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| One of the canals flowing out from the pool into the green grounds of Balmorhea State Park |
Our plan was to camp at Balmorhea State Park. I love that place. It's woven into my personal history even though it was often closed when I arrived, and I had to view its wondrous waters through a chain link fence, only to dream about what it would be like to dive into the world's third-largest spring-fed swimming pool. A large blue hole in the center, 30 feet deep, pumps 22 to 28 million gallons of clear, cool water per day that fills the man-made pool and is then the channeled out into sizzling desert via long canals. Oasis here is an understatement. This time too, the park was closed, and so once again, I was stuck viewing its wonders from a distance. Perhaps that only intensifies its lure, a sort of forbidden fruit enjoyed far all too infrequently. Whether or not that's true, I've come to accept that it's often closed when I go by, and so I wasn't too disappointed when we arrived to a mostly-fortified state park.
The first time I saw Balmorhea, I was on a great escape from my own reality. Karen was a bright, beautiful marine biology student from Berlin. I was floundering architectural student still hanging onto my childhood dream of becoming a world-class architect, while in reality, I frequently skipped my drawing and design classes to hang out in my dorm and write depressing poems. I had no choice. I have recently realized that I was probably experiencing PTSD--a delayed reaction from the bullying I received in junior high and high school. But, I didn't know that then. I just knew I had to write. I'd get up, intending to go to class, and instead I'd end up sitting on the top bunk, writing:
Architecture
I choose a society of bricks
and hollow dark caves.
I articulate words to escape my made womb.
I call to poems.
My poems grow in health.
I live in hell.
I live my whole life
with a cave-hole in my heart
where happiness is blown out
and loneliness is sucked in.
I bleed for it.
I am both ruthless master
and bleeding slave.
I love sacrifice.
I love sacred caves.
I wrote poems, stories, memories of my childhood in Utah and long, drawn-out letters to Karen. She wrote long drawn-out letters back. They were a life-line. Years later, even after marrying Marci, I kept them in a good-sized box on the closet shelf. I may still have them somewhere, or I may not. I remember one year when we were moving, I decided I didn't need them anymore. I was happy; Marci was my life; I no longer needed them. So, I think I chucked them. But I also think Marci may have told me to hold onto them. I don't remember what I decided to do, and Marci and I are not the type of people who can easily find our boxed memories. We have one house and three out buildings crammed with books and other sentimental junk. Hoarders is the term shallow people use to describe people like us.
Anyway, those letters always came in blue and red striped envelopes--Par Avion. I'd walk over to the post office in the student center and open my P.O. box. If that striped envelope was there, the day was good. If it wasn't, I'd walk back to my dorm with a light-less solar system flinging around a bunch of cold rocks inside me.
I still remember the day Karen first arrived that spring. Actually, it may have been February. Anyway, it was a freakishly cold for Texas. That morning I sat in the dorm room and watched snow drift on the roof of the student center across the way. I'd glance at the clock every few minutes, waiting for a reasonable time when I could drive to DFW to meet Karen for a few minutes before she caught her next flight to Albuquerque. She would stay with some relatives there for three or four weeks--her sister and brother in-law, if I remember right--and then she would come back to spend a week with me. I had a long road trip planned to west Texas and Big Bend National Park. I was sick with anticipation.
I don't remember the drive to DFW although I should. Driving in rare winter conditions in Dallas is not an easy thing to forget. Stupidity is pronounced everywhere with cars slid off onto the shoulders and into the medians. But I don't remember it. I just remember sitting in the cold terminal waiting for passengers from international flights to come in. It was crowded, and there was a sliding glass door behind where I was sitting; every time someone came in, a cold blast would bowl on in with them. It was brutal.
So was the anticipation. I feared I wouldn't recognize her. I hadn't seen her in over a year. Even then, we had only spent one weekend together. One night I received a call from the stepmother of my friend Carl. He was away at college, and his stepmom had never called me before. I hardly knew her. At first, I thought something bad must have happened to Carl. Nope. She was setting me up on a blind date with Karen, the daughter of a colleague of Carl's father, a renowned physicist. Why she chose me and not Phil, who was a better friend of Carl's, I don't know. Maybe she thought I needed a date more. Perhaps she thought we would have more in common. Karen was very cultured and I liked art. But then so did Phil, so I don't know. Anyway, I lucked out.
