A Very Long Western Story, Part Three: An American Garden of Eden

Here on this mountain top
I got some wild, wild life
I got some news to tell you
About some wild, wild life.
--Talking Heads, "Wild, Wild Life"

The Black Hills of South Dakota take their name from the Lakota Sioux who considered the area sacred. Paha sapa they are called in Lakota. They are an interesting formation, a sort of oval range, alone in the plains, surrounded by a valley playfully called the racetrack and containing several peaks in excess of 6000 feet. It is no wonder that many American Indians considered this area to be some sort of ground zero for creation. It is like a ragged, jagged Garden of Eden that Monkey and I were set to explore.

An early Monday night (after a meal of pork and sauerkraut at the Horse Creek Inn), led to an early morning at the table of our hosts at Emerald Pines. Mrs. Pines cooked up a scrumptious breakfast of french toast and bacon, with plenty of hot coffee, and some scones on the side. Monkey and I were well fed as we headed out to gaze upon the grandeur of Mount Rushmore.

I was prepared for a tacky 1960s-style North-by-Northwest version of Mount Rushmore. Something along the lines of a Graceland for George Washington, a gift shop full of shot glasses and rubber tomahawks, and coin operated telescopes. I did not get what I expected (except for the coin-op scopes).

Mount Rushmore is a pretty amazing sight. No doubt, even had the gift shop been full of plastic, glow-in-the-dark models of the heads, even had the cafeteria been doling out Mount Rushmore versions of Klondike ice cream bars, the monument itself would be spectacular. It was made more spectacular by a gorgeous day: clear, slightly windy, a bit of a chill in the air (some who came from the lowlands were in shirt sleeves). It was made even more spectacular by the off-season crowd.

Not many people were around on this fine late October Tuesday. It was great. We took a guided walk around the monument and trail around the grounds, and got to spend twice as much time with our Parks Service guide than we would have been able to in the summer. It was an awesome sight, and the interpretive center and museum were fascinating. I won't go into some sort of Modern Marvels shpeil about the wonders of the work that Gutzon Borglum and his crew did, but I will say that it is a story worth investigating. I would like to take this opportunity, however, to alert anyone thinking about taking a trip to Mount Rushmore in the off-season: use the restroom at the welcome center before you walk the trail around the park.

Another warning that is worth disseminating: be wary of belligerent burros while driving through Custer State Park, our second destination of the day. Near Wind Cave National Park, Custer is a large state-owned piece of land that is home to "wildlife-at-large," like so much of this area of the western US. We were amazed to see a herd of bison watering at a hole just a few hundred yards from the park's borders. After gazing in wonder at these magnificent, seemingly docile beast (yet we were warned by signs that they are "dangerous"), we motored on, only to be waylayed by a herd of wild burro astride the park road. We stared at them, and they stared at us. We inched The Penguin forward, they held their ground. We sat stalemated for a good fifteen minutes before these belligerent burros decided to let us through.

Beauty was everywhere on the other side of the asses. Not only in animal form, but the few deciduous trees still in leaf were blazing in color. against the backdrop of the grass and pines, they stood out, little accents to this western American Garden of Eden.

A Very Long Western Story, Part Two: Black Hills Fever Dreams

When I was a child, I had a fever.
My hands felt just like two balloons.
Now, I've got that feeling once again.
I can't explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.
--Pink Floyd, "Comfortably Numb"

When I was a small boy, I had some disease. My mother once told me it was Scarlet Fever, but I was under the impression that that was fatal, so let's say it was something else. At any rate, I remember very little about the time except these amazing fever-induced (I'm assuming) hallucinations or visual interpretations of images from the television.

During my convalescence, it seems, according to my memory, that I watched a great deal of TV. I remember a cartoon about a girl choking on a chicken bone. That was vivid and very blue--it had a Shel Silverstein meets Maurice Sendak kind of feel. When my grandmother was pretty sick, she used to like when I read Where the Wild Things Are to her. Ironically, it always reminded me of that dreamy childhood sickness feeling. Strange, but I just thought about that. Anyway, I also remember an episode of Soul Train in which every one had very large heads and they were levitating. Then again, that could have simply been the hair- and shoe-styles of the day making them look like that. I still to this day, when I have a fever, feel as if my own body has grown immense, and that, while I know if I look at my feet they will be right there, five and a half feet or so away from my eyes, they feel like they are a hundred feet away. It's a weird feeling, let me tell you. One other thing I remember is an image, from what I cannot recall, in which a metal, robot-like, pterodactyl-looking thing with orange wings fell burning from the sky. It writhed and roared on the oily street as reddish flames engulfed it. I was horrified.

