St. Mary, MT – Joliet, IL
6/22 – 6/28/16
6-22
This morning, I drove along US-2, the two-lane highway that runs endlessly across northern Montana. The road parallels the former Great Northern Railway, whose promoters drove the settlement of this remote region in the 1890’s. Every ten or fifteen miles, I would pass a forlorn little hamlet with an exotic name, founded by railway men to attract settlers. Often, little remained but a grain elevator and a few neatly-gridded streets of abandoned houses. Mile-long freight trains rattled through the empty towns without slowing.
Above the parallel lines of railroad and highway arched an infinite blue sky. Below, knee-high prairie grass ran to every horizon. As my consciousness receded into the restive coma that is the lot of long-distance drivers, I seemed to see my car from above – a glimmer on the infinite ribbon of road, engulfed by the prairie, swallowed by the sky.
Near the North Dakota border, the smooth green prairie began to be scored by ravines. Far to the southeast, under a sea of drifting cumulus clouds, the tumbled hills of the badlands along the Little Missouri River came into view.
As soon as I crossed into North Dakota, I entered a landscape transformed by the Bakken Oil boom. Bobbing oil jacks and serried storage tanks gleamed atop every grassy hill; each flyspeck town was ringed by new mobile homes and raw subdivisions. Development was especially rampant around Williston, where every vehicle on road besides mine seemed to be a pickup or semi hauling heavy equipment. A sticker on the back of a pickup in front of me summarized the prevailing mood: Drill Baby Drill.
Around 6, I pulled into the isolated, little-visited, and surprisingly pleasant North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The park is centered on the valley that the Little Missouri River has cut through fantastically eroded formations of mudstone and shale. The campground, located beside the river, was idyllic – shaded by cottonwoods, swept by a cool breeze.
Once I had set up, I followed the scenic (and only) drive through the park. Raking light picked out every nook and cranny of the scarred cliffs, shadows filling the ravines like veins. Parking at the end of the road, I hiked a mile and a half to Sperati Point, an overlook surveying miles of river valley. The hike was pure pleasure. The evening sun gilded the dry grass; bees hovered over patches of nodding wildflowers; light pooled and flowed over the cliffs.
After the hike, I performed my usual evening routine. The sun had set by the time I finished cleaning my dishes. Unwilling to make the half-hour trek to Watford City, I drove to an east-facing overlook high above my campsite to get a phone signal. Parking, I turned the car off, and set my camp lantern on the dashboard. Among the unread emails of the past three days, I discovered the University of Michigan’s formal offer letter for a part-time lecturer in history, which outlined the starvation wages that would validate my PhD. Suddenly very tired, I switched off my lantern and got out of the car.
Leaning against the hood, I looked down on the darkened canyon. Over the oil fields to the east, a half-dozen cell and radio towers were flashing cryptic messages at each other. The prairie grass whispered brokenly as the moon, waning gibbous, rose swollen and bloody behind the flickering towers. For nearly a half-hour, I stood watching the moon rise, suddenly and acutely conscious of the world beyond my patch of wilderness.
6-23
I was awakened this morning by a crunching noise. My first thought was that people were walking through the grass near my tent. As my head cleared and I realized that crowds of campers were not likely to be stirring at 5:30, a sudden suspicion flared in my mind. The snort of something large and decidedly not human immediately outside my tent heightened my apprehension. Feeling like the first victim in a horror movie, I slowly unzipped my tent. I looked to the right: nothing but the sun rising through cottonwoods. Ahead: only my car and an empty field. Then I looked left, and saw the bison. There were three of them, grazing about ten feet away. One, a large male, paused his cropping to peer disdainfully at me and snort once.
