Cairns

Kathryn Jones

February 18, 2024

The trail leads us into the Chihuahuan Desert, 

no signs except one marking the trailhead

and a warning: No water. No shade. 

There are four of us, our backpacks heavy with water,

a topographical map and compass for navigation  

through spiny agave and prickly pear.

Our hiking boots leave patterns in the sand, 

blown away by the wind, erasing our presence. 

With every step we blend into the desert. 

The trail becomes invisible. We stop, consult the map. 

Then we see them poking out of the scrubby brush: 

stacks of gray and pink stones – cairns.

A Scottish tradition to mark graves, memories, 

cairns mark the path for hikers on this trail in Big Bend,

posted like ancient guides silently pointing the way. 

Our eyes scan the desert, searching for the next cairn, 

but for more than that – guidance, grounding, calm. 

Each step is an act of faith that we will not get lost. 

Cairns mark human intrusion on the natural world;

some say knock them down, leave no trace, but they

are like prayer altars, leading us out into the wilderness. 

The monolith we seek rises ahead like a sky cathedral, 

an altar of wildness, a giant cairn marking the end of our trail,

the beginning of our journey away from the wired world. 

Hot and parched, we pitch our tents in Elephant Tusk’s shadow, 

find water flowing from a spring, purify it, find communion 

in and with the desert, dip our entire being into its coolness. 

Three days later we head out of the wilderness, restored. 

We spot the cairns but this time we know the way back 

even as the wind erases our footprints, leaving no trace.

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.