The Devil’s Tower

Devils tower

Motorcycle north through Wyoming. Darting deer at dusk. Camping. Night of immense rain and weird lightning. Crazy murderous animal noises in the night! Wet. Damp. Crisp.

Up early. Morning ride to a morning hike. Flowers. Soggy mud, Quebec couple, campsite view. Wild turkeys gobbling below. Crows making a racket. Crickets and other birds. Great Rock is clouded in. Slowly emerges as fog burns off.

I philosophize. Question purpose. Remind myself to get that tattoo. Because maybe living in the present is the true religion. Or maybe nature is. Or maybe some combination of both. Hiking this beautiful stunning morning feels more like god than anything else. Save for human connection. Maybe.

There is no fomo when living in the moment. There can’t be. But what do we mean by living? …Existing? Breathing? I feel like there is a better word to capture what we mean. What we want. Or at least what we want it to mean. Or what we mean to want.

Humidity. Sweat. I had forgotten this.

The only reason to think about the past is to create a better future. The only reason to think about the future is to create a better present.

I have many swirling thoughts I can’t quite reign in. I guess I’d been walking in some mentally opaque, lucid, dream-like state, because I just now felt awake. For the first time today. Awake, not so much like when the eyes open at the start of a day. But like when you notice how some things are uncomfortable or that you’re tired. And hungry. Being awake TO something.

Hiking so early, I had the trail to myself, save for the earlier couple from Quebec. I complete the trail and return to the parking lot; and the people have arrived. You know them. Glazed-eyed tourists who got up early to be American. To achieve the new white picket fence: Travel. Exploration. Adventure. It’s a cult now.
All well and good. It’s good for people. For the soul. But while I look into their eyes as I walk by and smile and say hi. Not for all, but for many, something is missing. There’s an emptiness. A void. A fog.

I’m walking around the base of this fortress now. This ginormous string cheese crashing out of the ground and up into the wide Wyoming sky. I marvel at it. Listening to bird coos echo off the rocks and listening to the phweoup phweoup phweoup of their wings as they duck abruptly in flight, in and out of the pines. Meanwhile, a couple walks by and the fellow speculates how cool it’d be to see a piece of rock break off and come tumbling down. I’m with him. And then he implored how lucky and cool it’d be to be randomly taking a video and catch it on film. And how someone probably has and he bets you could YouTube it. After pondering present living all morning, This conversation has no place here for me. I am pro pictures. Capturing blessed moments. I’ve been doing that too. But there is something uncomfortable about the motive. It’s off. He doesn’t want to see that incredible event for the wild rush and real life exhilaration of seeing, hearing, smelling, and experiencing it. He wants to see it to capture it, like an exotic wild animal might be captured so as to be caged and exploited, for views and likes and ‘fame’. Captivity. Perhaps we could refer to this as ‘owning the moment’ instead of ‘living in the moment’. I don’t know this man and I could be wildly wrong. But I am an intuitive sort, often wildly right about people.

String Cheese, no?

A chipmunk darts across the path two feet in front of me. So immensely cute. Posts up on a rock and uses it’s tiny little front ‘hands’ to hold its loot and nibble voraciously and aggressively on it. Proud as anything I ever did see, of it’s chipmunk-sized accomplishment.

I read a sign about how the land below USED to be plentiful. Bountiful. Pictures of native Americans using the land appropriately. I remember passing by a sign from yesterday about how building a dam made it so the land didn’t flood and therefore didn’t create grazing areas for animals and didn’t carry cottonwood seeds anymore, and so on. It feels so impersonal and disconnected. Just a sign about how this all used to be right and good, rich and plentiful. Another sign somewhere else about how white man made it wrong. And that’s all. Just facts I guess.

“Dear sign reader, here’s some words about a sad and stark reality. We’ve added pictures for distraction, and just kind of peppered it in here within nature so it will be something palatable and something you will hopefully readily forget. Have a blessed day!”

