the sky will always be there

As the sun sinks low on the first Saturday in January, the RVers in Big Bend National Park’s Rio Grande Village campground prepare for the evening. The desert air fills with the smell of hamburgers and the hum of generators as a couple sets out a pair of camp chairs to watch the sunset. Soon, they’ll settle in for a cozy, quiet night. But as their day drifts to a close, mine is just starting. I’ve enlisted my friend Sam Karas, a river guide with Redford-based Angell Expeditions, on an experimental adventure: an after-dark canoe trip down the Rio Grande. We plan to set out at moonrise. If all goes right, I’ll be back and cocooned in my sleeping bag by midnight. If not—I don’t want to think about that possibility.

The campground parking lot is fully dark by 6:30 p.m., when Sam picks up my boyfriend, Alex, and me for the short drive to the put-in spot. The trip seemed like a fun excursion when I dreamed it up from the comfort of my home in Austin. But now I’m having second thoughts. We immediately run into a problem: We’ve forgotten to bring headlamps, and there are none for sale at the campground store. Fortunately, Sam has an extra, but only one. An owl hoots 
quietly—a sinister omen. “I think we’ll be fine,” Sam says encouragingly.

The idea for our nighttime paddle has its origins in a mishap. A couple of months earlier, Sam went out for a solo afternoon canoe trip on the Rio Grande and became so entranced by the river that she lost track of time. She ended up paddling the last few miles at night, through the aptly named Dark Canyon. There was a new moon, which meant Sam had essentially no light to navigate by. It was a disorienting experience, she told me. She could feel the sensation of movement, but without being able to see the riverbanks, she had no way to gauge how fast she was going, or how far. Fortunately, she’s guided hundreds of trips down this stretch of the river and knows it well. “I used to say that I could paddle Dark Canyon blindfolded,” she told me, laughing. Finally, she had a chance to test that hypothesis. Navigating by feel and memory, she managed to make it off the river unscathed. After such a misadventure, some people would have vowed to stick to dry land for the rest of their lives. But that’s not how Sam’s mind works. Instead, she became preoccupied with how special it had felt to be in a canoe on the river at night. I’d like to do that again, she thought, but this time on purpose—during a full moon.

Hearing about Sam’s impromptu night paddle filled me with envy, and her plan to repeat the experience under more controlled conditions intrigued me. This is the kind of pitch—adventurous, a teensy bit foolhardy—that I used to be very susceptible to. I was moved by an exploratory spirit when I relocated to Marfa in the fall of 2012. That year, I visited Texas for the first time, on a cross-country road trip. Passing through Marfa, I was hooked. I’d never been anywhere like it, with its mix of high culture and desert ruggedness. It was a place where you could enjoy the smell of petrichor after a thunderstorm while gawking at whatever visiting celebrity happened to be wandering around town. I decided I’d stay for a while, as a lark. Then I surprised everyone, not least myself, by living there for 12 years.

At first, I explored constantly. The West Texas landscape, with all its craggy geological drama, felt like a revelation. I couldn’t get enough of it. I spent weekends hiking in both Big Bends, the national park and the state park, or driving north to Guadalupe Mountains National Park. I went to star parties at the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis and navigated the scenic, rutted Pinto Canyon Road to Chinati Hot Springs. I traveled the Rio Grande by raft, canoe, and even inner tube on a day when the water was abnormally high. I bought a tough old Toyota truck and had my friend build a sleeping platform in the back. I loved spending the night in the bed of my truck in some beautiful place or another, feeling as safe and self-contained as a turtle, ensconced in my own little world.

Part of what I appreciated most about living in far West Texas was the night sky. Having spent most of my previous years in light-polluted communities on the East Coast, I had never seen the Milky Way. Honestly, I didn’t even know it was visible to the naked eye. Now, suddenly, there it was above me nearly every night, a galaxy smeared across the inky sky. In my pre-Marfa life, seeing a shooting star had been an extraordinary occasion. Here, the night was spangled with them.

My new appreciation wasn’t limited to celestial objects. I loved the simple act of walking home from a friend’s house in the dark. And it really was dark. The town had hardly any streetlights, and some of the few that did exist had been shot out by peeved locals, or so the rumor went. But I found that my eyes adjusted as I picked my way through the streets and alleys, past the field where a horse always snuffled when he sensed my presence. In the distance, I could hear music from a bar band blending with murmurs from late-night backyard conversations.

The night skies were particularly dramatic in Big Bend, where the unofficial slogan was “half the park is after dark.” The first time I camped at the South Rim was during a full moon. I can still remember how the moonlight hit the striations of rock in the canyon, making the otherworldly landscape look even more alien.

