Walking the Paluxy River in Drought

Kathryn Jones

June 4, 2023

In summer I like to walk upstream on the Paluxy

to see its dry riverbed gleaming white in the sun,

limestone wavy from millennia of flowing water. 

If I keep walking, I will spot them: records scattered

of those that came before me 113 million years ago

when giants walked on the edge of an ancient ocean. 

In wet years, the triangular tracks made by

a three-toed dinosaur called Acrocanthosaurus

lie beneath the Paluxy’s shallow waters, barely visible. 

In dry years, the tracks hold water like puddles, then 

the water evaporates, revealing toes and claws captured

in motion -- right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. 

Other Texas rivers depend on water for their power,

but drought transforms the Paluxy from insignificant to epic,

exposing its natural history museum under a vast roof of sky. 

As I walk the dry streambed, I try to envision 

fifteen-foot-tall, seven-ton creatures trudging here, 

their size and weight sinking tracks deep in mud. 

A shallow pool beckons me to remove my shoes,  

feel cool mud squish between my toes. I walk onward,

leaving no impression, no record that I was ever there. 

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.