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 gender.

And so it is with ruins. “If walls could speak!”  I was seven, high on a mountainside and exploring cliff dwellings when I first heard that. My grandad’s words halted my random scrambling. I pressed my tiny body into the shadows of that mysterious mountainside aerie, and I listened, hard: Soft footsteps of children in woven sandals pattered across smoke-stained stone; ghostly laughter from a game of chase gifted the maze of rooms with life; a baby, one just the age of my sister cried, shushed by her mother’s crooning song.

At seven, you hear things others cannot.

Those ancient whisperings began a lifelong enchantment with old places. I love historic hotels, creaking-floored houses, but especially, I love ruins. Ruins are characters who’ve been around the block a time or two and lived to tell about it. (If people take on the characteristics of places they live, why can’t places retain the hearts of the people who once occupied them?) Admittedly, I no longer enjoy a child’s ears for language—as in conversing with my husband, my dog, my parrot, when listening to crumbling adobe, much is lost in translation—but painting is my Rosetta Stone. Through the eyes of an artist, I still hear ruins telling their stories. Like border country locals, Terlingua Ghost Town waxes rich with yarns.

Terlingua, once a remote mercury-mining community, is now just remote, a jump-off to even more remote Big Bend National Park. Terlingua is a colorful place where tourists spend a few days, at most, navigating an alien landscape populated with colorful people who have, for various reasons, chosen to live simpler lives than those known to corporate America. (We spend much of each winter in Terlingua and adjoining Study Butte, Texas, so that tells you something about my little family.) One of the most colorful places in Terlingua is Ghost Town, with its cemetery (eerie even at high noon) and scattering of mining era ruins, each once a home, a shelter in the desert.

Many are accessible. Some are occupied, coveted lodging for seasonal river rat guides and others content with any place to unroll a sleeping bag. On that dark winter morning as we drove up to the Starlight Theatre to await sunrise on the Chisos, the dog and I trod the ruin-happy arroyos near the cemetery with respect for private property. Feeling the call of nature, the terrier had wisely used body language to interrupt our drive. Shivering, still more concerned by the prospect of walking up on a sleeping human or stepping on a rattlesnake in the dark than taking pictures, I cautiously followed my four-footed family member down one of the deep cuts in the desert floor. My patience with our female terrier is seriously limited when it is dark and cold outside, however.

A coyote howled nearby. Jim and the parrot sipped coffee in the truck. The warm truck. Cooks-the-Ranch-Dog, as she is known to her friends, forgot her prior urinary emergency in order to meticulously sniff fresh rabbit scat. I shivered, and snagged my down vest on catclaw as Cooks struck out down the arroyo at a dead run. With visions of a sleepy, naked, scraggly-bearded human emerging from a hidden desert shack with a shotgun, I quietly struck out after Cooks, who, I realized, had twisted cross-species communication to her benefit and apparently savored frolicking across the desert way worse than she needed to relieve herself.

Cooks skidded to a stop at the edged of a drop-off approximating the Grand Canyon. I caught up in time to see the rabbit disappear below. Dog eyes looked up at me and clearly explained she could’ve caught the dangerous desert bunny, but did I really want to skin and clean it for her this early? I nodded my gratitude as I plucked thorns from my inadequantly insulated vest.

As the did a token pee, I reconnoitered: It was a long way back to the truck, and our chase had likely woken all the snakes ‘twixt here and there. I glanced around. The sun rose through layers of cloud, broke through, and as if in a fairy tale, woke the ruins sleeping all around us. I forgave our dog and forgot the cold. To date, I’ve done four paintings from photos of ruins I took in the next five minutes of dawn.

What story did the ruins speak that morning? I originally titled this large oil painting “Sunrise Sings Through the Ruins” but that, my husband explained in the language of males, was a bit of poetic overkill, even for an artist. But brimming with life, overflowing with stories, the ruins woke with the sun, yawned, stretched, filled their crumbling walls with the light of another day. Step into this landscape, feel the nuances of the desert on a cold winter morning. Walls can speak. The trick is in the listening.



SUNRISE WAKES THE RUINS     24" x 36" oil on archival Ampersandbord
copyright Lindy Cook Severns 2011
To see more Big Bend landscapes, please visit my website BigBendArtist.com