Early on a Saturday in the middle of May, my good friend Eli (my travel companion for the trip) and I took off heading West from Austin, car loaded with gear. Our sense of anticipation for the coming adventure was real. We’d both graduated from college the previous May, and had been working 9-to-5s ever since. In various ways our first year of adulthood had been unique, with the monotony of WFH and the uncertainty of a waning pandemic. In other ways it’d been a year like any other in our 20s, a rotating cast of characters and future plans. Big Bend was our chance to get a taste for the other edge of existence, to sleep under the stars, to cut the cord from modernity, if only for a brief time, and to walk in harmony with nature where it alone rules king. You know, that sort of spirit-of-adventure s***.
    The eight-hour drive was much smoother than we thought it'd be. In the blink of an eye it felt, we were strolling through Fredericksburg, before noon we were eating DQ combos in Junction, and mile over mile the hills of Central Texas gave way to dusty ridges. Finally we came to the entrance of Big Bend National Park, finding the guard station empty like a lost border post. Flat desert land buckled into soaring peaks at the park's heart, the Chisos Mountains. Looking up at them, all we could say was, "Wow." Before long we'd found our campsite, pitched tent, and watched the bright moon rise over Casa Grande. We'd made it.

The following few days were full of idyllic wanderings. The first morning we took the Lost Mine trail up to the highest peak, the next down to the Window, a sliver in the rock at the bed of a dry river trail. It had a view that must have been all the way to Mexico. We drove across the park to see the Rio Grande in all it's glory, which we'd never once seen in our whole natural-born Texan lives. We saw a lone horse drinking from it, and a Mexican Jay bird at the Lost Mine peak, a jackrabbit along the Window trail, and a pair of Black bear cubs with their mother resting near the visitor center. We even saw an exhibit of dinosaur bones, some of which were found in the park, all of them seemingly from the largest creatures one could possibly imagine. Both evenings the sunset lit up the sky against the Chisos, and one night to our surprise we saw a lunar eclipse, a red moon among a canopy of stars.
    The life of camping too suited us well, once we grew used to it. Our supply of dry goods, beef jerky, trail mix, fruit, and meal replacement drinks was more than enough to sustain us. The first night of sleep in the tent was rough, but we found that if we tired ourselves out enough, we slept just fine. Best of all, we knew our Airbnb awaited us, which we'd booked for a stay after camping to give us a relief from the outdoors and another day in the park. The trip couldn't have gone smoother so far.

Not long after we reached our Airbnb on the third day, we decided to get dinner in Terlingua, a 20 minute drive away. Five minutes in we heard a flopping sound from the driver's side, and that's when we realized we had a flat tire. In normal situations, a flat tire is a manageable inconvenience. It may have been one if I hadn't tried to make it back to our Airbnb on the flat, which resulted in the complete shredding of the tire's tread. That's when the situation became a more dire matter. We were alone on a back-country road in the middle of the desert, with a car basically on three wheels. Expletive curses and head-holding ensued.
    At that moment a rugged man rolled up in a beat up truck and offered to help us out. By the looks of his situation and ours, my initial thought was to decline. But we allowed him to help, and it turned out to be a good decision. His name was Diego, a guy who happened to own one of two tire businesses in Terlingua. He replaced the mangled tire with the donut and took my wheel, assuring us that by the next morning he could have it ready with a used tread that would get us to Alpine, a town an hour away. From that encounter on we killed time and suppressed nerves in the small Airbnb until dawn. As for sleep, that was the worst night of all.

The next morning, I called Terlingua's other tire spot (to no avail), nearby tow companies, far away autoshops, a Big Bend park ranger, my parents, anyone who could've helped, before I got a hold of Diego. He said he could bring over my wheel with the used tread after lunch. When he arrived, he bolted it to my car in short time, but found the tread made the wheel too large to drive. On the spot, he had to change it out with a different one using a couple of simple tools. At one point he asked me for dish soap to help get the first tread off. But the second one worked, thankfully. With a handshake and a $20 bill (we sent more by mail), Diego took off, and 500 miles of road were all that stood between us and Austin.
     We left early the next morning. I gingerly took the car up to 60 mph, and with the different tire size the car bounced a bit more, but nothing alarming. It was a tense hour as we covered the distance to the next new-tire shop in Alpine, punctuated by a stop at a border patrol checkpoint. When we finally rolled into Alpine, we both breathed a sigh of relief. We were out of the woods. I ended up getting not one, but two new tires. After that we drove almost non-stop all the way back to Austin. There weren't many words to say on that drive. We were worn out. We'd survived.