Mason jars, beamers, ghost towns, & presidents

With all due respect to the east and midwest – now that we were in an interesting part of the country I did my best to stick to the back roads. Attractive as 90 might be, with its decaying billboards for Wall Drug, you can go just as fast and cruise through small towns on the county roads. So that’s what we did – the contrast between the green grass and churned earth almost deafening.

It was mostly farmland, with round balers and combines and chisel plows licking their chops at the squared fields before them. There was the occasional rusting pile of outdated  machinery – drag harrows, reapers, binders, threshing machines – but nothing like you find in Pennsylvania. I truly can’t think of a better description of rural PA than Pennsyl – tucky.

It was nice to see a farm of windmills instead of oil pumps on the horizon lane. A bit like Kansas western Minnesota, except greener – that yellow-green of absinthe. Perhaps also the Lutheran spirit contributing a feeling of well-being and plentitude – instead of the aura of constant sinning felt in the Protestant south. But maybe that’s just watching Footloose one too many times.

The earth began to swell as we approached South Dakota. The grass grew thicker, and the eye appreciated the relief of the dimension of the hills. Roadfood.com began to grow sparse for offerings – and I resorted to Chowhound and Yelp, which led me to the Mexican Restaurant Puerto Vallarta on the outskirts of Sioux Falls.

The Enchildadas de la casa were not terrible – but the cabbage slaw was magnificent, and gave the gooey neon cheddar a crunch all too welcome. I tell you – you’re doing jack-all driving physcially – perhaps it’s all those thoughts waiting so patiently their turn in line to be mulled and masticated and considered – the work it takes to do this, while paying simultaneous attention to the number of seconds in between Dog’s panting and the huffing of Mathilda – well, I felt damn hungry and made short work of dinner. It felt nice to read and write some – even if it was Teju Cole’s “Open City,” which drives me fairly nuts, although I can’t seem to put it down, if only for its earnest desire to emulate one of my favorite writers, W.G. Sebald.

Teju, as I mentioned to another friend, seems to consider everything entering his orbit as a site to work his formidable intelligence upon. Museum exhibits, bus drivers, tourists, past professors – no one and nothing escapes the metal jaws of his critical mind. What a way to see the world – what a way to see New York City.

Some good ol’ boys in cowboy hats  reflective sunglasses with trimmed goatees chatted it up out the window, forearms resting on the rim of the truck dualy Ford F350 truck bed. Goateed out in Wranglers. When I left the bar they nodded hello – not something anyone in Pennsylvania or the south for that matter would ever do.

The sun was setting. I considered pushing on and sleeping in rest stops, as I used to do delivering furniture across the country. One time on the way to New Orleans I fell asleep in a Waffle House parking lot in Alabama listening to a book on tape – and woke up to a dead battery. Not a big deal – except I had locked the doors before falling asleep. Pretty awesome – using the cell phone (yes it was that recent, maybe seven years ago) to get the number for the Waffle House to explain the situation and have them come out to try and pick the lock. Especially awesome when someone from the outside suggested, instead of using the electric locks, that I just lift it manually.

Anywhoo – resorted to a campsite near the town waste center, just north of I-90. I followed a guy in a golf cart to my little corner of grass, next to a guy unpacking a red BMW bike (the pic below from the following morning).

“You said you’re headin’ to Alaska? Aint that funny – that feller over there is headed to Halifax, in Nova Scotia.”

And so he was. After we both set up our tents and got situated he ate ramen while I sipped tea from my mug used previously to scoop dog food. Cal was required to be on a leash and made his displeasure evident with long sighs. Mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds zzzzzed around us – Dan thankfully had spray. Darkness set in and I let Dog off, as Dan told me over the hiss of his MSR stove about his life as a UPS deliveryman in Bonner Idaho. Dan had black plastic studs in his ears and a twinkle in his eyes. He told me about the hijinks life of the Men in Brown, his lovely wife back home who was a potter, and their three children. He was 45, and had been married at the age of 20. Finally, he was doing it, just hitting the road, and happy as a clam.

“I tell you – I almost hit an angus on my way to Sturgis this morning. And I couldn’t be happier. I mean, if I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t even ride tomorrow.”

On the subject of UPS men as sex objects.

“Sure ain’t ever happened to me.”

We discussed the benefits and drawbacks of early families. He told me about his bagpiping – he was going to see the 72 year-old maker of his bagpipes in Syracuse NY. A hippy dude came over to table, greatly concerned because he could not open the wine bottle he and his crew had in tow. We had no wine opener, but Dan suggested stoving in the cork with chopsticks. I tell you – the guy could not have been more appreciative. It’s the little things in life that bring us together – ramen, tea, chopsticks to drink wine.

The hippy guy hung around for a bit. I described Greensaw, and the tug boat.

“I tell you man,” Dan said. “This is no dress rehearsal. That’s what I’ve learned these 45 years on God’s good earth.”

We said our goodnights and I put Cal in the truck for the night, and zipped myself into the tent. I still hadn’t taken the time to boil water to fix my Thermarest. So I slept on it once more deflated – but this grass softer, the ground of less interest to a phrenologist than the terrain in Wisconsin.

The next morning we were up at the crack, and hit the road, eager to make tracks across the Badlands. I tell you those billboards – one after the other! Each town competing with the other for the World’s Largest….bull head! Salt pillar! Arrowhead!

