Big Bend

Big Bend National Park. An 801,163 acre area of land full of desert vegetation, rivers, mountains and canyons at the south west border of Texas, it it also the place my parents met, the source behind my second middle name (Elena) and my second favorite place in the world. I have been incredibly lucky to have visited the park twice in my life, and both times was simultaneously blown away and drawn in by the stunning sights and magical beauty that permeated the land.
While my dreams of Big Bend have been somewhat overshadowed by the visions of Alaska I have each time I close my eyes, there is not a day I don't think of it, and I do long to go back there again...soon.

However, I definitely did not grow up with this love. As stated earlier, this was where my parents met, and so I grew up hearing stories about it's magnificence. I would compare these stories with the pictures posted around our house and didn't find a match. The pictures were a bunch of rocks - so what? Big deal! There was nothing in them that brought truth to my parents words. And then 2008 came bringing with it my first visit to the park, and my life was changed forever. I did, not only understand my parents love for Big Bend, I lived it. When we came home I tried to find the right words to describe the powerful scenes I had explored and found myself speechless. I showed pictures to my friends trying to get them to see what I had, and was met only with the smiling incomprehension I had held towards my parents only a few days before. I realized that there is nothing one can write, no pictures a camera can take, no videos a person can film, that could truly, accurately and fully capture the true specialness of Big Bend. Until one actually walks the land, they will forever be blind to its beauty.

 I recently started reading "God's Country or Devil's Playground", which is a collection of essays written on the nature, land and history of the area. I do love reading the stories and walking with the authors once more over the rocks and winding with them on the Rio Grande through the canyons. I can close my eyes once again and see the sun setting on the Sierra del Carmen. Many of these authors have put, in words more perfect and eloquent than mine, that it is impossible to describe this land, and to show off her beauty with pictures. So far my favorite has come from Walter Prescott Webb who stated that "men of literature cannot confine on the printed page the essential quality of the land, or convey the sense of unreality and romance that overwhelms the spectator and leaves him with a recurrant nostalgia for a land in which he cannot live...The visitor cannot be critical of those who failed because he feels is own inadequacy in the presence of the spectacle. It is this feeling, perhaps, that lifts him to awe and admiration, that tantalizes him into a desire to stay longer, to travel farther, to see more earnestly that he may be able to comprehend...When he goes, he carries his sense of inadequacy with him and is likely to be constantly haunted by a desire to return...he is by spells homesick for a land that was never his home and can never be his home..." Not only it is nice to read the stories of people who know and understand my love for Big Bend, but also share the frustration I feel of not being able to get others who have not been there to share that love too.

I wish that everyone I know could go there, I hope that one day they all will. As Mary Lasswell put it "The glory of the Big Bend National Park starts at Persimmon Gap, the northernmost entrance to the park, and to my mind, ends only when the beholder dies. Maybe not even then."

Everyone deserves to know that passion.