The land has many names:

El Despoblado. The Empty Space on the Map.

The Chisos. El Rio. La Frontera.

Sky Island in a Desert Sea.

The Last Frontier.

For more than fifty years, the heart of it has been officially known as Big Bend National Park.

***

I first saw Big Bend as a young boy.

My father had taken my sister and me on a trip through Texas in his brand-new Studebaker Silver Hawk. We'd come directly from the Alamo, whose stature and location in downtown San Antonio was a big disappointment to a seven-year-old smitten with Fess Parker and all things Davy Crockett. Big Bend made up for that letdown. At first glance, I immediately realized I had found the Texas of my dreams. These were real mountains, magnificent and grand, rising abruptly from the dusty plain. There was no mistaking that this was a desert, not the greened-up prairies and woodlands I'd known in North Texas, where we lived. The scenery was thorny and prickly—and dangerous. The distances were long. The sun was hot. This was not the kind of place to be lost in. The higher and wetter Chisos was a whole other world. Real mountain country. In Texas.

Big Bend National Park has been an integral part of my life ever since—it's my salvation, my respite, my escape from the real world, my quiet space far from the static of humanity, where my mind can wander and my soul be replenished.

I have never witnessed a sunrise as illuminating as the ones lighting up the mighty Chisos, thrust skyward aeons ago by volcanic forces. The luminous light that paints the ruddy bands of the limestone face of the Del Carmen Mountains above Boquillas at the end of the day makes the term "Technicolor" too understated. From the top of South Rim, I can see all the way to tomorrow. More than once when I've been camping in Big Bend, I've gone to sleep wearing my glasses—in case I wake up in the middle of the night I want to be able to gaze into the infinity of the brightest star-showered skies on the continent.

I have floated in awe through Big Bend's majestic river canyons, climbed its mountains, and trekked its deserts. I've ridden on horseback through the tall grasses and oak woodlands, driven its pavement, and spun around its back roads. I've wandered its trails and spent a week backpacking across more than seventy miles just so I could say I'd walked across the big bend of Big Bend.

I have tried and failed to count the exact number of layers that constitute the surreal, not-of-this-earth walls of the Big Tinaja—each limestone slice a lingering bathtub ring marking centuries of changing water levels.

I've witnessed crude petroglyphs, delicate pictographs, petrified forests and yucca forests, palisades turned into raging waterfalls in violent thunderstorms outside the entrance of Santa Elena Canyon, too close lightning bolts on the Mesa de Anguila.

Not everybody gets Big Bend—which is fine for those of us who do. The great American folksinger Woody Guthrie wandered here. The great Southwestern writer Ed Abbey extolled its virtues.

Being a Big Bend true believer amounts to having an innate willingness to drive five hundred miles at the drop of a hat to see a sunset where sunsets really mean something and then cracking a smile when you realize that for all that distance and all those extraterrestrial sensations imparted, you're still in Texas.

The more I go, the more I realize I've just scratched the surface. Big Bend National Park is too huge and too complex to ever fully understand. Which are two good reasons to love the place all the more.