This was an unexpected development. Opening my tent with deliberate slowness, I stepped out. The bison continued grazing. I waved my arms and shouted. The bison continued grazing. Choosing to regard this as a sign of the buffaloes’ benevolence, I began to take my tent down. The bison continued grazing. I had just gotten the fly off when I heard a clatter of hooves. With no further warning, sixty or seventy more bison emerged from the woods and surrounded my campsite. There were bison of every shape and size, from coffee-colored calves to massive humpbacked bulls. One bison began rubbing himself against the tree overshadowing my tent; another started to wallow in a dusty patch near my grill. The rest cropped grass on all sides. Uncertain of how to proceed, I hovered near my car. After what felt like an hour, the bison began snorting and shuffling their way to a field about thirty yards away. I scrambled to finish taking down the tent. Almost the moment I finished, the herd wandered back over my campsite. One large bull laid down exactly where my tent had been.
After this exciting start, I settled into the tedium of driving on the Great Plains. Western North Dakota seems to consist entirely of unambitious hills covered with dead grass. In my 200-odd mile drive across the state, I passed through only three towns, one of which –Amidon, ND – proudly advertised its status as “the smallest county seat in America.” White Butte, an unprepossessing hill near Amidon, was proudly signposted as the highest point in North Dakota. I was half-hoping that there would be a roadside gift shop nearby with White Butte paperweights and coffee mugs, but I was disappointed.
I perked up briefly at the South Dakota border (imaginary welcome sign: Welcome to South Dakota! Hey, at least it isn’t North Dakota!). As I drove south, the landscape became tentatively more interesting. Isolated buttes began to rear from grassy hills like icebergs in a heaving sea. Finally, over a prairie dappled with the shadows of passing clouds, the Black Hills appeared to the south.
Since my intended campground was in Wind Cave National Park, at the southern end of the Black Hills, I had to drive nearly two hours after passing through Rapid City. On reaching my destination – having braved a herd of bison and driven seven hours – I was rewarded with a campsite that was shadeless, thorny, and steeply sloped.
After some halfhearted attempts at making my campsite livable, I drove over to the Wind Cave visitor center, arranged a tour for later in the afternoon, and took a short hike to an old fire tower. From this vantage point, I could see a large portion of the southern Black Hills. Rocky hills rolled in every direction, crowned with dense stands of pine and interspersed with golden-brown patches of prairie. The whole landscape shimmered in the afternoon heat, pines and prairie alike seeming ready to boil away.
Ready to get out of the heat, I returned to the visitor center for my cave tour. I had chosen the Fairgrounds tour, a 90-minute walk through some of Wind Cave’s most spectacular rooms. The rooms and corridors were impressive in their own right; but the real highlight was the boxwork –gypsum tracery – that chased and adorned walls and ceilings. Impossible patterns leapt before the eye, to be succeeded an instant later by new half-truths and the pressing dark. Perhaps inevitably, I was continually reminded of ancient funerary architecture. The shape and size of corridors, which featured broad shelves of limestone, evoked the Roman catacombs; the rooms, with their darkened and niche-cut walls, seemed so many columbaria.
It was a memorable tour. I emerged from the cave, however, into a heat that had contrived to become still more stifling and unpleasant since my entry. The temperature was still in the eighties when I crawled into my tent around midnight. Sweating, I lay looking up at the open roof vents, watching the lighting of a thunderstorm that never arrived.
6-24
This morning, I visited Mount Rushmore. Having left my car a half-mile away to avoid the parking fee, I was treated to a slow reveal of the monument. Hints and half-glimpses – and then, suddenly, a direct view of the iconic stone faces. It was the rare attraction that was nothing more and nothing less than I had expected. The monument itself was worthy of a respectful hour’s walking and gawking; but I found myself more interested in people watching. Bored children ran madly across the plaza and down the avenue of flags; their parents screamed themselves hoarse and tried desperately to frame family photos. Elderly RVers peered myopically at the monument, shuffling through the plaza and shouting into each other’s hearing aids. Groups of foreign tourists, looking rather unsure of what all the fuss was about, took pictures in every direction. It was in short, the same circus that develops around every major tourist attraction: forever changing, always the same.
