All Hail West Texas
By: Sean Raftery
Tags: National Parks, Big Bend, Walden, Mindfulness

At the top of the South Rim, there is a cliff with breathtaking views of the Chihuahuan Desert. To accompany these views, I had some pretzels to snack on, and Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” as a travel companion, the perfect book to bring along in my search for solitude. Thoreau’s musings on society from his two years living off the land of Walden Pond in his self-made home mirrored the experience I sought from my time at Big Bend. “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society,” Thoreau writes. Looking out from that cliff, I saw the third chair in my house set out for society. It was an object I got to look at, just as the universe looked on me, and at that moment, I was unable to perform my habitual, anxious rumination of judging myself and my role within society. Society continued to run without me for the day as I looked back at it from West Texas on the top of a mountain, pondering what my role then is in society.

The quest for a personal feeling of liberation has defined a large part of my life since my childhood through my early adulthood. It started in childhood, learning of the American Revolution and Jefferson’s words “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. This grew in my adolescence as a disdain for “the man” and further into my young adulthood with a yearning for entrepreneurial work, free of bosses and hierarchies. However, staring back at society from the cliff at South Rim, I realized there is no escape from authority. There is no liberation from owing something to others because we are born in debt. We owe our very existence to our parents, and from that point, we live a life of creating debts as the bonds that connect us together in society and humanity. Even if you free yourself from financial debts or build a career where you are your “own” boss, you still live in service to your customers, your friends, your family, and society at large. We are all cogs working in service to other cogs. Perhaps my teenage self would scoff at such a notion with naive nihilism, but I stand now grateful that I get to exist as a cog at this point in human history, on the shoulders of our ancestors, doing the best I can with what I’m given to spin the wheels around me and move humanity forward. Perhaps the liberation I was looking for all along was not freedom from being a cog, but the freedom to define for myself what cog I would have the duty and responsibility of being for my time here on Earth. That’s something I can be proud of having the cosmos see when they gaze back down on me.

I packed my bag back up and started my journey back down the South Rim trail. Shortly after starting down the trail, I heard rustling in the woods to my right. I look and see an adult black bear staring back at me about 20 feet away. For the next three minutes, any concept of my identity leaves my body and I am an animal negotiating with another animal over whom is a bigger threat to whom. Fortunately for me, this bear was more afraid of me and was perhaps surprised to find out that the smell of salty pretzels in my backpack had a large human being attached to it. Thoreau writes in Walden, “I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.” Society can certainly be scary. 2020 serves as a stark reminder of this. Our history is deeply morally flawed and contains power structures that still actively oppress millions of humans. But society is constructed on myths like our history, your career, the stock market, Christianity, and candles to protect us from the animalistic fears that wait for us naked in nature, like realizing our insignificance in the universe and negotiating safety with a black bear. The healing power of Big Bend, as long as you’re willing to receive it, is in reminding you of the naked fear of being an animal in the dark and allowing you to carry that perspective alongside your duties as a cog in society, serving those around you in small ways to change humanity for the better.

Thank you for the reminder, National Park Service. I will need it again in the future.