Merry Christmas - Have a Road Trip

THE ROAD TRIP IS FINISHED!!!

Check it out here.

To whet your appetite

It's 1am, I'm exhausted and fried from editing all night. Don't have the brain capacity to edit anything else. But I also have two cups of coffee coursing through my veins and ain't falling asleep anytime soon. So I figured I'd be SEMI-productive and post a little sneak peak at what's to come in ROAD TRIP - WEEK FOUR. This snippet has a little bit of everything, history, narrative, commentary, self-righteous preaching. It's a good example of what you can expect, hopefully, within the next month when I, hopefully, post the final chapter of the Road Trip on my site.

So... enjoy.

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Caused by a freak surge of magma that cooled and fractured under the ground sixty million years ago, Devil's Tower is truly a sight to behold. Ribbed all around with deep grooves - like a paper fan turned into a cylinder - it stands alone, surrounded for miles by small hills and grassland, and looking as out of place in Wyoming as the Monument Rocks do in Kansas - which, as we recall, look as out of place as a desert in the state of Maine (which incidentally also exists). But where the Monument Rocks rise a mere seventy or so feet off the ground, this lone sentinel towers nearly nine hundred feet above you; looming, ominous and downright eerie.

According to a Native American legend, two young girls were out walking one day when a giant grizzly bear started chasing them. They ran from the bear for a while until they could run no more, at which point they stopped and prayed to the Great Spirit for help. That Old Guy really knew how to grant a wish because just as the bear was about to pounce on the two girls, the ground they were standing on began to rise and lift them into the air out of the grizzly's reach. Enraged, the great beast jumped and scratched at the new obtrusion, leaving behind his claw marks in the rock. Other legends suggest that the enormous supernatural bear still lives inside the monolith and has come to the aid of tribes against enemy war parties. Local tribes have variously named the site Bear's Lodge, Bear's House, Bear's Lair, Bear's Peak and Bear's Tipi. Other names included Aloft on a Rock, Mythic-Owl Mountain, Tree Rock and, interestingly enough, Penis Rock. The obelisk and surrounding area became a deeply holy place to more than twenty tribes who lived here. Every kind of sacred ceremony - funerals, prayer offerings, sweat lodge ceremonies, vision quests, sun dances - were performed here.

So I suppose it was only a matter of time before some white guy came along and desecrated the whole thing. And that's essentially what Colonel Richard Dodge did when he arrived with a regiment of soldiers searching for gold in 1875. He took one look at the strangely shaped mountain and called it "Devils Tower." And for reasons I wouldn't be able to fathom if they weren't so familiar and characteristic of over five hundred years worth of American history, that is the name they used when the tower was dedicated as the nation's first national monument in 1906. I suppose Devil's Tower just sounded cooler and was better for marketing, but could you imagine if somebody decided to rename the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, "Place of the Bastard"? What if we changed Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem to "Satan's Ridge"? Or for that matter, how about if they changed the name of Stonehenge to "Jesus' Circle" or the Parthenon to "Trinity Plaza"? How long before somebody, religious or not, stepped up and said, "You know what, that's just not right."

There have been a few feeble attempts made by various Native American groups to have the tower returned to its original name, Bear Lodge. These have been met with resistance, anger and outright ignorance by people who are afraid the renaming is merely a way of masking a deeper agenda: namely returning control of the tower back to the local tribes. God forbid. But that fight has largely been buried and you'd have to do a fair amount of digging to read anything of substance about it. After all, nobody really wants to know about anything American Indians are trying to accomplish unless it involves building another casino.

No, when it comes to Devil's Tower, what interests people most - far from any minor Indian corpse-raping for the sake of preserving the Christian-American way of life - is the fact that this was the location where the aliens landed in Steven Spielberg's blockbuster, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That's why we came here. Well, that's why I came here. Lauren could honestly have given a damn. But we'd just spent an entire week stopping at about every lighthouse along the Pacific seaboard, so now it was her turn to indulge my petty obsessions. I don't know why exactly I wanted to see Devil's Tower. I never really liked Close Encounters all that much and, to be perfectly honest, couldn't even remember what the movie's key location looked like. I think my motivations were more along the lines of simply being able to send postcards back to all my movie geek friends who would appreciate where I'd been. People who would recognize the location immediately and say, "Holy shit, I didn't even realize that was a real place!"

I was honestly expecting just another mountain. A lone mountain standing out in the middle of prairie, but a mountain nonetheless. Well even from a good ten miles away, it was obvious that Devil's Tower was not just another a mountain. Even the Rocky Mountains, which shoot straight up out of the plains, still have the everyday features of mountains; slopes, peaks, uniform angles. Devil's Tower on the other hand had an irregularly curved, almost logarithmic, pitch culminating in a wide flat top and looking more like the smokestack to a nuclear power plant than anything naturally occurring. But it's not until you get closer and see the tower's signature grooves, which really do look like they were put there by giant bear claws, that you begin to realize just what intrigued the Indians so much about this place.

