Westward Ho!

We're headed out for a week's trip West, to South Dakota's Black Hills and Medora, N.D. This is our one big shot to see the rest of this region; with Katie taking off East at the end of June, our time here as a family of five is drawing to a close. We'll be back in Fargo sometime Saturday.

Monday
We managed to get out of the door at 8:30 a.m. Monday. We got off to a slow start – "It'll speed up once we're clear of the city," I told Jen. "This is why you shouldn't leave during rush hour," Jen muttered through a smile:

Neither Jen nor I had been to South Dakota before today; the kids had gone with their Doc and Nanny last weekend to Sioux Falls to see its zoo. In fact, I don't think I'd been more than 10 miles south of our house down I-29, and I'd only been that far because one day a few months ago, I thought, Geez, I haven't ever been south of our house on the interstate highway – I wonder what's there? (Answer: uh, not much.)

We headed south, into S.D., and turned west just before Sioux Falls. It was a little unsettling – all the signs for I-90 had big orange signs on them: "CLOSED" Wait – the exit? or the interstate?

Later signs provided details on a detour. I-90, once we got on it for our long shot west, was pleasant – and, for a stretch in there, pink. "Very pretty," Jen said.

This is a funny part of the country we're headed into. Though the farmers seem to be quite busy going about their business, everyone else seems utterly devoted to nabbing the attention and dollars of travelers just like us – people headed to the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore. Wall Drug is the most obvious (and make no mistake, we're going to be stopping there), but it has plenty of company.

The first big attraction that drew us in was in Mitchell, S.D.: the Corn Palace. It's a multipurpose arena for local residents and tourist attraction for the rest of us, a minaret-cornered and dome-topped building decorated with thousands of ears of corn:

As a sign inside explained, the idea was to attract people out to Mitchell to live. It was also part of an unsuccessful effort by Mitchell city fathers to wrest the state capital from Pierre; for some reason, the giant corn-covered castle failed to seal the deal. Mitchell needed the help, having been singled out by Lewis & Clark as a place where no man could earn a living farming.

Some billboards along I-90 reveal a simmering battle between those who favor animal rights and those opposed. Someone financed a series of signs dissing the animal-rights movement (one read "Keep nature in balance – wear fur"), each of which is dutifully vandalized presumably just as high as the person with the spray-can could reach.

...

Wall Drug was largely the same as it was when I was a kid. It's the quintessential tourist trap, with thousands of signs for it posted along roads all over the world (we spotted 98 along our stretch of I-90), and the promise of "free ice water" that has been luring travelers off the highway since the 1930s.

The place is a massive collection of kitsch shops and, yes, a surprisingly complete drug store. Its cafe seats 400, though we opted for a little more formal service at a restaurant across the street. The knickknacks were nicely priced – they don't seem to be in it to gouge anyone. We picked up a couple of decks of Wall Drug playing cards that were tucked away in a corner, on sale for 50 cents apiece. We also snapped a few pix in what passes for a 'sculpture garden' – here are the kids astride a jackalope:

As tourist traps go, it is definitely on the friendly side (versus abusive). We were happy we stopped.

We sped west for another hour under threatening skies, then Jen ran into a Rapid City Wal-Mart to pick up a few groceries for the next few days while I stayed outside with the kids. I'm also happy we stopped there, because after a few minutes, the radio station we were listening to went into Emergency Broadcast System mode, warning of a line of storms with 60 mph wind and nickel-sized hail. I don't think I've actually heard the EBS kick in for real before. We were advised to take cover and avoid windows.

I hustled the kids inside, intercepted Jen, and we waited out the storm in the Supercenter. I spoke to a woman, soaked head to toe, who said her husband had been called back to the Air Force base that evening to haul the planes inside to avoid the hail. She said it had indeed been hailing when she dashed into the store. When the storm was fully upon us, the wind was blowing rain horizontally straight into the front doors of the Wal-Mart – very impressive.

