Mike Fink Goes To Big Bend

Sample of “Mike Fink Goes To Big Bend”

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.