There was nobody manning the Devil's Tower entrance station and we probably could have driven in without paying the ten-dollar fee, but we paid it anyway knowing somebody had to help keep the park service funded, since it certainly wouldn't be the United States government. Though in retrospect, I would much rather have given that ten dollars to any grassroots Native American movement who wanted only to reclaim something that means far more to them than it does to the Department of the Interior. The park road circles around the tower, passing alongside a rather large prairie dog town on the way, and ending at a parking lot and trailhead. After Lauren made use of the bathroom, we made our way onto the Tower Trail, a 1.3-mile loop around the national monument's main focal point.

At the risk of being annoyingly repetitive, a red flag went up in my head as soon as I saw how easily accessible from the parking lot this place was. It was like begging punks and interstate tourists, "Paint on me, litter on me, ruin me for everyone else." But Devil's Tower is saved from this fate by several factors. As I said before, this place is incredibly out of the way by most any standard. And unlike Yellowstone National Park on the other side of the state, there actually isn't that much to see here. There aren't dozens of turnouts each offering a different panoramic view of mountains, cliffs and canyons. There aren't bubbling mud pots or big holes that shoot water into the air at regular intervals. At Devil's Tower, all you get is the tower. And you can see that from your car from the main road. Most car bound tourists probably don't feel the need to walk over a mile around the big thing to get the idea. They drive in (shirking the entrance fee most likely) take a picture from the parking lot, maybe walk a few dozen feet into the trail to take a picture that isn't obstructed by trees, then head back to their car and back to the interstate less than thirty miles away. The tower is spared the disrespect of more committed tourists and vandals by a very natural, very formidable barrier: rocks. All around the base, separating the walking trail from the main tower by a good two hundred feet are piles and piles of boulders. You'd have to do some pretty serious, and often dangerous, scrambling to actually get to the tower and spray-paint or carve something onto it - which would likely be too small to see from the trail anyway - after which you'd have to climb your way back down without twisting an ankle.

The Tower Trail retained the perfect combination of convenience and beauty without the requisite ruination that usually accompanies it. Lauren and I enjoyed our leisurely walk, having the trail mostly to ourselves. The scale of this thing was truly impossible to express, much less capture on film, but I was determined to try. Under that guise of research and exhibition, I left Lauren on the trail and started scrambling up the boulder pile. It was as good excuse as any. The truth is, I love scrambling. I missed scrambling. It was an activity I had engaged in often during my time in California. One time while hiking through a desert canyon, I took a wrong turn that dead-ended into a tall mountain of boulders. Rather than attempting the tedious and probably futile process of retracing my steps and rediscovering the trail, I simply started climbing. Up and over the mountain on a more or less direct route back to my car. Sure, it was harder going, but it was way more fun than just trudging along on flat even ground. Lauren knew this about me, so when I suggested climbing to the top of the Devil's Tower boulder pile for the sake of a picture, she simply gave me a knowing smile and said, "Go ahead."

And so I climbed. I jumped. I scampered. I reveled. Up, up, up, I went as high as I could go without the assistance of climbing gear. From the trail, Lauren snapped a picture as close up as the camera's lens would allow, which showcased far better the scope of this place than any full length shot could have accomplished. At first glance, the picture just looks like a close-up of rocks at the tower's base. We often have to point out to others the tiny little person standing at the bottom of the picture. "Yeah, that would be me." Even at the very top of the rock pile, I was still a good fifty feet short of where the grooved part of the tower actually starts, a sheer rock wall preventing me from going any further.

I was surprised to find out that mountain climbing is actually allowed on Devil's Tower, and I have never wished more that I had taken the time and money to learn how to do it. How awesome it must be to scale that nearly vertical pitch. To make it to the top. To camp out high above the world on a throne the size of a football field. To share that kingdom with only the falcons and the eagles who nest up there as well. I can't imagine a more powerful feeling. I'm not sure what process is involved in the naming of a climbing path, but judging by some of the actual names in the trail register - Spank the Monkey; Calculus Affair; Pee Pee's Plunge; Ants On Angel Food; See You In Soho; Billie Bear Cranks the Rod - I suspect it is not the park service coming up with them.

We weren't able to see it, but there is apparently a metal rung ladder running the entire vertical length of the tower that has hung there for untold generations. Back in the days when this place still belonged to the Indians, it was considered a rite of passage, a sign of manhood to climb that ladder all the way to the top. No ropes, no carabineers, no room for mistakes. Just a solid steel set of balls and, I imagine, a strict warning not to look down. And after you actually got the top, manhood proven and all that, then you had to climb back down. My god, my palms are sweating even now just thinking about it. If that didn't get a brave laid back in the day, there was something seriously wrong with women in that society. Though it kind of makes you wonder, if the legend of this place is true, how did those first two girls get down from this thing after the giant bear finally left?