The farthest one might be able to get from the oily street, writhing, burning pterodactyl or not, might be a long stretch of the plains of southwestern South Dakota. It was a veritable sea of rolling brownish hills, resplendent in its dry grassiness, as it crested and receded under the wide blue sky. This was the predominant view as Monkey and I drove through Wind Cave National Park, where visitors can find Wind Cave (which I'll tell you about next time). In addition to Wind Cave, the park is home to a host of free-ranging (at large, they like to call them) prairie ruminants. We literally stopped the car in the middle of the road at the first sight of pronghorn antelope, not 300 yards from the road. We also saw, on a forty-five minute trek up US 385, through the park, bison, elk, coyote, and prairie dogs.

Yes, prairie dogs, as far as the eye could see, acres and acres of prairie dog town. Time would show that these towns were merely villages, compared to some, but that is (like Wind Cave) another story for another time. However, at this particular point in time, it was a thrill to see these little sentries of the plains up close. Monkey and I had seen prairie dogs (not dogs at all really, but, I think you know that) on our treks back and forth to Oregon. Once, in Wyoming, a little scamp ran out in front of Monkey and nearly wrecked her. Boy, that was fun!

Passing out of the park, however, did not end our views of nature, nor our startlements (as the Tiresias-blind railway handcar driver says in O Brother Where Art Thou?). With so much land and so few people, there are a great number more deer and elk and such running loose up in SD. The side of the road is like a waiting area for wild undulates, looking to collide with a speeding vehicle. Lucky for us, we never met with one of these suicide mammals, but we kept a nervous, watchful eye while in the area.

As we approached our destination, Hill City, SD, our nervous, watchful eye gazed upon the unfinished (perhaps never-to-be finished) startlement known as the Crazy Horse Monument. Really just a face and an arm pushing forward out of a mountain side, the monument seems to rise up above everything nearby. From a business standpoint, that doesn't seem very wise (especially when you're charging ten bucks a pop and your sculpture isn't done yet), but for the roadway gawkers (hello!) it is a boon, let me tell you. We had plans on visiting the monument proper on Tuesday, so we just snapped a few polaroids at seventy miles per and kept on rolling. After all, we had been rolling for about eight hours at this point, and the driving was getting a might tiresome. Little did I know that by the time we were done with the trip we would have covered two thousand miles over five days, but, that's another other story for another other day.

Of course, we rolled into Hill City at about four o'clock, an hour ahead of schedule, because we missed the damned Carhenge. We couldn't check into our lodgings, so we decided to wander about the town for a few minutes. It's a small town, with a population of about 700; we figured it wouldn't take long to see what was to be seen. After a brief pause for the cause at the local Exxon, we came upon a sight that filled me with wonder and awe. A true startlement, inducing dizziness, fainting spells, and pseudo-fevers in the author. For there, perched upon the Black Hills Dinosaur Museum, wingless, and no longer aflame, was a thirty-four year old vision from my past.

A Very Long Western Story, Part One: Approaching The Land of Rocky Raccoon

Somewhere in the black mountain hills of Dakota
There lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon
--The Beatles, "Rocky Raccoon"

You may have wondered where I've been, since it's been over a week since my last post. Or, you may not even be concerned, since it is not unprecedented that I take a long lay off now and again, for sometimes good and sometimes not so good reasons. Be you the former or the latter, I will tell you that Monkey and I have been a-roaming the western section of South Dakota and the eastern section of Wyoming (and a little bit of western Nebraska, too), these past five days.

We set out before daybreak on Monday morning, finding ourselves a hundred miles to the west before the sun made its way into the eastern sky. Our first destination of the day was to be Chimney Rock National Monument, near Bayard, Nebraska. It is billed as the most famous landmark on the Oregon, California, and Mormon Pioneer Trails. Many early westerers marked the site as the beginning of the west. Others knew it as the "Elk's Penis." Still others knew it as "that place a couple days east of Scott's Bluff." At any rate, it is an important enough site to be represented on Nebraska's state quarter, making it somewhat as famous as New Jersey's side of the Delaware River, West Virginia's New River Gorge, Connecticut's Charter Oak, New Hampshire's late Old Man of the Mountain, California's Yosemite Valley, Missouri's Gateway Arch, Oregon's Crater Lake, and Wisconsin's Block o' Cheese. Using the same logic, Chimney Rock is thus as well known as the entire states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Massachusetts, South Carolina, New York, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Alabama, Michigan, Texas, Minnesota, and Idaho, all of whom put the outline of their state on their quarter. But, I digress.

