A childhood friend that always got you into trouble. Y’all grew up some, and the trouble followed. But you came to appreciate the way they were always brutally honest with you. Erring on the side of falling too far, never falling too short. Every boundary was pushed—it was a way of life and learning. Making amends was hard, but it was guaranteed. When they dared you, they smiled so big, but it wasn’t a joke. They had no time for fear and ensured fear had no home in your friendship. They told you that fear is the mind killer. Your parents were wary of them, rightfully so, but they had a soft spot for them, just like everyone else. Even fraidy-cats know a Large Soul when they see one. Did you have a friend like that? I hope everyone has a friend like that. I have a friend like that, and I wrote them a letter:
Dear Big Bend,
When we first started sneaking out of the house together, I was out of my element. Me and my dad wrapped Rubbermaid containers in duct tape, virtually guaranteed to fail on the first canoe flip, taking on river water. I was only 8 years old at the time, and I thought it was a fun game you were supposed to lose. The respective heights of my sisters and brother and I marked on a doorframe somewhere were superseded over and over again. Was Santa Elena Canyon, too, growing taller by millennia? Or was the river just cutting deeper? Still, becoming a pseudo geologist is so much fun for a boy from the Permian. That it was a side effect of my father’s education in the brutal ways of engineering, the extraction of petroleum mattered none to me then.
Philosophical context is unique to humans; your rocks don’t care. We always drove to you from Andrews in a truck. In formations, stark contrasts I’ve seen nowhere else to this day were exposed anyway: miles-long limestone against an immediate horizontal transition to igneous and back again. Peering from the front of the canoe: “Explain that, Dad!” Something about an igneous intrusion, a sill. Eventually, feeling small and insignificant by measure becomes something to cherish. Us kids on the pale blue dot kept growing and getting new marks on the doorframe, their heights unquestionably negligible. By some point, I’m hungry, maybe even anxious. Doldrums. I’m wondering if I should go try to sneak back in through the window undetected. We’ve all been there—but my friend eggs me on. Just like always.
Paul handed me a postcard of Salvador Dalí’s crazed face in the parking lot of Far Flung Outdoor Center in Terlingua in the summer of 2009. On the back, his name, phone number and email address were hurriedly written in Sharpie. On the front, Dalí’s signature tendrilling ‘stache spooked me. Wavy ocotillo branches. For both creatures, crude yet effective antennae for extrasensory perception. Dalí and the ocotillo tuned into the same radio station, receiving signals from another dimension, telling them where to go, how to contort, or even what thought to think next.
Everything in you, Big Bend, can be humbling if you let it. My very first commercial trip was a Santa Elena overnight with one John LeRoy. For some, I don’t need to say more. Oh how we must learn to celebrate that which demoralizes us! Only touch any given piece of gear one time, or there’s something wrong with you, kid. Another fun game, but this time I was not supposed to lose. Don’t ruin the fun for me, nor the guests, John. Enjoy yourself, since it’s later than you think. Every trip was different. The stars were different, the river was different. Not every trip glowed the same way. Morning float/afternoon floats—double half-day trips in the state park when it is 113 degrees—were different. Tip your guides, and stop asking me if Mexico is dangerous.
Fifty days on the river, no days off. If life is anything, it’s embarrassing. Paul and I sang Todd Snider songs together in the raft. Old Miss Virgie’s proverbs really do hold up. Life’s too short not to love everybody, and life’s too long to hate.
“Go back to school, Sam,” Paul said. At 20 years old, Paul was actively disrupting my life plan to never leave you, Big Bend. His friend, a professional opera singer, sang us an aria inside of Fern Canyon. Even a lobotomy could not remove this memory—it is trapped in my chest. Is it trapped in yours by acoustic remanence? Over three days with Paul and his family in Santa Elena, we shared life stories. His height on the doorway was marked so high and bold and mine a faint pencil line forgotten below. When I was a child, I spoke as a child who was never more content, once again, with a chance to be so small. Paul got a man off of death row. I learned that he had worked this case for decades and exonerated a man falsely accused. It was his first trip without his beloved wife—every moment of the experience was expressly in her honor.
I hugged him, and walked away with the postcard. I took myself on a date to the Chilipepper Cafe for enchiladas. As I finish up, Paul and his family walk in. We give each other a nod—they express gratitude. I finish my Coca-Cola. “Those people paid for your meal,” the waitress tells me. I cried and tried to hide it. I think he knew he disrupted my plan. He felt bad about it so he bought the enchiladas. We both knew I was going back to engineering school. We hoped that you would be there waiting.
