midweek middle americana

The porn-star-cowgirl-looking attendant in a National Park Service uniform collected our $20 VEHICILE USE PERMIT FEE, and we were off into Yellowstone, wondering why our tax dollars alone could not support the nation’s first and foremost natural park. We’d only planned a visit to Old Faithful and a drive around the northern loop, but we were pleasantly and unexpectedly surprised (is a surprise ever expected?) by what the park offered us.

Yellowstone is known for its hotsprings, and their impressiveness varies by huge degree. There are those that create the circular, fluorescent reflecting pools shown on the postcards that are sold from South Dakota to Iowa. There are also the less appealing kind that spew steam from under the decaying roots of trees destroyed by the great fire of ’88. The springs we visited were somewhere in between on the scale of impressiveness: a shiny, pinkish, gemstone-like wall over which steaming groundwater babblingly flowed. Busloads on Indian and Chinese tourists clamored about the walkways. We took our photos and headed on to a more important task.

After days of preparing to confront a legend that had been force-fed to us by every grade school social studies text, we followed the map to Old Faithful. O.F., these days, is more a city than a geyser. It has its own 10-acre parking lot, a hotel, a post office, a mall-like gift shop, and a cafeteria, not to mention the stadium-like wooden platform constructed around the geyser itself. All this for folks to watch a little over a dozen steaming eruptions a day: Protestant sexual frustration at its worst and most profitable.

O.F. erupts every 90-200 minutes, so we expected the need to kill some time, but the thing went off as soon as we arrived so we checked out the gift shop. They must import aura from Orlando, because not since Disney’s Frontierland have I smelled such a pungent combination of rotting wood, bad cafeteria food, and old people. Perhaps Yellowstone, being a frontier land, nailed it first.

As it was getting late, it seemed wise for us to drive north and rejoin I-90 east. But the park, like any horror movie forest, drew us in. We competed with bison for asphalt and frequently stopped to photograph the dramatically morphing, late evening sky. Soon we were lost.

A turn down a one-way trail led us to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, a stunning natural crevasse about 600 feet deep. One could see how the river had for centuries carved its way down through the jagged, whitish-yellow rock. Light from the rising moon gently splashed off the canyon walls, giving the entire sight an otherworldly glow. In the still, cool air, the only thing we could hear was the roaring Yellowstone River gnawing its way through the canyon floor. Erich, Padraig, and I paused there for a while. I sat down on a ledge and let the grooves of my brown corduroy pants fill up with the whitish yellowstone dust. I hurled many little chunks into the gap, but never heard any of them hit anything. I thought about things; we all thought about things. After our minds wouldn’t work anymore, we drove north to Montana and I-90, our ticket west.

I guess one could say we’d gotten our $20 worth.

The next time I woke up the car was in some roadside shit-town called like Big Timber, MT. We drove from hotel to hotel, but each charged a little too much for us, and all the restaurants in town were closed. As we were about to re-enter the highway, a deep-throated minor chord pierced the cold night air and, a couple hundred yards from the road, a Montana Rail Link freight train roared quickly by. Now, you can chase coal and grain trains along the highways by daylight and make remarks to your traveling companions about their importance in building the country and keeping it afloat, but no romantic feeling compares to the thrill of chasing a freight train through the night, especially a Montana night. If you don’t believe me, try it.

Having not found a hotel, we ended up a couple more miles down the “freeway,” where the only businesses were a hat and saddle repair shop (closed) and a SALOON (open, but with no one inside at 1 am Wednesday). We rolled to the edge of town to turn around near an abandoned wooden grain elevator, when two glaring headlights on the horizon announced that we’d unknowingly chased the train from town to town. I rather expectedly and enthusiastically suggested we wait it out, for these are things you can’t see in New York. Somewhat reluctantly, tired Erich agreed not to move the car for a few minutes. But when the bells started ringing at the crossing gates, we awoke from our nighttime dazes and waited. The train, a dimly lit steel spectacle, roared through the crossing for a several minutes and we stared, transfixed, as tons of grain, steel, oil, and lumber squeakingly rattled their way east. Impressed with this simple and curious experience, we headed back to the highway.

After another hour, it became clear that we weren’t going to find lodging soon enough to get a full night’s sleep. Padraig and I ate pre-made “deli” sandwiches at a truck stop, and when we were finally exhausted, we pulled out at a rest stop for as much sleep as we could get. By sunrise, the interior of the car was coated in condensate. As the sun climbed higher into the Big Sky Country sky, the temperature in the cabin became unbearable. I now knew what it felt like to be the baby in the microwave in that awful joke (you haven’t heard it?). We awoke, I brushed my teeth in the rest stop bathroom, and the there of us hit the road for the red asphalt and open nothingness of Northern Wyoming.

We mailed postcards in Sheridan (beautiful town) and got gas and checked e-mail in Gilette (strip of gas stations). Somewhere in between, I shot a nice picture of a lone sky-blue Thunderbird chasing a freight train on the highway service road.

