Butch Hancock probably isn't the first singer-songwriter to wind up, 35 years after that first promising album, sleeping under a tarp down by the river.
But he is the first one I've ever watched wake up.
When I crawled out of my tent in Big Bend National Park in Texas, the United States, that chilly morning, he lay a few yards away, flopped near the water's edge, barefaced under the sky.
Soon the two of us were lined up with the others for coffee from the camp stove.
We had covered 13 miles of the Rio Grande in our rafts the previous day, then camped at the mouth of a canyon.
After dinner, we circled the campfire — eight customers, three river guides and Hancock, strumming and singing.
This is a man who has made several albums, who has played at the Texas governor's mansion and David Letterman's show and who generally sleeps at home with his wife and children.
Musical extravaganza
But Hancock, 62, is also a river rat. On and off for 20 years, he has been joining raft trips run by local outfitter Far Flung Expeditions, which runs two or three musical Big Bend trips every year with home-grown artistes.
For me, the Texas scenery was a big selling point but it was the Texas soundtrack that closed the deal.
To me, there isn't another state outside Louisiana that can match Texas as an incubator of a sovereign musical culture — one that's rich when it comes to lyrics.
Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Kinky Friedman, Lyle Lovett, Hancock — and this list could be longer.
They're not names you hear on the radio but they are voices worth hearing.
Now, as the sun threw a morning blush on to the rock-strewn slopes, the guides rustled up breakfast.
The rest of the campers came shambling from their tents. Hancock, laconic and perpetually bemused, shared the small talk and also some not-so-small talk with the rest.
Desert beauty
When we reached the top of a hike, he dramatically extended an arm to frame the desert panorama below.
It has craggy mountains, cactus-studded slopes, miles of meandering Rio Grande and a couple of born-again ghost towns at its edge.
The summers are infernally hot. Except for a handful of days, rafters can expect nothing more challenging than a Class III rapid.
And if you're from outside Texas, getting here means flying to Midland or El Paso, then driving about five hours while deer, rabbits, skunks, armadillos and javelinas scamper and shuffle in and out of your high beams.
By the time the hills began to undulate and I reached the cheek-by-jowl towns of Terlingua and Study Butte, I had seen more raw Texas than most outsiders care to. But there is a payoff.
As the Rio Grande makes its way south and east through the Chisos Mountains — marking the Texas-Mexico border as it goes — the river frequently dwindles to 30 feet wide and as little as a foot deep but the canyon walls leap up towards the sky.
Of fun untold
Most days, a child can cross the river in the right spot.
But that same river can take a rafter to spots that are remote, rugged and gorgeous enough to satisfy even a well-seasoned desert traveller.
The day we put in, the water was running 300 cu ft per second, a flow so scant that the outfitter almost put us into canoes, which are better than rafts in shallow water.
But we stuck with rafts and put in at Lajitas, ten miles outside Terlingua.
First, we drifted past boulders and tamarisks, a sipping horse here, a sunning turtle there.
Then the Earth began to ripple and rise on either side of us. Of three major canyons that cradle the Rio Grande as it passes through Big Bend, the deepest is Santa Elena, an eight-mile passage that's inaccessible by road.
And that was the heart of our itinerary, the stretch of water that awaited us under those sudden 400-foot cliffs.
In wonder and languor, we drifted along, four rafts in a deep declivity in the middle of nowhere.
Guides Patrick Harris, Sandi Turvan and Darren Wallace told us about the 22 kinds of bats found in the canyon, the 1,200 kinds of plants and the 450 bird species.
Knowing each other
Hancock rowed alongside us in a raft freighted with supplies, pausing frequently to pull out a camera and shoot close-ups.
Despite the ideal weather, we spotted just one other rafting group.
Everyone aboard was from Texas except Jon and Jodi Houlon, a Philadelphia couple, and I.
What, someone asked, inspired the Philadelphians to travel so far?
Jon, attorney by day and frontman by night for a band called John Train, explained to us how he had discovered Butch Hancock's music about 25 years ago as a high school student in Maryland, the US.
Jon ordered an album. And because Hancock was then running his own label on a shoestring, he recalled, “I was getting these cassettes in the mail from a trailer park in Austin, Texas.
My mom was like, ‘What is this?'''
That first night on the river, Hancock sang 17 songs. He wrapped up with the love song Bluebird and a war song When the Good and the Bad Get Ugly.
Then he thanked us for our applause, pointed up and invited us to join him spotting comets.
The headliner, in other words, was deferring to other stars. And in such a brilliant sky, with no competing light source for miles, the gazing was priceless.
The canyon swallowed us the next morning. Floating farther and farther, we ate lunch in Mexico, which is a fancy way of saying we pulled off the river on the right side instead of the left.
We skipped stones by the score, scrambled up a fern canyon and, much to our delight, saw nobody.
By the nightfall on our second camp, still miles from the end of the canyon, the looming walls had reduced the starry sky to a thin twinkling strip directly above us.
Hancock's lyrics bounced around the canyon like bats on the wing, which were present in great numbers as well.
And when I rose from my folding chair at the campfire to stretch my legs, there stood my shadow on the far wall, 75 feet high and flickering.
Bright or dim, a handsome canyon.
“I thought it was going to be pretty but it's just breathtaking,'' said fellow rafter Dottie Hall.
Hancock played a little longer that second night — about 25 songs, including a couple by Dylan and at least three by Townes Van Zandt.
He handed the guitar to Jon for a few minutes, who couldn't resist playing Johnny Cash's Big River. Soon it was 11.
Good things must end
“I don't want to go to sleep,'' Jon said.
But he did. We broke camp, eased back into the slow flow and watched the cliffs stretch up to about 1,400 feet, then dwindle to nothing.
We skipped a few hundred more stones into Mexico. Then we turned a corner and it was all over.
The sky, that narrow sliver overhead from the night before, was big again.
A telephone pole rose in the distance. You could see trails along the shore. Cars. People.
Damn, I thought. And then I remembered a line that Hancock muttered somewhere along the river, saying he was saving it for the right song: What a world this mess is in.
Go there ... Big Bend National Park ... From the UAE
Midland is the closest airport to Big Bend National Park
Emirates and American Airlines fly daily via London and Dallas. Fare from Dh4,290
— Information courtesy: The Holiday Lounge by Dnata. Ph: 04-3166160
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