As with most good road trips, a destination or two arises in the moment--a magical spot one is drawn to without premeditation, without even knowing the spot existed before driving upon it (or the sign post or bill board advertising it). Monkey and I were passing through Ogallala, Nebraska, when I spied a sign post for "Boot Hill." I just had to stop. As a child, I had as much of a love for the romantic idea of the west as any American boy of a certain age. For a long time, the only books I read were western adventures by the likes of Louis L'Amour (a decidedly un-western nom de plume) or biographies of western heroes. As a young child of the seventies, I was a kinder, gentler consumer of the western myth: I had a certain empathy for the American Indian. I understood (as much as any nine-year-old can) the unattractive aspects of the western legacy. However, I still feel that innocent, gullible, romantic joy, sometimes, when I think of the legends of the west. And, as a former devotee of such legends, I knew Boot Hill meant wild western history (some of which actually might be based on some semblance of facts).

Boot Hill, of course, is the name of many cemeteries in the west. Some are more famous than others. I didn't know that Ogallala had one, but I was excited to find it. So, on a chilly Monday morning, I maneuvered The Penguin through a residential area of tiny Ogallala, Nebraska, climbed a set of forty or so stone stairs, and there, on a hill in the west, I gazed upon the empty, but marked graves of some of the former residents of Ogallala, all presided over by a larger-than life (of course) bronze cowboy, meditatively, one leg hooked over his saddle horn, gazing off to the horizon. It was awesome (in an unabashedly nine-year-old-boy-enamored-with-cowboys way). But, we could not tarry for long....

We arrived at Chimney Rock in the early afternoon, and spent about a half an hour at the State Historical Society's Visitor Center. It was okay...not great. We did learn about the "Elk's Penis" there, so it wasn't a total waste. Alas, there are no trails, and no way to approach the site except upon the road that leads to the little visitor's center. I'm not sure if the monument is on private land, but I am relatively certain that it is surrounded by private land. So, no getting near it.

Rumors of wagon ruts from the Conestoga wagons of yore were not confirmed. I was bummed. I really wanted to see some wagon ruts.

We proceeded north, looking to find Carhenge. Unfortunately, due to one of the following, we were unable to find it:
a) the sun was in our eyes
b) a train was blocking our view
c) absolute, temporary blindness
d) it just wasn't meant to be.

At any rate, after we realized that we had totally missed it somehow, we drove on with tears in our eyes, saddened by missing Carhenge, but excited by the prospect of South Dakota, just a hundred miles or so, ahead.

What You've Heard? It's All True.

Love it or hate it, I have to admit, there truly is no place like Nebraska.

The Bird Of Paradise Flies Up My Nose

Lest it be said that only the darkness is allowed to pervade Central Standard, allow me to relate to you that I have had a pretty good week, so far. We're talking Cornopolis-style, lads and lassies. I have felt pretty on my game at school. As well, I have given myself a good talking to and decided to permit myself to be imperfect. This will, if past experience is any indicator, only last a week or two, and then I'll be right back to kicking myself for the littlest things, but, hey, I gotta be me.

In addition, I got an email from NaNoWriMo , reminding me that it is time to sign up. In 12 days, it'll be writing time, again! Woo hoo! I don't know if I can pull it off this year. Of course, I didn't know if I could do it last year, and I did, but this year, with all of the changes.... Already, I am making excuses. Boo! However, I did not complete Script Frenzy this June due to the move, so a precedent has been set (and an unfinished film script needs more attention).

And, to top it off, I nailed a trey from the top of the arc at basketball Wednesday, so, you know, I've got that going for me. Along with the fact that, after tomorrow's half-day of finals, I have a week off, and Monkey and I are going to South Dakota! We plan on seeing the half-finished Crazy Horse, the giant president's heads, the Badlands, the Black Hills...lots o' clash of cultures history. I am pretty psyched.

Now, if we could just get the football team up here back on track, life in Nebraska might start looking up.