The way up is steeper than I remember and the rocks are looser. In the past year I’ve ground the soles of my boots down bald, smooth as bowling shoes, and my backpack rubs weird on a body that’s changed as much as everything else. The sun is gracious enough to linger behind the cliffs, a cool sixty-five in the shade and an inferno in the light.
The mesa is an odd place. It feels tacked on to a map of Big Bend National Park — the western tail pinned on the donkey. It’s nearly impossible to access within the park itself except via bouldering in a treacherous slot canyon full of slick, deep bowls of water. They call that canyon Bruja, the Witch. Allegedly you can hear her at night, chanting her bad magic over the slippery cauldrons that deer and goats and pigs fall in and can’t crawl out.
The unenchanted typically climb the mesa from the west, via the Lajitas Golf Resort, an equally eerie place — though for much more modern reasons. The course is named for General Black Jack Pershing, who came to Lajitas to fight Pancho Villa, and is regarded by many as the best course in Texas.
Today, the course is owned by Kelcy Warren, the billionaire behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, best remembered for the protests staged by the Standing Rock Sioux that left one dead and hundreds wounded. That year the whole world learned a little Lakota: mni wiconi, water is life. Mni wiconi, and here in Lajitas it is harvested and sprayed over 27,000 acres, permanently greening a landscape that would otherwise look like the surface of the moon.
Lajitas is older than Texas, older than Mexico, maybe as old as the first people to sit down and rest awhile by the Rio Grande some 3000 years ago. The Comanche crossed the ford in the river throughout the 19th century. The shallow crossing has always been favored by smugglers of the usual suspects — weed, cocaine, Prohibition-era hooch — and also of candelilla, a wax harvested from a plant of the same name, which was once used in everything from lipstick and chewing gum to roof sealant.
Leering over everything is an inexplicable statue of Robert E. Lee, a man who never saw the Big Bend. The statue was removed from a Dallas park in 2017 after protests across the South toppled memorials to Confederate generals; it was purchased at auction by the manager of the Lajitas resort, who told a reporter that the statue served no symbolic purpose except as “a fabulous piece of art.”
The only thing in Lajitas that towers over this fabulous piece of art is the mesa. Its name is Anguila, which means “eel” in Spanish. There are no eels in the Rio Grande. The only thing close are alligator gar, unsettlingly long tubelike fish with anteater snouts.
Anguila is probably an Anglo misremembrance of the word Águila, or eagle. The first white people to see the Big Bend were Spaniards, who gave up on the place in the 18th century. When the Anglos came back a hundred years later most of them spoke no Spanish, finding the vowel-laden names of the canyons and creeks confusing, not knowing the electric world of the place in its language: the town of Noisy, the village of Knife Standing Up, the mountain meaning Disemboweled.
I come to Eel Mesa in part because the river is dying. They call it the Brave River or the Big River depending on which side of it you come from. Technically the river comes from Colorado, but it has been dammed and drained and abused to the point that it becomes a dry ditch in El Paso.
Hundreds of miles downstream it joins with the Rio Concho, the Seashell River, which comes from the Mother Mountains flanking the western edge of the Dry Sandy Place. Mexico is bound by treaty to give the United States a significant portion of its water, but there has been no rain in years, and the farmers riot whenever the water is released. The release is a betrayal, a kneeling before a greedy and hostile empire that must steal from others to feed its own.
For the past year and a half, the river below Lajitas and through the mesa and its twin across the river have been so dry as to be unnavigable. The river that carved Eel Mesa winds through a private world of fifteen hundred foot cliffs and its creatures adapted to vertical living: bats, spiders, flowering cactus sprouting from the rocks. I spent a charmed two years of my life running up and down that canyon — a charmed kind of life that may soon be impossible.
Last year I hiked up the mesa to a bald-headed mountain called the Butterfly, where the trail splits in three. Hugging the side of the Butterfly is another sheer descent down to a beloved camping spot that marks the entrance to Santa Elena Canyon. I took my boots off and walked into the water, soothing swollen feet, a toenail on the verge of flaking off. There were cowboys on the other side, watering their horses.
I almost always hike alone, and regard men — particularly in groups — the same way I would a pack of rabid dogs. The cowboys spark something else in me, respect and something like delight. More than two countries, we come from two different dimensions: mine an effete universe of Camelbak bladders and freeze-dried pad thai, theirs of tinned tuna and dusty jeans.
I remember an afternoon on the river, deep in another canyon, braced against a rock at the bottom of a rapid called Yearling Deer, waiting to catch my flock of sunburned tourists should they tup over into the water.
