Lone Star Inauguration

February 25 was our first night in Texas, the Lone Star State. Bill rode 62 miles that day, and it was also the day he hit his thousand-mile mark! (Congrats, boss. The spandex have made you aerodynamic and swift.) Upon entering the second largest state in our country, (square mileage: 268,601 as opposed to New Hampshire’s impressive 9,351) we were greeted with a sign proclaiming PROUD HOME OF PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH and signs saying DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS. I learned after spending time here that ‘don’t mess with Texas’ actually means ‘don’t litter’. It’s been adapted as their badass logo, even though the littering connotation takes a bit of the badass effectiveness away for me. I’m against littering, though. I am. (unless it involves throwing random projectiles on my ex-neighbor Jerry’s roof, but that is an entirely different story. I feel no guilt.) We spent our first Texas night at the Budget Inn in Kermit (like the frog, yes). The front desk worker at the Budget was an elderly Indian lady (from India, not a Native American) with a red bindi in the center of her head who needed ten minutes with a magnifying glass to scrutinize Bill’s credit card. The toilets in the rooms were industrial, with a metal lever off to the side which I would only flush with my foot, and only then if I was wearing shoes. And thusly we began our adventures in the fourth state of our journey.

Bill blew his bicycle tire after 7 miles the next day, (total flat tire count to date: 2) so we drove to Odessa, where the nearest bike shop was located. We dropped off his bike and then had six hours to kill; we ate at a Mexican place and then went sightseeing. The first stop the three of us made was the Meteor Crater, right outside the city. We drove down a dirt road and stopped at the visitor center, which was a small building with an old Buick outside. When we entered, there was a solitary elderly man sitting inside the one-room museum, where we politely observed pieces of rock while he conveyed his vast mental library of meteorite knowledge to us. We asked where the crater was, and the man said, “Right out there,” and gestured to the slightly indented field outside. We walked around the 20,000-year-old meteor crater on a small thin path, and it just took a few minutes to circumvent the grassy dip in the earth. It was slightly anticlimactic, to be honest; it was not the historical highlight of my life, although it is the sixth-largest meteor crater in the world. We then tried visiting the Million Barrel Museum, (which is home to a million-gallon tank built by Shell Oil in 1928, filled with oil once, and abandoned) but it was closed because something inside the museum had sprung a leak. (I couldn’t make this stuff up.) Our third and final option for entertainment proved to be the best one: Monahans Sandhills State Park, a collection of pure white sand dunes in the middle of the desert. (Sandhills State Park Claim To Fame: a new species of dung beetle was recently discovered there.) We drove up to the park and realized that for one dollar, you could rent a plastic saucer and go sliding down the sand dunes. The three of us each rented one, waxed the bottoms of our saucers with chunks of white wax that were provided, and began the ascent up the first dune. I hadn’t ever realized that people actually slid down sand dunes on waxed saucers, but they do. This was just not a recreational activity I had ever given consideration to. We had a blast, except my saucer kept turning around so I was cruising downhill backwards. I feel that snow carries you a bit faster than sand. And it’s quite different to get sand down your pants instead of snow. I know this, people.

With the bikes fixed, we headed to Fort Stockton, Texas, where we stayed at the Best Western. The next day, Bill rode the 26 miles to the Gage Hotel in Marathon.

There are some amazing people who make their homes in the middle of nowhere. That was affirmed when we spent the night at the Gage Hotel. Marathon is a tiny town that was founded in 1881 by an old sea captain named Albion Shepard who was reminded of Marathon, Greece when he saw the mountains and the plains. The Gage Hotel opened in 1927 and has a slow-paced, authentic Western feel to it. We stayed in a house on the hotel grounds called the Celaya House, which was completely decorated in death. Dead steer head on the wall; dead cow skull on the wall, its empty eye sockets staring into the room; a mirror that was about 3” by 5” and surrounded by about 8 pairs of horns (which had been plucked from dead things); a bobcat skin stretched on a table, its withered, anguished feline face smushed and pulled taut; an ottoman upholstered in the brown-and-white spots of something’s hide; and multiple animal skin rugs covering the floors. It was a bit unsettling to a person who wasn’t used to that décor. I stroked the bloodless cat’s gorgeous white-and-black coat and looked into its decayed eyes and felt very sad that it was now a table decoration. I wonder if interior designers out here have deals with the taxidermists. That’s a Texas business partnership made in heaven, I reckon.

