Texas: Chisos Mountain Lodge

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We arrived at the Chisos Mountain Lodge with not much of an itinerary except to walk together in the heat and sun, to explore as much of the vast park as we could and be back on our way home in a week.  The last time I lived with my dad for more than three or four days was decades ago; the last time I spent more than a few hours entirely alone with him was never.  I didn’t know what we would talk about for all that time, but I knew it would include a thousand unanswerable questions posed by him about the nature of truth, the identity of God, the possibility of a vast right wing conspiracy, and the meaning of life.  If you know my dad, you understand.

Two days before my father and I were set to take off for a long-planned trip to Big Bend my mother tried to pull a rock out of her garden and broke her back.

“You will not cancel this trip,” were her first words to me when I reached her by telephone at the hospital.  “I will not be happy if you do,” she said.  I tried to picture her laying there, flat on her crumbled, recently septuagenarian vertebrates.  “Your sister and the doctors can take care of me,” she announced.

“That’s the pain killers talking, mom,” I said, “Dad and I can go in a couple of weeks.  It’s no problem”

“It is not the medicine talking,” she replied in a tone that made me know this was indeed not the voice of percodans bouncing off the cell tower from her to me.  It was a tone that made me know as well that my father and I were going to Texas as planned, that no major or minor mishap of hers was going to get in the way of what she was certain would be an opportunity for Dad and I to--yes, I’ll say it—to bond.  So what could we do?  Make a seventy-year-old woman with a broken back unhappy?  We packed our knapsacks, and if you don’t understand, you don’t know my mom

We arrived at the Chisos Mountain Lodge with not much of an itinerary except to walk together in the heat and sun, to explore as much of the vast park as we could and be back on our way home in a week.  The last time I lived with my dad for more than three or four days was decades ago; the last time I spent more than a few hours entirely alone with him was never.  I didn’t know what we would talk about for all that time, but I knew it would include a thousand unanswerable questions posed by him about the nature of truth, the identity of God, the possibility of a vast right wing conspiracy, and the meaning of life.  If you know my dad, you understand.

There were no unhappy reasons why we hadn’t spent more time together over the years, no falling out, no unresolved rebellion, no unmet need.  I simply grew up, as children do, and left our large family to start a little one of my own.  But, perhaps equally conventionally, neither Dad nor I really feel in our own skin when in each other’s houses for more than the standard few days required at holidays.  You’re not quite a guest when you visit a close relation, but your not quite at home either.  So we carve the turkey, appreciate the pies, have some laughs and perhaps a few philosophical inquiries that end up pretty much where they began.  Invariably, after a day or so of this, whichever of us is the visitor starts making excuses about why we really have to get going. 

But I had this idea that maybe walking in a foreign terrain could be a neutral space.  The open trail belongs equally to all wanderers, right?  With time and space and miles to burn, who could say what small or mid-sized moments might occur between a grown-up son and his father.  It would be our twist on the classic father-son coming of age adventure, this one taking place a quarter of a century after I should have been doing too many drugs and falling behind in school to play the part correctly.  It would be a coming of middle-age story for me, a coming of golden years story for him.

Then mom broke her back, and though neither of us mentioned it explicitly, the coming gold of their retirement suddenly looked a bit tarnished.  She was doing well enough; we talked to her often in the evenings in our comfortable if rustic room at the lodge.  Still, I could tell my father was eaten up by her pain as we wandered 'close to the sun in lonely lands.'

“I’m so sorry this happened,” he’d say out of the blue whenever conversation stopped for more than twenty minutes or so. 

He’s always been a man who is able to express his love for his wife and family, but nevertheless, something about the forlorn and helpless quality of those unattached comments, something about their absolute lack of our usual philosophical circumspection, caught me off guard and saddened me as well.  My mother regularly and quite cheerfully speaks about and plans for her death, even though it is hopefully decades away.  She passes along prized pieces of silverware and quilts, so that there will be no confusion later.  She discusses with one of my sisters the remodeling they will have to do to the old farmhouse “when dad and I can no longer go up the stairs.”

My father, on the other hand, who worked his way through college at a morgue, never mentions death, and on our walks neither did I. 

Big Bend is a singular place for two generations of adults to wander with unspoken thoughts of mortality on their minds.  Not only is it generally hotter than hell, there are also the fossils, the million year old canyons, and the Chisos Range looking like a vision of Mordor when backlit and approached from the north.  We hiked through cactus gardens under the giant cartoonish flowers of the century plants, which bloom with extravagance only once in their long lives…right before they die.  We looked for mysterious Paleo-Indian paintings high up on canyon walls along the acrid smelling Rio Grande, and even saw a few.  But generally speaking, Big Bend celebrates the achievements of trilobites and bivalves more than those of mere humans, and is not therefore a place to tally your achievements and plan your personal impact on the world.  We often hiked silently, out of words for once in our lives, in a place where even the ancient and reliable philosophers’ questions seemed hopelessly fleeting and nouveaux.

But after a few days the heat and silence of the Chihuahua desert, of which Big Bend is a part, began to distill out of us all of our old habits and future concerns.  Surrounded by million year old rocks and bizarre sixteen-foot blossoms, yesterday and tomorrow blurred in the heat and the present suddenly snapped into disconcertingly three-dimensional focus, like an old stereoscopic image.  In this eternal moment mom was no longer hurt--that was forgotten history--she was healing.  And the two of us were not aging father and grown son seeking some undefined but moving experience that we were sure to remember forever, we were simply two equal travelers fortunate enough to be making our way together through the present in a very big world.  Without any philosophical inquiry, or chest cracking bear hugs in the moonlight, or six-packs and snickers, that simple gift turned out to be bonding enough. 

Some desert lover, maybe Edward Abbey or Anne Haymond Zwinger, once wrote that deserts always ask more questions than they answer.  That may be true, though to the two of us the question the Chihuahua asked was always the same, “why ask?”  To which we had no better answer than “Yes, why ask?”  

In the end, it’s not the job, or the home crowd, or the broken chair waiting to be fixed in a basement waiting to be cleaned that we humans flee when we hit the road. Those are just the hooks employed by the past and future to prevent us from our departure.  We travel, especially to the desert I think, and most effectively on foot, in order to arrive at the present.

After a week of this, it was past time to go home to mother.

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Tags: basecamp | big bend | desert | hiking | mountain lodge | national park | soutwest | texas | walking

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