I read another sign about how a guy built a ladder in a crack in the rock and first climbed to the top in 1893. I round a bend and sit on a rock. Leaning back on my hands, staring up, legs dangling off. Little bugs fly in my ear. Another couple walks by talking about pictures. Pictures. Pictures. Pictures. It’s so automatic:

See incredible nature, primarily through screen.
Take pictures.
Move along.
Take more pictures.
Take more pictures.
Take so many pictures!
Sort and find best pictures later.
Share with online world.
Be interesting. Be liked. Be validated.
Take on some cheapened, token form of worth.
Repeat throughout life.
Reach end of life not having actually lived and experienced a whole lot for yourself. (Optional alternate ending: have important realizations somewhere in life and start really living, for you!) Not having words to describe awe-inspiring moments of life. Instead resorting to endless scrolling or digging four subfolders deep on the hard drive to show what you sort of saw. Is it better to prove that you were there, than to actually BE while you are there? But hey, a picture is worth a thousand words. I adore photography. It is an exquisite and wonderful art. I also love 1,000 words! How rich and imaginative and beautiful to be able to use such a vast swath of vocabulary to tell a story. To describe beauty, a person, an animal, an idea, nature, and so on.

I don’t think a picture is worth that many words. Maybe like 12 words. Ah, but who has time for words in this society anyway. A quick pic will indeed be adequate. …. I think we could be so much more than adequate. We could be superb. Story-tellers. Oral traditions passed along through generations, are now electronic albums that mean little to nothing to the person who wasn’t there and doesn’t have context for that which led up to and came after the picture. …

I return to the trail I’ve been walking on, circumnavigating this ginormous, seemingly random rock. The trail’s surroundings are so lush and stunning. I take in this towering natural structure. I ponder towers. I ponder powers. How conquering towers is about powers. Mankind’s achievement. Getting to the tippy tops of things. The highest downtown offices host the richest companies. Penthouse suites are at the tops of skyscrapers. Ritzy rotating restaurants exist in the sky for the wealthy. Poor peons belong below. A tower is a representation for a position of power. I imagine the native Americans having so much respect for this ascending string cheese boulder. Using it as a waypoint. A guide. A sacred place. A holy site. Maybe they ‘conquered’ it too. I doubt it. But the white man sure did. And still does. Look at us now.

I wish native Americans still owned it. And we had to ask permission or pay them to see it. No, that’s not even right. Ownership is a word of ours. A silly concept in the context of nature. What I wish is that no one owned it, but rather that all humans mutually respected and regarded it and chose to exercise personal responsibility to not exploit it for any reason or purpose, at least financially or for any form of notoriety. Instead to protect and love and cherish it, and to learn from it.

This walking trail has speed bumps and I find that strange. Like how fast are people walking here?!

Dead snake on road.
Supposedly, per a sign, Snakes exist on top of this tower? What?! That is neither reasonable nor logical. How on earth!?
This ongoing snake motif in my life for so many years is….well, ongoing. That’s the only thing of certainty I can say about it.

Dawn. Duck tape tent. Pack up. Write postcards.

567.6 miles on odometer at end of day two.

Beautiful rolling greens. MT (guys wrestling) trucker dodging me swerving quickly. Bella fourche fuel. BMW guy. Subway. Spearfish. Brewery. Adventure pants. Rain fire. Memories made. Cute Abbie. Trader dough — 1890s starter. Amazing. Rain soon as I start. Dumped on. Barely could see. Muddy dirt roads. Adventures. Following gut on roads I knew nothing about. Fire and logging roads. Worked out this time. Lake. Cows. . Decision making not good. Grass trail nuts and fishing line. ? $24. So much. But having a blast riding so scoped out all over. SD — this area is surprisingly exceptional. Whitetail at 6,000 ft. Roger. Ripe old fart. Coffee. Hammock. Smoke. Read. Eat. Try to get warm. Geese. Kids. Tired. Thoughts are harder tonight. Just want to be warm. Wish I had my sleeping bag.


——-

Brown cows black cows
Clouds. Red carpet
Sunset
Wind
Directional mistake. Pannier mistake
Harley guy. Sweeping gas station. Wants to trade his sportster for my bike

Some push you to see if you’ll fall down. Some push you to see if you’ll get up again

Ride like the wind. In the wind.







* When I get into nature and have solitude, I find my thoughts tend to bounce around different subjects. I will sometimes record my stream of conscious in long or short form on my phone while I wander, discover, explore, hike, etc. I usually think in the moment that I’m thinking some brilliant thoughts and it will be worth expounding upon later on. Most of the time they are mediocre thoughts, and they just feel significant because everything feels significant in nature. In this case, I for months thought I’d lost this note, and then finally found it and when I read it I liked it as is. So this is an unedited stream of conscious, from Bear Lodge, back in the spring—more long form on the front end during my hike circumnavigating the great rock, and very short on the tail end of the trip. I admit my narcissism in adoring some portions of my stream of conscious, including this above portion. And so here it is. Make of it what you will.