By late afternoon we made it to Rapid City, So. Dakota, and headed south to confront another legendary American landmark: Mount Rushmore. After about a mile of winding state road, George Washington’s head announced its presence over the treeline. Excited, we approached, only to discover a parking lot in front of the mountain and an NPS toll plaza charging $8 to get in. Both sides of the road were sealed off with steel guardrail, so it was impossible to stop. Annoyed at the capitalistic ramifications of the mount, we drove on to a vantage point, took a profile shot and turned around, only to have our radar detector explode noisily. Parks service cops were patrolling the road in front of the mountain, waiting to give tickets to anyone over the 45mph limit. We held onto our wallets, did a Rushmore photo drive-by, and got the hell out of there. Confronting another legend proved an experience clouded by the NPS’s magnetic (though unfortunately necessary) thirst for our spare change.

Wednesday night we stopped at the infamous Wall Drug, a sprawling tourist trap of Western kitsch in Wall, SD that claims to entertain 20,000 visitors per day. At dinner (bison burgers) we befriended a charmingly South Dakotan waitress, who recommended we check out the Welsh Motel up the road for lodging. The motel didn’t have any double available, so they literally gave us our own 3-bedroom house for the night. Once settled in, we made our way to the strip outside the “drugstore,” and had a few pints. Courtney the waitress showed up after her volleyball practice—that was unplanned. She told us little jokes about the time zone split in South Dakota (“What time does the farmer bring the sheep to the fence? Montain time!”) and explained that most of the staff of Wall Drug were imported from Croatia for the summer. Then, after an hour of solid conversation, she went home with a big Croatian meathead. We can’t outrun our fates anywhere.

The next morning, or afternoon, we went to a local chain store for lunch. Somehow our discussion, politically inclined and snobbish as all our discussions are, turned its attention to law school. Our middle-aged waitress approached and asked if we were in law school. I told her that “we were avoiding it at all costs.” Padraig told her he’d “rather die” than go. Then she told us she was taking law classes, and dreamt of practicing family law. Good thing we’d already gotten our food.

***

Nothing describes the Badlands as well as the quotes in the NPS pamphlet, so I won’t even try. They include some of the most foreboding and forbidding terrain on the North American continent. Muddy flats and endless acres of conical, jagged rock formations seem to compete for surface area. Deep canyons cut by the ghosts of rivers past tear through the landscape. Bands of colors too finely defined for a Crayola box stripe the mountains in perplexingly level bands. Ochres, pinks, reds, browns, and grays roam the mountainscape, making the place look like a geological chocolate shop. One stares at close-by outcroppings hoping to visually delineate (and maybe scoop up) multicolored pebbles. But up close, everything looks like sand. Only distance and the sun’s changing angles make the color of the Badlands come alive. (They’re only seven short miles south of the Interstate; go! The $8 charged here seems measly when compared to the exorbitance of Rushmore.)

From the Badlands, it was on to Klassic American Kitsch. The Mitchell Corn Palace (THE WORLD’S ONLY CORN PALACE) serves as a civic and sports arena whose façade is decorated with a different corn mural every year. This year, the mural celebrated the voyage of Lewis and Clark, even though the kids working the info booth revealed that L&C originally thought the Mitchell area would prove useless as farmland. Cobs, husks, and stalks, varying in color from the blackest blacks to the reddest reds make up the “pixels” of the giant corn mural. The Palace has stood for over a hundred years as a testament to the viability of the local corn-farming industry. When the Palace isn’t hosting local college basketball games or the annual high school prom, there’s a retail shop set up on the court.

After a big Chinese dinner—the local paper touted the stereotypically named Twin Dragon as pretty much an innovation in local dining—it was back onto the highways. Somewhere, outside Sioux City, we spotted a Flying J Truck Stop. These places are palaces unto themselves: separate gas stations for trucks and autos, shower and laundry facilities, driver lounges, cafes, retail shops, and now, computer rooms. We hauled out the iBook, paid the $1.95 access fee, and met some other truckers who had come to rely on the internet. One skinny guy clutched his laptop bag under his arm. “I spent twenty-three hundred on this. I got me a 2.8 and a 60-gigabyte hard drive. I’m paranoid I’m gonna leave it somewhere,” he said. Another huge dude—about 300 pounds with a lot of earrings—came in to use the internet kiosk. He advised Erich and I on what type of power inverter to buy for the car while typing away in a Yahoo! chat room. All we saw of his conversation were big words in bold, pink teenybopper font. Every other one was FUCKER or NIGGER. Beware: the heartland is online!

We found lodging somewhere in Montana and watched TV “news” for about two hours. None of us are very used to television (most true for yours truly). On CNBC, we learned that Michael Moore supported Hezbollah (or vice versa; who cares?) and was thus an enemy of America, the Iraqi people, and Jesus. “A voice for the other side,” they called him. Then we learned that terrorists were planning an Attack on America this weekend, for the 150th consecutive weekend in the past three years. I longed for the irony of being killed by terrorists on a 4,000-mile trip. Finally we learned from a Larry King interview that John Kerry is kind of a putz. And then we went to sleep.

We've just now arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, where I'm at the campus bookstore. Wonder what we'll do tonight....