Once the storm passed, we set out for Custer State Park, where our cabin awaited. We ended up taking the scenic route in the dark in a light rain, and Jen navigated some extremely impressive switchbacks and single-lane tunnels:

We pulled into the cabin at 10 p.m. mountain time. It looks deceptively rustic on the outside, but is nicely finished inside with two double beds and a set of bunkbeds in a single room. It even has a flat-screen TV, which is a nice space-saver, because it is a little tight in here. Ellie is thrilled to finally get the top bunk. Good night!

Tuesday

Delicious Wall Drug donuts for breakfast. It's raining this morning, and it will rain all day. Jen is keen on hopping on a horse with Katie sometime this week, but the trail rides are cancelled for today. Maybe tomorrow.

We set off for the Crazy Horse monument, the absolutely enormous tribute to the Native American chief that after 60 years sits about a third finished in the Black Hills:

At the base of the mountain is a complex of museums, shops, and restaurants with a Native American theme, though the dessert menu featured strawberry-rhubarb pie and kuchen, a German pie-type item that serves as the South Dakota state dessert.

The monument really is something else. It was commissioned in 1939 by Native American leaders who liked what they saw at Mount Rushmore and decided they wanted one of their own. They found Korczak Ziolkowski, a Polish-American sculptor who had just won an award at the New York World's Fair.

Korczak – everyone calls him Korczak – spent a summer working on Rushmore to see what was what, did some models, took some time off to fight WWII, then spent the last 35 years of his life working on Crazy Horse before dying in 1982. The visitor-center film detailing the project shows how he went from urbane-looking artist to wild-looking mountain man in the interim. His wife and seven of his ten children are still on the job. In its interviews with Korczak's children, the film hints at a little tension between the kids who stayed and those who left.

The monument is financed by sales from the shops, and the $25 per car they charge to visit the thing. The theme of the place is "follow your dream," with the unspoken corollary being, "...no matter how nutty it is."

That done, we headed to Mount Rushmore, the granddaddy of mountain-defacement projects. No, wait – that's not quite true. The grandfather of all of these would be Stone Mountain in Jen's home state of Georgia. I was noodling around before we left on this trip, trying to learn a little about the region we were about to visit, but found the details around Stone Mountain to be ever-more fascinating.

This is off-topic, so I'm going to keep it to one (long) paragraph. The airbrushed version of history is that Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum was lured away from the Stone Mountain project. The truth is, he left Stone Mountain in a you-can't-fire-me-I-quit kind of huff. The project had been commissioned by none other than the Ku Klux Klan (of which Borglum was an enthusiastic member) to mark the spot where the modern Klan had been reborn in the early part of the century. The federal government and the Klan financed the first phase of the project, with the feds minting a coin Borglum had designed to raise funds. The coin was apparently ugly and did not sell well, leading to the rift. The Klan all but abandoned the project after Borglum left and scraped everything he did off the mountain. It was reborn in the 1950s during the fit of Southern pride that Brown v. Board of Education inspired throughout the region. The state of Georgia eventually took over the site and, years later, had to condemn the entire thing to void the perpetual easement the Klan had been granted to hold meetings up on top of Stone Mountain. This story pleases me mostly because it irritates Jen.

Now, where were we? Right, right, Mount Rushmore:

The thing was dreamed up by a South Dakota tourism person, who decided to not be resigned to the fact that South Dakota had nothing to see (remember, this was before Wall Drug). He brought an idea to Borglum, who changed it entirely but did succeed in creating a one-of-a-kind tourist destination out in the middle of virtually nowhere.

Rushmore was carved until 1941, when (a) WWII got rolling, (b) Borglum died suddenly in Chicago, and (c) they ran out of money. The instruction was given to wrap up the faces, drag the equipment off the mountain, and that was that. The plan to carve the four presidents down to their waists was abandoned. While Washington's face is lovingly well-defined, Lincoln's face barely emerges from the rock. A huge pile of rubble, never cleared away, sits right below the boys.

Something I did not know before today was the explanation for why Teddy Roosevelt is perched in the back row. It turns out that the sculpture was supposed to be the four of them jowl to jowl, but weaknesses in that section of the rock forced Borglum to push Roosevelt back further and further into the mountain. I can just visualize Borglum & Co. after each layer of rock was blasted off: "Damn it! Take it back another foot." They're lucky they didn't run out of mountain.

