Road Trip '07 - Day 6

Devil's Tower
A day on the road up to Wyoming to see Devil's Tower. But first a quick stop in:

We took the back (scenic) route to the Tower. The ups and downs of the Upper Plains with the terrain changing and rolling and just being awesome. You start seeing this sight in the distance. Slowly but surely it gets closer. Like so many such natural formations, I can't even begin to imagine what early settlers would have thought as they saw this in the distance. No wonder it became a sacred place.
Then, as we are driving along we hear a roar behind us and then over us and finally in front. Jets. In formation.
We stop and I get out the telephoto lens just at the right moment. We find out it is the Blue Angels practicing out of the local Air Force base. No, they aren't landing on the Tower, that's reserved parking for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Anyway, it was a neat extra serendipity for the day.
It is impressive. As you get up to the base of it you see this mass of rock with even more rock below it. Boulders galore which gives lots of people a place to do some rock climbing. It's also a sacred place (more on that later.)
There is this 1.3 mile hike around the immediate base of the Tower. I wasn't going to do it- my wife was not able. But I started out looking for the next good picture. Pretty soon I realized that I was almost half-way around so why not finish. I also realized that my wife was waiting - and wondering. So I kept moving around the hike.

It was getting hot but it was a wonderful walk. There were these raptors circling. I'm not sure what they were, never got quite a good enough look.
Then a buzzing something went flying by me and landed on a branch. It took a second to find it but there was this old locust. I got back around to the start of the hike just in time- my wife was about to send out the troops for me. She was, naturally, worried that my back had gone out or something and I was stuck in pain along the trail.

Actually, my back was fine. It is one of the mysteries of back problems in general- and mine in particular- that for no apparent rhyme or reason it does or doesn't hurt. I get this neuropathy-type reaction with numbness and tingling down my legs and the bottoms of my feet. Sunday night at Mt. Rushmore I even felt like I was going to fall down because my feet were that numb. I hadn't even walked that far then. But today, on uneven ground, I walked (with a couple sit-downs at benches) for well over a mile and it felt great! I have always enjoyed hiking like this. I felt for the day like I'm getting some of "me" back again.
As we left the area I just had to get this picture of the deep red sandstone. Quite a color.
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A Drive Through Loss
Actually there were a couple sense of loss on the drive home.

The first, with no pictures to show for it, was a stop in Deadwood. We didn't feel like shopping but we thought, well, let's stop at one of the casinos. We have never been gamblers, but we had heard that the payout odds are really good in Deadwood. So we stopped. We set a limit- which we didn't reach, by the way- and went in.

First, the cigarette smoke smell. Awful!!! I am an ex-smoker, but can no longer stand the smell. Strike one.

Second, the atmosphere. Depressing. There was no excitement, no interest. Just lights and noise and people dropping money in machines. Strike two.

Third, we tried a few slots. Not even close. We hit $23 into the machine and thought, "This is downright stupid. It isn't even fun." Strike Three.

We were out of there and on the way back to Hill City.

But on the way we stopped along a lake we had seen on the way up in the morning. It is a lake of human origin, as you can see by the dam on the right side of this picture.
It is Pactola Reservoir and is a recreation area. You can see the boat out in the middle of the lake in this picture:
And, though it is very hard to see them, there are two young people down along the waterline at that rock sticking out into the lake:
Which brings me to the second "drive-through loss" of the day. Pactola Dam and Reservoir is a Civilian Conservation Corps project from the depression era. CCC projects were a way of giving people jobs when there weren't jobs and providing parks and other projects in rural and wilderness areas. It was probably one of the most popular of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs and continued until just about the time of World War II.

But underneath the reservoir lake is the old mining town of Pactola, SD.

Then, just a few miles down the road toward Hill City is another lake:
Sheridan Lake. This was started as a CCC project dam on Spring Lake near where the old town of Sheridan, SD stood. It was an abandoned gold mining "ghost town" by then. It had flourished in the gold mining era as a stagecoach stop. Well, the railroads came along and stagecoach stops were a thing of the past. The people of Sheridan moved on. The funds for the dam ran out and the project wasn't finished until after the War. What was left of Sheridan now sits under 20 feet of water.

We were driving through a neighborhood of ghost towns. I was struck by a sense of loss- this one by the ongoing impermanence of life. Especially as we are traveling through this ancient landscape, the small, brief, even minuscule part that we humans have in the greater scheme of things is oh so very real.
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Sacred Ground
We have been traveling all week through holy ground- sacred places. The Celts called such places "thin places." These are places where two worlds meet- the material and the spiritual. The already thin curtain separating the two is particularly thin at these places. I have been doing a great deal of reading, thinking, and writing about these places since I believe they are around us and near us so much of the time yet we miss them. I know I grew up in such a place in north-central Pennsylvania. I have come across these places in many different locations from Israel and Spain to central Wisconsin and the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota.
One things the Native Americans have managed to show us is how rich and powerful these places are and can be. They have often kept a memory of what this means and how important it is for being human. At Devil's Tower we were reminded of this sacredness:

And as we walked we would see these prayer banners or cloths or bundles. They hold the prayers close in these holy places so they can be taken to the "other" world. The fact that a sign had to be posted also reminds us that these places are also potentially fragile. What happens when the connection to these places is under water, like the Glen Canyon Dam in Colorado or places like Sheridan and Pactola? What happens when we lose the connections that have held us - not to the earth - but to all of creation? What is the spiritual foundation of a life that loses its roots in the world of the Creator?

Or even in those sacred places, what happens when they become magnets for tourism and development? You may be able to set aside a Harney Peak or a Devil's Tower as a wilderness or protected area, but what if all around them, surrounding them like a besieging army, are bright lights, cars and trucks, and the latest housing development?

These thin places are essential places. Mindie Burgoyne at the web site Thin Places says

Thin Places are ports in the storm of life, where the pilgrims can move closer to the God they seek, where one leaves that which is familiar and journeys into the Divine Presence. They are stopping places where men and women are given pause to wonder about what lies beyond the mundane rituals, the grief, trials and boredom of our day-to-day life. They probe to the core of the human heart and open the pathway that leads to satisfying the familiar hungers and yearnings common to all people on earth, the hunger to be connected, to be a part of something greater, to be loved, to find peace.

I am grateful for this week's port in the storm that is life. What a joy. And there's still more to come.

Miles today: 241 (Total: 1141)