Photo by Reine Wonite/Special to the Alpine Daily Planet
“Here is a self-portrait taken at the high point of Lost
Mine Trail on March 18, 2013, moments after I set a new personal best for my
ascent from the trailhead while carrying 45 pounds,” says Reine Wonite. “It was
my first new personal best for such since May 31, 2011.”
Photo by Cindy McIntyre/Special to the Alpine Daily Planet
“I’m capturing video of the not-so-common common black hawk
in the Rio Grande Village area of the park,” says Reine Wonite.
Photo by Reine Wonite/Special to the Alpine Daily Planet
“Here’s one of the lion photos I shot for the park with my
Nikon D50 DSLR with 200mm lens on August 21, 2011, while scouting the Chisos
Mountains for Great Divide Pictures, the professional film crew who created the
soon-to-be-released “Big Bend: Life On The Edge” official park intro film,”
says Reine Wonite. “This is upper Pinnacles Trail. Although I passed the same
spot with them the following day, this lion has not been sighted since. Great
Divide used this photo and a few others to create a brief quasi-animation for
the mountain lion portion of the film.”
Editor’s note:
Terlingua resident Carlton Leatherwood writes for the Daily Planet, offering
insights into the people and places that give the Big Bend of Texas its texture
and flavor.
By Carlton Leatherwood
Alpine Daily Planet
The house design fulfills the dream of a little girl.
The surrounding land of “snow leopards” fulfills another
dream, at the end of a wild trail that led a high school dropout through
western and oriental medicine and wildland fire.
This is the setting for local goddesses who celebrated with
an expansive view of their heaven, the Big Bend country and its namesake
national park.
And it is fitting country for a “gorgeous, amazing” film,
which the park will soon debut.
I dropped in on Reine Wonite (pronounced “RAIN-ah Juanita”),
volunteer park videographer, the day her house got its travertine kitchen
countertops. They arrived just in time for the annual Terlingua Goddess Party,
which Wonite hosted this year. The event acknowledges the spirit of its
originator, the late Janet Sullivan, and the special quality of female energy
that gravitates to the Big Bend.
“In early 2004, I met many Terlingua Goddesses through
participation in Last Minute Low Budget Production’s version of Eve Ensler’s ‘The
Vagina Monologues’” Wonite said. “There were over 30 of us, and immediately I
resonated with everyone’s tremendous spirit.”
More recently, Reine portrayed a doddering 90-year-old in
another Last Minute Low Budget Production. “A lot of folks did not recognize
me. The makeup was pretty intense, and I used an old lady’s voice.”
A high clearance road winds up the hill to Casa del
Corazones (“Hearts’ Home”). It’s also called The Outside-In House, because much
of its interior is designed to look out-of-doors. The living room design
recalls a windowed courtyard, another room a fern-walled canyon. In the
bedroom, dark blue paint will mimic the midnight sky on its walls and ceiling,
where she’ll map the summer stars.
Home of her dreams…
“I wanted to bring the outside inside,” Wonite said. “Both
my father and grandfather were contractors who built creative one-off homes,
never tract homes. My dad in particular liked to do creative things with ‘unsaleable’
lots. One lot had a stream through the middle, and he designed a house that
went over the stream; the front hallway was a bridge.”
As a little girl, Wonite aspired to design her own house.
Casa del Corazones broke ground eight years ago, but it has been functionally
complete for just the past few years. She and her husband, David Elkowitz, are
building it on the Terlingua Plan — accumulate some money, build for a while,
save up again.
A rat-riddled hunter’s cabin had stood on the property.
“David dismantled it. I kept him distracted from the filth
by reading murder mysteries to him,” she said. “Most of our interior walls are
boards salvaged from that cabin.”
There was another dream.
“My whole life, I’ve wanted to tell stories with motion
pictures,” Wonite shared. She wrote her first screenplay when she was 6 or 7.
But when she got to high school, Reine was told that if she
was serious about such a career, she would have to go live in Los Angeles or
New York City. She could not see herself living in a large city, so she started
looking for a different career. She studied pre-med subjects and eventually specialized
in oriental medicine.
Getting ahead of
ourselves…
But first, let’s fast-forward 40 years or so.
Three years ago, Big Bend National Park was able to purchase
professional-grade video equipment with a donation from the Friends of Big Bend
National Park. Someone was needed to take on the task of learning to use it to
create a comprehensive series of short videos about the park. Wonite
volunteered.
She added, “Four decades later, the technology has changed
to where someone does not have to live in a big city to produce high-quality
videos. I felt like my ship had come in.”
She’s completed three so far: “Big Bend in One Day,” “This
Video Could Save Your Life!” and “Floodplain Farms — Then and Now”. The first
two have been uploaded to the park website and YouTube, the third will be up
soon. Many more are in various stages of production.
“The park gets a shocking number of new visitors who ask, ‘We
only have one day. What should we see?’ I based ‘Big Bend in One Day’ on the
stock answer. Its principal actors were seasonal rangers in real life. They had
just got engaged, so they had this delightful chemistry.”
