The Serpent Has Reached Its Tail: America Is Devouring Itself at Santa Elena Canyon
There are acts of destruction so grotesque that ordinary political language is inadequate to describe them.“Policy disagreement” is too mild. “Environmental damage” is too clinical. “Border infrastructure” is almost obscene in its bureaucratic evasiveness.
What is happening at the Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend National Park demands an older vocabulary—the vocabulary of desecration, sacrilege, hubris, and moral crime. Drawing on the Greco-Roman story of Erysichthon (pronounced "err-ih-SICK-thuhn"), the Norse figure of Jörmungandr (pronounced YOR-mun-gahn-dr), and the ancient Egyptian symbol of the Ouroboros (pronounced oor-oh-BOR-us), this essay turns to the ancients for a language capable of naming what ordinary political discourse cannot. Perhaps they understood this kind of madness—the arrogance of power, the violation of the sacred, and the self-consuming logic of domination—better than we do.
What I see in Santa Elena—and across the entirety of the “Big Bend country,” as some call it—is grandeur: an ancient, sacred immensity that reminds us how small we are and how presumptuous the human impulse to dominate can be.
Taylor Prewitt’s August 14, 2026, Texas Monthly essay, “We Can’t Look Away From the Bulldozers at Santa Elena Canyon,” gathers the reactions of Texans struggling to comprehend images that should be almost unimaginable: heavy machinery at the mouth of one of the most magnificent canyons in North America, disturbing a landscape people repeatedly describe in spiritual terms (Prewitt, 2026).
Prewitt brings together the voices of Texas Monthly writers and contributors—including David Courtney, J. B. Sauceda, Forrest Wilder, Stephen Harrigan, Emma Balter, Allegra Hobbs, Katy Vine, Laura Mallonee, José R. Ralat, and others—who remember Santa Elena as cathedral, sanctuary, geological wonder, family inheritance, and a place where human beings encounter something much larger than themselves.
Harrigan offers perhaps the most chilling comparison. Looking at the bulldozers, he remembers the Taliban’s destruction of the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan—monuments that had stood for roughly fifteen centuries before zealotry reduced them to rubble (Prewitt, 2026).
The comparison is devastating because it identifies the mentality at work.
Zealotry always believes that what stands in the way of its obsession is expendable. A statue. A book. A sacred grove. A university. A people’s history. A canyon.
Once power convinces itself that its objective is absolute, everything else becomes an obstacle.
And then comes the axe.
Erysichthon Comes to Big Bend
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| See U in History / Mythology Video (2018) |
Ovid tells such a story in Book VIII of the Metamorphoses.
Erysichthon enters a grove sacred to Ceres, goddess of the earth and its abundance. At the heart of the grove stands an enormous ancient tree, revered for generations. Offerings hang from its branches. The place has meaning precisely because earlier generations recognized that not everything in the world exists simply for us to use.
Erysichthon recognizes no such limit. He orders the tree cut down. Others hesitate. He does not. He seizes the axe himself. Even after warnings, even after signs that he is violating something sacred, he continues striking until the great tree falls (Ovid, 2004).
His transgression is bigger than cutting wood. His crime is hubris: the belief that possession of power confers the right to destroy anything power can reach. If I have the axe, Erysichthon effectively declares, then I have the authority. If I can cut it down, then I may. If it obstructs my desire, then it must yield (view informative video at See U in History / Mythology, 2018).
Tell me this does not sound familiar.
As much as he would not only prefer it to be otherwise—but to actually relish in the thought—it would be easy to blame all of this on one man, but that would let the rest of us off too easily. The deeper indictment concerns the values, mentality, and political logics and culture that produce such figures, elevate them, excuse them, and surround them with people willing to convert appetite into policy—the belief that domination is strength, restraint is weakness, and anything standing in the way of power is expendable.
Today, the axe has become a bulldozer. The sacred grove has become Santa Elena Canyon. And the men wielding the machinery have pieces of paper telling them they can proceed.
But paper does not make desecration sacred. A federal waiver does not make destruction wise. A government contract does not transform ecological vandalism into stewardship. And the phrase “border security” cannot function as holy water sprinkled over every act committed in its name.
