Customs and Border Protection has started wall construction out near Big Bend National Park, and the man who used to run that park has spoken up about it. Read the original report yourself, all of it.

I don't ranch that stretch of the river, but I know country like it. Big Bend is some of the hardest, least forgiving ground on the border. That terrain does more work than any wall ever will, and it does it for free. I couldn't tell you whether the people planning this ever bothered to notice.

The former superintendent decided this was worth raising hell about, and that tells you plenty. Those people don't come out of the woodwork over construction projects unless something's wrong. The report doesn't give you his whole case, and I don't put words in people's mouths. But when the man who ran the place talks, you listen. That's just how it works out here, and Washington could stand to learn it.

Here's the part that makes me squint: the timing. The report says there's a park project looming too. Anybody who's run a ranch knows exactly how this goes. One budget for fence repair, one budget for the barn, and somehow the fence crew shows up first, chews the road to pieces getting there, and now the barn crew can't get equipment in. Multiply that by a national park and you've got it.

Construction in remote country is never gentle. Haul trucks need roads, materials need staging, concrete needs water, and the mess goes somewhere. I've still got an old two-track on my place from a pipeline crew back in the 90s that grows nothing but caliche. That's my land and my story, and it's exactly why I don't trust heavy equipment on ground it doesn't own. The track record is garbage.

I keep a file in my head of what the government has built on this border and what it cost the people living here. Water lines cut. Gates left standing open. Fences pushed flat and never fixed. That's my ledger from twenty-five years of living out here, not something you'll find in any report. The wall argument itself is Vince's end of it, and we've been arguing it for years. My end is the ground truth: somebody has to live with what gets built, and it's never the people who signed the paperwork.

If the park project gets squeezed or delayed because of the wall work, that's a real cost, and the folks who visit Big Bend and the folks who work there will pay it. Bet on that.

Somebody ought to drive the river road and look at the country before pouring another yard of concrete. I've been saying that about this border for twenty-five years, and mostly what I get back is a form letter. It's about time somebody proved me wrong.