Of considerable more interest was the ghost town of Okaton, with its old gas station where the pump doesn’t stop automatically, and where, instead of a convenience store, you get room after room of socket heads, razor strops, mason jars, old medicines, rocks, kitchenware, and all sorts of other magnificent things.

And the number of Mason jars! It must be where all the lost ones go. And not just supermarket Mason jars – the blue ones with bubbles in the glass and tarnished metal screw-on caps with the glass inserts – it was almost too much.

The freckled and quite beautiful attendant had just about the widest smile one could ask for – I bought a magnificent box for six dollars, the name of the previous owner hammered into the front. Cal perhaps sensing her warmth leapt out the window to give greeting. She asked if I needed a dog-sitter for a couple, say, years.

Cal took it upon himself to check out the quarters before agreeing to terms. We decided to expand our reconaissance and took a stroll around the ghost town, which matched the gas station for both beauty and eeriness.

I can only imagine the railroad came through, to judge from the grain elevator, if I’m identifying this correctly. Houses sinking in upon themselves, flanked by double-wides, and cars seemingly exploded from the inside with the gases of disuse. Dog smelled all sorts of scents brought to him by the uninhibited wind blowing south over the prairie. I focused on old wicker chairs slid by the caving in of the house into the upper doorway – built perhaps with the idea of a deck later on, to watch the trains from back east pulling in. The bent metal archway, fastened to metal posts maybe with the idea of growing bougainvillea, passion vine, or clematis – just like in the old country.

But this here – it wasn’t even decay, like you find so often back east with the warehouses and factories. This simply Gaia, the living organism of earth, with her generous rifts to the south like crumpled wrapping paper, reaching up a hand and taking back what was originally here. I know that sounds new-agey and hippy-dippy – but this much less violent and depressing somehow than that steady downward swirl of old buildings back east.

Now as far as the roofless double-wide went , with its graffiti – I don’t know where to start with that. Neither did Dog, and we made our way back to the truck, stopping on the way out to cruise around a luminous white home, also abandoned, seemingly being swallowed back up by the green tongue of grass and juniper or who knows what all type of bush.

The amount of courage it would take to come out here and start a life. Of course there are the wonderful accounts of it all in Angle of Repose, the mining town of Leadville, the man leading the way and building a sanctuary, perhaps even with a wrap-around porch, before inviting the rest of the family west by train. But to deboard here in Okaton, walking the hundred yards to the marble threshold of this new house, being carried across in the work-hardened arms of a young husband, little ones following confusedly behind. There in the windblown grass, sound of trucks on 90 downshifting, smell of pine blowing down from Canada – almost too much to wrap one’s head around.

Dog could really care less. Actually that’s not entirely true. He cared considerably about the hot sun overhead, assaulting us through the open roof of the truck. I folded him up like a burrito in the furniture blanket. He looked a little self-conscious about his swaddling, but not too bad. We pushed north, blowing through the Badlands, and, after brief debate amongst the two of us, dropping down off 90 toward Mt. Rushmore.

First we passed through Rapid City – which, I’ve got to say, was utterly charming. Sun-splashed tree-lined streets, a healthy downtown, with the Corn Exchange serving all local food. Unfortunately closed, so I resorted to one of the coffee shops seemingly run by two young ladies, who had outfitted the open mic stage with fake brick seemingly pushing forth from the chipped plaster. The lust after the urban brick of the east, complete with butter joints! Put up some haybales, girls, get your own aesthetic going.

That’s not the nicest thing to say – I mean having the courage to start a coffee shop in the middle of farmland was in and of itself amazing. God – I need to stop reading Open City. I’m honestly no better. But I will say the turkey salad could not have been much worse – wilted leaves, chopped up cold-cuts with a generous coating of slime. But the pink lemonade hit the spot.

So we pushed on, with the idea that Mt. Rushmore was a public monument, paid for by Federal taxes. I lined up dutifully behind the RVs, slightly worried that the bike on the truck wouldn’t make clearance. But it did – and we passed through the toll, after paying eleven dollars to park in a park that didn’t even allow dogs.

Well that wasn’t going to fly with the heat – plus, Dog really needed to see this. I mean, four of our presidents carved into a mountain face.

I snapped a few pictures, and we piled back into the truck, eleven dollars lighter, and pushed Mathilda further up into the mountains, until we hit the town of Deadwood – of fascination to me after watching David Milch’s genius series.

I followed signs for Wild Bill Hicok’s grave – turned out you had to pay for that too. But the town itself pleasant enough, with sweet houses, and a small ill-kept museum that nevertheless had some fascinating yellowed town registers. Deadwood as folks probably know existed originally outside the hand of the Federal law, due to its location in Lakota territory. I tell you – it’s nothing less than a dream of mine to be outside the reach of that hand. You’d think I would have outgrown it by now – and perhaps I will out west, where the law perhaps operates in service of its community. But after growing up under the bloodshot eye of the fraternal order of police in Philadelphia, having started a business there, witnessing four days after my seventh birth day on May 14th 1985 the city police dropping a bomb on its residents, burning 60 rowhomes – Deadwood sounded pretty sweet to me. Not to mention gambling and prostitutes and gold mining. I mean – what more could anyone want?

To continue its legacy, South Dakota had made Deadwood the one town in the state where gambling continued to be legal. But these houses not holding a candle to Al Swearengen’s Gem, that bar of ill-repute, filled instead with tour buses of copperheaded couples dropping one quarter after the other into the slots, pulling on that lever as if those five lemons might just be the answer to all life’s woes.

I truly need to stop reading T. Cole.