If you head toward the Big Bend and then go into the region between the national park and state park, you’ll feel like you’re driving onto an alien planet. Sweeping desert views in every direction punctuated by rocky cliffs of tan and red are both beautiful and bizarre.
Eventually you’ll reach the notable ghost town of Terlingua (population 130 or so), a few miles from the Mexican border. It’s hard to imagine how folks live in such a faraway locale, but a trip to the cemetery confirms that Texans have been living out here for a very long time.
Like every tourist, I started my visit with a bowl of red at the Starlight Theatre, a destination restaurant built inside the stone shell of an old movie theater. After filling my belly, I wandered down the street and stepped onto the hallowed ground of the town’s historic cemetery.
This is not your typical green acres of eternal slumber but a dusty patch of desert with uneven stacks of rocks marking graves, along with handmade crosses, rusted metal ornaments, plastic flowers and even a few beer bottles.
The silence was broken only by the wind and the abrupt buzz of a grasshopper that I kept mistaking for a rattlesnake. Most of the graves date back to the early 1900s, when families moved here to seek their fortune in the long-defunct mercury mines. Many of the graves note the same death year: 1918, when the Spanish flu ripped through the community.
As the last bit of sunlight disappeared behind the mountains, the graveyard glowed with a dusty kind of reverence. It’s clear the community still feels a great deal of pride and connection to its past. It serves as a reminder that not all who wander to this part of Texas are lost, and some choose to never leave.
