The stars are as thick as crushed ice in a glass of cola above the rented room in Terlingua, Texas that acted as my temporary home. I stepped out onto the dirt-caked slab concrete patio just before 11 p.m., hoping the night air might settle my nerves or at least quiet the nausea that had haunted me for weeks on this leg of my cross-country road trip. My body never quite felt right in the Southwest. Some places do that to you. Since childhood, I’d always felt most at ease by the sea. The nearest ocean is more than 600 miles away in Corpus Christi, on the Gulf of Mexico, which in the middle of the desert I look out on felt like a taunt.
Divided by an International Border and the Rio Grande
My 500 square-foot studio in Terlingua is in the middle of a renovated shipping container sandwiched between two other units. I had booked a five-night stay to see Big Bend National Park as part of a nearly month-long journey across Texas, a state that seems determined to stretch itself farther and farther on each day of my trip. Every morning, Fox News blared through the tin-foil thin walls, accompanied by a wet, chest-deep cough from the next door neighbor that could only mean the opening act of lung cancer or the lingering aftermath of a few cigarettes from the night before.
Inside, the apartment leaned heavily into a chili pepper theme, decorated liberally in the motifs straight out of the popular restaurant chain. Cherry-red aluminum walls glinted sunbeams back at me, with drapes and bathroom towels to match the insubtle hue. The shade made everything feel vaguely like a diner bathroom that hadn’t been touched since 1985. On the front porch rested a folding camp chair with a red canvas seat warped by the brutal West Texas sunshine. I lowered myself into it this evening with a Lone Star in hand, uncertain how reliable the tap was in my current setup. With nausea still hanging on I figured beer with an alcohol percentage barely higher than drugstore Kombucha may be the safer gamble out here in the honest-to-God middle of nowhere.
Visiting Boquillas De Carmen, Mexico
Terlingua is a pin drop so small that I’m not even sure I can call it a town. It exists deep in the cradle of Texas’s Big Bend, where the Rio Grande curves East from Coahula before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. Spanish is spoken more commonly than English here. That morning, we had taken a rowboat across a shallow junction of the river into Boquillas De Carmen, a tiny Mexican village that survives almost entirely on tourism dollars from Big Bend National Park’s visitors.
There are no paved roads in or out of Boquillas; once you’re over the river travel is limited to overworked mules and four-wheelers that look as if they’d been limping along since the 90’s. We hitched a ride in the bed of a rusty Ford F-Series for the mile jaunt uphill into town then got around on foot, traipsing over the dusty rivershore bedrock.
“Quanto costa el viaje?” I aksed in my Frankenstein-esque Spanglish-meets Italian, trying to avoid English now that I was over the border.
I dug a few pesos from my wallet that I had withdrawn in the small national park customs office, but the driver shooed them away.
“No pesos, US dollar pot favor,” asked our driver.
The town was so reliant on tourism and cut off from the rest of Mexico, USD was the preferred currency. I obliged.
We spent a few hours in this tiny border village. We ate corn tortilla chips fresh from the fryer with guacamole and tacos al pastor slicked with spicy salsa verde, drank ice-cold Modelo Negras, and purchased our ritualistic souveniers: a post card and lapel pin. At this point they felt like proof of passage of the places we had visited in over a year of full time travel. I kept them in the center console of the Corolla.
On the Road to Nowhere
It was month seven of a cross-country road trip that was only supposed to last six, and I was still more than two thousand miles from home. When I first set out from Delaware, Big Bend hadn’t even crossed my mind. It was nearly five hours from the closest city, El Paso, and my father was horrified by the idea of me being so close to Mexico.
I learned that Big Bend is the most remote place in the entire United States, and tomorrow I was scheduled to meet a friend in Austin; an eight-hour drive away, and my return to Central Time for the first time since a two-week stint in Chicago back in September. Tonight was my last chance to see the stars out west before our route that would take us to New Orleans, then Florida, then finally up through Appalachian country before returning home. The stars here were virgin and unblocked by the city lights I’d grown accustomed to in my life spent between mid-Atlantic suburbs, plus the occasional rented home in Chicago or New Orleans.
I shut the porch lights and tried to train my eyes on the sky above me. To my left, a Mexican restaurant was closing up for the night. Across the street, a small motel cast yellow streetlights onto the blackened pavement. Even here, with a grand population of 183, according to the most recent census, I couldn’t escape myself.
I re-folded my camp chair, crushed the empty Lone Star, and crawled under the cherry-red bedspread beside my already-asleep fiancé. Austin was eight hours away. We already had a hotel booked outside of the city for the next night. No turning back now. No staying an extra day in West Texas. No doubling back. It was time to continue east at the same glacial pace we’d followed for seven months.
The next morning promised a long drive straight across Texas. Joe would drive while I napped against the passenger side windowpane. Eventually, highway hypnosis would settle in for both of us as Smashing Pumpkins played through the car speakers and the hours would pass inside my sedan. We’d drink canned yerba maté, drag on a mint-flavored vape to keep our minds buzzing, and talk about nothing and everything in equal measure. We’d arrive at the Holiday Inn outside of Austin and heat up canned soup in the micro-fridge they generously provided. If I was feeling glutonous, I may even snack on a bag of Chex Mix with my Progresso microwaveable.
A year on the road.
A year in Italy.
Eight years since I moved out of my parents home.
Maybe, I could finally relax.