A cowboy thundered down from a ridge, glinting in leather and silver on a dusty palomino. With his thighs he urged the horse into the water flank deep, and they emerged on the other side dripping, the water falling off of them like diamonds — a vision more fantastic than all the years of movie cowboys I was spellbound by as a kid.
One of the tourists asked me, isn’t it illegal for him to be in the United States. I tried to find the most politically neutral way to say that whoever decided this river should be a border understood neither borders nor rivers. Who would be so stupid as to delineate the boundary between these countries as its deepest channel, an unmappable, slippery line that shifts with each rain?
The cowboys of Eel Mesa wave to me, and I wave back. We leapfrog each other on the way back to Lajitas, and get to chatting a little bit. De dónde son?
One of them points south. Por acá, he says, over here.
A dónde van?
Por allá, he says. Over there.
They’re heading up the mesa on the American side to pick up some stray horses who do not understand the gravity of the international crime they’ve just committed. For the two men to cross legally they would have to drive two hours to the nearest port of entry and two hours back, towing a trailer they don’t have and carrying a visa that is nearly impossible to get. So they must trespass around the Butterfly, skirt the Bowl of the Frog, climb down into the town of Little Slabs.
On my second journey to the mesa I hope I will run into them again, but there is no one up there. The goal this time is to walk around the canyon’s edge, to look down at this part of the river I haven’t seen in years, saying hello to its slot canyons, its caves, its wicked rapids, which feel like a cast of lost friends.
The mouth of the canyon is perhaps the most iconic view in the Big Bend, the subject of commemorative posters, t-shirts and tote bags. The Santa Elena Nature Trail, which leads down into a quiet, grassy boulder garden and a shallow place in the river for swimming, is both the most popular and most deadly trail in the park. The pictures don’t convey how corrosive the sun is, and if time in the wild has taught me anything it’s that none of us can accurately gauge our own weakness.
Eel Mesa is not so fatal. I bought a book called Death in Big Bend on my second or third trip and read it rapt in a single sitting in an Airstream trailer in Taos. I did not go to the river, I did not go out to the bars, I blew off a date from a cursed app on my phone — I spent hours reading about what it feels like to die of dehydration, how the skin keeps burning even after your heart stops.
The names of the rangers, cops and locals in the book meant nothing to me at the time, though they lived like minor celebrities in my head. Now whenever I pick a sketchy foothold I picture Death in Big Bend’s stoic park ranger, whom I have watched drunkenly dance around a fire pit and whose sister lives fifty feet away from me, peeling my body off a rock. Or the local schoolteachers, upstanding citizens, who peered over the South Rim of the Chisos Mountains one day to find San Antonio’s famous Thong Man — and peering over again to find my body similarly twisted.
Eel Mesa’s sole appearance in the book is the sad story of a young park volunteer and his friend who planned to spend the night near the edge. They drank a pint and a half of rum. One of them got up to the pee in the night and fell off the cliff. Woah, was the last thing he said.
The park named a spring after him. On the map the employees use, there are only a handful of water sources: the dead man’s spring, Smuggler’s Tinaja, Tinaja Rana (frog), Tinaja Blanca (white), and Tinajas de la Verga (you can look that up yourself).
When I reach the very edge of Eel Mesa, directly above the deceptively dangerous Nature Trail, I feel something I hadn’t expected to feel: I feel for the land the same bittersweet nostalgia I feel for the river.
Fifteen hundred feet below is the paved cul-de-sac where tourists and guide services cluster, the sandy quarter-mile path I’ve schlepped canoes along in the blistering heat and in the snow, the fragrant pit toilets mixed with wafting cigarette smoke – the smell of waiting for clients to arrive and work to begin.
To the west: the Rattlesnake Mountains, a bruised spine rising from crusty bentonite clay and cryptobiotic soil. Beyond that is Terlingua, a mining ghost town turned AirBNB mecca, a tiny place I have lived off and on throughout my Big Bend life.
As I eat a cold burrito and the lights go out, Terlingua glows, and I realize I’ve never seen it from above. There it is, my life in miniature: heartbreak upon heartbreak, beauty beyond measure. How long it takes a quarter to hit the bottom of the mineshaft; how good a case of beer bought with your last twenty dollars tastes.
With the last light what’s left of the river glimmers. Hey, hey, what can you say, a song addressed to her goes. It’s hard seeing you look that way.
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I do enjoy your writing.
Dusty palominos, water falling off of them like diamonds