The funny thing is, Rushmore was turned over to the feds at some point, and is now a National Monument, with copious federal spending surrounding it. The site is treated like a shrine of some sort, as if it were to us as the Pyramids are to Egypt or the Wailing Wall is to Israel. The truth is a much better story – it's a half-finished publicity stunt embraced by a young country more willing to see the dream than to shake its head at the execution.

I'd lay money on a bill going before Congress someday that would pay to complete the monument – as long as Reagan were added next to Lincoln.

It's around 4 when we head back to the cabin, and we decide to take the scenic route, returning to the road with the hairpin turns and single-lane tunnels. This time, we turn off to the "wildlife loop" in hopes of seeing some local fauna. I don't know how the park arranged this, but we're not two miles into it before a herd of buffalo crosses our path:

The kids are absolutely thunderstruck. Ellie can barely speak. We snap about a hundred pictures and then drive on. The kids emerge from the car a little later to snap a few shots from a safe distance:

We next encounter elk (we think – maybe large deer), burros, and wild turkeys. The batteries on two out of three cameras are dead by the time we get home – a sure sign of a good outing.

Jen and I feed the kids PB&J sandwiches for dinner, set up a movie on the laptop, and sneak out to the Blue Bell Lodge, about 200 yards away, for a nice, quiet dinner for two. The menu there features USDA choice beef or "Genuine Custer State Park buffalo." I ask the waitress, Really? and she confirms it – some of the buffalo roaming the park are selected to become quite tasty burgers and meatloaf. This is a detail I will not share with the kids unless they read the blog. (Sorry, kids! It sounded too tasty to resist!) As we return from dinner, it is still light out, and we spy a buffalo visiting a neighboring cabin. We drag the kids out to see it:

Wednesday

This turns out to be the best possible week to be here. The season began last weekend for Memorial Day, and it sounds like things were pretty crowded, but then everyone went home, because most schools are still in session. So this week everything is open, but no one is here.

All five of us start the day with a two-hour horseback ride. It's a little chilly, and some dark clouds waft by every once in a while. But by and large, it's sunny and gorgeous. Here is Jen with the kids all helmeted up and ready to go:

Ellie, once again, is up front with the guide leading her horse, and has the time of her life. Everyone does well, and looks good on their horses:

Two riders pass us about halfway in; one of them, a cruel, cruel, woman, leans over to Ellie, and says, smiling, "Are you having fun? Would you like your Daddy to buy you a horse?" "Hey!" I yell, from five horses back.

The highlight of the ride is not two minutes into it, when Jen's horse, which is directly behind Katie's, comes up close to Katie's horse and turns slightly to the left. Katie's horse then poops on Jen's jeans-clad leg.

This ride is a little different from others we've done because we cross water six times, which is quite a bit of fun. Joey is on a pony, which is quite a bit shorter than the horses, and he gets a little wetter during the crossings.

It looks like the park suffered a major fire about ten years ago. The mountains along the trail are a beautiful mix of stark, burned trees and new seedlings. It's a great demonstration of how an ecosystem renews itself:

After the ride, we head south to Hot Springs. We stop several times to gawk and photograph the buffalo that sidle up to the roads we're driving along:

Hot Springs is a beautiful little town that we are told boasts a daily high of about 60 degrees – year-round – thanks to the warm river coursing through it. The river never freezes, steams all winter long, and frosts all the nearby trees.

We go swimming at Evan's Plunge, the town's large indoor pool – the kids judge it a little chilly to swim outside. There has been one pool or another at the mouth of the springs for a hundred years. This one is very large, with two slides, and different areas roped off for the small fry. One slice is reserved for those trying to swing across the pool on a series of rings. I acquit myself reasonably well on those.

The pool is so much fun that we're shocked to find out it's 7:30 as we leave. Jen all of a sudden has a hankering to shoot past our cabin and see the evening show at Mount Rushmore. So we do. It has gone from "a little chilly to swim outside" to "genuinely cold" – not winter-in-Fargo kind of cold, of course, but we've really only brought summerweight clothing. We bundle up as best as we can, and head down to the amphitheater in front of the mountain.

