The Fire
On this desert slope overlooking the Chisos Mountains of South Texas, you kneel before a grave at Terlingua Cemetery.
The grave’s makeshift mound of stacked flat stones includes a nook — a grotto — with a votive candle just outside and a brown beaded rosary just in. Deep inside the grotto and out of afternoon’s harsh light, a pair of eyeglasses have been folded and propped up against the back wall.
Desert dust darkens the lenses, but peer into them and they peer back.
Looming above, as you continue to kneel, is the grave’s tall wooden cross, planted in the stones and blackened by a century of border sun. The words and numbers once carved into its crosspiece, worn away, their indentations now a cypher.
Just under the crosspiece, look past the cemetery and find in the distance, etched against the sky, the outline of the Chisos mountain range. Just as it appeared on the day when they heaped soil and stones on this body. You heard from a local that chisos is possibly an old Comanche word for spirits.
Though weathering and neglect have erased the deceased’s identity and years of life and death, you have an inkling of life and death here, then. A quicksilver mine jumpstarted the town of Terlingua in 1903, and you know from a historical marker in front of the cemetery that many buried here suffered mining fatalities in the early 1900s.
The marker cites another old scourge, the influenza epidemic of 1918–20. That virus swept through Terlingua and vicinity, its fever killing dozens of men, women and children.
Pick up the rosary, feel its beads between your fingers, reckon its provenance, and put it back.
Finally, stand up. To better see. Your blackened cross is one of many on this bleak acre, a body of crosses, some toppled, others barely standing, but together. Like a copse of charred trees after the fire.
***
Comments on the visit to Terlingua and journal entry, two years later:
The visit to Terlingua Cemetery described above happened on January 19, 2020. The graves and their hardscrabble acre were poignant reminders of how tough life was for pioneers, miners, and families in old West. Along with the mining dangers, it is common knowledge that the influenza pandemic of 1918–20 rampantly killed approximately 500,000 people in the United States alone. But given the modern advances of science, medicine, and public health measures, that level of infection and death did not seem likely to be repeated.
In the days and months and follies to come, however, Terlingua’s poignancy extended to present day.
In fact, just a couple days after Terlingua, my friend Wade Courtney and I were back in El Paso at the end of the five-day photography trip along the border that had included Terlingua. We were heading back to Los Angeles the next day.
As we confirmed our flights to LAX, Wade and I learned that LAX was one of the three airports in the U.S. in which they would begin screening airline passengers from Wuhan, China for symptoms of a new and reportedly lethal coronavirus.
I recall that we did not take the news seriously. We did not guess that within months, the great city of El Paso itself, overrun with infection and death, would be ordering mobile morgues. We did not dream that over 880,000 people would die nationwide within the next two years.
Instead, we joked that we had drank enough tequila during our night in Juarez to kill any virus. And to our credit, we were otherwise preoccupied with what we had seen and experienced on this amazing trip — the sweep of the border’s beauty, people, and history, along with the tragedies of what we assumed was a bygone era.
