My Growing-Up Years were a collage of place and color. The piney-wood greens and azelea fuschias, the hydrangea blues and neon lemons of subtropical Houston regularly patched young eyes dulled by the dull olives, inhibited mauves and sun-baked ochres of the semi-arid High Plains of northwestern Texas and the yellow-green and oily black lushness of West Texas’s mesquite-and pump jack quilted Permian Basin. I found Midland’s pancake-flat ranchlands to be a relatively lush landscape compared to Lubbock’s ...

West Texas border country is untamed land defined by the Big River, the Rio Grande. Traveling the Big Bend region along this river, one that defines the United States border with Mexico, means following a water-carved path through one of the world’s great deserts. It also means navigating in close proximity to another county, something most Americans, with our geographical boundaries sprawling across half a continent, are unfamiliar with.

“Cataclysmic!”

It’s a word often repeated as my husband and I hike a favorite section of the Chihuahuan Desert of the Big Bend, a place where massive boulders stack precariously in unruly tumbles like vehicles caught in Interstate pile-ups. Ashen tuff coats the tops of our hiking boots while crumbs of lava abrade their soles. You can almost hear the hissing thunder of volcanic eruptions, smell the sulfur of fire and brimstone.

          Listening to Dawn Rouse Terlingua Ghost Town

I possess a keen understanding of foreign language: I live with a terrier, a parrot and a man. My days are rich with nuance, with profound understanding and often as not, with gentle misunderstandings. Each morning, we wake inside our respective lives with stories to share, while sometimes lacking sounds common to species and ...

How many Big Bend travelers, over how many centuries have spotted aptly named Mule Ears Peaks and felt their hearts smiling between beats?

I count myself in that timeless demographic.

My husband and I enjoy revisiting places that enchant us, and Big Bend National Park stays high on that list. There is, of course, much, much more of Big Bend to see than places we’ve explored, but it isn’t ...

SEIZING SUNRISE

                A Fort Davis, Texas Wildfire Lies Behind a Chisos Mountain Sunrise in Big Bend  

Wildfire of Biblical proportions recently ravaged the serenity of our Texas mountains. Wildlife, livestock and human residents greeted that first day’s sunrise as they had greeted so many. By sunset, many were homeless; many more were displaced, wondering their home’s fate. Some Fort Davis residents endured a series of evacuations, moving from one presumably ...

Florid, pockmarked rocks, weathered remnants of the volcanic activity that mothered the Davis Mountains rise above our high country West Texas homesite.  Our mountains maintain my interest, not just because mountains, by nature, are splendid things—these craggy red mountains, tumbled and stacked with no regard to order or symmetry, seem to have lanterns inside them. Spotty varnishes of kiwi-colored lichen make me dig past my comfortable earth-colored pastel sticks and into my little-used box of exotic greens. Sunrise to sunset, ...

Old windmills aren't much to look at, at least not by some standards. Drab constructs of weather-worn lumber, windmills aren’t quaint. Unlike lighthouses, you can’t live inside a windmill, can’t turn one into a studio, can’t sell tour tickets for inspection by inquisitive visitors. Most West Texas windmills are so battered, it’s hard to tell whether these much-repaired towers of bailing wire and scrap lumber are relics or actual working models, laboriously pumping precious water into rusty tanks flanked by ...

Water rules these desert highlands. Its scarcity in the Chihuahuan desert decrees that only those specie most efficient at conserving moisture will survive the summer.

This desert demands survival not of the fittest, but of the least thirsty.

We hardened Texas desert dwellers don’t complain too loudly about brown grass waving at an endless chain of arid days—if ...

We choose to live in a quietly lovely place. Our closest neighbors are deer, javelina and hawks.  So the first thing I notice about a city is the noise.  (I believe there must be an unwritten law stating that RV parks must be placed in close proximity to (1) an airport  (2) a train or (3) a high school with a marching band.)  The constant drone of idling engines is interrupted only by horns and sirens.  Returning to the city, I catch my ...