All Hail West Texas

The healing power of Big Bend National Park

2020 has been an unforgettable year. It has felt like the emotional crescendo to national unrest fomenting over the past decade as civilization reckons with unprecedented advancements in mass communication and networking, all in the midst of a generational pandemic. These seachanges, along with a confluence of personal events, have ensnared me in daily anxiety and guilt-riddled thought spirals for most of the past four years. That, however, is not the story I wish to tell today. Instead, I want to focus on the revealing ways I have chosen to cope with the intense emotions caused by uncertainty and how I found a glimpse of peaceful solitude and humbling presence at Big Bend National Park.

I have found myself in the midst of a period of profound introspection for the past two years or so in an attempt to explore the “why” behind my near-constant bouts of anxiety. While the isolation that has come with lockdown has blessed me with some space for this journey, I have found it difficult to achieve true reflective solitude. Even while living alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Austin, a city I moved to in October of last year without any existing ties or social bonds, I still found myself compulsively hyperconnected in lockdown thanks to the internet. With the goal of solitude on my mind for the past three months, I found myself gravitating towards travel as an outlet. So, I bought the first car of my adult life and booked four nights in Terlingua, Texas with the intention of experiencing solitude on the West Texas highway, under the stars of the Milky Way, and along the trails of Big Bend National Park.

I have spent the majority of my life up to this point in the heart of the northeast megalopolis: New Jersey and New York City. While there are certainly breathtaking natural vistas and long stretches of highway to be found and enjoyed there, you never quite shake the feeling that the largest cities in the country are still humming around you, waiting to greet you immediately with the latest and greatest when you arrive. This feeling is completely absent in West Texas. Highways stretch for miles along sprawling flatlands with only the occasional oil field or wind turbine to greet you along the way. The eight hours from Austin to Terlingua felt like an extended portal spiraling towards the feeling of solitude I was in search of.

All one sees when driving in the area of Big Bend at night are their headlights and the stretch of road they illuminate. Light pollution is as close to “nothing” as one can experience in the United States. I was driving to Sotol Vista, a lookout in Big Bend accessible entirely via car. I arrived, I parked, I locked the car and started to walk down the sidewalk at Sotol. I could barely see one foot in front of me. I found a nice area to lay down and take in the night sky. At first, it looked like the night sky back home in New Jersey; dotted and freckled with stars, but not the spectacle I had anticipated. But I continued looking. Gradually, more of the sky revealed itself as my eyes adjusted. Soon, I was taking in our entire galaxy with my naked eye. Stars upon clusters of stars rushing into my irises from lightyears away. When I’m plugged into my computer at home, I am fixated on my identity and my reputation. My eyes take the perspective of “subject” as I stare at a screen, typing my own thoughts and words under my given name and send them out into the world in the hopes my ideas are understood and push whatever project or goal I have in mind forward. It’s as if my eyes are a microscope of my consciousness, focusing constantly on my ego. That night on Sotol Vista, my eyes were given a chance to zoom out and my perspective shifted towards becoming the object of the observable universe’s gaze. I couldn’t help but be humbled by the sudden perspective shift as I truly felt my insignificance in the physical order of the cosmos.

The National Park Service is the federal government agency that operates Big Bend. As a federal agency, it is undoubtedly a part of society, and Big Bend’s amenities and staff are at the whim of our tax dollars. But the magic of Big Bend is its gift of disconnectedness from the very thing responsible for its existence: society. There is no cell phone service. Park rangers can only be found at trailheads and visitor centers. The park itself is situated about a hundred miles in any direction from what could be considered a “city”. When I arrived at the trailhead for the South Rim trail, I truly felt that it was just me and my supplies were the only things present, and the only thing that mattered was the next step I was about to take on a 13 mile round trip around the South Rim.

At the top of the South Rim, there is a cliff with breathtaking views of the Chihuahuan Desert. To accompany these views, I had some pretzels to snack on, and Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” as a travel companion, the perfect book to bring along in my search for solitude. Thoreau’s musings on society from his two years living off the land of Walden Pond in his self-made home mirrored the experience I sought from my time at Big Bend. “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” Thoreau writes. Looking out from that cliff, I saw the third chair in my house set out for society. It was an object I got to look at, just as the universe looked on me, and at that moment, I was unable to perform my habitual, anxious rumination of judging myself and my role within society. Society continued to run without me for the day as I looked back at it from West Texas on the top of a mountain, pondering what my role then is in society.

The quest for a personal feeling of liberation has defined a large part of my life since my childhood through my early adulthood. It started in childhood, learning of the American Revolution and Jefferson’s words “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. This grew in my adolescence as a disdain for “the man” and further into my young adulthood with a yearning for entrepreneurial work, free of bosses and hierarchies. However, staring back at society from the cliff at South Rim, I realized there is no escape from authority. There is no liberation from owing something to others because we are born in debt. We owe our very existence to our parents, and from that point, we live a life of creating debts as the bonds that connect us together in society and humanity. Even if you free yourself from financial debts or build a career where you are your “own” boss, you still live in service to your customers, your friends, your family, and society at large. We are all cogs working in service to other cogs. Perhaps my teenage self would scoff at such a notion with naive nihilism, but I stand now grateful that I get to exist as a cog at this point in human history, on the shoulders of our ancestors, doing the best I can with what I’m given to spin the wheels around me and move humanity forward. Perhaps the liberation I was looking for all along was not freedom from being a cog, but the freedom to define for myself what cog I would have the duty and responsibility of being for my time here on Earth. That’s something I can be proud of having the cosmos see when they gaze back down on me.

I packed my bag back up and started my journey back down the South Rim trail. Shortly after starting down the trail, I heard rustling in the woods to my right. I look and see an adult black bear staring back at me about 20 feet away. For the next three minutes, any concept of my identity leaves my body and I am an animal negotiating with another animal over whom is a bigger threat to whom. Fortunately for me, this bear was more afraid of me and was perhaps surprised to find out that the smell of salty pretzels in my backpack had a large human being attached to it. Thoreau writes in Walden, “I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.” Society can certainly be scary. 2020 serves as a stark reminder of this. Our history is deeply morally flawed and contains power structures that still actively oppress millions of humans. But society is constructed on myths like our history, your career, the stock market, Christianity, and candles to protect us from the animalistic fears that wait for us naked in nature, like realizing our insignificance in the universe and negotiating safety with a black bear. The healing power of Big Bend, as long as you’re willing to receive it, is in reminding you of the naked fear of being an animal in the dark and allowing you to carry that perspective alongside your duties as a cog in society, serving those around you in small ways to change humanity for the better.

Thank you for the reminder, National Park Service. I will need it again in the future.