I didn’t know it at the time, but the deities and elders of an ancient Pecos people were hovering nearby as I shivered and shoved my swollen feet halfway into my boots and began a graceless ballerina’s toe-walk down the highway toward Sanderson, Texas.
Earlier, I’d crawled out of my threadbare sleeping bag and noticed that my right foot’s long toe, the formal name for the closest neighbor to the hallux, or big toe, was blue. Goddamn, I thought, rubbing it. It’s stone cold out here. I’d better put on my boots. I couldn’t get them on.
It was late December, 1973, and my friend and hitchhiking partner Chris and I had camped on the rocky ground off the shoulder of U.S. Highway 90 West at Comstock, close by the Pecos River. We’d caught a ride with a couple of well diggers who’d dropped us off in the middle of the night at the cutoff for Pandale. Early Spanish explorers called this land el despoblado, the unpeopled place. We were 250 miles from where we were headed, Castolon on the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park.
That morning, Chris was still asleep in a bag that would keep one warm in the ice caves of Vatnajokull when I rousted him with news of my blue toe. It was apparently too wondrous strange a thing for him to fully comprehend early in the morning. Rubbing his eyes, Chris told me he’d dreamed he’d rolled onto the highway in his sleeping bag in the path of an eighteen-wheeler that roared by us in the night. I kind of remember hearing his screams.
But it was too cold to linger over stories of trucks and toes. We needed to press on even if I couldn’t shoehorn my heels into my boots. I wouldn’t be the first ignorant traveler to tiptoe unknowingly past the gods.
I’m speaking of the gods of the “White Shaman Mural,” ancient rock art in a cave above the Pecos. And what gods they are. Among them are five elders traveling east to the birthplace of the sun where they will transform into deities. A sacred deer named Tamatsi Prietsika leads them through the underworld to Dawn Mountain. He is in search of his own spiritual being. When Tamatsi Prietsika finds his real Self, he kills it, and for his sacrifice he is transformed into the sacred peyote plant.
Present in the mural are forty-two human figures, six zoomorphs, or gods in their animal form, and sixty-nine “enigmatics.” There are also aspects of the ancient “Flower World” cycle of stories. The road to the east is called the Flower Road. It leads to the primordial Flower Mountain which is filled with blossoms and butterflies and is also the birthplace of peyote, the flower of the sun.
The mural contains elements of an ancient religious system practiced widely by different peoples in northern Mexico and the American Southwest. Related rituals are still practiced today by many in the tradition, although the rock art was lost in time to them and most of the rest of us until very recently.
I was twenty years old, and I believed back then that the world was my very own dancehall, even as I tripped blindly passed the cathedral cave of a people who really do dance with the gods. “The feet are the link/between earth and body. Begin there,” wrote poet Robert Bringhurst. I wish I’d read that before I wore new, boardy boots to cut capers across the desert.
The Chihuahuan Desert can make folks feel tougher than they are. Mountains that seem to move beneath the traveling sun and the intoxicating air make us happy and high and given to delusions of desert savvy. But the calcareous ground (pronounced kal-ˈker-ē-əs, like the name of a victorious Roman general) is armed for ambush. A friend and inveterate hiker some years ago spent months carefully planning a walk across the east-west breadth of the national park. He wasn’t yet halfway when he retired from the field, his feet and his adventurous spirit nearly destroyed by the effort.
Back at blue toe morning, Chris and I caught a ride not long after setting off down the highway. I would have thanked the gods had I known they were there. We were dropped off in Marathon at a run-down café at the junction of US 90 and US 385, the road south into Big Bend Park. There, smiling over their coffee and their plates of eggs and bacon were two friends of ours. I forgot to tell you that this was a hitchhiking competition. It was me and Chris versus Bill and Rick in a 630 mile race from Houston to the campsite two miles downriver from Castolon.
First thing I did after settling into the café’s booth was take off my sock and check out my toe. I expected a frostbitten nightmare, but it had returned to its normal pink, more or less. Re-socked, I tried to get my feet all the way into my boots. It was a struggle, but I got it done. It was a new day. We visited a short time with Rick and Bill before they left. They’d arrived before us in Marathon and earned the right to catch the first ride. They got a lift within minutes.
Chris and I finished breakfast and took up our positions at the intersection. It was hours before we were picked up. We made it to Panther Junction, park headquarters, and somehow managed to get a ride to Castolon at the border reasonably soon. It was dusk when we got there. The place had once been home to a couple of small, if surprisingly productive farms. From 1916 to 1920, it was a U.S. Army outpost, Camp Santa Helena, home to some of the 100,000 American soldiers stationed on the border to guard against cattle rustlers, bandits and German spies.
The old army barracks later became a general store, which wasn’t open when we arrived that evening. During the day a young man in a rowboat would take you across the river to the Mexican village of Santa Elena. Santa Elena would become the remote base of operations for drug smuggler Pablo Acosta Villareal, the “Ojinaga Fox.” Some in our group of friends think they may have met him on one or another of our trips to the area.
There was a gate across old River Road between the concrete-walled bathroom and a park service residence. The river had washed out the road a couple of miles in, just this side of our campsite. We cleaned our faces, shouldered our backpacks and began the hike down the old road.
It was clear of brush most of the way, though mesquite was beginning to encroach now that there was no vehicle traffic on the road. Nearer the campsite, river cane, also known as giant cane, had grown thick. It was introduced into the region to control erosion, and so began a vicious cycle. The cane slows the river flow that leads to greater silt deposits that lead to more cane. As for erosion control, well, the old River Road was now impassable.
The only encounter we had on the hike in was with one of our friends, Rick, who was hiking out, his flashlight bobbing up and down. We could see him coming through the brush around the bend, but he didn’t see us. Let’s just leave it that we startled him more than either of us wanted to startle a friend. Or a stranger, for that matter.
After consoling our unsettled friend, we walked on and after shouldering our way through the cane finally made it to the campsite. The crackling fire was going, the sound of the river was calming. Bill put some stew on the fire for us. It was time to relax. That’s when I discovered I couldn’t get my boots off.
Note: Information on the White Shaman Mural is from the book by Carolyn Boyd, The White Shaman Mural: And Enduring Creation Narrative in the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos.