You Are Standing On Holy Ground: On the Road Part IV

Entrance to Big Bend National Park via Terlingua

When I think of my visit to San Antonio, all I can think about is the word underwhelming. The much ballyhooed riverwalk: underwhelming. The restaurants that line its length: underwhelming and overpriced. The Alamo Drafthouse location I checked out in the city: underwhelming. Hell, I spent my last day doing laundry because I had nothing I wanted to do by my third day in the city. And the most underwhelming part of it all, was the building San Antonio built itself around. What city it calls itself. The Alamo. Small, sad, tucked away into the city no less than five minutes away from the riverwalk. Here is where the legend of Texas sprung forth; a bunch of men fighting and dying for the right to own slaves. It's beautiful that the myth of the Alamo can be dispelled almost immediately upon seeing it or knowing anything about history. Texas history, is American history. American history is a collection of violent lies and half-truths used to dispossess those who lived here before white settlers and bring in an underclass of people to build the infrastructure that the wealthy elites of the country, whether they were slaves or low paid labor, they were as expendable as the next to their overlords. Texas history, is a lie. Those brave men fought and died for the freedom to hold other living, breathing human beings in bondage from the cradle to the grave. The answer to any reactionary's evasive response to what the civil war was about is "state's right to what", so too should the automatic response to the bullshit notion that the men at the Alamo died for freedom. Freedom for what? And for who? That has always been the crucial pair of questions for anyone who dares question the American dogma. The states south of the Mason-Dixon line, no matter how much liberals who live there protest, has always tried to keep the people of any color darken than tan away from any actual notion of freedom and democracy. The south is solid because the majority of the people that live there, are racist. This is America; they're racist everywhere but in different fashions. Down south they prefer to have the racism codified into law and in practice. Apartheid prevailed until the 1960s. If one prefers to use the Civil Rights act as the jumping off point, American Democracy is just about pushing sixty and appears doomed to backslide horribly as the empire at last comes home. After Texas won its freedom, it made slavery legal and fought on the side of the slave-owners in the Civil War. Even after that defeat, any kind of real freedom would not come for all Texans until the 1960s, one hundred years later. Just sitting there, staring at the cracked frame of the Alamo reminded me of all the strings of horror tied to this sad little building.

The Alamo! DON'T GO HERE.

After finishing my stop in San Antonio, I headed west down to the little town of Marfa for a home base to visit Big Ben National Park. There are always parts of states that people insist on as "the real-", whether it be western NC, western Iowa, downstate Illinois, the northwoods of Wisconsin, west Texas, etc, you get the picture. These are places where people aren't, and the average person who lives here is a reactionary who has had their brain rotten by years if not decades of conservative unreality broadcasts. It's an American trend that rural people can call city people everything short of subhuman, and that anything in return by said city people is unfair. Always. As with damn near everything else in this wretched shithole of an empire, it's a myth and a lie all in one. Farmers might claim they feed America, but they would be broke many, many, many times over if not for the welfare given to them by the federal government via urban populations' taxes. West Texas is real Texas because no one really lives there, and the people who do are subsidized by the people who live in the cities of Texas. It is all so stupid. Even the American myths are boring. I wonder how western Romans felt as their empire died. Maybe they also saw it as stupid beyond belief. I drove through the scrublands thinking about a Osita tweet that reminded everyone that the reason there was all this nothing was due to genocide on a scale nigh unfathomable to the human mind.

I have seen and driven through empty places before. One part of my life I wished I treasured far, far more were the long summer vacations my family would take for roughly two weeks across America to the National Parks. I have, and never will, be religious in the American standard of the term. Or the Christian one. Faith is not something I have ever been able to get. Yet. The National Parks of America are holy ground. Each and every single one of them. Not for the christian god, or any monotheistic one, but the old animistic religions we all once adhered to, if you believe the sorts of stories about the past that tend to get told. Gaze skyward at a redwood grasping with branches extended towards the sky; try to comprehend the other massive west coast tree, the Sequoia and its massive trunk, or simply, the Grand Canyon. That is holy ground. The awe you feel at the world we have not yet ruined for the sake of capital, is reverence for the gods in the trees, in the ground, in the air, and in the water around us. I don't practice religion, attend any churches or temples, but I do tread on holy ground. And that is Big Bend National Park.

It has been dry and windy in my time at Big Bend. The fire threat has been set to extreme. I keep seeing signs of the ticking clock everywhere, especially here in the scrublands. The Rio Grande was so shallow in parts of the park that one day I simply walked over it and into Mexico and took a couple of photos, and walked back. This is also the only park that has Border Patrol checkpoints out of the two main ways out of the park. Every fucking day I have to answer the same set of questions, roll down my fucking back window, and hope I don't get disappeared or something because the agent wanted to go on a power trip. That has been unpleasant, to say the least. But! The park is beautiful beyond belief. The mountains in the Chios Basin are incredible, the scenic drives are amazing, and the canyons are breathtaking. Santa Elena radiates peril unlike almost every other canyon I've been to. And the man who was given the reins to the American empire wants to take it all away. I dream of hell because I am denied justice in this life, so I must seek it in the next.

The end of the Window Trail

Part of the Window Trail in the Chios Basin

Santa Elena, with the Rio Grande cutting through it

When I first had the notion of going on this journey, it was with the hope of figuring out who exactly I was. At the time, I felt that I had lived life on some form of autopilot without doing any personal heavy lifting. This is no doubt deeply tied in to my utter lack of success in the professional world pursuing any dream. I have two degrees and have not managed to find gainful employment using either of them. Frustrated doesn't really describe my current situation, but stuck works just as well. I did what was expected of me and got a bachelor's degree. I struck out on getting a job with just that and wanted less of a bullshit job for myself, so I went to grad school. I got a diploma and a new gender out of it, but no job. I worked for a library for a year, and it seemed as if my direct colleagues in my department did not give a flying fuck about me. I am not surprised that an offer of temporary employment was not forthcoming, but I am deeply bitter about how I was treated. If you want to be paid to help the people you live around, I guess it means you must suffer first. But this is the capitalist upbringing talking. A communist should never speak of themself like this.

At the end of it, I remind myself that I am water, like the shallow river I crossed over. I am constantly in flux, headed to a destination I cannot see. I make my own identity with my bloody hands and bruised fingernails. To be clearly defined as one thing is to be static, and to be static is to be dead. The weather is going to get choppier over the years, and I must endeavor to endure. I am the river carving through the limestone, a dandelion in the concrete. I am not competing with anyone, or trying to get the best career possible. I am simply alive. And that's enough.