Federal contractors have begun clearing and construction-related work near Santa Elena Canyon as part of a larger border-security project involving vehicle barriers, patrol roads, detection technology, and other infrastructure. The National Park Service closed portions of the Santa Elena Canyon area to public access beginning August 12 because of the construction. CBP disputes descriptions of the project as a conventional wall, but it acknowledges roads, barriers, and detection infrastructure inside this extraordinarily sensitive landscape (National Park Service, 2026; U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 2026).
We should not allow vocabulary to anesthetize us. The land cannot tell the difference between a bulldozer constructing a “wall” and a bulldozer constructing a “road.” The Rio Grande does not become less wounded because lawyers have determined which statutes may be bypassed.
And the dead soil beneath a bulldozer track does not rise again when an official calls what happened “site preparation.”
This Is the Land of My Ancestors
For me, there is another dimension that makes these images almost unbearable. This is the land of my ancestors. I do not look at the Big Bend borderlands as empty scenery awaiting federal management.
I see an ancestral landscape.
I see a region carrying memory far older than the boundary line that now divides the United States from Mexico. I see Earth traveled, inhabited, loved, worked, crossed, remembered, and handed down across generations.
The political border is young. The land itself is ancient. The river is older still.
And my connection to this place does not begin with the establishment of Big Bend National Park in 1944. That distinction matters. Because one of the great violences of colonial history has always been the fiction that land begins to have history when governments map it, purchase it, annex it, police it, or declare jurisdiction over it.
It does not.
The land remembers before the state remembers.
The land holds stories that predate customs checkpoints, immigration categories, Border Patrol vehicles, federal appropriations, and the line someone eventually drew through a river and called it an international boundary.
For those of us whose ancestors inhabited these borderlands, the bulldozers therefore inflict something more intimate than environmental damage. They enter ancestral ground. They disturb memory. They impose the machinery of the present upon a landscape carrying the footsteps of the past. And they do so under the arrogant presumption that government ownership or jurisdiction means government possesses the moral right to mutilate what generations before us preserved.
It does not.
A deed is not dominion over eternity.
Then Comes the Ouroboros
But Erysichthon is only half the story.
There is another ancient image we should place before America now. Behold Ouroboros, the serpent with its tail in its mouth.
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| Source: Egypt Tours Portal |
Its history stretches back to ancient Egypt, where serpent imagery encircling divine figures represented profound ideas about time, completion, regeneration, beginnings, meeting endings, and the boundaries of the ordered world (Hornung, 1999). The image would travel through Greek, Hermetic, Gnostic, and alchemical traditions.
Over the centuries, the Ouroboros acquired many meanings. But today its visual logic speaks with terrible clarity: the consumer and the consumed have become the same creature. The mouth has reached the tail.
The destroyer has discovered that what it is destroying is itself. That is precisely what America is doing at Big Bend. We created national parks because earlier generations understood something we seem to be forgetting: that civilization requires the capacity to restrain itself.
The very purpose of setting land aside is to say:
Not this. Develop elsewhere. Build elsewhere. Exploit elsewhere. One would think that there must remain some places where appetite stops.
The National Park Service’s foundational mandate is to conserve scenery, wildlife, and natural and historic resources so they remain unimpaired for future generations.
Hmm. “Unimpaired.” What a haunting word that has become. We designate a place a national treasure. We promise future generations that we will protect it. Then another part of the same government arrives with bulldozers. The serpent has reached its tail.
America is no longer consuming someone else’s landscape. America is consuming its own.
Jörmungandr and the Unmaking of a World
Norse mythology gives us an even darker version of the serpent. Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, grows so vast that it encircles the world and grasps its own tail. In Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, the serpent’s release of its tail accompanies Ragnarök—the catastrophic unraveling of the existing cosmic order (Snorri Sturluson, 1995).
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Video Source: Mythology & Fiction Explained (2018) |
I do not invoke Ragnarök because bulldozers at Santa Elena literally signify the end of the world. I invoke it because myths encode warnings. They ask what happens when human beings disturb the boundaries that make a world a world—one that is inhabitable. A civilization depends upon certain forms of restraint if it is to continue.
