7 April 2008 by Sandy Hemphill
The Saga of the Best Bottle of Wine I Never Drank - Part 3
The park rangers joined us each evening for dinner, campfire music, the tall tales that make Texas famous, and lots of laughter. And beer.
On our last night at the park, they treated us to a night, and a party, at an old but spectacular hacienda on a cliff overlooking the Rio Grande River with wonderful views of the breathtaking Mexican desert. This is a very secluded building the park rangers reserve for their own personal use and is not identified on any maps, no road signs lead the way, and it isn’t mentioned in any literature available to the public.
There’s a tiny Mexican village on the other side of the river, with a raft that could transport people across from one side of the border to the other. During the day, our camp cooks crossed over and bought a couple of cabritos (baby goats ready to roast over an open fire), a couple bottles of tequila, a bottle of pulque, and more beer for our “last night” party.
A couple of our hardiest hikers trudged six miles up to the highest peak of the mountain range, where the rangers keep a cabin for their use when working way up there so far from their living quarters. There was a hand-cranked ice cream maker up there and we were bound and determined to have ice cream for dessert. Of course, the six-mile hike up the mountain meant a six-mile hike back down. I’ve never known anyone work so hard for ice cream.
My first thoughts were that this would be the perfect occasion to finally enjoy my special bottle of west Texas wine but I had second thoughts and didn’t open it after all.
I just had the one bottle and there were about 40 of us at the party. Seemed to me, there just wasn’t enough to make opening the bottle worthwhile.
And besides, I am a bit of a loner. I crave solitude. Being sequestered hundreds of miles in the wilderness with 30 strangers was beginning to erode my sociability. I wasn’t sure I wanted to share my treasure with these people anymore.
And I certainly didn’t want to suffer through the ravages of a hangover for a ten-hour road trip with them, especially when they might be hung-over, too. The tequila, pulque, and beer courted disaster closely enough for me to avoid them altogether on this night. I limited my liquid consumption for the night to cool, clear water. Lots of it but nothing more.
And, again, the wine stayed in my duffel bag.
I woke up the next day feeling absolutely fabulous. I’d stayed awake most of the night. I watched from the veranda overlooking the river as a fabulously full moon rose in the east and traveled slowly across the sky. As it drifted from one horizon to the other, it lit the desert with a magic that can only be witnessed hundreds of miles from city lights and it cast an unforgetably etheral light over the veranda. Tucked away out there, in the desert and under the open sky, it seemed the moon was so close I could have reached up and touched it.
The moon, the stars, the night breezes blowing across the desert, and the sounds of animals off in the distance was magical. Enchanting. I resolved to return to my friend’s house once we returned to the city, open the bottle of wine she’d sent with me, and share it with her while I told her of all the adventures, and the few misadventures, I’d encountered over the last eight days.
The return to civilization seemed to take forever. Once we arrived back in the city, unloaded our travel vans, I headed to my friend’s house.
She had company, a visitor I’d never met before. I just didn’t feel the setting was right for sharing my very special bottle of wine with this stranger, especially after spending a week with dozens of them. I didn’t stay.