#42 / 2004 Tour 3: Terlingua Agajo Campground

TRAVEL REPORT 14

#42

So far so good, the van is still starting. Joe and I discussed whether or not to take off early and miss two days of camping or just take our luck as it comes and drive on to Terlingua Abajo. It is our last stop. Again we have to drive down a primitive road that requires high clearance. It was scary, but we made it. Now it is Sunday afternoon and we keep fantasizing that all the other campers are pulling out just like the Frenchmen to get home and prepare to go back to work. The more treacherous the road becomes the more convinced we are that this time we might really get to be alone. It could have been possible here, but we found out that Thanksgiving weekend is one of the biggest camp seasons of the year at Big Bend.

I kept saying if I could just get a good hill to roll off of I wouldn’t worry. Battery trouble in a wilderness had tempered my savoir faire attitude.  As we descended further down the narrow road my expectations waned as we drew nearer to sea level. When we turned the last rocky corner there stood an enormous RV with numerous blankets flapping on a clothesline. Obviously these people were well ensconced and we certainly weren’t going to be alone tonight.

Oh well, it is so much better not to fantasize about these things, actually we have never been able to have a panoramic campsite all to ourselves. Might as well take what comes. After we backed into campsite four, which offered a nice expanse of flat land to push off on if necessary, we were meet by swarms of wasps.

I got a good laugh watching Joe swat at dozens of wasps with a fly swatter. We called in wasp tennis. He really had quite a workout. After a few minutes of watching this man swat wildly at the insects, our neighbor hollered across the sandy expanse, “They won’t hurt you.” I noticed a heavy European accent, guessed Dutch. It’s usually German or Dutch tourists you find out West in these big RVs.

Joe finally put down his fly swatter, waded through the little yellow corpses, and said he was going to check out the area. The last time he took off for a stroll like that he was gone for three hours so I asked him to return in a more timely manner this day.

I set about making our dinner. I took a moment to walk over to the RV to offer one of our newsletters to the fellow traveler. Nobody answered. I hoped we hadn’t offended him with Joe killing all the insects. Maybe he appeared a bit rabid. But after a while our neighbor strolled over to say hi.

He was alone, a robust looking gentleman who leaned on his walking stick as we spoke. I asked if he was Dutch. No, he was German. Through time we learned he raised a family in Canada, was a widower, and spent eleven months a year on the road. He ate practically nothing but meat, never touched water, didn’t drink or smoke, drank coffee and coke mostly, and was seventy five. He even had the audacity to have a full head of hair and what appeared to be all his own teeth. He was quite striking.

Kurt was such an interesting person we convince him to give us an interview for Speer Presents. The most outstanding thing about his 1989 Gulf Stream Regatta was the huge set up of solar panels. He had installed them himself. With solar panels he wasn’t dependent on RV hookups. He parked mostly in national parks and the Bureau of Land Management properties, which are often free. He had digital cameras, still and camcorder, computer equipment lots more sophisticated than our own, a motor scooter for getting to the store, and of course all the amenities of his palatial RV that he spent a lot of time modifying himself. I eyed admiringly his beautiful cabinet work.

At night Joe liked to ask him about his war adventures. He was an honest-to-goodness Nazi I guess, entering WWII when he was fourteen. I gathered by his striking good looks, still at seventy five, he could have been a poster boy for the Hitler youth camp.

“Oh those French soldiers, they were nothing. All you had to do was shoot in their direction and they would fall down dead. They were nothing. Those American’s they were nothing either, but they had all the good equipment,” he shared.

“What did you think about the Russians?” Joe asked with a knowing glint in his eye.  “What about the defense of Moscow and the siege of Stalingrad?”

“Oh, the Russkies could fight,” he admitted. 

Kurt told us about some sites to visit so there our last two days we visited old adobe ruins and a little cemetery. The land hasn’t really been inhabited since the thirties when some Hispanic farmers used to sell goods to miners in the area. The place is all mined out now, all the cottonwood trees along Terlingua Creek have been destroyed, and not much is left but the cactus. I am still sporting some fine filaments of cactus needles in my fingers. I couldn’t even see the spines when I went bent down to pick a bright red cactus flower. Ouch! Three days later I still feel them.

I also have the remnants of a splinter in my finger where I tried to restore one of the tiny wooden crosses that marked the lonely graves out there in Terlingua Agajo. One had been visited as early as Easter, there was still a small basket and Easter eggs. The woman Eulalia Martinez was born in 1900 and had died when she was thirty four. I wondered who had made such a long journey into that desert location to remember her on Easter. I prayed for all of them and thought of my mother’s own little plot back in Nashville, said a prayer for her as well.