Left with an hour of free time, I returned to Wind Cave National Park and took a short hike in valley of brown and blowing grass. About a mile down the trail, I encountered a large town of prairie dogs. I spent the next half-hour messing with the inhabitants. Every time I approached an entrance, nearby prairie dogs would send up a chorus of frantic squeaking and begin dashing, Chinese fire drill-style, from one hole to another. All would be quiet for a moment – then a few heads would poke up from the grass; furtive scurrying would resume; the prairie dog god in his heaven, all would be right with the world – until I moved again, and pandemonium broke out anew.
Tearing myself from the joys of antagonizing prairie dogs, I returned to the Wind Cave visitor center. Several days before, I had reserved a spot on the Wild Cave Tour. Donning long pants and a sweatshirt, I was assigned a miner’s helmet, kneepads, and an emergency flashlight. Duly attired, I and my four other would-be cavers descended with two rangers to the lower levels of the cave. The next four hours passed in a blur of twisting passageways, yawning pits, and echoing chambers. This intimate look at the cave was fascinating – my face was frequently inches from gorgeous boxwork tracery – and a little unnerving, particularly in the handful of passages so tight that we had to wiggle through. The two rangers (one was training the other) were excellent guides; one, a member of the Lakota Sioux tribe, shared the Lakota emergence story, in which Wind Cave features as a passageway from the spirit world. “So remember” she said, having finished her story, “Wind Cave is a sacred place, and should be treated with respect.” Literally two minutes later, I cracked my helmet on a low ceiling and knocked a handful of age-old calcite from the ceiling. Whoops.
Besides the natural wonders of the cave, I was particularly impressed by the traces we passed of the cave’s first explorers. At the end of the nineteenth century, a few boys – sons of the ranchers who owned the land above – explored large sections of Wind Cave. In one large chamber, we found the signature of Alvin McDonald, greatest of these pioneers, traced with candle smoke on the ceiling. I cannot imagine the fortitude (or desperate boredom) required to squirm, candle bucket in hand, through endless twisting and confined passageways, a fragile string your only connection to the world above.
6-25
I spent the morning in Custer State Park, the block of public land just north of Wind Cave National Park. Having paid an extortionate entry fee, I was determined to enjoy the park’s vaunted hiking trails to the fullest. I began with the most famous: the trek up Harney Peak, the highest point east of the Rockies. Though hardly comparable to the towering peaks of the west, Harney Peak presents an impressive profile from afar: a great gray dome, turreted and pinnacled with spires of slivered granite. The three-mile path up gains elevation gradually until the very end, where stairs mount steeply up to an observation tower.
I ate lunch on a granite shoulder just below the observation tower, reveling in an expansive panorama of the Black Hills. I was especially taken with the view to south, where a forest of granite pinnacles cast long shadows over pine forests decimated by bark beetle infestation.
Determined to get my money’s worth out of Custer State Park, I immediately began another hike upon returning to the Harney Peak trailhead. This time, I set out for Little Devil’s Tower, a granite stub bearing scant resemblance to its namesake. The views from atop this unimposing hunk of granite were, however, remarkable. Harney Peak loomed just to the northeast; but the most impressive prospect was to the east, where another garden of pinnacles shone against the infinite umber backdrop of the Great Plains.
I closed the afternoon with a tour of Jewel Cave. Though created by the same basic processes (and in the same limestone formation) as its neighbor Wind Cave, Jewel Cave looks quite different. Here, repeated inundations caused calcite to crystallize in great sheets on the walls of every chamber and passageway. Impurities in the water dullened the crystal sheets; but wherever they had broken or slipped, brilliant streaks of crystal glimmered. Again unlike Wind Cave, Jewel Cave has a number of wet rooms, where steadily dripping water has created fantastic stalactites and flowstone formations. The creamy slickness of this stone, which contrasted sharply with the off-white calcite walls, enticed me to shoot a long string of blurry photos.