Actually, it wouldn’t be odd for a Marathon citizen to be both an interior designer and a taxidermist; in a town so tiny everyone seems to have two jobs. Our waiter during dinner was also a firefighter, and we met an EMT who was also a professional photographer. Our dinner was beautiful; an outdoor seating area with heat lamps and a fireplace (flanked with prone, glass-eyed steer heads, of course.) We got into conversation with Lane and Tim, two Marathon firefighters, who invited Bill, Sarah and myself to their fire station to explore even though it was nighttime. This resulted in Sarah and I trying on the fireproof, reflective-striped bunker gear - boots, helmets, gloves and all, and I have to say that that clothing is very heavy and very, very hot. (Temperature hot.)

After the fire station we retired back to the White Buffalo Bar, where we exchanged dirty jokes with the locals and had a great time. (For dirty jokes, contact Sarah, Bill, or myself.) The bar is named for its mascot: a gigantic white buffalo head mounted on the wall. The owner purchased an entire museum some years ago just because of the white buffalo head that was displayed inside it, and he promptly placed it on the wall of his bar. The white buffalo is extremely rare, and I was corrected by the locals: it is not an albino buffalo; albino buffaloes are born white and turn dark after a few years. White buffaloes are white throughout their entire lives, and there have only been 12 known in recorded history. The buffalo at the bar was #9, and it died of natural causes in 1935. It should really be behind a glass display case instead of sucking up cigarette smoke into its white fur, but I was told that they have someone who comes in to shampoo it from time to time. The white buffalo is a sacred symbol to Native Americans; it is a messenger of creation and sometimes Native Americans will come into the bar just to look at the buffalo head.

The next day Bill rode 28 miles to the Best Western in Alpine, Texas. I recommend the Buffalo Rose restaurant to anyone reading this who happens to pass through town; the food was excellent and there was only one deer head on the wall. The food here is hot: before eating, a basket of chips and salsa is brought to your table, and the salsa is hot; their rolls are jalapeno cheddar rolls, and they served hot chipotle mashed potatoes. I like heat in food though; I enjoyed it all. I also tried a Lone Star beer, (“brewed in Texas by Texans”) which was not half bad.

We had been told by the cowboys in Tombstone to check out the Big Bend National Park, (except it is pronounced “Big Bey-Und” round these parts) and so on Thursday, March 2, we picked up Bill after 25 rugged miles and drove over a hundred miles to the Big Bend Motor Inn and RV Park in Terlingua, Texas, three miles from the park entrance. It is a beautiful place in the Chihuahuan Desert, just a few miles from Mexico, that is surrounded by faded purple mountains, layered against each other and pointing to the enormous sky. “Big Bend” refers to the curving of the Rio Grande river, which divides Texas from Mexico. We went for a sunset trail ride on horseback, past tumbleweeds, an abandoned mine, quail, and agave plants. The temperature was about 85 degrees, but dry. We also went hiking in Big Bend National Park, among brilliant plum-colored cacti and ocotillo plants, with no other humans in sight. There are roadrunners everywhere, and kangaroo rats, and rabbits. Desert animals are amazing; for example the kangaroo rat does not ever need to drink water - it metabolizes water from carbohydrates in the seeds it eats. There are flash floods out in this part of the country when it rains; there are white flood gauges every so often alongside the roads with black dashes for every foot from one to five. During a flash flood, the water can get up to 5 feet high because there isn’t any topsoil out here to soak up the water, so it just goes into the nearest ‘wash’ (ditch) and eventually flows down to the Rio Grande.

The sky above Terlingua is amazing; the sunsets burned red and I have never seen the sun so enormous. There is no light pollution whatsoever, and at night the sky is completely spattered with stars; layers and layers of silver dots, some bright and defined and others fading together into faint broad sweeps of white. The nights there are windy and warm, and the moon was huge; it was a low sliver, but the entire lunar outline was visible, and it was beautiful. The nighttime landscape was dark, and peacefully still, with a sort of lonely celestial romance. I walked outside alone at night, and realized that time can stand still underneath the silent brilliance of that sky. It was a sight that I could never forget. 

-steph

Comments

[misty]

Steph, I love reading your blogs. Your trip sounds really amazing and your writing is so entertaining. I check it everyday! Please be sure to let me know if you come through VA/DC. Take care and love you.

[meg]

stef, now i know boulder does not have wild boars, or oil wells... but we do have our share of crazies. for example: the man who sits in the middle of the pedestrian mall, boulder's main downtown area. he has a mouse, a cat, and a dog: one on top of the other. the 3 animals sit like that in their drugged oblivion (i'm convinced it's drugs) and the man holds his hat out in case you would like to donate money to further anesthetize his pets. i think you could really do good things for this dude in your blog. come back!