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DAY 23 – Monday, April 5
START: White Sulphur Springs, MT
END: Spearfish, SD
MILEAGE: 532 miles

HIGHLIGHTS: Kum & Go, El Burrito Cafeteria, Devil’s Tower

In his book THE LOST CONTINENT, Bill Bryson laments the boring and unimaginative naming of most American towns.  If the settlers weren’t shamelessly sucking up to political or religious leaders by naming the town after some monarch whose favor they hoped to garner, or after the patron saint most in style at the time, most towns, Bryson said are “named after either the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave.”  I guess the white guys who settled east of White Sulphur Springs must have arrived in a big group and forgotten to take down the names of the red guys they shoved out of the way.  In our first few hours on the road today we drove through the towns of Checkerboard, Two Dot and Roundup.  Also in the vicinity were Pompey’s Pillar, Pray, Thermopolis (in Wyoming) and the sexy-sounding, Sumatra. 

Of course, “town” is a rather generous word for what these places were.  “Two Dot” is as accurate a description as you’ll get short of “Dot on the Map”, which is pretty much what these desolate looking (beautifully desolate, but desolate nonetheless) places amounted to.  The first settlers were probably too embarrassed to name the towns after themselves or the king, and probably thought it blasphemous to give them saintly names.  Either that or they were settled by cowboys and outlaws, people who didn’t give a flying rip what any rich snob had to say about them or the name of their town.  Either way, these places were rather surreal to drive through on a Monday morning.  Here it was, the start of the workweek, but by all outward appearances there was nothing to indicate even a modicum of industrious activity going on.  Every empty town we passed through gave off the feel of a lazy Saturday morning where everyone was still in bed.  Even in the less alluringly named Harlowton, the only town along this stretch big enough to have its own website, we detected no signs of life.  No people.  No vehicles on the road.  No clusters of cars parked outside stores and businesses.  Just empty streets and darkened buildings.  By all outward appearances, Lauren and I were the only people left in one of those post-apocalyptic movie nightmares. 

We stopped for a moment in Harlowton because there was a city park with public restrooms Lauren could make use of.  The facilities were located next to a small grandstand facing a dirt arena, which I first assumed was used to run dog races or something.  In fact the Howard Holloway Arena, as it is called, is home to the annual Fourth of July Chamber Rodeo, which apparently is an NRA-approved event.  This struck me as a rather odd and amusing little tidbit.  Are shotgun-carrying members of the NRA not allowed to attend events without the association’s official stamp?  Or does the NRA just have really high standards for rodeos, meaning its approval guarantees a kickass shoot-em-up show?  I’m not sure, and apparently there was nobody around to ask. 

Lauren finished her business and we continued on into the city of Billings where we stopped for gas at the most hilariously named establishment I have ever patronized: Kum & Go.  The entire time I was filling up, I kept looking around the area for street signs, landmarks or anything else that would indicate some kind of motivation for changing the word “Come” to “Kum”, with all of its implicitly raunchy undertones (and don’t act like you weren’t thinking it too).  Was the station located on Kumquat Street?  Was there a major school in the area teaching Kum Nye yoga?  Was the guy who wrote the song “Kum Ba Yah” born around here?  Did a high concentration of people from India live in the area (the red dots on their foreheads are called Kum Kum)?  The answer appeared to be no, no, no on all accounts.

Turns out, Kum & Go is a modestly large chain of gas station convenience stores throughout the Midwest and Great Plains.  According to their website:  Company founders W. A. Krause and Anthony Gentle used the first letters of their last names to create a unique moniker to showcase the ease and convenience they instilled in a shopping experience.  Unique indeed.  (Unfortunately?) Krause and Gentle came up with said moniker in 1959, a more innocent age before the phonetic spelling of the word “come” came to mean both the verb for ejaculation and the noun for what was ejaculated.  But with over four hundred stores spread wide across thirteen states, the Kum & Go name is too big to pull out now.  So what does the corporation have to say about their double-entendre’d title?  Amusingly little actually.  Amongst all their web pages full of press releases, customer comments and merchandise for sale, the only mention of the store’s name as something that might be conversation-worthy comes from the historical snippet printed above.  Other than that, they don’t play up their “unique moniker” by changing every instance of the word “come” to “kum.”  Nor do they downplay it.  The title Kum & Go is apparently as innocuous to the people running the company as if they’d named it Mobil or Shell.  Even the official store motto, “We go all out,” is ambiguous enough that it could be construed as sexual innuendo – the kind of saying that might have been printed on one of those “Coed Naked” t-shirts from the 1990’s – but only if you really wanted it bad. 

