Three Texas-centric Big Bend Takeaways

 

Last evening I got home from a 5-day camping trip to Big Bend National Park in far west Texas on the Rio Grande River. Big Bend is a beautiful and prickly place that Nita and I have been visiting off and on for the past forty-four years. We started going there as dumb-ass college kids who didn’t have any camping gear and slept in the car and on picnic tables. We got better, though, I promise.

This time I camped with 25 “manly men” from around my town, on an annual pilgrimage to the land of rocks and cacti. Unlike Nita and I four decades ago, we had an excess of camping gear. But we still were reminded that nature is the queen. One guy, who can be so smart it’s scary at times, slept a couple of nights in the gear trailer when his tent flooded the first night during the rain. Anyway, this trip had three new things to add to my stack of interesting threesomes:

First, we went on a six-mile hike yesterday on a trail called “The Basin Window Trail.” This trail meanders through a lot of scrub brush, headed to a remarkable place where a stream run-off plunges over the edge of a cliff to the desert floor, way down below. It has always looked to me like the last hundred yards of The Window trail was a part of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and being anywhere close to the edge of the slick rock drop-off scares the pee out of me. I’d rather face an angry orc than creep out on the smooth slick sloping rocks to look down the cliff.

About half-way along our hike to The Window one of our fellow-campers, who is a retired wildlife biologist, stops us, points at a  long black cigar in the middle of the trail and says, “That’s a cougar’s first poop after a feed.” Uh-huh. He went on to tell us that the black cigar is full of the victim’s blood and other easily digested stuff. Later the cougar will poop like a great big dog, just normal old poop. Whoopee. Then, last before feeding again, the cougar will defecate a hair-ball looking mass of bones, cartilage and hair, the stuff that doesn’t digest well. Then, the big pussy cat will find another meal. Ain’t science fun? The three stages of cougar poop. Wow.

The second threesome of note was at Fort Davis, which is a post-Civil War cavalry fort north of Big Bend. It was home of several hundred cavalry and infantry whose purpose was to deter and when necessary, pursue and “punish” marauding Indians, mainly Comanches and Apaches.  The post was vacated in 1890 and became a National Park site in 1961. That would be shortly after Texan LBJ became Vice-President.

Several of the buildings have been restored and furnished to reflect their original purpose, buildings such as enlisted men’s barracks, officer apartments, the commissary, and the hospital. The hospital has the expected array of operating tools and devices for healing through torture. And because of good record keeping, the display includes specific instances when various ailments and complaints of real soldiers at Fort Davis were treated in the best medical fashion of the time.

The threesome here relates to laudanum, that early version of opium that was widely used during the Civil War as a pain-killer. General Hood is said to have made ample use of laudanum after his battle wounds that resulted in a leg amputation and a useless arm. But Hood did father several children after the war, so he was not utterly incapacitated, or he had a very creative and cooperative spouse.

The laudanum in the Fort Davis display was described as the treatment of choice for three different cases: In the first case the laudanum was taken orally as a pain-killer. Check. The second time, laudanum was poured into a soldier’s ear to treat an ear-ache or ear infection. Hmm, I guess so. The third was a case in which abdominal pain was treated with a good dose of laudanum applied as an enema. Zowee! Three avenues for the same drug to work its magic.

The last of the three Texas-centric bits was music. It was my joy to twice be in the audience when another of our campers, Fletcher Clark, strummed his guitar and sang. Fletcher’s another old guy like me who has been a professional troubadour in Texas for a long time. In one era of his life, he and a recently deceased Texas musician semi-legend Steve Fromholtz were part of Far Flung Adventures, the rafting company out of Terlingua, Texas. Far Flung takes people on rafts through the narrow canyons of Big Bend on overnight trips. Decades ago Fletcher and Steve provided sandbar concerts during the evenings and otherwise made themselves useful.  

This time, Fletcher sang Fromholz’s signature ballad, A Texas Trilogy, a song on par with Don McLean’s American Pie. Hardly anyone else sings it because it’s long and hard to do well, and the record is not played much. That made hearing Fletcher sing The Texas Trilogy, first at the Starlight Theater in Terlingua, then at our camp the next night, just like white cream gravy on a tender chicken fried steak. And that ain’t hardtack.