My brother's girlfriend was in town the weekend of my blind date with Karen. She had a sporty, dark-green TR-7, and she said I could borrow it for the occasion. I was nervous as hell. Carl's mom went on and on about how pretty this girl named Karen was. In my experience beautiful girls and my existence didn't have much in common. I worried that together we'd experience hours of awkwardness as I gawked at her and searched for something meaningful to say. So, I gladly accepted Maxine's offer of the TR-7; I thought it might make up for my deficiencies. At least Karen could go back to Germany and say, "That guy was a total geek, but boy did he have a great car."
Nothing went as I imagined. Karen had a little of extra weight on her. She was pretty, but Carl's mom had stressed her beauty so much that I was somewhat disappointed when I walked in and saw a pretty normal looking girl with a few extra pounds.
When I was a child I lied about everything--not to get out trouble, but to escape reality. I hated that I did that, so when I was twelve I made a promise to God that I'd stop lying, and ever since then I've had this obsessive need to tell the truth. That never stopped even during my many years as an atheist. So, the first thing I did was tell Karen that I'd borrowed the car hoping to impress her. That turned out to be a good move on my part. We immediately dropped all pretenses and quickly became friends. The TR-7, as it turned out, was loud, making conversation difficult. We ditched it back at my house and got my old Plymouth Reliant without air-conditioning to drive around instead. The back seat and floors were full of junk, but I didn't care. Somehow in a couple of hours I knew Karen as well as I knew Phil or Marsh. There simply was no need to pretend. We set off to see my Dallas.
I probably took her to DMA and White Rock Lake, but what I remember is driving her along the dirt roads that run along the channeled Trinity River bottoms. It was a fine, warm spring day. The bluebonnets were in bloom. Along those dusty roads, I was able to show her my two worlds at once. I loved the city, but my soul forever belonged to the country. After all, I grew up in a county with a population density of less than two people per square mile. We looked at cows (which were still pastured along the bottoms then) chewing on fresh green grasses, the gleaming skyscrapers of downtown behind the canal bank. We talked art, architecture, politics and science. I knew very little about science, but there didn't seem to be any subject I could bring up that Karen couldn't quickly join. She was incredibly well-educated for someone just out of high school. She spoke three languages--English, French and German.
When she returned to Germany, we wrote back and forth to each other at least weakly, sometimes more. Even with all that distance between us, we'd become best friends. Still, that day in the airport I worried that she would walk by without me recognizing her. I couldn't have been more wrong.
The minute Karen walked through the sliding glass doors from customs that brutally cold spring day, I knew her as well as any of my best friends. Only she didn't look the same. She'd lost that extra weight, and I now saw her the way Carl's stepmother had seen her all along. She was indeed very pretty. I had thought that I didn't really care about that. We'd had such a great time on her previous visit. Turns out I did, because standing there looking at her minus the extra-weight, I was stunned.
I don't remember what we did. I know we didn't have long before her next flight. I assume we went to a coffee shop in the airport. I do know she brought me some gifts from Germany--a couple of picture books about Berlin and a jar of Nutella, which was not sold in the U.S. then. When she explained that you spread chocolate hazelnut on bread like peanut butter, I thought, Chocolate on bread? Yuck. But, of course, when I actually tried it, I discovered what every American knows now. Leave the Jiffy on the shelf; grab the Nutella instead.
The time she spent in New Mexico was pure agony for me. I received a couple of post cards, but she was on vacation. She was sight seeing. I was staring past the gallon of orange drink I dangled in front of the window air-conditioning unit in my dorm room. I had tied a string around a water pipe near the ceiling and hung it there. We had no fridge, and it was a vein attempt to keep the sugary drink semi-cold. Anyway, I was on the top bunk, skipping class, staring past the jug of orange drink and out the window to the roof of the student center across the way, picturing instead west Texas. There would be the Monahans Sandhills, the Davis Mountains, which I knew well, and Big Bend National Park, which I'd never been to but had researched fervently. And there would be us, standing facing each other, that hot west Texas wind whipping Karen's long brown hair under a blue sky that goes forever. Anticipation was eating me alive. I couldn't even write my normal dismal poems. All I could do is dream.