The second video is about the imagined versus the real
dangers of the park.
“Many people assume ‘lions and borders and bears, oh my’ are
the most justifiable worries in the Big Bend, but negative incidents have been
rare to non-existent.”
She elaborated: “What people need to worry about most are
vehicle accidents: single vehicle rollovers on the park’s narrow roads. They’re
the most common cause of disastrous vacations here, followed closely by the sun
and getting stranded or lost.” Thankfully, even those don’t happen very often.
Firefighting,
Boquillas and staying in shape…
The park has a niche in her personal life as well. Consider
Boquillas where, after the border closed, wildland firefighting for the park became
its primary source of income.
Have you been over since it reopened? I asked.
“I have, I have,” she responded. “My first-ever visit. The
border had just closed when I moved to Big Bend in 2002. It’s been very odd,
because I soon became well-acquainted with many of its menfolk. You see, for
much of the past decade, I was a full-time wildland firefighter for the park,
and one of my duties was to help lead Los Diablos, the park’s Mexican
firefighters. We’ve fought many fires together — we’ve traveled together as far
away as northern Montana and Idaho. But I had never visited where they lived.
It was neat to encounter them in their own environment.”
And she uses Lost Mine Trail to stay in shape.
“At 56, I’m definitely into the Use-It-Or-Lose-It stage of
my life, and I need to carry the video gear in the back-country unassisted.”
One of the photos that appear with this article is a
self-portrait taken at the high point of the trail in March, moments after she
set a personal record for her ascent while carrying 45 pounds.
“While I walk up as fast as I can,” Wonite explained, “I
float back down on a cloud of endorphins, taking photographs and serving up
impromptu resource interpretation and general visitor information to curious
park visitors. My 1975 Alpenlite external-frame pack with its big plastic water
jug is a common starting point for their questions about the park.”
In her former life, Wonite practiced Chinese medicine in
California as a licensed acupuncturist and medical herbologist. She started
college when she was 16 after dropping out of high school at 15. She graduated
from UC Davis with a pre-med major, but soon decided she didn’t believe in
modern medicine.
Hospital work changed
her life…
“Right out of college, I went to work in a convalescent hospital,”
she related. “It really changed my life. I worked for over a year in a 100-bed
facility whose patients were mostly in their mid-80s. Most of them were in
there because they’d been ‘saved’ by modern medicine.
“They’d had a heart attack, or a stroke, or a bad bout with
the flu, or they’d broken a hip. In another era those people might well have
said, ‘I’ve had a life, and I’m ready for something else.’”
She continued, “But because of how the system is structured,
they were snatched up and taken to the emergency room, all these heroic things
done to them. They were stabilized, and then they got warehoused. Most of them
were very miserable.”
Eventually, Wonite obtained a graduate degree in oriental
medicine, got licensed, and was in practice for 10 years.
In Chinese philosophy, she explained, losing one’s life is
not nearly to be feared as much as losing one’s health. “Long life” is more
about adding life to your years than adding years to your life, but western
medicine’s priority is to add years.
“I’m sure people will debate me with specific cases,” she
concluded. “I’m painting with a very broad brush. But by the time I was to
leave for med school, I’d decided I needed to do something else.”
Back to the present.
Now that its new auditorium is ready, the park plans to show
a new film introducing visitors to that grand environment; the premiere is at
10 a.m. May 25.
“‘Big Bend: Life on the Edge’ is a gorgeous film, an amazing
film,” Wonite declared. “Great Divide Pictures, the outfit who contracted to
make it, spent a lot of money on helicopter footage so that visitors will get
to see the park as very few ever can in person.”
But principal shooting fell during the worst of the recent
drought, and the film’s first draft didn’t have a whole lot in the way of green
things, blooming things or animals.
Wonite and the
mountain lion…
“Meanwhile, it had started to rain again,” Wonite said. “Things
greened up and bloomed, animals started reappearing. I was out there trying to
capture as much as I could, and I work in the same high-definition format they
do. Although they were reaching budget by then, they sent me a huge external
drive. I copied my best clips to it and sent it back. They added some of them
to the film, until their funding ran out completely.”
She generously posted one of her mountain lion photos for
this article.
“Here’s one of the lion photos I shot for the park with my
Nikon D50 DSLR with 200mm lens on August 21, 2011, while scouting the Chisos
Mountains for the Great Divide film crew,” she explained.
“This is upper Pinnacles Trail. Although I took them to the
same spot the following day, this lion has not been sighted since. Great Divide
used this photo and a few others to create a brief quasi-animation for the mountain
lion portion of the film.
“I think of myself as video-stalking the ‘snow leopards’ of
the Big Bend,” she enthused. “In the BBC Nature series ‘Planet Earth’ with
David Attenborough, there’s a fantastic scene where a snow leopard chases a
mountain goat down a steep mountainside. It’s epic stuff, but it took that
videographer THREE MONTHS to get that footage — for maybe 15 seconds on-screen.
“That’s my inspiration. And the Big Bend is full of
fleeting, snow leopard-quality material.”
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