South Dakota

 The Badlands, the B-1, and the A-Maize-ing Corn Palace

May 30-June 4, 2003
    On the way, sort of, from Yellowstone to the Black Hills is Devil's Tower, famous as a destination for rock climbers and alien spaceships. It's a dramatic formation, made all the more so by the fact that it rises virtually alone from the floor of the plateau.

 (Remember Richard Dreyfus playing the cosmic Whirlitzer on this spot? The year, believe it or not, was 1978)

The Tower looks like a huge tree stump (which it what is was in the local Indian legend) and you can see why it's tough for someone into technical rock climbing to resist. (By the way, have you ever wondered what "technical" means in this context? I have visions of some guy struggling up the mountain with a couple of hard drives and maybe a circuit board strapped to his feet. If he makes it all the way to the top, does that make it "High Tech"?)
Here, in any case, is a climber on his way up the tower; I only hope his mother isn't reading this. As Ben and I walked around the base, we saw probably a dozen men and women making the ascent. They used ropes and belays on the way up and seemed, in most cases, to be in pairs.


Not my choice for a free-time activity, but this guy probably thinks politics ain't so smart, either. And we don't even use ropes.

After Devil's Tower, we had one more scheduled stop--western South Dakota--to see Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, and our friends David and Jayne Hickey who live just outside Rapid City. Jayne is the daughter of one of Mary's best friends growing up in Milwaukee and worked for us for a time in the early eighties as a baby-sitter for the big boys (who are now 32, 30, and 27 and need very little, if any, baby-sitting). David is from South Gardiner, Maine and is a "Wizzo" on a B-1 bomber for the U.S. Air Force. "Wizzo" is short for "Weapons Systems Officer", the guy who's in charge of evasive action if the plane is being attacked and dropping the precision guided bombs.

    David had just returned from Iraq where he had flown both the first and last missions of the war. He gave us a tour of his plane, but I didn't take any pictures for fear of breaching a security rule ( a very nice young man and woman let us onto the tarmac, but they were carrying some serious automatic weapons; I was on my best behavior).  Take my word for it, the plane was all business--very small crew's quarters (about the size of a Ford Explorer for four--two pilots and two wizzos); everything else was bomb bays.


South Dakota has its own special beauty (see above)--not spectacular like Montana or Utah, but quiet and soothing. Here's a late afternoon rainbow Molly and I saw rising from the prairie; I couldn't get the whole thing with the camera (I was driving), but it stretched from horizon to horizon; imagine this picture matched to its mirror-image and you get the idea. Cool.


Here's Molly reading in the passenger's seat just before we saw the rainbow. Usually Mary is the co-pilot if there's navigation to be done (or I'm there if Mary's driving), but the only directions on this part of the trip were to keep heading east on I-90.







    The Hickey's house is at Ellsworth Air Force Base, just east of Rapid City. It was a perfect stopover for us because not only did we get a great visit with our friends, it was near Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Monument, and Badlands National Park.

    Here, Mary gives a lesson in the ancient art of cat's cradle to the Hickey's daughter, Emma. Molly and Emma became fast friends as did Ben and their son Kyle.
   
     Ben , Kyle, David, and I had some good touch football (the Old Guys were all-time quarterbacks while the kids ran themselves into the ground); the final score was 36-36 with me and Kyle in the lead. David tells me that when he played for Gardiner, they never lost to Cony.




Saturday was set aside for Large Sculptures Carved Out of Mountains and we had come to the right place. Here is the model of the Crazy Horse Monument lined up with the unfinished real thing. As you can see, only his face (which is bigger and much more fully realized than this picture suggests) and the top of the arm are completed, but it's an impressive sight, nonetheless.
 


   And here are the presidents on their mountain, about 15 miles from Crazy Horse. This is one of those places (like the Grand Canyon or the Montana sky) that simply can't be captured in any picture.

    We were there for the evening program where they show a movie on the history of the four presidents, lead the audience in the singing of "This Land Is Your Land" and--


as night falls, slowly light the faces during the playing of the National Anthem.

    Whew; not too many dry eyes around where I stood.










    At about this time, we listened to a book-on-tape of Timeline by Michael Creighton. Without giving too much away, one of its themes had the bad guys creating super tourist attractions which they would generously give to the public while quietly buying up all the surrounding real estate to profit from the spin-off business.

    And lo and behold, here it is, in real life. If you look carefully, you can see Washington, et al in the top center. Ah, free enterprise.




And speaking of enterprise, how about this juxtaposition in downtown Rapid City? Just get an advance on your paycheck and go right next door and lose it at video poker.





    Or how about this one? At least there's no pretense of this being a family activity.

    The west was unfortunately full of these so-called casinos, often in the poorest neighborhoods. How could anybody argue that this would be good for Maine?





We did enjoy a real family activity outside of Rapid City, however--a night at the Flying T Ranch--with chuck wagon food, surprisingly good western music, and ancient vaudeville-type humor, which consisted mostly of North Dakota jokes, which seem to be big around here. I, myself would never make fun of New Hampshire. Except last week.






    OK, so I forgot to take my glasses off, but you get the idea. Maybe I don't favor Kenny all that much, but Mary sure does a good job as The Babe.

    On second thought, I look like a real dork. Oh well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.













Don't ever doubt the existence of Culture in South Dakota--here's a monumental sculpture of a bull rising out of the prairie just off I-90. A little strange, but isn't all true Art?






And then came the Badlands, an amazing combination of gullies, canyons, striated rock formations (above), and wide open prairie. There's a great loop that you can take right off the Interstate which winds through a good deal of the park.

    One minute you're in flat grasslands which seem to go on for miles, and then suddenly, you're down into a maze-like set of canyons. It's much smaller than the Grand Canyon, but you can have the experience of driving down into and through it. We didn't stay long, but it was sure worth the detour.

    Our final stop in South Dakota was the famous Corn Palace in the town of Mitchell.  Essentially, it's a big auditorium-gym covered with corn. Red corn, yellow corn, brown corn, corn stalks, corn ears, corn kernels, corn leaves. Virtually everything you see in this picture (except Mom, Molly and the white columns) are made of corn--and they change the pictures every year,




Here's how they do it; sort of like a big corn by number set. Each one of those little bricks is half an ear of corn.

    At this point, we're truly on the way home, with few stops except to sleep--from South Dakota up through Minnesota to Duluth, across the top of Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Sault Ste. Marie, then into Canada (below) and from there, home to Maine.



It's hard to believe it's almost over--this rolling, rollicking, sometimes (but only sometimes) rocky joyride across America. We've seen only a small part of all there is to see and met only a few of the millions of people out there. But at least we tried--to make America real to ourselves and the kids, to see what family means when all you have is each other, to experience the mystical bonds of place and time that hold us all together.

Our next and last report will be from
Home. For the final time, see you there.