Finally she arrived. Although we had planned on staying the night at my brother's, almost as soon as we got there we decided to leave. I was so excited to get out west that we drove and talked through the night, arriving at Monahan Sandhills well after midnight. It was late, so rather than setting up the tent, we slept on the dunes under a full moon.
The next morning we were up and on the road before dawn. I remember the sun rose over the flat eastern horizon just before Balmorhea, igniting the Davis Mountains to the southwest. I remember pulling off the highway and photographing a tree-yucca in the bright morning light.
By the time we reached Toyahvale the desert was golden. Off to the left, I saw a great patch of green behind a chain link fence and this enormous swimming pool out in the middle of nowhere. And nowhere is Toyahavale, Texas, population 60. What the hell? I don't know how Lloyd and I missed it on our trip to the Davis Mountains, but we must have. I turned around at some little white cinder block store with corrugated metal canopy out front. It looked like a roadside restaurant in Mexico. I drove back to the state park entrance. This we had to see. After all, Karen was a marine biology student. She was on her college swim team. This was her place. Only we couldn't. The gates were closed. There was a sign. Apparently, this week it was reserved for diving classes for University of Texas Austin students. Reluctantly, we headed back back down the road, pulled over, and just stood there in the brisk morning air, rubbing each others arms, taking as much of the warm sunlight as our chilled skin could absorb as we stared into the bluest water imaginable just beyond our potential to dive right in.
And then we drove on to Big Bend, which is another story.
Here, now, I'm wondering how to wrap this up. Part of me wants to follow that distant memory of Karen and I down to Big Bend, to feel again her smooth skin under my hungry finger tips as we stood all alone under the intense desert sun facing each other, lost in each other's eyes.
Part of me wants to just stick to the script. This is a travelogue of one route through Texas. The journey Marci and I took did not include Big Bend. I spent a little over a week with Karen. As of writing this, I've spent 23 years with Marci, and I plan on spending not only the rest of this life on earth with her but eternities after we die.
This morning I woke up realizing that what I really wanted to get across in this section is that life matters. Youth, for all its glories, is somewhat wasted because when we are young we are so busy looking forward to our future that we don't sit solidly in the now. I thought that those moments with Karen were an escape from life. They were not. Standing in the desert, looking into her eyes, feeling her smooth skin just below the hem of her shorts in my fingertips, I was alive. She was special and I'm glad she came along. However, I could have lived much more of life with that direct connection to living if I had just dropped all my worry and grounded myself and entered the moment, whatever it was. Hell, I probably could have even made it to class and still wrote my depressing poems. It's alright that I couldn't. I don't want to go back and rewrite life. I like how everything unfolded anyway. But, if I could pass one thing on to the next generation, it would be this--make each day count, not by escaping what needs to be done, but by keeping a sharp eye and generous heart open to the passing events and sights. The commute to work matters. The encounter at the drive-through window matters. The little daily interactions at work matter. What goes right, what goes wrong--none of that matters--as long as you are there to learn and appreciate the ride.
Generosity towards experience, as I've come to see it, is what we are ultimately here on earth for--to experience gratitude to God for this thing we call life and for the knowledge that comes from living. The fact that a place called Balmorhea came into my life is amazing. But if it hadn't, it would be replaced by someplace just as memorable. Life provides an oasis of experiences, but we get so stuck in the mirages in our heads that we fail to see the striking beauty before us. Karen provided a moment when I dropped all fear of living and instead just lived. There is no reason I can't do the same on my way to work this morning. Attention to detail is a choice, a choice well worth making. Yet it is so difficult to experience each day moment by moment because we get so caught up in the endless chatter of the mind.
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