DAY 7 - CONTINUED

We stopped for lunch in Stockton at a little place called Home Cookin’.  The entire fort was being held down by one girl, maybe fifteen years old with a pleasant demeanor, named Nellie.  She was taking the orders, cooking the food and serving the customers all by herself.  Not that there were a lot of people to tend to.  Other than us, the only other customers were two old ladies in a booth eating ice-cream cones.  I tried once again to fill the void left by Ridgewood and ordered a BBQ pork sandwich while Lauren opted for the lunch special, Mexican lasagna.  Each was decent, worth the stop if you’re ever passing through.  On the way out, we saw a jar on the counter asking for donations for Nellie’s mission trip to Mexico for Teens-4-Christ.  We threw in five bucks before we left.

For the next hour or two, we continued driving due west along almost-perfectly-straight Route 24 then hung a left and drove due south along almost-perfectly-straight Route 83 on our way to the Monument Rocks, a suggestion from the book ROAD TRIP USA by Jamie Jensen.  

Eighty million years ago, this entire patch of Kansas sat several hundred feet beneath the ocean.  When the waters receded, the old seabed was a dense collection of fossils, calcium and sediment.  Several million years of erosion by the Smoky Hill River left behind several chalk formations that tower seventy feet above the Kansas plains and look about as out of place as a desert in the state of Maine – which incidentally also exists.  This entire area is a mecca for archaeologists.  Even though Kansas sits pretty much at the geological center of the continent, scores of fossils from sharks and shellfish have been found littering the Monument Rocks and limestone cliffs in the distance.

Even though they were designated a National Natural Monument (the first such designation in the United States), the Monument Rocks, also known as the Chalk Pyramids, reside on private land about six miles down a dirt road off Route 83 – over thirty miles from the nearest interstate.  I can only imagine that this has helped preserve these geological wonders because there is nothing more destructive than an interstate tourist.  The reason they put fences around things like Old Faithful and the World’s Tallest Tree isn’t because of tourists like Lauren and me.  It’s because of the interstate tourists who just can’t get close to anything without feeling the urge carve their initials into it or toss a penny in for good luck.  Interstate tourists come in two packages: old people on buses and families with pre-pubescent kids.  Each has the same attitude on vacation: “Let’s see as much as we can, as fast as we can, for as cheap as we can, and annoy the shit out of everybody else around us while we’re at it.” 

These are the types of people who get annoyed that there isn’t an interstate going straight through the middle of Yellowstone Park.  Everywhere they go, they zoom in at 65m.p.h. and hop out of the car with the look of people who expect to see the Second Coming of Christ at every rest stop.  While the women use the bathrooms and give the fast-food vendors more grief than their minimum wage deserves, the kids run around screaming, knocking the stale nachos out of strangers’ hands and climbing on anything that has a foothold. 

Meanwhile, the men run around with ten-thousand-dollars-worth of camera equipment around their necks, taking pictures of anything within a thirty-second radius and complaining about how far they had to walk to get there.  After ten minutes, they all load up into their respective vehicles and zoom off in search of their next attraction, leaving a trail of litter in their wake.  They never stay long enough to take something in.  They never actually look at anything except through the viewfinder of their camcorder.   And they never spend the time seeking out those special nuances of an area that can’t be described in a guidebook.  They stick to the interstates where they never have to go more than thirty minutes between rest stops with bathrooms and Burger Kings.  A place like the Monument Rocks is much too far off the beaten path to attract any but the at least halfway dedicated travelers.     

Lauren and I were the only car driving down that dirt road about an hour and a half before sunset.  Behind us, our car was kicking up a huge cloud of dust and we kept trying to slow down, certain that we were going to get in trouble for being down this way.  Silly really.  Even though the Monument Rocks sit on private land, the owners have graciously left them open to the public and have never charged a fee.  Beyond that, they have left the area largely untouched, save for the road coming in and one handmade billboard advertising a museum close by.  In another rare thumbing of the nose to traditional American consumerism, they have avoided tacky eye-clutter and instead let the majesty and mystery of this land speak for itself. 

About four miles in, the dirt road turned south.  A little farther on, we came over a bump in the road and saw the rocks in the distance.  It truly was an eerie sight.  Wide-open plains everywhere, broken in just one spot by these giant obelisks.  Lauren and I both commented that it reminded us immediately of Stonehenge.  

