That Night in the Davis Mountains
Kathryn Jones
August 27, 2023
Do you remember that long road trip we made
to the Davis Mountains the year Hale-Bopp
streaked close to Earth and across the Texas sky?
The comet would not come this close again
for two thousand years. It was once in a lifetime.
Back then we’d never heard of Alzheimer’s;
all of our memories lay ahead of us
like the craggy blue mountains on the horizon.
We drove for ten hours, pulled into the state park
north of Fort Davis, got our permit from the ranger,
pitched our little dome tent by a dry creek.
At dusk collared peccaries roamed the campground,
rustling dry grass with their hooves,
searching for food with their small tusks.
After setting our watches for 4:30 a.m.,
we crawled into the tent, anxious, waiting.
At the beep-beep-beep, we unzipped the tent,
bolted out, aimed our binoculars up at the heavens.
There it was, a fuzzy silver head with twin tails,
one blue, one white, visible with the naked eye
even in the moonlight. When I looked down,
I saw an even more astounding sight –
a herd of deer sleeping around our tent.
They looked up at us with wonder in their eyes.
Many years later, I am the keeper of memory.
Soon you will forget even that night in the Davis Mountains;
It will fade like an old photograph in an album.
But the images stay fixed in my mind – the blue-silver comet,
the glittering Texas sky, the deer sleeping next to us,
protected in the park, content in the peace of simply being,
not fearing the unknown, not afraid of forgetting
what it was like to remember.
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.