The show is a spoken presentation by a park ranger on the importance of the four presidents, then a pretty slick movie about the importance of the four presidents. I like Teddy Roosevelt as much as the next guy, but you can tell they're straining a bit to justify his presence there. The Father of our Country! The Father of the Louisiana Purchase and the Declaration of Independence! The Savior of the Union! And, um, a guy who really liked parks!

The movie is kind of a standard government-issue airbrushed version of history. Most glaring is that slavery is only mentioned glancingly, even as the Civil War is discussed at length. And you get the feeling that it'll be a long, long time before Sally Hemings gets added.

I was under the vague impression that all this was building up to a laser show on the president's faces, but Jen whispers, No, no, it's Crazy Horse that has the laser show – this is just lighting up the mountain. What?! But, indeed, as the movie draws to a close and they make us sing the national anthem, the mountain is bathed in a medium-dim light. The kids are just happy to be getting back to the car before they lose any fingers or toes.

In our haste to get to Rushmore for the night show, we didn't stop for dinner. We dropped by the restaurant at the mountain for a quick meal of yogurt, Sun Chips, and hot chocolate. Not perfect, but it worked. It turns out that everything closes – even the bars – at 10 p.m. around here.

We stop at the only establishment selling food within 20 miles – a convenience store – get back to the cabin, and put the kids to bed. Jen and I end the evening with a candlelight dinner of apples, pears, cheese, crackers, a few beers, and potato chips with sour-cream dip (the last two being the bounty from the convenience store). Mmmm.

Thursday

We sleep in, say goodbye to our fine cabin, and head north to Medora. We leave Custer State Park via the quite beautiful Needles Highway, so named for the thin rock formations jutting into the sky. The highway was personally plotted out by a South Dakota governor on horseback in the 1920s, and he did a very nice job of it. It features things like the Hole in the Wall, (right), which lives up to its name. One of the one-lane tunnels is only eight feet and change wide:

Jen holds her breath and gets our six-feet-and-change-wide van through it like a champ.

Next stop is Deadwood, home of the cursingest HBO show on the air. I'm not sure what kind of regulatory perfect storm swept through to create the modern Deadwood, but it left behind a sort of old-West-themed mini-Las Vegas. Just about every storefront in town is some flavor of casino.

We eat a late lunch at Kevin Costner's sports bar, upstairs from his casino and downstairs from his fancy restaurant, "Jake's," where the high rollers presumably eat dinner. The place is encrusted with memorabilia, costumes, and photos from his movies. Man, he's been in a lot of movies. When they were good, they were very, very good; when they were bad, they were horrid. I still cry every time I watch "Field of Dreams," so Kevin's okay with me.

We commission an old-timey Western family photo that turns out pretty well and will be shipped home for us. A quick stop in Sturgis to pick up a few bandanas in this motorcycling paradise, and we're on the road to Medora. It's raining pretty hard, and we are in the middle of absolutely nowhere:

A question that has been plaguing us while we have had no ready access to the Wikipedia is whether bison are the same thing as buffalo. I've been telling the kids I think they are, but I am proved wrong as we approach the North Dakota border:

[For the record, the Wikipedia further proves me wrong: "In American Western culture, the bison is commonly referred to as 'buffalo'; however, this is a misnomer. Though both bison and buffalo belong to the same family, Bovidae, the term 'buffalo' properly applies only to the Asian Water Buffalo and African Buffalo."]

We pull into Medora around 9:45 p.m., after miles and miles of nothin' but grass (see above). We haven't seen much of the town yet; the part near our motel appears to consist mostly of bars. The first place we stop looks promising, but when we draw close, it turns out to have a big sign on the door barring entry to anyone under 21 – the restaurant part of it is closed. The bartender directs us across the street to the Iron Horse, which he thinks might still serve food. It does – but just barely. The Iron Horse's bartender tells me her cook left hours ago, but she can still fix some pizza. That'll do, but it's a close call – it's pretty terrible pizza. The beer is cold, though. Jen and I get to drink our first Moose Drool, which we've seen poured at a lot of places out here.

