What a long strange trip it’s been. In 2003, I came to the Big Bend as a sleuth, in search Dichromanthus cinnabarinus and other rare plants in the backcountry of Big Bend National Park. I had the profound wisdom to buy a newspaper, The Marathon Gazette (started in 2000 by lifelong journalist Barbara Novovitch), and to entice my girlfriend to abandon a career in teaching college writing in Idaho and come down to Terlingua to edit and design the paper.

I became a journalist and publisher while working in the remote reaches of a remote park. Thankfully, my seasonal job as rare plant researcher ended a few months into my publisher-small business owner-journalist-reporter gig.

Now I am a journalist in search of the truth. To be more accurate, I am a reporter covering the issues and people of the Big Bend.

Over the past several years we have strived to provide a quixotic lens on a unique region by way of thorough research, investigation and analysis.

We have had our ups and downs. Downs? Our first edition (October 2003) had a glaring typo in the headline. Ups: we led the initiative to bring DSL internet to Marathon, broke the story on a former Congressman’s pork barrel project to spend $1.4 million on a resort where he liked to golf, and the dichotomous approach to regulating our northern versus southern international borders.

– John Waters, Publisher

It’s hard to encapsulate the past four years of doing The Gazette. Particularly while still deep in its fermenting mash.

When prompted, John really likes to tell the story of how we ended up publishing a newspaper in West Texas, and our versions of how this came to pass have some discrepancies. Nevertheless, I can speak for us both when I say we clearly had no idea what we were getting into. I often compare it to raising an infant or living on a sailboat.

When we began publishing, I was then and am now still in love with storytelling and truth – others’ and my own. Yet I knew absolutely nothing about graphic design – which is obvious (see this issue’s cover). And which I learned on the fly, and continue to play with.

There is something terrifying and yet strangely liberating about learning something in front of others  –  and to do so in print, in a publication that lingers for a month is particularly humbling. So there’s a glaring typo in the headline? Oh, well. It’s done. No choice now but to live with it. Something like that happens every issue, no matter how hard we try otherwise. Now I almost (stress: almost) am relieved when I pour over the newest issue, fresh off the press, and stumble across a typo or missing word, or sentence that got cut off: How did that happen?! Oh, well. Found this issue’s error. Now that’s out of the way….

What can you do? Say you’re sorry, work harder next time. It forces us to accept the nature of being human, hopefully a little more gracefully and with a lot more amusement.

We came here and took over a small, local newspaper – as outsiders, a status which is sometimes a curse, sometimes a blessing. Four years later, thanks to the nature of this work and really thanks to the genuinely friendly nature of West Texans, I don’t feel like an outsider.

Still, we are not experts. We’d like to know: What do you really like about the Gazette? What do you think we do best? What do you eagerly anticipate finding in these pages each month?

And just as important: what do you think we’re lacking? What do we overlook? What would you like to see more of?

We are always open to suggestions, and always looking for more stories, essays, leads, photographs, artwork – and letters to the editor, praising or panning our coverage. Help us keep this publication a living, breathing organism by sending us your feedback.

And thank you.

– Marlys Hersey,  Editor