts in Terlingua.

Editorial by Voni Glaves Hey, it's Spring Break!

Editorial

by Voni Glaves

Hey, it's Spring Break!  We've got lots of fun stuff going on here

 in the Big Bend of Texas.  More serious topics next week.

Journey to the Edge of Texas A Memoir of Love, Travel, Natural Beauty, and One Man's Victory Over Manic Depression Chapter 3 - Rough Riding

Journey to the Edge of Texas

A Memoir of Love, Travel, Natural Beauty, and One Man's Victory Over Manic Depression

Chapter 3 - Rough Riding 

By Carlton Leatherwood Memoir of Love, Travel, Natural Beauty, Writing, and One Man's Victory Over Manic Depressio

By Carlton LeatherwHOUrIt took men of courage and imagination to settle the rangeland of Texas, particularly the mountainous desert country farther west. Asa Jones was such a man. He chose to put a ranch on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, in the Big Bend region.

Faced with thirsty livestock, he ran pipes down the towering bluffs of the Lower canyons to the river. "When I put those 300 ewes on the place," he was quoted, "there was a coyote for every one of "em, and a bobcat trailing every coyote."

It's still an isolated, tough place to eke out a living. I was able to get a sense of Asa Jones's life from the back of a horse provided by Lynn Carter, operator of Chisos Remuda, the mountain stable in Big Bend National Park. He had me mount one of the unregistered quarter horses. He also had a few paints, all accustomed to the high altitude and rocks. "We pride ourselves in our horses for this type of operation," he said.

Craig Carter, circa 1985

The stable nestles in a mile-high basin in the Chisos Mountains, most of which was once ranchland. The ranchers first worked the Chisos foothills, but by the late 1920s cattle had overgrazed those grasslands. Shortly after the herds were moved onto the highlands, development of the park began. Forty thousand head of stock were ultimately displaced.

Carter and his crews conduct guided horse trips through the mountains the year round, and on a winter day his son Craig rode with me toward the South Rim, the scenic high point of the park. The trail is a wooded, fourteen-mile loop with a vantage of seeing 107-miles of the Rio Grande, including the yawning mouth of Santa Elena Canyon.

Craig and I talked about his relationship with C. M. "Buck" Newsome, a former U.S. Border Patrol officer who ran the Chisos Remuda after leaving his government job. Newsome had hired Craig's father, and he gave Craig his first pony when the kid was three.

An aspiring country and western singer at the time of the ride, Craig borrowed the title of a book by Newsome, Shod With Iron, for the name of a song he had written:

Shod with iron and ready to ride,

trying to turn the great Rio Grande tide ...

He rode a big red horse ...

He was hired to hold back a nation of poor

who were trying to reach out for a bit more

Now time has taken its toll, and the story's

beginning to unfold, the dust has settled

on the trails he rode, but the memories

and stories will never grow old.

"About the only time I was nervous singing a song was when I sang that one in front of Buck," Craig said. "He never said much about it. He didn't dislike it, or he would have told me."

Newsome's job with the Border Patrol was to apprehend, process, and send back the illegal aliens who cross the river border into Texas, at times like a tide in the Rio Grande. Said Craig, "You see, if I were one of them, I'd be coming across, too. Living over there you just can't get ahead."

We passed through the Laguna Meadows. This time it was a leisurely trip, but Craig and a park ranger had once traversed the three-and-a-half miles of rough terrain in forty minutes--to fight a fire in the meadows. Our horse crossed the charred area, much of which is still barren, but stands of luxuriant native grasses have returned in spots.

Craig has had other adventures in the park, such as the time park rangers chased a mountain lion after a boy was mauled. "I went up there to take them some food and water," he said. "They happened to tree the cat a little bit after I got there." After the lion was killed, Craig brought it out on his horse.

The two of us reached the South Rim about lunchtime. The view was breathtaking, a panorama stretching for unknowable miles to the south. In his book Newsome reports the distance estimate of Ventura Gamboa, a Mexican national who once worked for him: "I asked Ventura how far we were looking across the river into Mexico. He said, 'Senor, como ocho dias a caballa'" ('Sir, about eight days horseback').

After eating the chicken Craig had packed for lunch, we took the trail to Boot Springs, skirting ice-encrusted springwater creeks as we rode. In April and May this is a gathering spot for birders who want to see the Colima warblers, which migrate from their wintering grounds in Mexico to nest in the Chisos. The tiny warbler is but one of the more than 395 species of birds that have been sighted in the park; no other National Park Service area contains so many. At the Boot camp site, all we encountered were a few lively and fat Mexican bluejays.

