"Gravity—the Big G!” sang Dade, still twenty yards ahead of me on the path around Devil's Tower. He was doing a bad job with the James Brown song, but he continued anyway, “On the third planet from the sun, I’ve been trying to get the funky job done…."

He turned back to grin at me, to try and get me to sing with him, but I wasn't in the mood. First of all, we weren't even supposed to be there. Up until the night before we were bombing straight from the Needles for Yosemite to do the famous Big Wall, Seven Seas. That was the plan, anyway. But while I drove us out of the Black Hills, Dade was reading a recent climbing rag with his headlamp, sucked in by an article on the Devil's Workshop. Although its second pitch was a famous, finger crack testpiece, the third pitch had been an infrequently done aid line until this spring, when two Slovenians freed it and dubbed it The Spanish Prisoner.

The new, 110 foot free line was smeary and nothing but fingertip crack until the cows came home. It was right at Dade's limit and he decided, just before we roared across the Wyoming border, that we needed to fire it off—"To start this trip with a bang," as he put it, yelling over the engine of his '70 Chevy van. Though I knew that what he really meant was that if he didn't do it now he wouldn't get a chance for a long time; his wife, Bev, was five months pregnant, and his baby-to-be, dubbed the Crackmeister because he thought it would climb so hard, was about to change everything. I mean, really, that's why we were on this trip in the first place. It was Dade's last hurrah.

I caught up to him just as he reached the boulder field off the northwestern flank, out of breath from running after I'd signed us in with the rangers. Dade grasped the back of my head with his big left hand, nodding it for me in a 'yes' as he asked, "You want to get funky? You ready to get myopic?"

What I really wanted to do—what I'd messed with like a loose tooth since we left Minneapolis—was figure out how to undo all the trouble I'd caused my maybe-ex-girlfriend Olive and my maybe-new-girlfriend Ruby Li, though a day's worth of driving and thinking had brought me no closer to figuring it out. Not that Dade had been any help.

"Born ready," I lied.

"You better be," he said, letting go of my head on an upswing, "Because we're gonna’ pull this bad boy down.”

I'd been so busy packing gear and signing us in that I hadn't really thought about where we were that morning, but when Dade let go off my head my vision snapped up to the Tower itself. I'd been there a dozen times over the years, once with Olive (though that was a disaster), and all the other times with Dade, but I'd never been so struck by its perfect size until this moment. 

Devil's Tower is enormous—a monster—and yet we can walk around it in twenty minutes. It's the biggest thing in eastern Wyoming, but is dwarfed by the broad plains that surround it—just like we were. For a brief moment I imagined that we were already done with the route, up on top of the Tower, looking down on the us that was approaching, the earlier us like a couple of pill bugs crossing a gravel path as we picked our way among boulders the size of washing machines—some almost the size of Dade's van. Cool, musty air rose from their shadows along with chipmunks, which, spoiled by tourists, were bold enough to follow us a ways, their tiny bodies covering ground even faster than we could. Or faster than I could, anyway; I’d ripped my shin open here before and picked my route carefully, while Dade found his inner mountain goat and leapt nimbly from rock to rock, building momentum and flowing over the rough edges and steeplechase gaps.

One of those chipmunks, which had been pacing me along my right side, suddenly shot over onto my boulder, then darted from one side to the other as if it would take me down if I tried to pass. I stopped to watch it for a moment, and then, without thinking, snapped at it, sending it into a short burst of chattering from a small cave beneath the rock. I felt rich, elemental—on a climbing trip. Maybe I was ready to get myopic. Maybe I was ready to fill my head with climbing and swim upstream against the Big G and maybe even hunt for what Dade calls the Climbing Brain—a mental place that lets him climb harder than I can. It's a place that he never wants to talk about—a place that I can never seem to find.

Suddenly inspired, I kicked it up a notch, leaping and running along the line Dade had picked out, though I still reached the base about a minute behind him. It was already blustery there, with winds coming from either side and also from behind, as if they were confused about why they hadn't yet worn down this old volcano plug and were unsure what to do next.