Where Rainbows Wait for Rain

Far down on the Mexican border the Rio Grande makes a great U-turn. Inside this mighty curve lies a national park and the special and spectacular section of southwest Texas known as “Big Bend Country.” More than a century ago a Mexican cowboy described Big Bend as “Where the rainbows wait for the rain, and the big river is kept in a stone box, and water runs uphill and mountains float in the air, except at night when they go away to play with other mountains....” This land is so vast and so wild that you can feel your human smallness and frailty. Silence takes on the quality of sound, and isolation can bring you face to face with the interdependence of all life forms.

Paradox abounds. There is killing heat and freezing cold; deadly drought and flash flood; arid lowland and moist mountain woodland; and a living river winding its way across the desert.

Spanish explorers called Big Bend the “unknown land,” and for hundreds of years civilization passed it by on either side. Entrenched behind deep river canyons and walled in by rough and rugged mountains, this vast country remains today a world apart. Fewer than 13,000 people occupy an area about the size of Maryland, mostly in two or three towns strung along the highway to the north. Only three paved roads run south into Big Bend, and whatever route you take, you’ll find yourself in country that looks less and less familiar the farther you penetrate it. Here are the landscapes, plants, and animals typical of the Chihuahuan Desert, a high dry wilderness that spills northward out of Mexico into far west Texas and southern New Mexico.

Basically, Big Bend’s desert is a rolling land of creosotebush and bunch grass. But it grows gorgeous forests of giant yucca and solid stands of lechuguilla, a barbed and bladed plant found only in the Chihuahuan Desert. Big Bend’s desert has living sand dunes, painted badlands, and petrified trees, and since it is a geologically young desert, its landforms stand in rugged relief. Igneous dikes march across plain and mountain like so many man-made stone walls. Chimney-tall stacks thrust up from barren flats as from a ruin. Volcanic ash heaps, white as snow, lean their concrete shoulders against maroon hills.

The Indians used to say that after making the Earth, the Great Spirit dumped the leftover rocks on Big Bend. Heaped up, scattered wide, and piled into mountains, they lie here to this day. Since vegetation is so scant, Big Bend mountains take their shape and color from the rocks of which they are made. They loom castellated, cathedral-domed, flattopped, and razor-backed. They look red, yellow, gray, black, white, and all the shades of brown, empurpled by distance or misted over after rain in a gauzy film of green. You don’t know which is more awe-inspiring, looking up or looking down, since the mountains rise with striking suddenness between the vaulted sky and the open plain. Approaching the Chisos Mountains for the first time, you can’t believe that cars can breach those bastions, or that high inside there actually is a Basin where travelers have camped since people first gazed on these mountains. Undulating foothills fling themselves like breakers against the sheer rock cliffs. Standing atop the escarpment that walls up the Chisos South Rim, you see hills and mountains rolling like ocean waves far, far below, with here and there a gleam of silver where the river runs.

Big Bend’s Rio Grande takes its moods from the weather, the season, the time of day, and the changing nature of its bed and banks. The river runs lavender-rose at sunset, brown between frost-reddened shrubs, shining like a tin roof under hazy skies, white as chopped ice where rapids churn, olive-green beneath the brooding cliffs of Old Mexico. Nobody knows which came first, the mountains or a through-flowing river, but for hundreds of river kilometers the Rio dodges and doubles, and where it cannot go around it rasps its way across the mountains. Deep-cut canyons alternate with narrow valleys walled in by towering cliffs. You can’t get across except at a handful of fords, or up steep trails at favorable stages of water. These canyons and escarpments lend Big Bend its monumental character, for as it digs, the river lays bare millions of years of Earth history. To run a desert river canyon is to penetrate the long, tortuous corridor from everlasting to everlasting: Time is here turned to stone. Imprisoned, yet wild and free, the Rio runs the ages down inside a rock-ribbed vault.