These two buildings were visible from our apartment in La Paz, Bolivia. The characters in the buildings and the scenes around them have inspired a new short story presently entitled "The Postal Clerk". More about this one coming soon.
Shortly after I moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s, I fell in love with the desert. I visited Joshua Tree National Monument several times, the Salton Sea and Death Valley National Park. When you start walking into and through the desert, you never know what you are going to find. If you take your time and look around, especially down, you will see far more than rocks and cactus.
That affinity stuck with me when I returned to Texas in the 1990s. I visited Big Bend National Park three times with my friend John Weems. We always took on some trail that was bigger than it seemed. The loop from the Chisos Basin to the South Rim Trail and back was one of those big ones. We left before the sun came up and returned after it had set. Other than the hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, this was the toughest hike I had ever taken. Still it was worth every painful step.
With my birder friend, Stu Wilson, I also visited and camped in Guadalupe Mountains National Park on the border of Texas and New Mexico. The area between Big Bend and the Guadalupe Mountains is vast and desolate.
When I became a birder, one of my favorite trips was to southeastern Arizona. Here the mountains and deserts meet. This area, and a quick pass through Rodeo, New Mexico, influenced "The Unlikely Twins", the title story in my second book.
Also, growing up in central Texas, legends of the Comanches abounded. I always found myself sympathetic to the Native American tribes that had once inhabited Texas and much of the United States. I always liked to point out that I was only the second generation of my family born in the United States to create a little distance from that dark period in U.S. history.
The images of Big Bend, the desert and the Comanches kept popping into my head as I began writing stories. After I had written a few, I wanted to write one with a strong female protagonist. Not just a strong female, but an unexpected protagonist. Somehow out of all of that came "Mustangs Dance" and the teenage Comanche girl who would play a significant part in leading her clan out of danger, at least for awhile. All pure conjecture on my part, but it certainly could have been true.
The story which became a poem includes several other images from Big Bend and the western part of Texas. I did do a little research to make sure I was close to accurate in placing the clans in certain locations in which they actually did inhabit.
On a side-note, if you have never visited a prairie-chicken or grouse lek in Colorado or one of its bordering states, check out a video of one. You will immediately see how the mating rituals of these species with head shakes, spinning and foot-stomping significantly influenced the headdresses and dances of Native Americans.
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