Some are constitutional. Some are ethical. Some are ecological. Some are sacred. A society survives because there are things it could do but chooses not to do. When those restraints disappear—when every law can be waived, every institution overridden, every landscape subordinated, every objection dismissed in the name of executive necessity—we should understand that something larger than dirt is being moved.
A political order is teaching itself that nothing is untouchable. And most importantly, that lesson never remains confined to one canyon.
A Crime Against Inheritance
There is now litigation challenging the Big Bend construction, including a lawsuit by People of La Junta for Preservation, Indigenous plaintiffs and the Terlingua river outfitter Far Flung Outdoor Center, who argue that federal activity threatens sacred places, burdens Lipan Apache religious practices, and harms local businesses that depend on river access and tourism.
I therefore use the word crime carefully. I am not pronouncing a criminal judgment that belongs to a court. I mean something older. Something morally larger.
There are crimes against inheritance. There are crimes against memory. There are crimes against beauty. There are crimes against the dead. There are crimes against people not yet born. There are acts so wantonly destructive that their legal authorization does not exhaust the question of their legitimacy. History contains many things that were legal when they occurred. Legality has never been humanity’s final measure of justice.
The emerging global Rights of Nature movement asks us to move beyond the assumption that Earth exists merely as property available for human exploitation. The 2010 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, developed at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, articulates a radically different proposition: that the living world possesses inherent value and that human beings bear obligations toward the ecological communities of which we are a part (Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, 2010).
That framework invites questions our politics almost never asks:
What does the canyon deserve? What does the river deserve? What does a cottonwood deserve? What do the javelina, mountain lion, black bear, peregrine falcon, cactus, desert grassland, and canyon wren deserve? What does an ancestral landscape deserve? What do we owe the dead whose footsteps crossed this ground?
And what do we owe a child born fifty years from now who should have the right to stand at Santa Elena Canyon and encounter something other than the ruins of our fear?
The Ultimate Obscenity
Border security is a legitimate function of government. But no legitimate function of government comes with an unlimited moral warrant. Security without proportionality becomes domination. Security without evidence becomes theater. Security without restraint becomes destruction. And security that destroys the thing being secured becomes absurdity.
That may be the deepest obscenity of Santa Elena Canyon.
In the name of protecting America, we are destroying America.
Think about that sentence.
We are damaging a national park in order to defend the nation. We are compromising an American inheritance in order to protect American territory. We are altering a landscape that generations of Americans deliberately preserved in order to demonstrate that the government controls the boundary passing through it. What exactly will be left when control itself becomes the highest national value?
A nation is more than acreage. It is more than sovereignty. It is more than the ability to place steel in the ground. A nation is also memory. Beauty. Restraint. Inheritance. Landscape. History. Obligation.
The willingness to receive something priceless from previous generations and to humbly say: We will not ruin this. We will preserve this.
Erysichthon’s Final Punishment
And this is why Ovid’s story ends as it does. Ceres does not simply strike Erysichthon dead. She curses him with hunger. He eats. And eats. And eats. Nothing satisfies him. His appetite expands in proportion to everything he consumes. He exhausts his possessions. He destroys what he has. And finally, with nothing else capable of satisfying him, Erysichthon turns upon his own body.
He begins to eat himself. That is the part of the myth America most urgently needs to hear. The punishment for believing that nothing is sacred is not simply that sacred things disappear. The punishment is that eventually the appetite turns inward.
The society that cannot restrain its desire for domination eventually directs that machinery toward itself.
The serpent finds its tail. The eater becomes the eaten. The government determined to protect everything through control discovers that it has destroyed the very inheritance it claimed to defend.
And someday, perhaps, our descendants will stand at Santa Elena Canyon and ask us the simplest and most damning question imaginable: You knew what this was. You knew how rare it was. You knew it could never be replaced. You saw the bulldozers. Why didn’t you stop them? I do not know what answer we could possibly give.
