Specimens from the Boneyard
Words and musc by Chuck Pinnell
Hello again. So what am I on about with this blog and this title? I’ll be talking about things that last and survive; like the hard bones of the earth, the memories and momemts and ideas of a long life—that endure.
The photo is a sunset at Big Bend in February 2025. Talk about hard bones. My first trip there and it was life changing. An eight hour drive from Austin to the state park headquarters and another two hours on an impossible four-wheel drive two track to an extraordinarily remote campsite. We arrived after dark with the temperature plunging. The next morning a spectacular basin sunrise with flatiron hoodoos to the immediate North, a towering chimney rock peak to the South, a colossal basalt butte to the West—and no other human beings besides the small band of seasoned BigBenders I was lucky to have accompanied.
They say on the eight day of creation everything left over was tossed into Big Bend. Igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary concoctions in wild abundance. Written into the very bones of the massive formations and crumbled and jumbled into an ifinitely confused riot of broken rock that everywhere overspreads the ground and water courses. A rainbow of color and textures painted in red, blue, orange, yellow, and green. And there are bears and moutain lions and Sandhill Cranes far above working the Rio Grande flyway. But the most extraordinary thing of all is the complete silence and peace.
I went there desperately needing solace. The American world has gone mad, in my opinion. We have done well, all through our storied history, to at least champion high ideals and occasionaly achieve them. But in today’s Washington and in a wide swath of the populace—it’s now only about huckstering greed, petty grievance, and myopic isolation. Anything else is too expensive and asks too much of the mind and heart. Well, my Big Bend trip cost 130$ and at that was an amazing bargain. It renewed my faith in the good hard bones of the world, the sacred worthwhile things that endure, not just milenia but the ages.
Some years ago now I produced an album of re-imagined classics, some from the 19th century and some of them centuries old. It’s called Dark River and well worth a listen. There are stirring instrumentals that I led the way on, like The Last Rose of Summer, but it’s mostly vocals from some of Austin’s finest singer/songwriters. I had the idea to match up specific artists with very specific songs and that worked better than I could’ve imagined or hoped. James McMurtry and Red River Valley, Slaid Cleaves and She Moved Through the Fair, Warren Hood and Rich Brotherton and Shiloh, the late great Jimmy LaFave and Lorena. It was quite a journey to recruit the talent, to work with and get to know them, but most of all to travel deep into the music and discover more of the hard bones of the world, more of the sacred things that endure.
In finally settling down to write The Irish Singer, the untold story of William Bonney—I was fascinated by what I saw as the beginning of the tale; a solo trip across the northern Chihuahua desert at the age of fifteen. It was a desperate on the run adventure into the wild and over some very hard bones. An odyssey, a walkabout, a pilgrimage and a coming of age all wrapped in one.
From Chapter 2…
The desert spoke its secrets in a language he was just beginning to understand. An immense borderless field of arcane knowledge, at once intimate and remote, solid and immaterial, beautiful and terrifying—available to the uninvited for a price. The familiarity soaked into his head a burdensome thing, with no regard for human frailty. And every day it costs more and sinks deeper in.
He’d been traveling on from the sheepherder’s little kingdom for three days. And lost from all marked paths for what seemed an eternity. Not truly lost, for he knew his direction. But the panic of being outside the map is no small thing. Danger closes in, takes on a life of its own. The silence of day sometimes as unnerving as the uncanny bedlam at night. Still, he has courage and faith and looked for a miracle.
It’s out there for me, somewhere.