Some land you don't pave over, and the folks out in Far West Texas would like the government to hear that sentence before the bulldozers start. A federal judge has issued an emergency injunction blocking border barrier and road construction across the Big Bend region, and the landowners who've been fighting the project are treating the ruling like a stay of execution. Which, in a way, it is. Their land is what's scheduled for execution.

The story over at MSN lays it out plainly. There's a $46 billion wall project moving ahead, and a stretch of it would run through some of the most beautiful, least populated country in the United States. The landowners out there have been suing to stop the plans, and their resistance, according to the reporting, had already slowed the project to a crawl before the judge stepped in. Construction is blocked now, at least for the moment.

I've driven through Big Bend country twice in my life, and I'll tell you what I remember more than any movie I've ever reviewed: the silence. It takes eight hours to get there from anywhere, and when you arrive, you understand why people endure it. The land is enormous and empty and older than any of our arguments about it. Standing out there makes you feel like an extra in a John Ford picture, except the sky is real and it goes on forever.

That's what these families are trying to protect. Nobody out there is pretending the border questions are simple. What they're saying is simpler: you don't run a concrete ribbon through that country because it looks tidy on a map in Washington. They went to court instead of rolling over, and for now the court has said the bulldozers wait.

The pause is temporary, mind you. Temporary pauses have a way of becoming permanent for whoever has the better lawyers, and the government has an army of them. But for the moment the work has stopped, and a handful of stubborn Texans have done what stubborn Texans do, which is plant their feet and dare somebody to move them.

The movies have a long tradition of this story, the homesteader against the railroad, the rancher against the baron, Spencer Tracy staring down the bad guys in Bad Day at Black Rock. Hollywood used to know whose side to be on in that one, and it wasn't the side with the machinery. You didn't need a lecture to get it; you just needed to watch a man's fence line at dusk and understand that some things aren't for sale.

The wall fight will go on in courtrooms and hearings, and I don't envy the judges stuck with it. But I know this much. Anybody who has stood in that country at sundown, with the mountains going purple and not a sound but the wind, knows there are places where the scenery deserves top billing. You don't bulldoze through the best set ever built just because the schedule says so.