I returned to my campsite to discover that the awful family across the road was still there. As mentioned previously, I have a way of attracting the loudest, most obnoxious, and generally objectionable people in any given campground. Here, I have drawn an awesomely dysfunctional family. There are three children – a girl in junior high, and two boys aged about 3 and 5. The girl, who is moody and seldom talks, is my favorite member of the clan. The younger boy is a spastic little brat who is constantly hurting himself and screaming. The older boy, equally hyperactive, channels his energies into the twin pursuits of whining to his parents and surreptitiously punching his brother. The mother, passive-aggressive, says little and drinks a great deal. The father compensates for her silence by shouting himself hoarse at his two sons. As I made dinner, I took an almost anthropological interest in their squabbles, and had to restrain myself from stealing glances at the chaos. Tolstoy was right: every unhappy family is unique.
6-26
I left my campsite just as the boy across the street woke up, instantly ran into something, and started screaming. Driving two hours on a desolate country road, I arrived in Badlands National Park a little before 9 – just in time to get the last available tent site. This site, inevitably, was adjacent to a camper with three yipping Pomeranians. I cannot tell you how ready I am to sleep in a hotel.
I have seen several badlands on this trip, most recently in North Dakota. These, however, are the definitive badlands –bigger, badder, and more fantastically eroded than any comparable landscape in North America. Architectural metaphors kept springing to mind as I drove and hiked among the buttes and ravines – turreted pinnacles, outthrust buttresses, skylines and avenues.
I hiked all day, despite brutal heat. My favorite trail was the longest – a five-mile loop above the Badlands wall. On this trail – far enough from the road to be nearly deserted –I spent a pleasant couple hours scrambling up buttes, poking through rock piles, and disregarding any number of other park rules. Silent castles and breached enceintes rimmed the broad prairie through which I walked, as knee-high grass, green and tan, bent before a stiff breeze.
Making the obligatory stops at scenic overlooks along the way, I looped the Badlands road and headed into Wall. I spent a pleasant twenty minutes in the iconic Wall Drug – surely the only establishment in the country that can boast a PHARMACY, MUSEUM & CHAPEL. Afterward, I found a Dairy Queen with an outlet to do my evening’s typing.
Around 8, enticed by the coppery light streaming through the Dairy Queen’s narrow windows, I decided to try to watch the sunset from one of the overlooks along the park loop road. This proved more difficult than I had anticipated. The endless curves of the road forced me to ride the brake and watch helplessly as the sun sank. I reached my overlook just as the sun’s disk kissed the horizon – too late for anything but a few wistful photos of twilit hills and bloodied clouds. I found myself entranced, however, by the play of colors in the gathering dark. For a few minutes after the sun disappeared, as the seamed hills glowed in residual light, new and grander patterns emerged in the landscape: strata melded, valleys joined, buttes collapsed – merging and melting into undifferentiated dark.
It was well after 9 by the time I returned to my campsite. Deciding to indulge myself with a shower, I trundled off the grimy shower block, depleted my slender stock of quarters, and stepped into the single available stall, which happened to be the one nearest to the door. I soon discovered why the stall had been empty. Every time someone opened the door – and someone was always opening the door – my curtain would fly open, threatening to expose yours truly, clean but very naked, to an unwitting audience of my fellow campers. The only way to keep it closed was to keep my head, a foot, or an elbow firmly against the right edge at all times. It was not a comfortable shower.
The lightning of a distant thunderstorm was flickering on the eastern horizon when I emerged from my shower. The storm, apparently stationary, continued for hours, filling a quarter of the sky with arcing bolts. Overhead, however, were thousands of stars, bisected by the ribbon of the Milky Way.
6-27
On this last full day of my trip, I was woken shortly after dawn by the yipping of the three Pomeranians next door. To quiet them, the owner – an elderly lady – began singing a lullaby. There was no sleeping after that. One last time, I rolled my sleeping bag, deflated the mattress, stowed my tent, and performed the dozen other little rituals of departure. And then I was off.
I paused at the edge of the park for a last set of photos. The clouds of last night’s storm lingered to the south and east, providing a dark backdrop for the banded colors of the Badlands wall.