If you had told me back then that I would eventually feel desensitized to all this beauty, I would’ve thought you were nuts. But it turns out that anything, even wonder, can wear off. And after I’d lived in Marfa for a decade, it did. I drove down to Big Bend only a couple of times a year, and the last time I went to a McDonald Observatory star party was before the COVID-19 pandemic. It was easy to come up with excuses: too far, too much of a hassle, too much planning. The park was uncomfortably hot in the summers and in the spring and fall it was overcrowded. A couple of years ago, an out-of-state friend came to visit. She’d never been to Big Bend and wanted to see it. Out of the question, I told her. It was March, and I was sure it was teeming with spring breakers. She insisted, and I caved. We had a lovely time hiking the trails and saw no more than a dozen people. It was increasingly clear that the problem wasn’t that West Texas had grown too popular. It was me who had changed.

In December 2024, sick of being in a long-distance relationship, I moved to Austin to live with my boyfriend. I kept my house in Marfa, figuring I would come back every few months. I was startled by how quickly I felt like an outsider in the town I’d called home for over a decade. After years of feeling quietly superior to all the visitors—no one does smug like a local in a tourist town—I was now just another Austinite in town for the weekend.

But I was surprised to find there was a positive aspect to moving away. Spending so much time apart from West Texas meant that when I returned, I was more engaged, more willing to explore. My blasé, it’ll-be-there-next-week, I’ll-just-go-next-time attitude was gone, replaced with the tourist’s hunger to gobble up experiences and to make the most of scarce time. On an unseasonably cool day last July, I spontaneously drove to Big Bend for a solo overnight trip in the Chisos. When was the last time I’d felt motivated to do something like that? So, when Sam mentioned her nighttime canoe idea, and I looked at the calendar and realized I would be back in Marfa on the January full moon, it felt like fate.

The afternoon before the trip was cloudless and warm, T-shirt weather. Alex and I loaded up with snacks at the French Co. Grocer in Marathon before heading into the park. It had been a largely rainless winter, and Big Bend was parched. From the passenger seat I could tell that even the creosote dotting the rocky hills was thirsty. Before I focused my eyes on the gray-green ribbon of the river, I could decipher where it sat in the landscape from the telltale line of green trees standing out amid all the dried-out grasses.

After meeting Sam at the Rio Grande Village campground, we shuttle in one car to the launching site near the Gravel Pit backcountry campsite, where she has already dropped off two canoes. Now, a half-hour after sunset, the dark has deepened. Sam flicks on her headlamp and loans me her spare. Alex will have to make do without. We load up the canoes with coolers, life jackets, and spare paddles, and stuff extra clothes into a dry bag. Sam encourages us to bring layers, reminding us that temperatures might drop by 40 degrees, to the low 40s, within a few hours. I spot the moon starting to show above the horizon. In Austin, I hardly pay attention to the moon. Seeing it rise over Boquillas Canyon, looking like an enormous gold coin, feels like reacquainting with an old friend. The river is so still, the moon is doubled on its mirrored surface. Finally, it’s time to set off. We push the canoes—one for Alex and me, the other for Sam—into the water, hop in, and begin paddling into the night.

After-dark tourism has always been a draw of West Texas, which boasts one of the darkest skies in the continental United States. Some short-term rentals in the Big Bend Triangle come complete with telescopes, and in Terlingua, you can spend the night in a private observatory with a retractable roof. A former Rio Grande guide recently launched Astro Mucho, one of the region’s first private astronomy guide services. Sam tells me the emphasis on night sky-based tourism makes a lot of sense to her. Over her years as a river guide, she has grown alarmed to see water levels in the river dwindling, due in part to persistent drought. “The river may be in trouble,” she says, “but the sky will always be there.”

During the first third of our 6-mile journey, the river is wide and slow-moving, and I feel my nerves settle as my paddle meets the water in a steady rhythm. “The biggest hazard in this section is probably the cane,” Sam cautions quietly, meaning the thirsty invasive plant that crowds the banks of the Rio Grande despite the park service’s best attempts at eradication. “Avoid it if you can. If you run into some, just duck. And keep ahold of your glasses.” We all feel compelled to speak in whispers out of respect for the stillness of the night.

The moon brightens as it rises. After a couple of minutes, I experiment with switching my headlamp off and realize I can see the riverbanks and the wedge of Sam’s canoe better without it. In the low light, my other senses sharpen, too. The smell of the river mud shifts as the vegetation changes, sometimes grassy and bright, sometimes thick and vegetal. In the distance I hear a faint metallic clinking. On the Mexican side of the river, a shadow resolves into the shape of a cow ambling along in the moonlight. An offended squawk interrupts the silence—the canoes startled a duck nesting in the cane.

