It is a smallness in us — this urge to line a canyon with access roads, this habit of picking fights with quiet things, this loss of restraint in the name of control. Yet the outfitter in Terlingua speaks up, the sheriff looks at the cliff and calls it God’s wall, and for a moment, the engines idle on the dirt.

There are places in this country that were supposed to be off-limits to our worst impulses. Big Bend was one of them. For generations, the idea of a national park was a quiet agreement between ourselves and the land: a promise that some places were too rare, too slow to form, and too fragile to be carved up by the politics of the day. Watching heavy machinery roll past Santa Elena Canyon to scrape wide access corridors through intact desert feels like a total breakdown of that agreement.

We’d always joke that the toll for having Big Bend in your backyard was living in Odessa—a small price to pay to endure the flat ground. You load up early on a weekend, head south down Highway 385 through Crane and McCamey, watch the pump jacks give way to mesa country, and by early afternoon, you’re pitching tents at Rio Grande Village Campground—a cherished memory.