The cliff swallows have returned to Madroño Ranch. They’ve expanded their housing development under the western eave of the Main House to several eastern eaves, one of which we can see from inside the house. We watched them build their nests, swooping down to the creek in droves and hovering, beating their wings like oversized butterflies, then soaring back to the house, landing under the eave with grace and precision, using their tails as props as they constructed—with no hands!—their elegant gourd-shaped mud nests.

Then we watched their babies poke their heads out of the nests’ mouths, opening their own mouths for food, their ever-busy, ever-graceful parents helping rid the air of the countless blood-hungry insects the recent rains have brought. I now know that the insides of these nests are also carefully padded with grass, having found a fallen nest on the porch last Tuesday morning. Also in the fallen nest were five tiny, almost featherless hatchlings, dead, and one eggshell, still improbably intact; it was so fragile that it disintegrated as I tried to pick it up. They hadn’t had time to crush their first homes before their second home crashed to the floor. The disoriented parents flew back and forth, but as I sat on the porch that morning it seemed they’d submitted to the new reality and moved on.

The swallows are a nuisance; they leave a significant mess under their nests. But I love them for their athleticism and the magical moment in mornings and evenings when they fly in mesmerizing patterns from nest to air and back and out and back again. If you sit on the kitchen stoop or stand in the driveway, you can feel as if you are the nucleus of an atom, part of something coherent and powerful, as if their trajectories were weaving some kind of electrically charged nest around you. And then you go back inside and they seem to do their chittering, beautiful work without you just fine. You weren’t the center after all, as pleasing as the illusion was.

One day during our recent trip to Big Bend National Park, we left the cool, dry air of the Chisos Basin and drove down to the Hot Springs Historic District by the Rio Grande. As we drove through the relentless desert, with not a tree to be seen, I realized that the innumerable yellow splotches I was seeing weren’t blooms from the recent rain but yuccas killed by the drought—how, I wondered, could there be a drought in the desert? The air-conditioned car suddenly felt as fragile as an eggshell.

By the time we got to the historic district, it was 95 degrees and humid, and the idea of sitting in the hot springs had lost much of its appeal; besides, they were closed due to the rains. It wasn’t quite a wash, though; we got to see the post office/store and barracks-style rooms built by J. O. Langford, a Mississippian who moved there sight unseen as a homesteader in 1909, with his pregnant wife and eighteen-month-old daughter, planning to turn the hot springs into a business. He had heard about them as he was seeking a cure for malaria in the high, dry air of Alpine, Texas. Several people had already tried to claim the place through the Homestead Act of 1862, though none had been able to meet the requirements, which included a minimum of three years residence on the property. A west Texas old-timer is reputed to have discouraged Langford: “Nothing down there but rattlesnakes and bandit Mexicans. And it’s too far away—that damned country promises more and gives less than any other place I saw.” It was an eleven-day journey from Alpine, the nearest town (now about a three-hour drive). The Langfords held out until 1912 and left, not returning until 1927. In 1942 Langford sold the property for inclusion in the new Big Bend National Park.

What were they thinking? Floods, drought, implacable sun, virtually no trees, snakes, bandits, two young children, loneliness as relentless as the sun. And yet they made some kind of living—enough to build the post office/store, the modest set of rooms for visitors, and a bathhouse (now gone) at the springs.

The next day we drove to the other end of the park to Lajitas, one of the weirdest places I’ve ever been. The road to Lajitas winds through an even fiercer landscape than the one to the hot springs, if that’s possible—the soil toasted a lunar white, virtually nothing growing. We went through Terlingua, the dusty former quicksilver mining center, now the self-proclaimed Chili Capital of the World. Another ten miles toward great looming cliffs and we found ourselves in what could have been the set of an old western, but for the lush grass at the golf resort.

Although Lajitas has been a modestly populated and popular river crossing for centuries, it didn’t get weird until the 1970s, when a Houston businessman bought and poured $100 million into it, building an airstrip for small jets, an 18-hole golf course, 92 luxury rooms, and an upscale restaurant. Not surprisingly, the place went bankrupt, but another optimistic Texas businessman bought it for $13.5 million or thereabouts. When we were there a few weeks ago, admittedly the beginning of the low summer season, the place was virtually empty. The cliffs continued to loom, and despite obviously steady watering, the golf course was beginning to turn brown under the imperious sun. The high in Lajitas yesterday was 104 degrees. What are they thinking?

