Rainbows arc over Dagger Flats in Big Bend National Park. Photograph by Medford Taylor

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At Maverick Gate, the western entrance to Big Bend National Park, the entry fees are posted: U.S. $10 per vehicle, $5 per individual. “Who are these ‘individuals’?” I asked the ranger, forking over my ten bucks. I waved ironically out at the West Texas badlands surrounding us. It was only the first of May, yet Big Bend had already reached 104°F (40°C) on several consecutive days. “Some people just walk through?”

Coyotes prowl the scrubland of Big Bend National Park, an area belonging to North America’s largest desert, the Chihuahuan. Photograph by Medford Taylor

“Yes,” the ranger answered. “It happens. There was an Aborigine who came through a couple of years ago. He was walking from El Paso.”

El Paso, the nearest real city, lay 300 miles (483 kilometers) away, across one of the driest landscapes on Earth. What was the Aborigine searching for, I wondered, so far from home? His Odyssean walkabout had not been sponsored by any magazine, according to the ranger. “That was just how he got around. Every law enforcement officer in West Texas must have encountered the guy. They asked him, ‘What are you doing? Why do you do it this way?’ He just smiled.”

The Aborigine became my hero in Big Bend. I thought about him constantly during my own walkabout in the park. I tried to see the desert through his eyes and in that unforgiving landscape make myself at home.

—Kenneth Brower

Read “Big Bend” in the November/December 1999 issue of TRAVELER.