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| View from McDonald Observatory, Davis Mountains, Texas |
I fell in love with the Davis Mountains through a brief, rapturous first encounter. One day in December in 1984 my brother and I headed southwest from Dallas greedily in search of topography similar to that we'd grown up with in Utah. We'd endured all the flat horizons we could handle and set out in search of real land and real life as we saw it. We had no camping gear, but we figured the Davis Mountains were far enough south that we could handle a winter night provided we each took extra blankets.
Luck was both with and against us. It was cloudy most of the way. If I remember right, the Premium Basin was clogged with fog, and so we couldn't search those southwestern horizons in anxious anticipation of any slight undulation, that magic moment when a jagged edge of a mountain range would meet the sky. As a result of the weather, we were almost in the Davis Mountains before we were aware of them.
Then, setting up camp at Davis Mountains State Park, something glorious happened. The storm broke right at sunset and hills of golden grass, yucca and oak ignited in a brilliant copper-colored glow below orange-edged clouds. It was a sight that would have sent Wordsworth into poetic rapture.
And then it was gone. The clouds moved together and lowered. Not long after we had our beds spread out on the ground, flakes of snow began to fall. We gathered up our bedding, preparing for a long, cold night in the front seats of a 1977 Ford Mustang. (If you know anything about Mustangs, you know that year, Ford basically decided to give Pinto a sportier body and call it a Mustang. Everything except the shell was Pinto. I don't think they exploded if you tapped the back bumper, but that was about the only difference. If they did, we were very lucky, the way we crammed all our belongings into the trunk and beat on it to get it closed when we moved to Dallas. The car was so full on that move, we literally had to cram clothes below the seats. Driving down the road, we could not see each other because a few of Lloyd's paintings were stacked between the bucket seats. As the car had manual transmission, how he shifted, I haven't a clue. I think I remember some cursing involved in that complicated procedure.)
Anyway, back to the Davis Mountains. It wasn't near as cold inside the car as we thought it would be. Not that we slept. Except for short amounts of time, that was impossible. Unlike most cars, Pintos and Mustangs didn't have bench seats in the back. They were low and there was an upholstered hump between the two sunken back seats. Thus, there was no place to stretch out. We slept in slightly reclined front seats, uncomfortable as hell, but surprisingly warm. It wasn't until Lloyd opened the driver's door in the morning that we found out why we weren't cold. The car was insulated by more than a foot of snow, and the instant he opened that door, it was cold, cold, cold! The inside of the windows immediately froze over with a thick frost as our breath crystallized before our eyes. We later found out we had woken up to 12 degrees as a rare blue-northerner, as they're called, had swept deep down into Texas almost to Big Bend National Park.
The Mustang decided it was too cold to run the defrost. I guess the fan froze. A little bit of heat seeped out of the vent, but not enough to melt more than the bottom few cementers of the inside face of the windshield. We had to scrape the inside, which, with us breathing, would immediately freeze over again. Once we got out on the highway, I had to keep scraping as Lloyd drove down the road, him seeing through a tiny hole that half of the time was obscured by a red plastic scraper blade going back and forth as I scraped again and again.
A few hours later, and many miles down the road, the sun came out, and once the sun was doing it's magic and the ice was all melted away, the damn defrost came on, blowing out the hottest air ever--just to mock us!
We never mourned that car when it died. Not even nostalgia could wake up some sort sentimentality. We were just glad to move on to slightly better vehicles.
The trip, however, brings a smile every time it comes up in conversation. Some difficulty, as I've written earlier in this book, does intensify the experience of camping, and if memories are what one is after, nobody should ever pray for a trouble-free vacation, but of course, I still do. It is only human nature to want a cushy ride to heaven.
My next memory of the Davis Mountains is of me camping alone. I had my blue A-frame tent, the one I'd set up with no poles in Galveston. Therefore, we must have returned to Utah sometime in between so that I could retrieve the camping gear that I'd discarded on the move to Texas.
Whatever time of year that second trip was, it was hot. I decided to hike from the campground at Davis Mountains State Park to the little town of Fort Davis on the other side of ridge. (There is something in me that always wants to hike over a mountain to get to someplace civilized. Later, I would hike over the Franklin Mountains in El Paso to get to a girl's house. I wanted to be able to say to her, "I crossed a mountain range to get to you." I thought it was terribly romantic. She thought it was insane. I'm still glad I did it though. There is just something magical about crossing a range and showing up in society. The great trappers and explorers did that frequently, but we just don't do that anymore. All of our epic journeys are away from civilization as the man-made world now occupies more space than the natural. These days our pilgrimage memories are away from the comforts of home and society and not towards them. Civilization is so much a part of our lives, we take vacations from it. I like to fantasize of a more rustic age. I just like the idea of showing up in town for a drink and clean shave after living months on-end in the wilderness. When I first started dating Marci,or rather when she first started dating me, I was living in a tent in the mountains. It was only for a week. The semester at college had ended, but my work wanted me to work a week longer, and so I just moved up the canyon. I was finally living my fantasy. I lived in the mountains and journeyed into town for a taste of civilization and the company of a lady).
Back to the Davis Mountains. I set out from the campground, hiked the Skyline Drive Trail, and dropped down into Ft. Davis National Historical Site, enjoying the wonderful, historic buildings before walking into town for an ice cold beverage and a meal. I was sunburned and desperate for some civilized refinement. The only things that would have made my mountain-man fantasy more real would have been a barber shop for a clean shave and a bordello for some female companionship afterward. I remember dreading the hike back to camp terribly. I was sweaty, sunburned and had blisters on my feet. Romanticism comes at a cost.
This trip, Marci and I experienced no complications. Still it was magical. Though not high by the standards of the west, topping out at 8,383 feet on Baldy Peak atop Mount Livermore, there is something special about the Davis Mountains. There must be because even coming from a place where I have 10,000 foot mountains out my back door and 12,000 foot mountains less than an hour away, the Davis Mountains still spoke profoundly to me. I was as enchanted this time as I had been during that first golden glimpse back in the 80s.
Coming from Balmorhea Springs, you ease into the Davis Mountains through narrow valleys between low cliff-lined uplifts. Trees trail along washes. Shadows are thrown by the bluffs. Very western. Very real.
We arrived at camp late in the afternoon, just in time to set up camp and have dinner before sunset. I enjoyed looking at the familiar golden hills as I set up the propane stove to cook. We simply heated up a can of chili and had Frito pie, but it was marvelous. My mom used to say, "Everything tastes better when you eat outside," and she was right. The odd thing is that even with mom's philosophy, we didn't have a barbecue or picnic table in the back yard. As an adult, I have remedied that. My back yard is designed as a place to eat and occupy, not just something to look out on from the kitchen window. A home should only exist to give you easy access to what really matters--outside! A sliding glass door should be opening and shutting all day long as one moves in and out of the house. Inside is only a place to grab a drink from the fridge or to watch an episode of NCIS during the hottest part of the day.
Although my entire life now is pretty much just camping minus the nightly campfire, there is still something extra magical about doing all one's days activities except sleeping and using the restroom outdoors. A glass house is the next best thing to being there. Being there, brushing flies away from your food, is where it's at. I stirred the beans, looked towards a low, golden hill with blobs of oak and juniper and thought, Damn this is the life. In my mind, if looking at golden hills at sunset is the only reason we experience mortality, well, it is quite enough.
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