Advice received in a raft in a canyon from a widower, and my river changed course again.
In Tsitsikamma, cliffs dissolved into the Indian Ocean, but all I could think about was you. A pathology unknown to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. My brother and I jumped off the Bloukrans Bridge, but I still failed as a tourist. Days later, I flew from Cape Town to Johannesburg to Amsterdam to Chicago to Austin then hauled ass to Terlingua to run with you in Carol Voss’ Big Bend Ultra. “Lost person behavior” in Sam Karas’ words. Carol is turning 80 as I write this, happy birthday to a legend.
Big, I saw enough of the world to understand that what you are has no precedent nor peer. I spoke so highly of you behind your back and called you unrivaled. Wild, intact, uninterested in being appreciated. If they kill you, they’d better kill me too.
Texas was Mexico. Then it was its own country. Then it joined the union. Then it tried to secede. Ninth-generation La Junta families still live in and around Presidio, their roots deeper than any flag that has flown over them. Reliably, your natural walls tell a 130-million-year-old story. Here I am, worried about a five-year business plan. What a riot!
I didn’t ask Paul or the opera singer for permission, but I bought the grocery store in Marathon in 2019. You laughed when you dared me to do it. Someday I’ll figure it out. More lost person behavior—you bring that out in me. The deafening sound of my own hubris colliding with the canyon wall. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I call it courage to make my friends and family feel better about it. I will be buried in Marathon, regardless of what happens between now and then.
In 2021, we dragged a canoe through Colorado Canyon at 17 cubic feet per second. Three days in the shallows, pushing to exhaustion. Humor is this plus time. In the fall of 2025, I floated that same canyon at high water with friends in rafts. Rancherias to Lajitas, 20-some miles, effortless. Same river. Entirely different experience. You are never the same twice, Big, and neither am I.
There is a state of consciousness available at all times. I have heard interpretations such as “prior to awareness.” Open, a mirror unencumbered by constructs. Social constructs. Intellectual constructs. Even artistic ones. One needn’t be a practitioner of zen to realize this. Big, in your most wild and unperturbed state, you remind us that this openness is always present in us, even when or especially when it has lain dormant a while. We need you as wilderness to remember what we already are. Why do humans have to fuck with every single thing? From the longest-known cultivated land in North America through the Wild & Scenic Rio Grande, creature and crag alike hollering “HUMAN! HELP US HELP YOU!”—even willing to go so far as to make it an infomercial, to make it more palatable for Amarillo.
A blank slate is forgiveness. A blank slate is consciousness free of every framework we’ve ever built to protect ourselves from it. A blank slate is every idea you haven’t had yet. We need your wild, and we need it blank from collusion and vandalism and human imposition now more than ever.
I’m praying so hard for you, Big. I’m praying they leave you be. I’m fighting for you because I now see why you were that kind of friend. It was in your DNA but it was also no accident. You helped me and so many others find suffering yet you saw us through the transformation of that suffering over and over again.
Everything cherished about you is an automatic metaphor for what makes human life roll forward. The river moves. The canyon deepens. There is always more downstream, and we are tormented and blessed by the unknown of what we’d see if we just kept paddling. The grip of modern life pulls us away until the next trip, and the next, and the next, until some of us stop leaving altogether.
I’m writing this from my house in Marathon. It’s quiet. I see you, just out the window. I still have Paul’s postcard. Still tuned in and receiving signals from another dimension.
You’ve never asked me for anything, Big. You never had to. You just kept daring me, and I tried to keep showing up, and somewhere in there it became a life. Never known a companion so hard to keep up with. The big pull, every time. The same river, new experience. Reliable, consistent, blank and same yet catching me off guard at every turn. I cherish you, friend, for keeping me on my toes.
Living here with you long enough makes one strange. I’ll freely admit that. But even stranger is when you go back. To “civilization.” Returning to the city after real time in the desert and then feeling that pace, the sounds, the consumerism, the material games crash into you all at once. Disorienting. Nausea-inducing. And then you adjust, and that’s worse, because adjusting means the blank slate went dormant again. I am not alone in knowing this feeling. Anyone who has lived here knows it. The re-entry repulsion is the proof that something was open that is now closing. Stay ill, my friends, and never give up this fight. Rarely is our battle so undeniably worth it.
I don’t know how to end a letter to someone who was here 130 million years before I learned to hold a paddle. So I won’t.
Still sneaking out,
Sam Stavinoha
Marathon