6.) He Has Arrived!

I wake up in Alpine, TX.  I’m learning that the desert of reality is not the desert of cartoons.  As the sun goes down it doesn't take long for the temperature to drop.  Last night it went from 86 to 55 in less than a half hour.  Darkness just fuels the decline which continues throughout the night, hence the 27 degree morning.

The turn into Big Bend is only about 20 minuets away and my excitement grows as I near it.  Big Bend was recently raked the #2 national park in the world by a travel channel documentary, so my excitement is not unfounded.  

I make the turn toward the park and discover that it’s another 70 miles straight into the desert before I even reach the entrance. The road snakes along through valleys, passed sheer cliffs, and rocky hills covered in scraggily brush that grab at your pant legs as you walk by. After what seems like forever I finally reach the ranger station at Permission Gap.   

Before I left I purchased an season pass for 80 bucks that will get me into every national park in the country for free.  I present it to the ranger and I’m allowed a weeks access.  Normally the entrance fee is $20 per vehicle, so it seems the pass will pay for itself rather easily.  I pay $10 for a week of backcountry camping and choose my campsites with some help from the ranger.  Keep in mind, generally speaking, I have no idea what I'm doing, so I just kind of wing it.  I make an attempt to pick sites throughout the park so I get to see as much as I can. 

Big Bend is enormous, 801,163 acres, around 70 miles from end to end.  I takes a good hour to just drive across the damn thing.  With my basic itinerary mapped out I embark to my first campsite, Grapevine Hills.  

The turn off for it is just a few miles down the road, but mine is the very last site at the end of a gravel track 7 miles deeper into the desert.  My jeep chugs along relentlessly and the gravel gives way to dirt, and then basically just rocks that I navigate through slowly but surely until I find my site.  It’s nothing more than a square of desert  where the brush has beed cleared away and the ground leveled.  The solitary feature is a large metal box about six inches off the ground colorfully named a bear box.  Storage for food and anything pungent that could attract the attention of the local fauna.  Theres a hidden latch that locks the door, making it wildlife proof.  

Setting up my tent for the first time proves difficult in the desert wind.  In the weeks to come, I’ll realize that the desert, like the beach, is almost always windy; sometimes to a terrifying degree.  Camping in either of these venues, I imagine,  is a kin to living in a kite.  I hunt down the pair of mechanics gloves I bought and use my knife to cut the plastic straps holding them together.  My old man had given me a knife he had received as a gift in the Philippines.  As I remove it from its leather case I remember thinking, “Watch me cut myself with it the first time I use the thing."  Sure enough, because of me wielding it in a incompetent way, it slices through the plastic strap, and then, swiftly across and deeply into the base of my left index finger.  My stupidity overshadows any sense of pain as I watch the blood begin to run and pool in the palm of my hand. All I can do is shake my head.  “Idiot”, I think to myself and run to find my first aid kit.  I manage to stop the bleeding, but it looks awfully deep, I could probably use a few stitches.  I just wrap it up tightly, put my gloves on over the bandage and hope for the best.  

Eventually, I get my tent sent up despite the wind and the less than desirable stakes that came with it.  If you’ve ever bought a tent before, you know the ones I mean.  The flimsy, blunt-ended, ‘L’ shaped rods that bend as you drive them into the ground, or simply pull out altogether if the wind yanks your tenet at the right angle.  

Finally arriving has calmed my nerves considerably.  Two straight days of nothing but driving had me pretty low.  Worried that I’d made a mistake with this life style change.  But I’d much rather be here, doing this, than working any of those old jobs with deadlines, and due dates, and scheduled breaks.  While that my be a safer life, this one is infinitely more interesting.  The good Doctor Thompson said it best, “It seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed??"  My first hike is planned for tomorrow, to the south rim of the Rio Grande.  Visions of wide open vistas, purple sunsets shuffle through my mind as I huddle deep into my sleeping bag and drift off to sleep.