ON FIGS & STORIES; Reflections from Devil’s Tower

Devil’s Tower is an impressively strange thing. Shooting straight up 867 feet in the air, the ridges going all the way around it give it the air of a giant crème caramel. The Native Americans – perhaps more respectfully – called it Bear’s Lodge, and there are many stories about how it came to be. My favourite was a girl running away from a bear, which caught up with her and was about to kill her, when the ground lifted beneath her, carrying her high into the air where the bear could not reach her. It is striking how many things in or near the Badlands, are named for Beelzebub: as well as the Devil’s Tower, he also has a bathtub and a backbone in the area. Perhaps analogies could be drawn here with another powerful American property magnate, but I would never be so crass.

"We have the best rocks, such great rocks, American rocks..."

More interesting to me is that the Indian names for these things are far more connected with the land itself, or the myths associated with the land – the Bear’s Lodge being a case in point. The white settlers seem to have been very quick to condemn any geological abnormalities as the work of the evil one, and the naming of the landscape seems to point to the fundamental difference in attitudes to land of the native and colonising people. Fuelled by religious extremism, profit, or both, the pioneers saw the land as something to be tamed, converted, or extracted from, not an ecosystem that they were a part of. It’s notable that all the white stories in the area are of the exploits of people  who came to the frontier looking for fame or fortune. These are the cowboy stories that captivated me when I was a kid, and the reason I wanted to come to places like Deadwood and Buffalo in the first place on our road trip.

But compare them to Indian stories, and as well as the tales of great warriors and their fight for freedom, the stories they tell about the land reflect the way they hold it as sacred. Their legends often mix the land and the people; the land itself is a character. In a Western, the landscape is the setting for a gunslinger to have his moment; at best it gets the role of pitiless adversary to be endured. It’s strange because travelling around, “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” and accompanying stars and stripes are emblazoned on buildings, hoodies and T-shirts everywhere, but this pride is not necessarily in the land itself. The natural beauty of America is so jaw-dropping and vast that you cannot help but understand why the land was sacred to Indians – it’s hard to describe without reaching for religious imagery. For the pioneers, however, it was seen as a gift to them from God, rather than sacred in and of itself. And once you have been given a gift, it is yours to do with what you please. Like massacre bison at a rate so rapid that you exterminate a populate of 35 million animals on the great plains in 50 years. This is sometimes referred to as “The Bison Genocide”- the word might seem jarring at first, but learning about the policies behind the event, it starts to seem entirely justified.

Anyway, back to the Devil’s Tower, now part of the National Parks Service, an organisation set up partly in response to the destruction of the bison, committed to preserving and conserving America’s natural beauty (and therefore, naturally, facing massive cuts from the current government). Around the path at the foot of the tower is a forest, and in the branches of the trees are tied bits of material that flutter in the wind like multi-coloured blossoms. Each of these – scarves, bandanas, scraps – represent a prayer from a Native person. A sign asks you not to take pictures of them, but invites you to use them as a prompt for reflection.

Tightly encircling the structure itself are huge bits of rocks and scree that have fallen from the Tower over the years (dislodged, if you will), forming a beginner’s slope before the real climbing begins. To me this was irresistible, and I began my scramble up the rocky obstacle course.

Off for a scramble.

Accompanying me all the way up were the prayer scraps, the branches reaching towards me as got higher. Finally, I could go no further. I sat, and looking over the branches, those fabric prayers got me to reflecting.

I thought on my grandfathers, both of whom passed away in the last few years. One would have loved the climbing, the adventure of this place, and the other the stories attached to it. As I thought more on the idea of stories, a moment came back to me, the significance of which I pondered. In the car afterwards, I wrote down these thoughts, and they came out somewhere halfway to poetry:

Years ago, in my late teens, tasked with entertaining my cousins:

Three boys,

Less than five years apart,

Six arms, each begging each other to be deadened…

The quietening no small feat.

I came up with a character, Diego, a sabre tooth tiger

(I may or may not have watched Ice Age not long before)

And the boys sat transfixed at Diego’s adventures, their upper arms breathing sighs of relief as they listened.

And each time I saw them after that, they’d ask for a new Diego story, so that his legend grew, year on year. I would forget the lore, but the boys always remembered, plot lines down to the tiniest detail, as if they’d watched the recap of the season before:

“Previously on the adventures of Diego…”

And so we grew the story together, shared it between us like a fat and juicy fig, them laying the foundations, and me building higher, safe in the knowledge that Babel wouldn’t crumble while their minds kept it safely stored.

And then, one cold day in Hamburg (for these are my German cousins; perhaps the total recall is explained…),

standing on the steps outside the cathedral, something changed. The familiar request came up as we were waiting:

“How about a Diego story, Quentin?”

I was now in my twenties – the age a man’s brain stops growing, they say –

I launched into it, but quickly something felt off; a clunking under the bonnet, my legs treading air three feet past the edge of the cliff…

I’d lost the feel of it somehow.

The names weren’t coming back to me, and maybe the boys couldn’t remember them as clearly either, but something was lost. This last chapter of Diego’s adventures was a disappointment, like a series finale fizzling into disgruntled fan forums.

The fig was dried or finished.  

Sometimes I worry that this marked a turning point, me losing an ease with storytelling, realising I was naked in the Garden, my narrative ease inhibited by a scramble for fig leaves in the outskirts of my mind…

Is every story I’ve told since then just trying and failing to find that child-like ease?

But sitting on that rock in the middle of the Badlands of Wyoming, I remember that a dried fig has a sweetness all of its own.