On the one hand, I admire the moxie of these people who go into the vast west Texas landscape thinking they will somehow outsmart it, or at least wrest a modest living from it. On the other, I’ve become aware of the necessity in every life for submission to some other force. In Big Bend country, most people would find that force pretty hard to ignore. To quote Flannery O’Connor, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.”

In recent months I’ve found that the power of Love is as startling as the force of nature. When I found that my life was as fragile as a nestling’s egg, disintegrating as I tried to pick up its shattered pieces, something appeared, an unexpected padding, to help me into a new life. The realities of death and illness, grief and anger—the possibility that this new home will fall—never stop looming. But over time the steady swooping kindnesses have built an improbable nest in which I have been, for now (and what else is there?), protected.

Despite years of thinking and reading and analyzing, I’ve been overwhelmed by the steadiness of Love’s flow, as powerful as the wind and water eroding the west Texas vastness and almost as impersonal, a force that needs an outlet, that seeks to move where it is not. I’ve stood in the midst of the swallows’ enfolding flight and seen that it continues when I step out of it.

It’s almost harder to submit to Love because it is personal: if I were to try to return gift for gift, prayer for prayer, I would run out of time long before finishing. (Also, I would have to learn how to knit, equally unlikely.) I get why those ornery people think they can vanquish the forces of nature—Texans have fashioned themselves as the most stubborn of the stubborn. For a while I drove myself crazy when I tried and failed to respond individually to every kindness. What was I thinking? I’ve discovered recently that people I don’t know are praying for me. How can I possibly pay that back? I can’t. What can I do instead? Say uncle. Throw up my hands. Submit, give thanks as often as possible, bring some beauty into the world.

And be cautious about buying west Texas real estate in the expectation of a quick return.

What we’re reading
Heather: Joy Harjo, A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales
Martin: Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams—The Early Years, 1903–1940

The Chisos Basin, the bowl in which the lodge sits, is more than a mile above sea level. The only break in the surrounding ring of volcanic mountains is the Window, a triangular notch through which one can see the Chihuahuan desert thousands of feet below, and, on clear nights, the lights of Study Butte and Terlingua, some fifteen miles away. (That’s it in the photo above.) It’s no accident that the dining room at the lodge, and many of the guest rooms, look out over the Window; it is mesmerizing.

We spent the cool, sunny mornings hiking the Lost Mine and Laguna Meadows trails, which begin in the basin. On Friday afternoon we drove down to the Hot Springs Historic District and Rio Grande Village, and on Saturday afternoon we drove down to Terlingua and then on to Lajitas. We saw various flycatchers, Western and summer tanagers, Mexican jays, canyon towhees, a Say’s phoebe, a blue grosbeak, a Western kingbird, a black-footed ferret, and several rabbits, in addition to a disgruntled-looking coyote padding along the road in Rio Grande Village; we saw centuries-old pictographs and petroglyphs at Hot Springs. We ate dinner at the truly surreal Lajitas Golf Resort and Spa, at which an episode of the reality TV show Ammo and Attitude was being filmed. (No, we’d never heard of it either.)

All of this felt like pure gift to Heather and me, given the events of the last six months, which as most of you know have been hard ones for us. At the beginning of December Heather learned that the source of the pain in her left hip that had been bothering her for a couple of months was in fact a stage 4 cancer that had already metastasized to the bones in her pelvis and spine. Then her father, whose own health had been declining since the death of her mother two years ago, died a week before Christmas.

Heather’s cancer is still officially of unknown origin, though molecular analysis indicated a 90 percent probability that it was breast cancer—despite the fact that years of mammograms and, more recently, a battery of tests and scans had found no tumor.

In January, she began a regimen of four chemotherapy infusions, one every three weeks, combined with monthly infusions of Zometa, a bone strengthener developed to treat osteoporosis. At times we wondered if the treatments were worse than the disease; the chemo affected her palate to such an extent that few if any foods tasted good, and the Zometa brought on agonizing flu-like symptoms: aches, joint pain, fatigue.