The dreamy lull is interrupted by the sound of swift water up ahead. Sam pulls her canoe onto a sandy beach so we can scout what we’ll be paddling into. The rapids in this part of the river don’t exceed Class II, meaning they require no technical skills. But the Rio Grande had flooded over the summer. “It was the most water I’ve ever personally seen in the park,” Sam explains. “It took out roads that are still not fixed.” She hasn’t been down this section since, and it’s possible the channels might have shifted in the floods. This is going to be exciting, she says brightly. “We’ll try to stick near the American side. If that plan needs to change, I’ll let you know,” she advises. “Oh, and anything you don’t want to lose, you should make sure it’s tied to the boat.”

We push out from the beach and before I have time to think, we’ve moved into the current. On both sides of the river, the bluffs glow white in the moonlight. The water propels the canoe forward, into the channel, and suddenly we’re moving fast around a bend. I yelp with something between glee and fear. It’s over quickly, the river widening and slowing as the sound of voices comes from up ahead. We’ve reached the midway point of our journey:  the Langford Hot Springs. These waters, emerging from the ground at 105 degrees, are one of the park’s perennial draws. The road leading to them was damaged in the summer storms, but intrepid visitors are still making their way to the soaking pools by foot—or, in our case, by canoe.

But first, Sam announces, it’s time for dinner. We park the canoes by a picnic table that sits, incongruously, on a gravel shoal in the river. According to Sam, it washed here in the floods. She lays out a tablecloth and a host of supplies: a camp stove, enamel plates, a stack of corn tortillas, and Tupperware containers full of fixings. Within minutes, we’re gobbling up vegetarian picadillo tacos and discussing why food eaten outdoors always tastes better. Sam tells us she moved to the Big Bend area in 2017 after graduating with an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin. When she isn’t guiding river trips, she writes for the Big Bend Sentinel, the weekly newspaper in Marfa. She’s currently living in Shafter, a town with no cell service and a population of around 16. She is, as far as she knows, the only resident older than 9 and younger than 65. She lives on the “wrong side” of the creek that flows through town. When the water rises high enough, she sometimes gets “creeked in” and can’t leave until it ebbs. Once, she was stuck at home for four days, though she said it was glorious. Listening to her rhapsodize about experiences that many people would find frustrating, I realize that Sam’s commitment to adventure keeps her entranced by West Texas. By always seeking out new experiences, no matter how scary or uncomfortable, she constantly renews her sense of awe. It’s an approach I could stand to learn from.

On the riverbank, the hot springs steam in the darkness. We wade through ankle-deep water to reach them, finding space among other happy soakers. The Langford Hot Springs are another place that I visited regularly when I first came to West Texas. I haven’t returned in years, on account of the crowds that I imagined were there. But now, immersed in the life-giving waters alongside a dozen friendly strangers, my reluctance seems foolish, self-defeating. We hop back in our canoes, and the hot springers hoot and wave as we float on down the river.

The section of the river we are approaching now is more dynamic. The channel bends and straightens as the current speeds up and slows down. The moon’s reflection riffles when the water quickens. But it isn’t just my eyes that have adjusted; I feel surprisingly comfortable despite, or maybe because of, the darkness. Orion rises overhead as the canoes move into Hot Springs Canyon. The limestone walls look mysterious, almost sculptural, in the moonlight, like art made by a forgotten civilization. We all instinctively stop chatting, lifting our paddles from the water, to better enjoy the moment in silent appreciation. Then something sizable splashes into the water behind us. “What was that?” I whisper. After a quiet discussion, we conclude it was most likely a Rio Grande beaver, a subspecies of the dam-building critters that lives only along the stretch of the river from northern New Mexico to South Texas. They’re mainly active at night.

It feels as though no time has passed when Sam angles her canoe toward the bank. We have made it back to the Rio Grande Village boat launch, the end of our moonlight adventure. (I could’ve kept going, but Sam points out that the next river access point isn’t for another 34 miles.) We haul the canoes onto shore and load them onto the trailer. Alex and I return to our campsite and crawl into our sleeping bags just before midnight, exactly as Sam had predicted.

Hours later, as the rays from the morning sun wake me, I realize I can hear the trickle of the river in the distance. Last night’s canoe trip feels surreal, like a dream I can only half-remember. What remains is the feeling of wonder. It had been there waiting for me; I’d just forgotten how to look. By embracing adventure again, despite the challenges that come along with it, I remember how to see something familiar through a different lens. Sometimes, all it takes is a little moonlight to remind you of what’s been there all along. 

Rachel Monroe’s Open Road essay “Around the Bend” appeared in the February 2019 issue.