Just as the Chisos are as far north as the warblers come, some of the flora and fauna here can be found nowhere else in the United States. And vice versa. This is the last outpost of the ponderosa pine (in Pine Canyon), Arizona cypress and Douglas fir (in Boot Canyon), and quaking aspens (on 7,835-foot-high Emory Peak).

As we returned to the stables, we caught a glimpse of a white-tailed deer--another oddity in the apparent middle of a desert. Deer roam in these mountains the way they did throughout the lowlands and highlands when a moister climate prevailed 10,000 years ago. When the lower elevations dried into desert country, the deer were marooned up here along with the pinyon pines, junipers, and oaks. That's why, in the fall, a horseback rider can catch a glimpse of a white-tailed deer romping through vivid splashes of red and yellow foliage.

The whole Carter family worked the Chisos Remuda. "As far as the labor situation, I should have had a house full of kids," the elder Carter said. He and his wife Cathey had two, Craig and Lynnene. Craig handled an outpost, the Lajitas Livery, for wagon rides and campfire cookouts. Lynnene lent a hand at headquarters. Mrs. Carter grew up in nearby Marathon and couldn't wait to return to this area after moving away as an adult.

"It's home, it grabs you," she said. "I love it. I really do. I got homesick for the mountains. You can turn around two or three times without bumping into anybody." She reflected a moment and added, "When it rains you freeze to death in July. If you're out in it and get wet, I guarantee your lips will be blue. It's that cool and nice."

Her advice for park visitors: "You've got to get out and do some riding and hiking and looking, and not just drive through, to really appreciate it and see it."

Riding out of Chisos Remuda wasn't adventurous enough for me, so I contacted Mimi Webb-Miller, a free-spirited U.S. citizen who ranched near San Carlos, Mexico. She deserted the big cities of Houston and Dallas for the love of a different way of life.

"We're running horseback trips and truck trips for those who would like to come over into Mexico," she said the first day I saw her. "It's in the frontier zone, so a visa isn't required. We have a ranch about eleven miles from Lajitas. We bring people out to the ranch and San Carlos, which is about seventeen miles in. The horseback trips are very diverse."

I fell for her pitch.

Mimi Webb-Miller, circa 1985

As we jostled inside the Bronco along the backcountry bumpy ranch road, Webb-Miller explained the nature of her trips. She hosted people at the ranch and satisfied their fancy, whether in a ride to an abandoned lead and silver mine or to an old frontier fort, called presidio. Then there was the view from 10,000-foot mountains.

"I originally came out to run a river," said the young blonde, who was on her way to becoming a legend in the Big Bend. "I'm an outdoor person. I fell in love with the country and came out for my first vacation as a single female alone--and ended up coming out about once a month to break the routine of Houston." She moved to Lajitas and worked in its development and at the Trading Post.

"I think it takes a tough person to live here," she said "Aesthetically, there's a beauty here like the beauty I dealt with when I dealt with art. Life is very simple. It's basically a matter or existing. but I never seem to have time to do all the stuff I want to do out here. I like to go fishing, and I still haven't been fishing. I enjoy ranch life tremendously. Even though I cook on a woodburning stove and make tortillas, I still enjoy working cattle and being out on the ranch itself."

Webb-Miller grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, and attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, majoring in art history. She moved to Houston and started guiding groups through museums and commercial galleries, transporting them in her own Checker cab.

That was another time and another place.The day I visited, Webb-Miller was rolling flour tortillas in the rustic kitchen of her Rancho El Milagro. Light filtered through a small orchard of quince, figs, and peaches into the unscreened windows. The place had no electricity. At night, she said, she burned kerosene lanterns, and thick block walls combined with the 5,000-foot altitude to keep the room cool. Nor did her home have running water inside. Instead, she and her friend Meno Proano had tapped a spring with pipe and a hose. The spring, and several others, fed a creek that tumbled down a narrow valley. I follwed it to a forty-foot waterfall that poured into a pool secluded by dense vegetation.

Back in the kitchen, Proano joined in the cooking after a day of planting oats for feed. He rolled out a goat membrane and filled it with sliced kidney and liver, onions, tomatoes, lime juice, and salt--a traditional Mexican dish called burronate. It then went into the Lily-Darling wood stove in the corner of the kitchen to cook for a later meal. For now we would munch on hot tortillas and feast on the rest of the goat. A cat purred underfoot as mariachi sang over a car radio in the background of our conversation.

