Ribbons of Time

One of our all-time favorites, Ribbons of Time, was reviewed by Jean Hardy in the Winter 2007 issue of The Desert Candle.

EVERY NOW AND THEN, when I recall my first, life-altering, encounter with the Big Bend in 1988, I feel that somehow the magic and mystery of the Big Bend Country that I felt back then has faded?that everything is known, everything revealed and written about. All plants and animals described, all rock formations named and arranged in their appropriate geologic time sequence, all human history catalogued and recorded.

Are there, in fact, any mysteries left for anyone to discover here?

Then along comes a book like Ribbons of Time: The Dalquest Research Site, and with it the reminder that yes, there is still magic and mystery in abundance, certainly in the Big Bend, and surely in many other places on the face of the earth and beyond.

The book came as a surprise. A photographer, Walter W. Nelson, walked into the store and handed it to me, and I was astonished by its beauty. Essentially a book of Nelson?s photographs of a canyon few have ever heard of, it also had text by Douglas Preston, a versatile and famously successful writer.

The photo on the cover made clear the titular phrase ?ribbons of time.? Spreading across the wide-format front and wrapping around the spine and back was a sweeping panorama of steep canyon walls eroded through eons, exposing horizontal ribbons of varicolored stone in crenallations of white, tan, brown, peach, and reddish hues, the far-reaching shadows awash in purplish blue. Inside the book, more than a hundred images, the largest ones, I later learned, taken with a heavy 8x10 Deardorff view camera, captured the breathtaking scenery, the textures of weathered stone, the desert skies, mists and fogs, the grasses and succulents, wildflowers, springs, the oddly eroded rocks?and all in various qualities of light. It was the work of a photographer with patience, endurance, agility, and artistry.

Nelson left me with a stack of the books and came back later with a photography show of framed, numbered, and signed limited-edition prints, moved from a showing at a Marfa gallery. He expertly hung his photographs on our red walls, and many visitors have seen and appreciated them. It has been a joy to live at work with these photos for the past weeks.

The canyon?actually a series of canyons?is known as the Devil?s Graveyard, a name bestowed by geologists. Situated south of Marfa, east of Casa Piedra, and well west of Highway 118, it lies north of the eastern portion of Big Bend Ranch State Park, about two-thirds in Brewster and the rest in Presidio County. It is approached only by private roads with locked gates. Don?t even think about trying to go there.

Preston?s text gives a valuable and readable summary of the entire region?s history, and an excellent narrative of the ownership of the ranchlands specific to the site and adjacent properties. He deftly interweaves the complex geologic story, the cultural and historical contexts, the biological richness, and the carving out of the Dalquest site as a unique natural laboratory for scientific research. And he charmingly describes his personal study of life around a desert pool, a tiny drama in which a Southwestern Big Red dragonfly is the protagonist.

The research site came to be in this way: In the mid-1900s, when the canyon was part of the remote Bandera Ranch, Lee Glascock Bennett inherited the entire tract from her stepfather, Pearl Andrew Jackson. Lee and her husband, Murphy Bennett, lived and ran sheep above the canyon in the 1950s, moving to Marfa when their two boys reached school age. During that period, they seldom made it down to the Falls, as they referred to the beautiful canyon bottom, as the descent was treacherous and time-consuming. They sold the sheep and established new lives in town, Lee teaching school and Murphy engaging in several business enterprises. Eventually he returned to improving the land and running livestock from his base in Marfa.

In 1968, Murphy Bennett suggested they sell the beautiful but unproductive canyon portion of the ranch; Lee reluctantly agreed. Two sections of it were snapped up, site unseen, by Walter W. Dalquest, and his first wife, Ruth, of Wichita Falls. Dalquest taught biology at Midwestern State University and was widely known as a field man, a dedicated naturalist who had published prolifically in mammalogy, ornithology, ichthyology, and vertebrate paleontology.