East of the Badlands, I reentered the thousand-mile coma of the Great Plains, whipping at 90 Mph through a landscape so monotonous that it reminded me of the looping backdrops in old Hannah-Barbera cartoons. After a few hours of this, I grew desperate enough to stop at Mitchell, home of the Corn Palace.
The Corn Palace – accurately if unhelpfully advertised as “the world’s only corn palace” – is the sort of attraction that can only survive in the midst of a (figurative) desert. I-90 passes just south of town, bringing in hundreds of thousands of visitors desperate for some relief from the monotony of driving on the Plains. This relief the Corn Palace provides. A massive auditorium graced with a corncob mural, the Palace centers on a large auditorium-cum-showcase floor, where a dazzling array of corn-themed souvenirs is usually on sale. At set hours, audiences are given by Cornelius, an anthropomorphic corn cob. Regrettably, I arrived too late to be ushered into the presence.
I admired many aspects of the palace, particularly the murals detailing the torrid relationship of man and maize. I was especially taken with the fact that Mitchell’s city hall is an annex to the palace. I envisioned a meeting of the city council at which Cornelius was introduced as the mayor’s special counsel: “Good evening gentlemen. Pray excuse my voice, which has been husky of late. There is a kernel of truth in the recent allegations…”
After another hour and a half of unrelieved tedium, I rolled into Sioux Falls. Deciding to treat myself for surviving the drive across South Dakota, I drove to Bob’s, a well-known burger joint set inconspicuously along a faded commercial strip. The only customer in the dark interior, I ordered a bacon, cheddar, and barbeque double burger to go. Picking idly at the chipped counter, I watched the cook transfigure two handfuls of ground beef into my burger. The product, served with perfectly browned fries, was delicious.
I consumed this feast in the shady park that surrounds the eponymous falls of the Big Sioux River. Picturesque if not dramatically beautiful, it was a pleasant place to murder a burger.
And then, onward and eastward. It took nearly four hours to get across southern Minnesota, where massive arrays of windmills churned over level fields of corns and beans. Finally, in late afternoon, I reached the bluffs along the Mississippi River, and crossed into Wisconsin. I decided to halt in La Crosse for the evening. After claiming my room in a rather decrepit Motel 6, I drove up to the bluffs overlooking the city, the only real local attraction. Granddad Bluff Park proved to be a pleasant surprise. The views over La Crosse and the Mississippi valley were impressive, and the weather was perfect. I spent a contented half-hour under rustling oaks, savoring the first evening in long while that was neither chilly nor sultry.
6-28
Instead of racing home on I-90, I decided to take the scenic route. From La Crosse, I drove south along the “Great River Road,” a two-lane highway paralleling the Mississippi. The river was lake-like and placid, its surface mirroring the wooded bluffs ranged along both shores. Every fifteen minutes or so, the road passed through a faded little town, where houses and shops straggled raggedly up steep slopes.
I stopped in the pleasant little town of Guttenberg, Iowa, and walked along the river for twenty minutes. Carp surfaced to swallowed mayflies; birds sang on the wooded banks. The weather was postcard-perfect. For the first and only time in the last seven weeks, I suddenly wished that I were camping that night.
But the moment passed, and I drove on. I was struck by how green everything looked – the trees arching over the road, the tall grass by the roadside, the reeds and cattails by the river. After so long in deserts and semi-arid zones, I had forgotten how verdant a Midwestern summer could be.
As I crossed into Illinois at Clinton, all shades of green resolved into the faded emerald of corn. Corn and beans, beans and corn lined the way as I rolled east along the old Lincoln Highway. About forty miles west of Joliet, I stopped for lunch at the Wedron Office, a bar in the middle of a cornfield known for its fried chicken. After devouring my bird in the dark interior (decorated with tinsel for the Fourth of July), I walked slowly into the parking lot. The corn, already shoulder-high, was rustling in a light breeze. Cicadas chirped in the tall grass along the road. Fair weather cumulus clouds drifted silently overhead. I took a deep breath, started my car, and pulled out onto the empty two-lane highway.
