When Everett Ewing Townsend, a 23-year-old customs inspector stationed on the border in the Big Bend, saw the South Rim of the Chisos Mountains for the first time, he knew his life was about to change. The vista — a hundred-mile panorama of lush green piñon forests giving way to forbidding desert and finally to the glittering ribbon of the Rio Grande — brought him to his knees. “It made me see God as I had never seen him before,” he recalled years later.