The most beautiful place on Earth

This will be sent out in the next edition of the newsletter. Please consider a subscription to support our work. Or else join me in donating to Indigenous-led work across La Junta de los Ríos and the Greater Big Bend here.

Whatever they build we’ll take back when they get bored and leave

This is the most beautiful place on Earth. 
-Edward Abbey

by Rob Brill

We live in Marfa, Texas, 1600 or so people in an artist colony, frontier outpost, and former fort built as a railroad water stop about 50 miles north of the Rio Grande in the high Chihuahuan desert. We look at and make art and music and write and get into small town tiffs with each other. It’s the most beautiful place on earth. It’s a pilgrimage to visit, and a choice to not have access to a lot of things to live here; beauty isn’t one of those.

John McCain released an ad during his Arizona senate campaign after he lost to Obama where he said that if he won, he’d “build the dang fence.” A lot of people online thought it was a funny phrase. I made a joke about it in an Instagram caption a couple years later when I first visited Santa Elena canyon, where the Rio Grande passes between thousand-foot-tall cliffs in Big Bend National Park and all along the river are sacred sites and petroglyphs. This year Santa Elena has been where we hold protests and get photographed in the water holding signs between those cliffs. On the three hour drive from the airport to Marfa, which is still 50 desolate miles from the river, you see why this has always been contested territory, why it can’t be controlled. I’ve been trying for years to find the NEXT SERVICES sign with the longest distance on an American highway and there’s one two hours north of here near the Guadalupe mountains that’s in the running at 145 miles. The one at the edge of Marfa heading to El Paso says 75 miles but that’s just to Van Horn (pop. 5000). El Paso, our nearest airport, is 170 miles away. We have to pass through a border patrol checkpoint in Sierra Blanca on the way. The joke was that you’d have to be crazy and stupid to try to build a fence here.

Presidio county, which we’re the seat of, is larger than the state of Delaware and has about 6,000 full-time residents. We pretty much all know each other or like to pretend that we do. The federal contracts awarded this year to build a 30-foot-tall steel fence, roads, lights, and cameras along the part of the river that forms the southern boundary of our county total around $2.1 billion dollars, or about $350,000 per resident. Presidio is one of the poorest counties in Texas. We could have used that money.

What really got people outside the region going was footage of Caterpillar D20 bulldozers tearing up untouched sections of the national park along a cliff edge. Everybody hates to see that part. It made national news. 

We sell Caterpillars to Israel to do their gruesome work as well. 

The largest and best-funded organization against the wall in this region filed a lawsuit a few weeks ago and got a temporary injunction against continued construction on the basis that there aren’t very many people caught crossing the border around here. Since then they’ve been loading up the machines and taking them somewhere else. Today I saw that someone asked them where they were going and they said they were taking it to where they can still use it. 

Right after the ruling came down that they couldn’t keep destroying things here, for now, they cut down the grandmother tree in Arizona and have been trying to break the resistance camp there, arresting and beating up those of us putting our bodies on the line for our home and its soils and plants and animals and history. They’re trying to get people out of the next tree they want to cut down by pumping exhaust from the trucks at the tree sitters so I guess they found a use for that equipment already. They couldn’t let us think that hauling it off from here meant they were done. A court will probably say they can come back and we’re supposed to think that there’s nothing we can do about it except get arrested for destruction of federal property or impeding a federal officer or whatever. Lots of us have been getting arrested for stuff like that everywhere they’re doing this. When I talk about “them” I mean it in the paranoiac sense that becomes real when you live under occupation. When I talk about “us” I mean it in the sense of community and family and loving one another.

Texas doesn’t really have public land, which, surprisingly, makes it harder for them to build here than elsewhere. When the Texas government surrendered at the end of the civil war, a condition of it joining the union was that the state would be allowed to sell all of its claimed land to pay off the debts from fighting a losing war for the right to keep slaves. It took a lot more violence to be able to sell that land and pay that debt, most of it committed by the Texas Rangers who killed pretty much everyone they could find to try to make this place a part of Texas and America. But it’s still not really Texas and still not really America, no matter what all those westerns say. Lonesome Dove makes what Blood Meridian describes sound charming. You can read about the Porvenir Massacre on a historical marker during that 75 mile stretch without services on the way in from the airport.

They parceled off the land along the river from El Paso to Laredo and sold, to families who managed to stay here through the years of lead and desert rats who came after, titles written in blood. A pretty funny bumper sticker you see sometimes says “I Wasn’t Born In Texas But I Got Here As Fast As I Could.” They bribed and threatened those along the river when they created the national park, funny enough, so that’s how it got made. They promised a few dollars an acre and that it would be protected forever. One weird trick that people from far away still fall for after visiting out here is buying cheap land online only to learn later that it can’t be reached without a helicopter. No roads touch the land but they don’t tell the buyer that. Interestingly, the Texas parts of the Lonesome Dove TV show were filmed in the state park right near the river. Lots of There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men were filmed out here too. Maybe it’s not funny but you gotta laugh.

Earlier this year a friend called me because there were some guys with nazi tattoos carrying pistols who were bullying a local into letting them take a busted-down truck that they said they owned from a handshake deal with the guy who used to own the bar here. My friend wanted to go stand up to them and tell them to fuck off. He’s been here a few years longer than I have and always keeps a loaded .38 in the glovebox. Most people here have a gun pretty close to hand. The local they were threatening talked my friend down, told him hey, let’s just wait ten years and go get it back from wherever they take it, they’ll get bored and leave. From experience he’s right. So I try to keep that attitude. Whatever they build, we’ll take back when they get bored and leave.

We live here and know the power of this place to transfigure people and ideas. Probably why all those prophets from the bible were always going out to the desert. Two years ago in preparation for doing this stuff the U.S. government sent 500 infantry members our way, which is a lot of people in a town of 1600. Plenty of them still live in a hotel in downtown Marfa and get free gym and pool passes from the hotel owner. They show up wearing fatigues in white and black Suburbans with illegally-tinted windows and plates from Idaho, California, and Montana. For a few months after they arrived we would see them towing big green jungle-camouflage six-wheeled trucks with mounted guns south toward the river on semis with huge flatbeds. They still drive around town a lot but you can always tell they don’t belong because everyone’s cars here are weird or old or busted or all three and they’re always wearing those fatigues. We all wave to each other when we drive past. They don’t. The liquor store won’t sell to them.

Before this, when someone you didn’t want to see was driving around town all day it was usually just a drunk old guy who would talk your ear off. Earlier this year one of them called the cops on one of the drunk old guys and tried to get him arrested for smelling like booze at the gas station in the morning. Followed him to his house in one of those Suburbans and waited until the city cops got there. He smelled hung over, not drunk—when you live here long enough you can tell the difference. The last time I was getting a burrito at the burrito place where Anthony Bourdain visited and his picture is on the wall and you used to have to order in Spanish and pay in cash a few of them were there. A Mexican guy was politely fucking with one, asked her if she spoke Spanish. She said no, her family does but she never learned, she understands more than she speaks. A few times a week now they fly a blue and white helicopter low over the main streets of town, it’s almost as loud as when the train goes by. I know the people in the helicopter see that this is the most beautiful place on Earth. When they leave we’ll have some of those big trucks with mounted guns. We could use them.

Rob Brill can be found on Bluesky at @dessertrat.bsky.social.