Pulling up, we realized that the Monument Rocks actually sit in two clusters about a quarter mile apart.  The cluster to the southwest consists of several angular towers that cast creepy-looking shadows across the dusty ground.  The cluster to the northeast is one long wall accentuated by a large trademark “window” in the rock.  After Lauren took her toilet paper and Ziplock bag behind one of the large chalk pyramids and did her thing, the picture-taking frenzy began.  It was like being at the St. Louis Arch.  As we walked around, each different angle offered a new and unique play with light and shadow.  Lauren encouraged me to climb up on one of the lower rises for a picture, but I declined.  The way I saw it, in geological terms these formations are being held together by a veritable Scotch Tape of sediment and decaying fossils.  I didn’t mind walking among them, but I didn’t want to be responsible for any unnatural crumbling of these monuments. 

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For the first few minutes Lauren and I were alone, nothing but the gently howling wind to break the silence.  A lone teenager pulled up and walked around quietly for a few minutes then left.  After him a mini-van pulled up and out of it poured four kids under ten-years-old, two older ladies and a man with a ten-thousand-dollar camera around his neck.  The kids started yelling and screaming and the women complained about the fact that there wasn’t a bathroom, while the man fidgeted with about a dozen lenses and filters.  Lauren and I both rolled our eyes.  They must have taken a wrong turn at the interstate.  When the kids started running up and climbing all over the rocks, that’s when we got in the car and drove over to the northeast side.

We spent the next thirty minutes walking around the rocks, walking through the window in the wall, taking pictures and just holding each other as we gawked at the beauty of God’s natural wonder.  We were waiting for sunset because we just had to take a picture of the sun shining through that giant hole in the wall.  As the time approached we could hear the voices of kids again and realized that the interstate family was on their way towards us.  One of the kids, a snot-nosed boy of about five ran up and sat right in the middle of the window. 

“Oh no you are not,” I hissed loud enough so only Lauren could hear.  

Fortunately, the man with the camera equipment had the same idea as we did and he yelled at his son to move.  I’ve since realized that ours was by no means a unique photo opportunity.  Type in “Monument Rocks” into Google and on each page you’re guaranteed to see at least one picture of the sun shining through that window. 

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The sun began to set and all of us took picture after picture.  As soon as the sun dipped below the horizon, the other man packed up his camera and called to his family.  They loaded into their van – kids still screaming, women still complaining – and headed back to the interstate.  Lauren and I had the place to ourselves again.

There was a chill in the air that the wind was punctuating, but we threw on a sweatshirt and shivered through it.  We walked hand-in-hand to the big stone window.  Standing beneath this big beautiful archway with the day’s fading light casting a soft glow over everything, Lauren and I held hands and prayed together.  We thanked God for this opportunity, the opportunity of a lifetime, to spend a month going off the beaten path and seeing His creation.  We thanked Him for giving us both the means and the courage to do something like this and we asked Him for His continual blessing on our journey.  We prayed for our baby and for our own safety.  After saying, “Amen,” we just stood there in each other’s arms for a few minutes, looking at the rocks and listening to the wind.  The latter finally got the better of us and we decided to head back to the car and find a hotel for the night. 

Even still, in the dying light, we couldn’t help but continue taking more pictures of the now-silhouetted Monument Rocks, looking more like Stonehenge than ever.

Back on Route 83, we drove almost an hour south to Garden City and got a room at the Continental Inn.  It was cute, though the sink and tub needed a healthy dose of Drano.  After our sneaky check-in routine, we went in search of dinner.  We really did try to patronize a local establishment, but it just wasn’t to be.  The first restaurant we tried, a little diner near the outskirts of town had just closed for the night as we pulled up.  We drove back into town and found a bar and grill, but as we opened the door we heard the very loud noise of mariachi music and turned back around.  We were in the mood for quiet tonight.  At a loss, we ate at the only other open place in town, Pizza Hut.  The greasy cheese and pepperoni were heavenly.

We drove back to the hotel, wrote out some more postcards, wrote in our road journal, watched a little bit of Pulp Fiction on HBO then went to sleep in anticipation of tomorrow when we would leave the Great Plains and cross the Rockies.

ONTO WEEK 2