Rice Cemetery, Big Bend National Park, Tx

Death has been on my mind lately. This land is full of it, marked, unmarked. Animals, humans, plants. A land that once thrived – or as close as you can get to it along the scorching border.

Terlingua Abaja. Castolon. Hannold. Mariscal. Johnson's Ranch. Glenn Springs. To live here, often meant to die here.

La Coyote Cemetery, Big Bend National Park

La Coyote: Twenty-one unnamed but not forgotten graves. Some surrounded and covered by river rock, others with a meticulously crafted combination of handheld stones. Many of which do not resemble the immediate terrain, a ground of mixed earth and volcanic tones.

It’s as if they were brought here for this purpose - to put color on death - and all with an eternal view of the grand Santa Elena Canyon. A place where two nations rise together, the only division one of ground.

Rice Cemetery took two tries.

First: A late start. I’m walking out into the lush desert pointed nowhere, or so it seems, following an old fence line, a few random posts the only markers which remain.

A jackrabbit darts from the brush ahead. A tarantula saunters across my path, pauses for a moment to size me up. We move on in mutual agreement that neither is a threat.

I have yet a mile to go but the sun is retiring and begs me to join him, so I mark it for another day and retrace my steps back up and down through valley and gully. I’ve had enough of these prickly waves for now.

Rice Cemetery, Big Bend National Park

Second: An earlier start. I find the old road, take the left turn where marked, and start bushwacking through the desert – and now, there is no semblance of road to be seen and I am pointed again into nowhere.

A draw, winding southeast through the desert, becomes my path instead – as it has been the path of others before me, evidenced by large round prints followed by dried manure. A cow has been here.

Mexican in origin no doubt, as are the horses in the park whose tracks are littered across the southern lands. There are bear prints here too, a bit older, discarded yucca leaves.

There are no human prints to be seen.

Wispy layers of the Sierra del Carmen fill the eastern horizon, still gray in the morning sun. A mockingbird plays backup, a symphony of clucks and whistles but only one musician. His song follows me.

A mile or two in, I climb out of the low, on the hilltop stands a weather station. This marks my arrival at Rice Cemetery. A place of eternal resting. A place of forever vistas. A hallmark to those who lived a tougher life than I will ever know.

And it is life and death, this land; something easy to forget while sitting in our air-conditioned cars, our suburban houses with manicured lawns. Our plush leather couches.

She is a wilderness, hiding under the guise of a park. She takes no prisoners. Those who settled here knew it.

The silence speaks volumes if only we stop and listen.

Note: As always, please be respectful if you visit any of these places. Many who still live here remember the dead.