The Iron Horse is a pretty honky-tonk looking place, kinda dirty and loud, but not particularly dangerous. A fair number of yuppies mixed into the dusty cowboy hats. Still, I laugh when I realize that my parents never, ever walked into a joint like this with their kids.

We're there a few minutes when someone turns the jukebox up so loudly that you can't hear the person next to you. Katie and I head over to the jukebox with cash in hand, and find that someone has left a bunch of credits unspoken for. If the music's gotta be loud, at least it should be something we like. We risk a beating by punching in some Dixie Chicks songs and a lot of The Fray, Jen's all-time fav band at the moment. The jukebox, surprisingly, plays them all in a row, which risks us another beating. Hmmm... I thought jukeboxes played their requests in random order.

Jen brings Ellie along when she bellies up to the bar to pay the tab. The drunk guy at the end of the bar looks down, surprised to see someone so short, and takes a break from buying the bartender shots to offer to pick up Ellie's tab. Time to go!

Friday

The Medora Badlands Motel is clean and seems well-run, but man, stepping into the room is like stepping into 1960. A note by the door instructs us not to turn the light switch off, as it controls every outlet in the room, including the TV and the alarm clock. It's in a very nice setting, however:

It's nice in the morning as we head downtown for breakfast at the excellent Cowboy Cafe and then go to see "The Cowboy and His Horse," a free talk given five mornings a week by "Cowboy Lyle," a long-time employee of the foundation that runs everything in Medora, along with his beautiful horse Chocolate. Today's topic is "Grooming," and we learn how one cleans a horse:

We then take off into the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We check out TR's Maltese Cross Cabin, which is in kinda original shape, but has been moved all over the country over the years. We then embark upon the park's 36-mile nature drive, where we see field after field of prairie dogs, lots of buffalo, and some wild horses:

The views are amazing, and even the kids seem impressed:

About halfway into the drive, we run into a buffalo traffic jam. Six buffalo decided to wander down the road, flummoxing the human drivers on either side:

Jen finally decided to break the logjam, and snuck past them:

We were supposed to have a full evening of entertainment, but rain got in the way. The "Pitchfork Fondue," a steak dinner where the meat is stuck onto a pitchfork and boiled in oil, went on as scheduled, but the "Medora Musical," a "mix of modern country, western, gospel and patriotic music" with "historic, patriotic themes dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt," was cancelled.

I'll admit to mixed feelings about the musical's being rained out. On the one hand, whenever I said we were headed to the western Dakotas, the first thing out of every Fargoan's mouth was, "Are you going to see the Medora Musical?" On the other hand, I'm not sure it's really my and Jen's style of entertainment. On the third hand, the kids would have loved it. On the fourth hand, the rainout policy is to only give half your money back. grrr....

Saturday

We catch another episode in "The Cowboy and his Horse" series, this one slyly called "Ranch Dressing" – cowboy clothing:

Cowboy Lyle took us from hat to boot. Interesting if true: Cowboys originally didn't have belt loops in their pants, preferring to wear them tight at the waist instead, until the rodeo circuit got going, and they needed to have a way to display their prizes: Belt buckles.

We also learned how to properly tie and wear a bandana. Speaking of bandanas, Ellie has been wearing hers from Sturgis on her head, and it gives me a start every time I look over at her. It really is surprisingly tough-looking, even on a little girl. I wasn't quite able to capture the effect; this is the closest Ellie would come to providing a "mean face" for the camera:

We jump in the van for the straight shot back East. We make the turnoff for the "Enchanted Highway," a collection of giant sculptures along a road. We drive a few miles, then look up the details online and find out the highway is 32 miles long, ends 32 miles out of our way in the tiny town of Regent, N.D., and has just six sculptures along it. We turn back, and decide to snap some shots of the world's-largest sculpture that actually sits on I-94:

We next stop in Bismarck for lunch and to check out the tallest building in North Dakota, the State Capitol, the "Skyscraper on the Prairie." I'm disappointed on our quick drive by it; whatever Art Deco charms the building has must be hidden away on the inside:

The rest of the drive is uneventful. Our big Western adventure is over. Asked what they liked most about the entire trip, Katie and Ellie replied, "The bison!" while Joey, being contrary, said, "The buffalo!"