Wally and I decided to drive out to Big Bend and camp out rather than fly to do Thanksgiving with the kids. I went in to work on Wednesday morning—only 4 kids showed up to my Women and Gender Studies 1301 course and students in my sophomore literature sections were turning in essays electronically. So a short work day, with hopes to get out of town around noon. We left the house at 12:15 but it took about an hour to get out of Kingsville, what with filling up the truck with gas, going to two ATMs for cash, returning home for something forgotten, and then grabbing lunch from Arby’s—all in a cold drizzle.
Luckily, we drove out of the drizzle on the back roads south of San Antonio to Del Rio, our stop for the night. Not much to note on this route—cattle, some long horns, oil derricks and pumps, mesquite and cactus, and some sad little towns. Hondo had signs announcing it is God’s Country, and on the strip of land between the main street and the railroad tracks, various organizations had set out their little Christmas signs, many with the note about being in God’s Country. Hondo also seems to be the site of the wild hog festival and hunt. West of Hondo multiple signs advertise dove hunts. So, as in much of Texas, hunting seems to be a primary activity for residents and visitors.
Made it to Del Rio around 7 pm, checked into our motel, and then consulted Yelp for a place to eat some good Mexican food, for as its name suggests, Del Rio is on the border with Mexico. We found a mom and pop restaurant, five tables and limited menu. We went with two “Gringas,” chopped pork with onions and cilantro in a four tortilla served on Styrofoam. But oh my, it was good and the people so friendly. The place was located on a Farm Road, just down from the prison, so it generally served locals and family.
Once we headed west out of Del Rio, the landscape began to change to look like West Texas, scrub, limestone, emerging hills or buttes, and canyons. We went to Seminole Canyon State Park to look at the Indian pictographs. The park is named for the Seminoles who emigrated from Florida to the West Texas Rio Grande area but they were not the ones who made to pictographs. Those were done by Pecos Indians around 4000 years ago. To view them, you have to go on a ranger-led hike, mainly to preserve the drawings. Our group of about forty followed our guide, who took time out to tell us about the artifacts. In the group were retirees, couples traveling together, and families. One woman had an infant in a front pack; another family, the man an Asian with a thin beard tied together to make a beard pony tail, round glasses, and slightly protruding teeth—an image of kindness. His daughter, a girl of about 5 or 6 wore her long red coat; she kept looking for dinosaur bones. The toddler he carried on his back. At the park museum they had a metered telescope to look out over the canyon. My husband saw her try to look through it then tell her daddy it did not work. He said it needed a quarter but all he had was a dollar bill that he tried unsuccessfully to insert it in the coin slot as way of demonstration to her. Going up the stairs to the overhang where the paintings were I was reminded of the climb we made in 1998 at the Mesa Verde ruins. Up a steep ladder to the overhang and ruins, and a crawl through a tight space to go from one room to another. It was particularly tight for some of the men, Wally included. Up at the great height, where families lived and kids had run around, my fear of heights, of kids falling over the edge made me queasy. It makes you wonder about the lives that the Native people had, the dangers they faced. But then the view, to be up high and to look out over the valley, how marvelous. The climb at Seminole was rather tame compared to Mesa Verde, the height and views not as grand. But then the pictographs—the one with a human-like figure, arms or wings outspread as if to greet the day or visitors. The ranger explained about the paint they used, the process they must have undergone to come up with mixing deer tallow with the mineral dust and water and some plant stuff—the same stuff of soap—in order to create an oil-based paint that would stand the test of time. The desire, the human need to create art, to tell stories is amazing. You can almost imagine the groups around a fire, telling stories, the artists painstakingly converting those tales to art, an art sanctioned and supported by the community.
Los Magueyes Tacos, Del Rio — the “Gringas” was fantastic!