

Last night we rented Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Spielberg classic in which Devil's Tower features prominently, which is why Samagra recommended I see it. The film came out in 1977, and, weirdly, I was in Wyoming that fall, not to visit Devil's Tower, had done that sometime in the 60s, but on a long fishing trip with parents and future husband. A remake of Close Encounters today would be so simple with iPhones – no banks of computers, no paper maps, no movie cameras, no instamatic film cameras, no dial-up phones, no flashlights (free app for that, too). In the movie, François Truffaut's character conjectures that all the people trying to get to Devil's Tower were "invited." Where do you go from a flat-top mountain? Apparently, into space. Isn't that what I said about the "ok plateau" theory too? My future, space…