At Elephant Tusk

Kathryn Jones

January 8, 2023

A memory: four friends, topographical map in hand,

compass, provisions stuffed in our backpacks,

disappearing into the desert out in Big Bend,

hiking single file on a faint trail through 

sparse lechugilla and creosote, guided by cairns, 

walking through dust and time, trying not to lose our way.

Back at crowded Panther Junction, the ranger asked

where we wanted to go. Wherever no one else is going,

we told him. Two hours later, after bumping over dirt roads,

we arrived at the trailhead pointing us to Elephant Tusk,

volcanic pinnacle thirty million years old, jutting

above the desert floor, remote and primitive. 

No trees or shade, no toilets, no “amenities” except

solitude and sky. Nothing and everything we needed.

We pitched our dome tents on a rocky point so high

we could almost lasso the half moon rising that night

above the ivory black outline of Elephant Tusk,

mammoth pedestal holding up the fire-ice firmament. 

We, such tiny figures in a boundless landscape, 

felt our human insignificance and reveled in it. 

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas. Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.