Heather lost about twenty-five pounds, much of it muscle; she had always been an athlete, and the ensuing weakness, which affected her posture and her gait, was in some ways much harder to take than the loss of her beautiful hair, much as she hated that obvious and public signifier of illness. (After her hair had started to fall out, she had me shave her head, which I must say was not a duty I had ever imagined performing on my wife; after I finished the job, we joked that if she just got a few tattoos and piercings, she’d be indistinguishable from much of the rest of the population of Austin.)

Perhaps the most tiresome thing about Heather’s illness—aside from the physical effects, of course—was how boring it was. We found ourselves utterly unable to focus on anything except her illness. Events in the world outside us passed virtually unnoticed; we found ourselves unable to concentrate on anything—writing, reading, you name it—beyond the reality of illness and treatment. We were locked in the dark house of her cancer, and we couldn’t even imagine the world outside.

After her fourth chemo infusion in March, she got a break of five weeks before returning to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for testing and evaluation. At Anderson she had a PET scan which failed to find even a single lesion; she was, unbelievably, completely cancer free.

It was as if all the doors and windows of the house in which we’d been shut suddenly flew open, and we could see the sky and trees and streets and people outside. Our trip to Big Bend marked our first tentative steps back into the beautiful, messed-up, complicated world.

The Window is mesmerizing. Like any gap in any wall, any break in any symmetrical pattern, it naturally drew our eyes; we always want to see beyond our immediate surroundings, to see behind the curtain. For us, emerging from the claustrophobia of Heather’s illness, the view from the Window was a symbol of the vastness, the wholeness, that we had been unable to imagine during these last six months. But of course it was there all along, waiting patiently for us to lift our heads and look.

What we’re reading
Heather: Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil
Martin: Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

West Texas has been much on my mind recently, in part because Heather and I drove down to San Marcos a couple of weeks ago for a panel discussion marking the opening of an exhibition entitled Big Bend: Land of the Texas Imagination at Texas State University. And then last week came the news of the devastating Rock House fire that ravaged Fort Davis, which I followed on the Marfa Public Radio website.

Shocking and shameful admission: Heather and I have never been to Big Bend National Park. Oh, we’ve been to (and through) west Texas—far west Texas, I mean; the part of the state west of the Pecos River, pinched between Mexico to the south and New Mexico to the north, but maybe excluding El Paso, which is after all sort of a city—many times, and I even became a sort of long-distance expert on the region during my tenure at the Texas State Historical Association—more on that below—but that embarrassing gap in our knowledge remains.

The Trans-Pecos, for all its stunning beauty, can seem a place of natural indifference, if not outright hostility, to humankind. In Pecos, Terrell, Reeves, Brewster, Jeff Davis, Culberson, Presidio, Hudspeth, and El Paso counties, the towns are few and far between, and always seem just a little, what shall we say, conditional. The dried-up remains of Orla, on Highway 285 between Pecos and Carlsbad, New Mexico, make the point hauntingly and emphatically, as does the Rock House fire: people can live out here, but not easily, and not for very long.

Yet even here, unexpected signs of civilization can spring up out of nowhere. My earliest experience of the Trans-Pecos came thirty years ago as Heather and I were driving from San Francisco back to San Antonio, the last leg of our epic road trip the summer after we graduated from college. We were driving through the vast emptiness of Terrell County on Highway 90. I was behind the wheel, with my foot to the floor of Heather’s little Toyota Tercel, as we swept around a long downhill curve, when a state trooper’s car suddenly appeared on the shoulder, radar gun pointed straight at us.

“Oh, shucks!” I exclaimed, or words to that effect, as I slammed on the brakes in an attempt to bring us back under, or at least close to, the speed limit—honestly, who obeys the speed limit out there?—but it was too late. He flagged us down and instructed us to follow him on into Sanderson, where he took us to the justice of the peace’s house.

We entered through the kitchen door, and the J.P., who turned out to be a very friendly woman, seated us at her kitchen table and served us lemonade, charged me some nominal fine (the trooper had rather sportingly knocked about ten miles an hour off the ticket), and sent us on our way with a cheery warning about all the other speed traps between Sanderson and San Antonio. All in all, it was about as pleasant an experience as paying a speeding ticket could possibly be—and we made it the rest of the 275 miles to San Antonio without receiving another ticket.

