We drove 8 hours from Austin across rolling different landscapes and arrived at our house rental outside Big Bend National Park at midnight. Big Bend has the least light pollution of any other National Park in the contiguous 48 states. We stepped out of the car to see the sky aglow with the millions of stars and galaxies of the Milky Way. Who knew the night was so bright. We thought of how much sense it made that early people were so fixated on the stars, if this is what they saw every night. And we thought of how few people in the world get to see this every night, and how most never see it at all. How many more poets, artists, and dreamers might there be if we were reminded every night about the vastness of the universe?
We awoke to the sprawling sunrise as layers of plateaus and canyons emerged through the haze of morning. An open valley of silence.
Colossal mountains and plateaus rise from the flat desert floor like the ruins of a much greater civilization than ours.
The parched but vibrant Chihuahuan Desert extends into infinity in all directions.
Prickly Pear Cactus dot the landscape like bouquets of spiny flowers, providing food for tenacious javelinas (wild pigs).
But the heartbeat of the park is the Rio Grande, the river that divides the United States from Mexico. Originally planned to be an international peace park, with nature preserves on both sides of the border, Big Bend stretches along 118 miles of the border, through soaring canyons.
That such a narrow strip of river divides two countries makes the arbitrary nature of political borders even more apparent.
