One of my favorite memories was when my family and I drove the moderately painful trek from Phoenix to Tucson to see my aunt when I was six years old; a trip my mother insisted on taking at night so the relentless heat of Arizona Summer days wouldn’t kill her sad and barely drivable Honda Civic. I remember sitting in the backseat, staring out the window at the endless void that was the desert landscape. I could see shadows of creatures darting across the sand, mountains rolling in the distance, patches of saguaro cacti here and there, and an occasional shooting star cutting through the sky. It was beautiful. My favorite part of this drive, however, was the elephants.
About halfway through, in the distance I started seeing groups of trees silhouetted against the mostly empty horizon. Relatively rare in the southern part of Arizona, these large anomalies seemed to have risen out of nowhere and, with the dark masking the pertinent details, I was a smidgen confused as to what they were. Before logic and reason kicked in, my 6-year-old imagination went to town. Trunks began to bend into pillars of roughened grey skin; branches curved into curiously long and twisted snouts; and leaves shuffled into the full, flapping, and friendly ears of my favorite pachyderm. Though no one else in the car had noticed, the world around me was suddenly filled with a circus of elephants, gently trudging together through the desolate desert alongside my Mom’s tiny Honda. There were hundreds of them, they were everywhere, and it was magical. I stared at them for miles and miles until the lights of Tucson illuminated the mystery and the trees were trees again.
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