Mike Fink Goes to Big Bend
by Raymund Eich
© 2011 Raymund Eich
Published by CV-2 Books
Smashwords Edition
Cover art: Detail from portrait of Davy Crockett by John Gadsby Chapman (1808-1889)
Map of Big Bend National Park, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. NPS and DOI do not endorse this use of the image.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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You know, niña, Big Bend used to be very different. No lakes, no forests, no pygmy triceratops and stegosaurs roaming the countryside. No, honest, niña, I wouldn’t lie to you. Back at the turn of the century, Big Bend was the dustiest corner of Texas. How did it change? Well...
Mike Fink had worked for a couple hundred years--poling flatboats down the Ohio, running locomotives for the Missouri Pacific, driving a tractor trailer between Juarez and Windsor--so he retired rich. Compound interest, you know. He bought fifty thousand acres in Presidio County, the biggest part of the Big Bend. Nothing grew on his land but dry grass along the highway between Marfa and the Chinati ridge.
Mike, though, had a plan. He took off his shirt, knelt down, and punched the ground. A crater formed under his fist. He turned around and tossed rock fragments into the Pacific. Waves swept over atolls, but Mike paid no mind. He turned back to the fist-sized hole, punched, tossed the fragments out to sea. Forty days he kept at, and extended the hole five hundred miles southeast. Sweat poured off him, and when it dried the wind pushed salt drifts across the highway. Scientists blamed rising sea levels on global warming, instead of the rocks he'd thrown.
Finally, Mike’s tunnel reached the Gulf of Mexico near Brownsville. He groped up through sea bottom mud and reached the cold salt water. Yet Mike had a plan for that too. He squeezed his fist around some ocean water, squeezed so hard the water flowed up the tunnel but left the salt behind. He squeezed, again and again, till the veins stood up on his arms and his forehead; but he had fresh water for his fifty thousand acres. He used rubble from the tunnel to dam the water, and planted crops on his land: insect-resistant corn, herbicide-resistant soybeans, blue-gene cotton. Tired from his work, Mike sat on the Chinati ridge, looked north at his land, and rubbed his sore right arm.
Behind him and to the right, gravel popped under tires. Mike turned. Across the river, a black Chevy Suburban with tinted windows and state of Chihuahua license plates pulled up. The driver’s door opened, and Principe Oso stepped out on his hind legs. His claws scratched at the ground, and his gold-brown fur shone in the sun. Sunglasses and a vacquero hat don’t look good on every bear, but they looked good on him.