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Riding the Border: Lajitas Trails in Big Bend, Texas

From Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos River, the Comanche Trail runs south to Fort Stockton / Comanche Springs and there, if you veer west, it eventually arrives at the old San Carlos ford on the Rio Grande in Lajitas.



Six miles northeast of the crossing lies a bank of trails cut through desert asphalt. Trails cut through the same swales and ridges traveled by Mexican Indians, Apache, and Comanche bands moving in and out of Texas and Mexico, and likely even before there was a Texas and Mexico. People who knew this land way better than us.


Today those trails are mainly used by hikers, bikers, and the occasional horseman – or horsewoman, in this case.


A short mile and a half in on loop three, we pause atop a small mesa then continue downhill, eventually landing in a dry creek bed. It’s warm for late December, and dry, making 70 degrees feel like 80. My throat is parched, my nose dry and stuffy. Each swallow and breath an effort.


It’s easy to imagine how quickly one could lose themselves in this desert - what it would be like. The thought plays in the back of my mind until the call of a raven interrupts. The bird swoops down and perches on a nearby rock watching and suddenly I realize I HAVE lost the trail and there is nothing to do but turn, retrace our tracks back to the arroyo, and carry forward again.


I’ve been thinking a lot lately about fear, about comfort, about how the two go together and breed immobility. How they lock us between what is known and what is not. Each time I step away from this horse-led life the act of return is greater, the effort is greater.

And it has been too long since we rode. The horse is clumsy today, hesitant, resistant, short stepped – as am I. He wanders off trail, never much for straight lines; we are alike in that manner.


But fresh or not, when I return to the saddle I recover something lost and I begin to see my way anew. It’s like a shot of life straight to the vein, a needle that never misses. Only afterwards can I truly face the world.


Only afterwards, am I truly myself.


We make our way along a narrow ridge, through fields of jagged Lechuguilla bent like grass in the wind, through a series of desert waves where I let the horse run up but hold him steady on the down, and finally we reach another mesa top.



The dogs lag now and the wind wants my ballcap for its own. I tuck my chin in defiance, secure any loose shirt ends, and glance up to see the raven again. His dark silhouette a clear contrast to the deep, cobalt sky.


He's following us, I’m sure of it. He waits as we pass then takes flight, coasting forward to perch on some near-distant outcropping. Cawing and calling at us with his throaty voice. An omen of change to come, of untold visions and spectral messages.


A reminder that what we see before us is not always truth. A sign perhaps.

Or maybe he’s just hungry.

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