The next morning we set out for the ruins of the old lead and silver mine. There were no easy trails here, sometimes no trails at all, and cacti slapped our chaps on the entire route across the desert. Oscar W. Williams, surveyor and Harvard lawyer, wrote a letter about a similar 1902 ride. He noted his horse was always slipping, sliding, and lurching on round pebblestones: "I never saw so many round pebbles, apparently waterworn, anywhere except in the beds of creeks and rivers. Yet here they lay in the high lands as well as the low--on the crests of mountains as well as in the hollows of valleys."

We trotted in the vicinity of the Comanche War Trail. Running across the Trans-Pecos region from the northeast to southwest, it split into two forks in the Big Bend. One fork crossed the Rio Grande near Lajitas and continued into Mexico through San Carlos. The other crossed between Santa Elena and Mariscal canyons. Throughout the mid-1800s, aided by late summer rains that filled water holes, the Comanches penetrated deep into Mexico by way of the Lajitas route, taking livestock, housewares, and captives along with them. Slowed by the pirated herd, they returned with their booty via the other fork, which was farther from soldiers at Presidio. The bones of cattle that died en route still litter a trail a mile wide.

Our ride entered San Carlos Canyon, where we splashed through a boulder-strewn creek, from which an aqueduct (following canyon curves) carries water to townspeople. Ranchers have also constructed small rock huts in the canyon to shade the offspring of their goats. We were more straightforward in finding respite from the grinding sun; we found a cool spot under some ferns that grew on an overhang.

After a lunch of steak and potatoes, we ascended to the rim of a side canyon--a precipice that tested the sure steps of our horses. High in the mountains we came to the ruins of a mining community that Webb-Miller believes once was populated by 5,000 people. The adobe and stone hulls of long-vacant buildings sprawl up the mountainsides. As late as the 1950s men labored here, removing, over time, a million tons of ore (primarily for lead) for American Smelting and Refining Co.

The mine did not exist when Williams, the early surveyor, rode to San Carlos. He had, however, previously discovered another lode native to the area, the storyteller Natividad Lujan. Lujan was born in San Carlos where he lived most of his life. A grudge forced him to move across the river to Texas. He would at times act as guide for Williams and tell of earlier days by the light of a burning sotol (a desert lily) where they camped. His grandfather had worn the uniform of a Spanish soldier and was sent to serve at the San Carlos presidio, an outpost against the Indians. "Here in San Carlos I was born and raised among wild Indians, many of whom lived temporarily in and about the presidio," Lujan said. "When a tribe was in danger from their enemies, they would ... make a treaty with our people of San Carlos, in which they would promise to be good to our people of the town and not to rob or kill any of them, no matter what they might do to other peoples; and we would for our part let them live among us.

"The people of Santa Rosalia used to talk hard about us, because some of these Indians while they lived with us went in a war-party to that place, and killed and robbed many of them. But, Senor, we could not stop them when they started out on the warpath, nor did we know where they were going ... Thus, many kinds of Indians lived among us. I remember when at one time there were among us Kiowas, Comanches, Apaches, Mescaleros, Gilenos, Pananas, and Cionabas."

The observations and collected stories of Willams were published as a book, Pioneer Surveyor, Frontier Lawyer, in 1968. S. D. Myres edited it with annotations.

San Carlos, with a population of about 2,500, retains much of the layout and character of Williams's time. Williams had asked for a hotel and restaurant and found none. There is today one tiny restaurant. Streets parallel the creek. Stores carry goods necessary to the home, not the few tourists. A church fronts on a pleasant plaza. The aqueduct provides a means to water plants and to wash the main street, which is almost free of vehicle and sign pollution.

The nearby presidio was built by the Spanish as part of a network to guard the northern frontier of New Spain. Troops first occupied it in October 1773. The ruin sits eleven miles southeast of Lajitas on the east bank of San Carlos Creek. The fortification was located there under a plan that placed presidios at 120-mile intervals from the Gulf of California to the Gulf of Mexico. The plan required sites on unobstructed land with good water and pasture; such restrictions resulted in seventeen forts being more closely spaced.

The adobe walls at San Carlos, which rested on a stone foundation, have melted over time into mounds, but they still outline the presidio's shape. Rows of rooms for subordiante officers, soldiers, and Indian scouts backed up to the quadrangular perimeter wall. A chapel was centered in the northwest side. The main entrance presumably was midway in the southwest wall. Soldiers took their stations in diamond-shaped bastions at the north and south corners. A block of rooms built around a patio and projecting into the central plaza may have housed the captain.

When Webb-Miller and I headed back to Rancho El Milagro (and our dinner of burronate, I had a sense that the day of the horse, the day of the Spanish, and the day of the Indian isn't that far distant into the past.