Because Santa Elena Canyon was never the obstacle. If anyone has ever been to the Santa Elena Canyon, you know exactly what I mean. That this area needs any monitoring is itself a fiction. It was never a weakness in America's defenses. Its people, never a problem for our country. It was part of what made America worth defending.
The bulldozer is Erysichthon’s axe. The nation has become the Ouroboros. The serpent has reached its tail. And in our insatiable hunger to demonstrate that we control the border, we have begun devouring the country inside it.
References
Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. (2010, April 22). Universal Declaration for the Rights of Mother Earth. https://www.garn.org/universal-declaration-for-the-rights-of-mother-earth/
Hornung, E. (1999). The ancient Egyptian books of the afterlife (D. Lorton, Trans.). Cornell University Press.
Mythology & Fiction Explained. (2018, January 29). Jörmungandr: The great serpent of Norse mythology (Norse mythology explained) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyXVXQRPXWs
National Park Service. (2026). Alerts & conditions: Big Bend National Park. U.S. Department of the Interior. https://www.nps.gov/bibe/planyourvisit/conditions.htm
Ovid. (2004). Metamorphoses (D. Raeburn, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published ca. 8 C.E.)
Prewitt, T. (2026, August 14). We can’t look away from the bulldozers at Santa Elena Canyon. Texas Monthly. https://www.texasmonthly.com/travel/santa-elena-canyon-big-bend-bulldozers/
See U in History / Mythology. (2018). Demeter and Erysichthon: The hunger myth—Greek mythology [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKsQLtMnc68
Snorri Sturluson. (2006). The Prose Edda (J. L. Byock, Trans.). Penguin Classics.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (2026, August 13). Statement from CBP Commissioner Rodney S. Scott correcting the record on Big Bend National Park. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/announcements/statement-cbp-commissioner-rodney-s-scott-correcting-record-big-bend
We Can’t Look Away From the Bulldozers at Santa Elena Canyon
Construction equipment is disturbing the silence at the spiritual heart of Big Bend National Park. We are asking what that means to Texans.
By Taylor Prewitt August 14, 2026 TEXAS MONTHLY
Demonstrators against the construction of a border barrier during a protest at Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend National Park on August 12, 2026.
For so many Texans, the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend National Park is an evocative, almost spiritual symbol of the region itself. With the Rio Grande cutting through the towering rock, it’s also one of the most visceral—and gorgeous—reminders that a border runs through the pristine landscape. In a 1980 ode to Big Bend, longtime Texas Monthly contributor Stephen Harrigan described the landmark as “extraordinarily, soporifically peaceful.”
More recently, Sam Karas, a river guide and reporter for The Big Bend Sentinel, called it “the closest thing I have in my godless millennial life to a cathedral” in an essay for Texas Monthly.
Then, this week, we began seeing footage, shot by photographer Natalie Newman and shared by Center for Biological Diversity employee Laiken Jordahl, of crews bulldozing the mouth of Santa Elena, where the canyon rises up from the riverbed. The images followed days of reports and photographs coming out of the park showing construction equipment arriving and beginning to build roads.
To see that peace disturbed has further disquieted the many Texans already heartbroken over what’s happening in Big Bend amid the constantly changing reports about where and in what form the federal government plans to erect barriers along the border. I asked my colleagues to share their own memories of Santa Elena Canyon and what the image of a bulldozer at its mouth means to them. I’d love to hear from you too.
