The Devil's Tower

Look, if anything in the vast Powder River neighborhood merits the word "monumental," it's the mile-high monolith that rises out of nowhere, Devils Tower, who long ago, it seems, shook off the apostrophe that was meant to indicate ownership. With or without punctuation, this huge protuberance deserves the title. When you come up on it early, and the thing is perfectly dark even in a background of glowing morning sky, that this thing belongs to the Devil seems wholly legit.

Get this: no geologist knows for sure how it got here. Theories exist, and you can study them, perfectly reasonable theories. But no one knows. Look at this thing. It's mammoth, from miles away it looms up, bold, fist-like, scary. Honestly, scary.

Didn't help that snow fell the night before, so reaching the behemoth could only happen on isolated, winding roads, so empty that early morning that I felt tempted to stop the one or two pickups I met to say hello. That someone way back when called it "Devils Tower" (even without the apostrophe) makes perfect sense, even though the monument didn't push me to recite the opening lines of Macbeth.

That it is America's very first National Monument (designated so by Teddy Roosevelt, the patron saint of America's Western heritage parks) isn't surprising because no matter how you get there, Devils Tower is no small potatoes. You don't look past it. You can't. It was, long before T. R., a lower-case national monument like none other. Teddy just baptized it into the fellowship he was creating.

The truth? When I got up closer, I breathed more easily somehow. The area was lighter, but there was no sun. Some prairie, some fallen trees, and the beast seemed somehow less fearful.

I was worried about not seeing it in sunlight, so when I got to the gate, I asked the ranger when it would catch some, assuming that I'd been hanging around the wrong side. "Oh, I'm sure it'll get sunny out here sometime," he said.

A quarter mile up the road, I suddenly had the sense he must have thought the only customer he'd seen was some old fool.

It was still early and I didn't have time, but I tried to compose some things--but without a sun even good shots just don't pop. I kept going to the end of the road, where there was no one around and nothing open. Even the beast itself gets lost when you're in the woods beneath. So I just as slowly crept back down the icy road. The sky was blue, but from my angle, Devils tower was bedeviled by darkness. Simply didn't want to be captured.

So I left, my GPS steering me away. Devils Tower was huge and it was stirring, but it insisted on the livery of shade I wanted badly doffed.

When I was a kid, maybe ten years old, my family tented across America. I had no clue of what Devils Tower was, but when we stopped, my memory of that event is itself shrouded in fear, probably because that blessed Schaap piety made the name of the place alone strike fear. Even my parents had trouble saying, "the Devil's Tower" because the Devil was real. That I didn't know why people talked like that likely only increased the evil all around.

That was sixty years ago. Devil's Tower hasn't changed, but I'm a good deal less pious. So down the road a ways I went, that massive magma statue in my rear view mirror. The icy road demanded my attention, but when I glanced back for a moment, voila!



And I pulled over.

In a full bath of pure western sunshine, this massive thing simply seemed both far less demonic and far more magnificent. Finally, in my soul, the sun redeemed the thing. It was not only huge but gorgeous.

But nobody knows exactly how it got here. Isn't that wonderful?