04/16/2026
96% of Texas is privately owned, which makes it no surprise that folks have found themselves so goddamn up in arms when faced with the potential defilement of the tiny bit of it that happens to have remained public. In a land of cattle guards and barbed wire fencing, the big bend region is an anomaly, a wild and rugged stretch of Chihuahuan Desert that has somehow managed to resist the plague of modernity.
It is a big and formidable place, humbling in its scale and consistently exhibiting the kind of wild indifference that can only be found in the desert. As you move through the park and the wildlands on its periphery, it is made abundantly clear what kind of world we traded to accommodate our misguided human desires. It’s difficult, dare I say impossible, to walk through this landscape and not find yourself resenting the arbitrary boundaries that have been built at its edges.
In all of its milky teal magnificence, the Rio Grande snakes its way between our nation and our southern neighbors in Mexico. It is not only the lifeblood of both the human and animal communities along its banks, but also the pulse of the entire region. Be it a river, spring, or dingy dusty pot hole, there is nothing in the desert that is more powerful than water and that fact is baked into this landscape around every big damn bend of The Rio.
On my first morning in the area, I watched a beaver gently swim downriver while the sun crept over The Chisos Mountains. She was quiet and playful, delicately spinning in circles as she bounced from country to country, flaunting her limited understanding of our terrestrial politics. As she floated out of sight, I couldn’t help but wonder what we think we’re protecting when we carve a place like this into pieces.
I don’t care what side of the aisle you’re on, or who you’ve been voting for as of late, if you can’t agree that this place needs to stay intact, then you aren’t paying attention. If the only way to protect our way of life is to the destroy the sanctity of the wild spaces that make this country worth living in, then maybe our way of life isn’t worth protecting.
No goddamn wall belongs in this place.
Not now… Not ever.