My next memorable experience of the Trans-Pecos came years later, on a family trip to Colorado, when we stopped for the night in Fort Stockton at the end of a long, exhausting day of driving. We checked into the first motel we saw (one of those generic places with a big central atrium), smuggled Phoebe the dog into the room (I believe I carried her under my jacket), and, too tired and dazed to uphold our usual standards, Heather and I told the kids they could watch TV and have fried chicken for dinner. (For years thereafter, whenever the subject of a family vacation came up, the kids would say, “Let’s go back to Fort Stockton!”) Again, an unexpected outpost of civilization—high culture! haute cuisine!—in the midst of America Deserta.

This trip took place at just about the time when, while working for the Texas State Historical Association, I was given the assignment of writing many of the entries on the Trans-Pecos for the New Handbook of Texas. I still remember some of the remarkable things I learned in the course of my research:

• No matter where or how long you drive in the Trans-Pecos, you will inevitably come to a highway sign that says “El Paso: 330 miles.”
• The population of Jeff Davis County increased an astonishing 300 percent between 1950 and 1970—from two to six.
• The legendary swimming pool at Balmorhea State Park, in Reeves County, is home to a rare species of freshwater man-eating shark.
• The Marfa lights are actually an elaborate practical joke left behind by the crew of the classic Texas epic Giant after they finished filming on location in 1955.
• Marathon, in Brewster County, was the site of a battle between the Comanches and the Athenians in 490 BCE. The upset victory by the visiting Athenians (the Comanches had been favored by two touchdowns) marked the beginning of the rise of classical Greek civilization.

Three years ago, Heather and our daughters and I spent Easter weekend in the Trans-Pecos. The weather was unseasonably cold (Lizzie, on spring break from her Massachusetts college, was outraged; she had imagined a week of tropical languor after the rigors of a New England winter, and instead spent most of the trip shivering in 35-degree temperatures), but we had a wonderful time. Among the highlights were a “star party” at the McDonald Observatory outside Fort Davis and a drive down Ranch Road 2810 into the Chinati Mountains southwest of Marfa. Imagining what it would be like to be stuck out there with multiple flat tires and no cell phone reception, we chickened out and turned back before we made it all the way to the river, but it lived up to our friend Bob Ayres’s recommendation as possibly the most beautiful drive in Texas.

I offer all of the above to explain why I considered myself something of an expert on the Trans-Pecos when we went to the panel discussion at Texas State last week. Moderated by Jake Silverstein, the editor of Texas Monthly and a former reporter for Marfa’s Big Bend Sentinel, the panel included local writer Joe Nick Patoski and his collaborator on the handsome University of Texas Press book Big Bend National Park, the photographer Laurence Parent, author in his own right of Death in Big Bend: Real Stories of Death and Rescue in Big Bend National Park; Barbara “Barney” Nelson, an English professor at Sul Ross State and the editor of God’s Country or Devil’s Playground: The Best Nature Writing from the Big Bend of Texas; and Marcos Paredes, a legendary ranger who recently retired after twenty years at Big Bend National Park. How could these people possibly know more about the region than I?

All kidding aside, the discussion was lively and informative and marked by the panelists’ obvious mutual respect and love of west Texas. Each of the panelists presented a strong case for the significance and beauty of the Big Bend and the Trans-Pecos. Patoski argued that any meaningful discussion of the area has to include the portions of Mexico just across the Rio Grande as well; the river, he noted, is less a barrier dividing Texas from Mexico than a force that draws the two sides together. (Isn’t that a lovely way to think about the border?) Parent movingly recalled his mother and father impressing upon him at an early age the importance of our national parks. Nelson and Paredes spoke eloquently of the need to protect Big Bend from the sort of crass tourist-industry commercialization that has grown up around—and marred—so many other national parks.

Together, all four painted an irresistible picture of this, the remotest and most mysterious part of the state, and merely strengthened our resolve: someday soon—maybe this fall?—we’re going to make it to Big Bend. And then we’ll celebrate with a big bucket of fried chicken.

What we’re reading
Heather: George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (still!)
Martin: James S. Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend (still!)