Unnecessary, unwanted, disappointing, and dumb. —David Courtney, the Texanist
In 2015 I flew over Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend National Park with writer Rick Bass for Texas Monthly. It was early Sunday morning. We commented to each other that seeing the beauty below felt like a form of attending church. I’d looked up at the canyon from the floor so many times before. It was my first time seeing it from this perspective. New perspectives are good for us. Rick perfectly captured this feeling about perspective, and Texas as a whole, in the piece he wrote about our time together. I hope you’ll read it. —J.B. Sauceda, Texas Country Reporter host
I’ve hiked the Santa Elena Canyon Trail many times. I don’t enjoy the crowds in national parks, but I make an exception for Santa Elena. I love seeing people’s reactions as they hike into the aperture of the canyon. Texas is often regarded as flat and topographically uninteresting. Tall, steep, imposing Santa Elena is the rejoinder to this false notion. Geological time and the power of water is on display here. Everyone should be able to enjoy that without the scars of border barriers. —Forrest Wilder, senior writer
When I saw the photos of the bulldozers in front of Santa Elena Canyon, I thought of another sickening image: the two colossal, 1,500-year-old Buddha statues in central Afghanistan being blown up by the Taliban in 2001. What is happening in Big Bend is an act of mindless zealotry being sold as border security. And it forces us to realize that the things of this earth that are beautiful and sacred and mysterious to most of us will always be regarded by a cynical, powerful few as just being in the way. —Stephen Harrigan, longtime Texas Monthly contributor and former staff writer
Can we sue? —The children of Sandi Villarreal, executive editor
The only way my cousins could persuade me to camp was to offer up the banks of the Rio Grande, hugged by Santa Elena Canyon’s towering walls, as our resting place for the night. I knew the experience was worth forgoing the usual bedding I favor. As day tourists around us snapped pictures of the iconic mouth of the canyon, we loaded our kayak and canoe with essentials: tents, poop bags (to my dismay), beer. We paddled for about two hours, often having to get out and drag our boats by hand because the water levels were so low. I remembered the guidance we were given: You can set foot on the Mexican side, but you can’t pitch your tent there. Navigating the river, looking at the dirt and rocks and shrubs on either side, I thought about how little we mattered, how little power there really was in the invisible line we drew to divide two sides of the same land. We set up camp just past Tinaja Blanca, cracked open some beers, made a fire for hot dogs and s’mores, and settled into a night of watching the stars and listening to the wind hurl through the canyon, eventually retreating to our tents. I barely slept all night, but I didn’t need to. —Emma Balter, senior editor for travel, outdoors, and service
After covering a floating protest against the incoming border-wall construction in the region, my friend Sam Karas and I got in a canoe and paddled into the canyon for what’s called a boomerang trip (it’s what it sounds like—you go in, turn around, and leave the way you came). We went in knowing we would encounter strong winds, but nothing could have prepared me for the reality—Sam, an experienced river guide, would later tell me they were the most intense headwinds she’d ever encountered. At certain points in the trip, we were paddling against winds so strong they pushed us backward, and for the last few yards, we had to get out and pull the boat; the force of the water against my legs was so strong that I was sore the next day. But I found even then that I was at peace. If you are a person with a tight grip, someone who tries to exert control over everything in your life, being forced to surrender to the elements is freeing. I couldn’t control the wind; it was bigger than me. Then the moments of the journey when we’d round a corner and encounter stillness felt touched by the divine. It’s impossible to convey in words how quiet it is there—there is no sound but the river and the calls of the canyon wrens echoing off the walls. You feel carried along by some magnificent force that has you in its arms. Then you pull your boat out and go back to normal life, but you know you can always, you hope, go back. —Allegra Hobbs, news and politics editor
One of my favorite memories of Santa Elena Canyon was taking a canoe trip guided by singer Butch Hancock, accompanied by Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Once we were in and pulled the canoes up onshore, we ate lunch while Butch and Jimmie Dale sang “Leo and Leona.” You do not get a better venue for that kind of experience. —Katy Vine, distinguished writer
When my family first visited Sana Elena about ten years ago, I was stunned by the immediate impression that it is a holy place, the most beautiful place in Texas. Our visit brought my son unabashed joy. At eight years old, he splashed about in the river, touching the Mexican side of the canyon and then running back to me, laughing. It was the kind of magical moment parents dream of sharing with their children. We still talk of our time in Big Bend and our desire to return. To think it could soon be only a memory, however treasured, sickens me. —José R. Ralat, taco editor
We spent spring break camping in Big Bend, and the highlight was hiking Santa Elena Canyon with my and my sister’s kids. The light was golden and ethereal hitting the canyon’s limestone walls. I couldn’t imagine them touching a place as beautiful as this, and yet here we are. —Laura Mallonee, contributing copy editor