I absolutely needed a shotglass from this place.  Unfortunately the Kum & Go in Billings had none for sale, so I settled for a thermal beverage mug featuring the Kum & Go logo and motto.  This has actually worked out better for me in the end (so to speak) because since I use the mug outside the house for something other than display purposes, it has initiated several conversations that always begin with the question, “Where on earth did you get that cup?”

It was getting on lunchtime, so we asked the Kum & Go attendant for directions to the El Burrito Cafeteria, another suggestion from ROADFOOD.  Even though Billings is Montana’s largest city, and even though El Burrito is a tiny little hole-in-the-wall place, the guy knew exactly where it was.  I wasn’t sure if that was indicative of the size of Montana cities, or the reputation of El Burrito’s food.  I hoped the latter.  Billings feels like a city in much the way that, say, New Brunswick, New Jersey feels like a city.  It has multi-storied buildings and multi-laned streets where you occasionally have to sit in traffic at major intersections and circle the block several times to find a parking space.  But I don’t think anybody has ever driven through New Brunswick, which is just a short tunnel hop to New York City, and thought metropolis.  But when the only nearby points interest are big fields and the Wyoming state line, Billings does feel decidedly urban.

We drove through town and managed to find the El Burrito Cafeteria, and a metered spot just outside, without getting turned around too much.  ROADFOOD describes this place as “a one-room storefront with too many customers and not enough seats,” which has “the best Mexican food for miles around.”  Of course, the place is less than two hundred miles from the border – Canadian not Mexican – so we took that statement with some margarita-sized grains of salt.  Actually the food was quite good.  They had all the staples of a taco stand, namely (duh) tacos, burritos, enchiladas, chimichangas, and things of that nature.  They had a decent sauce and salsa bar, the high mark of any great burrito place in my opinion.  Yes, the place was quite crowded and the ordering process was a tad confusing – order here, pay there, trays on that side, orders shouted over the crowd in broken English – but the end result was worth it.  The food was good, the portions were huge and the prices were cheap.  What more could you ask for?  All told, with drinks and everything, we didn’t spend more than fifteen bucks and neither Lauren nor I were able to finish our respective meals.  So yes, if for whatever reason you find yourself in Billings, Montana, I would most certainly recommend the El Burrito Cafeteria.  For all the selection you’re going to find in the surrounding areas (New Brunswick it ain’t), I imagine this is the very best option.

Our next stop was Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, a place so in the middle of nowhere that if you’re not originating from a town already quite close to it, then there’s frankly no easy way to get there.  The only access roads (at least the only paved ones) approach from the south and east.  Since we were due northwest of the place, we had some roundabout driving to do.  In the interest of cutting time and distance, we got on I-90 and headed in a more or less south-south-west direction.  Some quick calculations indicated that even with the time we’d be saving on the interstate, we’d still end up getting to Devil’s Tower at or close to sunset, and this was definitely a place one needed to visit in the daytime.  Plus by this point, we figured, we’d seen Montana.  We didn’t need to tack on an additional hour or two of small roads and big sky just to get the point.

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 on site. 

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 five 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 basic 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. 

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, well then 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?

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I clamored my way back down to the trail and Lauren and I completed the circuit.  Devil’s Tower doesn’t have a uniform shape all the way around and we stopped often to take pictures of its seemingly morphing structure.  The sun had set and dusk was quickly turning to night by the time we got back to the car.  We drove east toward South Dakota and watched as the biggest, fullest, reddest moon either of us had ever seen rose over the Black Hills, all eerie and foreboding.  We stopped at a rest stop off the interstate and picked up a ton of postcards – which I mailed out to every filmophile I knew – as well as a funky green porcelain Devil’s Tower shotglass.

We had a few stops scheduled in western South Dakota tomorrow, so we decided to find a place to stay just across the border.  According to HOSTELS USA, there were two hostels in the area.  We called up the first and found out they were actually just a motel, not a hostel.  When we called up the second, a very tired-sounding man answered the phone and informed us that the hostel had been closed for over four years.  I’m not sure if that phone number was for the guy’s residence, but you got the idea he broke this news to people a lot.  We got off the interstate in the town of Spearfish and found a room at a place called the All Star Travelers Inn that was actually cheaper than either of the two defunct hostels’ private rooms would have been.  It even had a fireplace in it.  We ate some Pizza Hut, watched a little Blue Collar Comedy Tour on Comedy Central and fell asleep early.

ONTO DAY 24